Nobel laureate astrophysicist John Mather recounts Stephen Hawking's reaction to NASA's COBE satellite map of cosmic microwave background radiation.
Opinion
Mather: Extraterrestrial life is likely frequent but mostly elementary
“I think the answer is, no, we're not alone, and I think life will occur quite frequently, but it will mostly be rather elementary.”
Opinion
Mather: Unexplained phenomena on Earth are unlikely to be space aliens
“Probably we're not gonna find the neighbors. Similarly, that we're not in danger from the neighbors. So, yeah, maybe we got lots of unexplained things here on planet Earth, but it's not very likely to be space aliens.”
Assertion Supported
James Webb Space Telescope showed early galaxies grew faster than predicted
“We built the web telescope, it did what it was supposed to do, it produced beautiful pictures, and right away we could see that the galaxies grew even faster than we thought. And so even though we had the information from Hubble and all the simulations and cal…”
Assertion Supported
Mather: Small Earth-like exoplanets analyzed so far lack detectable atmospheres
“And so, the technique works, and now we're just now busy analyzing the small stars that have potentially small Earth-like planets, and I can't say that we're really surprised, but so far the little ones do not have atmospheres that we can tell.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Oct 2028
Mather: Habitable Worlds Observatory will directly image Earth-like planets
“And the next one we're going to build is called Habitable Worlds Observatory. And so when we do that, we'll be able to see an image with a little dot next to the other Big dot, and it'll be an Earth-like object around a star like the Sun”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mather: In 100 billion years, most galaxies will recede beyond detection
“If you were to come back in another, say, hundred billion years, most of the galaxies that we know about would have receded from us so far away that we couldn't see them anymore. So the universe will be in the process of appearing to empty itself out, and if y…”