9 year old discusses the meaning of life and the universe

winston53660 said:

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Very cute!!!! And reminds me of this:

Very precocious kid, but he is over-complicating it, I think he is old enough to learn that the answer is simply 42

marduc said:

Very precocious kid, but he is over-complicating it, I think he is old enough to learn that the answer is simply 42

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Where are the Magratheans when you need them?

It would have been so much cooler if while talking about humans as ants he had started stomping on them.

Wow, that was ingenious. Clever little kiddies.

Perhaps another Stephan Hawkins. Unusually well thought out regardless of his positions and his positions were very rational. I would like to meet his parents as they have a very specail child on their hands.

To address a few points....
1. We aren't simply on a planet within a giant galaxy. We are on a planet within a galaxy within a Universe encompassing hundreds of billions of other galaxies.
2. The likelihood of extraterrestrial life that has reached sentience is very debatable, and I see no reason to suspect that technology will ever allow us to contact them.
3.He discussed that every human being has a choice, and that we must simply overcome obstacles of varying difficulty to reach our goals. Utter nonsense on that, our innate intelligence determines our problem solving abilities and we have relatively little ability to raise our innate intelligence by anything more than marginal increases. Some are genetically predisposed to be short/prone to obesity/diabetes/heart conditions/etc, that prevent them from ever becoming accomplished in sports.
4. He believed in destiny. A determinate Universe that incorporated destiny would predetermine our existences, and therefore remove any possible ability for a human being to chose what to do with their lives. This contradicts his other points on subjective purpose as well as human beings having choices.
5. Subjective purpose, this offers purpose only in the perspective of the individual who constructed their own subjective purpose, and has nothing to do with objective reality. We cannot "make our own purpose", we can only believe that we have made our own purpose.

My pessimistic criticisms aside, this young lad is certainly wise beyond his years. I can only hope that the future of humanity rests on children who are intelligent enough to salvage the train-wreck of a world we have left for them to inherit.