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Narrow mindedness

dannycheveaux1

dannycheveaux1

Devoted Cultist
Joined
Apr 30, 2003
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214
Watching an episode of Jane Goldman Investigates (I realise it is quite a few years old now) that I hadn't seen before, I was reminded of how narrow minded scientists can be. It was the Aliens episode and over all it was pretty balanced. Jane visits Prof Ian Morrison at Jodrell Bank for a scientific view of the chances of there being intelligent life elsewhere.
His answer was that years ago (when science was naive, apparently) it was thought there could be thousands of planets in our galaxy supporting intelligent life. The thinking now, he said, was that science thinks we could be the only ones (!) but if we were really optimistic there could be 10 to 100 in the Milky Way.
It was astonishing to hear these kind of arbitrary remarks. I've heard this kind of thing before from the scientific establishment "experts" although of course they don't speak for the entire scientific community, but if this narrow minded "we're so unique and special" kind of thinking came from a religious community I could understand it!
 
dannycheveaux1 said:
Watching an episode of Jane Goldman Investigates (I realise it is quite a few years old now) that I hadn't seen before, I was reminded of how narrow minded scientists can be. It was the Aliens episode and over all it was pretty balanced. Jane visits Prof Ian Morrison at Jodrell Bank for a scientific view of the chances of there being intelligent life elsewhere.
His answer was that years ago (when science was naive, apparently) it was thought there could be thousands of planets in our galaxy supporting intelligent life. The thinking now, he said, was that science thinks we could be the only ones (!) but if we were really optimistic there could be 10 to 100 in the Milky Way.
It was astonishing to hear these kind of arbitrary remarks. I've heard this kind of thing before from the scientific establishment "experts" although of course they don't speak for the entire scientific community, but if this narrow minded "we're so unique and special" kind of thinking came from a religious community I could understand it!
Click to expand...
He was probably only reflecting the mainstream scientific thinking at the time. Astronomers and exobio types do all sorts of calculations and extrapolations, based on the available evidence. This is one of those areas of, so far, speculative science that is in a constant state of flux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_life

Eburacum will be along in a minute. ;)
 
Theory validated by experiment isn't it?
Or extrapolating from known facts to suggest theories which cannot be tested but are consistent with general principles.
I thought even setting the lowest values in the Drake Equation gave the result that there are millions of planets with life.
This conflicts with the Horizon doc I saw on Infinity,given the astronomical odds(but still finite) of atoms arranging themselves into another me, infinity MUST contain another me.
Weird but the maths support it. :?
 
smokehead said:
This conflicts with the Horizon doc I saw on Infinity,given the astronomical odds(but still finite) of atoms arranging themselves into another me, infinity MUST contain another me.
Weird but the maths support it. :?
Click to expand...

Not quite.

Following that logic, there must be infinite other yous.
 
That also must be true,in which case I can only apologise. :oops:
This is essentially the infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters writing Hamlet probability conundrum.
Iirc Richard Dawkins tackled this in one of his books,the Blind Watchmaker I think, and he wrote that such an occurence could happen, but the time required was longer than the actual age of the universe. :shock:
Science is weird.
 
I know that there are at least two other me`s, one in oligarchs one in the hairy bikers.
 
The sooner we make a start the sooner we'll find one.
 
eburacum said:
that's about 10,000,000,000,000 light years, by the way...
Click to expand...
To find a duplicate of me specifically, but then there are 7,000,000,000 humans. Surely that makes a duplicate of a human closer?
 
You have to be careful about all this.

I remember talking to a senior mathematician who reckoned that, mathematically, there had to be a minimum of 9 dimensions, and we only know three.

We essentially are in the position of someone in a closed prison cell floating in a void and we think that science can tell us everything. Until some dramatic breakthrough occurs it can only tell us about what is inside the box.

Why do we know there is something outside the box? We don't for certain, except that it is not something the human mind can conceive - that you can have something that has no 'outside'.

Science tells us we started as a singularity that expanded. The singularity cannot have come out of nothing, it was not made of nothing, and its state changed so that it expanded. This implies it was acted on by outside forces.

So, while we may have a scientific method that tells us a lot about our planet and something about the known universe, there is no reason to suppose that that what is discovered applies elsewhere, or even that the scientific method works at all outside of this continuum. Even for our known universe, the science based explanation is far from complete - and we don't know how far.

When scientists overlook this, then they are in danger of elevating what is a very useful method of validating philosophical assertions about the physically apparent universe into a religion.
 
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