Ugh. Junk scientists were wrong all along. Film at 11.
Astrobiologists and astrophysicists have the same junk science issues as anthropology and palaeontology. I mean, many of them are good-faith scholars and researchers. They find things. They measure stuff. They determine facts about the world around us.
But often, these people and other, more vocal ones, are storytellers and mythmakers. They compose narratives about the way things have happened. Fairy tales about how we got here and why the world is like it is. They reconstruct stuff, they formulate backstories, they leave no miracle unexplained and no space for divine intervention.
And then gradually they're all proved wrong.
And these stories just hang in there because they're the entertaining parts of these hard sciences. The stories are remembered and shared and passed on among laypeople. The facts don't matter and the retractions and errata become irrelevant when the myths have been cemented into place.
I once saw a story that illustrated a fictional dinosaur museum, where they had assembled all the different bones wrong, backwards, mix-and-match, fur in the wrong places, feathers, all the anatomy out of whack. And it served to illustrate how much we don't know. How much we've reconstructed. How much we are basically lying to fill in the gaps but just to write a good story for our research paper.
Just take all the facts you know in astrobiology and toss them in a blender, because those facts are 99% conjecture. Scientists are piecing things together on the slimmest evidence. They are extrapolating and interpolating at every stage. We're sending robots to feel out new worlds, but those robots are insanely dumb. Neil Armstrong can show you a moon rock but he couldn't impart how it felt to jump around on the surface, or how moon-dust got into everything everywhere, or how it felt to control that landing. What is it like to spend 50 years living on Europa? That's experiential, and those are the missing narratives that scholars want us to feel excited about when they're filling in 8 billion years of gaps.
There's no good solution. Researchers and scholars can't simply drop databases of facts or spreadsheets of figures without a narrative. Laypeople and journalists will constantly ask "why? how? when?" and narratives satisfy our urges to know more than facts do.
AStonesThrow•6h ago
Astrobiologists and astrophysicists have the same junk science issues as anthropology and palaeontology. I mean, many of them are good-faith scholars and researchers. They find things. They measure stuff. They determine facts about the world around us.
But often, these people and other, more vocal ones, are storytellers and mythmakers. They compose narratives about the way things have happened. Fairy tales about how we got here and why the world is like it is. They reconstruct stuff, they formulate backstories, they leave no miracle unexplained and no space for divine intervention.
And then gradually they're all proved wrong.
And these stories just hang in there because they're the entertaining parts of these hard sciences. The stories are remembered and shared and passed on among laypeople. The facts don't matter and the retractions and errata become irrelevant when the myths have been cemented into place.
I once saw a story that illustrated a fictional dinosaur museum, where they had assembled all the different bones wrong, backwards, mix-and-match, fur in the wrong places, feathers, all the anatomy out of whack. And it served to illustrate how much we don't know. How much we've reconstructed. How much we are basically lying to fill in the gaps but just to write a good story for our research paper.
Just take all the facts you know in astrobiology and toss them in a blender, because those facts are 99% conjecture. Scientists are piecing things together on the slimmest evidence. They are extrapolating and interpolating at every stage. We're sending robots to feel out new worlds, but those robots are insanely dumb. Neil Armstrong can show you a moon rock but he couldn't impart how it felt to jump around on the surface, or how moon-dust got into everything everywhere, or how it felt to control that landing. What is it like to spend 50 years living on Europa? That's experiential, and those are the missing narratives that scholars want us to feel excited about when they're filling in 8 billion years of gaps.
There's no good solution. Researchers and scholars can't simply drop databases of facts or spreadsheets of figures without a narrative. Laypeople and journalists will constantly ask "why? how? when?" and narratives satisfy our urges to know more than facts do.