When Did Science Become the Enemy?

By Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
posted: 15 February 2007
12:05 pm ET

You, dear reader, are one in a thousand.

The fact that you’re confronting this column on a web site devoted to space science and astronomy makes you roughly as rare as technetium.  Despite the fact that astronomy is one of the two most popular science subjects in American schools (the other is biology), it’s really not that popular.

The overwhelming majority of the citizenry has other interests, and looming large among them are the peccadilloes and personal intrigues of the rich and famous.  Consider the contrast: in the past week the Space Telescope Science Institute released a startlingly detailed photo of a distant cluster of galaxies, a picture that gives even the non-expert a good idea of the structure of these, the largest entities in the universe. The photo of cluster Abell S0740 an image that would have bedazed every previous generation of humans probably didn’t even make it to the front section of your local newspaper.

However, what did garner front-page ink last week, not to mention huge dollops of chatter on talk radio, was the unexpected death of Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy Playmate and reality TV star.

Movie director Frank Capra wasn’t disclosing a staggering new truth in noting that ‘“what interests people is people.’ One dead-obvious reason is that those who are thoroughly unresponsive to their fellow humanoids don’t get a lot of representation in the next generation.  We’re most interested in people, in the same way that click beetles are most interested in click beetles.  That’s evolution.

But why the seemingly preternatural fascination with famous personalities, be they powerful figures (politicians, for example) or mere celebrities, as was Ms Smith?

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