Quote:
Originally Posted by Daldolma
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Do you mean me? I don't have an expert opinion, I'm not a fucking expert. Stephen Hawking is. I'm just a guy on P99's RnF boards capable of respecting a belief that intelligent extraterrestrial life does exist, as well as a belief that intelligent extraterrestrial life doesn't exist. I refuse to consider either belief ludicrous.
If you want my non-expert, guy on elf emulator forum opinion, I believe Earth isn't extraordinarily atypical. I don't believe life is so extraordinarily rare that Earth is the only place in the entire universe where it has developed into what we would consider 'intelligent life' in over 13 billion years and throughout 100 billion galaxies. I don't think the fact that we haven't tripped across extraterrestrial life within 50 years of first being able to exit our own atmosphere means much of anything at all. There are potentially sextillions of habitable planets. The universe is 13 billion years old. The sheer enormity of those numbers would suggest that Earth would have to be extraordinarily atypical to be the only planet that harbored life for long enough to produce intelligent life, and I see no reason to believe that.
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You're right, Stephen Hawking is an expert. He's an expert on theoretical physics.
He also played poker with Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, so he probably knows more than anyone about Klingons and Borg and stuff.