Posted on 04/25/2019 6:22:53 AM PDT by Heartlander
Liar out of the gate.
NO ONE who is a SERIOUS science fiction reader calls it “sci-fi.” That is considered an insult to the genre.
IOW: Cool story, bro.
Second, when faced with choosing between just one Unseen Mind or an infinite number of unseen universes, remember Ockham’s razor.
I’m a sci-fi fan and that’s what I call it.
He spelled Occam wrong. :)
I spelled add hock wrong once. Whoops. I did it again. :D
...belongs in the religion forum.
The author is exactly right. The theory of the multiverse was SPECIFICALLY created because science cannot not explain how a life sustaining universe can happen by mere chance. They MUST postulate that out of an infinite number of universes randomly occurring that ONE will be like ours. This way they don’t have to deal with REAL science and look toward a creator.
Even using the most optimistic extreme upper limits for the probabilities of blind and mindless nature coding the digital information for thousands of functional proteins necessary for an operating cell, including the required molecular machines, those probabilities are so infinitesimally small that if Eugene Koonin thought we needed an infinite number of universes to explain the origin of RNA translation, that is nothing compared to getting an entire cell up and running. So what possible explanations do we have?
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“....NO ONE who is a SERIOUS science fiction reader calls it “sci-fi.” ....”
Don’t agree with this! I’ve read science fiction since I could read roughly 1960. I have seen it as short hand for science fiction since then. I am not offended by it, don’t know anyone who is ! Why would anyone be?
I am tired of the “Age of “I-Am-Offended-by-Everything!” it makes me want the “Age of Aquarius” back! It wasn’t as pompous & tedious and at least the chicks were hot!
I am not offended by anything. I am stating this label has been despised by science fiction fans going back to the Campbell era.
You should know this, as well as who Campbell was.
Sci-fi is science fiction for short. What’s insulting about it?
I know who Campbell was & have read many of his works. (Personal favorite - “The Mightiest Machine” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mightiest_Machine)
I never ran across that statement! Maybe it just passed me by because its silly!
I know who Campbell was, and read science fiction starting in the fifties. Never was I or anyone I knew ever offended by the term sci-fi.
I’ve been reading sci-fi since the mid-70s (hard sci-fi, with an actual chance of happening, not the dragons and wizards crap), and I don’t get offended by the term.
Who cares what another person calls it - just enjoy this most interesting of genres, one that has inspired real scientific advances because of how it has inspired so many bright, young kids to go into the sciences.
A phrase from a film that was decidedly not sci-fi comes to mind: “Lighten up, Francis.”
“for many people the distinction between doing science, and creative storytelling, has become blurred.”
Unfortunately true.
But please feel free to go with the multiverse if that is all you can grasp. Infinity and beyond.
“Fantastically improbable events would be commonplace in a multiverse containing a near-infinite number of possibilities.”
Actually, they would still be just as improbable and just as rare, but with infinite iterations, you can at least argue they would inevitably exist.
Thanks. I’m not smart enough to discuss multi-verses.
Physics goes, hopefully, where the math and observations lead it. I’d trust a physicist over a pope, but that’s just me.
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