Find someone in this thread that said we are special.
What are the chances that the chances are 1/2?
All I’m saying is that - if we’re not special, and Blake’s other assertions are right and the anthropic principle destroys everything we can say about the chances of life arising anywhere else except that it’s possible - we’ve still got a vanishingly close to 1 in 2 chance of life being somewhere else - since we then can’t possibly assign any other chance. And I think that’s ridiculously conservative.
Frylock, I agree with most of what you posted, except for the part about dishonesty. It is possible that I’m not being as clear as I could be.
My concern for how science is viewed by the general public is based on the concept that for most people: Perception = reality. They don’t understand the intricacies and don’t want to understand them. They want an answer that they can digest. It is not fundamentally dishonest to hazard a guess, provided you state that you are doing so. Even if Blake is correct, and I don’t believe he is, making a guess will be perceived far better than refusing to comment from the ivory tower.
I’m trying to figure out why we can’t just settle on the following premises:
- The universe is a very, very big place
- There is nothing inherently special about the earth in terms of physical or chemical processes
Which lead a person to one of two potential beliefs: - Given the above, it is perfectly reasonable to assume life exists elsewhere (even though there is no direct proof)
- There is also nothing wrong with the presumption that life does not exist, since we have no proof
Either you fall in one camp, or you fall into the other. Neither has absolute, definitive proof - so the whole thing becomes a circular argument, both sides presenting perfectly reasonable pieces of evidence or logical conclusions - but since a person goes one way or another based on gut instinct, it is unlikely that a person will easily change their mind.
I think you need a third premise:
- The probability of life arising on an Earth-like planet is unknown.
Unless you have a good reason to believe you do know the probability, then the conclusion from the premises is that you cannot rationally support one position over the other. I don’t think Blake has a problem with people identifying their positions as beliefs, but rather saying that their position (usually that life is everywhere) is supported scientifically.
Then (and since he’s taken such a hostile tone on such an innocuous question) he’s full of shit. Or, to put it another way, is the position that there might be a Higgs Bosun particle ‘supported by science’? How about Dark matter/dark energy? If no then why not? If yes then how is this theory any different? After all we have exactly as much physical evidence for dark matter as for life outside of Earth. If science is only about what we have only physical and directly observable evidence for then it’s a pretty limiting field, and a lot of things associated with ‘science’ are suddenly going to go away. Some of them rather fundamental and broad. The entire field of cosmology for instance and a lot to do with quantum physics…
-XT
That is absolutely not true. There is plenty of evidence for dark matter in terms of observed mass not matching up with mass predicted via other observations. There is no evidence, direct or indirect, that extraterrestrial life exists.
Instead, what you have is a probabilistic argument, which is not evidence. And the problem is you don’t know what the probability is, which means you have nothing. Of course, you can always say you believe the probability is high enough such that life is everywhere (I do believe this). But that’s a pure belief, not a scientifically supported theory.
I HAVE A NEW BUT VERY MUCH RELATED QUERY…
And I confess in advance, (without shame, since we all have our strengths and weaknesses) that your answers will almost certainly go right over my head in almost every instance. I find the idea of enough cornfields to supply the USA’s many corn needs to be sufficiently vast to make my head hurt… imagine how my head locks up at the idea of infinity! So if you could dumb it down as much as possible, you will be much more effective at fighting my ignorance. …speaking of which, Blake, I specifically asked you to explain a term you used in the other thread and you were, I guess, so busy correcting people who believed that they did understand what they were talking about that you completely spaced on actually helping someone who freely admitted she could use some schoolin’ - I guess that’s not as much fun, but hey man, walk the talk!
So here it is:
Since we have not actually been anywhere except our own moon…where the fuck do we get off assuming that we know about the chemistry and physics of worlds beyond ours, especially worlds beyond our little tiny solar system? Doesn’t all our “knowledge” really amount to educated guesses and what seem to us, given the limits of our undersanding as Earth dwellers, to be reasonable assumptions?
Maybe once you get a few billion miles out (light years, miles…whatever. And what’s all this about not aging the same when you’re in space??? HUH?) everything changes…maybe there are 500 more and different elements…maybe the laws of physics are entirely different elsewhere (Avatar’s groovy upside down floating mountain ranges…). In order to say that something is true with absolute certainty, don’t we need to be a little bit closer to it than a million miles?
And hey…how in hell do we know what the sun is made up of? Seriously. We certainly can’t get close to it to take samples, so isn’t THAT a whole lot of guessing?
If looking at stuff from miles away and guessing is perfectly acceptable for off-world questions, why bother with microscopes here on Earth? Well??
So really, isn’t 95% of what we think we know about the universe that isn’t Earth or the moon just really the product of very highly educated and intelligent guesswork that seems pretty likely to be true, probably, but cannot yet be verified as true in the scientific sense of having been proven to be true? Isn’t it all just very fancy math? Yeah, we have some meteorites (And we know they are meteorites why…?) but aside from that we can’t KNOW without getting up close and personal, can we??
Please dont mistake me, I do recognize that we are pretty smart and we know a lot and it’s not just a lot of wishful thinking, there’s an underlying basis. I jsut have a hard time swallowing that we can legitimately claim to be SURE about things that are a thousand lifetimes distant from us. (Yet another WTF: the light we are seeing now doesn’t necessarily actually still exist, since it was “sent” to us years ago and is only now arriving? The star that we think we see might have turned into a black hole already? WHAT?)
Remember: limited capacity to comprehend this stuff. I have a good brain, I reason well and I’m logical, but things tend to seize up and misfire when the heavy math and physics start getting thrown around.
I welcome the enlightenment you can provide.
Thank you.
(And if someone wants to take a stab at the question of how we can know what we think we know right here on earth: how do we KNOW the moon causes the tides? What scientific test proved it? How do we KNOW, beyond a limited period of time, the rate at which carbon decays…maybe it accelerates or slows at a certain point? And what is it we use for the billions of years stuff… since we’re measuring spans of time that are so vast and cannot personally observe, how do we know our methods hold up? I know, this is way too complex to answer in a post…I’m just displaying how my mind works in case you do have an easy-to-understand answer.)
We have some observational evidence that something is out there (wrt dark matter anyway…I note you didn’t mention the others, nor address the point that much of modern science isn’t built only on directly observable data) but not what it is. By the same toluene we know the conditions by which life on this planet exists. We know a bit about the early conditions of the earth. We know that the same elements exist outside of the earth. So, seems to me we know about as much…yet you and presumably Blake assert one is science and one isn’t.
I don’t need to know what the exact probability is for it to be ‘science’…that assertion is either showing a lack of understanding of how science works or shows a double standard in order to attempt to ‘win’ the discussion…I suspect the latter in Blakes case based on past experience with debates where he is passionately involved.
-XT
Looking back over my post, I think I was wrong to say a probabilistic argument is not evidence. If you do know the probabilities of something, then a computed result could indeed be taken to support the existence of something else.
But it still stands that if you don’t know the probabilities, then any computation you make with “guessed” or “assumed” values means nothing in terms of reality.
Before you continue that absolutist idea, have you ever wonder if you are ignoring evidence? About 20 years ago there was little or no evidence of other planets around stars. Point being that before there was nothing on that regard, now we have about a hundred or more systems found, with more being discovered. What I’m trying to say here is:
Is that “nothing”? Or nothing will change the probabilities regarding extraterrestrial life?
You’re right I should have more thoroughly addressed your post. The dark matter direct comparison just jumped out at me as very wrong because that’s a testable model we can make observations on, and extra-terrestrial life has not reached that point yet.
I’m not saying that determining the state of early Earth or showing that those conditions appear everywhere in the universe is not science. I’m saying that drawing a conclusion that life is most likely common is unscientific. This is because while you can show early Earth conditions appear everywhere, you still don’t know what the probability of those conditions sprouting life is. Determining that is, I believe, far beyond our current capability.
Perhaps more accurately, you could say our error bounds on that probability are so large as to make any conclusion drawn completely meaningless.
I agree it’s not nothing, but nor is it evidence. Getting a fix on an average number of Earth sized planets (i.e. Kepler) helps improve the bounds on the possible probabilities. Unfortunately, the overall probability has a lot of sub-factors multiplied together, many of which we still have no idea for. Therefore, the bounds on the overall probability are still too large to warrant a conclusion (or even educated guess), even with improving knowledge on things like extrasolar planets.
You are missing the point, there was indeed not much reason for an educated guess before, but IMHO there is now. The question remains, when would the evidence be significant enough for you to make even an educated guess? Or do I have to assume that it is your ideas the ones that have less basis now?
Why? Knowing roughly how many Earth-like planets are out there still leaves you in the dark about the probability that life would come in to existence on one of them.
I don’t understand your second question, but I would say we have enough evidence when we have reasonable bounds on the probability of every term in the Drake equation (or something similar). Then if upper and lower extremes of the computed result provide a small enough range that can provide for a meaningful conclusion, feel free to say science has demonstrated whatever that conclusion is. Until that point, it’s an unsupported guess or belief.
The idea that nature is uniform is a methodological assumption. What this means is, we proceed as though it were true and we hope this will give us good results. So far, it hasn’t done us wrong. But why put our hopes in this methodological assumption and not some other one? That gets complicated and there’s disagreement here among those who bother to think about it much, but basically, (I should maybe put an IMO here) the uniformity assumption is the only one that allows for any basis of prediction at all. In other words, if you don’t assume uniformity, you can’t make any predictions of any kind. And if you don’t make any predictions, you can’t… act. So to act, you have to assume uniformity.*
The way you’re all-capsing “KNOW” makes me want to be very sure I know what you’re looking for when you talk about things that are “KNOWN” vs. things that are not.
What do you mean by KNOW?
*But then there’s the super-sticky problem of what actually counts as “uniform”. But you said you didn’t want to get too complicated, so I’ll just leave off there unless you ask for more.
Because before we had no idea what was out there, indeed a perfect example that validated a big chunk of your position so far.
What I’m trying to figure out here is if one should bother to continue, at least one huge item in the equations is being taken out of the dark, what I’m trying to get from you is what weight you are giving to that item, so far it is clear that you are willing to ignore it.
I’m not talking much here about intelligent life BTW. However the main point is that uncertainty goes both ways, I still do not see any examples from you that would lead me to believe that we should continue to reduce the possibilities that there is life out there.
Another thing that is bothering about the discussion so far: AFAIK very little current research comes with the idea that life **must **be out there, the scientists are now mostly saying: well, we should investigate then what is actually out there, my impression so far is that even that seems to be frowned upon, if not by you, then by the OP.
If you are thinking my position is to suggest that life in fact actually is unlikely, that is incorrect. I admitted earlier that I believe there is lots of life out there. I also admitted that I don’t consider this belief to be supported by science.
I don’t frown upon researchers saying we should keep investigating. But you should agree that generally in scientific social circles, the consensus is that life is in fact likely to exist and that this is supported by scientific fact. Obviously I disagree with the second half of that.
I can only share a quote from one of my favorite essays by a favorite scientist and thinker, Stephen Jay Gould:
He was referring to evolution here, and I get it: the evidence pointing to evolution being a fact (Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” being a theory of how evolution works, not whether it is a reality.) is so overwhelming that it would be and is “perverse to withhold provisional assent”.
But evolution is easy. Biology is easy. We have bodies and life and death and fossils and DNA and direct observation of all kinds of things that prove the fact that evolution occurs and it is the way life has progressed into different forms.
But moons and tides and planets… not so much with the tangible evidence there. Seems like a lot of relying on hardcore mathy stuff.
Or maybe there is more practical evidence for these things than I am aware of…?