Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards on Science Sensationalism

On this episode of ID the Future, philosopher Jay Richards and astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, co-authors of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, discuss reports on another extra-solar planet recently in the news.

It’s K2-18b, 124 light years away, the first exoplanet found in its star’s circumstellar habitable zone with liquid water in its atmosphere. Science journalists have sensationalized it as another potential earth-like home for life, even though, says Gonzalez, it’s much more like Neptune or Saturn than Earth. BBC science journalist Pallab Ghosh recently criticized this kind of unbalanced science reporting. We have to keep our eyes open for this sort of thing, especially since — as Gonzalez and Richards show — Ghosh makes precisely this mistake himself in his article warning about the problem.