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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

So you find it more probable that we are the only sentient life in the vast known universe?

That would be the best proof of a(n absentee) God ever, basically. The one special planet deemed OK to magic-pixie-dust life onto!

Which makes me presume it to be false.

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It's shame this is downvoted because it's the key insight of the two propositions:

1. the lack of ET-evidence is really odd and could be indicative of a barren universe

2. The outcome of 1 civ / universe is a really odd output (vs. a zero/many civs) from a Drake-equation-like natural, random universe.

Which should, if we can fill in the gaps to the above sketchy proof, cause the most rational among us to wrestle with the idea if we really know what's going on.

I'd add the other most salient fact is how quickly we're gaining the ability to examine proposition #1, by say in this case, datamining astronomy data sets...

3. In a few decades we'll have a pretty exhaustive survey of exoplanets that should find a TruePositive if there are some to find, heck even a photosynthesizing planet in the galaxy should suffice.

Taken together, there should be some philophizing about the idea that we could end up proving ourselves to be alone, all within the forseeable future, while we're still all still on Earth.

Thank you for realizing my gist. I believe the possibility of 1 civ/universe to be so odd that I cannot believe it's true. Problem is, once you accept that, now you're in uncharted territory. Are these hypothetical ET's far away? Are they pre-sentient? Or are they already here somehow (alcubierre drive?) and all those people claiming UFO sightings and/or encounters are in fact, in large part, correct? :O

No, they find it more probable that these particular signals are not aliens. It's not about whether or not you believe aliens exist, at all, it's about whether or not their the best explanation for any phenomenon. One day, we may get evidence for which there is no better explanation (say, a flying saucer landing at the White House with little grey aliens hopping out.) Right now, we do not have to use that hypothesis of last resort; it's still more parsimonious to think we just don't understand stars that well.

That isn't science it is opinion.

So far there is no evidence of life beyond this planet. Until there is that hypothesis should be viewed with skepticism.

We still have no idea what carries the force observed as inertia. While it may be a hypothesis that aliens exist, it's also a hypothesis that they don't. We know things have inertia, but have no idea why they do. We have a reasonable assumption that aliens exist. Proving they exist consists of finding an alien civilization, but proving they don't would include an exhaustive search of the entire universe. Inertia appears to be a universal force, but proving that would also require an fairly exhaustive search from everywhere in the universe.

Sure, but if we're going to look let's look in those places that are generating the kind of evidence we'd expect to see which are showing interesting behavior.

It's a bit more than opinion, it's the Cosmological Principle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle

There's room for debate but it generally seems to match our observations. There's no a priori reason to believe that Earth is special in the universe since all the rest of our solar system / galaxy seem to be unremarkable.

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