U haz ben pwned. Why you should have recognized that this article is bogus:

“Most of the trees on the Ridge [a mountain range in Florida ...]”

Then you could go peruse the “List of Florida’s highest points” on Wikipedia to find that teh highest elevation in that state is 345 ft. above sea level.

So it is pre-published peer reviewed, and they missed IMHO that it lacked some references to previous art. Then you can start to home in on how this could be a larger (“terrible”) failure instead of, perhaps, a variant of an already established and well motivated hypothesis. That would mean some reference to criticism that Yong (and now I) have missed.

The rest of my comment still stands, I believe.

Cosmology is a small part of my astrobiology interest, but it so happens that I need to understand arxiv and inflation (structure formation; anthropic theory) both.

- As this paper is publicized in arxiv, the peer review that will happen after getting ‘license to publish’ is post-publication. It is not an obvious failure of peer review for an outsider.

- I happen to be finishing up Bousso et al paper on how time will end early in an eternal inflation cosmology with a sensible (geometric cutoff based) measure, because Susskind et al work on anthropic theory has astrobiological implications.

And I may easily misunderstand what they are describing. But they claim that there is a 50 % risk that the universe will end within ~ 3.7 billion years (clear astrobiological implications, IMO) and that it is similar to how these measures predict a thermalized observer, not an end of time, in these situations. This seems to be what Sheikh has independently suggested, perhaps not aware of Bousso et al work.

The physics seems to be:

a) There is no global view to be had because of relativity, and the two descriptions (outside and inside observer) are not in contradiction. On the contrary, trying for a global description would constitute “quantum xeroxing” in the sensible measures, which I take it is forbidden. (The “no cloning” theorem perhaps?)

b) Thermalization comes from spacetime being an incomplete emergent phenomena (p17), so future physics may come to a better description (but see a)).

[I'll give the paper where the actual refs are, because I haven't finished it: "Eternal inflation predicts that time will end", Bousso et al, arxiv 2010.]

I assume the paper may be seen terrible outside of this physics view, but even detractors like Tom Banks recently wrote on Cosmic Variance that the mass of publications on the landscape of string theory is on eternal inflation and thus in some measure [sic!] also on its measures.

Coincidentally Bousso et al claims eternal inflation is a straightforward prediction of general relativity motivated by our observations (longlived field theory vacuum with positive vacuum energy: de Sitter vacuum; dark energy and a “conspicuous” lack of evidence for a it not being a cosmological constant). So how this is over all “terrible” instead of a good catch by Yong I don’t see – these things are not exactly rocket science.

Everyone needs a friend like Jupiter, to take asteroids in the face for them.

Actually, it is likely that outer gas giants are foes, not friends:

” “When George Wetherill did his work back in 1994, the computers available to him were much more limited than what we have today,” says Horner, who originally comes from the UK. “The lack of computing power meant that he had to make some fairly big approximations and simplifications. His was a ground-breaking study but at the same time it was one that was limited by what he had available.”

Horner and and Jones decided to run the experiment again but this time with twenty-first century computing power, hooking up tens of computers in parallel at the Open University. Their simulations agreed that Jupiter is a factor in protecting Earth from long period comets, but how would it fare with the new populations of short period comets and near Earth asteroids? Described in a series of papers published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the duo found their answer to be at odds with conventional theory.”

“The simulations showed that the number of asteroid impacts on Earth peaks when there is a planet in Jupiter’s orbit that has a mass one-fifth that of Jupiter’s mass, whereas just over half the peak rate of impacts occur when there is a planet with a mass equal to Jupiter. The impact rate falls off again at the lower extreme, when Jupiter’s mass becomes too low to be able to nudge any asteroids with its gravity.”

“Jupiter’s role seems confused. It definitely sends asteroids and comets our way and, in any given year, more than 90 percent of all objects crossing Earth’s orbit are asteroids, so the protection Jupiter provides us from long period comets, or by eventually removing short period comets, is of lesser importance. Hence Jupiter is not the friend that it has been perceived to be.”

My interest here is the astrobiology implications. Whether impacts are good or bad for abiogenesis or later habitability is one set of questions. But another question is that the atrocious “Rare Earth” hypothesis relies on combining specious factors (here: Jupiter lower impact rates, impacts are bad) in such a way that they have all been shown to be irrelevant or questionable or outright erroneous. This is one of the latter cases.

2) Isn’t “grumpy tech people” redundant?