Here you go – well worth a watch. Hat tip to Mr. Tudor for this.
Remember this the next time someone starts talking about the likelihood of alien contact.
The Fermi Paradox Made Simple and Cool
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Thank you Mr. Tudor and Dr. Heiser for posting this awesome video!
1. Multicellularity is hard.
2. Life out of water is hard.
3. Intelligent life is hard.
4. Fossil fuel bases are hard.
5. Innovation is hard.
Agreed.
Seems like scientists and philosophers of late (starting back with Carl Sagan) somehow have gotten this idea in their head that life should be present all over the universe, the milky way galaxy included. But, given how difficult it is for life to start and then, more importantly, persist, I have my doubts.
Just look at all the downright miracles that had to happen in our own Goldilocks world/solar system in order to get life to happen on earth. If we didn’t have a Jupiter in our solar system, we wouldn’t be here (for, Jupiter sucks in debris and comets all the time, especially important in the distant past when life was first forming). If a big planet-sized rock didn’t hit the early earth to blow off the thick atmosphere (that would have otherwise choked out life), infuse the earth’s crust with radioactive metals and create the moon – we wouldn’t be here. We have a sun just the right size and age to last long enough and remain stable enough to allow intelligent life to evolve over billions of years. We have a magnetic field (created in part, per my understanding, by that early earth collision with a small planet that beefed up the iron core of the earth) that protects us against cosmic and solar radiation that would otherwise destroy the precious DNA that perpetuates life… And the list goes on and on.
If all of that perfect timing and coincidence working together to our advantage doesn’t constitute a miracle…I don’t know what does.
I just don’t think there is any chance that life of any significance has survived out there given everything cited above that was required to get us here, just via natural processes alone. Even the natural processes that I have cited above have required some degree of Divine Intervention (I think) in order to time things out correctly and see to it that life forms and persists. Of course, God could have done anything He wanted and if He created other life out there via a similar process – then so be it. BUT, if you are going to appeal to science exclusively in support of the idea that life has to be present out there somewhere (especially intelligent life that would have necessarily taken time to evolve and therefore been exposed to a myriad of certain life-ending catastrophes), I think that is misguided. I think a true scientific understanding of what it takes to create intelligent life would support the idea that we sentient beings here on Earth are probably all that there is in the Universe. Thus, our existence still had to have been orchestrated by the Creative Word of God, even if Evolution and the orchestrated processes of nature were the means to that end.
You’ve summarized (the science part) why there is a small contingent of scientists of the “rare earth” opinion.
That video is absolutely right, it is really hard to see Extraterrestrial Biological Entities as being out there, and here; When, you absolutely IGNORE any evidence to the contrary. It’s like closing your eyes and saying your invisible because you can’t see yourself in the mirror.
Egad, the arrogance behind the presumptions of that hypothesis are astounding. Say we accept all evidence that EBEs are already here is hogwash.
That still leaves our physics saying FTL {Faster Than Light} travel IS possible given ADVANCED technology. Why assume they are running around the Milky Way in rocket ships? Why assume that ‘we’ will continue to use rocket ships to get to other starsystems? We already have ion engines, we want to advance the technolkogy some first but it is there.
Moreover, an FTL systems such as ‘wormholes’ would allow us to travel to a distant galaxy in the blink of an eye. Thus, since wormholes have a lot more evidence supporting them than this hypothesis.?. Saying anything outside our intergalacitic local group is beyond reach, is flat out false. The technology to do so fails us at this time, yet that fails to mean it is beyond our ability to invent.
That idea sound more like the saying “If God meant us to fly, He would have given us wings.” Again false because arrogantly dismisses they idea that the Goddess gave us brains to invent wings.
Now putting the subject that they ARE on Terra back on the table.
Project Blue Book’s sole mission was to dismiss, demonize, discredit, et cetera all Kryptid reports and their supporters. They failed, there were a single digit percentile of cases even they were stumped by.
Crop Circles, yes yes pelicanists love to point out 94% of all crop circles are likely man made hoaxes. Again with the abject arrogance though, because of willfully ignoring the 6% {or whatever the number is really} that defy conventional explaination. These are the ones that have radiation signatures, magnetic disturbances, and the crops are ‘bent’ over instead of ‘broken’ when humans do it.
The Trilithon at Baalbek, Nazca, Sacsayhuamán, Puma Punku, Pyramid of Giza. Mountains sheered in half horizontally in a straight line, massive stone blocks fit together with greater precision than we are capable of, the absolute lack of mortar.
We convict people of murder on circumstantial evidence. With all this combined, I am positive an unbias jury would say there are likelt many different types of entities we fail to even fully comprehend.
And this hy[pthesis that wishes it was a grown up theory, basically sets out a table at a beach for dinner. Everything is prepared and the host is patiently waiting for the guest to arrive. The guest being EBEs. The night passes and the host assumes that since EBEs failed to show up, that they fail to exist anywhere.
I believe that is patiently insane. The creator of this hypothesis sounds more like a pelicanist than an actual scientist, journalist, or investigator. That is someone such as Hector Quintanillla whom sole purpose willfully ignore facts and dismiss any hint of the possibility of EBE involvement.
Mr. Heiser suggest we remember this the next time someone want to make money by revealing something in Mexico City? I say we would be better off simply remembering the Scientific Method and seek multiple verification of evidence.
Marcello Truzzi: “…extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence…”
Mike – Thanks for posting this well made video.
I agree with its rationale.
In response to its content, I believe ET proponents might simply say, “Listen, they ARE here…UFOs, abductions, and cover-ups etc…so the video’s rationale is flawed. The evidence is obvious with the inability to explain the inexplainable aspects of a real but typically ignored phenomena”.
I would submit there is indeed a “real” phenomena that defies current explanation. Instead of an ET explanation, however, one might consider “intelligent evil” playing its hand in these affairs. Of course, ET’ers are quick to dismiss this idea because it requires belief in a Judeo-Christian worldview.
I might also add there are very few exobiologists and other scientists who agree that alien life forms, if they do really exist, “evolve” uniformly into stereotypical humanoid form as currently reported. This is true even of those scientists who advocate extraterrestrial life.
What a load of crap!
Fermi’s paradox is well known in “ET life” circles, and no one says it’s crap. The questions and the conundra are real.
Thanks for posting this, Mike! The one aspect of all this probability that is consistently ignored and/or downplayed is the conundrum of evolution. As a physician in psychiatric practice, I am more and more awed by the ridiculous complexity of life, especially our brains. New revelations posit that all the so-called “junk” DNA, actually contains regulatory sequences that manage the transcription and decision-making of the DNA itself. That is yet another layer of complexity that requires careful 3D astrochemical design. The regulatory segments puzzled researchers for years, trying to understand why they were often thousands or millions of base pairs separated from their targets. That is, until they were finally able to properly fold the DNA and find that the sequences were spaced such that the regulators ARE proximal to the targets…in 3D space! That is quite a trick, because we would not be able to make that placement without serious supercomputer time to predict where the strands will fold.
And this added complexity is not really accounted in the Fermi Paradox. The whole evolutionary puzzle is treated as simply a fairly common event. That is mathematical baloney! Considering that if evolution really happens (which I reject, BTW), the likelihood of a successful evolutionary journey is really extraordinarily unlikely.
There is life out there…it’s just that it is not found in our space-time, and you have to be an elohim to hang out there!