Bad science
Do I like Michael Crichton as an author? No. I enjoyed The Terminal Man and The Andromeda Strain as a kid (and both hold up fairly well today), but it's been downhill ever since. this speech, however, is quite brilliant. Whether you happen to believe in aliens, nuclear winter, second hand smoke, etc, etc or not, his points are still well taken. It's not that these things are necessarily false, it's that there's no science in them right now. It's fairly crucial reading, and coming from someone I'd long written off as a hack, I'm pleasently surprised at the source.
