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Comment by nathanmcrae | Hacker News Reader

The preceding sentences explain the model that generates that estimate, including the 200 Myr - 2 Gyr number; that's not a case of hand-waving.

Is your issue with some aspects of the model or with the idea of trying to model this at all?

It's certainly early days for this theory, but it's worth not dismissing out-of-hand.

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My issue is: can this model make testable predictions within our lifetimes? It doesn’t seem that way.

Even models of the far future and the distance past of the universe are held to standards of evidence and testability. Why shouldn’t this one be?

Yeah, that's an important point, but that seems to be an issue with the subject of study rather than this particular theory. At least their model has very concrete and explicit premises that could be used to reject it. Particularly the 'hard steps' model of evolution: I don't know how widely accepted that is (genuinely don't, it may be accepted) and, if it is in time rejected by the scientific community then that would discredit--if not falsify--the theory.

The idea that only testable predictions are valid is... short sighted. Seriously considering extraordinary ideas with as much rigor as possible, with the tools available, is something that has propelled science. If not then ideas about the moon would have been dead in the water.

If anything this kind of "rationalism" only conceals dogmatic ideas about what is or isn't possible..

That's not true. It's a basic tenet of science. Even astronomical theories (for which no experiments are possible) are backed up by observation.

Scientific theories must be testable. It must be possible to prove them wrong with experiments or observation.

Except in many cases, we didn't have the tools or technology to be able to test theories that eventually turned out to match real-world measurements. But the theories existed beforehand anyway and weren't any less science.

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