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"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the Truth" -Sherlock Holmes It seems like now might be the perfect time, for

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the Truth" -Sherlock Holmes It seems like now might be the perfect time, for the price of a single space telescope, to build an exa-scale computer capable of simulating every extreme astrophysical event. Technosignature "clues", and all probable causes could be instantly classified. It's now also possible to add gravity waves and neutrinos to the simulation ;)

krapp 7y ago
>"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the Truth" -Sherlock Holmes This axiom works in the fictional universe of Sherlock Holmes, where it's guaranteed that the protagonist will know all of the variables with perfect unbiased clarity and can, therefore, eliminate all unnecessary possibilities and solve the case. But in the real universe, one often cannot "eliminate the impossible," because one cannot always know everything that is possible, or where ones assumptions are wrong. >It seems like now might be the perfect time, for the price of a single space telescope, to build an exa-scale computer capable of simulating every extreme astrophysical event. This is a good example of what I mean. We don't know what the set of all extreme astrophysical events contains, or what their nature is (ex: dark matter and dark energy) and we're constantly discovering new events and phenomena. If we could perfectly simulate the universe in this manner, we wouldn't need to. And this is why, despite many fields of science already spending far more than 'the price of a single space telescope' to simulate everything from the Big Bang to biology and neurons to particle collisions, "instant classification of everything" isn't possible. That's just not a thing that computers can do outside of science fiction.
- ArtWomb 7y ago
  But "possible / impossible" seems in itself to be a really useful classifier! Perhaps not worthy of exa-scale computing resource allocation. When it could be put to better use in say, nuclear fusion instability prediction. And with the qualifier "possible" conditioned on "known astrophysics by humans in the early 21st Century". But still an interesting tool for likelihood candidate detection. And it still seems constrained to me at least (not a professional astronomer) by the scale of astrophysical phenomena which would be detectable here across the vast expanse of space. It could be an infinite set, certainly. But so far we have cataloged only a handful of significant sources of, in the case of gravitational wave interferometry, bursts: black holes, quasars, pulsars, neutron stars... https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/gw-sources https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/gw-sources

krapp 7y ago

>"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the Truth" -Sherlock Holmes This axiom works in the fictional universe of Sherlock Holmes, where it's guaranteed that the protagonist will know all of the variables with perfect unbiased clarity and can, therefore, eliminate all unnecessary possibilities and solve the case. But in the real universe, one often cannot "eliminate the impossible," because one cannot always know everything that is possible, or where ones assumptions are wrong. >It seems like now might be the perfect time, for the price of a single space telescope, to build an exa-scale computer capable of simulating every extreme astrophysical event. This is a good example of what I mean. We don't know what the set of all extreme astrophysical events contains, or what their nature is (ex: dark matter and dark energy) and we're constantly discovering new events and phenomena. If we could perfectly simulate the universe in this manner, we wouldn't need to. And this is why, despite many fields of science already spending far more than 'the price of a single space telescope' to simulate everything from the Big Bang to biology and neurons to particle collisions, "instant classification of everything" isn't possible. That's just not a thing that computers can do outside of science fiction.

ArtWomb 7y ago
But "possible / impossible" seems in itself to be a really useful classifier! Perhaps not worthy of exa-scale computing resource allocation. When it could be put to better use in say, nuclear fusion instability prediction. And with the qualifier "possible" conditioned on "known astrophysics by humans in the early 21st Century". But still an interesting tool for likelihood candidate detection. And it still seems constrained to me at least (not a professional astronomer) by the scale of astrophysical phenomena which would be detectable here across the vast expanse of space. It could be an infinite set, certainly. But so far we have cataloged only a handful of significant sources of, in the case of gravitational wave interferometry, bursts: black holes, quasars, pulsars, neutron stars... https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/gw-sources https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/gw-sources