Stephen Hawking seems rather daft to me…

I’m beginning to wonder why, when he isn’t talking about his extremely specialized field, people think he Knows Something.

In the past couple of years he has come out with two public pronouncements, both of which struck me as somewhere between utterly crazy or, like today, just… weird.

The one a couple of years ago was about our urgent need to colonize Mars because earth wouldn’t last–a statement something like saying the population of Seattle needs to all move to Antarctica. It was just loopy. Now I’m all for exploring Mars. It would be cool. But the notion of setting up a functional and independent human civilizaation there is… well, nuts. It would be far easier to found New Seattle at the South Pole (you don’t have to import your own atmosphere for one, and the temperatures and likelihood of agriculture are similar. Plus, you can airdrop supplies in hours instead of months.

Now, the guy is warning us away from trying to contact ET with the bizarre claim that it’s “a little too risky“. I can think of a lot of terms to describe SETI: “fruitless”, “a waste of time”, “faith-based initiative” and so forth. But “risky” is not the word I would choose. All SETI has done is make more acute Fermi’s question: “Where is everybody?” I have lots of things to worry about. The War of the Worlds is not among them.

What cracks me up is that, had the Pope said what Hawking did, the media would be screaming about the Catholic War on Science or ridiculing Benedict as a medieval boob terrified that ET was going to dislodge us from our Most-Favored Species status in the eyes of the Almighty. But since it’s Hawking saying these silly things, the press sits around and pulls its chin at the wisdom of this great Arch-Priest of Science.

The modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority; but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with “they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say. – G.K. Chesterton

Post-modern culture still has a lot of lingering faith in the Enlightenment Project floating around in it. Big Name Scientists still get treated as Priestly figures capable of mediating All Truth to us on whatever subject they choose to hold forth on, rather than as specialized technicians who know a lot about a very narrow spectrum and, on the rest of life, are as prone to ignorance, stupidity, and sheer daftness as the rest of us. You’d think Richard Dawkins would have taught us better, but lots of people still believe that specialized knowledge of wasps confers upon Arch-Priests of Science the knowledge of the deepest truths of existence.

Still, in honor of the “risks” SETI has been taking without any results whatsoever for 50 years, I give you:

I especially appreciate Dr. Pierce Brosnan, holding forth in that “Scientists Know Everything” way at the beginning.