I'm a big believer in the universe as predicted by the Fermi Paradox, and that we'll only ever interact with "human-descended" intelligences.
My gut still says it's more likely we'll talk to aliens than harvest vacuum energy. Entropy says we don't get anything for nothing.
(I Am Not A Theoretical Physicist, though - or a xenobiologist, for that matter.)
That's an unfortunate attitude. He's not claiming "something for nothing," he's saying that zero-point energy (which demonstrably exists) could one day be harvested. It's very difficult, but not unimaginable.
I'm sure people said the same thing about nuclear energy until it was very, very clearly demonstrated.
The aliens bit was continuing the GP's probability comparison, nothing more.
That's a fallacious comparison: E = mc^2, the discovery of the neutron, and the discovery of uranium's fissile nature told us very clearly how to get nuclear energy (getting nuclear energy _controllably_, however...). Special relativity told us exactly how much power was available. Solid physics.
With ZPE extraction, the physics doesn't give us any way of accessing the energy beyond the Casimir effect, which is pretty restricted. Actually powering anything is in the realms of perpetual motion machines; wikipedia discusses it better than I can here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy#Free-energy_...
(Edit: Rutherford did say the idea of nuclear energy was "hogwash", so you're right there...)
Ok, where I say 'alien', imagine I said 'extra-terrestrial'.
We know the probability of the universe evolving intelligent life from scratch is 1. We know nothing about the probability of the universe evolving intelligent life from scratch twice, and the Fermi paradox implies we're very unlikely to ever find out more.
My gut still says it's more likely we'll talk to aliens than harvest vacuum energy. Entropy says we don't get anything for nothing. (I Am Not A Theoretical Physicist, though - or a xenobiologist, for that matter.)