ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 298

Question of the Week – 4/25/18

This past Sunday was Earth Day. (Maybe there is also a Proxima b Day?) If you did anything to mark the occasion, what was it? What do you think is the best way for all of us to celebrate Earth Day?

Our favorite answer will win a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins.

Want to suggest a Question of the Week? E-mail submissions to us at qotw@richarddawkins.net. (Questions only, please. All answers to bimonthly questions are made only in the comments section of the Question of the Week.)

Escape from Proxima b

By Abraham Loeb

Almost all space missions launched so far by our civilization have been based on chemical propulsion. The fundamental limitation here is easy to understand: a rocket is pushed forward by ejecting burnt fuel gases backwards through its exhaust. The characteristic composition and temperature of the burnt fuel set the exhaust speed to a typical value of a few kilometers per second. Momentum conservation implies that the terminal speed of the rocket is given by this exhaust speed times the natural logarithm of the ratio between the initial and final mass of the rocket.

To exceed the exhaust speed by some large factor requires an initial fuel mass that exceeds the final payload mass by the exponential of this factor. Since the required fuel mass grows exponentially with terminal speed, it is not practical for chemical rockets to exceed a terminal speed that is more than an order of magnitude larger than the exhaust speed, namely a few tens of kilometers per second. Indeed, this has been the speed limit of all spacecraft launched so far by NASA or other space agencies.

By a fortunate coincidence, the escape speed from the surface of the Earth, 11 kilometers per second, and the escape speed from the location of the Earth around the sun, 42 kilometers per second, are close to the speed limit attainable by chemical propulsion. This miracle allowed our civilization to design missions, such as Voyager 1 and 2 or New Horizons, that could escape from the solar system into interstellar space. But is this fortune shared by other civilizations on habitable planets outside the solar system?

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In Closed-Door UN Meetings, Trump Administration Officials Pushed Abstinence For International Women’s Health Programs

By Ema O’Connor

In closed-door meetings at the United Nations in March, Trump administration officials pushed socially conservative views on women’s rights issues — including abstinence-based policies over information about contraception — that were further to the right than those expressed by most other countries present, including Russia and the representative for the Arab states, UN officials who attended the meetings told BuzzFeed News.

The Trump officials’ approach at the UN meeting makes it clear that the administration intends to extend its views on abortion, contraception, and sexual education beyond US borders to an extent that is unusual even for Republican administrations.

The comments came during the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women, a two-week session described by a spokesperson for the US Mission to the United Nations as the UN’s “most important meeting on women’s empowerment.” The main event is a closed-door negotiation on language to include in an annual UN document that sets global standards and outlines potential policies pertaining to gender equality efforts in all member countries.

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A Life of Pretending: Being Egyptian and Atheist

By Anthon Jackson

Note: All the names in this story have been changed, aside from those of public personalities.

The sun was almost directly overhead as I slipped out from the rambling alleys of the Khan al- Khalili into the open square. Al-Hussein Mosque towered ahead to the north. The call to prayer blasted from its pencil minaret, its solemn strains echoed by a cacophony of loudspeakers across the city. Exhausted and craving coffee, I headed for the strip of tourist-trap cafés lining the square’s western edge, and was barely seated when a young Egyptian couple motioned for me to join them for a game of backgammon.

As I’d come to expect after nearly a dozen visits to Egypt over the years, the question of religious identity came up within a minute, and I answered honestly. Just as often I’d opted to lie, claiming to be Christian for civility’s sake, but I told this stylish young couple the truth: I’m not religious. A host of experiences answering the same question across Egypt had me braced for a look of pained disappointment. But ‘Amr’s eyes lit up with a smile as he leaned into the table: “I’m an atheist too.”

Rather than going our separate ways, ‘Amr, Sara, and I walked together towards Bab Zuweila, climbing to the spacious roof of the Mosque of Sultan al-Mu‘ayyad for panoramic views of Old Cairo and, even more precious for ‘Amr, for solitude. With no one around, he unloaded his journey towards nonbelief, from teenage skepticism to angry backlashes from friends in whom he had dared confide. Among the latter group he couldn’t recall a single non-hostile reaction.

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Government vs. God? People are less religious when government is bigger, research says

By Jared Gilmour

Researchers call it an exchange model of religion: If people can get what they need from the government (be it health care, education or welfare) they’re less likely to turn to a divine power for help, according to the theory.

But are people actually more likely to drop religion in places where governments provide more services and stability? In a new paper, psychology researchers crunched the numbers — and found that better government services were in fact linked to lower levels of strong religious beliefs.

Those findings held true in states across the U.S. and in countries around the world, researchers said.

The article, “Religion as an Exchange System: The Interchangeability of God and Government in a Provider Role,” was published April 12 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

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In 200 Years Cows May Be the Biggest Land Mammals on the Planet

By Jason G. Goldman

Around 13,000 years ago North America had a more diverse mammal community than modern-day Africa. There were multiple horse species, camels, llamas and a now-extinct animal called Glyptodon, which looked something like a Volkswagen bug–size armadillo. Smilodon, a saber-toothed cat around the size of today’s African lion, skulked across the grasslands in search of ground sloths and mammoths. Seven-foot-long giant otters chowed down on massive trees. And such massive creatures were not just found in North America. On every continent mammals on average were a lot larger in the late Pleistocene, the geologic epoch spanning from around 2.5 million until about 11,700 years ago.

Scientists have long debated what caused all these large-bodied critters to go extinct while many of their smaller counterparts survived. A team of researchers led by University of New Mexico biologist Felisa Smith analyzed evidence from millions of years’ worth of mammalian extinctions and found that on each continent large mammals started to die out around the same time humans first showed up. They announced their findings Thursday in Science.

If the extinction trend continues apace, modern elephants, rhinos, giraffes, hippos, bison, tigers and many more large mammals will soon disappear as well, as the primary threats from humans have expanded from overhunting, poaching or other types of killing to include indirect processes such as habitat loss and fragmentation. The largest terrestrial mammal 200 years from now could well be the domestic cow, Smith’s research suggests.

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Senate committee approves bill to let Louisiana teachers pray with students

By Wilborn P. Nobles III

Members of Louisiana’s Senate Thursday (April 19) supported another bill that would allow teachers to pray with students in public schools. Senate Bill 512 is now moving to the Senate floor after an education committee voted 5-1 in favor of it.

The Senate bill would expand upon existent law that allows school employees to volunteer to supervise voluntary, student-initiated, student-led prayer. The law currently allows school staff to only participate in the gathering if it occurs before or after the employee’s work day.

Sen. Ryan Gatti, R-Bossier City, the bill’s sponsor, introduced the proposal in the Senate on April 2. He stressed to senators Thursday that his bill allows a school employee to participate in student-initiated prayer during the work day only if participation does not interfere with their assigned work duties. The employee will be able to do so upon the request of one or more students, Gatti said.

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Navy Official Won’t Remove Bible from Display; It Doesn’t “Promote Religion”

By Hemant Mehta

As we learned a couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Naval Hospital in Okinawa, Japan now has a “Missing Man” table dedicated to prisoners of war or those missing in action. That’s perfectly fine, but this particular table included a Bible, suggesting that POW/MIAs were only Christian and that atheists and people of other faiths didn’t make the same sacrifices as other soldiers.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s founder and president Mikey Weinstein (on behalf of more than two dozen mostly Christian clients) sent a letter to Rear Admiral Paul D. Pearigen saying this Bible had to go.

Pearigen has now responded, and he says the table and the Bible are staying put.

When depicted with the other eight ceremonial items, the book is not the focal point of the table. As one of nine symbolic references on the table, the purpose of the book and accompanying description is not to promote religion, but to commemorate the strength and resolve required of POWs and MIA personnel in the most difficult of times… In light of the forgoing, neither further review nor an investigation of this matter is necessary.

It’s so easy for someone to say the Bible isn’t there to promote religion when no other religious text would ever be able to get away with that excuse.

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As algorithms take over, YouTube’s recommendations highlight a human problem

By Ben Popken

YouTube is a supercomputer working to achieve a specific goal — to get you to spend as much time on YouTube as possible.

But no one told its system exactly how to do that. After YouTube built the system that recommends videos to its users, former employees like Guillaume Chaslot, a software engineer in artificial intelligence who worked on the site’s recommendation engine in 2010-2011, said he watched as it started pushing users toward conspiracy videos. Chaslot said the platform’s complex “machine learning” system, which uses trial and error combined with statistical analysis to figure out how to get people to watch more videos, figured out that the best way to get people to spend more time on YouTube was to show them videos light on facts but rife with wild speculation.

Routine searches on YouTube can generate quality, personalized recommendations that lead to good information, exciting storytelling from independent voices, and authoritative news sources.

But they can also return recommendations for videos that assert, for example, that the Earth is flat, aliens are underneath Antarctica, and mass shooting survivors are crisis actors.

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Religious exemption in state’s anti-discrimination laws only would add injustice

By Daniel Smith

Fifty years ago, in the wake of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act. Congress was coming to terms with the awful truth that people of color were systematically refused a decent place to live. And they decided it was time to do something about it.

And the people of Colorado wondered what took them so long. Seven years earlier, in 1951, we passed the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, and soon after established the Colorado Civil Rights Division (CCRD) and Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC), protecting all citizens in our state from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Today, the CCRD ensures that a man isn’t denied a job because he is older, a woman isn’t denied a place to live because she is pregnant, or a family isn’t denied a seat in a restaurant because they are black or both parents are dads. That’s something we can be proud of.

Of course, you don’t have to look far to see that problems still persist. The “protected classes” in Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws still face prejudice: Women are still paid less than men for the same job. Segregation in our cities and schools persists. LGBTQ youth are far more likely to be homeless. People with a disability still fight to have a place at the table. None of these problems can be solved alone by the CCRD and CCRC, they are the ugly results of generational prejudice and systemic injustice.

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