The 2017 survival guide

In the post-truth era – science may need a little pep talk. Well listen up, Russ Swan is here with his survival guide for the upcoming year… 

Motorcycle riders are taught to make a quick backwards glance over their shoulder before any manoeuvre, as a last safety check – a trick known, for good reason, as the lifesaver. It’s a pity the same does not apply to the calendar; when I tried to reflect back on 2016 the result was not so much lifesaver as brownpantser.

Rarely have we been so much in need of intelligent leadership and clear direction, with so little evidence of those things being present. But all is not lost, even if we have to rely on such old-fashioned ideas as education and expertise to see us through. Others may revel in their moronic post-truth fantasy worlds, but that doesn’t mean we have to indulge them.

With this in mind, we are happy to provide the Lab Babble survival guide to the post-truth era, 2017 edition.

1. Truth is still truth and facts are still facts. No matter what the fingers-in-the-ears “nah-nah-nah, I’m not listening” brigade may think, simply repeating lies does not change the fact that they are lies. Scientific facts remain absolute and invariant, until overturned and replaced by new scientific facts which are even more absolute and even less variant. And probably shinier too.
2. Diet foods make you fat. No, really. Obesity is a major concern to health professionals and society in general, and its rise closely matches the growth in popularity of zero-calorie drinks and snacks. You eat something sweet, and your body expects to have loads of energy. When the tank is found to be empty, an urgent refuelling order makes you hungry, so you eat more, so you get fat. Try using actual sugar, or train your palate to enjoy the sensations of bitterness, saltiness, and umaminess.
3. In exactly the same way, politics makes you stupid. As a default position for the period ahead, the safest thing is to assume that all politicians are wrong all of the time. It doesn’t matter whether this is deliberate – a condition known to psychologists as telling lies – or inadvertent (known as ignorance). Studies have shown that incorporating the assumption of wrongness into all received communications from politicians does a great deal for the mental wellbeing of non-politicians.
4. Don’t sweat the small stuff. The scientific pedant inside all of us (OK, inside me) wants to stop people on the street and tell them that graphene is not in fact a two-dimensional material, no matter what they may have heard. Its z-dimension may be merely the height of an atom, but that is still a measurable dimension. Now, berating people for their ignorance (see above) may be a valuable and justifiable activity but is sadly more likely to result in a restraining order than a convert. Much better to hand-build a set of sandwich boards bearing important truths, and march around the town centre for the edification of the populace.
5. Title inflation has become inescapable. 2016 was the year in which a minor effect caused by the coincidence of perigee and zyzygy led to the full moon being promoted to the status of supermoon. Attractive young people who earn a living wearing clothes are supermodels. The highest court in the land is now the Supreme Court. The trend is pervasive and irreversible, and it’s time we all jumped on the bandwagon. Next time you are asked what you do, please say you are a superscientist, a hyperphysicist, a megabiologist, or an ultrachemist. If we all stick together, it will catch on.
6. The sequence continues. Mega, giga, tera, peta, exa. You’ll need these before you know it.
7. Some mysteries will never be solved. I’m talking about the big stuff here, like why the only thing that comes out of the dishwasher with water clinging to it is the one thing in there with a non-stick coating. Explain that, Mr T. E. Flon.
8. Star Trek still trounces Star Wars. I mean, the spaceships are cool and all but Wars it’s basically a quasi-religious parable based on the gift of superpowers and the rise to dominance of one megalomaniac after another. We have quite enough of that just now in a galaxy not very far away at all, thank you very much.
9. The dominant emerging consumer technology of 2017 will be virtual reality, in which we can fool ourselves that we exist in a whole different universe, never mind galaxy. As escapism goes, VR is getting better and better and, by the end of the year, it might even approach the level of participant immersion that was previously accessible only by reading a book. Given the way things are going, we may all be grateful for the new levels of removal from reality that this affords. A lifesaver, perhaps.
10. Happy New Year. Really.

Russ Swan