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Rather than taking a position, being agnostic seems more appropriate to me. We don't know. We don't know what physics may enable, we don't know if there's othe

Rather than taking a position, being agnostic seems more appropriate to me. We don't know. We don't know what physics may enable, we don't know if there's other life out there or what capabilities it might have. I don't see any need for coming down on a particular side, nor any solid evidence for doing so.

simias 9y ago
You basically give up on science then. Maybe gravity doesn't work the way it does and it's just highly advanced aliens messing up with us. Maybe there's a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. Maybe I'm actually an alien trying to confuse you so that you don't find the truth. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  Nonsense. You make judgements based on the amount of evidence available. To simplify a bit, the more favourable evidence the more likely you think something is, and you make decisions accordingly. My point was basically arguing that you should always factor in the known limitations of your current knowledge, whereby if you know there's limitations to the knowledge you can't just assume that the knowledge is representative of how things are. > Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. What part of being agnostic about something do you think involves believing extraordinary claims??
  - simias 9y ago
    I see what you mean but unless you can argue otherwise it seems that the people who work on that stuff have "largely ruled out" this theory. I don't have enough knowledge or experience in astronomy to contradict them. You're free to disagree of course but so far your argument sounds more like a nihilistic "you can never really know anything" which leads to a logical dead end.
    - jamesrcole 9y ago
      So apparently one of the reasons it has been "largely ruled out" is the amount of power that would be required to generate the signal. Because we know that our knowledge of physics is not definitive, it is entirely possible that there are ways of exploiting physics that we aren't aware of that could produce such amounts of power. We also know that our knowledge of whether there's alien life, and, if there is, what their capabilities might be like, is very limited. We know that we know very little about what they might be able to do and why they might do it. Thus, it would be making a massive assumption to think that, just because we don't know how or why such a signal could be artificially generated, that therefore we can largely rule it out. Thus, I believe the appropriate position is being agnostic. We don't know. If we learnt more then that could change, in either direction. This argument is based on positive knowledge about the limits of what we currently know, not the nihilistic argument you reference. . A relatively-recent example that comes to mind. These days we know of many many planets outside of our solar system, but it wasn't long ago that we had not found any. I remember hearing a lot of people say that the fact that there was no evidence of such planets meant that there odds were very low. They were making the same mistake: of not factoring in the known limitations of the knowledge we had (i.e. we knew that the tools we had weren't good enough for spotting planets below a certain size/distance away from us), and assuming that the knowledge we had was representative of how things actually were.
      - simias 9y ago
        That's fair I suppose. It's true that when you consider the universe at large the scale of everything is so mind numbing that it's hard to draw the line between the likely and the extravagant.
    - ddingus 9y ago
      We don't really know anything! We do understand a lot of things, and we have degrees of confidence in said understanding, and we have a scope where confidence is high. That's all science can give us.
    - ddingus 9y ago
      Ruled out = extremely low confidence, according to our current understanding.

simias 9y ago

You basically give up on science then. Maybe gravity doesn't work the way it does and it's just highly advanced aliens messing up with us. Maybe there's a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. Maybe I'm actually an alien trying to confuse you so that you don't find the truth. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that.

jamesrcole 9y ago
Nonsense. You make judgements based on the amount of evidence available. To simplify a bit, the more favourable evidence the more likely you think something is, and you make decisions accordingly. My point was basically arguing that you should always factor in the known limitations of your current knowledge, whereby if you know there's limitations to the knowledge you can't just assume that the knowledge is representative of how things are. > Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. What part of being agnostic about something do you think involves believing extraordinary claims??
- simias 9y ago
  I see what you mean but unless you can argue otherwise it seems that the people who work on that stuff have "largely ruled out" this theory. I don't have enough knowledge or experience in astronomy to contradict them. You're free to disagree of course but so far your argument sounds more like a nihilistic "you can never really know anything" which leads to a logical dead end.
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    So apparently one of the reasons it has been "largely ruled out" is the amount of power that would be required to generate the signal. Because we know that our knowledge of physics is not definitive, it is entirely possible that there are ways of exploiting physics that we aren't aware of that could produce such amounts of power. We also know that our knowledge of whether there's alien life, and, if there is, what their capabilities might be like, is very limited. We know that we know very little about what they might be able to do and why they might do it. Thus, it would be making a massive assumption to think that, just because we don't know how or why such a signal could be artificially generated, that therefore we can largely rule it out. Thus, I believe the appropriate position is being agnostic. We don't know. If we learnt more then that could change, in either direction. This argument is based on positive knowledge about the limits of what we currently know, not the nihilistic argument you reference. . A relatively-recent example that comes to mind. These days we know of many many planets outside of our solar system, but it wasn't long ago that we had not found any. I remember hearing a lot of people say that the fact that there was no evidence of such planets meant that there odds were very low. They were making the same mistake: of not factoring in the known limitations of the knowledge we had (i.e. we knew that the tools we had weren't good enough for spotting planets below a certain size/distance away from us), and assuming that the knowledge we had was representative of how things actually were.
    - simias 9y ago
      That's fair I suppose. It's true that when you consider the universe at large the scale of everything is so mind numbing that it's hard to draw the line between the likely and the extravagant.
  - ddingus 9y ago
    We don't really know anything! We do understand a lot of things, and we have degrees of confidence in said understanding, and we have a scope where confidence is high. That's all science can give us.
  - ddingus 9y ago
    Ruled out = extremely low confidence, according to our current understanding.