Quote:
Originally Posted by astroron
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Have you or any of the detractors of Brian Cox picked up any obvious faults in his presentations 
BTW I have never read a Biology text book,I am not that clever to understand it all,
So when I get people like Brian Cox and Carl Sagen explaining it in layman's terms I can get some sort of understanding. |
Hi Ron,
"Bio stuff" is really cool! I particularly enjoy observing the behaviour of single-celled animals in the microscope;
I recall a view of various microscopic "wrigglies" which had been extracted from a termite gut;
the vista was like a secret and hidden and very complex world; the observed level of complexity was in fact reminiscent of what I might see in a cluster of galaxies.
Incidentally, the "wrigglies" (tragically!!) died within a few minutes, as the environment in which they normally live has no oxygen, and these little creatures were actually poisoned and killed by the oxygen in the air of the lab!
Actually, what did annoy me about Cox's presentation in respect of the question of the existence of life elsewhere in the universe is; that he gives the impression that it is necessarily very likely, or even nearly certain, that there are other biospheres out there somewhere in space.
It is not intellectually reputable to give the impression of certainty about an issue about which the smartest and most knowledgable people are still in strong disagreement.
Given the uncertainties, it is still within the realm of scientific possibility that life is relatively common in the universe. However it is still within the realm of scientific possibility that life is extremely rare in the universe.
The point of asking the question "is there life out there?" is to make people think and to make people learn. It does the enormous complexities of this issue a disservice to come down on the side of "life is everywhere in the universe" without giving the opposite point of view; that a lot of reputable scientists believe that life in the universe will be exceedingly uncommon.
Leading a "biologically uninitiated audience" to the view that it is very certain that the universe is teeming with life is not presenting science. It is expressing a personal opinion (whether well informed or otherwise) which is masquerading as "science knows this for sure"
cheers,
Robert
P.S.
Given that there is no hard evidence that life exists outside of the
Earth, one has to ask "why the big push by various scientists to give the impression that it is going to be relatively easy to find it?"