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    • More on the Fermi paradox (from David Wallace).

      In a comment to the previous post on the Fermi Paradox, David Wallace wrote this terrific exposition of it.  I agree with almost everything he says, so I will save my own quibbles for a comment.  David writes:

      Just to clarify the force of the Fermi paradox (which is intended to rest on quantitative factors, not just a general "where are they?"), here are the main basically-uncontroversial premises that get it going:

      1. The Galaxy contains an awful lot of stars, and plenty of them have planets. There are 100+ billion stars in the Galaxy, and in our neighbourhood, around 5% of them are G-type stars like the Sun in non-binary systems. Our best theories of planet formation make planets look generic, and the current era of exoplanetology backs that up. I think it would be very hard now to argue for fewer than several hundred million Earth-type planets, and that's almost certainly a significant underestimate.
      2. The Galaxy is much older than it is large. The Galaxy is something like 100,000 light years across. But it's nearly ten billion years old, which is to say that light could have travelled across the Galactic disk and back some 50,000 times.
      3. Slow interstellar travel (c.0-1%-1% of light speed) is technologically possible. Pioneer 10 is already a starship, travelling at (1/30,000) of the speed of light, and that was by accident. There are a quite large number of designs and plans for spacecraft capable of reaching between 0.1% and 10% of light speed. That we are unlikely to build any of them any time soon – the mission time is too long and the cost is currently rather painful – isn't my point; the point is that this kind of speed is borderline possible with *current technology*, let alone the extrapolated capabilities of much-more-advanced civilisations. (Contrast relativistic starflight, which doesn't violate any known physical principle but isn't remotely possible with any feasible technology we can think of now; contrast faster-than-light starflight, which actually looks *physically* impossible.)
      4.  Self-replicating intelligent machinery is technologically possible. We have an existence proof for this: humans. (I guess I can't absolutely rule out some strange principle of emergent engineering which makes it physically impossible to make a slow-moving space probe capable of carrying machines (humans or not) that can reproduce the probe even though self-replicating intelligence and probes are separately possible, but it seems ad hoc.) Given 2-4, it is technologically possible for a civilisation to send physical vehicles to every solar system in the Galaxy in a timescale *much* less than the age of the Galaxy. (Err on the pessimistic side: assume 0.1% light-speed propulsion and a 1000-year turnaround time; you still get an expansion wave moving at 0.05% of lightspeed, enough to span the galaxy in 200 million years, or 2% of its current age. Why might a civilisation do so? Several plausible reasons: (i) colonisation. As Allen Olley points out, this isn't a plausible way to move your existing population (I don't really agree with Eric's resource-based argument for colonisation) but it is a plausible way to spread your civilisation, or your species, across the Galaxy. (ii) exploration. Robot probes is a really great way to explore space, as we've found ourselves. (See the Wiley paper cited above.) (iii) malevolence or prudence. People very often react by noting that each of (i)-(iii) is speculative, and maybe intelligent civilisations don't tend to do that kind of thing. Fair enough. But the crucial issue in the Fermi paradox is that *it only has to happen once*. And unless life *basically never* evolves, or intelligence *basically never* evolves, or civilisations *basically always* die off before they get to the stage of exploring the galaxy, there ought to have been so many civilisations that it seems implausible that not even one would do this. (Note that I'm pretty sure *we* would do it, if we got to the point at which it was reasonably inexpensive.) An illustration: suppose life only turns up on 1% of earth-type planets, and that intelligence only evolves in 1% of biospheres, and that 99% of civilisations wipe themselves out through war or resource exhaustion before reaching the stage when it's feasible (indeed relatively cheap) to spread across the Galaxy. Then, on a pretty conservative estimate of 1 billion habitable planets, there should have been 1000 suitable civilisations so far in Galactic history. Yet *not even one* decided to try the explore-the-galaxy strategy? Things get several orders of magnitude worse when you consider that the strategy works perfectly well over intergalactic distances too, and that there are hundreds or thousands of galaxies in realistic exploration range. Could they be here but not be noticed? Well, it's quite hard to hide a decelerating starship, but maybe none happen to have turned up recently. There could be all manner of things hiding in the Solar System. But again: does *every single* civilisation behave that way? It seems unmotivated to suppose so. (Unless there is a single hegemonic species or coalition that requires it coercively.) I think the force of the Paradox is this: yes, for any given civilisation we can imagine reasons why we could be completely oblivious of it despite it being millions of years older than us and quite capable of having spread across the Galaxy. But unless technological civilisations are fantastically unlikely to arise on a per-planet basis, there should have been such an enormous number of them by now that it becomes really implausible that *none of them* have done so.

    • Fighting creationism through debate is pointless; how then can we do it?

      A friend of mine is doing her DPhil in Oxford. She's American, and out of term she goes back to her home in middle America. She recently went to see the newly refurbished museum in her home town. When she was looking at the displays on human evolution, a museum guard, who had been observing her, suddenly said "So, what side are you on: the Bible or evolution?" Whereupon my friend replied "What do you mean what side am I on? This is not a football game, you know".

      I am deeply troubled by the incipient creationism, which treats biblical literalism as a serious intellectual contender to scientific inquiry. I want my children to grow up with normal biology textbooks, not with Of Pandas and People. If creationists win their lobbying efforts to make creationism mainstream in schools and the public sphere, that is a loss for everyone (including the creationists). Debates don't seem to do any instrumental good. If we are not going to fight creationism through debates, how can we – as public intellectuals – ensure that creationism doesn't encroach even further upon our schools and public life?

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    • SB 1391 and the Criminalization of Pregnancy in Tennessee

      A petition is circulating online asking Gov. Bill Haslam to veto SB 1391.  The bill would modify the Tennessee criminal code to allow for criminal assault charges to be brought against women who use illegal narcotics while pregnant, should their drug use lead to harm or death for the fetus or child.  These charges carry a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.  But the bill is so badly written, it could affect all pregnant women in Tennessee, whether or not they use drugs, should something go wrong during their pregnancy.  In effect, SB 1391 threatens to criminalize pregnancy in Tennessee. 

      Policy analysts and political commentators across the world have voiced their concerns with SB 1391, arguing that it could have far-reaching consequences (Reality Check, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and NPR).  Even some pro-life groups recognize that SB 1391 could incentivize abortions for women who use drugs, since women risk up to 15 years in prison by continuing their pregnancy, especially if they are unable to access drug treatment programs (All Our Lives).  

      If we really want to support the flourishing of children in Tennessee, then we need to move beyond the pro-life/pro-choice framework to seek reproductive justice for everyone, based on “the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments” (SisterSong).  For example, rather than punishing women who use illegal drugs while pregnant, we should be extending the Safe Harbor Act to support women who use either prescription drugs or non-prescription drugs to get the treatment they need, and to stay clean for the sake of their families and themselves. 

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    • Talk like Shakespeare day

      Mark, 'tis 'Talk Liketh Shakespeare Day!' Then come, good fellows, and let us dream of dragons and finless fish, take but a moment and speak of clip-winged griffins and a ramping cat. The youth of England are on fire, and though men may sleep, some have knives with edges. Such words as his delight the eyes and fill the mind as the secret parts of fortune come to a handsome gentleman, as a stratagem to its quarter returns an ill-shaped fish with magnanimity! If you disagree, you are a stuffed cloak-bag of guts, a bolting-hutch of beastliness!  (h/t David Hoyt)

       

    • Things not to do at conferences

      Have you done any of the following or had them done to you?

      1. Changing your paper after receiving written versions of the comments, so that the comments no longer make sense (Eric Schliesser on this HERE).
      2. If you are a senior European philosopher, instead of asking a question during the Q&A, just telling the junior speaker that only a fool would believe their premises.*
      3. Not turning your comments in ahead of time, so the speaker cannot prepare a response, and then in your comments trying to eviscerate the speaker's paper (hypothetical imperative- if you are not going to turn your comments in on time, then either show interesting things that follow from the speaker's claims, or show that something interesting is left of the speaker's claims after your criticism, or opt out and don't deliver them).
      4. Only attend your talk (this one and the next three are courtesy of Melissa Ridley Elmes, hat-tip Daily Nous).
      5. Attend other talks but grandstand during the Q&As in a way that is not as bad as the senior-European-philosopher malfeseance, but still manifestly unhelpful to the presenter (see PrawfBlawg for good Q&A guidelines).
      6. Go overtime on your paper so that other speakers are shorted.
      7. Act radically different towards other scholars, depending upon where they currently are in the academic hierarchy.

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    • Radical Philosophy and the Free Alabama Movement

      Last summer, thousands of prisoners in California launched a 60-day hunger strike to protest and transform oppressive policies in the California Department of Corrections.  One member of the organizing team called their strike action a “multi-racial, multi–regional Human Rights Movement to challenge torture.”

      This weekend, another prisoner-led human rights movement is gaining momentum in Alabama.  The Free Alabama Movement (FAM) seeks to analyze, resist, and transform prison slavery from within the Prison Industrial Complex. 

      Both of these movements challenge us, as philosophers and as people, to interrogate the meaning of slavery, torture, human rights, and political action.  What does it mean to struggle for one’s human rights as an “offender” in the world’s first prison society?  What can philosophers and political theorists learn from the example of incarcerated intellectuals and political actors whose everyday lives are situated at the dangerous intersection of racism, economic exploitation, sexual violence, and civil death?  What would it mean to respect the specificity of the Free Alabama Movement, and at the same time to recognize that even the freedom of non-incarcerated philosophers may be bound up with the freedom of Alabama?  What is freedom, after all?  What – and where – and who – is Alabama?

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    • First earth-sized exoplanet found in habitable zone.

      Astronomers have found the first  Earth-sized planet located in the habitable zone of a star — the right distance away to host liquid water and possibly life.  Story here.  The system is only about 500 light years away.

       

      This of course raises the issue of the Fermi paradox:  if there is even a tiny chance of intelligent life arising on such a planet, and many of the stars around which we would expect to find such planets are billions of years older than the sun, then why hasn't some intelligent species already colonized our galaxy in such a way that we would have observed it?

      To my mind, there are only a few premises one can plausibly deny that give rise to the paradox.    

      One is that there is any substantial chance  at all of life arising at all on a planet with conditions more or less like ours.   I admit that it is possible for this premise to be false, but I don't begin to see how that could be.  Given the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, let alone our local cluster, the needed probability here would be so tiny.

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    • Deleuze on Learning and Skill

      Johann_sebastian_bach_at_organWhen it comes to learning, Deleuze argues that “it is so difficult to say how someone learns.” (DR 23). More dramatically, Deleuze adds, there “is something amorous – but also something fatal – about all education.” (DR 23). In learning to drive a stick shift car, for example, it is not sufficient simply to be told by the instructor to “do as I do,” or to follow the rule as they have stated and/or exemplified it in their actions. Learning is not a matter of following a rule or of doing what someone else does; to the contrary, what one encounters in learning to drive a stick shift car is the task of connecting various elements – namely, the hand, foot, clutch, accelerator, slope of the road, etc.—and of connecting them systematically so that the foot releases from the clutch right when the accelerator is being pressed, etc. Similarly in learning to swim it is a matter of establishing connections between the various parts and motions of one’s body with the resistance, currents, and buoyancy of the water. As Deleuze puts it, “To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the Objective Idea in order to form a problematic field.” (DR 165)

      In clarifying what Deleuze means by conjugating the distinctive points “in order to form a problematic field” will offer, I argue, what I take to be a helpful perspective from which to understand Merleau-Ponty’s example of the expert organist as well as Jason Stanley’s recent work on skill.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Wave’

      I’m in San Diego at the moment for the Pacific APA. Naturally, California rhymes with sea and sun, and in the absence of a California-themed Brazilian song worth posting (of course, there’s this silly one by Lulu Santos), I had to think of the classic ‘Wave’, composed by Tom Jobim and perhaps best known in the João Gilberto version. But I’m also posting it in the original instrumental version, by Jobim himself, and a live version with Jobim and Herbie Hancock. In other words, plenty of choice for picky ears…

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    • The Gourmet Ranking and Gender: How Can It Improve?

      I noted in another post the apparent difference in impact of the Philosophical Gourmet ranking of one's PhD granting institution on tenure-track placement according to gender, following up on posts elsewhere (here, here, and here). In this post I want to follow up on a speculation that I made in comments that the apparent difference in impact is due not to a difference in the way prestige impacts women and men on the job market, but due to a difference in the way that the Philosophical Gourmet tracks prestige for areas that have a higher proportion of men versus areas that have a higher proportion of women. 

      You may already be familiar with work by Kieren Healy that shows that the Philosophical Gourmet ranking especially favors particular specialties: "It's clear that not all specialty areas count equally for overall reputation… Amongst the top twenty departments in 2006, MIT and the ANU had the narrowest range, relatively speaking, but their strength was concentrated in areas that are very strongly associated with overall reputation—in particular, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Language, and Philosophy of Mind."

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