On UFOs-as-Aliens Priors
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
More broadly, I suspect that there is a defect in education on this matter. You are commonly given rules and variables, and have to figure out the variables given the rules. But you are usually given all the rules and not typically required to figure them out, and not misled with respect to them.
This is quite different from reality where the rules are often as unknown as the variables, and there can be great uncertainty about what they are.
I wonder if it is a result of institutionalized education that students are not taught to mistrust the rules they are given?
I'm no expert on abiogenesis, but my understanding was that we're nowhere near being able to estimate its probability like this.
Sure it could be that life commonly emerges from Earth-like conditions when given enough time, but it could also be that life requires such an extraordinarily unlikely sequence of events (to get started and then thrive) that it only occurs on one planet in every googolplex universes.
> [10% chance that] A sibling star gave rise to a long-lived advanced civ long before now
I'd like to see the reasoning behind this estimate (or any of the other numbers given).
I read a paper on this a while ago, which I cannot find now, but it places the likelihood at some meaningful percentage per million years, which in aggregate across several orders of magnitude of planets, makes life elsewhere in the universe very likely.
It uses the statistical notion that Earth should not be modeled as a single data point, but as a series that you integrate over, and concludes that since life emerged so soon after Earth became habitable, that the emergence of life is likely likely (the probability of the probability) - within the lifespan of a similar star.
To give you a more clear example...
Imagine a handing a subject a bag containing a die with an unknown number of sides. You ask a subject to reach into the bag, pull out a die and keep rolling it until he gets a 1. ...and then report to you only the number of times it took to roll a one.
In statistics, can you infer a probability on the number of sides of that die, based upon how long it took the subject to reach a 1 - even if the experiment is only performed once? The answer is YES. If the subject only had to roll the die twice to get a 1, you can estimate that the die probably had very few sides. Similarly, if the subject that it took a million tries to roll a 1, you can very comfortably say that the die was not 2 sided (a coin).
In the same vein, since life appeared on Earth in the few hundred(s) of millions of years after it became habitable, then the likelihood is probably not close enough to zero to rule out life in the cosmos.
Treating Earth as one data point is an unwise oversimplification.
No, we can't.
> Treating Earth as one data point is an unwise oversimplification.
It is one data point. We have no other. We can't know anything about any others.
Doing anything else is wishful thinking hidden in fancy methodology, just like this article. It is all nonsense.
We really, really do not know a single thing about the likeliness of life appearing. Not until we find a second data point.
If you don't have anything meaningful to contribute, it's better to just not comment at all.
All of the "leaked" videos have been debunked and yet they are presented by the media as "aliens."
Either one is open to the idea that Earth life is not alone, or one isn't; and Reason alone isn't a big enough engine to pull one over the hump to the other side.
I wonder what the "earth is unique" folks will do if faced with proofs; declare war or declare themselves slaves? I doubt they'll be able to handle "peaceful coexistence," which I'd say is a damned good reason for the aliens to stay hidden.
Better might be "known life is all life" or "all life is known". My particular peculiar kink in this discussion is that I think there's whole orders of life and modes of being, on this planet, that we have at most barely perceived and roughly imagined.
So I get to piss everybody off.
Not me, totally on board with whole modes of being and life that we are unaware of and could possibly be unable to perceive at the present moment, even on this planet.
Very interested in models to help explore/experiment this space rather than those that don't allow to knowledge to be built upon for future proofs or falsification.
They also just couldn't care.
> how come our technology can routinely spot their spacefaring machines?
Does it?
Supposedly ;)
And so far they’ve just been lucky and some complex conspiracy requiring they have a fuzzy polaroid filter on all our systems is not required.