Alien Worlds

Netflix has this new series, Alien Worlds, that I sort of half-watched yesterday. It was nice brain candy to munch on while I was more focused on grading, but nah, sorry, not a lot of substance to it.

It’s only 5 episodes long, and each one is built around a different imaginary planet with somewhat different parameters, with different challenges for the life that evolved there. Within each episode, there’s a fraction that uses CGI to model the imaginary creatures of the imaginary world — and the CGI isn’t bad, we’ve come a long way from the clumsy models of old Discovery Channel “Walking with…” shows — and there’s a larger fraction dedicated to describing the earthly research that inspired it.

The problem is that the real world stuff, with interviews with real scientists, was far more compelling than the CGI gimmicks. The “Janus” episode, for instance, is supposed to be about a tidally-locked planet with huge extremes in the environment, but it’s really much more about terrestrial arthropods, with researchers explaining their work in interesting environments with complex organisms. Their imaginary pentapods were sterile and cartoonish — it was a world with a nearly negligible amount of species diversity, just their one cartoon alien scampering about, plucking out 1-dimensional prey creatures on rather barren landscapes. Every time they were on screen, I was grumbling “Get back to the leaf-cutter ants”.

That’s how I felt about every episode. The central gimmick of imaginative CGI aliens was less impressive than the real biology being done on Planet Earth, and was just a distraction. Human imagination is just not as good as evolutionary reality.

One big plus about the show: they were working with actual researchers in various places around the world, and that meant they escaped from the usual trap of one narrator (usually a white person who isn’t involved in the science) providing third person descriptions of what’s happening. Instead, we get lots of diverse people, women and brown people with accents, describing in first person what they find exciting about their work. The researchers have a lot of enthusiasm and joy about the biology.

One big negative: skip the last episode, it’s terrible. I knew it was going to suck when they opened with the “alien autopsy” footage. They then move on to an imaginary planet populated with brains in vats faced with the death of their star…and they lack any earthly analog, so instead of cutting back and forth between CGI and enthusiastic scientists doing real research, it’s switching between animated robots tending blobs floating in tanks (boring!) to human SETI researchers (even more boring!).

I’m not looking forward to a continuation of the series. It’s nice background noise, but if I were to make any recommendations to the producers, it would be to ditch the whole CGI/aliens nonsense, but that’s probably the premise that got them a Netflix deal.

This exists

You can buy it as a Christmas gift! It’s only $70!

There are other versions. There are a whole lot of these things!

In case you’re wondering what it is, it’s a small Faraday cage for people who are sensitive (they think) to EMF radiation. These are designed for you to place your WiFi router in so that it will stop hosing your house with 2.4-5 gigaherz radiation. Which is the whole point of a WiFi router. So yeah, you go drop $100 on a router so you can browse the internet, and then cage it up in a metal box so you can’t browse the internet. Brilliant!

Another amazing thing: those cages have a significant number of 5-star reviews. I guess they work!

Syracuse, you still there?

Of course you are, but maybe you didn’t notice the meteor that tried to kill you. I have to say, though, that the news report is full of admirable scientific detail.

This meteor was so bright that it was captured by a NASA satellite that monitors lightning. The bits of debris scattered after the meteor exploded could likely be seen on National Weather Service radar. And the sonic boom was detected in Ontario by a seismograph, the instrument that records earthquakes.

When the meteor finally got hot enough to explode, Cooke said, it released as much energy as 66 tons of dynamite.

“When it broke apart it produced a shock wave that produced the sonic boom that people heard,” he said.

The meteor was just under 3 feet across and weighed about 1,800 pounds, NASA estimated. That’s hefty as meteors go: The shooting stars seen in annual meteor showers are not bigger than small pebbles or golf balls.

Wednesday’s meteor crashed into the atmosphere at 56,000 mph.

“That’s slow for a meteor, actually,” Cooke said. “Some, like the Leonids, move at 150,000 mph.”

The relatively sluggish speed indicates that the meteor probably broke loose from the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, about 92 million miles from Earth. That’s as far from Earth as the sun is.

As the meteor pushed through Earth’s increasingly thickening atmosphere, it reached an estimated temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. For comparison, the surface of the sun is a little less than 10,000 degrees.

Cooke said the rock – technically called a meteoroid before it hits the Earth’s atmosphere and becomes a meteor — was the color of pencil lead. As it burst into a fireball, it emitted light 100 times brighter than a full moon.

So, Syracuse, how’s it feel to have not been destroyed by an 1800 pound rock traveling at 56,000 mph, exploding with the force of 66 tons of dynamite, that has been traveling for millions of years to get you? You should feel special.

Uh-oh, the young’uns are noticing our incompetence

I guess one of the dangers of teaching a class in critical thinking is that students might lose respect for us old people.

But students have grown annoyed.

“They were uniformly outraged,” Smith says, “because people are investing time and energy into this instead of doing things like stopping the spread of coronavirus or putting in place policies to counter global warming.”

Most are in their late teens and early twenties, having grown up as digital natives.

“They believe they have better skills to fact-check,” he says, citing anecdotes — admittedly not ideal for a science class, but there hasn’t been enough polling, yet, for good data — about middle-aged women falling for QAnon’s co-opted “save the children” slogan. One student’s mother had fallen for it.

While it’s heartening that his students can see what’s going on, Smith is concerned about what it all means for the rest of us.

History is going to remember us boomers as the generation that was so stupid that they fell for that QAnon bullshit. Someday you might be dandling a grandchild on your knee and they’re going to ask what side you were on in the Idiot Wars, and you better have a good and honest answer.