Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

204 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
them, and why was I vaguely disappointed when we identified them
as ducks? I laughed to my dad, maybe a little bit too loudly, and
we resumed our vigil over the shuttle.
PPP
I learned two interesting lessons from this experience. Well, three:
the first would be not to mistake ducks for alien spaceships. But the
other two are a bit more profound. One is that there is a human
need to believe in extraordinary things. Over the course of our
lives we build a mental database of ordinary events. We see trees,
airplanes, buildings, people we know, and we catalog them in our
minds. When we see something that doesn’t fit into the picture we
have of life, it can be hard to categorize. It’s easy to get excited by
it, to wonder about it. Sometimes we wind up either identifying it
as something we already know or setting up a new category for it.
This happens in science all the time. Say a scientist spots a new
phenomenon. It might turn out to be something we already know
about that is seen in a new way, or maybe it’s something actually
new that deserves study. But so far, with all the observations made
by thousands or even millions of scientists, not a single phenomenon
has ever been shown to be anything but natural, and certainly
nothing appears to be guided by an intelligent hand not our own.
But the need to believe in such things is firmly planted in our
collective psyche. There is something wondrous in seeing something
we cannot explain. I like mysteries, for example, and I’ll
worry over them until I can solve them. I think there may be some
hardwiring in our brains that almost demands us to want mystery
in life. If everything were explained, where would the fun be? So
even I, a hardheaded and skeptical scientist, once allowed myself
to be momentarily swept up in a nonrational thought process.
The third lesson from my close encounter that night at Cape
Canaveral is that even an astronomer with years of experience and
training in identifying objects in the sky can make a mistake, even
a silly one. Together with a series of unusual circumstances (the
objects were glowing, they were distant, they were headed roughly
toward me) it was possible and perhaps even easy to make a false
conclusion, or at least skip over the correct one.