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Toss a coin (known to be non-evenly-weighted) five times. It comes up heads once. Can you now estimate the probability of the coin coming up heads? Of course yo
by nkoren 9y ago
Toss a coin (known to be non-evenly-weighted) five times. It comes up heads once. Can you now estimate the probability of the coin coming up heads? Of course you can. What you can't do is put error-bars on that estimate: you might have just seen the only "heads" that you'll see in the next ten thousand tosses. So the error bars are essentially infinite, but you can make a first-order estimate.
Analogously, we've had the capability to to detect `Oumuamua-like objects for ~5 years, and after searching for 5 years, have found one such object. That's good enough to start making first-order estimates of probabilities. Such estimates will obviously change, possibly significantly, as more observation time goes by.
Absent error bars, you can't be certain of that first-order estimate is even approximately correct. But if it's not even vaguely correct, then that means your initial "heads" observation was very, very, unlikely. Hence my conclusion is valid: either we got extraordinarily lucky in detecting `Oumuamua when we did, or Carl Sagan is wrong.