Trust in institutions continues to plummet, and science is getting dragged down in the undertow. It’s tempting to blame anti-science politicians, or the scientists themselves, who struggle to clearly communicate their work. But there’s another culprit we often overlook: the media, whose chronic inability to accurately portray the scientific process frequently turns nuanced findings into hyperbolic headlines.
So when I got a New York Times alert about alien life on a distant planet a few weeks ago, my immediate reaction was both surprise and skepticism. Do we really have proof that we’re not alone? And what was with the alert’s odd locution — that astronomers had detected a “signature of life”?
The discovery of life apart from Earth, no matter how far away or what its form, would be the biggest story in human history. I immediately texted a good friend of mine, who happened to be handing in his dissertation at Columbia that week on exoplanets. “On a scale of 1-10, how legit is this?” I asked.
“The research is very legit…like an 8 or 9. Really interesting and important work,” he replied. “But in terms of the New York Times article I’d say not at all legit.”
Ouch. My friend referenced Carl Sagan’s famous aphorism, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and felt that while the scientists had not overstated the case in their paper, the New York Times’ handling was “sensational.”
If you want to dig in, the research is indeed fascinating, particularly the way that Nikku Madhusudhan et al conducted their studies. Their takeaway is that K2-18b, a candidate hycean (ocean) planet 120 light-years away, produces a chemical, dimethyl sulfide, that as far as we know is only generated by living organisms (mostly algae). That’s the “signature of life.”
But there are so many caveats. The biggest may be that last one: as far as we know. In the outer reaches of space, the unknowns are mind-boggling. It is hard to overstate how vast the possibilities are. They break our typical conceptions of probabilities; in the famous Rumsfeld matrix, out in space is where the ultimate unknown unknowns live.
And yet I saw so much hubris online, with people only-sort-of joking that K2-18b’s life would be stuck in a gravity well. Their thought experiment contends that K2-18b is so dense and has such a large diameter that it would be difficult for any rocket to break through its (potentially) thick atmosphere to reach escape velocity.
Even putting aside this argument’s myriad assumptions (K2-18b’s atmospheric makeup is very much up for debate), such a line of thinking only makes sense if you have a profoundly anthropocentric way of seeing the universe. Ethnocentrism led to the dangerous mistakes of phrenology, the Tasaday Hoax, and the mound builder myth; assuming alien life forms and their technology would have anything in common with ours could lead to the same kinds of scientific setbacks and perilous blind spots.
This was in part the argument of a fun essay by Erik Hoel, which was recommended by our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman. In “Alien Poop Means We Are Not Alone. But Let Me Just Adjust This Model Parameter…” Hoel argues that we should get used to living in what he calls the age of alien agnosticism — that we must live within the uncertainty of working science when it comes to aliens and many other parts of modern life (AGI, for example). As Hoel puts it, “as our world ever more resembles science fiction, we become collectively more uncertain, not less.”
I agree.
Which is why I can’t understand his claim elsewhere in the essay that “if anything, The New York Times (and other outlets) downplayed the news.” As we attempt to douse the fires of what Danny recently termed the idiot inferno, we have to be more careful, not less, when evaluating and espousing such important claims.
Otherwise, the result is a public that goes right along with believing that drones in New Jersey are UFOs, while real scientists attempting to do basic research are subjected to attacks and mischaracterizations that they are largely concerned with “making mice transgender.”
These attacks come largely but not exclusively from the right these days. This hasn’t always been the case; the infamous golden fleece awards were the invention of a Democratic Senator. But after numerous Covid-19 communication fumbles, from the early “don’t mask” message mistake to physicians claiming social justice is more important than social distancing, the right’s increasingly anti-institution mentality grew to encompass science. In just the past four years, Republicans’ trust in science went down nearly 20 percent. It’s no wonder the Trump administration has found a political target in the NSF.
It certainly doesn’t help that scientists themselves aren’t very good at conveying their findings to a general audience—last year’s Pew Survey found that more than half of Americans think research scientists are bad communicators. But most Americans don’t hear about science from scientists. Rather, the latest and greatest in scholarship gets filtered through the media, mostly through headlines. When those shocking conclusions aren’t backed up, or are shortly contradicted, they help the rightward attacks find purchase, and prime the public to be skeptical of cutting-edge research.
The answer isn’t more liberal yard signs that claim “In this house we believe in science.” The arrogance of assuming that scientists always know everything is exactly what led to this polarization. Rather, to earn trust back, scientists and science communicators—and especially the media—need to be extra careful when it comes to touting the size and certainty of their claims. Most readers don't have an exoplanet expert on speed dial. Overhyped headlines, even those tempered later in the article by caveats or alternative views, directly undermine the slow and crucial work of rebuilding public trust in science.
The hyper-attention market for clicks may drive most publications to sensationalize their titles, but surely The New York Times, our country’s most important newspaper, can do better? After all, as one departing Times employee joked with us recently, the Gray Lady is the Wordle company now. What’s the point of having a Games and Cooking business model if you can’t play it as straight as possible with your reporting?
“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology,” Sagan said in one of his final interviews, nearly 30 years ago. “And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.” That’s the soot you feel on your face right now.
Our reaction should not be to continue to ply the public with the false certainty and exactitude it craves, but rather to embrace the messiness and chaos of the scientific process. The Times, the media, the scientific community — all of us should do our best to make the uncertainty the point. We live in a mysterious universe. Why does this one faraway planet emit a chemical that only life seems to give off? We truly don’t know, and that’s precisely why it’s worth investigating further.