Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014 (26 page)

He's gone, but his
footprint survives up there
in the moon dust.
Footprints, actually,
for after planting his symbol
for all mankind,
he walked about some,
checking out the neighborhood,
far as his oxygen and
Houston allowed.
These days the
robot machines leave their own
sets of footprints,
tread-marking the
surface of our newest stop on
the solar system tour,
and Neil lived
long enough to follow those
amazing machines like the rest
of us on the TV,
just itching to slip
his dusty old boots on again,
and walk about on mars.

As a child in the 1960s I ate up what semblance of science there was on TV:
National Geographic, Wild Kingdom,
and of course the
Apollo
coverage.
Nova
dawned in the 1970s and in 1980 Carl Sagan's groundbreaking
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
legitimized a new format of science programming.

But predating
Cosmos
by several years were pseudoscience "documentaries" inspired by Erich von Däniken's "ancient alien" books, followed by the "theory and conjecture" series
In Search of...
Today, although we have many high quality science documentaries, the specter of bad science that once haunted the airwaves now infests inter-net streams and fiber optic conduits.

The mid spectrum is typified by
Mythbusters,
where the straight man of experimental rigor is upstaged by sideshow antics. At the lower end a shameless glut of shows depict topics from UFOs and ghosts to little Grays and Bigfeet as science. Although
XFiles
was clearly fictional, its conspiracy-theory underpinning resonated with viewers of pseudoscience. The attack on traditional authorities opened a door to belief in the improbable.

This devil-dance between science and entertainment is where my own television appearances come in. I was brought in late to
Alien Invasion: Are We Ready?
a docudrama that premiered on the Discovery Channel's
Curiosity
series in August 2011. Other participants familiar to
Analog
readers included Stan Schmidt, Charles E. Gannon, Paul Levinson, and Michael Flynn. The show was designed to discuss cutting-edge science in the framework of a science fiction scenario—a concept that sounds torn from the pages of
Analog.

The results did not meet everyone's expectations. As Flynn put it, "TV and science are in eternal conflict since the former requires for its viability exciting visuals and these being iconical rather than logical tend to bypass the forebrain." Gannon lamented that the promise of scientific rigor had been largely pushed aside in favor of a pulpier texture. There certainly was a dumbing down. At one point during my interview I used the term "ballistic." "That was good," the director said, "but could you say it again without using that word?" I was perplexed, so he explained. "Imagine the viewers just flipped to this show from
American Idol."
An expert on Naval warfare, Chris Weuve, was asked to use a more pedestrian word for "hull." On the spot, he cleverly came up with "skin."

One can therefore see why personalities such as Sagan, Michio Kaku, and Neil de-Grasse Tyson became so popular. They have credentials, but also the arguably rare ability (for scientists) to describe things simply. Not only do they use layman's terms, they have an evocative command of language. Sagan's poetic "billions and billions"—however apocryphal—is immortal. Would a precise count of stars better communicate the scale of the Universe? In
Alien Invasion,
Kaku likened an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to throwing sand in the eyes of a gunfighter. A viewer may not grasp how an EMP can render technology useless, but who doesn't understand the old trick of blinding your opponent with a fistful of dirt?

To the public, the effect of the technology is what counts, not how it works.

On December 21, 2012, just in time for the Mayan Apocalypse, I appeared in
Evacuate Earth
on the National Geographic Channel, along with
Analog
regular Catherine Asaro. In this science docudrama a neutron star is going to eat the Solar System, posing the question: can some fragment of humanity escape? One thoughtful viewer raised concerns that cast the show in a fairly dark light.
¹
He said that "speculation rapidly degenerated into silliness, and ultimately pseudoscientific nonsense." He felt that each problem presented was framed simplistically, with broad assumptions that trivialize serious technical hurdles.

This sounds like the format for an SF short story, doesn't it, focusing on a single aspect of a problem? Or a high school physics problem that necessarily neglects factors such as friction? Personally I felt the show was pretty good. There was some hand-waving and a few unrealistic images, but no pseudo-science.

Science fiction fans like both science
and
fiction, so when the two are combined we expect a mind-expanding experience along with some ocular frosting. We instinctively know hard from soft SF, so when television mixes these freely, our shields go up.

Is this merely a problem of audience expectation, or is science being sold out? I suspect most
Analog
readers would say that pop science can be damaging by spreading misinformation, fueling non-existent "debates," or just sucking oxygen from better programming.

A counter argument is that even sloppy science can serve to raise awareness. Does this vague assertion bear up? I think it can. While my generation of geeks cut our teeth during the heyday of the U.S. space program, many cite
Star Trek
as inspiration. Certainly SF can lead people to science, but how far down the road to pseudoscience can that be said?

To help delineate the battle line, let's make a furtive digression to pseudoscience. Searches for Bigfoot and Nessie
could
fit into the respectable milieu of cryptozoology, but that rigor leads to disappointment, not "good television." Do ghosts and UFOs lead to serious science? Seldom. For example, adherents are quick to tout the power of paranormal "energy," but under no circumstances attempt to understand or even define this "energy." (If it really is energy, it would have been dissected and harnessed into useful technologies long ago.) No matter; if the paranormal has an
appearance
of authenticity, many viewers are satisfied.

That's the litmus test: is the provocative claim subjected to the scientific method?

Television producers are not gullible; they view this as entertainment, however exasperating to us. I recently spoke with an "investigator" for a show of the ghost hunter variety. I learned that while they try to convince the viewers that ghosts do exist, there are lines they do not cross. They screen out charlatans and do not knowingly televise hoaxes. They sometimes omit the more dubious evidence. For example, a "ghost" seemed to obey the investigator's verbal commands to turn on an infrared-activated sink. The camera crew pointed out that their equipment also caused the water to run when they focused on the sink. The producers did not air the "haunting."

But integrity may be the exception. Damningly, the ghostly manifestations are not given the attention such discoveries demand. What they were looking for, I concluded, was sufficient evidence to
suggest
a haunting—and nothing more. If they truly believed they had filmed a ghost, they would not have flown off to their next assignment with such a stunning lack of curiosity. Imagine that the Apollo astronauts met an alien race on the Moon, sold a few fuzzy pictures to a tabloid, and then flitted off to Mars in hopes of finding life there, too!

Thus another litmus test: is the investigation designed to plumb a particular mystery, or to perpetuate a broader one?

All this serves to illustrate how the line between science and pseudoscience is blurred to a litmus-less public. Pseudoscience defames science. End digression.

Now, it is necessary to water things down for public consumption, but doing so well is a rare skill. And the integrity can be lost anywhere along the information chain—science can turn to junk with a single headline.

In a recent interview, Harvard geneticist George Church discussed the hypothetical difficulties of cloning a Neanderthal from preserved DNA. He was labeled a "mad scientist" by the tabloids. One falsely claimed that he was looking for an "extremely adventurous female human" to bear a Neanderthal baby!

"We really should get the public of the entire world to be able to detect the difference between a fact and a complete fantasy that has been created by the Internet," Church said. But he added that discussing the possibility of Neanderthal de-extinction might be a better teaching method than rote memorization.

Is it possible to have our cake and eat it? The entertainment industry is openly wrestling with this issue. A January 2013 television conference tackled it in a session billed as: "Filmmakers and commissioners will illuminate how to balance information with entertainment."

In penance for the sins of my own talking head, I cobbled a little e-book,
Worst Case Scenario: Evacuate Earth!
and posted it for free on
smashwords.com.
It details my nitpicks of the show and outlines omitted ideas. This ploy is common. You've seen the books: "The Real Science Behind [SF blockbuster title]."

Evacuate Earth
was developed into
How to Survive the End of the World,
a series on which I consulted. I mid-list this as "popcorn science," a treat of lurid visualization salted with science. It's fun to weave science and speculation from both ends to the middle, rationalizing an improbable premise. That's how a lot of SF is created, but in this case the goal of selling popcorn is often in discord with good science.

Therefore this epiphany: a science consultant can only advocate, not police.

Motion pictures also value technical accuracy. "In the gap between science fact and science fiction stands the motion picture and television science consultant." So begins a blurb by SF blockbuster writer/producer Zack Stentz, writing about David Kirby's book
Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema,
perhaps the first serious study on this topic.

Like SF, Kirby points out that popularized science can "make" knowledge, creating the illusion of science by using a convincing framework. A number of studies conclude that this has been detrimental to public understanding. (Has there ever been an archetype as destitute of actual specimen as the mad scientist?) Other studies show that television viewers tend to mistrust science, and suggest that the positive portrayal of the paranormal on TV has resulted in more acceptance of it.

Such findings lead to an important insight: it is not the details of scientific accuracy that are the problem. Think about it this way: If nuclear technology is shown killing millions, while a smiling medium connects the grieving to their dearly departed, which appears more beneficial to humanity?

Enter the National Academy of Sciences, (NAS)
²
which created the Science and Entertainment Exchange to "create a synergy between accurate science and engaging storylines in both film and TV programming." This and other collections of volunteer scientists are available to media producers as needed. NAS has advised such projects as
The Amazing Spiderman, Battleship, Fringe, House,
and
Lost.
Chris Luchini of JPL has confessed surprise at how much of his input influenced
Deep Impact.

Yes, Hollywood wants good science, but as with good SF, it must serve the story and never the reverse. This suggests that the problem is not so much with the way science is distorted but the way it is generally respected.

Scientists have their own biases, and these inform the discussion. For example, NASA consulted on
Mission to Mars
knowing that the script included an inaccurate portrayal of the infamous "face" on Mars. Evidently that wasn't a deal-breaker, but they reportedly refused to be associated with the movie
Red Planet
because of a scene in which one astronaut shoots another. Similarly, scientists objected to a part of the
Deep Impact
script where a quirky scientist ran around an observatory in the nude.

Apparently it is better to fudge the science than to malign the scientist. That's getting personal!

Another bias of the scientific community is the "deficit model," an assumption that the public is uninformed, and scientists are purveyors of facts. That sounds perfectly logical, but a number of studies challenge the model on the basis that minutia in pop science add little to science awareness. Studies by George Gerbner show that if science in a film has a negative impact, viewers will view science negatively. Maybe NASA wasn't being so inse cure back there on Mars.

What matters is that the viewer is inspired by the mysteries of the natural world and mankind's valiant attempts to lay them bare. An audience doesn't learn much science from a few facts painstakingly portrayed; there's a different venue for that.