Post #4049121

2026-07-23 23:40 UTC

Hence the right-wing popularizers of #science and #technology have been allowed to define what #space is to the popular imagination. They want it to be a landscape of corporate conquest and so there's a lot of specious speculation especially from British authorities such as Dick Dawkins--for U.S. media culture grants Great Britain with superior intellectual authority--which the science journalists print as though it weren't pure speculation. Possibly nobody at @arstechnica@mastodon.social and @popsci@universeodon.com etc. has the capacity to double-check what these purported authorities say, so they just let nonsense get through. Dick Dawkins hasn't talked like a scientist in decades, and I daresay from what little I remember of his writing that he was NEVER any fucking good at it. "Mediocre" is almost too nice a word for Dick Dawkins. (cont'd)

Replies (1)

@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-23 23:44

There's a dismal sort of "anthropic" rationale for dismissing the idea that there's life anywhere else in #space other than Earth (if this IS Earth =) which goes something like this: very slight changes in such physical properties as the mass of the Sun or the range of chemical compositions found in the Solar System MAY, according to #software simulations which might very well be written by #programmers who can copy equations into software without the faintest idea of what they actually mean, have led to an alternate Earth devoid of life. Therefore, life exists nowhere but here. We're the lucky ones. If life exists elsewhere, so the rationale goes, it's got to have basically the same parameters as ours and here's where Dick Dawkins got really cute one day--he said that it's obvious the forms of Earth's biological evolution are optimal. (cont'd)

Open ##4049191