(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.