Clara

In the novel The War of the Worlds, no one knows what their lives on Mars were like aside from what they could figure out afterward from the remnants of the invasion.  The Martians arrived in a series of cylinders which landed on Earth.  Those landing sites were craters of some sort, but I believe the tops were above the surface.

I believe that question is known as the Fermi Paradox.  If there are all these aliens out there, then where are they?  Of course, if no one is able to find some way to dodge the speed of light limitation, there might simply be no aliens within close enough range to visit.

Sounds interesting. I'll see if I can find this.

I don't remember it very well (I'm not even sure of the author), but there was actually a story about some scientist getting a bunch of monkeys to pound on typewriters to see what would happen.  They actually did produce copies of literature, and indeed that was all they were doing.  Another scientist, who didn't like the implications of this utterly implausible or even impossible event, decided to kill off the monkeys.

I would say it’s not even an approximate science. It’s another piece of guesswork dolled up to look scientific.

I’ve read opinions from those who think SETI is a waste of time because it’s based on the Drake equation. These opinions are, frankly, idiotic. Anyone who stares out into the night sky — and/or has a basic understanding of just how many stars and galaxies are out there — is right to train a telescope (regardless the frequency observed) to see what we might see in the electromagnetic spectrum.

We don’t know how life started on earth. But it seems there are three choices: Design, chance, and built-in design (fabric of the universe stuff) manifested by time-and-chance. That is, #1) God created the first cell (and subsequent unique combinations) because of conscious thought; #2) life occurred by complete chance (in a completely atheistic, purposeless universe), or #3) designed into the fabric of the forces and properties of energy and matter is the propensity for life to self-assemble as surely as water forms into snowflakes.

The Drake equation cheats and chooses option #2 without justifying itself. Now, even if one assume #2, the equation is so open-ended that it makes liberal climate models look like science.

However, recent planet-searching success suggests there are a lot of planets out there. There was really no reason to think otherwise but the proof is always in the pudding. There’s some speculation if the laws of nature are the same everywhere (or have perhaps changed a little since the Big Bang), but I think it’s generally concluded that they operate everywhere.

Thus the amazing thing is some of the reasonable (even valid and validated) conclusions we can come to  about extremely distance objects that we have no hope of observing more directly. We can see our own star and understand that those points of light out there are other stars as well. We can intellectually understand physics to the point that we can (it seems...surprises are an inevitability) surmise the precise cause of supernovae in stars in distance galaxies.

This is a double-edged sword. Science is full of interesting speculation that, because they were proposed by “science,” take on a solidity they don’t deserves. Examples are: dark energy, the multiverse, inflation theory, and string theory. It’s not that some of these theories are held without reason. And some of them could turn out to be true or partially true. But I’m amazed how quickly these things have been assumed to be true when there really is no hard evidence.

We can castigate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for delving into spiritualism (which many prominent people did, holding it as a theory of how the world might work). But Sir Arthur has nothing over those who hold to the theory of “dark energy.” It’s just that the latter sounds “scientific.” Cosmologists have noted that there must be hidden matter in order to account for the structure and motion of galaxies. And this matter is “invisible” and presumed to be so different from normal matter/energy that it is undetectable.

Well….basically this seems like a sort of scientific “spiritualism.”

My own belief is that we’re making idols of many of these things. As traditional religious belief has been marginalized and considered the provence of rubes and the unsophisticated, “science” has become many people’s temple.

And I’m not talking about being in awe of modern electronics, of miracle medicines, or of the amazing photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. All those, and more, are worthy of awe, respect, and even a bit of secular veneration. This stuff is amazing.

But now “science” has become a term, a moniker used to anoint, as a priesthood would, certain ideas. First off, there is no “science.” There are simply various methods, theories, data collecting, and publishing. When I see these pompous idiots aim a camera at some bird in the Amazon jungle and say that he is bringing these creature under the purview of “science,” well, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

The clear meaning is that nothing in this world is real or important until some smug “scientist” has categorized it. And yet, frankly, if you add up the entirety of scientific (not technological or manufacturing, mind you) thought and research, the equations and the math are amazing. And yet at the end of the day, in terms of telling us what it all means and what it is all about, this same reverent “science” has nothing to say but gibberish such as the multiverse theory — a theory that could be true but there is no evidence for it nor could there be…at least in the “scientific” sense.

What we have is a universe of amazing complexity and consistency. But nothing inside this universe — absolutely nothing — gives evidence for why it should be the way it is, let alone why it should be at all.

Thus in that context, these Drake equations seem downright silly.