Re: Why Americans believe in Flying Saucers and why most scientists do not?

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Article #14989

#14989

From: mARK bLOORE
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 00:00

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In article <36CC926B.3283@spammers.of.the.world.unite.etc>,
nospam@someplace.somewhere.somehow wrote:

>an age of the world that is old
>enough to have gone through lots of evolution and arrived at the point
>where a technological civilisation has appeared.

it is a common fallacy to think of evolution as having a direction, and
thus of being able to 'arrive at a point'.  evolution is more of a
diffusion process through the set of accessible organisms, with any
given path as likely to go 'forward' as 'backward' (whatever those mean)
at any given time.  what fraction of those accessible organisms are
capable of technology, and how far they are from the starting point,
is not at all clear.  neither is the rate of diffusion.

thus, even given a high rate of appearance of life in the universe,
and lots of time, technology could still be extremly rare.

-- 
mARK bLOORE (mark@pobox.SPAMSBANE.com)
             remove the .SPAMSBANE from my address when replying

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From: email@domain.com (mARK bLOORE)
Subject: Re: Why Americans believe in Flying Saucers and why most scientists do not?
Date: 1999/02/18
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