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God made the world and everything in it. All else is too improbable. The universe was made so that we could be made. Without the one hundred billion galaxies each with one hundred billion stars, the earth, our life-giving home, would not exist. Everything is needed to sustain the earth; nothing is superfluous. Believe all that or not, but please don’t believe cockamamie scientists.
Because there are so many stars and encircling planets, many scientists believe that intelligent life must exist elsewhere. As the universe is much older than the earth, some go further, claiming that much more advanced life must exist.
You will notice that they never quote the odds of intelligent life arising on any given planet. My sister believed that there were so many flying-saucer sightings that at least one must be real. My sister and scientists who simply rely on large numbers to establish their case are on the same page — and she, without any degree in science at all.
Suppose I locked an ape in a room for a day with a bottle of water, a bowl of bananas, plenty of Basildon Bond paper and a typewriter. What are the odds do you think of me finding Hamlet neatly typed next day? Believe me when I say that if these odds are anywhere remotely close to the odds of intelligent life arising on any given planet, then there are far too few planets in the universe to credibly think that intelligent life exists elsewhere. Yet with zero evidence, and without knowledge of the odds, claims that such life exists are commonplace among scientists. They feed the gullibility of the unwashed.
And, as you can’t get lower than zero evidence for unfalsifiable spitballing, go for broke! And they do, protected as they are from ridicule (well, mostly) by being credentialled scientists. This, below, is where they end up.
In some far-flung parts of the universe robots have supplanted organic life or perhaps melded with organic life to form cyborgs. And, we better keep shtum -, cosmologically speaking, lest the aliens discover our whereabout and do us harm. For example, Michio Kaku (professor of theoretical physics in the City College of New York among other accreditations) explained this with a straight face while speculating, in the same talk, that aliens might already be here, having sent their consciousnesses travelling agelessly on light beams throughout the universe. And why don’t we know that they’re here? Why, because we are too primitive to pick up their signals.
And why do we have to try to disguise our presence if the aliens are already here? He didn’t say. Holding contradictory ideas at the one time is an attribute of only the cleverest minds – though, to be clear, not so clever as the brainiest cyborgs who can send their consciousnesses on light beams.
Where am I going with this? At one level it’s a matter of believing in God or becoming a crackpot. On a more mundane level, it’s to do with people of normal common sense not being snowed or cowed by so-called scientific experts, whatever their field of expertise. Some cosmologists have shown how silly they can be. They are not alone. Numbers of climate scientists and medical scientists have followed suit.
We are told that CO2 is about to fry the planet. It’s not quite on par with aliens traveling on light beams; nonetheless, there is no compelling evidence to back up this fanciful claim, unless you count a simplistic association of CO2 emissions with some recent inconsequential warming of the planet. It’s been warmer before without the accompaniment of man-made emissions. CO2 has been higher before without the accompaniment of man-made emissions.
Here is another difference between Professor Kaku and, say, climatologist Michael Mann. Kaku’s dumb ideas do no damage except to our confidence in his and some of his colleagues’ soundness of mind. Mann and his fellow travellers’ dumb ideas are a different kettle of fish. They have turned the world upside down. At their behest we are replacing dispatchable, reliable and cheap energy with intermittent, unreliable and costly energy. All to no purpose. And, troublingly, with no idea into what seas of despair it might lead the free world. More troubling still, China won’t be joining us.
Segue from dumb to at least as dumb. Unhinged medical scientists at the heart of government decided for the first time in history that healthy people and children at no risk, should be locked down to contain the spread of a virus of lethality no greater than a bad flu. Initially, if you recall, this was to flatten the curve of infections in order to allow hospitals to cope. This morphed, effectively, and seamlessly, into eradication.
There is a very good chance that this unique stratagem has given the virus windows of opportunity to continually find fresh un-immune hosts and the time to mutate. The hyped-up pandemic might not have lasted so long (and likely to continue) if the healthy population of adults and children had been exposed to the virus within a short timeframe. Now, it’s never-ending. And rushed, inadequately tested, so-called vaccines which don’t stop you catching it or spreading it, won’t stop the madness. Once eradication is the goal you have to be very, very lucky to hit that target. Think here of colds and flus. Biden will likely be still doddering around in a mask come the next US presidential election.
I’m not too sure who will have done most damage in the end result. Climate scientists or medical scientists. While scientists generally have high IQs, this doesn’t necessarily translate into common sense. In fact, evidently, it can lead to tunnel vision. Inconvenient and contradictory information is blanked out, as are broader perspectives. Following the science, is not nearly as sane as it sounds. No surprise then that it’s usually preached mindlessly by lefties.
Regarding “the carbon-doixide causes the climate” hysteria/fakery/falsity:
A proper social scientist or a proper politician would ask several key questions.
1. What are the incentives, prospective punishments and underlying cultural cretinism that cause climate “scientists” to embrace in the obvious superstition of the Climate Thing?
2. Who are the big power-mongers and big money-scoopers in the shadows who are orchestrating the climate “scientists” -who has most to gain from the mass hysteria that is a consequence the idea of a human-caused climate?
3. Who are the naive idealists and totalitarian-inspired intellectuals who channel and reinforce this Climate Superstition?
4. can anything be done, or are we sunk?
Note that if the greenist people -and that includes the ALP people- get their way regarding so-called renewable energy, the population of the Earth will have to be reduced to 50%, perhaps just 10% of its current level.
5. Which ten per cent, and who will decide?
Peter Smith running straw men again – must be a fuller moon.
Irrespective of whether life, intelligent or otherwise, exists on some other planet apart from our own solar system, we will never know. Time/distance facts (the space-time continuum) show this.
Astronomists have measured the longevity of mid-level solar systems such as this one to be 10bn years (yes, +/- a % or two). This one is now verging on half-life, given that the star (sun) going super nova towards its’ end fries everything about 2bn years before lights out.
The time/distance to other potential solar systems is many, many, many multiples of any technical capabilities we have even wondered over. No worm holes … even after 4.5bn years of evolution we are nowhere in sight of Captain Picard’s warp speed and other junk. We won’t survive long enough to find out, even if we last until Sol carks it.
Other aliens finding us ? “They” have the same time/distance issues. If somehow beyond our ken they managed to make it here, their very first action would be contact (after all that unimaginably enormous effort, that is the point). But contact has not occurred. Because they’re not here.
Peter Smith conflates “science fiction” (with his emphasis firmly on fiction to discombobulate the naive) with the undoubted powerlust of some medical people and climate activists to try and lampoon science. All he has shown, and has done so many times, is his own scientific illiteracy. He doesn’t mind that, of course. The superstitious never do.
It seems to me that belief in a parallel universes where I am president of the United States is just as weird as any Christian belief. Same with the nature of light, that light is particles with mass and electromagnetic radiation without mass at the same time, depending what you are looking for. Yes religion is weird, but so is plenty of science.
Good entertaining piece Peter, as usual. When science keeps coming up with the possibility of other life, further and further away from Earth, based on nothing more than there just must be, because there’s so many stars out there, yet all those we can detect are completely dead, I just put it in the same category of the Global Warming scare that keeps putting tipping points further and further back knowing that we’ll all be dead long before their deadline comes up. Suffice to say, in my view common sense tells me there is no other life than us on planet earth, and there is no possibility of any dangerous unnatural global warming.
A major problem with the mantra ‘follow the science’ is trying to work out which science and which experts to follow. It is convenient for some politicians – and some scientists – to perpetuate the myth that science proceeds in an orderly way from hypothesis to proof via evidence, and therefore resembles a kind of evolving Socratic rational consensus only understood by an elite. However the actual evidence is that science proceeds by a relatively chaotic process involving a lot of imagination, and a lot of what will turn out to be stupid mistakes and irrational theories. It only looks neat and tidy in the school textbooks.
Anyone acquainted with the science of science (i.e. the actual historical evidence about how science proceeds) will know that the alleged ‘consensus’ on vast and complex topics like global climate or the pandemic is purely imaginary – or ought to be.
On closer inspection, almost every aspect of actual public health policy related to the current pandemic is highly questionable. To speak of ‘the science’ in this context is only to reveal the speaker’s ignorance (or duplicity). Perhaps the unsettled nature of the real science partly explains why Anthony Fauci made so many conflicting statements, and sidestepped so many important issues.
As with the popular Thunberg-myth of global climate catastrophe, so with the pandemic: there is what the politicians and activists call ‘the science’ – and then there is the real science, which is diverse, complex, and frequently inconvenient for persons with political and commercial agendas.
My favorite pandemic quotes come from a world-leading scientist and expert on scientific method in medicine. Speaking of the science of physical interventions as public health measures he said “Lockdowns destroy everything”. Speaking of the SARS-Cov2 virus he said: “We cannot destroy our lives, democracy, privacy, our world, for something like that” (John Ioannidis, 6 September 2020).
Astrobiology is a discipline in search of a subject.
“Scientific illiteracy,” suppose I plead guilty ianl, though I was simply trying to make fun of Kaku. “Superstitious?” True, as well. I don’t like walking under ladders or opening umbrellas indoors.
Neither aliens nor strangely elusive transcendental gentlemen have a jot of evidence for their existence other than in the fevered imagination of storytellers. Some stories are just older than others.
“Without the one hundred billion galaxies each with one hundred billion stars, the earth, our life-giving home, would not exist.”
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Perhaps not, with life on it. If we think of the universe as a closed system, it seems intuitive that it must be rather large to allow a reasonable chance of a tiny anomaly existing—for a time—in which entropy decreases.
As Richard Feynman once said: “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Imagine what he would have said if today’s climate pseudo-scientists had been in the ascendancy at the time. “Just follow the money”?
As for believing in God or becoming a crackpot, perhaps there is a third way: become a crackpot pseudo-scientist. For surely it could be argued there is a strong correlation between the decline in belief in a Supreme Being and rise of belief in apocalyptic “climate change”. It has become the new secular religion.
Where once folk said: “it’s God’s Will” when trying to come to terms with something inexplicable, they now prostrate themselves before the prophets of climate doom and climate-controlling fanatics.
Meanwhile, governments, anxious for votes, stumble over themselves to lead the people to the Promised Land of Net Zero by 2050. The date serves a useful purpose too. It conveniently moves the day of reckoning far enough in the future for them not to be around to eat their Humble Pie.
Behind all this is the fallacy of the single cause – “if X causes Y, then only X can cause Y”
Especially seductive when confronted with complexity and/or mystery: in both the microcosm or macrocosm.
Well said Alice. I think we have discussed previously the regression of post Christian society towards an ancient oriental state of nature worship, with designated leaders performing the priestly role of intermediaries between chaos and order, or nature and heaven. I think this is also why socialism is spawning at such a fearful rate. Without Christ, the human mind flails around helplessly for truth, and human endeavor is crushed.
In my recent reading of the Old Testament I find it astonishing, as ever, to note how quickly and consistently Israel reverted to a similar mindset under poor leadership and the influence of foreign cultures. It speaks to the seemingly miraculous robustness of Christianity, that it managed to guide human endeavor so successfully for so long.
J. Vernau, increasing the sample size does not make an impossible event possible. There is nothing intuitive about considering the occurrence of the impossible. Entropy is one of the keystone concepts of our understanding of the natural world. If we allow for anomalies in such a foundation just to suit a materialist worldview, then all of our understanding collapses with it. The only way to logically understand the existence of life, whilst remaining consistent with our understanding of nature, is to allow for the supernatural.
Thanks for the reply, Mr or Ms pgang. As I understand it, entropy can decrease locally within a larger system in which it is increasing overall. It is a matter not of impossibility but probability.
My point is that I don’t see any particular contradiction between religion and science. This does not hold, of course, for mere scientism, the refuge of the ignorant and malicious.
pgang–Well said, and thank you!