In September, 2010 the scientific community made the announcement that it had found an Earth-like planet in a far away solar system in the Milky Way galaxy, and implied that the probability of life existing there is extremely high. Immediately the media trumpeted this to the general public as fact, complete with spectacular graphical depictions. There are a few problems with this. First, no one has actually seen this planet, but now there’s a perception in the general public that someone has. Second, the techniques used by scientists to ‘discover’ this planet are so obscure that if the general public were aware of them they might be more skeptical about the whole thing.
But finding an actual explanation of the process scientists used to ‘discover’ this planet and determine that it is ‘earthlike’ is extremely difficult. What I did manage to find is this: “The discovery was made using radial velocity measurements combining 11 years of data from the HIRES instrument of the Keck 1 telescope and the HARPS instrument of ESO’s 3.6m telescope at La Silla Observatory” (Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_g).
On further research, I found that the HIRES instrument (High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer) breaks up incoming starlight into its component colors to measure the precise intensity of each of thousands of color channels, and The HARPS instrument (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) uses Doppler Spectroscopy to detect if the light from a star indicates that it is wobbling. The theory is that if a star is wobbling it must be caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet ‘tugging’ on the star. The star, Gliese 581, is around 20 light years from earth (that’s about 117,572,507,463,660 miles).
So, in as plain words as possible, the entire assumption that the ‘earthlike’ planet Gliese 581G exists is based on scientists trusting the accuracy of the radio telescopes and the HARPS/HIRES instruments to provide flawless data on the behavior of the light from a distant star that took 20 years to reach us, in order to ascertain that the star has a virtually imperceptible wobble, and assuming based on this data that it does, to then make the further assumption that the wobble is caused by a planet that cannot be seen. And then based on those assumptions, scientists claim that the distance this new planet is from its star gives it a high probability that it is like Earth in that it has all the right conditions to support life.
To me, those are a lot of (potentially flawed) assumptions and therefore I am skeptical of the claim that this even planet exists.
Now, I am someone who supports scientific discovery, and I’m not saying that I think the scientific community is wrong about the Gliese 581G planet. What I am saying is that the general public should not automatically accept as fact what the scientific community presents to them, without being made aware of the basis from which the scientific community is making these assumptions. And the Media has a responsibility to not just automatically sensationalize what the scientific community tells them, but to research the processes that were used in making these discoveries and effectively communicate that information to the general public.
One more caveat: Another reason why the scientific community and the media need to make more of an effort to disclose the basis for these discoveries is that sometimes the nature of the discoveries themselves can cause a rift between the religious community and scientific community by potentially challenging long-held beliefs about the universe from a religious perspective (for example that we may be unique and therefore special in the universe). I believe that the religious community should be open to considering these discoveries, but it is critical that the scientific community and the media provide all of the details regarding the processes and techniques that the scientific community used as the basis of their assumptions, so that a well educated public can decide for themselves if they believe it is fact.
-H.E.Miller http://www.ApocalypticDreams.com
But finding an actual explanation of the process scientists used to ‘discover’ this planet and determine that it is ‘earthlike’ is extremely difficult. What I did manage to find is this: “The discovery was made using radial velocity measurements combining 11 years of data from the HIRES instrument of the Keck 1 telescope and the HARPS instrument of ESO’s 3.6m telescope at La Silla Observatory” (Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_g).
On further research, I found that the HIRES instrument (High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer) breaks up incoming starlight into its component colors to measure the precise intensity of each of thousands of color channels, and The HARPS instrument (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) uses Doppler Spectroscopy to detect if the light from a star indicates that it is wobbling. The theory is that if a star is wobbling it must be caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet ‘tugging’ on the star. The star, Gliese 581, is around 20 light years from earth (that’s about 117,572,507,463,660 miles).
So, in as plain words as possible, the entire assumption that the ‘earthlike’ planet Gliese 581G exists is based on scientists trusting the accuracy of the radio telescopes and the HARPS/HIRES instruments to provide flawless data on the behavior of the light from a distant star that took 20 years to reach us, in order to ascertain that the star has a virtually imperceptible wobble, and assuming based on this data that it does, to then make the further assumption that the wobble is caused by a planet that cannot be seen. And then based on those assumptions, scientists claim that the distance this new planet is from its star gives it a high probability that it is like Earth in that it has all the right conditions to support life.
To me, those are a lot of (potentially flawed) assumptions and therefore I am skeptical of the claim that this even planet exists.
Now, I am someone who supports scientific discovery, and I’m not saying that I think the scientific community is wrong about the Gliese 581G planet. What I am saying is that the general public should not automatically accept as fact what the scientific community presents to them, without being made aware of the basis from which the scientific community is making these assumptions. And the Media has a responsibility to not just automatically sensationalize what the scientific community tells them, but to research the processes that were used in making these discoveries and effectively communicate that information to the general public.
One more caveat: Another reason why the scientific community and the media need to make more of an effort to disclose the basis for these discoveries is that sometimes the nature of the discoveries themselves can cause a rift between the religious community and scientific community by potentially challenging long-held beliefs about the universe from a religious perspective (for example that we may be unique and therefore special in the universe). I believe that the religious community should be open to considering these discoveries, but it is critical that the scientific community and the media provide all of the details regarding the processes and techniques that the scientific community used as the basis of their assumptions, so that a well educated public can decide for themselves if they believe it is fact.
-H.E.Miller http://www.ApocalypticDreams.com
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