The thing a lot of people here seem to still be missing is that "no evidence", coming from scientific authorities, carries an implication that there's no eviden

The thing a lot of people here seem to still be missing is that "no evidence", coming from scientific authorities, carries an implication that there's no evidence. But with science, we don't actually _know_ that to be true unless we look. This is an important distinction because in popular culture, 'no evidence' seems to get a lot more headline space than 'we have an untested hypothesis'. Over the past decade, it feels like the aspect of curiosity and hypothesis have disappeared from science, which has become much more institutionalized, compartmentalized, and formalized. It's 'peer review or gtfo'. It is not literally correct to say there's 'no evidence'. We don't know! There could be! 'No evidence _yet_' at the absolute minimum.