5 ms·
No
by sigi45 8y ago
No
- MR4D 8y agoHow do you know - did you ask them? (the aliens)? ;)
- olivermarks 8y agoAlways amazes me how people won't acknowledge there is plenty of things we humans don't know. I didn't think this was clickbait, it's just some interesting ideas based on our limited knowledge of something, nothing pretentious or over reaching IMO
- theoh 8y agoBut consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- intended 8y agoI thought it was a play on the rule that any headline ending in a question can be answered with "no".
- crimsonalucard 8y agoWe have knowledge of probability. The probability of the interstellar object being a light sail is equal to the probability of the flying spaghetti monster existing. So in other words, the probability is not Zero. Meaning it is very much worth considering and this article is legit.
- ArchTypical 8y agoWe have knowledge of probability. The probability of the interstellar object being a light sail is equal to the probability of the characteristics matching a known light sail. That's not zero, since it's lining up. It's low enough that it's discountable by many people, to be sure, but not zero.
- crimsonalucard 8y agoRead my post. I literally said it's not zero.
- dboreham 8y agoActually it's equal to the probability of a Sperm Whale being spontaneously generated above a planet. Or a bowl of Petunias..
- ElBarto 8y agoI would say that it's near impossible to assign a probability since this is the very first extra-solar object ever detected.
- crimsonalucard 8y agoWhat's the probability that the very first extra-solar object is a light sail? Lets be real...
- ElBarto 8y agoLike many things when it comes to space: We have no clue.
- crimsonalucard 8y agoProbability allows you to say with confidence that the object cannot or is very unlikely to be certain things. For example, unlikely that the object is a sperm whale or a giant statue of liberty. That same probability applies to the light sail.
- ElBarto 8y agoThat's because we can be reasonably sure that no sperm whale is going to fly by from outer space, for obvious reasons. On the other hand, we have essentially no knowledge about what can possibly be flying around out there and thus your claim that it is extremely unlikely to be an artificial object is not based on anything but your own conviction that this is the case. Probability allows you to say something with confidence if you have information to work out the probability. If you have no information then you have no probability.
- crimsonalucard 8y agoThe same "obvious reasons" apply to the light sail. Your biases are just prevent you from seeing the logical implication.
- thaumaturgy 8y agoBut that's not what happens: proposed alien technology always approximately tracks human technological development. I'm having trouble finding it at the moment, but somewhere out there is a pretty good article that points out that even though more people are now carrying cameras than ever before, UFO sightings have basically fallen off a cliff. They rose with the advent of jet aircraft and the space age, and then fell away in the era of drones. (The ones that I found in search results weren't the one I was thinking of.) "Lightsail" is being floated as a possible explanation for this because we've recently imagined that technology. A few decades earlier, and nobody would imagine it as an explanation; a few decades later, and we'll have some other favorite new possible explanation that we can't imagine now. The article wasn't terrible, though.
- olivermarks 8y ago'proposed alien technology always approximately tracks human technological development' Or to put it another way, humans conceptualize, observe and measure based on what they currently know and the tools they have. My point again is we all to often fill the vacuum of what we don't know with 'the extent of our knowledge and experience is the extent of the entire universe'. We have no idea about what we don't know...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cliffy 8y agoClickbaited
- curtis 8y agoCentauri Dreams can be highly speculative at times but it definitely does not do clickbait. Note that the title on that article is actually "‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails". I suppose it might have been different when submitter submitted it, but that seems unlikely.
- cliffy 8y agoThe title of this submission was different when I made my previous comment. Something about aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence.
- gota 8y agoThis is a law, I think, maybe with the capital L and maybe with very few exceptions: every headline that states a yes or no question can be truthfully answered with 'no'.
- CGamesPlay 8y agoAnother very easy to apply capital L Law: It's never aliens.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mikek 8y agoBetteridge's law of headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- gota 8y agoThanks!
- tome 8y agotome's law https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17978737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17978737
- credit_guy 8y agoIn any HN thread where Betteridge’s law is invoked, tome’s law follows with probability 0.85. Anonymous law.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nikofeyn 8y agowhat are you "no"-ing?
- dang 8y agoThis low-quality subthread happened because the submitter posted the article with a tarted-up title ("Is the interstellar object Oumuamua a lightsail from an alien civilization?") We've since changed the title back. Doing that to titles is explicitly against the HN guidelines and eventually will cause an account to lose submission privileges. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html