Apparently – according to The Conversation – the discovery of habitable planets may not bode well for mankind.  Excerpt:

Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler-186f is special because it marks the first planet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting in the “habitable zone” – the distance from a star in which we might expect liquid water, and perhaps life.

What did not make the news, however, is that this discovery also slightly increases how much credence we give to the possibility of near-term human extinction. This is because of a concept known as the Great Filter.

The Great Filter is an argument that attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox: why have we not found aliens, despite the existence of hundreds of billions of solar systems in our galactic neighbourhood in which life might evolve? As the namesake physicist Enrico Fermi noted, it seems rather extraordinary that not a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has been detected (UFO conspiracy theorists notwithstanding).

This apparent absence of thriving extraterrestrial civilisations suggests that at least one of the steps from humble planet to interstellar civilisation is exceedingly unlikely. The absence could be caused because either intelligent life is extremely rare or intelligent life has a tendency to go extinct. This bottleneck for the emergence of alien civilisations from any one of the many billions of planets is referred to as the Great Filter.

The tenor of this article is pessimistic – the main thrust being that intelligent life has a near-inavoidable tendency to self-destruction, which is why no near neighbors have yet paid us a call.

But, given the vastness just of our own galaxy, that doesn’t necessarily make sense.  Our own Milky Way contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars.  If one in ten of those stars has planets, that’s somewhere between ten and forty billion solar systems – if one in a thousand of those systems has a habitable world, that’s somewhere between a ten and forty million habitable worlds.

That’s a lot of real estate, True Believers.  Most of it hundred or thousands of light years away.

And we’re worried about the destructive tendencies of all intelligent life because, out of all that vastness, we haven’t picked up a radio signal in the paltry few decades we’ve been listening?  That’s far from enough to be convincing.  And, besides, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Although, personally, and just for now, I’d be pleased with some evidence of intelligent life in Washington.

Another Mittwoch, another week halfway through.

I find it more than a little disappointing that the Smithsonian magazine, a publication nominally concerned with science, would stoop to this:  On the Trail of Florida’s Bigfoot – The Skunk Ape.  Excerpt:

The first time Dave Shealy saw a skunk ape, he says, he was ten years old. It was 1974, a few years after his father had come upon a set of footprints left by the creature—an Everglades version of Bigfoot named for its supposedly pungent odor. Dave was out deer hunting with his older brother, Jack, in the swamp behind his house, in what’s now Big Cypress National Preserve, when he encountered the ape incarnate.

“It was walking across the swamp, and my brother spotted it first. But I couldn’t see it over the grass—I wasn’t tall enough,” Shealy says. “My brother picked me up, and I saw it, about 100 yards away. We were just kids, but we’d heard about it, and knew for sure what we were looking at. It looked like a man, but completely covered with hair.” He and his brother stared at the creature, mouths agape, but almost at the same time, as he tells it, the skies opened and rain poured down. The ape hurried away, into the cypress hummocks scattered amongst the marsh. “Holy crap,” he remembers thinking. “I finally saw this damn thing, and it got away, just like that.”

Here’s the point:  He didn’t see a skunk ape.

There aren’t any skunk apes.

There aren’t any Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) Yetis, or any other mysterious, hairy, bipedal apes.

Why so confident, you ask?  Simply this:  Biology.  There can’t be just a few of these creatures running around – there has to be a population.  A genetically viable, breeding population – thousands of animals.  In the heavily settled Southeast, it’s staggeringly unlikely that a population of thousands of giant, hairy bipedal apes exists and yet not one has been killed by a car, or shot by a hunter, or died and left remains anywhere where a human could stumble across them.

A corpse, now that would be proof – inarguable proof.  But we don’t have a corpse, we’ve never had a corpse, and unless the dumbfoundingly unlikely actually happens, we won’t have a corpse.  And what’s more, in this era where every cell phone has a camera, nobody manages to get an unarguable photo.  Let a cop start smacking around a gang punk and everyone and their brother is taking video, but a giant, bipedal hairy ape?  Somehow we’re still stuck with grainy, crappy video that could be anything from a man in a gorilla suit to a rerun of I Love Lucy.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.  In this case, there just isn’t any.

But still – videos keep surfacing:

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Once more into the Hump Day breach!

One wonders about all the implications of this science-y tidbit:  Dad May Join Two Moms for Disease-Free Designer Babies.  Excerpt:

A new technology aimed at eliminating genetic disease in newborns would combine the DNA of three people, instead of just two, to create a child, potentially redrawing ethical lines for designer babies.

The process works by replacing potentially variant DNA in the unfertilized eggs of a hopeful mother with disease-free genes from a donor. U.S. regulators today will begin weighing whether the procedure, used only in monkeys so far, is safe enough to be tested in humans.

Because the process would change only a small, specific part of genetic code, scientists say a baby would largely retain the physical characteristics of the parents. Still, DNA from all three — mother, father and donor — would remain with the child throughout a lifetime, opening questions about long-term effects for this generation, and potentially the next. Ethicists worry that allowing pre-birth gene manipulation may one day lead to build-to-order designer babies.

It takes some doing to wrap the brain around this one.

We’re only really beginning to unravel the mysteries of genetics.  At the moment we can’t guess at what all may be possible – although a lot of ink and pixels have been burned up in speculation, both in fiction and non-fiction.  Robert Heinlein’s entertaining work Friday is one such, the story of a genetically engineered superwoman trained as a combat courier.   A common saying among the artificial humans in that work is this:  “My mother was a test tube – my father was a knife.”

At the present, here in the real world, there’s no evidence that genetic manipulation could be used to produce designer babies, much less supermen.  But fifty years from now?

Who knows?

Louisiana Woman Forced Out of Apartment by Bats.  Bela Lugosi was unavailable for comment.  Excerpt:

Kiara Keasely, who was living in an apartment in the New Orleans suburb was basically forced out of her home when bats that had been living outside the building decided to move inside. She told WVUE, “I decided to move out, pack my stuff and move out because the exterminator wanted to open the vents to free the bats but I didn’t want them to be over my furniture so I moved everything out.”

An exterminator has removed more than 200 of the little guys from the apartment, and plans to release them outside of town, as is required by state law that mandates the bats not be killed. In the meantime, building owner Wendy Whitsett is working on preventing more from coming in.

She told the station, “We closed the windows, we sealed up the building wherever they had holes so they can’t come into the building. We caulked the whole building.”

Bats are normally pretty inoffensive little creatures who spend balmy summer nights gulping down millions of mosquitoes and other nasty insects.  On the other hand, they are a known rabies vector.  You really don’t want a few thousand of them bumming around your apartment, drinking your beer and eating all your Cheetos.

In other sort-of science news:  Getting Shot in the Face is Bad.  I believe the appropriate response is “no shit, Sherlock.”  Excerpt:

Published this month in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, “Gunshot wounds and blast injuries to the face are associated with significant morbidity and mortality: Results of an 11-year multi-institutional study of 720 patients” brings scientific precision to the common-sense proposition that bullets to the face are really bad.

Well, at least that’s cleared up.