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The Voyager Message.
Abstract
The theme of this work is the Voyager message that the U.S. National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) sent to the universe in 1977 on interstellar probes Voyager I and Voyager II. Voyager message consists of a phonograph record - called Golden Record - that carries a message for extraterrestrial civilization. The work provides the basic overview of scientific search for extraterrestrial life and describes the NASA Voyager program. Except for the basic overview of the message contents, the work offers an analysis of both visual and audio parts of the Voyager Message compilation. It employs the anthropology of science as an essential theoretical framework for examining the message contents. The work explores the reflections of scientific viewpoint and supposes science as the fundamental concept that shaped the composition of the Golden Record and considers mathematics as an universal tool of interstellar communication efforts.
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When scientists act as consultants during the production of a fictional film, it becomes an act of communication that plays a role in the process of science. Fictional film provides a space for scientists to visually model their conceptions of nature. Film impacts scientific practice as science consultants utilize film as a virtual witnessing technology to gather allies among specialists and non-specialists. Film not only has the ability to act as a virtual witnessing technology, but also forces consensus on the public version of scientific debates by presenting a single vision of nature in a perceptually realistic structure. This paper shows films to be successful communicative devices within the scientific community by showing that, and how, other scientists respond to the depictions in the films. It also demonstrates that science consultants use fictional films as promotional devices for their research fields.
Let's begin with a
Definition: The Anthropic Principle is the drawing of scientific inferences from a consideration of Man's Place in Nature.
There are various versions of the Anthropic Principle. The most conservative version of the Anthropic Principle is nothing but a systematic working out of the fact that the astrophysical (and other scientific) data we have is self-selected due to the fact that Homo sapiens is a particular type of intelligent being. This conservative version of the Anthropic Principle is called the
Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP): The observed values of all physical quantities are not equally probable, but rather take on values restricted by the fact that these quantities are measured by a carbon-based intelligent life-form which spontaneously evolved on an earthlike planet around a G2 type star.
Again, the Weak Anthropic Principle is just a warning to take into account a grandiose type of selection bias when interpreting data.
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection is both a key scientific work of research, still read by scientists, and a readable narrative that has had a cultural impact unmatched by any other scientific text. First published in 1859, it has continued to sell, to be reviewed and discussed, attacked and defended. The Origin is one of those books whose controversial reputation ensures that many who have never read it nevertheless have an opinion about it. Jim Endersby's major new scholarly edition debunks some of the myths that surround Darwin's book, while providing a detailed examination of the contexts within which it was originally written, published and read. Endersby provides a new, up-to-date and very readable introduction to this classic text and a level of scholarly apparatus (explanatory notes, bibliography and appendixes) that is unmatched by any other edition.
Recent work in sociological/cultural studies of science (SCS) is
characterized by the virtually total absence of any participation by
practising scientists. This interdisciplinary barrier appears to be largely a
consequence of the relativist approach to the study of science. In addition
to having philosophical objections, scientists may reasonably ask whether
an approach that effectively renders their interests irrelevant is
strategically sound. If there are significant areas of opportunity where the
methods and concepts of SCS could have a positive impact on the practice
of science, collaboration between scientist and SCSer might well be
preferred to the treatment of scientists as non-participatory laboratory
specimens.
Arguments favoring the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence nearly always contain an overt appeal to big numbers, often combined with a covert reliance on generalization from a single instance. In this paper I examine both motifs, and consider whether big numbers might actually make palatable otherwise implausible single-case inductions. In the end, the dispute between believers and skeptics is seen to boil down to a conflict of intuitions which can barely be engaged. let alone resolved, given our present state of knowledge.
Part 1 Crises in development theory and in the world: crisis of theory and theories of crisis three worlds of crises the state - problem or solution? Part 2 Eurocentrism and development thinking: development ideologies in Western history the rise and decline of development economics the modernization paradigm. Part 3 The voice of the Third World: academic imperialism and intellectual dependence the rise of dependencia the indigenization of development thinking - Latin America in search of otherness, the sociology of civilizations - India and China, the battle for decolonization in Africa. Part 4 The globalization of development theory: from dependance to interdependance analyzing world development development stategies and the world system. Part 5 Dimensions of another development: the sociology and politics of anotherness egalitarian development self-reliant development ecodevelopment ethnodevelopment. Part 6 Transcending the European model: development theory returns to Europe development options in Western Europe the rise of market ideology in the East - Soviet development thinking. Part 7 Reorientations in development theory: one field or many? transcending Eurocentrism and endogenism three worlds of development.
Although controversial, science studies has emerged in the 1990s as a significant culture area within anthropology. Various histories inform the cultural analysis of science, both outside and within anthropology. A shift from the study of gender to the study of science, the influence of postcolonial critiques of the discipline, and the impact of cultural studies are discussed in terms of their influence upon the cultural analysis of science. New ethnographic methods, the question of ''ethnosciences'' and multiculturalism, and the implosion of informatics and biomedicine all comprise fields of recent scholarship in the anthropology of science. Debates over modernism and postmodernism, globalization and environment, and the status of the natural inform many of these discussions. The work of Escobar, Hess, Haraway, Martin, Rabinow, Rapp, and Strathern are used to highlight new directions within anthropology concerning both cultures of science and science as culture.
This lecture starts by considering the old problem of how to account for social change theoretically and criticises some of the models used either because they see the social process in terms used by the actors and so are unable to explain how it is that actors can change those terms, or they see the mechanisms of change as occurring in terms totally alien to the actors and so are unable to explain how these mechanisms can be transformed into meaningful action. The source of this problem is traced to Durkheim's notion that cognition is socially determined. By contrast it is argued that those concepts which are moulded to social structure are not typical of knowledge but only found in ritual discourse, while the concepts using non-ritual discourse are constrained by such factors as the requirements of human action on nature. This means that there are terms available to actors by which the social order can be criticised since not all terms are moulded by it. Finally it is suggested that such notions as social structure only refer to ritualized folk statements about society, statements expressed in ritual discourse precisely with those concepts which are given as demonstrations of the theory of the cultural relativity of cognition. The Durkheimian correlation between society and cognition is merely a correlation of only certain ethical statements and certain aspects of cognition. This type of discourse is present in different types of society in varying amounts according to the degree of instituted hierarchy that these societies manifest. Anthropological theories about the conceptualisation of time are given as an example of the general argument.
Modernization is a term which became fashionable after World War II. It is useful despite its vagueness because it tends to evoke similar associations in contemporary readers. Their first impulse may be to think of “the modern” in terms of present-day technology with its jet-travel, space exploration, and nuclear power. But the common sense of the word “modern” encompasses the whole era since the eighteenth century when inventions like the steam engine and the spinning jenny provided the initial, technical basis for the industrialization of societies. The economic transformation of England coincided with the movement of independence in the American colonies and the creation of the nation-state in the French revolution. Accordingly, the word “modern” also evokes associations with the democratization of societies, especially the destruction of inherited privilege and the declaration of equal rights of citizenship.
Use of the term ‘modernization’ in its present connotations is of relatively recent origin, becoming an accepted part of the vocabulary of American, if not international, social science only in the decade of the 1960s. Despite its relatively rapid rise to currency, the popularity of the term does not appear to be matched by any widespread consensus concerning its precise meaning. The proliferation of alternative definitions has been such, in fact, that the ratio of those using the term to alternative definitions would appear to approach unity. The popularity of the notion of modernization must be sought not in its clarity and precision as a vehicle of scholarly communication, but rather in its ability to evoke vague and generalized images which serve to summarize all the various transformations of social life attendant upon the rise of industrialization and the nation-state in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These images have proven so powerful, indeed, that the existence of some phenomenon usefully termed ‘modernization’ has gone virtually unchallenged. While individuals may differ on how precisely this phenomenon should be conceptualized and a number of critics have addressed themselves to the relative merits of alternative conceptualizations, both critics and advocates alike tend to assume the basic utility of the idea of modernization itself, treating only the manner of its conceptualization as problematic.
Scientific reflexivity stands opposed to the narcissistic reflexivity of postmodern anthropology as well as to the egological reflexivity of phenomenology in that it endeavours to increase scientificity by turning the most objectivist tools of social science not only onto the private person of the enquirer but also, and more decisively, onto the anthropological field itself and onto the scholastic dispositions and biases it fosters and rewards in its members. ‘Participant objectivation’, as the objectivation of the subject and operations of objectivation, and of the latter's conditions of possibility, produces real cognitive effects as it enables the social analyst to grasp and master the pre-reflexive social and academic experiences of the social world that he tends to project unconsciously onto ordinary social agents. This does not mean that anthropologists must put nothing of themselves into their work, quite the contrary. Examples drawn from the author's own research (with special focus on field enquiries carried out concurrently in the far-away colony of Kabylia and in his home village in Béarn) show how idiosyncratic personal experiences methodically subjected to sociological control constitute irreplaceable analytic resources, and that mobilizing one's social past through self-socio-analysis can and does produce epistemic as well as existential benefits.
Even with slow rates of technological advance, extraterrestrial civilizations substantially in our future will have technologies and laws of nature currently inaccessible to us, and will probably have minimal interest in communicating with us. If this communication horizon is ∼103 years in our future, other crude estimates previously published imply that only ∼10−4 of the technical civilizations in the Galaxy are accessible to us. The mean distance to the nearest such society is then ∼104 light years. Radio detection of extraterrestrial intelligence seems to imply either (1) much larger telescopes or antenna arrays for the detection of civilizations within our Galaxy than now exist; or (2) attention to the nearer extragalactic systems, with smaller radio telescopes, to detect the very small fraction of very advanced societies which may choose to make their presence known to emerging civilizations via antique communication modes.
This compelling book uses 103 illustrations to argue that modes of visualizing science have profoundly determined âfetal politicsâ and the contemporary abortion debates. With its close interplay of visual and verbal texts, it traces both the history of fetal images from the sixteenth century onward (including the classic Life magazine photographs of Lennart Nilsson in 1965) and the consequences of how obstetrical and embryological knowledge was represented over time in Europeâto both specialists and the publicâas medical knowledge came to be produced and understood through anatomical observation. As the abortion debates witness, perhaps no flesh is more overdetermined with cultural meaning than the female reproductive body. Language and rhetoric have had an important role in framing the debates and shaping attitudes: âpro-choiceâ versus âabortion,â âanti-abortionâ rather than âpro-life,â âfetusâ rather than âbabyâ or âunborn child,â âuterusâ rather than âwomb.â How visual modes of representing obstetrical and embryological information, which have similar consequences in forming both public and professional opinion, shape the politics of the abortion debates has until recently received very little attention.
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