Chances Are, When We Meet

The Strength And Weakness Of Physicists Is That We Believe In What We Can Measure. And If We Can't Measure It, Then We Say It Probably Doesn't Exist. And That Closes Us Off To An Enormous Amount Of Phenomena That We May Not Be Able To Measure Because They Only Happened Once. For Example, The Big Bang. ... That's One Reason Why They Scoffed At Higher Dimensions For So Many Years. Now We Realize That There's No Alternative.

What I Do For Living, Working On Something Called String Theory Which We Think May Answer The Fundamental Question: Are There Other Universes? Can You Go Through A Black Hole? Can You Warp The Fabric Of Space And Time And Meet Your Mother Before You Were Born? These Are All Questions That In Principle String Theory Should Be Able To Answer.

The Most Likely Possibility, Favored By Current Data, Is That The Universe Will Die In Ice, Not Fire. However, Personally I Believe That Trillions Of Years From Now, We (if We Are Still Around) Will Have The Technology To Leave The Universe, Perhaps In An Interdimensional Life Boat, And Move To A Warmer Universe.

A Hundred Years Ago, Auguste Compte, ... A Great Philosopher, Said That Humans Will Never Be Able To Visit The Stars, That We Will Never Know What Stars Are Made Out Of, That That's The One Thing That Science Will Never Ever Understand, Because They're So Far Away. And Then, Just A Few Years Later, Scientists Took Starlight, Ran It Through A Prism, Looked At The Rainbow Coming From The Starlight, And Said: "hydrogen!" Just A Few Years After This Very Rational, Very Reasonable, Very Scientific Prediction Was Made, That We'll Never Know What Stars Are Made Of.

Chances Are, The Aliens Will Not Want To Land On Our Backyard, Or Even The White House Lawn, With Their Flying Saucers. They May Have Tiny, Robotic Self-replicating Probes Which Can Reach Near Light Speed And Can Proliferate Around The Galaxy. So Instead Of The Enterprise And Huge Star Ships, The Aliens Might Actually Send Tiny Probes To Explore The Universe. One Might Land On Our Lawn And We Won't Even Know.