Hostility to life is norm for exoplanets, senior astrophysicist says

Artist's conception of  Kepler-10b, NASA

In “Kepler-10b - The first extrasolar system rocky planet”, British physicist David Tyler notes,

The presumption that there are millions of Earth-like planets in habitable zones is based on theory that is not supported by evidence. This point has recently been made by Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at Harvard. He has made the claim that "we are alone in the universe" after an analysis of the 500 planets discovered so far showed all were hostile to life.

"Dr Smith said the extreme conditions found so far on planets discovered outside out Solar System are likely to be the norm, and that the hospitable conditions on Earth could be unique.
"We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different from our own. They are very hostile to life as we know it," he said."

never mind rare Earths, there aren’t any spare Earths, period. Better take care of the one we got.

Telic Thoughts weighs in on Coppedge case

Bradford for Telic Thoughts comments on the Coppedge case:

Another issue merits attention. Coppedge is not merely a creationist, he is a Christian version of one. There are Muslim creationists and creationists of other non-conventional religious persuasions when assessed by American cultural norms. That group falls within a different category within the tortured minds of PC advocates. We need to practice diversity when dealing with them. Understanding. Tolerance. The contradiction is nauseating but perhaps explainable.

Oh, but this is common, Bradford. In Canada, for example, anti-Semitism isn’t tolerated - except when it is Islamist anti-Semitism. The political motivation is obvious: Islamists, like leftists, restrict intellectual freedom, so they are useful to the left. (Though, in fairness, many bystanders here are starting to wake up, led by courageous younger Jews.)

PC is a very successful strategy of the new hard left. Tolerance means nothing more than what the NHL choose to tolerate, in the process of limiting free or thoughtful inquiry. As Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out, PC's real value is forcing most people to lie. They are morally ashamed of themselves for succumbing so readily to making cowardice a virtue, make nervous little jokes, and blame anyone who expressed honest opinions for bringing the storm on themselves.

Bradford offers,

IDists have been tagged as wedge practitioners by critics. But the dubious charge never had substance. If some IDists did have a wedge strategy in mind they were clearly ineffectual. Take notes from the pros. PCers are experts at wedging.

Yes, the political correctness thugs assume, as do most humans, that everyone thinks as they do. If PC enforcers turn any institution they take over into a stinkpot of closed, mediocre minds, it goes without saying that everyone else must want to do the same, but they got there first.

Smart on the Telic guys’ part to take an interest, because they are next. In a PC environment, even asking questions, other than the prescribed ones leading to the approved answers, is a sure sign that you are trouble.

What if scientism had to pay its own bills?

Here's commentator David Klinghoffer's comments on the purging of astronomers Gaskell and Gonzalez and NASA mission specialist David Coppedge, among others, for doubting the Central Dogma of biology:

For years I've collected accounts of scientists who voiced doubts about Darwin and ended up paying a high price. In February, the University of Kentucky will defend itself in court in a discrimination case brought by astronomer Martin Gaskell, now at the University of Texas. He argues convincingly that he was turned down to direct Kentucky's observatory because of remarks on his personal website noting reservations about Darwinian theory and an openness to intelligent design.

Gaskell's attorneys present records of email traffic among the faculty search committee. Professors falsely tarred Gaskell as a "creationist" while a lone astrophysicist on the committee protested that Gaskell stood to be rejected "despite his qualifications that stand far above those of any other applicant."

The case resembles another at Iowa State University. Astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez was refused tenure, despite a spectacular research publication record, because of a book he co-authored arguing that earthly life is no cosmic accident. Again, email traffic told the tale. The department chairman had instructed faculty that intelligent design was a litmus test for tenure, "disqualify[ing] him from serving as a science educator."

[ ... ]

This year, a top-level computer specialist on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Cassini mission to Saturn, David Coppedge, sued JPL for discrimination after being demoted for circulating among colleagues a couple of DVDs favoring intelligent design.

- "'Science Says' Is Now Just Another Special Interest Claim" (Human Events, January 6, 2011) January 30, 2011

Interestingly, Gaskell ($100, 000 settlement) and Gonzalez (new observatory) didn't do so badly out of it, and one hopes Coppedge will also land on his feet.

The key thing to see here, in my view, is that the scientism lobby can't hope to both treat science as their private game park and expect public funding. Or can they? Let's see what the Coppedge case brings.

Cassini flies past fizzy ocean on Saturnian moon

Here:

Cassini found the little moon busily puffing plumes of water vapor, icy particles, and organic compounds out through fissures (now known as "tiger stripes") in its frozen carapace. Mimas, a nearby moon about the same size, was as dead as researchers expected, but Enceladus was precociously active.


Many researchers viewed the icy jets as proof of a large subterranean body of water. Near-surface pockets of liquid water with temperatures near 32o F could explain the watery plumes. But there were problems with this theory. For one thing, where was the salt? In 2009 Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer located the missing salt – in a surprising place.


"It wasn't in the plume gasses where we'd been looking for it," says Matson. "Instead, sodium and potassium salts and carbonates were locked up in the plumes' icy particles.* And the source of these substances has to be an ocean. Stuff dissolved in an ocean is similar to the contents of these grains."


The latest Cassini observations presented another intriguing discovery: thermal measurements revealed fissures with temperatures as high as -120o Fahrenheit (190 Kelvin).

More heat out there than we think could mean a lot of things.

(This was Coppedge's project, of course.)

So what will you do when they come for you?

David Coppedge

Nathan Black reports for Christian Post "Intelligent Design Proponent Fired from NASA Lab" (Jan. 26 2011).

David Coppedge is an information technology specialist and system administrator on JPL’s international Cassini mission to Saturn, the most ambitious interplanetary exploration ever launched. A division of California Institute of Technology, JPL operates under a contract with the federal space agency. Coppedge held the title of “Team Lead” System Administrator on the mission until his supervisors demoted and humiliated him for advancing ideas that superiors labeled “unwelcome” and “disruptive.”

He favoured intelligent design and talked about it, and one superior didn't like that.

There was no workplace policy that forbid discussing private opinions at work, and claims that Coppedge harassed fellow employees proved unsubstantiated.

Here's columnist David Klinghoffer on the case:

What did Coppedge do to get himself in trouble? He occasionally chatted with interested colleagues about the scientific case for intelligent design, he passed around a couple of pro-ID DVDs, which made good sense since JPL's officially defined mission includes the exploration of questions relating to the origin and development of life on earth and elsewhere. His supervisor severely chastised him for this, humiliated and demoted him.


Now he's been fired. JPL claims it was a cost-cutting measure. ... The truth will emerge when Coppedge's lawsuit comes to trial, but the appearance here certainly suggests a final strike at Mr. Coppedge for his offense of introducing fresh ideas to co-workers.

In the light of this case and the recent, similar Martin Gaskell case, one hardly knows what to make of doubt that Ben Stein was right. There is an Expelled factor. Today, you can doubt anything except Darwin, and you must contrive not to know about or speak of the growing mass of evidence that contradicts the stuff government forces students to learn in tax-funded schools.

But there is no freedom for adults either, it turns out. Darwinism today has nothing to do with the science and everything to do with protecting the cultural status of an icon that has given government everything from compulsory sterilization to scientific racism to ... the right of tax-funded institutions like JPL to run inquisitions powered by devotion to that icon.

Sadly, Klinghoffer writes,

It's bad enough when private universities clamp down on the free exchange of ideas. But public institutions have often seemed to be the worst offenders of all in this respect, and that is something taxpayers have every right to protest.

Klinghoffer suggests that Americans phone: 202-358-1010 or e-mail Charles Bolden, charles.bolden@nasa.gov Yet will they?

I've covered ID stories for about a decade now, and on the way, I learned something interesting: What is keeping Darwinism alive right now is not evidence; the evidence is leaning sharply against Darwin's "information for free" mechanism.

What keeps Darwinism alive is the awful passivity of the taxpayers who doubt it, yet continue to fund its long, persecutory march through the institutions.

Christians are the worst, incidentally.

Galaxies produced in "cosmic blink of an eye"?

Adam Mann reports at Nature News (26 January 2011) that "Oldest galaxy is lone ranger: Discovery of the most distant known object hints at empty early Universe." (26 January 2011)

Astronomers have glimpsed the most distant galaxy ever detected — a lone object 13.2 billion light years from Earth. The discovery implies that the fledgling Universe was emptier than was previously imagined.

[ ... ]


The near-barrenness of this epoch stands in contrast to a period roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang, in which the team has found around 60 galaxies.


The results suggest that in fewer than 200 million years — a cosmic blink of an eye — large galaxies rapidly built up from smaller ones, and the rate of star formation increased tenfold. "It's telling us that there is a very dramatic change taking place at this time period," says Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a co-author of the paper.


The sparseness of galaxies raises a mystery.

It's almost as if a blueprint was unfolding, but no ... Actually, it would be interesting of some design-oriented and non-design-oriented astronomers made sealed predictions abut this stuff and see who is closer to the mark.

4% solution: Ultimate Copernican revolution is “We’re different”?

In “The challenge of the great cosmic unknowns” ( New Scientist 24 January 2011),

Dan Falk reviews Richard Panek’s The 4% Universe: Dark matter, dark energy, and the race to discover the rest of reality:

As he nears the present day, Panek weaves together two separate yet closely related storylines. In the first, he takes us to sophisticated laboratories around the world where researchers are trying to isolate particles of dark matter. Their best guess is that dark matter is made of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which were created at the time of the big bang and are now fiendishly difficult to detect.


In the second storyline, we join the hunt for dark energy, which began in the late 1990s when two teams of researchers studying distant supernova explosions reached a stunning conclusion: that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, but speeding up.

The Amazon site features an interview with Panek:

Q: Sounds like science is a pretty straightforward process of discovery and follow-up.

Panek: Straightforward, maybe. Pretty, no. As I show in The Four Percent Universe, the discoveries involved a lot of behind-the-scenes rivalries that sometimes turned ugly—rivalries that continue to this day. But in a way, these rivalries have been good for the science. When scientists who would like nothing more than to prove one another wrong wind up agreeing on a weird result, their peers can’t help but take the result seriously. Astronomers hate to say it—they’re as superstitious as anyone else, and they think they’ll jinx their chances—but there are Nobel Prizes at stake here.

Q: So this is real. Astronomers actually believe that 96 percent of the universe is "missing"?

Panek: Yes. They call it the ultimate Copernican revolution. Not only are we not at the center of the universe, we’re not even made of the same stuff as the vast majority of the universe.

Hmmm.