The Great Heinlein Juveniles Plus The Other Two Reread 10: Time for the Stars

[james_davis_nicoll]

In which archaic sexism and racism provide unwelcome distraction from dubious physics: Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein


As ever, corrections will not be dealt with until I get home tonight.

Comments

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

What the principle of mediocrity says is that most people who employ it will turn out to be more or less correct. It does not say that any given person can safely assume themselves to be representative in any way; that's generating information from nothing[1]. So, say, a subsistence farmer could reason that most people are like them, and they'd be right (as would most people would be in general) by virtue of the fact that most people are still subsistence farmers (I know this is no longer strictly true, but you know what I mean). Somebody with a college degree living in the first world and owning multiple computers, laptops and smartphones could not . . . even though personal experience says otherwise.

This, btw, is one of my strongest justifications for a space program: you don't actually know until you go out and look. Is life common as dirt, or a once-in-a-galaxy occurrence? Is life a property of organic chemistry, or can you make it out of any old stuff -- silicon, arsenic, magnetic vortices, neutronium and whatnot? Is a precondition for multi-cellular life aerobic respiration, or will something more modest suffice? These aren't the sorts of question, imho, that are amenable to anthropic reasoning or appeals to the principle of mediocrity. You have to get your ass up out of that chair and take the trouble to go out and look for the answers instead of handwaving them into existence.



[1]Which has been pointed out many times to the anthropic types who like to go on about stuff like Boltzmann .

[monte davis (from livejournal.com)]

Emphatically This. So much writing on exobiology, SETI, etc. begins well by nodding respectfully to the unknown unknowns, endorses caution in generalizing or extrapolating -- even catalogs the weaknesses of the old Drake equation -- and then can't resist bounding from the far end of a range to the near end of an error bar like Eliza crossing the Ohio.