3 December 2020 Paul Davies To expect alien technology to be just a few decades ahead of ours is too incredible to be taken seriously.
3 December 2020 Paul Davies In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.
3 December 2020 Paul Davies Perhaps the best motivation for going to Mars is political. It is obvious that no single nation currently has either the will or the resources to do it alone, but a consortium of nations and space agencies could achieve it within 20 years.
3 December 2020 Paul Davies For me, science is already fantastical enough. Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance.
3 December 2020 Paul Davies Is there anything science should not try to explain? Science is knowledge and knowledge is power – power to do good or evil. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
3 December 2020 Paul Davies Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term ‘doubting Thomas’ well illustrates the difference.
3 December 2020 Paul Davies Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light.
3 December 2020 Paul Davies We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws.
