Science

iPad confusion and Tory antics indicate lack of intelligent life on Earth | John Crace


Monday

After three years of training telescopes on 1,327 stars within 160 light years of Earth as part of the Breakthrough Listen project, astronomers have been met with silence, having failed to detect any signals that resemble intelligent life elsewhere. And yet many scientists still believe such life must exist. Even if they don’t accept the premise of the 1961 Drake equation, written by the US astrophysicist Frank Drake, that there are 100m worlds where life has been created through evolution, they still reckon the probability of extraterrestrial civilisations has to be above zero. So what are we doing wrong? The most likely explanation is that either we are looking in the wrong places or we are looking for the wrong things and that our equipment is not quite up to the job. But is it also possible that other civilisations are rather more sophisticated than our own and deliberately maintain radio silence to stop us getting in contact with them? That they’ve known about us for hundreds – if not thousands – of years and there is an international extraterrestrial alliance hellbent on blanking us out. They’ve taken a good look at us and concluded we are not intelligent enough to be worth bothering with. Just give us a couple of hundred years more and we’ll have probably destroyed the entire planet and ceased to exist, so why make the effort of trying to get to know us?

Tuesday

The first of three days of voting in the Tory leadership race, which meant much of my week was spent hanging around the corridor outside committee room 14 in Westminster as Tory MPs scurried in and out. It was both a repetitive and depressing experience. The formula was almost invariably the same. Jeremy “Ken Doll in British Airways steward uniform” with rictus smile insisting that the loss of cabin pressure was entirely normal. Michael Gove trying to conceal his naked ambition while looking like a newcomer at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Sajid Javid saying anything to sound hard on Brexit and appear more interesting than his dog. Dominic Raab working on his anger management issues while bodies unexpectedly piled up in the Thames. All of whom knew they were really running for a post in the cabinet rather than prime minister. Boris “Priapic Mr Blobby” Johnson remaining tight-lipped, knowing that if he actually said something he would haemorrhage support. The only one who appeared halfway human was Rory Stewart, which automatically disqualified him from the contest. But the candidates were far from the worst specimens on view. The sight of so many men and women betraying their principles for the sake of their careers even took some of their colleagues by surprise. MPs such as Matt Hancock and Damian Green, who had openly made no secret of Johnson’s unsuitability for the job, were now competing for his attention and disappearing so far up his arse that they began to reappear out of his mouth. As one MP said to me: “It appears that almost everyone on Team Boris has forgotten how to count. There just aren’t enough jobs to go around.” Come the end of July, there is going to be a lot of disappointed people in the Tory country. And in the rest of the country.

Wednesday

Within hours of the advance squadron of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party MEPs descending on Brussels, Annunziata Rees-Mogg had retweeted a video of their arrival with the comment: “I think I might watch this on my shiny new iPad I was given for no very obvious reason. We need to leave the corrupt gravy train, as we were promised we would.” Which rather begged several questions. The first being that if Nancy really thought it was such a waste of money her being given an iPad, there was no reason why she could not have given it back. Presumably no one was forcing her to take it. There again, maybe she treats all gifts as a form of manorial tithe. On a more existential note, it made you wonder whether Nancy actually knows she is meant to be in Brussels to represent her constituents and not on a summer holiday. In which case she is probably a little pissed off that the EU did not also supply her with a sun lounger and an umbrella to cover all weather eventualities. But presuming she is vaguely aware of the responsibilities that come with her £90,000-plus pay package, it has clearly never occurred to her that employers have a duty to provide the means for its workers to do their jobs. Or that an iPad is not just a toy on which to watch YouTube videos of cute dogs. No doubt the cleaners and nannies who keep the extended Rees-Mogg family on the road are expected to bring their own bleach and nappies. Nancy must also feel it is the height of decadence that the European parliament supplies lavatory paper in its own toilets.

Thursday

The final day of voting in the Tory leadership election had a demob happy feel to it. A sense of relief that the whole thing was over. And that wasn’t just me. One Tory MP confided to me that the whole experience had been like a prolonged bushtucker trial in which she had been repeatedly forced to consume from an array of voting options all of which made her want to retch. Several others told me it had been a miserable experience with threats to careers being made if they failed to vote in the right direction. Many MPs of course were more than happy to do as they were told and what was noticeable about many of Johnson’s supporters was that they were unable to explain exactly why they were voting for him. Some said the serious politicians had let us down and that it was time for a clown – though logic might suggest that if the serious politicians had failed then the task was rather more tricky than we had been led to believe. Others insisted they had been impressed by Mr Blobby’s plan, his sense of vision. Though when pressed, none were able to articulate what precisely that plan was. Because there isn’t one. They had merely heard what they had wanted to hear. The fifth and final ballot was dominated by claims of vote rigging as Johnson’s team contrived to keep Gove out of the final two, leaving their man with an easy run in the members’ hustings against the anodyne Hunt. Shortly after the vote was announced, a Tory MP phoned to explain how it had been organised. Several members of Johnson’s inner circle had up to nine proxy votes each and had used them judiciously to control the outcome. If the Conservative leadership contest had taken place in an African country, we’d be calling it out as a failed state.

Friday

We’ve never had much luck with cars. Our previous one had the terrifying habit of suddenly losing power when travelling at 70mph on the motorway, a fault that repeated trips to the garage never resolved. It also had a satnav that was so inaccurate it thought we were heading across the middle of Tooting Bec common when we were parked outside our house. Eight years ago, we decided to give up the unequal and replace it with a diesel car. Because back then diesels were not only meant to be far more reliable, they were being marketed as the cars that would save the planet. Far less damaging to the environment than petrol cars. We all know what happened next, though I can’t help suspecting that car manufacturers knew exactly how toxic diesels were for many years before the information became public knowledge. To add to its obsolescence, the ultra-low emissions zone means we can no longer drive anywhere in central London without paying £12.50 per day – which, to be fair, is no great loss as my over-60s Oyster card means I can travel everywhere for free by public transport. More importantly the zone will extend to our patch in under two years meaning we will be paying £12.50 per day not to use the car. So it’s got to go. Though we’ll almost certainly find that we end up having to pay someone to take it off our hands as it’s splattered with dents, full of more crap than Johnson’s car and soon to be undriveable in London. Any takers for it in Scotland?

Digested week: Mr Blobby v Barbie’s Ken

Child to Gove: ‘You’re unfit for office.’



Child to Gove: ‘You’re unfit for office.’ Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images





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