I’m sure many readers are familiar with the famous “trolley dilemma” in which a person much choose one of two scenarios: imagine you are driving a trolley and in front of you are five people who will die if you don’t switch the tracks to divert the car. If you divert the car, however, one person is standing on the other track and will be killed. Most people, I would bet, would choose to save the five people versus the one, unless there was an important reason why the single person might be more significant or special than the five.

Say, for instance, that on the first track, there were just five blue collar railway workers, all single men with no wives or children, but on the other track stood a single mom who was eight months pregnant. True, five lives is still greater than a woman and an unborn child, but the decision, I think, then becomes a little tougher. Or, say the scenario included the five blue collar workers versus the Dalai Lama, Bill Gates or some other figure who has had a sweeping impact on humanity. Or, five privates who just enlisted in boot camp on the one side and one four-star general on the other track.

Nonetheless, the dilemma is an interesting one to think about because it forces us to put value judgments on life itself. Is one important person’s life more valuable than a bunch of nobodies? Should we always choose to save the greatest number of people no matter who the single person is on the second track?

Carlos David Navarrete, a evolutionary psychologist at Michigan State University, recently put 147 participants using a virtual simulation. Ninety percent of those tested pulled a switch to divert the car, while 14 let the car kill the five people. Three people pulled the switch to change the tracks but subsequently changed their minds.

Here’s a brief analysis of the findings:

While the findings corroborated with the results of a previous study that relied on self-reported methods, the experiment also showed that participants who did not pull the switch were more emotionally aroused. This means that their inaction might not be so much a conscious choice but a result of freezing up during highly anxious moments, which is akin to a solider failing to fire his weapon in battle, Navarrete said. Perhaps if they had remained calm enough to process what was happening, the percentage of people who would have pulled the switch to save five and let one die might have actually been greater.

“I think humans have an aversion to harming others that needs to be overridden by something,” Navarrete said. “By rational thinking we can sometimes override it – by thinking about the people we will save, for example. But for some people, that increase in anxiety may be so overpowering that they don’t make the utilitarian choice, the choice for the greater good.”

And a video (with some nifty accompanying music, I might add):

As I noted here, Kepler-22b was discovered earlier this month. Kepler-22c and Kepler-22d have also been found as part of the mission.

The announcement came today that too more planets have been discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. These two planets have been named, appropriately enough, Kepler-22e and Kepler-22f.

Here is a snippet from The New York Times’ article:

Astronomers said the discovery showed that Kepler could indeed find planets as small as our own and was an encouraging sign that planet hunters would someday succeed in the goal of finding Earth-like abodes in the heavens.

Since the first Jupiter-size exoplanets, as they are known, were discovered nearly 15 years ago, astronomers have been chipping away at the sky, finding smaller and smaller planets.

“We are finally there,” said David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was a member of the team that made the observations, led by his colleague Francois Fressin. The team reported its results in an online news conference Tuesday and in a paper being published in the journal Nature.

You can learn more about Kepler here.

Earlier this month, NASA’s Kepler mission found its first star orbiting in a habitable zone around a sun similar to our own. This is another important discovery because as we know and as I have pointed out before, any planet that can be found within the habitable, or “Goldilocks zone,” as it is otherwise called, has the potential to support life (as long as water is also present).

According to the article:

The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don’t yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets.

Previous research hinted at the existence of near-Earth-size planets in habitable zones, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Two other small planets orbiting stars smaller and cooler than our sun recently were confirmed on the very edges of the habitable zone, with orbits more closely resembling those of Venus and Mars.

“This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Kepler’s results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA’s science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe.”

Kepler discovers planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets that cross in front, or “transit,” the stars. Kepler requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a planet.

“Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet,” said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the team that discovered Kepler-22b. “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”

Here are a couple illustrations of the planet and its orbit:

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech - This artist's conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech - This diagram compares our own solar system to Kepler-22, a star system containing the first "habitable zone" planet discovered by NASA's Kepler mission.

Head over to the Breaking Spells blog to read that intellectual superstar, William Lane Craig, explaining how animals other than humanoid primates aren’t conscious of pain because they have no prefrontal cortex. Actually, mice do seem to have these, and other animals probably do as well. Here’s another article from the NIH that suggests as much.

This is Craig’s comment about prefrontal cortices:

…the awareness that one is oneself in pain requires self-awareness, which is centered in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain—a section of the brain which is missing in all animals except for the humanoid primates. Thus, amazingly, even though animals may experience pain, they are not aware of being in pain. God in His mercy has apparently spared animals the awareness of pain. This is a tremendous comfort to us pet owners. For even though your dog or cat may be in pain, it really isn’t aware of it and so doesn’t suffer as you would if you were in pain.

And a portion of the blogger’s response:

… the pre-frontal cortex is present in animals outside the primate line. It’s a bit different (primates tend to have granularized cortices^[1] ). …

WLC is citing the work of philosopher Michael Murray, who suggests that animals aren’t aware of their pain (therefore god exists) -but Murray has some fatal flaws in his work. Murray differentiates humans from other animals by claiming (with minimal evidenciary support) that there exists a “affective pathway” which allows for self-awareness -this pathway, he says, terminates in the prefrontal cortex in humans. Because non-human animals aren’t self aware of their pain, according to Murray, they aren’t suffering. In other words, gratuitous evil is not present.

But lets suppose it’s the granular layer that’s found in primate cortices that makes the difference. This granular layer is present in many non-human primates, and yet these primates experience pain and are clearly, demonstrably aware of it. Gratuitous evil, therefore, exists among non-human primates that suffer predation, abuse, natural disasters, anthropogenic habitat destruction, infanticide, etc., etc.

If gratuitous evil exists, god can neither be omnipotent or benevolent. Therefore, god doesn’t exist. It’s not my reasoning, it’s the reasoning of WLC and Michael Murray. Surely one or both would move their goalposts accordingly if called on it, so I’m not expecting either to revise their positions. That would be too much like science.

The arguments against irreducible complexity have been carried on with such weight elsewhere, that I don’t feel the need to regurgitate what someone else has already said, simply to link back to this blog post, which presents a good explanation of the eye and how it is emphatically not irreducibly complex. I do this because the subject has recently come up in the comments section of this post: ID on Twitter. Here are some thoughts from “Foxhole Atheism:”

First, we should not assume that our eye is this perfect device. In fact, the octopus has a better eye than humans do. We also have some severe deficiencies in the range of the electromagnetic spectrum we can see, we have a significant portion of the population needing corrective lenses, we have blind spots, and on and on. We even have severe malfunctions like blindness and cataracts. So, it seems silly to think of how great the eye is – this is clearly a matter of perspective because it could be much better. But we still have a pretty good eye and it’s fairly well suited to our normal lives. We can then ask, “Are there precursors to our type of eye that are less complex and adapted to other scenarios?” The answer is yes.

As Richard Dawkins and others have often pointed out, eyes seem to evolve at the drop of a hat. Eyes have developed independently several times. There are eyes without lenses, eyes that use pinholes, eye cups, eye spots, and even  bumps for where very simple eyes used to be (see the following for a few of several examples).

Credit: Illustration by Pete Marenfeld/National Optical Astronomy Observatory - An illustration of a black hole the size of nearly 10 billion Suns. Inside it, where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape, our solar system is shown to scale.

In a remarkable discovery, scientists have now found the largest black holes in recorded history, including some that may be 10 times the size of our solar system:

Such  holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of violent quasars, the almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies that dominated the early years of the  universe.

One of these newly surveyed monsters, which weighs as much as 21 billion Suns, is in an egg-shaped swirl of stars known as NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in a sprawling cloud of thousands of galaxies about 336 million light-years away in the Coma constellation.

The other black hole, a graveyard for the equivalent of 9.7 billion Suns, more or less, lurks in the center of NGC 3842, a galaxy that anchors another cluster known as Abell 1367, about 331 million light-years away in Leo. …

Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, called the new work “an incremental step,” noting that the study of these monsters has been a part of his life for a long time. “It’s good to learn about even bigger ones,” he said.

Black holes, regions of space where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape from it, are among the weirdest of the predictions of Albert Einstein’s curved-space theory of gravity, general relativity — so weird that Einstein himself did not believe it. He once wrote to a friend that there ought to be a law of nature forbidding such a thing.

But he was wrong. And some of his successors, like Dr. Rees and a colleague at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking, have spent their careers studying the implications for physics of objects that can wrap spacetime around themselves like a magician’s cloak and disappear.

Such is the fate, astronomers agree, of some massive stars once they run out of fuel and collapse upon themselves. Indeed the galaxy is littered with stellar-mass black holes detectable by the X-rays spit by doomed matter swirling around them like water in a drain. And there seem to be giant ones in the heart of every galaxy.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/This artist's concept features NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life. Curiosity is slated to launch toward the Red Planet on Nov. 25, 2011.

The Mars rover, Curiosity, which has taken close to 10 years to plan and construct, is set to launch out of our atmosphere on Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., with the main objective of determining whether Mars can, or once did, support microbial life, not to find life itself. That loftier objective would be for another mission, scientists say. As Doug McCuistion, head of NASA’s Mars exploration program, put it:

We bridge the gap from ‘follow the water’ to seeking the signs of life.

See here for more information.

Scientists have discovered evidence of pockets of ice on the Jupiter moon, Europa, which is further acknowledgment that life most likely exists, in some form, elsewhere in the universe, since, as we know, the presence of water is a basic necessity for the development of biological life. And I have pointed out numerous instances on this blog in which water or ice particles have been found elsewhere in the cosmos. Presumably, it’s only a matter of time before life is found somewhere other than earth, even if that life consists of only simple microorganisms.

In this photo is pictured the Conamara Chaos region of Europa:

Credit: NASA, JPL, UNIV. OF ARIZONA/Jumbled icy patches on Jupiter’s moon Europa, like the Conamara Chaos region pictured here, may indicate the presence of large liquid reservoirs a few kilometers beneath the surface.

According to a report from The Associated Press, an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier came quite close to Earth on Tuesday of this week. It was the closest encounter of that large of an object in more than 30 years.

Credit: NASA/A radar image of asteroid 2005 YU55 taken on Monday.

Here is a snippet from the article:

Its closest approach to Earth was pegged at a distance of 202,000 miles at 6:28 p.m. EST. That’s just inside the moon‘s orbit; the average distance between Earth and the moon is 239,000 miles.

The last time a large cosmic interloper is thought to have come that close to Earth was in 1976, and experts say it is not likely to happen again until 2028.

Scientists at NASA‘s Deep Space Network in the California desert have tracked the quarter-mile-wide asteroid since last week as it approached from the direction of the sun at 29,000 mph. …

If an asteroid that size would hit the planet, Purdue University professor Jay Melosh calculated the consequences. The impact would carve a crater four miles across and 1,700 feet deep. And if it slammed into the ocean, it would trigger 70-foot-high tsunami waves.

Since its discovery six years ago, scientists have been monitoring the spherical, coal-colored asteroid as it slowly spins through space and were confident it posed no danger.

The Atlas of the Universe website offers maps of the known universe up to 14 billion light years away from sun, which spans the entirety of the known universe.

Here’s the universe from 1 billion light years out, showing neighboring superclusters:

Credit: atlasoftheuniverse.com/Neighboring superclusters

And from 14 billion light years out, here is the visible universe:

Credit: atlasoftheuniverse.com/The known universe