When did that happen? He must have written the obit himself! Lying 'til the end, eh!
Let's hope he ends up in his paradise of an Earth orbiting inside the atmosphere of a brown dwarf. Most people would call that 'Hell'!
https://www.holoscience.com/wp/wal-thornhill-jwst-l-type-brown-dwarf-stars-thunderbolts/
"Life may be possible inside the glow of a brown dwarf—far more likely than on a planet orbiting outside a star—since the radiant energy arriving on a planet orbiting inside a glowing sphere is evenly distributed over its entire surface."
This betrays a fundamental ignorance of thermodynamics. Life doesn't just need energy to exist. That doesn't suffice, not by a long shot. Life is an entropy-decreasing process, and so it needs to increase entropy in its environment. And the best way to do that is with energy
gradients. It's basically the same reason that you need both a heat source and a cold sink to run a heat engine. Having a planet surrounded on all sides by heat is actually far worse for life than having light only illuminate part of the planet at once. The energy gradient between the influx of light from the sun (our heat source) and the darkness of night (our cold sink) is what allows life to flourish. Local entropy can decrease because we can still increase global entropy. You can't do that if you're surrounded on all sides by your heat source, with no cold sink available.
I used to teach a thermodynamics class, and one of my favorite test questions was whether or not a chicken egg with a growing chick inside absorbs heat or gives off heat. It's a great question because it doesn't require any calculations, it doesn't require any detailed knowledge of biology, but it does require understanding some fundamental concepts of thermodynamics. It's not a
hard question, but it's easy to screw up if you don't think about it in terms of entropy. A lot of students answer that the egg absorbs heat, because they think of the chicken having to sit on the egg to keep it warm, and so conclude that the chicken is transferring heat to the egg.
But this is wrong. The egg gives off heat. When transforming from an egg to a chicken, the entropy is decreasing. You're going from an arrangement with lots of disorder (the yolk and the white are basically undifferentiated masses) to a very ordered arrangement. But in order for the egg to decrease its entropy, it must increase the entropy of its surroundings. And it can only do that by giving off heat. The chicken incubating the egg isn't necessary to
provide heat, but merely to make sure that heat isn't lost
too fast so that the chick gets too cold and dies. It's the same reason we wear jackets on a cold day.
My point here is that basic thermodynamic considerations are fundamental to life. It's pretty clear that Thornhill would have flunked my class, because he obviously doesn't understand thermodynamics or how it applies to life.