The Webb telescope and habitable planets
Let’s get far away from politics, if only for a moment.
Far, far, far away.
For the second time, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has looked for and failed to find a thick atmosphere on an exoplanet in one of the most exciting planetary systems known. Astronomers report1 today that there is probably no tantalizing atmosphere on the planet TRAPPIST-1 c, just as they reported months ago for its neighbour TRAPPIST-1 b.
Tantalizing atmosphere.
More:
Because planets of this type are common around many stars, “that would definitely reduce the amount of planets which might be habitable”, says Sebastian Zieba, an exoplanet researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany…
All of the seven TRAPPIST-1 planets, which orbit a star some 12 parsecs (40 light years) from Earth, have rocky surfaces and are roughly the size of Earth. Astronomers consider the system to be one of the best natural laboratories for studying how planets form, evolve and potentially become habitable. The planets are a key target for JWST, which launched in 2021 and is powerful enough to probe their atmospheres in greater detail than can other observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope…
The planets’ host star is a dim cool star known as an M dwarf, which is the most common type of star in the Milky Way. It blasts out large amounts of ultraviolet radiation, which could erode any atmosphere on a nearby planet.
The system’s innermost planet, TRAPPIST-1 b, is blasted with four times the amount of radiation that Earth gets from the Sun, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise when JWST found that it had no substantial atmosphere2. But the next in line, TRAPPIST-1 c, orbits farther from its star, and it seemed possible that the cooler planet might have managed to hang on to more of an atmosphere.
They’re going to keep looking at the other planets farther away from the star. But my gut feeling, for what it’s worth, is that they won’t find what they’re looking for. I think that the conditions for life, and particularly for the development of intelligent life, are far more rare than most people think, given the size of the universe.
That doesn’t mean I think that we are alone; the universe is vast. But I think we might be alone or effectively alone, which is not the same thing but would be the same thing in the practical sense. There’s also the Fermi Paradox, although there are ways around that as well (one was discussed today already here).
Contemplation of the question is both fascinating and anxiety-provoking, and awesome (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) either way.
I think the movie Ad Astra, was correct in this regard: “We’re all there is.”
And daring for actually saying so.
Also daring in adapting the thematic and structural frameworks of Apocalypse Now and The Heart of Darkness. But that’s another subject.
Statistically, with billions of stars in an individual galaxy, and literally countless galaxies, even if life is improbable, there’s life out the in the universe.
Now, let’s narrow down to the slightly more practical Milky Way. We need better data for the parameters in the Drake Equation. It used to be uncertain what stars had planets, we now know that’s a very high percentage. How many rocky, earth size planets in the Goldilocks zone with a suitable environment? That number also becoming a bit better defined. Then the problems: given those conditions will life arise, and then intelligence?
To me the big stumbling block is life itself. Given Earth’s biological history, intelligence seems to emerge at various levels in many species. If we find evidence of Martian life, then maybe it’s not so rare a phenomenon.
My gut feeling, there’s probably other life in the Milky Way, intelligence less so. The complete lack of evidence over 50 years of SETI really brings the Fermi Paradox into play.
It’s a mathmatical certainty that we’re not alone given the unfathomably colossal size of the Universe that we can observe. We see something like 200 trillion galaxies with an average of 400 billion stars each. But as you say, we could effectively be alone in the sense that there’s nobody else in a reasonable distance in both time and space from us.
Effectively alone is an apt term. Do the math: Distances within our own galaxy are prohibitive (even at Star Trek warp speeds) to explore more than a slice of it. But telescopic technology will continue to advance. It will be interesting to see what turns up.
I wonder, considering the statistical probabilities, at what point does our mathematical reasoning depart us, exhausted? Suppose our math tells us that, examining ‘x’ number of solar systems containing sun & planet configurations similar to ours, with planets similar to ours in terms of size and orbit – that one of these systems has a 99% probability of finding conditions conducive to generating an atmosphere capable of supporting life.
What happens when we reach ‘x’, and haven’t found one yet? And I wonder what ‘x’s value might be, for an astrophysicist? Would a belief in God, or at least Intelligent Design, start to prevail for Life on Earth?
Nonapod is correct but I’d like to go further. Intelligence is quite common on Earth, all the mammals are as well as birds. The real issue is the construction of a technological civilization that has control of and can exploit all the forces of Nature.
The advanced technology that we benefit from are all due to the scientific and industrial revolutions of the West. A few battles here and there and Western society would have succumbed to Muslim civilization and none of it would have happened. Just look at all the Islamic societies. They all derive their technology from the West. They have made next to no contributions to its development. Ditto for Hindu, Buddhist, or Chinese cultures.
Well, ChatGPT says my ’email is not supported’, so I can’t ask AI it’s thoughts on ‘life elsewhere’. But just considering the varied abundance on earth, even after mass extinctions, we aren’t alone imo. How near and how smart they are remains questionable.
@Aggie: What happens when we reach ‘x’, and haven’t found one yet? And I wonder what ‘x’s value might be, for an astrophysicist?
As physicsguy points out, the Drake equation gives you a number for ‘x’ but what that number is depends on parameters that are mostly unknown, and will be for an unknown time to come.
It’s far too premature to say we know enough about how life works to say that that the probability of seeing any other life in the universe is high or low or zero.
I don’t know how many people know this, but pretty much everywhere on Earth that carbon chemistry can happen, you find life there. For example, boiling hot springs have life in them that lives nowhere else, extremely salty or frozen water has too, and the volcanic vents on the ocean floor support an ecosystem that is based on hydrogen sulfide instead of photosynthesis.
So from this you might think, wow, life could probably be found in lots of places in the universe. But there’s a catch, and the catch is that all the life we find is DNA-based*, and it all seems to be related to each other. There doesn’t seem to be more than one lineage of life on Earth.
So what we see is, once life gets started somehow, it gets everywhere and into everything. But what’s the probability of it having got started in the first place? We can’t easily say because we’ve only ever found one kind. If there was ever non-DNA-based* life, or DNA-based life not related to ours**, it didn’t survive on Earth and hasn’t left a trace. If there had been 5 or 10 different lineages of life around I’d find it easier to think that in the universe life might be common.
Like Powerball, somebody wins, so even if life is so improbable that it only happened once in the universe, the universe is really big so eventually it would have happened somewhere; the Earth doesn’t seem to be so obviously unique that life could ONLY have happened here if it happened at all.
Further than this it’s simply not possible to go at this time.
*Life doesn’t have to be based on DNA. Schroedinger’s 1944 book “What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell” predates the discovery of DNA and outlines what properties a chemical needs to have in order to transmit heredity.
**You’d detect this by looking at what genes are needed for the most basic cell functions and looking for radical differences.
physicsguy:
“Statistically, with billions of stars in an individual galaxy, and literally countless galaxies, even if life is improbable, there’s life out the in the universe.”
You could just as well say, since the cosmos is so big, there must be another world out there where they speak English. It depends on how improbable, doesn’t it?
IMO, the search for ET is based on false premises. Here’s a rough sketch of the unknown and why searching for a planet is the wrong approach. 1) How old is our galaxy? IE, how long was our galaxy here before life began on Earth? 2) All life on Earth is composed of carbon. Which is a product of a star. All the elements which sustain life on earth are products of stars. Stars that have expired in one way or another. How long does it take for a galaxy to produce the elements needed for life? 3) Earth is located in one of the arms. Presumably 4 billion years ago, during new star formation in our arm, there was plenty of elements needed to create a solar system. Is life dependent on being in one of the arms? 4) We seem to be searching nearby stars with no knowledge if they were formed fairly recently or are old and ended up in the arm by chance. Searching like this seems too random to produce any results. Since we are 4 billion years old do we need to search for stars that are 4 billion years old to increase our chances of finding ET?
Mostly I think our scientists are using linear thinking about the issue rather than going outside the box.
Pieces and parts:
Key building block for life found at Saturn’s moon Enceladus https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230614220041.htm
interesting view in interstellar, the three planet that were in the proximity of a black hole (which in itself is quixotic) almost all had earth like atmosphere, but yet didn’t seem to have much in the way of life,
I believe it is likely that there are other intelligent life forms that evolved on distant planets. However, I do not believe we will ever come into physical contact with them. I do not believe alien-created UFOs have ever visited earth.
To get a good idea on how alien contact would be made, see the beginning of the movie ‘Contact’. We would receive an electromagnetic signal with a sort of ‘Rosetta Stone’ based on mathematics so that we could eventually translate what they had to say. It would take hundreds or thousands or more years for that signal to reach us. We would then send a return signal which would take an equal amount of time to reach them.
The movie includes the notion of building a device to create a wormhole, but we can safely ignore that until our understanding of such hypothetical things is more fully understood, which is probably never, because they probably do not exist and even if they do, they would not allow for the passage of physically frail things, like human beings, due to the massive gravitational tidal forces that one would be subjected to.
So we are left with conversing by electromagnetic signals, with a very long interval between responses, likely thousands of years or more.
People find this notion depressing, but it is really a good thing. It means we are free to follow our course of development without interference of any alien life form. They cannot come here and gas or otherwise harass us, for whatever reason.
And precisely what, pray tell, what would be the benefit of coming into physical contact with an alien life form, even if they were completely benign? If you really put your mind to it, you will find that there is no practical benefit to being in physical contact with an alien life form. Communication from afar is potentially great, but actual physical contact carries no benefit beyond the communication aspect, for which we do not need to come into physical contact.
Erronius
Frederick says “It depends on how improbable, doesn’t it?” True. And conversely, how probable?
Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Doust Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies. [Wiki]
In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble used the 100 inch diameter telescope at Mt Palomar, then the largest ever made, to determine that Andromeda (M31 in the night sky%) was a separate galaxy, since then understood to be colliding with our own.
Wiki states that our Milky Way contains 100-400 billion stars, with an estimated like number of planets. And since there are estimated to be millions of galaxies…..
Well, do the math. Just multiply.
I’m haunted by the Fermi Paradox plus the failure of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) thus far to detect said intelligence.
Yes, I know the counter-arguments, including the Dark Forest, but it seems to me that if we aren’t the first intelligence, then there must be intelligences millions of years older and therefore that much more advanced.
At least one of those in our galaxy would have left traces detectible even to our technology. We might not understand those traces, but we could tell they weren’t natural.
But we probe our galaxy and we just find wilderness.
Maybe the odds are one ETI per galaxy and we’re it for the Milky Way.
I’m the other identified physicist here. As a grad student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1970s, I was peripherally involved — I was the one who actually looked at the raw data — in Project Ozma II, which was a modest search for artificial radio signals from the directions of some nearby stars. (I could go into details, but they weren’t especially novel.) You would know about it if we’d detected anything real.
Beyond that, my instincts are with Neo — that we’re effectively alone — and with not_a_lawyer for the reason/explanation: A single cycle of communications would take a couple of decades or longer. So why would we be interested? (It’s not like building a medieval cathedral that won’t be completed for generations; in such a case, you have something to be satisfied about along the way.)
physicsguy and others brought up the Fermi Paradox. Fermi didn’t really make such an argument (“Where are they?”). But if he had, I’d say that’s the one thing Fermi (my greatest hero in physics) got wrong: Just as with interstellar electromagnetic messaging, but worse, distances are simply too great for travel to be realistic. At least for beings such as ourselves who live something like 100 years.
Nobody’s going to be visiting Proxima Centauri … I don’t think humans will even be colonizing Mars.
“We seem to be searching nearby stars with no knowledge if they were formed fairly recently or are old and ended up in the arm by chance”
Not true. Stellar life cycles are very well established so that given a particular star type, we can accurately know its age. For example. O, and B type stars are relatively young and will die out soon, stellar speaking. As compared to an M star.
Why make the assumption that life must be on the SURFACE of a planet? Earth has plenty of species that spend much or even all their life underground . How do we know that Alien species are not more common under the surface of a planet than on it?
And we generally assume those underground species are within a short distance of the surface of the Earth. But how do we really know if there are not extremophile species even deeper than we drill for oil? How do we really know?
The secular people will likely dismiss this, but the book of Revelation, chapter 9 , in the Bible, seem to be describing a previously unidentified species that emerges from deep in the ground ( or maybe through a portal in the ground) during the time of the Great Tribulation as the Christians call it, or the “Time of Jacob’s Trouble” as some Jews call it, and attacks people.
Count me among those who think it to be a virtual certainty that there are hundreds, if not tens of thousands of intelligent life forms, in just our Galaxy alone.
“In my father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.” John 14:2
“the scientific consensus was that, at the very least, the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life. It appears that we live in a “Goldilocks Universe”, in which both the arrangement of matter at the cosmic beginning and the values of various physical parameters — such as the speed of light, the strength of gravitational attraction and the expansion rate of the universe – are just right. And unless one is frightened of the term, it also appears the universe is designed for biogenesis and
humanlife”.https://dennisprager.com/column/why-some-scientists-embrace-the-multiverse/
@Frederick:
You might want to check out the ciliates. Their use of codons varies from everyone else, have evolved different nucleus structures and a number of other differences.
Very interesting critters. You’ll have to read abstracts mostly.
@JackWayne: “4) We seem to be searching nearby stars with no knowledge if they were formed fairly recently or are old and ended up in the arm by chance.”
Nearby stars are the only ones we have the technology to look at and bio-detection is only one part of it. Have patience.
After I learned how vast and empty the universe actually was, Star Wars and Star Trek didn’t seem believable anymore. If there are other forms of “intelligent life” out there, it also seems unlikely that they’d be zipping all around the universe. Maybe they’re just homebodies. The aliens imagined in 20th century science fiction may have been distorted and displaced images of 19th/20th century humanity — technocratic and imperialist.
If life is a function of accident–the requisite molecules eventually bump into each other and manage to reproduce a few times before some cancelling event happens–UV, lightning, vulcanism, etc–then evolution guarantees speciation and growth and increasing complexity.
Intelligence can be selected for. Should be said that cetaceans have big brains but not necessarily for cognitive exercises; they have to manage incredibly complex sounds coming in and going out and that part of the brain is quite large compared to most other mammals’ .
But there will be trees–shrubs trying to beat other shrubs to the UV–which means some energy in seeds or leaves or shoots which will, inevitably, attract attention and those who do better at it will prevail.
And we have…primates. Or at least creatures capable of grasping. A giraffe can be a genius but without the ability to manipulate the environment, he’ll have to be restricted to philosophy and not technology.
Given the number of chances and the guarantees–stored energy attracts attention and that can be a walnut or an antelope, for example–it would seem that eventually, a planet with dry land–probably need combustion for technology–and with the proper atmosphere will have life and eventually intelligence.
Finding out about them is different. Trick question: How long from the Copper Age to interstellar travel? Five thousand years, see Voyager. Not that anybody’s going to find that thing any time soon.
If the speed of light can be dodged as a limit, then we do have a Fermi question. If somebody figures out how to make the sci fi convention of “hyperdrive” a reality, then folks will be at least able to zip around the galaxies. Technological civilizations may come and go but…there ought to be a few extant, however many have disappeared.
At the beginning of the use of electricity for machines, some had arcs as contacts were made and broken, some with pretty good amperage. And it would be regular as the machine went around and around or whatever it was doing.
An arc fills the electromagnetic spectrum and so we’ve been shooting this stuff–with its obviously artificial regularity–into space for….maybe over a hundred years, after which it was replaced by better machines and broadcasting coming from radio and radar and since WW II, we’ve been firing sufficient juice into the sky to spot incoming bombers or ICBM.
The stuff fades according to the inverse square law so, fifty light years out it might not be discernible from background radiation. But maybe….with sufficiently delicate receivers and analytical tools….Somebody might know we’re here, given suitable exoplanets within fifty light years. Which is how many?
The advanced technology that we benefit from are all due to the scientific and industrial revolutions of the West.
Not hardly, sir, much of the ‘advanced technology’ which formed the curricula of the early Western European Universities (12th century on) was imported from Central Asia, in the Arabic language, developed by pioneers who stood on the intellectual shoulders of the early Greeks, but made great advances themselves.
A few battles here and there and Western society would have succumbed to Muslim civilization
Dude! the Central Asins I cite WERE largely Muslims.
And it is just astounding how far they have advanced since the 12th century. Dude!
I have consulted a cardiologist who has a PhD in astrophysics. I haven’t asked her why she is a cardiologist after all that education but I suspect she gave up and went to medical school. I did ask her about her dissertation and since learning its topic, I can understand a bit better why she did go to medical school.
’bout fifteen years ago, went to a reunion of a band of cheerful brigands–lacrosse team. I was surprised at how many weren’t too crippled up to serve. Couple of Air Force guys said everybody’s got a story about UFO. But talking about it back in the mid to late Sixties on into….after they got out could be a problem when the next Efficiency Report rolled around.
That has apparently changed.
Because there is so little difference between 12 century and 21 st century technology. ( Sarcasm ). Beware of people claiming the ” Muslims” advanced this or that, especially if those advancements pre dated Islam….that being said, the Ancient Chinese were no pushovers . They did manage to invent gun powder.
Recently there was a reader comment posted on the Fox News website claiming that all modern medicine was due to sub Saharan Africa. The rational was the ” immortal” cell line from the black lady Henrietta Lacks. …talk about extrapolation!!!!
”Count me among those who think it to be a virtual certainty that there are hundreds, if not tens of thousands of intelligent life forms, in just our Galaxy alone.”
Almost certainly not.
1) The speed of light is an absolute limit. Nothing travels faster than light, not even massless photons. There is no hyperdrive, warp drive, or anything else of that nature.
2) The distance between galaxies is so vast that it is nearly certain that nothing can cross it. It would take millions of years traveling at near the speed of light with no inputs of matter or energy for a generation ship to cross even to the nearest galaxy.
3) The speed of technology is so much faster than the speed of biology that it is almost certain that the first spacefaring civilization in the Milky Way will colonize the entire galaxy before the next one reaches that same initial technology level. A species that evolved on a planet that formed the very same day the Earth did but evolved just 1% faster would have become spacefaring 40 million years ago while the ancestors to humans were still lemurs. Likewise if they evolved just 1% slower, we’ll colonize the whole galaxy while they’re still lemurs.
We’re probably only 200 years from being able to colonize the entire solar system and another 200 years from being able to send a generation ship from our Oort Cloud to the Oort Cloud of the next star over. From there the whole galaxy is ours within a million years. No great technological leap is required — just modest advancements from and a large scale-up of the International Space Station.
Sorry, but the Star Trek scenario just isn’t likely.
mkent
Without hyperdrive, where do I get my space opera?
Who do you have lined up for the next Oort Cloud over?
Been a couple of SF stories where a “ship” is a world with a society–for plot purposes gone astray–which will reproduce itself generation after generation until they get to some star system. After which they’re supposed to do….? Usually, the mission statement is missing and hilarity ensues.
What it does for Terra is left unsaid.
So unless your goal is spreading H. Sap throughout the universe, it’s for naught. Terra would have forgotten about it by the time any signals came back.
Just gonna drop this here —
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/06/20/did-the-galileo-project-just-find-the-remains-of-an-interstellar-craft-n559344
Richard Aubrey –I like the way you think on this subject.
The Muslims take the credit, but my bet it was their educated, literate, “unbeliever” slaves who did the discovering and preserving.
Moreover, whatever knowledge Muslims might have passed down/preserved from classical civilization was whatever bits and pieces were left over after they first burnt down all of the unbeliever libraries they encountered in their raids and conquests into what used to be called Christendom.
As for the accomplishments of the Chinese in the areas of science and technology, which were considerable, take a look at a massive Cambridge University Press published, multi-volume work exploring these accomplishments by Joseph Needham titled, “Science and Civilization in China.”*
* See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China
Many insightful comments here. I particularly admire Dr. Avi Loeb for having the courage to investigate a taboo subject like ETI.
I really enjoy this topic and thinking about it, and I like the Drake equation; we ought to have something like it for the point of discussion, but the problem with it in use is any number multiplied by zero is zero and the final four variables can, possibly, turn out to be zero.
Even if the variables preceding those four that turn out to increase (tenfold, a hundredfold, a googleplexfold) beyond what we currently perceive, a zero in one of the final four = zero.
Fermi’s paradox is only a paradox if we agree as stated that we have seen no evidence of alien life. The key word is “no”.
Since early recorded history, there have been untold thousands of reports of UFO-type phenomena that could be associated with aliens or alien technology. It is reasonable to hypothesize that many of these reports were the result of unusual circumstance, innocent ignorance, or even deceit. Some are positively laughable, but many are not! I have myself witnessed several occurrences that I at first thought might be UFOs, but which I subsequently understood were not.
But what is NOT reasonable is to make the blanket assumption that EVERY ONE of these hundreds and thousands of reports are false, especially without any serious investigation, only a search for anything with which to debunk. Like I said above, the key word in Fermi’s paradox is “no”.
It only takes ONE, and the “paradox” goes poof!
Ray Van Dune–
The convincing, objective evidence which makes me think that the top 5% of truly “unidentified” UFOs are very likely “not of this Earth,” is their flight characteristics–the “five observables”–which have quite often been observed simultaneously by several different sensing systems–the Mark I eyeballs of highly trained pilots (sometimes several of them, simultaneously), and by various radar, and other sensing systems.
Something that can be observed by such sensor systems “flying” through the atmosphere at speeds of many thousands of miles per hour–sometimes an estimated ten or even twenty thousand miles per hour–is not a “balloon,” not “swamp gas,” a “canopy reflection,” an “electronic sensor glitch,” an “adversary aircraft,” a “drone,” or a “misperceived star or planet,” neither is an object which is able to instantaneously accelerate, or to perform abrupt, sometimes a series of many, right angle turns, when the tremendous G-forces generated by even one such a turn (calculated at hundreds or even thousands of Gs) would literally convert any human pilot into jelly.
FYI I’ve read that Human fighter pilots (suited up with special g-suits and other special, top of the line equipment) can withstand about 9Gs of force before blacking out and risking permanent physical damage, whereas our top of the line fighters start to disintegrate when the G forces on them reach around 16Gs.
An object which is observed by multiple sensor systems to drop from 80,000 feet–at the edge of space–down to ocean level in little more than a second (one calculation which has been made is that performing this maneuver alone would require expending the equivalent of the total amount of energy used by New York city in a whole year) is not a bird, or the misperceived moon.
An object which flies but has no control surfaces—no wings, no tail or tails, no propellers, rudders–and no engine or rocket exhaust should not be able to fly, yet, these UFOs do.
An object which can fly out to the edge of space, fly into our atmosphere and, later, dive into and out of our oceans, is not a balloon, a drone, a diving bird, or any other everyday object.
Aircraft in our human inventory cannot just hover-and, in particular, cannot hover without any sound (recall how loud a helicopter is when it flies low, over you, or your house) sometimes hovering for hours.
Everyday objects–those supposedly commonly mistaken for UFOs-should not be able to spoof various sophisticated surveillance systems, to be essentially invisible, or to fade in and out of visibility, yet, these UFOs do just that.
It is for these reasons that I think that UFOs are real, and most likely of extraterrestrial, or perhaps extra-temporal, or even extra-dimensional origin.
Supposing there is other life out there, travel seems virtually impossible, or at least orders of magnitude more difficult than communication. Haven’t we been sending out radio signals into deep space for 100 years or so? Though this piece points out the the signal strength attenuates with distance.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/3390
Still, presumably some life forms thousands or millions of years more advanced than us could have signaled to us by now. So either there is none, or it’s much farther away than a few hundred or thousand light years.
Unicorns do those amazing flight maneuvers all the time and they don’t even have wings! Those alien UFOs are even more astonishing and fabulous!
Count me among those who think it to be a virtual certainty that there are hundreds, if not tens of thousands of intelligent life forms, in just our Galaxy alone.
Geoffrey Britain:
Where are they?
My point was not so much to argue for the existence of aliens (although if forced to guess, I would guess they exist) but to reinforce the idea of how poorly appreciated Fermi’s paradox really is.
A paradox is a paradox not because the universe is somehow misbehaving, but because there is something wrong with our thinking about it. We like to believe it is one truth and one lie – but we often don’t know which one is true – if either.
Ray Van Dune—I am continually amazed by statements to the effect that, this or that natural “law,” or scientific finding or principle make this or that development—in this case we are talking about being able to someday travel faster than the speed of light—“impossible.”
These statements, apparently assuming that we today, at this stage in our development as a species, have a complete and total understanding of all the forces at work in our Universe, about how they operate, and what limitations they might place on us.
This kind of assumption seems not only extremely arrogant, but totally ridiculous to me considering that, a hundred years or so ago horses were still being used in major cities for transportation, the Wright brothers were just getting a few feet off the ground at Kitty Hawk, radios were just coming into use, there was no such thing as a TV or computer, some people were worried that if you traveled more that a few miles an hour in a newfangled automobile, you might die from the effects of the “high” speeds involved, and astronomers of the time believed that the Milky Way was the entire extent of our Universe.
Snow’s observations on science reminded me of this concept in the philosophy of science, particularly the bolded quotation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
The final paragraph quoted explains why the leftists’ paradigmatic theories (socialism, CRT and DEI, to name a few) are not scientific paradigms.