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Ok. I'll say it. I know very little of physics and maths. What features need to be observed to rule out the possibility of intelligent design in terms of the pu

Ok. I'll say it. I know very little of physics and maths. What features need to be observed to rule out the possibility of intelligent design in terms of the pulse?

mc808 12y ago
Any cosmic-level communication would probably either be so simple that it could be explained as natural phenomena (given that we can't go there and study the mechanism in detail) or so complex that we don't even recognize it as containing a message. Interesting numbers like pi and the golden ratio occur so often in nature that we would incorporate them into a naturalistic explanation rather than supposing they had an intelligent origin. And there are probably still many fundamental numbers/relationships that we haven't discovered yet, so they would look like noise (as would the digits of pi if we weren't already familiar with it). Broadcasting fundamental constants wouldn't work. Likewise if they were to broadcast more complex information such as their genetic sequence. However, someone on Earth might eventually recognize a signal containing a human genetic sequence. That sort of leads up to a vague theory I have about communication: There is no way to encode information that guarantees an arbitrary intelligent being, no matter how smart, would be able to interpret it. We will have to develop a common language over time through deliberate interaction and feedback.
- classicsnoot 12y ago
  That is really interesting. It seems relevant to the Yucca Mountain puzzle. http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/ http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-...
mangamadaiyan 12y ago
What is the connection between intelligent design and the pulse?
- adeptus 12y ago
  1) If pulse = message, then proves intelligent life elsewhere 2) If elsewhere = several thousand to million+ years closer to the bigbang than Earth, then implies civilization is aprox that much older/more advanced than us. 3) If we went from horse and buggy to travelling at 20,000 km/h in space in the course of 3 centuries, to say nothing of discovering Newtonian theory all the way to quantum mechanics, then it is plausible they have even far more advanced theories (of everything?), if they are a mere few hundred years more advanced than us, nevermind if they are 10,000 or 1 million+ more years more advanced. 4) Anything after 500 years would look like magic to us. It is thus not impossible (though yes it is impossible by our incomplete quantum theories today), that they have managed to not only figure out how to travel across however many hundreds or thousands of light-years to us, but also that they've managed to figure out time-travel, whether physically or "read-only", only. 5) Once "4)" is a reality, at least half the thousands of UFOlogy "crazy" reports becomes plausible if not some variant of truth/reality (i.e. ancient aliens, space craft that appear out of nowhere, craft that can travel 10,000 miles/hour then do a 90 degree right turn, human abductions for genetic experiments/ ongoing species hybridization, etc ). In other words, humanity may have been created/started by intelligent design (or not - perhaps we really did start from monkeys) and then continued on its own via Darwinian evolution and/or accelerated along the way by our alien overlords. In either case, intelligent design (or "alteration" if only half way through) thus becomes possible As the saying goes: "If you're one step ahead, you're a genius! If you're two steps ahead, you're insane!" PS. Queue the downvoting...
  - michaelcampbell 12y ago
    The common, typical use of "Intelligent Design" is a thin veil over a deity of some sort being behind it, but your use is not. Is this intentional?
    - sp332 12y ago
      Intelligent Design doesn't imply a belief in any particular god(s) or even necessarily a supernatural being. Just that life and/or the visible universe was created according to some intelligent rules and not by random chance.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
te_platt 12y ago
I think your question is a bit backwards. What features would a pulse need to indicate it was caused with intelligent intent? These pulses have plausible (although exotic) explanations as natural events. There are people who have looked at the bursts as possible signals (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence#Gamma-ray_bursts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_int... ) but the more plausible explanation is natural.
- classicsnoot 12y ago
  Excellent point. Thank you. So i guess that leads me to the next level of questioning. What known cosmic events need to be ruled out before intelligence behind the event gets on the list of probabilities, say somewhere in the top 20?
deeviant 12y ago
What features need to be observed in order strongly link the pulse to the possibility of intelligent design? What kind of predictive power does intelligent design have in regards to the pulse? What does intelligent design have to say at all, in regards to very high energy cosmic ray bursts? Was the crux of your question regarding the statement, "Their source is a mystery," which you took as "scientists don't know something," thus intelligent design?
- classicsnoot 12y ago
  ... the crux of my question, rather the bent of my inquiry, is could this be something designed by a possibly intelligent being or group of beings? God needs no proof; absolutes are the authors of their own demise.
  - deeviant 12y ago
    Inquiry is a difficult thing, and it's often gone about in extremely ineffective ways. Asking what can or could be, is useless unless it leads to something that connected to something that is. Saying something needs no proof(and by that I simply mean a substantial amount of supporting evidence coinciding with a decided lack of evidence to the contrary) is the ultimate intellectual cop-out, although it is one that I understand. An idea, concept, person or thing which "needs no proof" is in every way identical to an infinite amount of things that could be, but that which we do not know to exist/be true. I can look around at the world and come to the rather well supported conclusion that gravity exists, even though gravity is invisible because gravity interacts with the world around us in a predictable and consistent manner. But what if I want to make a conclusion of what kind art a hypothetical alien living in a distance galaxy would make, I would be very unlikely to be correct. Put another way, let's say there is a finite of things-that-exists, and an infinite amount of things-that-do-not-exist. Let's say you put a white marble in a great big infinite pot for each thing-that-exists, and a black marble in it for each thing-that-does-not-exist, then pick a single marble. What are the chances of getting a white marble? Infinitesimally small. Coincidentally, this is the same chance some thing which "needs no proof" being true. Getting back to the original point, and sorry for the detour, but I must ask again, why do you think this cosmic ray burst says anything about the possibility of intelligent beings? Gamma Ray Bursts hit earth every day, and a great deal of them are well explained by science, it's just that if science finds something not well explained by current theories, it can't just make something up, it has to say, "I do not know why this thing is, but I will do my best to find an explanation." Of course, scientists are people too and do bad things like make up stuff, but they are very often exposed because made of stuff is very difficult to reproduce(read: impossible).
anigbrowl 12y ago
Do you mean 'could it be artificial'? Because 'intelligent design' is often used as a shorthand for the idea that the universe was created by a God, especially the Christian one, but I don't get the sense that your question is religiously motivated.
- classicsnoot 12y ago
  If i had been referencing the desperate attempt of a bunch of pseudo-scientists to cover up for the fact that they have had no clothes for centuries, i would have capitalized the 'i' and the 'd'. Edit 01: Artificial bugs me. Who are we to draw a line between artificial and natural? It may seem unlikely, but everything we know of as 'natural' may just be really well crafted machines that were made to iterate on their own. That is why i shied away from 'artificial' or 'alien'. With the possibility of simulated universes, i feel like there is a lot more possibility on the table as it were.

Ok. I'll say it. I know very little of physics and maths. What features need to be observed to rule out the possibility of intelligent design in terms of the pulse?

mc808 12y ago

Any cosmic-level communication would probably either be so simple that it could be explained as natural phenomena (given that we can't go there and study the mechanism in detail) or so complex that we don't even recognize it as containing a message. Interesting numbers like pi and the golden ratio occur so often in nature that we would incorporate them into a naturalistic explanation rather than supposing they had an intelligent origin. And there are probably still many fundamental numbers/relationships that we haven't discovered yet, so they would look like noise (as would the digits of pi if we weren't already familiar with it). Broadcasting fundamental constants wouldn't work. Likewise if they were to broadcast more complex information such as their genetic sequence. However, someone on Earth might eventually recognize a signal containing a human genetic sequence. That sort of leads up to a vague theory I have about communication: There is no way to encode information that guarantees an arbitrary intelligent being, no matter how smart, would be able to interpret it. We will have to develop a common language over time through deliberate interaction and feedback.

classicsnoot 12y ago
That is really interesting. It seems relevant to the Yucca Mountain puzzle. http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/ http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-...

mangamadaiyan 12y ago

What is the connection between intelligent design and the pulse?

adeptus 12y ago
1) If pulse = message, then proves intelligent life elsewhere 2) If elsewhere = several thousand to million+ years closer to the bigbang than Earth, then implies civilization is aprox that much older/more advanced than us. 3) If we went from horse and buggy to travelling at 20,000 km/h in space in the course of 3 centuries, to say nothing of discovering Newtonian theory all the way to quantum mechanics, then it is plausible they have even far more advanced theories (of everything?), if they are a mere few hundred years more advanced than us, nevermind if they are 10,000 or 1 million+ more years more advanced. 4) Anything after 500 years would look like magic to us. It is thus not impossible (though yes it is impossible by our incomplete quantum theories today), that they have managed to not only figure out how to travel across however many hundreds or thousands of light-years to us, but also that they've managed to figure out time-travel, whether physically or "read-only", only. 5) Once "4)" is a reality, at least half the thousands of UFOlogy "crazy" reports becomes plausible if not some variant of truth/reality (i.e. ancient aliens, space craft that appear out of nowhere, craft that can travel 10,000 miles/hour then do a 90 degree right turn, human abductions for genetic experiments/ ongoing species hybridization, etc ). In other words, humanity may have been created/started by intelligent design (or not - perhaps we really did start from monkeys) and then continued on its own via Darwinian evolution and/or accelerated along the way by our alien overlords. In either case, intelligent design (or "alteration" if only half way through) thus becomes possible As the saying goes: "If you're one step ahead, you're a genius! If you're two steps ahead, you're insane!" PS. Queue the downvoting...
- michaelcampbell 12y ago
  The common, typical use of "Intelligent Design" is a thin veil over a deity of some sort being behind it, but your use is not. Is this intentional?
  - sp332 12y ago
    Intelligent Design doesn't imply a belief in any particular god(s) or even necessarily a supernatural being. Just that life and/or the visible universe was created according to some intelligent rules and not by random chance.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

te_platt 12y ago

I think your question is a bit backwards. What features would a pulse need to indicate it was caused with intelligent intent? These pulses have plausible (although exotic) explanations as natural events. There are people who have looked at the bursts as possible signals (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence#Gamma-ray_bursts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_int... ) but the more plausible explanation is natural.

classicsnoot 12y ago
Excellent point. Thank you. So i guess that leads me to the next level of questioning. What known cosmic events need to be ruled out before intelligence behind the event gets on the list of probabilities, say somewhere in the top 20?

deeviant 12y ago

What features need to be observed in order strongly link the pulse to the possibility of intelligent design? What kind of predictive power does intelligent design have in regards to the pulse? What does intelligent design have to say at all, in regards to very high energy cosmic ray bursts? Was the crux of your question regarding the statement, "Their source is a mystery," which you took as "scientists don't know something," thus intelligent design?

classicsnoot 12y ago
... the crux of my question, rather the bent of my inquiry, is could this be something designed by a possibly intelligent being or group of beings? God needs no proof; absolutes are the authors of their own demise.
- deeviant 12y ago
  Inquiry is a difficult thing, and it's often gone about in extremely ineffective ways. Asking what can or could be, is useless unless it leads to something that connected to something that is. Saying something needs no proof(and by that I simply mean a substantial amount of supporting evidence coinciding with a decided lack of evidence to the contrary) is the ultimate intellectual cop-out, although it is one that I understand. An idea, concept, person or thing which "needs no proof" is in every way identical to an infinite amount of things that could be, but that which we do not know to exist/be true. I can look around at the world and come to the rather well supported conclusion that gravity exists, even though gravity is invisible because gravity interacts with the world around us in a predictable and consistent manner. But what if I want to make a conclusion of what kind art a hypothetical alien living in a distance galaxy would make, I would be very unlikely to be correct. Put another way, let's say there is a finite of things-that-exists, and an infinite amount of things-that-do-not-exist. Let's say you put a white marble in a great big infinite pot for each thing-that-exists, and a black marble in it for each thing-that-does-not-exist, then pick a single marble. What are the chances of getting a white marble? Infinitesimally small. Coincidentally, this is the same chance some thing which "needs no proof" being true. Getting back to the original point, and sorry for the detour, but I must ask again, why do you think this cosmic ray burst says anything about the possibility of intelligent beings? Gamma Ray Bursts hit earth every day, and a great deal of them are well explained by science, it's just that if science finds something not well explained by current theories, it can't just make something up, it has to say, "I do not know why this thing is, but I will do my best to find an explanation." Of course, scientists are people too and do bad things like make up stuff, but they are very often exposed because made of stuff is very difficult to reproduce(read: impossible).

anigbrowl 12y ago

Do you mean 'could it be artificial'? Because 'intelligent design' is often used as a shorthand for the idea that the universe was created by a God, especially the Christian one, but I don't get the sense that your question is religiously motivated.

classicsnoot 12y ago
If i had been referencing the desperate attempt of a bunch of pseudo-scientists to cover up for the fact that they have had no clothes for centuries, i would have capitalized the 'i' and the 'd'. Edit 01: Artificial bugs me. Who are we to draw a line between artificial and natural? It may seem unlikely, but everything we know of as 'natural' may just be really well crafted machines that were made to iterate on their own. That is why i shied away from 'artificial' or 'alien'. With the possibility of simulated universes, i feel like there is a lot more possibility on the table as it were.