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There Have Probably Been Aliens

nytimes.com

131–140 of 163 posts

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#131
post #9

"In other words, given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational." This is terribly silly. It reminds me of the Onion talks: "Step 1: Devise an idea to create a car that runs on compost. Step 2: Create the car. We’ve already compl…

73 bits is massive. Considering the variability of conditions on each planet, you will get into ridiculously contrieved scenarios of what could be needed to start life way before you come even close to that number.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely hypothetical: where N is the fewest number of bits for a successful virus. There could be 10 different ways to make a virus N bits long. There could be 1000 ways to do it in N+1 bits, and a billion ways in N+2. The relationship between how many possible successful viruses exist to number of bits doesn't have to scale by any obvious pattern.

I don't see why adding more bits would make the program significantly more likely. Yes in theory that is possible, but I don't think it's relevant.

Knowing the size N of the smallest possible virus doesn't tell us much about the probability of a given random string being a virus (as long as it's longer than N)

There could be a magic threshold where if you're shorter than that you don't work.

For ex, maybe a valid file has to be at least 100 bytes, or the OS can't treat it as a file. Any random file 100bytes or longer could have a 10% chance of being a virus (the actual number depends on how the os works).

This would mean a really high chance of randomness creating a virus, even though N is 100.

The probability of vitality depends on the specifics of the operating system, and we can't infer it by looking at the size of the smallest possible virus.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#133
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . The events that took place on earth could still be one in a billion, or they could be one in an incomprehensibly high number. I disagree with this. It seems that, from what happened to other planets on the solar system, that nothing happened on Earth too much out of the ordinary. Mars had a similar story (except for the whole Moon coming out of a giant collision), and had water. But maybe it was too small to keep…

It's not about how probable are these conditions but given these conditions how probable is that life will appear.

What does it even mean? Why would it not appear when the necessary conditions arise?

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#134
post #9

"In other words, given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational." This is terribly silly. It reminds me of the Onion talks: "Step 1: Devise an idea to create a car that runs on compost. Step 2: Create the car. We’ve already compl…

Your assumption that the odds of abiogenesis is given by `~1/2^n, where n is the complexity in bits' is utterly, completely false. Statistical mechanical entropy and information theoretical entropy ('complexity in bits') are not the same quantities! But even if they were, your expression would still be incorrect because living system are definitionally not at equilibrium - so equilibrium statistical mechanics (whose…

I think you're misunderstanding the grandparent comment. Your argument about convection rolls and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics is an excellent argument that the probability of abiogenesis is much, much higher than the probability of some organic molecules in solution spontaneously assembling themselves into a fully-functioning smallest-possible bacteria. However, that's not what the statement that "the odds of abiogenesis are ~1/2^n" is saying.

Saying that "the odds of abiogenesis are ~1/2^n" isn't an assertion of fact, it's merely defining n = -log2(probability of abiogenesis). (Of course, the probability of abiogenesis occurring in any particular body of water is not a constant, it depends on conditions; but all the oceans on Earth are only 80 binary orders of magnitude bigger than a single mL [1], so n for a lab experiment and n for the entire Earth can't be more than a couple decimal orders of magnitude different, so it's immaterial.)

In other words, your argument about convection rolls is an excellent argument that the n for abiogenesis is much, much lower than -log2(probability of organic molecules in solution spontaneously assembling themselves into bacteria), which grandparent claimed is ~1 million. I have no reason to believe ~1 million is accurate, but I don't care, because grandparent has convinced me that the upper bound is many orders of magnitude greater than 73. Your argument that n could be much less than that upper bound is convincing, but unless you're arguing it's so much lower that it isn't much greater than 73, grandparent's counter to the paper still holds.

[1]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log2((volume+of+ocean+i...)

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#135
post #126
post #9

"In other words, given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational." This is terribly silly. It reminds me of the Onion talks: "Step 1: Devise an idea to create a car that runs on compost. Step 2: Create the car. We’ve already compl…

I don't know enough to know if the range you specify is right, but I agree that it is silly to say 10^-22 is a ridiculously small number. For one thing, when talking about the size of probabilities, we should talk about the size of the exponent. -22 is not a ridiculously small number. People base the idea that there should be other life in the universe on the fact that life developed at least once, which is here on e…

AIUI the term "observation" in quantum physics has absolutely nothing to do with life.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#136
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know enough to know if the range you specify is right, but I agree that it is silly to say 10^-22 is a ridiculously small number. For one thing, when talking about the size of probabilities, we should talk about the size of the exponent. -22 is not a ridiculously small number. People base the idea that there should be other life in the universe on the fact that life developed at least once, which is here on e…

AIUI the term "observation" in quantum physics has absolutely nothing to do with life.

In some interpretations of quantum mechanics, it actually has:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation

More precisely, these interpretations require consciousness, but we can take that consciousness requires life.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#138
post #129
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quantity of interest in any probability problem can always be re-cast as the conditional probability of the event given that the person asking the question exists, which is necessarily 1.

Pardon me, but I'm not sure what you mean by quantity of interest. If the quantity of interest can always be re-cast as a value which is necessarily 1, isn't "quantity of interest" the same for all probability problems?

Sorry, I wasn't very clear.

> the authors essentially claim to know the probability of their own existence

The "quantity of interest" is the probability of aliens, but not the probability of aliens in all possible worlds, but rather the probability of aliens in this world. In this world, the probability that the authors exist is 1.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#140
post #28

I enjoy these quasi statistical arguments. Can anyone remind me what is the probability that God exists, or that we live in a computer simulation?

Define God?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuji_(philosophy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purusha

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