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'may', 'tantalizing hope', 'perhaps'... What about 'maybe not', 'doubtful', 'perhaps not'... is that any less scientific? Imagine applying for a $1B grant to

'may', 'tantalizing hope', 'perhaps'... What about 'maybe not', 'doubtful', 'perhaps not'... is that any less scientific? Imagine applying for a $1B grant to study the possibility of a designer? What would be more dramatic, discovering there was a creator, or finding some bacteria on mars? Not that the discovery of life on Mars or any other place for that matter would alter truth in the slightest.

Strilanc 13y ago
- How is a one billion dollar grant going to make progress on discovering if there was a creator? - How much evidence do we expect to get for a billion dollars? A decibel? A hundred decibels? - Would sufficient evidence either way come about anyways, through other human endeavors?
- ygmelnikova 13y ago
  Now apply that same logic to the pursuit of life on other worlds.
  - Strilanc 13y ago
    - I don't have the expertise to list off the progress, but a lot of questions about water seem to have been answered. We're ahead of where we started, which is more than I'd expect from a billion dollars spent on searching for a designer (well, to be fair, I'd expect it to help progress in biology; but we could just focus the money on that and do better). - Assuming we started at 1:1 odds for long-term presence of water, and moved to 100:1 odds, that's twenty decibels on that particular question (and there are others). Again, way higher than I'd expect on designer research. - Probably not. I'm not sure I why you said to apply the same logic to the pursuit of life on other worlds. We're clearly discovering things. Plenty of people say the value of discovering those things is low, but I didn't mention value-of-information.