Tweet of the Day, I’d Rather Hear About The Goat edition.

Don’t get me wrong: I laughed.

…But after that I rolled my eyes. “Alien Civilizations May Number In The Trillions, New Study Says.” Yes, I suppose that they could, at that. Or there could be two. Or seven hundred million, six hundred and fifty thousand, nine hundred and seventy fou… no, wait, those guys just Singularitied themselves and got Gray Goo all over their ecosystem. The point here is: WE DO NOT KNOW. WE DO NOT EVEN HAVE ENOUGH DATA TO MAKE AN INFORMED GUESS. We don’t need a study to tell us that.

Moe Lane

PS: I’m tempted to write a story where Bishop Ussher was right completely by accident; God took an off-the-shelf universe and plopped humanity into it. Only He didn’t add any other aliens because He didn’t need any for the exercise – and He was in a hurry anyway. If I did it right, I could probably tick off the entirety of Western Civilization with that one…

8 thoughts on “Tweet of the Day, I’d Rather Hear About The Goat edition.”

  3. We have one poorly understood and incompletely documented example of a planet with intelligent life. What could go wrong extrapolating from that?

    .

    Or to borrow from James Taranto, what would we do without studies?

    1. “what would we do without studies?”
      .
      Someone should conduct a study on that, and on the efficacy of studies.

  5. I remember back in 1997 when somebody on the radio mentioned that that day was, if Ussher was right, the 6000th birthday of Creation, which in some folks’ minds should’ve been the start of the Millennium (God having created in six days, then resting on the seventh, and “thousand years is as a single day…”, etc).
    To the amazement of very few people, at least one assumption in that analysis appears to have been proven faulty.
    Only thing I find potentially offensive in your precis, Moe, is the idea that God is ever in a hurry. 🙂

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