Crichton has already written about the nebulous, non-scientific values ascribe the the variables in the Drake Equation.
Despite not having a whit more evidence, a group of scientists who aren’t going to be listened-to seriously, have decided tha the chance of a nearby extraterrestrial civilization is much higher than most think.
GET THE UNSUBSTANTIATED STORY.
Conspiracy-oriented minds might wonder if this the beginning of the "disclosure" that precedes The Facade.
The UFO community will certainly wonder about that.
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
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Jimmy,
Out of curiosity, what do you think about the whole UFO phenomenon, including reports of alien abductions, crop circles, etc.? It seems to me that there are several possible explanations:
(1) Delusions
(2) Hoaxes
(3) Demonic activity
(4) Some combination of the above
(5) Genuine extra-terrestrial activity
My own opinion is that #4 is probably the most likely explanation. I would be interested to hear your thoughts if you have time to comment.
Paul
The belief that there must be extraterrestrial civilizations may be unscientific because of lack of evidence, but I don’t think you can say the Drake equation is unscientific. Crichton’s complaints were that people were using the word “science” to justify beliefs that could not be confirmed. But if you cannot test the hypothesis, then it’s not actually science. Crichton then said that the Drake equation was the same case, but he’s wrong. The hypothesis of extra-terrestrial civilizations can be confirmed by contact. SETI is the means to test the hypothesis. One must distinguish between the non-scientific theories scam-artists use to to make claims about extra-terrestrial intelligence and the scientific utility of the Drake equation itself.
Chris,
I don’t remember precisely what Crichton did or didn’t say, but I don’t think he was saying you can’t investigate ET life, or that there’s anything wrong with SETI. The problem with applications of the Drake equation regarding ET life is not that the question can’t be tested, but that there is no way to plug meaningful numbers into the Drake equation, because we have no meaningful knowledge of the relevant variables.
For example, we don’t begin to have any meaningful notion of what range of conditions could be compatible with any form of life whatsoever, because we have meaningful way to say what kinds of life beyond life as we know it are possible.
We have no idea whatsoever how common such conditions might be in the universe, or even how common conditions are that could support life as we know it.
And we especially don’t have the slightest notion how likely or unlikely it would be, given conditions favorable to life, for life to actually evolve. Maybe you could have fifty billion fertile planets totally primed to support any sort of life imaginable, but life just doesn’t like to evolve. Or maybe life readily evolves given any decent sort of chance. We have no clue.
So the only way to use the Drake equation is to fill in the blanks with a bunch of guesses — not informed guesses, not guestimations, but pure speculation and prejudice. Garbage in, garbage out. It’s got nothing to do with SETI, which is a reasonable way to approach the question of ET life. The only way we will ever be in a position to make meaningful statements about life on ET planets is to look and listen real hard. If we find something, we’ve found it; if we don’t, we keep looking.
Unfortunately, while SETI could potentially verify the existence of ET life, it seems unlikely that it could ever falsify it. In testing jargon, SETI’s value as a test for ET life potentially offers some sensitivity, but no meaningful degree of specificity.
God could certainly create life anywhere He wanted to. There are several locations in the solar system where Terran microbial life could thrive.
OTOH, SETI appears to be a religious quest taking taxpayer money.
Crop circles – hoaxers or corn borer.
Alien abductions – psychosis or the demonic
UFO sightings – I once had it second-hand that “you’d be -proud, very proud-” if we know what USAF black projects had achieved. On the edges of aerospace technology, there are some very interesting things, from plasma-field stealth on Sukhoi fighters, to triangular zepplins that could breach the cold of space, and still drop off a specops team in Damascus or Tehran.
Having heard one too many times that just on probability there are certainly “billions and billions” of habitable worlds out there, I have come to wonder if the origins of life even on our own planet were not far more tenuous and improbable than we might think. Given that the spontaneous origin of the simplest living organism could come about by chance (however unlikely that really is), that organism then has to survive changing environmental conditions, feed and reproduce with enough success to increase it’s numbers dramatically with each generation. Over the long haul I think the numbers would be really bleak. Could life just be a lot trickier than we figured? As terra-centric as this may sound, could Earth truly be the gem of the Milky Way?
See, here’s the thing: WE JUST DON’T KNOW.
So called UFO activity and ET ineractions are Satanic. Many Early Church Fathers and mystics encountered similiar phenomena.