The theme under which this year¿s AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. took place was telling in its honesty: “Science in an Uncertain Millennium.” It could have just as well been titled “Scientific uncertainty in the new Millennium”.
After all, if we have leaned one major lesson from the study of science history, it is that science can no longer provide us with the “certainties” and “truths” it used to be associated with by its most zealous missionaries.
This shift in the perception of what science can, and cannot achieve, enfolded mostly during the 20th century and has come about, as I believe, chiefly in response to the sobering realisation of our rather precarious place in space.
It was therefore not completely surprising that the AAAS accepted a rather exotic sounding session on “unpredictable events of extra-terrestrial origin and their impact on humanity.”
As the session¿s synopsis pointed out, human affairs on Earth have and often have been directly associated with astonishing events taking place in the visible sky. “The very imagery of the skies, which is usually so predictable, can sometimes change without warning.
This symposium will explore these often-unpredictable extraterrestrial inputs and the profound effect they have had on human culture.
Yet, the presentations at the AAAS meeting and some of the reactions to the arguments and questions raised have demonstrated, once again, that current research on the history of cosmic impacts differs quite notably between why I have tentatively called the British and the American schools of thought.
This controversy, an often bitter conflict within the NEO research community and largely unnoticed by the interested public, has been going on for more than 20 years – ever since a number of Britain¿s leading astronomers started to look at historical catastrophism as a legitimate field of scientific study in the late 70s and early 80s.
See the attached link below for a lengthy expose by the WHY FILES team about this ongoing controversy that was rekindled in reaction to our AAAS session.
If, as a result of our debate, we could at least agree that the issue of historical impact catastrophes has been ignored (if not ridiculed altogether) for far too long, and that this field of investigation should be taken more earnestly in the future, perhaps something good may still come out of the often acrimonious encounters of the past.
