(no subject)

[deckardcanine]

News outlets last week: Stephen Hawking says there must be extraterrestrial life!!

Me: That's news?!

Seriously, the guy's been a household name for a long time now. Has it never occurred to any reporter to ask his opinion on the matter? Did he abstain from answering? Did he change from a previous position? If either, why didn't they say so?

If Hawking had come up with an innovative perspective, I could see it making headlines. Instead, he firmly voiced a popular answer to a question whose affirmative has yet to be proven, and that's where the burden of proof lies. As I see it, the outlets that gave the most attention to his statement are aiming for emotions: Believers in space aliens will feel largely vindicated, and the rest might engage them in discussion.

This isn't scientific progress. This is gossip.

Comments

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

Heh, interesting of Stephen to use the word "must" in absence of scientific evidence. Maybe scientists just follow a different religion, one where superstrings and their requisite 11 dimensions exist, etc. :)

I think the mathematical odds of complex organic compounds forming elsewhere in the universe are quite high (virtually 100%), but I can't say whether the odds of complexity required to achieve intelligence is more than infinitesimal. Maybe with a couple billion years of evolution, many primordial soups will yield intelligent life, but maybe it only happened once.

[carlfoxmarten]

I really wish that reporters and the scientific community would get their emotions and facts straight and separate, that way we'd be having fewer problems with theories getting presented as fact when nothing has been properly proven... >.>

[sleepyjohn00.livejournal.com]

99.9% of the reporters have no idea what he does, or why he is important to physics. They know he has something to do with outer space. The only thing they know about outer space is that that's where aliens come from. Therefore, the only thing they can think of to ask is what he thinks about aliens.

How many headlines can they got out of "Stephen Hawking announces supermassive black hole due to evaporate from Hawking radiation in less than 5 billion years!"

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

Which still doesn't explain why they took so long to report it.