Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

Strictly speaking, it's a very small percentage of the world's brightest minds. To imply otherwise reflects a stunning amount of hubris.

If we do some very rough back of the envelope calculations :

There are roughly 1.3 million software developers in the U.S, out of a population of ~306m (0.4%).

Extrapolating that against the global population of ~7 billion, we can round up to ~30 million developers worldwide.

If we define "brightest minds" as those holding IQ scores in the 99th percentile (135+), there are 70 million people with genius level intellect.

While I don't have numbers measuring the IQ distribution across developers, I think we can safely assume that no more than 10% (3m) have an IQ in the top 1%.

Therefore, no more than 4.2% of the world's brightest minds are in fact developing software of any kind. The number can be further pared down to reflect the number of "geniuses" working on generating ad-clicks.

2) The original poster who I'm responding to said, "the days of the wristwatch and one-function cell-phone are gone [. . .]," so I'm not sure how one can be simultaneously "trendy" and part of a declining trend (that is, watch-wearing).

3) If you'd read the link, you'd know that I don't use Moleskine notebooks any more because their quality variability appears to have increased over time.

Hipster culture is all about celebrating declining trends as trendy. It's precisely because watch-wearing is a "declining trend" that makes the hipster wear one to stand out. A hardcore hipster would probably sport a pocket watch, but check this out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/28/casio-f-9...

""" If you'd read the link, you'd know that I don't use Moleskine notebooks any more because their quality variability appears to have increased over time."""

Spoken like a true hipster. As if a non-hipster cares to measure the "quality variability of his notebooks".

Now, you might be totally ignorant of the hipster culture, I'll give you that.

But the prevalence of things like Moleskine notebooks are precisely because of that demographic. Check: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2009/02/24/122-moleskine-not...

For a realistic calculation you would definitely have to take access to education and enough wealth to pursue some field of study into account. That certainly falls under the definition of "brightest minds" by any fair definition since IQ on it's own isn't very meaningful. I would argue that you would also want to take motivation into account as well as the opportunity/temperment to work in an organized fashion with a good team if you wanted good numbers but I never mentioned that.

Still, I don't really take issue with your ballpark numbers. Let's just assume that's close for the sake of argument.

I could have been more clear and less flippant I suppose but I certainly didn't mean "a majority", I think 5% is a large percentage.

So pedantry aside, the idea is to consider the enormous waste of talent going on at places like google, facebook, yahoo and the majority of internet or mobile app startups. Very little of that effort will have any actual long term impact (other than the relatively small team at google working on search).

Not really: I'm guessing. Or in more erudite terms, I'm conjecturing.

You seem to be saying that science is what is all wrapped up and solid and that anything else is "science fiction". That's a bit rigid! Also that view would keep us from ever discussing the unknown before it becomes known, and science is a long march through millions of small and dozens of huge cases of the unknown becoming known.

Indeed, if read Einstein's special relativity paper, it reads like conjecture or guessing. That is, when he wrote the paper it was not at all clear that the Lorentz transformation had any physical reality. That paper became accepted as the real physics only later.

There's no solid proof that we can't go faster than light (FTL), and I have much more than enough math and plenty of science to have seen the arguments.

Sure, for any particle with ordinary mass as we know it, as it goes faster through space and approaches light speed, its mass increases and at the speed of light would be infinitely large. Right. So, for that case, FTL would be impossible.

But we don't really know the deeper mechanism for this mass increase. Thus we are like someone in the 18th century saying that travel faster than 60 MPH would be impossible because no horse could move its legs fast enough. That is, once we understand the deeper mechanism that establishes the speed of light speed limit, maybe we could find a way around the mechanism and the limit. The mechanism seems likely connected with the Higgs field, and we don't understand that very well yet.

E.g., we know so little about dark matter we can't be very sure it can't go faster than the speed of light.

For dark energy, we are assuming conservation of energy much as we understand it, estimating the energy of dark energy, assuming that E = mc^2 also applies there, assuming that how matter and energy curve space in general relativity continues to apply, and then concluding the huge mass of dark energy. That's a lot of assumptions from extrapolations. We're assuming that what we see for ordinary matter in accelerators applies to dark energy; that's a GUESS.

So, in science we need to be able to talk about possibilities not yet established. Such "talk" is not the best science, but it's also not "science fiction".