Using the panel
discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in London this
past August, I will jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with
the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. The link is
provided below…
Hart-Tipler are WRONG! (add echoing sound effect);
Sagan-Anyone That Believes Wildly Enough MUST BE RIGHT!!!! (add earthquaking
and echoing sound effect)…
It’s funny, because the author George Dvorsky here (http://io9.com/11-of-the-weirdest-solutions-to-the-fermi-paradox-456850746)
says, “Most people take it for granted
that we have yet to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.
Trouble is, the numbers don’t add up. Our Galaxy is so old that every corner of
it should have been visited many, many times over by now. No theory to date has
satisfactorily explained away this Great Silence, so it’s time to think outside
the box.”
What exactly does “the numbers don’t add up” and “No theory
to date has satisfactorily explained away this Great Silence” mean to these
people? Apparently it means, ignore reality and propose ever more fanciful and
wild explanations when Occam’s Razor is quite clear: “...among competing
hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions
should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove to
provide better predictions, but—in the absence of differences in predictive
ability—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.”
Thus far, all of the hypotheses are equal: not one has
produced evidence of intelligence beyond Earth. Ergo, the one hypothesis that
DOES explain the evidence: “There’s no one but us”, is correct.
But science fiction writers and pseudoscientists refuse to
accept such a conclusion and try to come up with wilder and wilder explanations
for the observable fact that there are no intelligent alien life anywhere but
here. In fact, despite brightly optimistic claims from NASA its very self, “‘I
think we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a
decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30
years,’ NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan said April 7, 2015 during a panel
discussion that focused on the space agency's efforts to search for habitable
worlds and alien life.” There remains no EVIDENCE that there is life, space
scientists insist that there is WATER everywhere, “For example, oceans of
liquid water slosh beneath the icy shells of the Jupiter moons Europa and
Ganymede, as well as that of the Saturn satellite Enceladus. Oceans covered
much of Mars in the ancient past, and seasonal dark streaks observed on the Red
Planet's surface today may be caused by salty flowing water.”
For whatever reason, they leap to the conclusion that where
there is water, there certainly must be life. While evidence on Earth certainly
supports this belief, “...extreme heat and some synthetic laboratory
environments might be the only sterile conditions on the planet’s surface that
it’s possible to find zero traces of life. New organisms are regularly
discovered that push the boundaries of life as we understand it, although where
that line will ultimately be drawn remains unknown. As Santos says, ‘What does
not exist is more difficult to prove than what does exist.’”
While it is certainly possible – and despite the abundance
of negativity above, I still hope we discover life off of Earth – confirmation
of life off Earth awaits presentable, incontrovertible EVIDENCE. As for the
arrival of that dubious day – I am not holding my breath.
Reference: http://io9.com/beyond-fermi-s-paradox-ii-questioning-the-hart-tiple-1697244447?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow,
http://www.space.com/29041-alien-life-evidence-by-2025-nasa.html,
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140303-last-place-on-earth-without-life
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