Sean Carroll

So it looks like there used to be a lot of water on Mars.

This is a great discovery. There’s so much we don’t know about the origin and evolution of planets and their chemistry, any little bit of information helps. The evidence seems to be somewhat indirect (sulfate concentrations, shapes of rocks), but I’m willing to believe that it paints a compelling picture.

Still, I have profoundly mixed feelings about this. Of course, the result is immediately spun as evidence for the possibility of life, with some intentional ambiguity about how strong the possibility is, when the life might have died out, or what form it took. More than one of the scientists comes right out and says that this part of Mars would have been an hospitable environment for life to exist. Really? Just because there was water? Wouldn’t we need to know a little more than that to make such a sweeping statement?

Discovering solid evidence for life native to Mars (as opposed to some organic material that was splashed there from Earth, as we now know can happen after comets or meteors impact us) would be a truly wonderful event. But it’s not very likely. For one thing, it’s just hard; I can imagine a long series of experiments reaching inconclusive results. For another, the a priori chances that life evolved separately on Mars seem incredibly small. There seem to be a lot of planets in our galaxy (one hundred billion, maybe?), but yet the galaxy is not teeming with the electromagnetic buzz of numerous advanced civilizations (the Fermi paradox). Either civilizations destroy themselves with extremely high probability, or life comes into existence with extremely low probability. Choose for yourself which seems more reasonable.

But still, it would be well worth chasing after this remote possibility if it didn’t cost anything. (Warning: curmudgeonly realism ahead.) But this finding will certainly be used as justification for funneling yet more money away from other NASA science programs and into the Mars program, especially into the manned mission which Bush recently proposed. Which is just silly.

The space shuttle and the space station were part of a NASA strategy to make travel to Earth orbit cheap and routine, which is certainly a laudable and achievable goal. The problem is, it’s been an abject failure. Shuttle missions are infrequent, unsafe, and fantastically expensive; the space station is even worse on all counts. So the new strategy is to build a base on the Moon and then visit Mars? This is like a kid who can’t quite get the hang of riding a bike without any training wheels, who decides that everything would improve if he enters the Tour de France. Not that it’s not a worthwhile goal (either the Moon or the Tour de France), but it’s not necessarily right under any circumstances. And we’re just not there yet.

Meanwhile, the rest of NASA’s science budget is being strangled. I gave a colloquium at the Space Telescope Science Institute on January 14th this year; the starting time had to be delayed so that everyone could listen to the President’s announcement of the new initiative, which had been (coincidentally, one assumes) scheduled for the same time. The sense of dread in the room was palpable; here were dozens of dedicated scientists, who were devoted to using this fantastic instrument to discover new things about the universe, who could see it being undermined before their eyes. And indeed, soon thereafter the planned servicing mission (to install $200 million of new equipment, which has already been built) was canceled. Safety was certainly a major concern in the decision, but money was a crucial factor.

And Hubble is not the only thing to go. I was recently on a NASA “roadmap team” to sketch out a future plan of missions in cosmology and astrophysics. We came up with the Beyond Einstein program, an ambitious but practical set of missions to learn about black holes, dark matter, dark energy, and the early universe. In the President’s new budget, all of the new missions were pushed back several years; of course they can continually be pushed back until they never happen. I have a vested interest in this kind of science, it’s true; but by any objective measure the most successful science missions that NASA has done have been unmanned satellites, not sending people around the solar system. Our scientific decisions are being increasingly driven by spectacle and political calculation, which is a shame when there are such exciting results potentially within reach.

It’s terrible that I can’t simply enjoy a wonderful scientific result for what it is, but automatically start fretting about the wider political consequences. Must be a grownup or something.

On NPR this morning, a teaser for The World mentioned a story this afternoon about a new program in Mexico: they are going to hand out free books to people riding the subway. (Here’s a version of the story from Newsday.) Apparently Mexico has the highest literacy rate in Latin America (about 90%), but people don’t really spend that much time actually reading, so the program make it easy for people to read in a context where they can’t do much else. Hopefully the reading will catch on, maybe even cut down on crime in the subways.

Now, as an idealistic liberal, this sounds like pure genius to me. But realistically there are a couple of questions. First, is this really going to work, or is it just a fantasy cooked up by Mexican liberals who are as starry-eyed and idealistic as I am? Second, who chooses the books? From the story it appears that they are publishing special books of short stories for the occasion, but someone has to decide who gets included. Can you imagine the political (or even literary) wranglings over that one?

So far only about 64 percent of the books have been returned. That doesn’t sound so bad, actually, and I can imagine that people will quit swiping them if they are consistently available for free on the subways. Besides, it’s kind of encouraging that people would want to steal books at all.

The first time I’ve ever seen a paper with my name in the title, and they manage to get the spelling wrong. Now I know how Zbigniew Brzezinski must have felt all the time.

Meanwhile, I seem to have attracted almost a hundred visitors on my first blogday. This internet thing, as others have already noticed, just might catch on. But I don’t know how to tell where people come from, or which pages are linking to me; I think blogspot won’t reveal this information unless I pay them money.

[Update: Now I know how to find who’s linking where. It’s all at Technorati.com, but you probably knew that. Thanks to Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber for the tip. (I still think it takes cash to figure out which visitors came from where.)]

This quarter Shadi Bartsch and I are teaching Moments in Atheism, an undergraduate course in the Big Problems curriculum here at the University of Chicago. I’m not sure what is more surprising, the idea of a course on the history of atheism, or the fact that I could get a humanities course to count as a regular teaching credit.

Teaching the course has been a fantastic experience; it brings me back to my own days as an undergraduate, exploring great ideas in philosophy and history. Indeed, one of the interesting things we have realized along the way is how much the history of atheism parallels all of the major twists and turns in the intellectual history of Western civilization generally. This has to be one of the few courses ever taught with Thomas Aquinas, Karl Marx, and Stephen Hawking on the same syllabus.

We were concerned at first about the touchy nature of the material; we wanted everyone to feel comfortable, no matter what their personal beliefs about religion were. So far it seems to be a success; there is a range of views represented in the class, and nobody has yet complained (out loud, anyway) about being marginalized.

One interesting discovery is the paucity of scholarly work on the actual history of atheism. It’s easy enough to find polemical books on either side of the issue, or careful philosophical works for and against the existence of God, but there’s not so much done on how the ideas have actually developed through time. Maybe because it’s a touchy subject? Also fascinating how reluctant people were to declare themselves atheists (until the 19th century), no matter how obviously the implications of their work were pushing them in that direction. Up at least through Hume, the pressure was so great that nobody could admit to disbelieving in God, even if they thought He was completely powerless in the world, or equal to the world.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to do much about the present day. It’s still a touchy subject, of course; probably as much now as two hundred years ago. The elder George Bush famously said that he didn’t think that atheists should be considered as citizens. I’m not sure why the US and Europe seem to have diverged so dramatically on this.

My first link, from Pharyngula (thanks!), who was understandably disappointed that I wasn’t the other Sean Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin. I’ve never met the other SC in person, although I do remember a moment about ten years ago when I found an article in Time magazine about the nation’s 50 brightest minds under the age of 40. I picked it up, optimistically searching for my own name, and much to my surprise there it was! Only, attached to a different person. Just last year we were both interviewed by the BBC on the same program (about different science topics). But my site comes up first on Google, so there.

In the only category I am qualified to comment on, I notice Finding Nemo won the Academy Award for best animated film. As I’m sure cinema snobs will never grow tired of pointing out, it really should have been Les Triplettes de Belleville. The imagination and artistry in that movie were truly spectacular.

Let’s cast this as a shrewd, techno-savvy blow against the hyperspecialization of the modern academy. In other words, the conventional modes of expression available to a physics professor (writing papers and books, giving talks, hectoring students) just don’t provide sufficient scope for all of my opinions that I’m sure the world is waiting to hear.

The plan is to occasionally talk about science, both substance and politics (the decision to abandon further servicing missions for the Space Telescope was the issue that first made me want to start this), but also about things that have nothing to do with science. If Matt Drudge can have a significant impact on our nation’s political culture, why not me?

The title of the blog is my favorite phrase to describe the actual universe in which we live, as recently inventoried by cosmologists. After thousands of years of wondering, we now know what the universe is made of: 5% is ordinary matter (everything you or anyone else has ever seen), 25% is something called “dark matter,” and 70% is the even-more-mysterious “dark energy.” This set of ingredients provides an excellent fit to all sorts of data, but it doesn’t really make sense to us — thus, a preposterous universe. Long ago Copernicus told us that we weren’t at the center of the universe, but we continue to discover new senses in which that is true.

It’s a big universe, and there’s lots to say about it, even when we just stick to the mess here on Earth. The challenge, of course, will be to see if the postings will remain regular enough to be worth reading. We’ll see how it goes.