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Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

#136: Feb. - Mar. 2015 (Non-Fiction)
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geo

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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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Personally, I think SETI has an extremely low probability of success (for a lot of different reasons) and I would argue against public funding for it. In this book, Sagan argues for government funding. But even if this was a pet project of his, I see nothing wrong with it. Science has to start somewhere and I think SETI is based on a perfectly valid premise that intelligent life may exist and we may be able to detect it. Many scientific discoveries have come from just looking around to see what we might find.

There’s a gray area between pseudoscience and real science and sometimes we’re wrong about where to draw that line. But I think it’s important to keep our minds open to possibilities.

I have a running joke with my wife that she suffers from positive bias. She feels like anything is possible and why not try it? Positive bias often leads to false conclusions, but it's also the basis of a can-do attitude that often does yield positive results. Certainly Sagan was very positive and in my opinion this was one of his best qualities. He had an infectiously positive attitude that we can find joy in understanding the universe the way it really is (to the degree that we understand it) and also to imagine the endless possibilities of what might happen if we looked around with an open mind.

Thus the SETI project.

We can also use scientific methods to look for Bigfoot (though that's not to say the starting assumptions are equal.) Regardless, belief in either Bigfoot or extraterrestrial life should always contingent on evidence and as of now we have no evidence of either. Would you argue that Sagan believed in extraterrestrial life absolutely and irrationally (regardless of the evidence), or did he merely believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life (contingent on the evidence)? I think it was the latter since the very purpose of SETI is to find evidence.
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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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Interbane:

You're trying so hard to disagree with me that you're talking out of your butt.
ant:

you're so far up yours when you come out to talk to us all, you wreak of the scent of feces.
Unacceptable name calling. Unworthy of either of you. We need to disagree as otherwise there would be no debate. Please stoppit.
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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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Geo wrote:
Personally think SETI has an extremely low probability of success (for a lot of different reasons) and I would argue against public funding for it. In this book, Sagan argues for government funding. Though this was a pet project of his, I see nothing wrong with it. Science has to start somewhere and I think SETI is based on a perfectly valid premise that intelligent life may exist and we may be able to detect it. Many scientific discoveries have come from just looking around to see what we might find.
Youre right I think about Sagan's encouragement of government funding. But that was cut off sometime ago from what I understand. I personally am glad that it didn't die because of private funding came to the rescue.

But I can agree that public funding should not be used when we can use it for more practical reasons.


So lets say we were back to the hypothesis that "all swans are white" and we decided to prove they were by searching the planet for every swan we could find to prove our hypothesis (yes, I know black swans were discovered)

We observed 55,000 swans and all were white.
We suspect countless more are yet to be observed locally (on earth).

Where should the probability that all swans are white stop us from continuing our observation?


intelligent life exists elsewhere = hypothesis.

prove it, however long it takes. it can never be falsified because the hypothesis is never-ending.

so, we throw falsification out of the window and observe indefinitely?
Is that science?
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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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Penelope wrote:
Interbane:

You're trying so hard to disagree with me that you're talking out of your butt.
ant:

you're so far up yours when you come out to talk to us all, you wreak of the scent of feces.
Unacceptable name calling. Unworthy of either of you. We need to disagree as otherwise there would be no debate. Please stoppit.

I agree, Penelope.
I should have ignored our moderator on that one.
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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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Mr Davies points out that scientists who search for aliens using radio telescopes are assuming that other life would use this form of communication. But people are increasingly using the internet to talk to one another. Within the next 100 years, mankind may no longer use radio. Astronomers are using the only tools at their disposal but these may well be the wrong ones for the job.

http://www.economist.com/node/15864923

Given the great size not only of space but also of time, perhaps intelligent life looks different elsewhere. If mankind persists for a further 100,000 years, the species will surely change. Indeed, it has already developed intelligent machines and is well on its way to building devices that are more intelligent than their makers. Perhaps the baton of intelligence will be passed to these contraptions, in which case, those looking for extraterrestrial life should be seeking not little green men but little green machines

What we are doing is looking for either little green men or life that looks like us and uses the same technology as us.

If life can be something totally different than carbon life we would never be able to detect it, let alone determine if it is intelligent.
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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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ant wrote:So lets say we were back to the hypothesis that "all swans are white" and we decided to prove they were by searching the planet for every swan we could find to prove our hypothesis (yes, I know black swans were discovered)

We observed 55,000 swans and all were white.
We suspect countless more are yet to be observed locally (on earth).

Where should the probability that all swans are white stop us from continuing our observation?


intelligent life exists elsewhere = hypothesis.

prove it, however long it takes. it can never be falsified because the hypothesis is never-ending.

so, we throw falsification out of the window and observe indefinitely?
Is that science?
I'd say the swan analogy is not a very good one because it doesn't matter if all swans are white. No one really cares.

But finding evidence of extraterrestrial life? Huge.

The hypothesis is not never-ending. All it takes is one Mars Rover finding fossilized microbes in the frozen Martian soil and we've made a huge discovery that ultimately changes how we see ourselves in the cosmos. A lot of people care enough that they're willing to fund the venture. It's an important question.

Searching the skies with a radio telescope has a very low cost and many people think it's also a worthwhile venture. Indeed, both are very similar in what they hope to accomplish.

http://www.space.com/21901-nasa-mars-ro ... signs.html

By the way, there was a time I had one of those SETI programs on my Macintosh computer crunching data, so in a way, I participated in the SETI project. I thought it was way cool and still do.
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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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ant wrote:I agree, Penelope.
I should have ignored our moderator on that one.
You should have ignored me. I apologize to you and Penny, and everyone else.
ant wrote:intelligent life exists elsewhere = hypothesis.

prove it, however long it takes. it can never be falsified because the hypothesis is never-ending.
This is one of the area where the criteria of falsification falls short. Consider how falsification would apply to the search for a black swan. At the point where we found 55,000 white swans but no black swan, wouldn't it be apparent that no black swan would ever be found? There would be no practical way to falsify the claim that there is a black swan somewhere on Earth(we could search every inch, only to miss one that migrated). Would it still be a hypothesis that a black swan exists? History has shown that it's not only a hypothesis, but a fact.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure we should be putting money towards it. The odds of intelligent life being in our neck of the woods could be one in a million, so the government is just gambling with our money. Perhaps a private company like SpaceX should fund it...
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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I've posted my thoughts about SETI before. There are some serious what-ifs that seem to make the SETI experiment a highly unlikely venture at best.

http://www.booktalk.org/post94231.html? ... eti#p94231

And yet, I don't think chances for success are among the criteria used to determine if something is scientific or not. SETI is a scientific experiment or rather a series of experiments. Bottom line, you got to play to win. Or, as William Shatner says, at least I'm trying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPBt4IuQEbw
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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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The only difference between the scales is their starting points: 0 K is "absolute zero," while 0°C is the freezing point of water. One can convert degrees Celsius to kelvins by adding 273.15; thus, the boiling point of water, 100°C, is 373.15 K.
Bearing in mind that 273.15 K is absolute zero by our scale......and we all live at around 300 K.....that is really a very low temperature state of being when you think that temperature can rise to thousands of degrees. What is to say that intelligent life cannot exist at these higher temperatures? We could never be aware of another life form that could exist in such heat......or could we? :wink:
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Re: Chapter 5: Spoofing and secrecy

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geo wrote:And yet, I don't think chances for success are among the criteria used to determine if something is scientific or not. SETI is a scientific experiment or rather a series of experiments.
Is it even an experiment? It seems to be more of a program, though I'm sure nearly anything can be considered an experiment if it has results that are studied.
ant wrote:The question is whether or not homosapiens can define "intelligence" adequately enough to recognize it in something completely alien to its species. To say that we know what intelligence is universally is homocentric.
We can define intelligence easily enough. The question is whether or not our definition is broad enough to account for all the possible intelligences we've never encountered. I'm sure our definition will broaden and gain nuance in time. If we do find aliens and they're dramatically different, we'll probably analyze how they process information and create another connotation of intelligence.
ant wrote:If life can be something totally different than carbon life we would never be able to detect it, let alone determine if it is intelligent.
I read something a while ago about arsenic based life, found in a lake. There was some controversy and I didn't care enough to see how it panned out. Here's a recent article.

I'm sure there are different forms of intelligence, but I don't know if that
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