Richard Dawkins’ new programme, Enemies of Reason (Monday, 8pm, C4), is an impressive and much-needed riposte against the rise in pseudoscience and superstition.
Pity, then, that his opening six words contained a factual error.
“Science has sent orbiters to Neptune, irradiated smallpox and created a computer that can do 60 trillion calculations per second.”
To use Dawkins’ own words “It all sounds very poetic, but it’s not reality”.
We have never sent a single orbiter to Neptune, never mind the plural. The nearest we got was a fly-by mission (Voyager 2) that shot past the gas giant at around 15 km per second.
It might seem pedantic to criticise a geneticist over space terminology. But this is the first line of a programme advocating the superiority of scientific fact. Doesn’t someone check these things?
It seems not. Especially when it comes to space. Reporters and sub-editors seem so starry-eyed on the subject that the most basic and verifiable facts burn up on re-entry. Take this recent howler from the Daily Mail, reporting on a fanciful space hotel supposedly opening its hatches to tourists in 2012:
“The hotel’s structure, which makes it look like a model of molecules, was dictated by the fact that the pods will have to fit inside the US space shuttle which will ferry them into place three at a time.”
The US space shuttle?
That’s space junk of the first order. Galactic Suite, the company behind the – let’s say ambitious – scheme have yet to divulge how they will assemble their space station and then ferry astronauts to it. (Indeed, it’s hard to find a press report that even asks these important questions.) Imagery from their site suggests some kind of magical single-stage orbital space plane – a technology that has so far eluded every space agency and private company on earth.
That’s not a US space shuttle.
Putting aside the unlikely scenario that a newly announced company could develop their own orbital space plane and space station and overcome regulatory hurdles in just five years, what were the Daily Mail thinking by suggesting the US space shuttle would be doing the trucking? The ageing fleet will be retired in 2010. Does Nasa know that a private space company are planning some kind of hand-me-down space programme with their defunct orbiters?
It’s just the tip of the asteroid. We’re nearly all guilty of misunderstanding basic facts about space. If you believe that astronauts operate in zero gravity, or that Sputnik was the first man-made object in space, you can hang your head in shame with millions of others. Including, it seems, one of the world’s great champions of science.