You may be asking yourself, why does this matter. Why should we take up such arms against bad science in a TV show? Can't I just say "It's just a show" and move on with my life?
If you understand the science behind it and why it's wrong, then absolutely! The problem is when you don't know the science: things that sound sciencey (scienceish?) can get stuck in your head as if they are real science.
This episode is a perfect example of why...
Take, for example, the fears that occurred when the Large Hadron Collider was turned on. There are legitimate concerns about some of the particle physics that occurs (see Rees's warning about Strangelets in "Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning or Hawking's warning about vacuum decay.) However, all of these concerns are simply hypothetical scenarios that are so unlikely to happen, it'd be more likely that every single human would randomly buy the same lottery ticket and all of us win with that ticket. Ok, maybe not THAT extreme, but not far off from it.
None of the legitimate scenarios have anything to do with black holes, even though scientists hope to create microscopic black holes in colliders (and way back in 2008 claim to have created something with an event horizon, which would technically make it a black hole). Yet, sensationalist news rags posted headlines such as "Could a super collider end the world? Proposed upgrade could create black holes and 'strange matter', warn experts" (even though within this article they later acknowledge that even if black holes were created, they wouldn't do any damage).
We can fairly easily see how these two fears are linked - in the real world, scientists might create a black hole in a particle accelerator. People are afraid such a black hole might destroy the Earth. We have a particle accelerator in our show. Maybe it could create a black hole that might destroy the Earth.
It couldn't, but that doesn't stop the show from playing on that fear. A fear that is now reinforced by virtue of seeing it on a TV show.
Such fears have real-world results, and it's this that we need to be worried about. Most of my readers, surely, will already have some feelings about the problem of Americans not knowing anything about science and the ways in which that can cause problems politically. However, even among my readers, I have many who fall into these traps as well, because there are some scientific issues that are not concerned with political leaning... such as GMO foods.
Back in January, Pew Research released a report, the summary writeup of which can be found here. It looked at the differences between layman perception of science and scientist perception of science. In regard to the GMO issue, it showed that 57% of Americans thing GMO foods are unsafe, whereas 88% of scientists think they're safe. 88%. This can only occur in a world in which we have a few fundamental beliefs about science - namely, that science is a bit like the wild west, people are just experimenting on foods without regard to the impact of those foods, big corporations are doing all the research and just pushing this stuff through, etc.
They don't understand how incredibly specific this gene work is:
When scientists take a gene from one thing and put it into another, they know exactly what that gene does and doesn't do. They select the gene very carefully to get exactly what they want, and in so doing can completely eliminate any risk to human health.
The risk is made clear in the above video - people who don't understand genetic science are making policy decisions that make rolling out modified plants harder, which keeps the poor and malnourished of the world both poor and malnourished. This is an issue that affects billions of people.
And it's not the only one. Global climate change has the potential to do even more damage, and yet our knowledge of science has limited us there, too.
Not only do Americans often not thing climate change is man-made, with only 50% acknowledging that it is, we also don't think it's that important! Only 48% of Americans think it's "a major threat to the US". This despite our own military warning how it could increase global terrorism.
We need a drastic change in how we portray science in TV and movies, to counteract our own irrationality and lead us to the point where we're not living the next disaster movie, because even though TV and movies are fantasy, we seem to be really bad at understanding the difference between fantasy and reality.
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