Baart said most experts were "generally pessimistic" about finding extraterrestrial intelligence.
"I'm not optimistic. We might be alone in the universe," Baart said.
And even worse, he said, "We are in imminent danger of extinction."
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6 comments:
I am so sick of the curmudgeony pessimism that has become popular among scientists in the last few decades.
We've got some ugly problems, but close to excinction? That's silly. There's six billion of us.
The same utter lack of imagination and pessimism causes this guy to think that we're alone in the universe. What a tiny, paranoid world.
I can see lots of reasons to think that intelligent life may be rare, but "alone in the universe"? Utterly absurd. And who are these "experts" Baart talks about? He's a professor of physics and electronics. With all due respect to his academic credentials, how exactly does HE qualify as an "expert" in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - more than say, a constitutional lawyer, or a medical doctor?
W everybody knows we re not alone
We've got some ugly problems, but close to excinction? That's silly. There's six billion of us.
"Imminent" extinction is relative. Although I don't especially care for Baart's cynicism, I think that we could very well be on the verge of a massive die-back. It wouldn't be overnight, nor would it likely kill every last one of us, but we could be effectively wiped out within a frighteningly short amount of time.
That's the main reason I advocate space colonization: without it, we're dead meat, sooner or later.
"professor Eddie Baart" makes a lot of well-worn points about the whole issue. For one thing, I always suspect anyone subscribing to some version of the "Rare Earth" hypothesis has a hidden religious agenda.
For another, I think Clarke had it right in "2001" and Sagan similarly in "Contact" -- any aliens we encounter are likely to be so far ahead of us that they will seem basically godlike to us. And whatever else they might be "into," we can be pretty sure they're not terribly interested in communicating with us using primitive electromagnetic signals. (However, they conceivably might have set up and automated "Encyclopedia Galactica" to "bring us along," so to speak, out of sheer charity (or, more likely, some incomprehensible-to-us motivation).
I'm convinced that this all MAY become clear by the end of the year 2012 C.E., when we MAY witness the End of the World -- and the Beginning of the Universe!
--WMB as Anon
For one thing, I always suspect anyone subscribing to some version of the "Rare Earth" hypothesis has a hidden religious agenda.
Same here.
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