TMQ Watch: December 26, 2017.

Because this year’s schedule meant football on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, TMQ didn’t watch any.

We’re still unclear on why this was the case. Especially on Christmas Day: the first game started at 3:30 PM Central, and was over with enough time left to watch the good “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and promptly flip over to the second game before the bad “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” came on. (Really, whose bright idea was it to show the vastly superior animated special before the feature length movie that should never have been made?)

But how can you miss me when I won’t go away?

So. Many. Possible. Punch. Lines.

My holiday gift to readers is a column-length expansion of Tuesday Morning Quarterback’s A Cosmic Thought item.

Can we return this and get something actually useful? Like socks?

After the jump, this week’s substitute for a TMQ…

A rough guess might be that men and women currently know 1 percent of what is possible to know.

What about non-gender binary individuals? Do they know more or less than that 1 percent?

(450 words down.)

What if we are not the first on Earth?

The Michael Kipp research sounds interesting. But:

We like to assume that nobody but our magnificent selves could have built cities, invented silicon chips, or devised the breakfast burrito.

Well, we like to assume that because we haven’t seen evidence to the contrary. But if there was intelligent life that did precede us on Earth, wouldn’t we see evidence of that? Wouldn’t we see remains of complex structures, showing sighs of having been built by intelligent life?

(“Maybe we don’t recognize those.” But we’re talking about life on Earth: there are certain constraints that we can expect intelligent life to work within. Or is the idea here that maybe there once was intelligent life before us, but it and all evidence of it was mysteriously wiped out?)

What if we are the first overall?

Fair question, reasonable answer to Fermi’s Paradox. But is it statistically likely, over 14 billion years, that we are the first to evolve?

When did people reach North America?

Okay, to be fair to Easterbrook, this is some genuinely fascinating stuff. We’re a little skeptical of those 130,000 year old hammered mastodon bones, but we haven’t really looked at Holen’s work.

How many galaxies are far, far away?

Answer: “Two trillion galaxies would suggest somewhere around 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. That’s two million times greater than the seemingly-incomprehensible star census estimate at the top of this article.”

And yet, out of those 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, only one in 14 billion years has evolved intelligence?

Life keeps looking older. Latest indications are that life began on Earth at least 3.7 billion years ago, quite a bit farther back than once presumed. This gives credence to the possibility that life is not spectacularly improbable, rather, likely to arise whenever the proper range of elements, temperatures, and pressures are present.

1. This assumes facts not in evidence: namely, that only “the proper range of elements, temperatures, and pressures” is necessary for life.
2. If indeed this is the case, doesn’t that make the “we’re the first to evolve intelligence” hypothesis even less likely?

Are deep-space “bursts” the muzzle flashes of weapons?

Ding! As we all know by now, this is one of TMQ’s stupider tropes.

Scientists are trained to seek natural explanations for phenomena, but if there really are 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, some must host worlds that build weapons (nuclear explosions release gamma rays) and communication devices.

The universe may have existed for only a tiny fraction of a projected life that will run deep into the trillions of years. (Hold that thought till the end of this column.) If the cosmos is youthful compared to itself, maybe there has not yet been enough time for intelligence to evolve.

—Gregg Easterbrook, earlier in this column

There may be natural explanations for bursts of gamma rays and energetic radio. It just seems presumptuous to suppose we already know enough about the enormity of the cosmos to rule out that large-scale distant events are indicators of other societies.

Seems far more presumptuous to us to suggest that these are “indicators of other societies” before natural explanations are ruled out.

Hey, what about “dark matter”? And “dark energy”?

My favorite is that the acceleration of expansion is really a gigantic illusion and thus does not have to be explained.

We kind of think Easterbrook meant that sarcastically. But we’re reminded of Ernst Mach’s explanation of why the Michelson–Morley experiment failed to find the luminiferous aether: it didn’t find it because it wasn’t there because it didn’t exist.

Forget the two trillion galaxies: Our galaxy alone is, like, so, like, totally huge.

Space is big,
The Universe dark
It’s hard to recall
Where you park.
—Burma Shave

Stars are still forming.

Because the cosmos is ancient compared to us, we conceptualize creation as running toward decay.

Well, no, Gregg. We conceptualize creation as running toward decay because it is. All closed systems tend to run towards decay absent an input of energy. It’s called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The fact that somewhere, stars are being created doesn’t mean that the universe as a whole isn’t running down: just that there’s a local flow of energy towards where the stars are being created, offset by a decrease in energy elsewhere.

If the universe is just getting started, who can say what the cosmic enterprise may call for? Happy holidays.

Is the universe calling for happy holidays?

TMQ promises to be back next week. We will be, too.

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