Dr. Phil Plait comes at science blogging with some heavy credentials, having actually worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and, to a lesser extent, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) programs. His blog,
Bad Astronomy,
began life as an outlet for his frustration at the misuses and misunderstandings of astronomy in popular culture, but soon became a venue for his advocacy of all things science-based.
From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Plait was the President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a group which advocates for science and critical thinking. He’s written two books, the most recent of which is
Death From the Skies, chronicling all the ways the universe might kill us all, and recently created and starred in three pilot episodes of a Discovery Channel program called
Bad Universe.
Keith Daniels: You spent years working on the Cosmic Background Explorer and then on Hubble. Why did you feel that focusing instead on science education and popularization were where you were needed the most?
Phil Plait: [Laughs]. “Where I was needed the most!” Yes, I’m Captain Astronomy, here to save the world from its misuses and abuse! I don’t know if I’d phrase it that way
precisely, but yeah, I was doing some research on Hubble. I wasn’t on COBE for very long, but I did use Hubble when I was in graduate school, and then for several years afterwards. It’s not that ‘I was needed more elsewhere’, it was more along the lines of... I really enjoyed talking about this. I always have. I like writing about it. I like talking to people about astronomy, and I just started
doing it. What I found was that the more I did it, the more I liked it. As far as research goes, a lot of it was really cool, and really interesting, but it didn’t “sing to me”. It didn’t feel like my calling. It felt more like getting out there and writing about this, and showing people what’s going on... it was more fun and more gratifying. I guess it is important, you know?! People are interested in this kind of stuff and it’s
cool, and I wanted to make sure everybody sees what’s going on in the sky above their heads. I guess that’s why I started spending more and more time doing it.
KD: You’ve published two books, you’ve had a popular blog, and you’ve done tons of public speaking, but last year you did a television show,
Bad Universe. Is television another level entirely?
PP: Yeah, it’s kind of terrifying. A one minute cameo on
Jersey Shore can actually reach more people than a year of blogging, which is
sad, but true. Yeah, television is a terrific medium. It’s
really good for astronomy, because astronomy is a really visual science. There are two broad appeals of astronomy: one is that it is simply
beautiful -- you have these pictures of galaxies and planets and all these things.. it’s artwork, it’s just
fantastic, and every time I get a press release, or a note on Twitter or something, from Hubble, or the European Southern Observatory, or any of these groups, I always get excited, because I know there’s going to be some sort of really beautiful image involved with it, and that’s great. The other prong of the fork is: it appeals to our brains. Astronomy covers a lot of really great questions that we’ve had forever, including, “Why are we here?”, “How did we get here?”, “Is the universe all there is?”, “Is there life on other planets?”, “How big is ‘big’?”, “Is the universe infinite?” All of these [questions] can be realistically claimed by astronomy. So, I think there are these two reasons that it really appeals to people, and on television you can tackle a lot of this stuff. Now, it’s kind of hard to dive in and say, “Here’s precisely why stars blow up,” or, “Here’s how black holes work.” It’s not easy to do that in a 42-minute documentary, and have it make sense, and still have people watching by the end of it, but it’s still a terrific medium for that and something that I’ve always wanted to do. So I was pretty excited to be able to get the documentary.
KD: You mentioned answering the Big Questions with astronomy. Going all the way back to its beginnings as a science, astronomy has always had an almost... political... dimension. Why do you think that is? For example, why does it make the news every time Stephen Hawking even mentions the word ‘God’?
PP: [Laughs]. I don’t know about “politics”, but it’s always had strong roots in our psyche. You can imagine, in an agricultural society, they need to know when their seasons start. They need to know when their river’s going to flood. They need to know when the days are going to start getting longer, that sort of thing, and astronomy tells them that. The seasons
are astronomical, and so people were tied to the skies. Plus the fact that, before big cities, people were more familiar with the sky. It was darker at night. Now we have so many people living in the cities and suburbs that they’re not as tied to the sky as they used to be. So it’s not surprising to me that there’s a deep and rich history of astronomy being tied to
people. Nowadays, there’s so many different ways astronomy plays on people. On the Internet, certainly, it connects with people. A lot of the people who were originally on the internet were, y’know, geeks like me, and so they were already interested in astronomy. Then you’ve got this reliance on experts that is kind of funny. Stephen Hawking, everybody knows who he is, although they may not know
why they know who he is. I mean, here’s a guy who, 30 years ago, was breaking ground with black hole research as a theoretical astronomer and astrophysicist, and he came up with some really cool ideas and became very famous for it. Now, when he says
anything it’s newsworthy, which I think says more about us than it does about him, whether he’s right or wrong. I’ve disagreed with him on a couple of things he said, but yeah, he comes in and says something like, “We don’t need God to explain the universe,” [and] it’s
huge news, and I think that’s funny, because a
lot of people have been saying that for a
long time. [Laughs]. That idea goes back a long time, but for some reason, when a famous scientist says it, it becomes newsworthy. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but I guess if people have somebody they look up to and respect and then he says something like this, it’s controversial. And of course the media these days, anything that has anything to do with religion, they like to play it up.
KD: You’re also involved in the skeptical movement with the James Randi Educational Foundation, and TAM. Skepticism is often seen as a negative process, y’know, “debunking”, but one of the common themes of your work is demonstrating just how
awesome actual science is. Do you feel that’s more important than demonstrating what
isn’t true?
PP: Yeah! People think skepticism is a bunch of cynical old balding white men with beards, and I’m like, “I’m not cynical!” I
am a middle-aged white guy with increasingly flesh-colored hair -- that’s the way I usually phrase it -- and a beard, so I guess I kind of fit in to that, but I’m
not cynical. People think that skepticism is cynicism, it’s saying, “No, that’s not true,” and that’s not at all what skepticism says. That is an output of skepticism if the evidence points that way, but what it
really is is a way of looking at stuff and saying, “What’s the evidence for this?” Here’s a claim, “I think that there is a 75-foot purple turtle living in my basement.” Alright, What’s your evidence for this?” You start looking at the evidence and saying, “This is good evidence,” “This is bad evidence,” “Where do you stand on this?,” “What’s the precedent for this?” You can look into all these different ideas, and then at the end, look at them all and say, “What’s my conclusion?” Is my conclusion that, “This idea does not make sense,” or “This idea does make sense,” “it
might make sense,” “I don’t know,” but skepticism is
not a conclusion, it’s a process. It’s basically the same process science uses: you make a claim, you look at the evidence to support it, or that tears it down, and you make up your mind based on that evidence.
Everybody is skeptical of
something, and it may be something as mundane as going out and buying a car, and looking at the car salesman and saying, “He really wants to make this sale, so is he going to mention that in crash tests this car tends to explode and kill everybody within a 100 mile radius? Maybe he won’t, because he wants to make that sale.”
That is skepticism, looking at
why somebody might be making a claim. Now, there are all sorts of logical traps. You don’t want to immediately assume that person’s lying to you because they may have a vested interest in making that sale, but you’ve got to make sure you’re looking at all these things, and that’s what a skeptic
does. What is the claim somebody is making? Why are they making it? What is the evidence for that claim? Do I have evidence that supports or denies that claim? Does the claim even make sense? You can look at all these things and come to a conclusion, and you can apply that to more than just comparison shopping. You can do that when you’re listening to a politician, or a religious leader, or a scientist. When somebody tells you -- and this is where it really gets important -- “I think vaccines cause autism,” “I think if I drink this water, in a couple of days I’ll feel better and my shingles will go away,” or something like that. These are testable claims, and that’s what skepticism looks at: the evidence for testable claims. It’s
really easy to fool people, and it’s
really easy to fool yourself, and if you use these skeptical ideas, you find out what the truth is. The whole idea of skepticism and science is to find out what’s most likely to be true, and what’s most likely
not to be true.
That’s the goal: to not fool ourselves, and that’s where the real power of skepticism is. That’s why it bugs me when people think it’s a negative thing -- it’s not! It’s
the most positive thing we have. It is the search for the real, objective truth.
KD: Do you think a lot of skeptics themselves get the wrong idea? You gave a famous speech at TAM 8 called
“Don’t Be a Dick”...
PP: Uh-oh, here we go.
KD: ...I think it’s tempting sometimes to lash out, as an atheist myself, because we’re possibly the last group in the U.S. that it’s completely OK to discriminate against. I read a poll recently that more people would rather have an openly gay President than an atheist, for example.
PP: That’s right. It’s the last subculture that it’s OK to make fun of, or be prejudiced against. It’s amazing, and polls show that when people are asked, “Can an atheist be moral?,” a lot of people think, “No, you need to be religious to be moral,” which is fascinating. That’s completely
wrong, and there’s a lot of evidence that that claim is wrong. Atheists can be moral without religion. As far as the “don’t be a dick” talk goes, the two problems with it were that I didn’t have a lot of time to make all the points I wanted to make, and so that made it really misinterpreted. What I found out was that a lot of people really read-in their own prejudices into that talk which were not at all what I meant, which happens. A lot of times people [hear] different things in something you’re saying than what you originally meant. What’s funny is: they were reading stuff in that I
never said. A lot of people were saying, “Oh, Phil is saying we should just stand by the sidelines and wring our hands and never say anything bad about people....” I didn’t say that! Oh my gosh, I was
very clear to say that we need our passion, we need to fight, that I’m not giving a free pass to anybody. It’s
ridiculous that people have said that, and I’ve seen that over and over again. If you read
anything I’ve ever written... right as we’re talking I’ve got a window open for a blog post about people claiming that an airplane con-trail was a missile, from last November. There’s an ex-politician who is still rattling his saber about this...
KD: This is the one in L.A.?
PP: Yeah. It was an airplane flying over L.A., but he was saying it was a missile launch. Here’s a guy who is an ex-Senator from New Hampshire writing an op-ed about this, saying, “Why aren’t we getting any answers about this?,” and making an off-hand comment about Obama not being a citizen, and all this stuff, crazy talk. I’m like... no, [skeptics] don’t have to let this stuff go! You can be forceful, but I’m not going to call this guy an
idiot. I might use mockery. I think mockery is OK: satire is a well-established method of showing something is silly, and I don’t have any problems with that. What I
don’t like are the attacks: the mean-spirited, immediate reactions that a lot of people have when they feel like whatever it is they’re fighting against is ticking them off. I see this all the time... not just arguments -- I’ve had arguments with people all the time, it happens -- but it’s the really over-the-top dickishness. I was vague on that term
on purpose, because you can insult somebody, and even that might not be a real dick-headed move. There
are times when it’s uncalled for, when it’s
really over-the-top, and that’s what I was trying to say. You don’t have to be super nice. You don’t have to be all polite and milquetoast-y about this, but studies have shown repeatedly that when an argument gets really heated, you’re
less likely to convince the other person -- they’re going to dig their heels in even more. The fact of the matter is that when people are
watching an argument like that, if somebody’s being a real jerk, people who are listening to that argument aren’t going to listen to the person they perceive as being a jerk. They’re going to find ways of saying, “That guy’s being a jerk, and so I don’t think what he’s saying is true.” So, my point is that, if your goal is to convince people that you’re right, it’s probably best to try to restrain yourself a little bit.
I get angry. I get
furious. Babies are
dying because people aren’t vaccinating enough. Whooping Cough is literally killing infants who are too young to get vaccinated.
[ed. note -- And thus depend on the herd immunity of the people around them.] How angry do I get about that? So angry I can’t speak, where my blood-pressure goes up, and I can’t sleep at night, I’m so furious about this kind of stuff. It’s
difficult to restrain yourself, but I think it’s necessary if you want to make a difference in this world.
KD: On the internet, it seems like someone can’t just say, “I didn’t really care for that movie,” instead it’s, “the Worst Movie
Ever.”
PP: The internet is a terrific medium because it gives everybody a voice, but it’s also a
terrible medium because it gives
everybody a voice. You look at comments, like on Youtube if you want to go to the absolute rock bottom, but even on Twitter... It’s just so easy to snark. It’s so easy to just make fun of stuff. When you’re driving down the road and somebody cuts you off, it’s suddenly, “I want to
murder this guy!” When the airline announces that the flight is delayed fifteen minutes, “Oh, this is terrible! How can they do this?” Really? There are people starving in the world, and dying from epidemics, and it’s so easy to get into that mindset of “first world problems”. I love it when people say, “I know this is a first world problem, but...,” and it’s like, “Good! I’m glad you see that,” because it’s really easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. We are such a reactive species that when somebody says something, you’re like, “Oh no, you’re full of crap, you idiot. How can you possibly believe that?” I see it all the time in skepticism, and it’s easy because people are attacking your
beliefs. It’s your self-identity! When you introduce yourself to someone, what do you say? “I’m an astronomer,” “I’m a Catholic.” You identify yourself with these words, and so when somebody attacks those words, they’re attacking
you. You’ve got to be
super careful not to trip that reaction, because as soon as you do, the argument’s
done -- you’re not going to make any headway that way.
KD: What are the most common mistakes you feel most scientists make in dealing with the media? Do you feel that media literacy should be added to the curricula of science educations?
PP: Oh
God... The most common mistake scientists make [in talking to the media] is talking to the media. No, it’s really kind of funny. This is a long, looong argument that’s been going on for as long as there has been science and the media. Scientists
need to talk to the media, for all kinds of reasons. The public loves this kind of stuff, in general. A lot of polls show that the public
want more science, and they like it, so I think it’s important for scientists to talk to the public. Plus, the public
pays for a lot of the science, so I think you’re kind of obligated to talk to them and say, “Here’s what your money’s going for.” That’s not to say that every scientist is good at talking to the media; some are, some aren’t, just like anybody else. On the flip side of that, the media... a lot of them want to do this right, they try to do this right, but you’ve got people who don’t understand the science trying to report on it, and that makes it really difficult to get a really good, accurate story. In the meantime, you get a lot of misquoting. Every astronomer I know -- and I mean that almost literally -- has been interviewed for the news, a newspaper, a website, whatever, and the journalist has gotten their story almost completely backwards. They’ve either inserted the word “not”, or left the word “not” out. So a story about, “This asteroid is
not going to destroy the Earth,” kinda turns into the opposite story, and so they report it as, “This asteroid
may destroy the Earth.” [Laughs.] It just gets inflated beyond reason. A lot of the media online are irresponsible that way: it’s not really journalism, it’s
churn-alism. They’re trying to stir the pot. They don’t care if it’s accurate or not. “If it bleeds, it leads.” So, if they can say, “Oh, astronomers say this asteroid’s going to hit us in 2036, and it’ll blow up with the yield of all our nuclear weapons,” even though that is
completely not true, and
not at all what the astronomer said, they’ll write it, and hey, it makes [that website] popular for a short amount of time. You can fight that kind of stuff, but it’s going to be there forever. If people are going to do that, they’re going to do that. I just wish there were more science reporters, and more people trained in science. CNN let go of Miles O’Brien, who was basically their best science reporter, and CNN’s science reporting has been
abysmal since then. That’s true for a lot of big sites, they’ve just been consolidating and trying to save money, and what’s happening is their science reporting has gone into the trash can.
KD: On Thursday the shuttle Discovery is set to launch. It’s possible that it could be the last shuttle launch ever. Is there any
positive side to the end of the shuttle program?
PP: It’s the last launch for Discovery. There’s one more shuttle launch later this year for, I think, Endeavor, and these are both going up to the space station to deliver pieces of it and crew and all that kind of thing. The shuttle’s an interesting machine. It’s a magnificent, complex, amazing rocket that can actually lift a huge amount of material into orbit, which is
hard to do. The problem is it was sort of billed as a space truck: it was going to launch every two weeks, and it was going to be cheap. The original NASA designs for it were kind of going to be that way, but it became a political football. Anything that costs a certain amount of money, suddenly every congressman wants their district involved with it, and it just got more and more bloated, got more and more complicated, and eventually basically could [only] be launched four or five times a year and couldn’t do a lot of the stuff that NASA wanted it to do originally. So, considering it costs a billion dollars a flight, or something like that, yeah, seeing the shuttle go away is not entirely a bad thing. The problem is, because of all the political issues over the past few years, we don’t have a replacement rocket. A lot of people are saying, “Obama’s killing the shuttle and manned-space program.” That’s
bull. That makes me so upset when people say that, because that is total crap. It was George [W] Bush who cancelled the shuttle program, and said, “You guys are going to have your last flight in 2010, get moving on this,” and the problem was it was too late to actually design, build, and test a replacement rocket. So, no matter what, even before Obama was even sworn in, it was too late to have a replacement for the shuttle and not have this several-year gap. I’m hoping that NASA will come up with a good replacement for it, and, in the meantime,
private industry will be able to launch payloads into orbit. SpaceX is a company that’s doing that -- testing a rocket right now -- and it’s looking pretty good that they’ll be able to have launches to the space station within the next couple of years. I think that’s what should be happening. I think private industry should be taking over this routine, quote-unquote, “space truck” business. Let NASA be paving that road, and then let private industry follow.
KD: Do you feel like the Obama administration has done better, in general, on science issues than the Bush administration?
PP: You’re setting a pretty low bar there. The Bush administration did a lot to absolutely destroy science, from the stem-cell issue, to global warming, to a hundred other things, including infiltrating NASA with political hacks -- which happened, a few years ago I reported on that quite a bit. There was a P.R. guy there was who was trying to downplay global warming and the Big Bang in NASA science. It was pretty astonishing. So it would be pretty easy, just by
not doing anything, to do better than the Bush administration, and Obama’s administration has done quite a bit. They could do a huge amount more. I mean, he talks a good talks, in his “State of the Union” and other things, about getting science back to where it should be, but he had two years of a Democratic Congress and couldn’t seem to get it done. I know that the Republicans did a
lot to obstruct a lot of that, and now that the Republicans have a majority again, they’re attacking science with glee as far as global warming goes -- and some other issues of science. It’s really astonishing to see this anti-reality force brazenly saying things which are just
grossly and
provably false about issues like global warming, evolution, and that sort of thing. These attacks on science are pretty brazen. I would like to see Obama and the Democrats -- and
Republicans! -- standing up to this sort of thing. I don’t know what happened over the past ten years. Ever since Newt Gingrich destroyed the
Office of Science and Technology in Congress, things have been on a long downhill slide for science, and it’s terrible. Our economy depends on science and tech, and we’re raising a generation of kids to not understand this stuff. Carl Sagan talked about this even before it was happening, politically, and said this is a recipe for disaster. He’s still right.
KD: He was pretty much right about everything.
PP: [Laughs]. Well, not
everything. I’m re-reading
The Demon-Haunted World right now, which is as far I’m concerned his best work, and even though it was written fifteen years ago -- something like that -- you know, I hate to use the word “prophetic”, but it really does seem like a prophecy of the 21st century right now. The things he said could be a blog comment off of things that happened on the news the night before. It’s amazing that he basically called all this stuff out, and said we’ve got to be super careful about what our politicians are doing, and how this fundamentalist religious stronghold on science is growing. It’s bad, it’s really bad. If kids don’t understand evolution... If a state board of education... [cough]Texas[cough] ...comes out and says that Evolution is a crock and Creationism should be taught in class, biomedical industries are not going to want to go to Texas, or Louisiana, or any of these other states that are downplaying [science]. They’re not going to want to go there if the only people they can hire are people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old. This has a real, fundamental -- ha ha ha -- financial impact on this country.
KD: Speaking of hiring people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old. The University of Kentucky recently settled out of court in the case of Martin Gaskell, who was probably discriminated against in his application to become the Director of the university’s new observatory, on religious grounds, because he’s a Young-Earth Creationist...
PP: Allegedly. It’s
unclear whether he’s a Young-Earth Creationist, actually, but go ahead...
KD: Religious discrimination
is illegal, but in cases like that, is it
wrong?
PP: You know, that’s a really, really good question, and I wrestled with that. When the news came out it was unclear to me exactly what was going on, and then, as time went on and more emails were released, it became a lot more clear. It was funny how a lot of the science blogs were fomenting about this, and I thought, “You don’t really know! You’re saying this, but you don’t really know exactly what happened.” Then it became clear that, yeah, the religious discrimination was pretty obvious. These guys [from the University of Kentucky] were saying, “This guy’s a religious fundamentalist, and we don’t want him representing our university, so we’re not going to hire him,” and that is illegal. Like you said, is that
right? Should you be able to discriminate against somebody on religious grounds? I think, yes, you should, because if somebody’s religion dictates to them that the Earth is 6,000 years old, I’m not going to hire them to teach geology, astronomy, biology, archeology, or any of a hundred other “ologies”, because, clearly, all the real evidence points to the Earth being
billions of years old not thousands. I wouldn’t be able to trust somebody to separate their religious belief in a young Earth from the actual truth of the matter, which is that the Earth is old. It’s interesting that we have these laws against religious discrimination; they’re too broad, basically. If I’m going to hire somebody at a fast-food restaurant, or to be my waiter or...
whatever, if it has nothing to do with religion, then yeah, you shouldn’t be able to discriminate against their religion any more than you should because they’re a man or a woman, or they’re gay, or they’re black, or whatever. But, when it comes to their beliefs having a direct impact on the job requirements, you should be able to discriminate, because the word “discriminate” means to be able to separate somebody out because of the evidence. I don’t think you should be
prejudiced. On the other hand, I do think you should be able to look at all the job requirements and see if what they believe will interfere with that. You don’t expect a Catholic church to hire an atheist to be a priest -- now, the Catholic church may not be getting public funding to do that, but maybe they are -- but the point here is that when the job
requires something, and their religious beliefs will interfere with that requirement, then you don’t have to hire them. If somebody applies to a job where I need a doctor on Sundays, and their religion says they can’t work on Sundays,
I’m not going to hire them. I don’t think anybody would have a problem with that, but when it comes to an astronomer, suddenly it’s terrible that we’re discriminating against them. I don’t think it is. I’m sorry, I’ve been giving you long answers to these -- I tend to do that -- but this is an interesting case where it’s not straightforward. It’s not a bumper sticker issue where I can just say it in six words. It doesn’t work that way. There are layers and levels and subtlety to a lot of this, and that’s why I get unhappy when I hear people sort of rallying on one side or the other based on their own prejudices. You’ve got to really look at the details of this, and that’s why I never wrote about this issue, because the more I learned about it the more I realized that I’d have to write a 5,000 word blog post, and nobody’s going to read it.
KD: Switching topics here, how important is the work being done by
Kepler?
PP: [Laughs]. The work being done by Kepler is
super important, for a lot of reasons. The design of this mission is to sit and
stare at one spot in the sky. It’s looking at 150,000 stars I think, and it’s just
staring at them. It’s looking for tell-tale signs of a planet passing between us and that star. So, if there’s a star in that field, and it’s got planets orbiting it, and a planet’s orbit happens to line up such that it passes in front of the star, the starlight will dip a little bit. You can measure that dip, and by precisely measuring the length of time that dip takes and how much light is being blocked from the star, you can get an idea of the planet’s orbit and how big the planet is. We have some idea of planets orbiting other stars, but it’s sort of vague right now. The methods we had for looking at them didn’t give us a good idea, statistically, of how many planets are out there and what they’re like. Kepler’s going to do that. So, by really staring at those stars, Kepler’s going to say, statistically, “Here’s how many stars have planets, here’s how close they orbit to their star, here’s how big they are,” and that’s really important right because we don’t have those numbers. What it’s finding, statistically speaking, is that there may be billions -- with a ‘b’ -- of planets in our galaxy alone, certainly millions, but maybe as many as billions that could be -- in some stretch of the imagination -- Earth-like. They are orbiting far enough from their star that temperatures at that planet could [allow] liquid water on them, which is what we think is really important for having life. There could be other kinds of life that don’t need liquid water, but all the kinds we know do. If there is liquid water, that means our kind of life has a shot, and that is one of those Really Big Questions, “Is there life in space?” Holy crap! Is there a cooler question you can ask that we have a
really good shot at answering in the next few years? No, there really isn’t one, and that’s it. The proof of that is basically if we find a fossil on Mars, “Oh, look! Here’s a fossil on Mars! The answer is, ‘Yes, there is life on other planets.’” But you need to find these planets first, and that’s what Kepler is doing. It’s doing it very, very well. It has already found several dozen planets that could potentially be something like the Earth, or have Earth-like conditions at least. That’s frickin’ awesome.
KD: Some of the stars that Kepler is looking at are over 4,000 light-years away. Imagine that tomorrow you wake up and Kepler has found an Earth-like planet in the “Goldilocks zone”. Later observations find that it’s got liquid water, and oxygen in the atmosphere. But it’s 4,000 light-years away. How do you react to that?
PP: That’s a good point. There’s a sense of scale here that a lot of people don’t have, because they’re just not familiar with how freaking
big space is. Honestly? 4,000 light years isn’t that much different than 4, because both of them are really, really far away. A light year is six trillion miles, and our faster probes ever launched would take tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest star. So, honestly, is 4,000 light years any worse than 4? In my opinion, no, that’s not the point, how far away these planets are. The point is
they exist. If we can find a planet orbiting another star, and we can actually observe it with our telescopes and say, “Look, it has oxygen in its atmosphere,” that would be really critical. Oxygen is
really reactive, and it’s really hard to keep oxygen around unless you’re producing it; otherwise, it goes away really quickly, and the best way to produce it, not the only way, but the best way, is biology -- is something alive and making that oxygen. If we were to find that, holy crap, would that be awesome! That would
really be strong evidence that there is life on other planets. Even if we got a signal from intelligent life on these planets, it’s not so much the distance that’s important. It’s the fact that it
happened, and we’re not alone, that there could be other life out there. Now, very briefly if I can, the difference in distance comes in because if we do detect a signal... Imagine if we don’t just detect oxygen in an atmosphere, but we get a radio signal from one of these planets, the difference between 4 light-years and 4,000 is
huge. The speed of light is really fast, and if there are aliens living on Alpha Centauri trying to communicate with us, we can send them a signal and hear back from them in 8 or 9 years. If we try to have a conversation with somebody 4,000 light-years away, it’s going to take 8,000 years to hear something back. So, we might at least have something resembling a conversation with somebody who’s close, but that’s a pretty big “if”. I’m more interested right now in the much more realistic chance of us finding Earth-like planets, than us finding aliens we can talk to.
KD: What are your plans for the near future? Are you working on a new book? Are we going to get some more
Bad Universe?
PP: Well, I’m getting a lot of tattoos and piercings. I’m hoping to be a model for Suicidegirls. I’ve got the pale skin, I never see sunlight, so I should fit right in. Actually, I’m hoping that the network will pick up the show as a series. It was basically sort of a pilot to see if they would run it as a series, so I’m waiting to see if that will happen. In the meantime I’m still writing the blog. I have a couple of book ideas I’m working on right now, nothing I can talk about specifically, because they’re still in the proposal stage. A lot of other things [are] keeping me busy. I really, really enjoy writing and giving talks about this kind of stuff, so I’m still doing that. I don’t know! This is my... fifth? career. I was a research scientist, a writer, a public outreach guy, I was in education for a while, and now I’m a blogger. The evolution of an astronomer goes from cutting edge scientific research to sitting around in my pajamas railing in my blog about how they cancelled
Stargate: Universe, but honestly, it’s a lot of fun. I love having the ability to talk about this stuff, and actually have a voice on the Internet. To be able to say, “Here’s something you guys may not know about that you might find interesting, and is actually kind of important,” that is terrific, even if it does mean I don’t see the Sun for three or four days in a row. It’s important to me, and I think it’s important in the grand scheme of things to open this door to people who might not otherwise see it. A lot of stories go away that really deserve to be investigated, or at least
read by people out there, like, “Look, here’s this galaxy that’s kind of throwing a monkey-wrench into how we think things work. Look over here. This star, why is it doing this? What would happen if this thing were to do that?” I
love writing about that, and from the comments I get, the emails I get, the questions, the tweets on Twitter, people
love this stuff. They want their minds expanded. They want to know what’s going on in the universe without all the B.S. about it, and that’s what I’m trying to do. That’s my goal in life. If I can take somebody by the hand and say, “Look over here. Look at this thing right here. Isn’t that awesome?” If I can achieve that every now and again, that’s it, I’ve got it made.
ONE MOMENT. i. will. be. right. back. i know i have a lot of unanswered mail ... i'm just ... overwhelmed. sorry, & thank you for understanding. you can always keep somewhat updated on my erratic comings-and-goings here: 
Now I can't stop fondling them!!
I'm glad that I have a busy work schedule now to help with this ridiculousness. I plan on saving, so that I can push myself to the next level. I think I know where my heart lies, and that is, in fact, psychology. I'm going to read my text books over, and start preparing mentally for the specific area of expertise I'd like to hone in on.
