Rare Earth - 20 Years of Science

This is technically not part of my "50 Years of Science" series.  But I recently reread a very interesting book called "Rare Earth:  Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe" by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee.  It was written in '99 and published in 2000 so the "N years of Science" idea fits it too.

After I read that book but before I wrote this post I also came across and read "Five Billion Years of Solitude" by Lee Billings.  It came out in 2013 and covers much of the same territory. I will be including some material from that book in this post.  I am also going to add this post to my index of "50 Years" posts.  That can be found at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-links.html.  Now on to the subject at hand.

Serious consideration of the possibility of intelligent life existing elsewhere goes back at least to H. G. Wells and "War of the Worlds".  The book was published in 1898.  The famous radio play was broadcast in 1939.  Probably the best movie version was released in 1953.

This was far from the first time the subject was considered seriously.  But it represented the first time that the general public was exposed to it in a big way.  "War of the Worlds" was a work of fiction but Wells spent considerable effort in getting the details right and was well versed in the science of the day.

Pretty much from 1989 on there have been a continuous stream of fiction written on the subject.  Most of it was of the "evil aliens are coming to eat you" variety.  In response to that scientists tended to shy away from the subject.  But that all changed in about 1960.  A well respected scientist named Frank Drake found a way to legitimize the subject.  His major contribution was the "Drake Equation", a serious effort to try to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations to be found in the Milky Way galaxy.

The existence of the equation allowed serious scientists to weigh in on what constituted reasonable values for the various terms.  And, more importantly, they could propose projects to gather data to support or refute the reasonableness of a given value for a given parameter without being laughed at.  Most critically, they could put in funding proposals for those projects with a reasonable expectation that they would be accepted.  So they did.

Drake also popularized an acronym, SETI, the "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence".  That too became a generally accepted scientific term that could be used in serious scientific contexts.  And, again importantly, projects could be proposed to do SETI.  They were and some of them were funded by NASA, other governmental organizations, and eventually, private sources.

SETI has been around for 50 years.  And if the search had been successful it would have been front page news.  It hasn't been successful.  But a lot of people assigned numbers to the Drake Equation so that it predicted that intelligent life would be common.  If ETI was common why wasn't it found?  For a long time that was a question many people feared to talk about in a public setting.

Why?  Because the "they are everywhere" crowd was ubiquitous in the public media and the assumption was that raining on that particular parade would be very unpopular.  When coupled with the fact that there was little solid science to back up anyone's opinion.  The "science" consisted primarily of wishful thinking so discussions were likely to quickly devolve into "us versus them" arguments that generated a lot of heat but shed no light.

This logjam was finally broken when "Rare Earth" appeared.  By then 40 years had passed since SETI and, so far, all the space aliens anyone had been able to locate were of the fictional type.  The "Star Trek" TV show of the late '60s was one of hundreds of entertainments that featured, to a greater or lesser extent, space aliens.

In the real world, there have been a couple of false alarms.  One of the more interesting ones happened in the late '60s.  Radio Astronomers found an instance of just what you would expect to find, a beeping radio source.  They had no idea what it was so they labeled it LGM-1, with the "LGM" literally standing for Little Green Men.  Well, it turned out that they had discovered the first example of a common phenomena we now call a Pulsar.  Other than this, and a few other false alarms, all scientists found was silence.  This result led to the "Five Billion Years of Solitude" title of the second book.

I have written a couple of previous blog posts on this subject.  Almost the first post I wrote was called "SETI".  You can find it here:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/11/seti.html.  You can find a follow up I posted a few years later here:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/03/seti-revisited.html.  I spent some time analyzing the Drake Equation in more detail in this latter post.  But I made no reference to "Rare Earth" in either post.  I'm not sure whether I had read it at the time or not.  Probably not.

But I have now read it and "Solitude".  And, instead of directly rehashing some of the arguments I laid out in my previous posts I would instead like to ask my standard question from my "50 Years" series:  Now that some time has passed, how does the science stand up?  The short answer is:  just fine.  Now for the longer answer.

"Rare Earth" tackles the SETI question by broadening its perspective quite a bit.  The Drake Equation makes some simplifying assumptions.  This is a proper scientific thing to do.  You simplify a question down, frequently to the point where it bears little or no resemblance to the real world.  Then you try to get an answer to that question.  Let's say you are successful.  Then you re-introduce some of the complexity of the real world and ask the question again.  If you can again get an answer you repeat the process.

Each time around you introduce additional complexity and move the question closer to one that realistically incorporates all the details of the real world.  You again ask the question and hope you can still get an answer.  If you can succeed in doing this enough times then your question completely applies to the real world situation you started with.

But this didn't happen with the Drake Equation.  It has been updated but the modern version is not that different from the original.  And we are still a long way from having good values for all the Drake parameters.  So, generally speaking, it has not been worth the trouble to add the complexity back in.

We know a lot more about some of the Drake parameters and a little more about the rest.  But the uncertainties are still large.  Making reasonable guesses results in answers that range from a vanishingly small likelihood of a second civilization existing in the Milky Way to there being more than fifteen million.  If that's as close we can get to having a definitive answer to the simplified version of the question then why bother adding the complexity back in?

So most people don't.  But Ward and Brownlee wanted to make a serious attempt to answer the question posed by their title.  So they decided to go all the way to asking the question in a way that incorporated the complexity involved in dealing with the real world.  As you can no doubt deduce from the title, they ended up firmly in "few to none" camp, as did Billings in his "Solitude" book.

But what do we know now that we didn't know in 2000 when "Rare Earth" was published, or even in 2103 when "Solitude" was published?  And does it invalidate anything either has to say?  Well, yes, in a certain way.

If you read actual scientific publications (or properly written books), you will find that scientists are very honest about what they don't know.  They are happy to put forth all kinds of wild theories.  But they also tell us whether it is a solidly grounded theory or one that is more of a placeholder, a piece of speculation that is likely to be changed drastically as additional evidence becomes available.

Drake did this in his original publications.  He said, in effect, "here is a way to sensibly ask the question and here's what we currently know about the answer".  As far as it goes, the Drake Equation still stands up.  It's just that there are a lot of additional factors we now know are important.  And this is an example of science working the way it is supposed to.

Drake said "here's a starting point".  And that's all scientists took from his early work.  They then did a lot of work and found modifications for Drake's original equation that changed it, but only in fairly minor ways.  Is the new Drake Equation better?  Yes!.  Does that mean that the original Drake Equation was a mistake or an error or whatever?  No!  It completely justified itself by serving as a good starting point.

Many scientists are content with the current Drake Equation.  It's not that they think it is right.  It's that they think there is so much useful work that can be done in the context of the modern version of the Drake Equation that they don't feel the need to take it further at this time.  But, while being true of most scientists, it is not true of all scientists.

Ward and Brownlee go through the work that led to the modifications that led to the modern versions of the Drake Equation.  But they didn't just stop there.  They go on to dive into the geologic history of the Earth.  There they found a lot that bears on SETI.

Drake avoided any detailed analysis of earth's history, geological or otherwise.  He was content with the assumption that all planets that are found to be of the same rough size and composition of the Earth and that circle a star in a "Goldilocks" orbit (too much complexity for me to go into so let's just call it an "earthlike" orbit and leave it at that) will end up spawning intelligent life.  (Actually he had a parameter for this but he assumed its value was near one.)  This is a good starting point but only that.

Ward and Brownlee go into a lot of detail having to do with the composition and geological and astronomical history of the Earth.  And they keep unearthing key characteristics or events that seem to them to be critical to intelligent life arising here.  Others argue that there is some other path that would permit intelligent life to arise anyhow.  But over and over Ward and Brownlee argue that is unlikely to be true.

Here is a much condensed list of the issues they found:

Liquid water - This is a criteria that is widely adopted.  It is the criteria that is used to define the Goldilocks zone.

The composition of the earth's crust must include the right amounts of carbon and several other key elements - DNA (and a lot of other chemistry) seems to be necessary for intelligent life.  There may be alternatives to "carbon based" life but they now seem unlikely for reasons Ward and Brownlee go into in detail.  But the right amounts of the right elements seem to be necessary to allow any kind of "organic chemistry".

There needs to be the right ratio of land and sea - Why?  Read the book.  They note in passing that the earth had the wrong ratio for much of its history.

The earth needs a stable celestial environment - Things seem to take a long time.  That means a sun that burns steadily for billions of years.  It also must not be too big (they go supernova too quickly) or too small (the planet will not be able to have a day/night cycle).  Also, it must not be to close to the center of the Milky Way (too many supernovas and other high energy explosions that can wipe out all life) or too far out (too little carbon and other important elements).  Also, no double-stars, clusters, etc., as they don't make for a stable orbit around a stable source of sunlight.

Plate tectonics - The argument is a bit complicated but it is also compelling.

A moon about the same size as our moon - The short version is tides and the right amount of orbital tilt (necessary for seasons but not too drastic seasons).

Jupiter - Specifically a large outer planet to sweep up cometary debris so we don't have a life killing impact every few hundred million years.  If the meteor that took out the dinosaurs had been much bigger it would have wiped all life out instead of just most of it.

Beyond this they go through the entire geological history of the earth.  In it they identify event after event (the precipitation of most iron out of the oceans, the transition of the atmosphere to one containing about 20% oxygen, many more) that seem necessary.  Why?

They make the case that it is possible that life is common.  If we study extremophiles, organisms that live in extreme environments (oxygen free, high pressure, high heat, low heat, etc.) we conclude that single celled life actually can exist and even thrive in a wide range of environments.  It is possible, for instance, that life exists under the ice on a moon circling Jupiter.

But when it comes to single celled life, the general response is "who cares?"  What we care about is intelligent life.  Drake came up with a very good practical definition.  He said "if it can create and operate a radio telescope then it is intelligent life".  Single celled organisms can't create and operate radio telescopes.  Is it possible to create and operate a spaceship that can traverse interstellar space and not be able to make and operate a radio telescope?  Nope!

It is this requirement for life that is intelligent that drives most of the additional criteria they add to the basic Drake list.  There arguments are too complex to permit summarizing here but I find them compelling.  So, cutting to the chase, what did they get wrong?

Well, it turns out that they underestimated how hard intelligent life is to create.  When "Solitude" was published a lot of data that the Keppler telescope had gathered was available.  But not all of it.  And that meant that both books missed a significant development.

The Kepler telescope was a "planet hunter".  The way it worked was actually quite simple.  It was orbiting in space so it was above the earth's atmosphere.  That meant it didn't have to deal with atmospheric distortion.  And that meant it could see very clearly.  Its telescope was fairly large.  It was not as big as the one on Hubble but it was bigger than a typical back-yard telescope.  And unlike the Hubble, the Kepler telescope was kept aimed at the same small part of the sky.  But, like Hubble, Kepler had a CCD camera.

But Kepler's CCD had a zillion pixels.  And the Kepler satellite was kept super stable so that the light from a single star was focused on a single pixel of the CCD.  This allowed Kepler to monitor the brightness of about 150,000 stars.  It then looked for slight dips that would indicate a planet crossing in front of the star.  This required a tremendous amount of sensitivity but Kepler had it.  Over its life (it has now been retired because the pointing hardware no longer works) Kepler has been able to find thousands of planets.  And this trove of data completely destroyed traditional models of how our solar system formed.

The old theory was that all the planets formed pretty much where they are now.  Specifically, "rocky" planets like earth formed close to the sun while "gas giant" planets like Jupiter formed outside the "frost line" (the point where gasses could condense to become a large planet).  Jupiter was and is well placed to protect earth from things floating in from the Kuiper Belt or the Ort Cloud.  As a result, the earth doesn't get hit by a "life killer" rock every few hundred billion years.  It all made sense.

That is until the Keppler data came in and scientists had some time to digest it.  The modern theory of solar system formation has the gas giants forming close in.  That means no rocky close in planets like earth as they would get swept up by one or the other of the gas giants.  So where did earth and the other inner planets come from?

The modern theory is quite a bit more complex than the old one.  The gas giants formed close in and swept up any rocky inner planets along the way.  Then they migrated outward to their present locations.  Eventually, by a process that is not well understood, the rocky inner planets we now see formed some time after the gas giants got out of the way.  This whole theory is still a work in progress.  But what scientists now know for sure is that the old theory was wrong.  (This all came out too late for Billings to include it in his book.)

And what this means is that it looks like the path to intelligent life on earth includes several steps in addition to the ones that Ward and Brownlee identified are necessary.  And that means that intelligent life is even harder to pull off.  And that means that intelligent life existing elsewhere looks like it is even rarer than Ward and Brownlee had concluded.

If you want to explore this subject I can strongly recommend "Rare Earth".  "Solitude" has its own charms but if you are only going to read one, go for the former.  "Rare Earth" also is a good introduction to "deep time".  "History" is defined as the time period for which there are written records.  That is, at best, three thousand years.

As late as the nineteenth century it was possible to be conversant with modern (for that time period) scientific thinking and be confident that the earth was tens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years old.  It is only in the twentieth century that we have come to know that the earth is 4.5 billion years old.  The study of the period from the formation of earth to, at most, a few hundred thousand years ago, has acquired the nickname of "deep time".

"Rare Earth" takes you on a tour of this period that is well suited to those who do not consider themselves geologists but have some interest in the subject.  Finally, let me return to SETI.

Since the acronym was coined SETI has been associated with using radio telescopes as the primary search tool. We now have sufficient context to identify just how limited this perspective is.  Consider, as I did on a previous post, a thought experiment where we put a planet that was in every way identical to earth in various places in space.  We then ask ourselves the question "if a planet identical to earth was located here would we be able to detect that it harbored intelligent life?"

Drake knew that earth was emitting powerful radio beams as a side effect of the broadcast of television signals.  Another source of powerful radio waves was military radars.  In searching for signals he could pick up at great distances with '60s technology, he seized on this.  The technology he had access to was capable of detecting the kinds of radio waves earth was continuously emitting across interstellar distances.  And if such a radio signal was picked up it would be easy to determine that it was artificial and not caused by some naturally occurring phenomena.  So that's what he went with.  And at the time he was right.

But, as I also observed in a previous post, things have changed since then.  TV technology has changed from "analog" to "digital".  And almost everybody now gets their "TV" from cable or the internet.  Neither of those broadcast strong radio signals.  Other changes have been made to how radar is used.  In short, radio detection no longer seems like it is as good a method as it used to be.  And we now have better alternatives.

The earth has only been broadcasting powerfully in the radio part of the spectrum for about a hundred years.  That means the time window for aliens to detect our presence by looking for powerful artificial radio signals is far shorter than the blink of an eye.

But life on earth has had a profound effect on the composition of the atmosphere for billions of years.  In Drake's time there was no way to detect this.  So he discounted it and focused on radio.  We still don't have the capability to perform this measurement.  But we now know that it is possible to do so with currently available technology.  It's just fantastically expensive.

Several designs have already been proposed for doing exactly this.  If somebody wanted to spend something like ten billion dollars then we could be collecting data within a few years.  The US could do it.  The Europeans could do it.  The Chinese could do it.  But, so far, none of them are interested enough to commit that kind of money.  A few of the wealthiest billionaires on the planet could afford to do it.  But none of them is interested in stepping up either.

At the moment, that is.  But this is the kind of thing where costs decrease over time.  The cost of doing this could easily drop to a few billion over the next decade.  With the right kind of breakthrough, the cost could drop much further.

At some point someone will become interested.  But it is important to remember that an "interesting" atmosphere doesn't guarantee intelligent life.  But if planets with interesting atmospheres are located then we could then do a radio based focused search of them.  At that point there would probably be a lot of support for doing so.  And maybe someone will figure out something else to look for.

I'm patient.  After all, a round trip signal to someplace 50 light years away and back will take a hundred years.  And that's in our back yard, astronomically speaking.  So what's the rush?  We can afford to wait a decade or so and see what tomorrow's technological advances bring.

And I still think the best course is the one I recommended previously.  Keep looking up.  Don't look for life.  Look for what's interesting for other reasons.  Look for signs of intelligent life by not looking specifically for signs of intelligent life.  I'm confident intelligent life will find it impossible to hide its presence.  Something will leak out that is impossible to ignore.

Binging is Better

This post is short and punchy, at least, for me.  And when I say "binging" I am NOT talking about drinking.  Binge drinking is definitely a bad thing.  Rater I am talking about binge watching entertainment type TV shows.

I am old enough to remember "those thrilling days of yesteryear" (that's a steal from the introduction to an old radio (and later TV) show called "The Lone Ranger").  Back when I was a kid the typical TV show aired thirty-nine new episodes per year.  You got a new episode every week from Labor Day to Memorial Day.  Reruns were confined to "Summer" season that ran between those two major holidays.

But then and now it takes about a week to shoot a half hour of scripted TV.  So back then most shows ran a half an hour.  And shows of this period had no story arc.  Each episode was pretty much a stand alone affair.  To take a typical example, "Peter Gunn" was a detective show.

Every week Pete would chase after a different bad guy.  His gal pal Edie would croon a number and his cop buddy Lieutenant Jacoby would be world weary as he stepped in at key moments to help Pete out.  There were some other repeat characters.  But they were mostly there to provide atmosphere and comic relief.  You could watch episodes in pretty much any order you wanted and everything would make perfect sense.

But audiences yearned for shows with plots that could not be resolved in a half hour so hour long shows appeared.  In the beginning these were often anthologies where each story hewed to the same theme or genre but often the cast was completely different for each show.  This made it possible to shoot parts of two or more shows at once.  This, in turn, allowed the shooting of an individual episode to stretch across two weeks or occasionally a little more.

But the "soap opera" had been invented for radio in the thirties.  These "daytime dramas" featured elaborate story arcs.  And that was one of the features that made them popular.  These shows aired daily so they chewed through a lot of story in a year.  These elaborate story arcs, when combined with a lot of repetition and recapitulation, allowed writers to churn out enough material make a year's worth of shows in a year in spite of the fact that soaps aired daily year round with no reruns.

And an episode of any kind of show could be churned out quickly on radio.  Once the script was ready all you needed was some actors huddled around a microphone.  And they didn't need to memorize their lines.  They could just read straight from the script.  All of this was impossible when radio morphed into TV.

All of a sudden you needed sets, costumes, locations, etc.  And the actors now needed to learn their lines.  Somehow soaps succeeded in making the transition.  One trick was to use a big cast.  A specific story line would only involve part of the cast.  This allowed parts of the show to be broken into semi-autonomous units.  Another trick was to write dialog on cue cards.  These were positioned so that the camera couldn't see them but each actor could.

A soap production had to be economical so they generally stuck to pre-constructed sets that were located on sound stages.  This limited the number of locations but meant that the show was not dependent on the weather or the availability or suitability of a particular location.

 Audiences would put up with this on a daytime soap but they expected more from an evening show.   They demanded a more movie-like experience.  And this required custom sets, exterior locations, actors not woodenly reading lines off cue cards, etc.

And even with the use of the most efficient and economical production methods, it turned out that it took 5-6 days to shoot everything necessary to assemble a single half hour episode of a scripted night-time TV show.  You could employ teams of writers, directors, editors, etc.  But people tuned in for the cast so you were stuck with only one cast.  Or were you?

An early and very popular TV show was "Maverick".  It was a "western" built around a roving gambler named Bret Maverick.  Regardless of what tricks anyone came up with it became literally impossible to turn out the requisite number of hour long episodes each year.  So a brother, Bart, was introduced.  This meant that two episodes could be shot at a time.  One featured James Garner as Bret and the other featured Jack Kelly as Bart.

The problem was that Garner was much more popular than Kelly.  I went back and watched a bunch of episodes a couple of years ago.  Kelly was actually quite good.  He just wasn't as well likes by audiences as Garner.  This haunted Kelly and he didn't do much acting after the series wrapped.  He just couldn't shake the reputation of being the guy who wasn't as good as Garner.  And that's a bad thing because he really was very talented.

Using tricks like Bret/Bart made it possible to put out 39 hour episodes per year.  But there was another problem.  It was fantastically expensive.  So first shows started cutting back to 32 episodes per year.  Then they cut back to 26.  Finally, they settled on 22 episodes as a "full season".  If it takes two weeks to shoot an episode that means 44 weeks of work followed by some time off for the cast.  No modern show shoots more than 22 episodes per year.  And many shoot less.  It is now not unusual for as few as ten episodes to be shot per year and still be labeled a "full season".

And one way or another, this idea of story arcs spanning multiple episodes got tried out and gained quick acceptance with audiences.  Possibly this grew out of mini-series.  These became popular in the '70s.  "Roots" was one of the most popular and memorable.  It was a dramatization of the book of the same name by Alex Haley.

People had been turning books into movies for a long time.  "Gone With the Wind" premiered in 1939.  It ran 3 1/2 to 4 hours, depending on the version.  But that was hard to pull off so most movies made from books clocked in at about two hours.  You have to throw a lot of a book away to do this.

And it is possible to get it down to a single hour if the material is of the right kind.  A popular TV show of this early period was "Perry Mason".  It was a TV series with pretty much the same cast (and many of the same sets) showing up in each episode.  And many of the "Perry Mason" books that Erle Stanley Gardner wrote were translated into a single one hour episode.  But the books were short and the puzzle that Mason had to solve could be simplified so that all the key material could be condensed down to fit into a single 44 minute (if you ignore the titles and commercials) "hour" of TV.

But over time story arcs, often lasting an entire season, and sometimes spanning multiple seasons, became the norm.  "How to Get Away with Murder" is a classic contemporary example of this.  You can watch just a single episode and make sense of it without having watched previous episodes.  But you get much more out of it if you have watched enough previous episodes to be familiar with the several multi-episode arcs the show features.  And that means you are not getting the full experience the show offers if you watch an episode in isolation rather than in its proper sequence.

Another problem arises because it is common for four, eight, or even more, weeks elapse between the airing of consecutive new episodes.  Twenty-Two episodes fill up about four and half months of the year.  So if a show airs four episodes per month in October and November to get viewers hooked then there isn't much left.

If, for instance, four episodes are aired in February, a "sweeps" month (a month where more intense ratings information is gathered), and another four are aired in May, another sweeps month, then that leaves only two other episodes to slot in anywhere else.  And, assuming no new episodes air in the Summer, that means that there are two different two month gaps and a four month gap each year.  That's a lot of opportunity for viewers to forget about the show, or lose track of the current status of various story arcs, or otherwise become disconnected from the show.

And there's still another problem.  If you like a type of show you tend to watch several of them.  And often the shows with the most elaborate and convoluted story arcs are the most popular.  So, it becomes very easy to mix the details of one show up with the details of another show.  We can all sort this out over time.  But it takes effort and the whole point of TV is that it demands little effort of us.

But binge watching avoids these problems.  Once you finish watching an episode of a particular show, you can immediately move on to the next one.  All the characters, details of various story arcs, etc., are already at the front of your mind.  You can easily get deeply immersed in all aspects of a particular show.  Once you have finished binging one show you can move on to binging a different show.

On paper, binging has been possible for a long time now.  Decades ago I collected sets of episodes of old TV shows I liked on video tape.  The technology then moved on to DVD.  They were more compact and the picture quality was much better but it was the same idea.  Now we have streaming services.  I currently subscribe to Amazon Prime and Netflix.  They are probably the two most popular options.   But there are a more and more streaming services popping up all the time.  Disney is about to get into the game in a big way, for instance.

And very recently I got a chance to do a "side by side" comparison of binging versus the traditional model.  I have watched every episode of a show called "Lucifer".  Its first three seasons aired in the traditional  manner on a regular TV channel.

This show is mostly episodic.  It is primarily a standard "police procedural" but other elements have been added to spice it up.  So we get the "crime of the week" to solve.  Each weekly crime is pretty much independent of the other crimes in other episodes.  In that aspect it follows the old "Perry Mason" model.  But, unlike "Perry Mason", it also has "arc" aspects that play out over several episodes, and even multiple seasons.

But then the regular TV version of "Lucifer" got cancelled.  Luckily for me, Netflix swooped in almost immediately and picked it up.  Netflix made "season 4" available for streaming recently.  As a result of Netflix moving so quickly the "between season" gap has been about the same as it was previously.  So I binged a bunch of episodes from the new season.

And it is very much an "apples to apples" comparison.  The original "TV" structure has been carried over unchanged.  You can tell where the "commercial breaks" are because the screen goes black for a second or so in all the places a regular show would have to break for commercials.  There aren't any commercials because it's Netflix.  But the "commercial break" structure has been retained anyway.  So, in terms of how the show is structured and shot, nothing has changed.

But the viewing experience is quite different.  It is much easier to get into the show, re-establish and then maintain my connections to the various characters, and to follow the various "arc" components of the show.  It is just a better way to experience the show.  It also helps, of course, to not be yanked out of the show for a couple of minutes every 10-15 minutes by a block of commercials.

Something that is an even better showcase for binge watching is a show called "Bosch".  It too is pretty much a standard cop show.  And, like "Perry Mason", it is based on a series of popular books.  In this case, the author is Michael Connelly.  But in spite of this high degree of similarity there are points where it diverges significantly from "Perry Mason" or even "Lucifer".

This is not because a typical season is extracted from three books.  That allows for a more interesting and varied show.  But you wouldn't even notice if you hadn't read the books.  Instead the differences follow from the fact that "Bosch" is built from the ground up to be streamed.  As a result, watching a season of "Bosch" is very much like reading a "Bosch" book.  It can go into the same kind of depth as a book can.  It can explore character more thoroughly like a book can.

Since it was made to be streamed the length of each episode varies slightly.  The creators have the luxury of letting the amount of story they want to cover in an episode dictate the exact length of the episode.  The episode is created to be about an hour long.  But it no longer has to have a run time that exactly fits a "one hour" time slot on a TV channel.  As a result the show flows more smoothly than it otherwise would.

There are also no artificial mini-climaxes ever 10-15 minutes designed to hold an audience across a commercial break.  Some scenes are long.  Some are short.  But each no longer needs to be constructed to lead us into or out of a commercial break.  This lets the show creators focus on the needs of the story and character.

And, of course, what should be the most bingable show out there is not, in fact, bingable.  That's "Game of Thrones".  GoT is on HBO and HBO is sticking with the old "an episode a week" model left over from TV.  HBO has been around long enough that it long predates streaming.  Back in the day they needed to conform to some of the TV rules like airing an episode a week and slotting it into the same date and time every week.  They have not been able (or perhaps willing) to deviate from that old model.

HBO has figured out that this is an old model that is losing ground to streaming services.  So they are moving away from it a step at a time.  They now offer "HBO go", a way to stream HBO shows.  It is an open question whether they can survive as a stand-alone entity.  I expect them to go "all streaming" at some point.

But they will probably eventually end up as a part of some bigger streaming service.  If they time it right, they can probably sell themselves for a lot of money to some service that is having trouble braking through the clutter and needs something to get them on the map. But HBO has been selling their content on DVD for some time.  Neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime do this.  If you want access to their content you have to sign up with their service.

The easiest call ever is that streaming is the future when it comes to entertainment programming.  Traditional TV still does the better job for news and live sports.  But the future does not look good for traditional TV and cable stations that currently depend primarily on entertainment programming.

ESPN has demonstrated that there is an "all sports" business model that works, or at least used to.  And we have "all news" cable channels that are also doing fine at the moment.  But things look bleak for "local" TV stations and the networks that feed them.  And things look even bleaker for entertainment oriented cable channels.  Unless, of course, they are able to successfully transition to streaming.