Example of The Below

NASA: We will find alien life within 20 years

At NASA's Washington headquarters on Monday, a panel of space program scientists announced their estimation that humans will find extraterrestrial life within 20 years, going as far as to say that the estimate is a "conservative" one.

NASA outlined its plan to search for alien life and said it would launch the Transiting Exoplanet Surveying Satellite in 2017. The agency predicts that as many as 100 million worlds in the Milky Way galaxy may be home to alien life.

Why 20 years?  Why not within the next 28 seconds?  Or 22,958 years?  They're as founded in reality as 20 years.   The 100 million worlds are home to "alien life" line is ridiculous, as well.  Not because it might not be absolutely accurate but predicting such a number on a known example of 1 in the billions of planets in the Milky Way which has life on it doesn't allow you to make any kind of speculation. Every single planet outside of or within the Solar System could have life on it, there being no way to know if all life or any other life is like our kind.  Or the Earth could be the only planet in the entire universe with life on it.  That's a pretty wide range of possibilities from which to winnow it down to even 100 million in the entire universe, never mind one galaxy.  To think that scientists are going to find one in the next 20 years based on any kind of expertise is ridiculous.  They would probably come up with as good an estimate from randomly choosing a stream of numbers from a random numbers generator and putting a percent sign after it.

As to the assertion I read that the guys pulling this one out of the astronomical odds being "experts" on this topic, there simply are no "experts" on a topic which has absolutely no verifiable examples to base any expertise on.   You have my permission to declare yourselves experts on skeantisynteyology.  It's a very, very specialized and esoteric study based on a bunch of letters I just typed into my computer with -ology attached to it.  In fact, you don't need my permission, I'm no expert in skeantisynteyology.

This isn't science.  It isn't mathematics.  It certainly isn't news.  It's NASA's famous PR promotion of its funding.   It is, however, apparently enough to get Ken Ham his own PR opportunity which has his name on the online mags and the blog threads.