“If we push back boundaries far enough, I’m sure eventually we’ll find something out there,” said Mike Foreman, a mission specialist on the Endeavour.
Unfortunately, Japanese astronaut Takao Doi agrees that “life like us must exist.”
NO. That’s where the whole set of Drake equations behind SETI is like holding pudding in your hands. We simply don’t have enough empirical evidence yet to make anything close to a stab at most the Drake parameters. To quote Wolfgang Pauli, SETI enthusiasts who ramp the Drake numbers up high “aren’t even wrong.”
But Foreman sounds the soul of rationality next to the quasi-mystical Gregory Johnson.
“I personally believe that we are going to find something that we can't explain. There is probably something out there but I’ve never seen it.”
“Believe” would be the right word indeed for this.
Fellow astronaut Dominic Goree trots out a twisted analogy, claiming that Columbus, et al, didn’t know what was awaiting them, either.
Wrong in so many ways. First, Columbus et al were looking for spices, not alien life. Second, especially once Dieu got around the Cape of Good Hope for Portugal in 1487, the Portuguese, at least, knew exactly what was awaiting them. Most Spaniards laughed Columbus out of court for underestimating the size of the world, but Ferdinand and Isabella had to do something.
Oh, and working on a trip to bring Martian soil samples back to Earth? Great idea. Seeing the trip as prep for a manned journey to Mars? Stupid idea.
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