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AudioGames.net Forum → Off-topic room → do you believe in extraterrestrial life?
@25
Hehe, they weren't optimistic, and kind of felt like they were the prologue to something larger. I also would have liked it if they were about twice the length so we could get more details about pretty much everything. 
23:
Probability is about faith in this case though. Essentially, the argument boiled down goes like this. We've calculated the probability of other and/or other intelligent life in the universe. It's so high, there's no *way* it can't be out there. Let's start looking for it!
In other words, they have so much faith, or trust if you like that word better, that the universe complies with their calculations that they're insisting it's so and that we should go find out that they're correct. But it's kind of like sitting down and doing a bunch of math that says the probability of your aunt's being pregnant is 0.999999999999999999999999999998 and then calling your aunt and telling her she should make a doctor's appointment and find out her due date, because the math tells you the chance that she's not pregnant is vanishingly small.
@26
yeah, I mean. They're not. But the author thinks they are. I don't have a source for that handy; it's in an interview somewhere. I'm definitely not an optimistic person but I can't imagine writing something as depressingly bleak as those get and going "I consider this an optimistic view of the future".
Also @27 is right about probability. If you don't see fish in the sea, you have to sort of assume there aren't fish in the sea. You might have an explanation as to why there should be fish in the sea, but there aren't until someone grabs one. There's a few weird math things that go into probability estimates, but one of them is this: if you draw two white stones and a black stone from a bag, it's reasonable to say that the probability of black is 1/3 even though it might be 1/10 or 1/100 or whatever other number. Drawing more stones from the bag actually sort of changes the probability because probability is basically the estimate of itself--it's hard to articulate it well. There's a sort of second part that we can call certainty that also goes into the estimate, where every time you draw a stone from the bag you use the evidence to update (there's literally formulas for this; google bayesian inference). At the moment we've drawn at least thousands of no intelligent life planets from the bag, and not one intelligent life planet; this means that the base probability we're working from for intelligent life is actually 0%, and the strange thing is that we don't know why this is. I say you can't say there's fish in the sea until you've seen one, but you can also be very confused about why there aren't if you can't find it but have a good explanation.
Who really knows? As of now, as @28 said the probability is technically 0 percent. We currently can't possibly scope out all the planets that exist, and so we may not ever find anything even if there's something to be found.
Well, technically not 0 because we are on a planet with life on, so that does count for something. If you sampled a few thousand ponds in a set of trillions and you found fish in only 1, it still doesn't seem unreasonable to me to think there might be others as well. Even if life is incredibly rare, the insanely large number of possible planets out there means that it is a reasonable possibility that it has happened more than once.
@Khomus, I'm not sure I understand your point. It doesn't really seem to me to be about faith, in general where we can test it the universe often does comply with our calculations, and where it doesn't people then go and try to figure out why. If you calculate that your aunt is likely to be pregnant, is it really unreasonable to tell her to go make a doctor's appointment in case to find out? That's what people generally do actually. You don't know for sure you're pregnant, but you think it might be likely based on the symptoms you're experiencing, so you go to the doctor to make sure. And isn't that basically what we're doing? We think that there might be life out there so we're trying to look for it. Maybe there isn't and we're wasting our time, but I don't think it's irrational to think that there might be.
To be fair, I'm not saying it's unreasonable to look for life, intelligent or otherwise. I agree that if you find fish in a pond, it's reasonable to make inferences, e.g. fish live in water, and use those to look for more fish. I'm more fighting with the futurists like Sagan who piss all over religion because it has dumb stuff like faith, and then turn around and go, "we did some math and it tells us ... let's go find that, because it's *definitely* out there"! OK, but it's kind of not. That's just math. I realize you think you have a good reason for thinking that, but so does everybody else.
If you think they're not right, you should be skeptical of your own claim too. That's all I'm saying. When you say things like "the probabilities tell us that life *is* out there", that's faith. I'm not even saying it's unjustified, as such. I'm just saying, I want you to understand that's the same thing that makes your aunt Gurdy say she saw the ghost of her pet bionic chicken last night.
Except not quite, because at least she had some sort of actual experience to base that claim on. But that background trust making her go "I think ghosts are totes real and I might see one some day"? Same thing the people who totes think aliens are out there because math are doing. I think it's really cool that we're looking for life, intelligent or not. I just don't think it's an utter certainty that it exists, whether we find it or not. But that probability argument, billions of stars in our galaxy ,billions of galaxies, so it's an impossibility that we're the only planet with life? That's faith. More precisely, the conclusion is faith.
Let me try this. Here's a quote from Neil DeGrasse Tyson:
"ISAACSON: Let me ask you a question that Enrico Fermi asked, which is, where is everybody?
TYSON: That’s a really important question that Enrico Fermi, he’s a physicist back, you know, 70 years ago, 80 years ago. So, he was thinking about this, thinking about aliens. Where are they? If they’re anywhere in the galaxy. You can run a fast calculation and show that if you’re anywhere in the galaxy and you have technologies to expand to other planets, they would have expanded across the entire galaxy by now in the history of our galaxy. So, you can do that calculation and that’s what led him to that question. And so, now you have to ask, where are they? So, there’s several replies, several responses as we explore in the book. So, one of them is space travel is just too hard, really. It’s hard on everybody, not just hard on us. So, no, they didn’t become the multiplanet species. OK. That’s not good for science fiction storytelling, but it’s — I think it’s the lead answer. Another one might be, they did explore the galaxy, and they did have a go with Earth, took a look at us, and returned to their home planet reporting there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth. OK. So, that would just be embarrassing for us that we wouldn’t even count as intelligence on their scale. But here’s another more intriguing possibility. That whatever is the urge that has you say, I want to colonize planets, whatever strand of DNA they’ve got that urges them to do this is incompatible with colonizing the entire galaxy. Why? Because as this strand of DNA manifests in everyone who’s doing this, there will come a point where they start competing for each other’s planets and they start fighting, I want that planet because I am the colonist. And then they implode out of their selfishness. And they say, come on, they’re aliens. No, excuse me, that happened on Earth. How far back do you have to go? Spain, Portugal, France, England, they’re colonizing the world, sending their ships and their armies, doing land grabs around the world. And then what happens? They end up fighting with each other. And then the whole system of colonization implodes. That happened here on Earth. It’s not a stretch. So, maybe the urge to do that is self-limiting of your capacity to succeed with that ambition.
ISAACSON: Do you think there is life on other planets?
TYSON: Often when people ask that question, they are thinking about intelligent life, you know, with ray guns and things. If you’re a biologist, you’re looking for any life, microbial, anything that has a metabolism that we might recognize as life. And if you just look at the abundance of the native ingredients of life as we know it, you look at how fast life formed on Earth, you look at how many planets are now in the catalog, more than 4,000, and that’s just in our little pocket of the Milky Way Galaxy, you would be inexcusably egocentric to suggest that we are alone in the universe. And so, it’s these calculations that any one of us have made in astrophysics and astrobiology, a new field with the conjoined words of biology and astronomy, astrobiology. We all have confidence that there’s life out there for those reasons I just gave, and we should be looking for it. And so, that’s motivating these trips to Mars with rovers. These are biology and geology experiments loaded onto clad onto this mobile laboratory. And in the recent incarnation we even have a helicopter, love it, that goes up, and it can drop into craters and things that the rover cannot navigate. So, this search for life is motivated by the expectation that there’s life out there. And we look in our own solar system. First, we follow the water. Multiple places within our solar system have evidence for liquid water in them. And every place on Earth, every place on Earth where we find liquid water, we find life, even the dead sea. It was called the dead sea by people who didn’t have access to microscopes because they weren’t invented yet. It’s dead of vertebrate fishes, right. But pull out a drop of it, you’ll see microbes doing the backstroke."
Let's say you wanted to have unprotected heterosexual sex. And your claim was that you or your partner weren't going to get pregnant for some reason or another. I'd tell you, like Tyson about us being the only life, that it's a pretty egotistical view. I'd explain to you why that is. A lot of the time, I'd be right. But maybe one of you has a fertility issue, and you really won't get pregnant? You see what I mean? There are really good reasons to assume that the majority of heterosexual couples in the right age range and so on are perfectly normal and functional, and that if they have unprotected sex, they'll get pregnant at some point ,so if they don't want that, they shouldn't.
It would be really egotistical, or something anyway, to assume that you're so special that these concerns don't apply to you. But that having been said, maybe they really don't. You can't do some mathematical calculations, or reasoning about how human reproduction works, or what have you, and just assume that your conclusion is correct in all cases, because that's not how the world works. It's why you hear so many people get tripped up with logic, "well X doesn't make sense"! "Well that's how X is". "But Logically, X should work like this"! Yep, that's nice. Too bad it doesn't, but them's the breaks. It doesn't, no matter how sensible it is that it should be some other way.
So I kind of feel the same way about Tyson's quote. Is it egotistical of me to say we're alone? Maybe. But it happens to be true, until we find life from somewhere else. In the wider sense I think Tyson meant, i.e. we are not only alone but unique, we always have been and always will be alone, yeah, that's egotistical, again even if it just so happens that it's true. Just because it's egotistical, doesn't mean it might not be so. Me, I'm a true skeptic. I have no idea if we're alone or not. I think it's a cool thing to investigate just because I like knowing stuff. But maybe we're alone, maybe we're not. You find out by finding direct or indirect evidence, not by playing around with numbers and saying it's impossible for us to be the only life in the entire history and future of the universe. The person who says it's impossible that we're not the only life is going by just as much faith as the person who says we're unique in the entire universe, past present and future.
@31, the problem with your claim is that faith in religion or other things is not based on any actual proof of anything. Not even statistical evidence. Probability-based faith, on the other hand, is based on probability, which is based on mathematics, and the language of the universe is mathematics. Therefore, if mathematics -- and by extension probability -- tells us that something exists or that a certain event will occur x percent of the time, its much more reasonable to put faith in that because the only time that the output of a mathematical equation is wrong is if the input is wrong or if the equation is wrong. However, if the equation has been proven throughout time to be correct and the input remains constant, you will always get the same answer. Faith in religion is different: religions tend to be very dynamic, and so there's very little that actually remains the same. If you run a probabilistic simulation and it says that there is a 99.999993 percent chance you are pregnant, then you pretty much are guaranteed to be pregnant, and you should go to the doctor to get that simulation verified. If I gather the list of pregnant women this year and then get the list of total pregnancies within the last century and the probability says that there is an 85.50 percent probability of someone being pregnant within the next 5 minutes, I can trust that that will occur, even if there is a 14.50 percent chance that it won't happen. If it doesn't happen, and I'm constantly running both success and failure stats side-by-side, I simply add to the list of failures. As each event occurs, I just keep adding to both datasets and determine, based on logical reasoning, the most likely event that will occur. It might not happen, perhaps, but the higher the chance of success is, the more plausible it is that I don't need to reference the stats at all and the more certain I can be when I say that there will be a pregnancy within the next five minutes.
While there's no mathematical evidence to prove that extraterrestrial life exists other than this lone planet in the milky-way galaxy, it cannot be discounted, even if no evidence exists. Unlike the faith in a god -- which there hasn't been absolutely any evidence to prove since science was invented -- there is evidence that proves that life can exist on other planets, even if that life is only microbiological in nature. The universe is so massive that the likelihood of extraterrestrial life not existing anywhere else in the entire universe is pretty much impossible. Remember that the larger a system is, the larger the amount of entropy exists, and the higher the entropy of a system is, the more chaotic and random things become. People say that life must exist outside of just us on Earth because the likelihood/probability of it not existing is ridiculously low considering the size of the universe. Even if you scale it down to just the size of our galaxy, that's still a ridiculously massive system, and so the probability of life not existing other than that which is found on Earth is still incredibly low.
38:
Thanks for proving my point dude. Your whole argument boils down to, this math says X is so unlikely it's pretty much a certainty. But you have no evidence of this supposed certainty. Absolutely none whatsoever. And yet you want me to believe X is so without any evidence whatsoever. I'll wait while you figure this out, but I sure as hell won't be holding my breath. I'd like to live a few more years.
yes, I do, all of this ufo sightings, project bloo book, there loads of mor evidence that I can't remember
@Ethin exactly
Since religion seems to short-circuit people's reason and pregnancy isn't working, let's try this. This is essentially Ethin's argument in post 32, not 38 the dumb typo I made before.
1. humans have made X pizza throughout history.
2. Y of the earth is covered by ocean.
3. Calculations.
4. Therefore, it is *so* unlikely that there isn't pizza on the ocean floor that it's a *certainty* that there *is* a pizza on the ocean floor.
Ethin's claim isn't that the probability tells us there's a good reason to go looking for a pizza on the ocean floor. Ethin's claim is that the math tells them that, given world enough and time, we will absolutely, 100% without a doubt, certainly find a pizza on the ocean floor, because we've made so much of it that it's impossible that one not show up there. It's that certainty, that complete lack of doubt, based *only* on playing with numbers and no evidence whatsoever, that I'm challenging, and I'm saying is absolutely 100% equivalent to faith, whether that's in religion or ghosts or some superstition about your sports team or whatever.
I also completely disagree with Ethin that there's no evidence for gods or ghosts or whatever. People have all kinds of experiences that tell them these things exist. They may be wrong, but Tina isn't saying "I've played with some numbers, and ghosts must exist", or "there has to be a god". Tina's saying she saw uncle Cyrus last night or God answered her prayer. In other words, however mistaken you personally think Tina is, Tina has some sort of experience. She thinks uncle Cyrus appeared to her, or talked to her, or that God stopped her from going on the plane that crashed or cured her cancer or whatever.
Now the part where this is faith, trust, belief, is that Tina doesn't have evidence that's external. But that doesn't strike me as much of a problem. I could tell you I saw a bear yesterday, and there might be no way for me to actually prove it, one way or the other. That has nothing to do with whether or not I actually saw a bear. It just has to do with whether or not you'll believe me.
There might be things that really make you question me, e.g. if I was in a desert, which isn't a typical bear habitat. Then, I really need to do some work to explain why that was there, *if* I actually care whether or not you believe me. However, if I was in the woods, you'd probably just go "OK yeah he probably saw a bear". Maybe if you really cared, you'd do some research and find out if bears were common enough where I was at, or whether they were rare enough that you need to question me some more.
But my ultimate point is this. If I said I did some calculations, and I'm absolutely sure there's a bear within five miles of my house, you'd probably have questions. Are there woods near my house? Do bears exist in my state? If you don't like bears, use wolves, they're pretty rare. You wouldn't just go, yep, he did some math in his living room, there are totally bears/wolves near his house, that proves it! You'd want to know where I live, what kind of spaces are near my house, that kind of stuff. Maybe there *are* bears/wolves in my state, they're just up north, not where I am, so we're back to me needing to explain more if I claimed I saw one near my house.
Aliens aren't special. It doesn't become special because we're dealing with Sagan's number, "billions and billions"! Aliens, if they exist, work like any other thing, and we find them the same way we find giant squids or bears near my house. In other words, the math, or stories, or whatever we have, is a suggestion. If we have a strong enough set of suggestions, that might tell us where to start looking, or whether it's worth looking, or what have you. But *none* of it tells you that it's certain that whatever exists, certainly not math with nothing else backing it.
But that's exactly Ethin's claim, and the claim of the folks I'm talking about who think like Ethin. But that's not how it works. We don't do math and deduce the existence of giant squids. That guy on all the documentaries about giant squids gets obsessed with them because of stories, and he goes and looks and looks and looks for one until he finds one. That's how we know there are giant squids, because we've found them, dead or alive. Which is exactly why I said, yeah, go look for other life in the universe. Just quit assuming it certainly exists because math, whether you actually manage to find it or not. That's not how this works. That's not how *any* of this works.
@36, that isn't how probability works. There are three types of probability:
Classical probability: one needs to know the entire sample space (that is, every possible combination) to perform a probability calculation. This is the least-used method, as well as the least practical, but is the most accurate.
Experimental probability (also known as empirical probability): one takes the number of times an event has happened (called the successes) over the total number of events of the kind that your looking for have occurred (called the trials). This is the most widely used and the most practical. Accuracy increases over time.
Subjective probability: one just takes a guess. This is the least accurate of the three methods.
I am strictly talking about empirical probability. Your examples don't satisfy the conditions of that method because they are two completely separate things. You'd need to rephrase it to something like this: humans consume 3 billion pizzas per year (supposedly). We scanned all of the ocean floors on earth a total of 15000 times. Out of those 15000 scans, 650 of them indicated that pizza was on some of the ocean floors. Therefore, there is a 650/15000 (4.333333 percent) probability that pizza will be found on any of the ocean floors on Earth in the next scan.
A better version of empirical probability might be this: an online game is running geo-location code to determine whether someone is connecting from a legitimate internet service provider (ISP) or one that they shouldn't be connecting from. The online game took a measurement of how many players connected per year for a total of 5 years and determined that, over the past 5 years, they had received a total of 500,000 connections from IP addresses all over the internet. Using an IP geo-location service, they determined that 350,000 of those connections were illegitimate. Therefore:
There have been 350,000 successes in this probability test
The total number of trials is 500,000
Therefore, the online games' administrators can say that, within the next 5 years, there is a 70-percent probability that a connection will be illegitimate, and they can make plans to react appropriately.
Your example on Tina doesn't quite work with probability. People claiming that they saw ghosts, or communed with God, etc., can usually be medically determined to be fabricated by the mind. There is no actual evidence whatsoever that proves that this is not the case. However, when determining that life does undoubtedly exist, we take into account various facts:
Life exists on Earth. Therefore, it is indubitably possible that a planet can have a life-supporting atmosphere.
There is scientific proof that microbiological life can exist on other planets. It has been scientifically proven that life on Earth, at least, has evolved from microbes, and so it is theoretically possible that this process can be recreated over a long period of time.
The galaxy is so large that, subjectively, there is a very low probability that Earth is the only planet in the entire galaxy where life can exist. Pseudo-randomness from computer simulations can trivially prove this claim. The universe is truly random, and though pseudo-randomness is a poor imitation of true randomness, it follows similar logical pathways.
The universe is approximately 93 million percent larger than the milky-way galaxy. Chaos theory tells us that, considering the size of the universe (93 billion light-years), the entropy is so high that the likelihood of no other life existing anywhere within the entire universe other than here on Earth is literally impossible.
Therefore, though we might use subjective probability, there is evidence that proves that life is possible (mainly, Earth), and, therefore, it is understandable to conclude that life does exist somewhere else in the universe, even if we only have one planet to prove this particular assumption.
Hope this makes a tad more sense. I imagine this logic has flaws, but this is generally the logic chain that I prefer to follow. Perhaps I'm just proving your point, but the point I'm trying to make is this: there is absolutely zero evidence to prove that God exists, or that people spoke to ghosts, etc. Therefore, the obvious conclusion is that it never happened -- not in the real world, at any rate. And sciences inability to reproduce those experiences without psychological manipulation is a big tell as well. On the other hand, there is evidence that proves life exists, or can exist, both on Earth and other planets, and there is evidence to suggest that other planets did have a life-bearing atmosphere in the past. Therefore, the obvious conclusion is that life does exist elsewhere in the universe. We may not find it due to distance constraints, or due to scientific or technological limitations, &c., but to outright say that it doesn't exist at all is ridiculous. Science is all about evidence and proof, with a bit of theory thrown in. There is evidence and proof that life exists, can exist, or did exist. There is no evidence that God, or ghosts, etc., do exist -- absolutely none, and science has repeatedly failed to find a single shred of evidence in the real world every single time that we've tried to prove it. I could inject you with a hallucinogenic that makes you believe that your talking to God, but that doesn't mean it ever actually happened in reality. And yes, you might say that we can suffer sensor ghosts and things like that, but that's why we have experts roving over the data to analyze it for errors using proven methodologies.
Who knows, though. Maybe we're all wrong. But I think I've stated what I believe quite clearly.
I do get where khomus is coming from now. To use his analogy but modified (pizzas won't work, because obviously it will get eaten by the mermaids before it ever gets anywhere near the bottom). So we produce a lot of plastic waste and a lot of it ends up in the ocean. So let's say we found one site where plastic made it to the ocean floor. Knowing that it is reasonable to think that there likely are more places where that is the case. But we check a bunch of other sites and don't find any. Obviously the ocean floor is massive, and we've only scanned a fraction of it, where one out of the thousand or whatever sites had plastic, but potentially there are billions of possible sites you could look at. So the point is, you can still say that probably if you keep looking you'll find plastic at the bottom somewhere else. But you can't say that there is most definitely going to be, because it's not inconceivable that some yet unknown mechanism is preventing plastic from reaching the bottom, and a very unique set of factors at that one site made it the only exception. It's not likely, but you can't rule it out as impossible with the data that you have.
It makes no sense whatsoever. Let's rephrase your empirical probability example with the data we have on life and see if we can't illustrate.
humans live on one planet. We've discovered about 4000 exoplanets.
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/faq/6/how-m … are-there/
Let's say 5000 to be generous, which gives us 5009 planets. We know of life on 1 (one) planet. That means there's life on .020% of the planets we know of. The more planets we discover, the lower that number becomes. And from this, you want me to conclude that it's an absolutely incontrovertible certainty that there's other life in the universe? And we're talking life in general now mind you, probably microbes, as yo u say.
So now I'm not only concluding that there are certainly microbes, but intelligent life as well? Because that's where this thread started. Look, for me the bottom line is that you can talk probabilities all you like. They're a great reason to give an educated guess and go looking for something you think might be there. What they're not is any kind of proof whatsoever that the thing you're talking about is actually there.
Tina's either pregnant, or she ain't. You can produce all the probability you want about whether she should be, but what it really comes down to is, she is, or she ain't. So sure, the probability gives us a great reason to go looking for life. Did you find it yet? No? Then quit saying it exists. You're lying. That's something you don't actually have knowledge of.
Oh finally, Re: ghosts/a god:
You're missing my point. I never said Tina had probability. You blathered on about how math was better because its the language of the universe and probability tells you that something exists, so you must be right because math is the language of the universe. What I'm saying is this. Contrary to just using numbers, Tina literally has an experience of her uncle Cyrus talking to her. Did you miss the part where I said, regardless how you personally feel about that? Because here's the thing.
I didn't say that means there are ghosts, I said Tina's basing that on something she actually experienced. I made no claim one way or the other about whether she was mistaken or not. It may be "medically proven to have been fabricated by the mind", but my point is, here we're dealing with an actual experience. I may be mistaken and think that Tommy hit me with a baseball bat, when what really happened is a car kicked up a rock and it hit me, but I really *do* have a big lump on my forehead and a really annoying headache. You don't even have that much to go on with this claim that life absolutely 100% certainly exists elsewhere in the universe, you just have some numbers.
38, for real this time, yep, that's it exactly. More precisely, I'm saying you ain't found a damn thing until you've actually found it. So making a claim of certainty, however unlikely you think you are to be wrong, is overstating your case, and acting like you've got certainty is faith, just like any other thing you act like you're certain of without complete evidence, plain and simple.
@39, I see where your coming from. Still, you have to admit that the likelihood of life not existing *anywhere* else in the entire universe, given what chaos theory and entropy tell us, is pretty damn low. That's why I -- and lots of others -- are so certain that it must exist: because everything we know about randomness and chaos tells us that its ridiculously unlikely that it doesn't. It may be pseudo-random but this is something you can simulate yourself: ask your computer to generate a number from 1 to 93 trillion for example, and run that random function a huge number of times -- say 30 million for instance. Then, for the sake of discussion, assume that if the number is above 5 billion you have life, and if its below that, you don't have life. So go through the list and filter out all numbers below and above 5 billion, and run a probability test on it, and see your result. To get a better match you could run this many times and then average out both numbers to get an average probability. This doesn't mean that this assumption -- that life must exist elsewhere -- is wrong, especially since its pseudo-random; but it does suggest that, if you go purely by the mathematics, there is a high chance that that conjecture is true. (As an example, I ran this simulation in Python, and I got a 99.994416 percent of success and a 0.005583 percent chance of failure for a first run.)
Bringing in the factors of reality and just how random it can be, any logical individual who believes that life must exist elsewhere must also acknowledge the possibility that it in fact doesn't, and I'm not saying this isn't possible, because knowing just how truly weird the universe can be (have you seen how weird quantum mechanics can be?), it might be. But its perfectly fine to assume that life exists elsewhere than the alternative until the alternative is proven true, if only primitively, e.g.: we can't technologically advance ourselves any further and still haven't found life elsewhere. But people are so certain because mathematics has indicated that its true, and its rare for mathematics to be outright wrong unless (1) we've used the wrong information or (2) the knowledge we understand about whatever we're using to run the calculations is misunderstood or wrong. The universe can defy mathematics, which is why I won't deny that life doesn't exist elsewhere. Hope this makes a bit more sense.
Man, I've been seeing half-assed examples and a severe lack of understanding about the basics on probability and correlation. As well as a poor understanding about the scientific method.
Let's make the Tina pregnancy example a bit better. Right now we're just saying Tina is or is not pregnant without any context. You really can't run any sort of probability model like this.
Tina recently had unprotected sex with her boyfriend, and he forgot to pull out. Tina is not on her period and this occurred during ovulation.
the probability that gynecologists' have measured for getting preggers from this type of situation is actually 20% (Apparently getting pregnant is hard). Especially if you're having sex randomly, rather than having sperm exist in the woman's womb for a few days before ovulation.
So, there's a 20% chance Tina might be pregnant right now. Granted, there's an 80% chance she isn't. These probabilities were forged out of numerous tests and experiments to see how likely one is to get knocked up in a single session.
As proving something doesn't exist is an impossibility and not what science is about, we generally tend to focus on the chances of something occurring. However, people seem to fall into the trap of dismissing low probabilities as essentially being 0%. to some people, a probability as low as 20% is essentially a free pass thinking nothing is going to come out of it. However, since women obviously get pregnant or the human race would of died out a long time ago, it obviously is not.
Also, personal experience is always a poor measure of reality, especially if you're only using your own. In this example, Tina doesn't get pregnant, her body acting as normal from the experience. based off using personal experience as a measure of reality, she would conclude sex doesn't result in babies, and that all those evil scientists are wrong.
She continues having unprotected sex, eventually getting surprised 6 months later she's 3 months pregnant.
For that pizza example, that...that's literally an example of correlation does not equal causation. Statisticians have tools to determine if the relationship between two or more variables is statistically probable, or entirely unrelated.
here is one example that sounds equally as insane. Someone, reviewing educational data and data on the students notices something. the children with more bathrooms in their houses tend to have far better grades than those with less bathrooms. Children's who's households have 4-5 or 6 bathrooms tend to get the highest of grades.
When this person runs tests on seeing if this correlation is statistically significant, his stats program decides to put up an image of the trollface, not imagining a value that incompatible.
Later on, that researcher compares academic achievement with income. Seeing another correlation, he runs with it, and the usual tests all statisticians have to show their work with show statistical significance, the troll face being replaced with a thumbs up.
While also doing this, he also notices that people with higher incomes also have more bathrooms. Granted, this relationship isn't as statistically significant, but does explain why a lot of the students who did well in school had a lot of bathrooms.
When you're performing research utilizing statistics, your research has to go through a gauntlet of calculations and tests before you can determine if your hypothesis holds any water. If it does, then you can see how well it does in comparison to reality. It also serves as a guide for people who want to make a decision to see if a certain action or event is worth it. However, one needs to realize that even if the relationship is statistically significant, and the probability of an outcome is high, unless that probability is 100%, there's the chance it'll not go as planned.
returning back to the original topic. based on what we know about life, we know what it takes to sustain intelligent life in the universe. We also know that microscopic simple organisms can form multi-celled organisms and eventually into the little green men. We've done it in labs already (not the little green men part, we'd probably use this knowledge to make two headed kittens first). As well, to point out the obvious, our planet has life. We see other planets that have a fraction of what is needed to hold life, but not everything. However, it shows that some places have formed the things needed to keep lifeforms alive. based on the evidence, and scientists suggest that evidence supports life being on other planets at this time.
the problem comes with trying to apply this scientific theory into reality. If you can tell, space is huge, resulting from the universe just deciding to gather all of the material in the cosmos, and slowly expanding it out across space over billions of years (the big bang was more of a slow splash). However, until people can map out the stars and see how accurate their prediction was, the theory that life exists somewhere else is still just that.
And don't forget one important detail...
Scientists aren't afraid to change their position when new data presents itself. The scientific community never proves anything. They state the evidence supports or does not support a hypothesis at this time, and they've totally made a lot of does not support hypothesis's into supports and vice versa.
@41, that was a really good description of probability. I did my best to explain it but you did it a lot better than I did. And thanks for that discussion on correlation -- I definitely hadn't considered that. And your note about really low probabilities not actually meaning zero unless their actually zero percent was pretty much the point I was originally trying to get at.
#40:
Fine. Let's run that same Python simulation again, but this time, if the number's above five billion, I'm Santa Claus. You see the problem?
#41:
No, a low probability doesn't mean zero, and I never said that. In fact, I actually said the opposite, there are all kinds of good reasons to council Tina not to have unprotected sex if she doesn't want to get pregnant. But it's possible that she can and won't. In other words, just as a really low probability doesn't mean zero, a really high probability doesn't mean 100% or certainty either.
That's my entire point. We've got good reason to tell Tina to have protected sex, we've got good reason to go looking for other life in the universe. What we don't have is the certainty to tell Tina that unprotected sex means she'll get pregnant eventually, or that there's absolutely life out there, whether or not we can find it. Both the probability that Tina will never get pregnant having unprotected sex and the probability that there's no other life in the universe besides the stuff on our planet are low.
That doesn't mean those things can't be the case. The fact that the bet against them, as it were, is really high doesn't mean that Tina can't have unprotected sex and never get pregnant, maybe she has a fertility issue we don't know about for instance, or maybe out of dumb luck she's sleeping with partners who do, nor does it mean that we can't be the only life in the universe. That doesn't mean I'd tell Tina to have at it with the unprotected sex and she'll be fine. Nor does it mean I think we're alone in the universe, I think it's pretty likely that there's other life, microbial if nothing else. I just don't think it's a certainty because probability. It's a certainty when or if we actually manage to find it, just like anything else we've proposed and that we're looking for evidence of.
It's not a certainty. Scientists theorize life can be found on other planets. The probability life can be found on other planets has spurred up attempts to do so, finding evidence of the necessary features a planet needs to hold life on other planets. Granted, they never said it's a certainty, just likely based on current evidence. Even though you state you don't claim to consider low probabilities as 0%, you're doing this in reverse. You're commenting that scientists think that life does exist on other planets, disregarding that any calculations never were 100%. The scientific method prevents such a claim, only stating that a theory is supported or not supported by current evidence. Right now scientists support the theory life exists on other planets based on current data. The prediction just makes anyone interested pull the trigger to start programs on space exploration for other lifeforms.
I also think you just shot your entire argument in the foot with your last line. You basically just said unless I see it, it is not true. Probability isn't looking to see if something did happen, then it wouldn't be a probability. probability is a decision making tool to determine the viability of a likelihood to happen, and determine if it's worth doing.
On the pregnancy example, since Tina didn't get a baby at all, that means sex does not cause babies. Since Tina sees she's not bloating up and feeling anything, by your standards, sex won't cause a baby to be created. One didn't appear after 1-2-3 attempts, so one can't get babies from having sex and probabilities mean nothing.
That's how your last statement came out as. We haven't found it yet, so it doesn't exist. Just like it hasn't happened yet so it doesn't exist, and we should stop trying.
Remember that the probability that life exists somewhere else can only be verified once we've searched everywhere. The actual probability of finding a lifeform on any planet is low. The probability that Earth formed the way it did was extraordinarily unlikely, but it happened. It isn't that far fetchd for one to theorize life exists somewhere else because it happened once already.
As well, the more something happens, the more likely an event is to occur. With pregnancy, the probability of getting knocked up as the time period increases goes up. At a year of having unprotected sex, Tina's chances of getting pregnant is 95%.
the more planets we look at, the higher the chances of finding something becomes. However, just like with the pregnancy example, it isn't 100%. There is the possibility no life exists outside of ours, and that's something we can conclude. Still was worth trying if there was a chance. And hey, we don't have to endlessly divert resources to a potential threat that doesn't exist, and can orient our goals to exploiting the universe like we do Earth! No one else will care, they don't exist.
Only faith deals with certainty. Science is always open to change by design.
@44, agreed. Plus, 43, I wasn't trying to illustrate what you said in your first example at all. I'm not sure how I ever implied that. I was trying to illustrate that the likelihood of one or more events occurring in a system increases as its entropy increases. My example may have not been the best one out there, however.
Jesus tap dancing Christ people, I'm done. I've literally said like four or five times now that I'm not saying you shouldn't go look for life. Go. Look. Just quit talking about it like it's a certainty, you know the way some posters here have, until you actually find it. Because that's how we prove things, we find them. Once again, probability said "there might be giant squids". We didn't *know* there were giant squids until some dude went out and found them, and saying "I played with some numbers and it's so unlikely that there aren't giant squids that there are totally giant squids somewhere and we just have to go and find them" isn't how probability works either.
And let me tackle experience ,since this is really confusing some people. You tell Tina not to have unprotected sex, because probability suggests a really high likelihood that she'll get pregnant. She does, multiple times, and she doesn't. All that says is that you're wrong, or more specifically, that she fell into the low end of the probability, i.e. the 20% or 10% or .000000000001% that didn't get pregnant. In other words, you can not probability your way to Tina's pregnancy.
Tina is either pregnant, or she is not pregnant. You can't go "the probability is .0000000000000000000000000001% that if Tina has sex X times she'll become pregnant. She had sex X times. Look, run some stuff in Python and let numbers above five billion mean Tina's pregnant, and you'll see, Tina's pregnant"!
No. Tina's either pregnant, or she's not. You can't math and logic your way to a physical condition in the world, the way you find out if that object or state or whatever exists in the world is to go and find it. It's that simple. However unlikely it is for Tina to not be pregnant if she's had unprotected sex with X partners Y times, if it's possible for her not to be pregnant, the only way to determine that is to go and find out if she's pregnant, not run simulations or calculate probabilities or ramble about entropy and what it means.
In short, experience. Tina experiences pregnancy, or doesn't. We have the experience of knowing whether or not she's pregnant. It has nothing to do with what dumb conclusions somebody draws from that. It just has to do with whether or not Tina is *actually* pregnant or not. That doesn't change if we crank the sample size up to thirty million, let's say. If there is some probability that every single one of those thirty million women might not be pregnant at the end of our weird little experiment, then again, however unlikely that is to happen, it *could* happen, and the only way to find out if it did or not is to find out whether they're all pregnant or not.
And guess what? Science agrees with me. That's why we're going and looking for other life, i.e. getting an experience of it, instead of just concluding that it totes exists because numbers. So once again, with feeling. I don't care how high your probabilities are, or what entropy tells us, or anything else. The only way we know whether or not there's life besides ours in the universe is to go and find evidence of its existence or former existence. All probability can tell us is how likely we think something is or isn't.
People like Sagan and Tyson can say it's egotistical to think we're the sole life in the universe. But as of right now? That's what we are, however egotistical anybody may or may not find it. And all the probability or entropy in the world doesn't change that fact. Until or unless we find evidence of current or former life, for all intents and purposes, life doesn't exist beyond our planet. And anybody who says anything other than it's possible but we don't know is, to bring everything full circle, operating on faith.
Alright, listen up people, I don't think people understand each other very well here. Khomus, just because people say, they think it is probable to think life exists elsewhere, or that it is improbable that life doesn't exist elsewhere, however you want to put it, does not mean they think that life definitely, 100 percent exists. I have seen very few people in this thread that claim complete certainty, and I think you have brought it into the discussion more than everybody else together. Not only that, I think many of those who do write that it is impossible for us to be the only planet containing life, actually means something to the extent of the probability is so low that they don't think it makes sense believing otherwise. I would not go that far, but whatever.
My point is, you keep arguing that we say that it is probable therefore it is true, which is not what we are actually saying. We say, that it seems more likely, with our very limitted information about the matter, that life does exist, and therefore we tentatively put ourselves in the believer camp. We are not saying that aliens exist beyond a reasonable doubt or anything like that, and if we make a discovery that makes it clear, that some super special and unlikely things have to happen in just the right way, or that it becomes unlikely to happen or have happened anywhere else, we would likely change our minds.
Also, I think you are taking this way too seriously. For me at least and many others probably, this is a very speculative thing, that we don't know enough about, and to be honest, I don't really find it that important of an issue. My life would not change very much if we find out we are the only ones around, sure if we do find other life, many things could possibly change, but that would mostly be scientific and, very unlikely but still, political, and wouldn't change the way I view our universe or our place in it. My life would change massively if suddenly we find out that minds and personalities can exist without brains or a God exists, and I would therefore require more evidence for these things, than I would for aliens. Most people don't care about 100 percent certainty because outside of "I think therefore I am", we are all maneuvering on a scale of uncertainty, so why are we talking about it.
Yeah, I thought this topic would mostly be about one day discovering alien babes in space.
Personally, I'm on the camp that thinks intelligent life does not exist out there in the universe. More so, outside of finding microbes, we'd at best find planets with animals on them with a more primitive form of society rather than another technology heavy species. There's one thing to have the same events that resulted in a liveable planet that formed life on its own. It's another step to have said life rise to the intellect and awareness of humanity. We see examples of intelligence in other animals, but none have ever risen to the awareness of humans.
Granted, if our explorations for other life results in the discovery of two headed 6 legged cats. It'd be worth it.
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