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A long time ago, I heard an analogous statement about software bugs: Testing can only disclose the presence of bugs. Never their absence. So it's impossible t

A long time ago, I heard an analogous statement about software bugs: Testing can only disclose the presence of bugs. Never their absence. So it's impossible to prove there isn't any life beyond Earth.

Koshkin 3y ago
And the intelligent life will likely be bugs.
asynchronous 3y ago
Conversely it’s impossible to prove there is life beyond earth. PROOF is a high standard. All our existing evidence seems to point to the fact that we are indeed alone in the universe.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  > it’s impossible to prove there is life beyond earth. why do you say that? If SETI finds unambiguous signals, and they're independently confirmed several times, why would that not be "proof"? As for the last sentence, the less said the better. "All our existing evidence" is pathetically small.
- cafeinux 3y ago
  Our lack of evidence tends to suggest that we are alone. But it's a mere conjecture. A single counterexample would invalidate it.
ksherlock 3y ago
One strategy for estimating bugs is to intentionally seed your code with bugs and then see how many of them the QA team find. ie, if the QA team identifies 5/10 intentional bugs and 20/?? true bugs you can estimate there are 40 true bugs (20 still unidentified). Likewise, we just need to seed other star systems with intelligent life and see how many our astronomers can find.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  There's that "just" word again /s
- gls2ro 3y ago
  I think this could be a maybe a way to assess the efficiency of the QA team, but I am skeptic of using it as a metric about estimating the number of bugs. This is because QA is there to help with reducing the probability that an important bug will happen to a real user. But the total number of bugs a system have is a sum of bugs found by developers + bugs found by QA + bugs found by average users + bugs found by power users + bugs found at scale/big numbers. The more we move to the right of this sum the hard is to replicate conditions to find bugs and so we move from finding to probabilities and risk management.
- cafeinux 3y ago
  For the moment, astronomers found 0 life forms out the 42 we seeded. Unfortunately, 0/42 is equal to 0/n where n ∈ ℕ, so we don't gained much knowledge on the matter so far.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

Koshkin 3y ago

And the intelligent life will likely be bugs.

asynchronous 3y ago

Conversely it’s impossible to prove there is life beyond earth. PROOF is a high standard. All our existing evidence seems to point to the fact that we are indeed alone in the universe.

AlbertCory 3y ago
> it’s impossible to prove there is life beyond earth. why do you say that? If SETI finds unambiguous signals, and they're independently confirmed several times, why would that not be "proof"? As for the last sentence, the less said the better. "All our existing evidence" is pathetically small.
cafeinux 3y ago
Our lack of evidence tends to suggest that we are alone. But it's a mere conjecture. A single counterexample would invalidate it.

ksherlock 3y ago

One strategy for estimating bugs is to intentionally seed your code with bugs and then see how many of them the QA team find. ie, if the QA team identifies 5/10 intentional bugs and 20/?? true bugs you can estimate there are 40 true bugs (20 still unidentified). Likewise, we just need to seed other star systems with intelligent life and see how many our astronomers can find.

AlbertCory 3y ago
There's that "just" word again /s
gls2ro 3y ago
I think this could be a maybe a way to assess the efficiency of the QA team, but I am skeptic of using it as a metric about estimating the number of bugs. This is because QA is there to help with reducing the probability that an important bug will happen to a real user. But the total number of bugs a system have is a sum of bugs found by developers + bugs found by QA + bugs found by average users + bugs found by power users + bugs found at scale/big numbers. The more we move to the right of this sum the hard is to replicate conditions to find bugs and so we move from finding to probabilities and risk management.
cafeinux 3y ago
For the moment, astronomers found 0 life forms out the 42 we seeded. Unfortunately, 0/42 is equal to 0/n where n ∈ ℕ, so we don't gained much knowledge on the matter so far.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]