Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Recent experience with Pluto shows us once again that all the expert ideas about remote things are usually wrong.

Sensing something from a distance, a.k.a., remote sensing is difficult. I’ve written about this before. Everyone seems to know this, but that doesn’t stop people from acting as if they are exceptional. I mean, all you have to do when sensing from a distance is start by saying something like,

We are basing our statements on distant measurements and we believe…

(Note the use of “and” instead of “but”)

Now we have a close fly by of Pluto. Up close, Pluto has some features that it shouldn’t have. Gosh, how could the experts have been so wrong? Another example of the difficulty of remote sensing.

Sorry, but now I go back to one of my least favorite topics—climate change. Experts are stating the temperature of the earth 10,000 (did I put the correct number of zeros there?) ago based on data sensed from afar (this time the distance is years, not miles). They don’t preface their statements with the recommended preface. Instead, they speak with enough certainty to cause well-intentioned to legislate legislation and proclaim proclamations that eliminate jobs and generally disrupt the lives of other people, while not altering their own well-guided lives.

Perhaps, just perhaps, one day we will learn.