I got to know Max fairly well over the years, even traveling with him on occasion. He is a very interesting man with some interesting points of view. Yes, he believes in the Flat Earth theory, which I've attempted to explain the fallacy of this to him on more than one occasion. And yes, he is into other conspiracies as well, as someone else pointed out on this thread. I guess some people are just wired this way. All this said, Max is an excellent pool player and a very talented artist. And I think we all know that very creative type people can be eccentric.
By the way, the Universe as we know it, is still in it's infancy, only maybe fourteen or fifteen billion years old. It has been postulated that it should last for billions and billions of years before finally dying out. We are babies in this Universe, on a planet that is only four or five billion years old and humans have been here a relatively short time, maybe two million years at best and modern man (Homo Sapiens) only about 250-300,000 years. A blink of the eye in the Universe's history. There may well be (or have been) other intelligent life forms in the Universe long before us that have died out, and almost without question there must be other intelligent life out there now, probably billions of them on different planets. All of them far different from us and yet with some similar qualities. They have the same problem we do, the inability to reach out far beyond their own locale. All life forms are suited for life on the planet they exist on, just like us. Of course, the correlation here is that with so many worlds out there that can sustain life (oxygen, nitrogen and water should do the trick), shouldn't there be some like ours. And yes there probably is, but we will never know! We are very frail creatures, barely able to hang on here and we may be extinct a million or two years from now. It sure looks possible from what we are doing currently to destroy the environment that gave birth to us.
We nearly died out about 75,000 years ago, after a major meteor hit the Earth and sent us into a long ice age. We were down to maybe only 10,000 to 50,000 people on the entire planet! That we survived is only due to our superior intelligence and ability to adapt to severe weather conditions. It was only after this episode in our history that we really started to make breakthroughs in using the resources we had available from the Earth like agriculture, solar and wind power.
Am I a scientist? You're damn right, as much as anyone else who claims to be one. If you have a working brain, you can theorize as well as they can. And maybe I'm just as nuts as Max!