I forget who first said it, From the water's perspective it's a pothole is perfectly shaped to hold it. It exactly contours to the shape of the water, so must have been created for that water.

Now, we know that this is a backwards way to look at things. So why do we look at the universe that way?

I think the Drake equation needs a tweak on the last term 'L', the mean length of time a civilization can communicate. It really needs to be something like the ratio of L over the time period a civilization can arise. If the numerator is 1e5 years and the denominator is 1e9 years. The Drake equation then starts to represent the number of possible civilizations existing in the same time period (a reduction of 10,000X in the example given).

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As I said, keep dreaming and hoping.

People doing simple experiments claiming X, Y, Z of impossible things happens fairly often, and they all fail to be reproducible or conclusive.

Nobel Price for anyone out there showing anything even close to FTL being a thing.

I'm sure there'll be one on the first crew landing on Mars.

I suspect that while we will soon discover that simple, prokaryotic life is common if not abundant, the conditions needed for complex (let alone intelligent) life are quite rare. I have no doubt that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but I’m skeptical about there being any in our own galaxy, let alone close enough to swing by and visit.

EDIT: It’s also worth pointing out that our definitions of “intelligent” and “life” could be (and likely are) extremely narrow and incomplete. In fact I would say that if we did encounter intelligent life, there’s a good chance that at first we might not even recognize it as being alive, let alone intelligent.

The piece implies Hawking and Hertog rethought the relationship between scientific theory and reality along the lines of theories are emergent from the evolving nature of reality.

Yes, I realise that previous sentence is a nebulous string of profound sounding buzzwords. I'm interested to see what H & H have come up with.

Looking forward to the book.

Every time I see Komarov's name, I get angry. Most astronaut deaths can be traced to a bad decision somewhere, either in design or construction, and none of them expected to die in the ways that they did. Even for Challenger, they thought the odds were with them for a safe flight. Komarov's situation was so blatantly based on politics--everyone was afraid of Brezhnev's wrath in case of a delayed launch--that he knew he was going to die, and he preferred that it be him instead of close friend and national/world hero Yuri Gagarin.

Outright ignoring the very real scientific results of the White-Juday Laser Interferometer study. Nice. Yeah, you're real intelligent.

That's cool, I learned something new there!

> “The problem for Hawking was his struggle to understand how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life,” says Hertog, a cosmologist currently based at KU Leuven University in Belgium.

Didn't he "solve" that question by invoking the anthropic principle? As per the original book, if we apply strong anthropic principle, the universe is perfectly hospitable precisely because we are here to observe it, if it was not perfect, there wouldn't be an observer.

Guess I'll have to read the new book when it comes out...

There’s one other one that comes to mind, that being the “Moon Museum”. It’s a ceramic wafer about an inch wide, and is believed to have been hidden in the gold blanketing of Apollo 12’s lander legs.

A couple prominent artists were featured on it including Andy Warhol.

Source

I think even back then dying in space was pretty much always a tragedy. Pretty sure nasa astronauts also attended funerals for cosmonauts who died.

Do you think heavier than air flight is impossible?

In any case your logic is flawed:
X stating incorrectly Y is impossible, does not mean Z is possible, even if Z is though to be impossible.

FTL is just pure fantasy at the moment, sorry to say. Keep dreaming though.

Ah... resorting to insults because you're too closed minded. Got it.

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"said local village idiot" - while all intelligent people before even the pyramids of Egypt knew that "heaver than air flight is doable, because birds do it all the time".

It is assumed that:

1. It is possible to travel for thousands of years in space, which might be impossible, even for machines.

2. It is assumed there is anyone even wants to do it, when there might be no point in doing it.

But I personally think the great filter and rare earth hypothesis are enough. Us being alone in the Milky Way is absolutely possible. Us being alone in the universe is possible, but irrelevant, we will never be able to do any meaningful interaction with any extra-galactic civilizations.

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Evolution requires a population with heredity and selection pressures. I guess I don’t know what Hertog is talking about.

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"Heavier than air flight is impossible..."

You must be confusing science fiction with reality.
There is no FTL device, even theoretically conceived, that does not require magic.

We knew flight was possible, because birds fly.

FTL has never been shown to exist in nature, and our best scientific theories also prohibit them (unless you add magic).

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