Free Republic

If six billion humans died, the world would be a better place. That's the message a professor from the University of Texas is proclaiming. An article in The Gazette-Enterprise details Professor Eric Pianka's doomsday beliefs. "In his estimation, 'We've grown fat, apathetic and miserable,' all the while leaving the planet parched. The solution? A 90 percent reduction." Can anyone say "Thomas Malthus wannabe" (high school flashback: Malthus was the guy who said the earth's population would outgrow its food supply). Pianka tells the Gazette, "[Disease] will control the scourge of humanity. We're looking forward to a huge collapse." The professor...

The year 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of humanity's strangest scientific quest: the use of giant radiotelescope dishes to listen for radio messages from alien beings in space. So far, the search has been a complete bust. The radioastronomers keep listening, but the stars aren't talking to us -- not yet, anyway. Oddly, the failure of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, has been largely ignored by the general public, journalists and Hollywood filmmakers. They continue to be enchanted by (and, in Hollywood's case, to commercially exploit) the hope that intelligent life is sprinkled across the galaxy like...