Contrabang #3

6 Supermassive Questions On The Eve Of The Event Horizon Telescope’s Big Announcement (link)

The major takeaway is that general relativity predicts a perfect sphere, although they might observe something else, and that's okay. I'll write a dedicated post about the black hole photo later this week.

What If It's Just Us? (link)

When it comes to the question of extraterrestrial life, humans optimistically assume the Universe is prolific. After all, there doesn’t appear to be anything particularly special about Earth, and life not only took hold here on our world, but evolved, thrived, became complex and differentiated, and then intelligent and technologically advanced. If the same ingredients are everywhere and the same rules are at play, wouldn’t it be an awful waste of space if we’re alone?

No, it would not be a waste of space at all. The vast cosmos are "worth it" alone just for our wonderment at the night sky. From their perspective, life is just a natural side effect of physical processes innate to the universe. They can't comprehend that in all the enormity of the universe, life may have only arisen once, and they are truly bothered by the possibility.

He lists three big steps that must have occurred for intelligence to exist elsewhere in the universe.

1. Life must have somehow arisen from non-life. That is his materialism showing. We might also suggest that non-life somehow arose from life!
2. Life must have thrived and evolved to become multicellular, complex, and differentiated. There are some compelling counterarguments. The gist is that, to modern scientists analyzing the genetics of various species, similar traits are taken as evidence of evolution, and dissimilar traits are taken as evidence of evolution.
3. Intelligent life must have evolved, with the right traits to also become a technologically advanced civilization. Again, more materialist assumptions. Ethan believes that only a long series of random changes could cause intelligence, so he must consider the probability of that chain of random events occurring. (Too bad for him that the chances are zero.)

What To Do If You Encounter A Visitor From Another Universe (link)

One of the dumbest things you'll ever read. (But you shouldn't.)

Fine-Tuning Really Is A Problem In Physics (link)

The one good thing about Ethan is he doesn't shy away from the difficult contradictions and paradoxes that face modern physics. If only he took a step back for a moment and realized that those questions are profound and provide cause for skepticism, he might stop with his ridiculous cheerleading.

By comparing the observations we make with our theoretical predictions for what those fluctuations should look like in a Universe with varying amounts of curvature, we can determine that the Universe is extremely spatially flat, even today. If we extrapolate back to the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang based on our modern observations, we learn that the initial expansion rate and the initial energy density must be balanced to something like 50 significant digits. [...] This puzzle is known as the flatness problem, as a Universe where energy and the expansion rate balance so perfectly will also be perfectly spatially flat.

This is a big one. Although it may not be intuitive what they mean by a flat universe, understanding it is not necessary to see the improbability of their assumptions. He goes on to describe a flat universe as akin to a boulder in unstable equilibrium. It's so unstable that the universe has to be tuned to 50 digits of precision to remain flat. Interestingly, spacetime would also appear "flat" if it didn't exist at all. So, what is more likely: that the universe is randomly balanced with an infinitesimally small probability, or that spacetime is bullshit? This is another one of those cases of an unfalsifiable theory. If your theory requires universal constants to be randomly tuned to 50 digits of precision, it should be taken as proof that the theory is bunk. But no, they just say they have a "fine-tuning problem." The name drips with hubris and is so indicative of the mindset of the modern scientist. They always assume that they pretty much understand everything already, and the remaining unknowns are just a matter of ironing out the wrinkles.

When we see what appears to be a cosmic coincidence, we owe it to ourselves to examine every possible physical cause of that coincidence, as one of them might lead to the next great breakthrough.

How about examining that the concept of spacetime is nonsense? See, they do this constantly. Always talking about considering all possibilities to explain the absurdities of their theories, while always deliberately ignoring the obvious ones.