About halfway through the program, (which I would not class as a documentary, more a discussion of various theories), they made a logical jump that annoyed me.
The basic claim was that if the universe was infinite, there must be an infinite amount of atoms, and given the amount of permutations that infinity allows, that would lead to duplicates of everything we know.
The justification for why the universe was infinite seemed to be based on the basic logic of "what happens at the edge then?", fair enough.
Duplicate observable universes are only valid if you can be sure that the infinite universe is filled with things all the way out, and I saw no evidence whatsoever that seemed to back this up, nor any evidence of the size of the gap between observable universes. Even despite this, the scientist seemed to come up with a distance in meters to his next duplicate.
Sure, if the emptiness of space is filled with repeating neighbouring observable universes, and these continue forever, then, yes I'm happy that the whole program and all of it's conclusions are valid. But they did not substantiate that claim, so it just left me annoyed.
I think that our universe consists of our observable universe, probably a load of non observable things, and beyond all that, just infinite nothingness, nothing worth pointing a telescope at, forever. Nothing in the program gave any evidence to disprove this view, so I'm sticking to it.
The thing that really annoys me is that this discussion of theories will be misunderstood by many, and regurgitated as "scientists have now proved that extraterrestrials exist".
The people really interested in this type of program aren't interested in sensationalism. Tell us the facts as facts, tell us the theories as theories, don't try to spoon feed unfounded conclusions as that is bad science.
Rant over.
The basic claim was that if the universe was infinite, there must be an infinite amount of atoms, and given the amount of permutations that infinity allows, that would lead to duplicates of everything we know.
The justification for why the universe was infinite seemed to be based on the basic logic of "what happens at the edge then?", fair enough.
Duplicate observable universes are only valid if you can be sure that the infinite universe is filled with things all the way out, and I saw no evidence whatsoever that seemed to back this up, nor any evidence of the size of the gap between observable universes. Even despite this, the scientist seemed to come up with a distance in meters to his next duplicate.
Sure, if the emptiness of space is filled with repeating neighbouring observable universes, and these continue forever, then, yes I'm happy that the whole program and all of it's conclusions are valid. But they did not substantiate that claim, so it just left me annoyed.
I think that our universe consists of our observable universe, probably a load of non observable things, and beyond all that, just infinite nothingness, nothing worth pointing a telescope at, forever. Nothing in the program gave any evidence to disprove this view, so I'm sticking to it.
The thing that really annoys me is that this discussion of theories will be misunderstood by many, and regurgitated as "scientists have now proved that extraterrestrials exist".
The people really interested in this type of program aren't interested in sensationalism. Tell us the facts as facts, tell us the theories as theories, don't try to spoon feed unfounded conclusions as that is bad science.
Rant over.
