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Have we already been visited by aliens?

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Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#201

Post by alisonkisk »

openasocket wrote: post #123
eloff wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very common in science. New theories are usually rejected and ridiculed until/if they develop enough evidence behind them to sway people. Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades. Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded a…

It's not just science, I can think of an example from pure mathematics. Cantor's work showing the uncountability of the real numbers was derided by prominent members of the mathematical community for decades. This despite the fact that he was able to boil down his argument into a proof so simple it's taught in introductory undergraduate classes. Now, this was at a time when mathematicians were still trying to rigorou…

Cantor proved that R, the set of all reals, cannot be countable. That was never controversial. What's controversial is claiming that R (or any uncountable set) exists, as no one has rigorously proved without adding an axiom.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#202

Post by alisonkisk »

jwally wrote: post #195
deeeeplearning wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the Impact Factor of a Journal can help but it's not perfect. For example Nature and Science, generally considered the most prestigious journals in the world, have impact factors around 1000 and smaller but still quality niche Physics journals might be in the low hundreds. The bottom line is that as a Layperson it would be extremely difficult to vet the validity of any given paper let alone whole journals.…

Bookmarking that. Thank you! I think I was starting to draw that conclusion. If a claim is in the Lancet, NEMJ, Nature, etc; its probably pretty credible. If a claim is in another journal; it shouldn't have much bearing on my decision (positive or negative) since I don't have the expertise to evaluate it.

But how do you know those are credible? It's fundamentally impossible to decide from first principles. You have to choose where to put your faith. Longstanding reputation is one popular way, but old things can sell out, or can be fairy tails (like at least all but one religions).

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#203

Post by alisonkisk »

InitialLastName wrote: post #25
leblancfg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/natural world/inorganic matter/

There are also rocks that do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones

They are called "sailing" but they don't sail in the sense of this discussion.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#204

Post by sailingparrot »

networkimprov wrote: post #159
tiborsaas wrote: post #47

Prof David Kipping did a point-by-point analysis of Loeb's claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms TLDW: most likely a natural object.

After I watched that (love Dr. Kipping) I watched Event Horizon's interview with Loeb, and it raises a cpl items that Kipping didn't address (e.g. the shape is a pancake, not cigar). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D24E4F90HTo

> That Kipping didn't address (e.g. the shape is a pancake, not cigar).

Kipping does mention this in the video, but he says that the shape could be a cigar, or could be a pancake. I don't think there is hard evidence that it definitly is a pancake.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#205

Post by openasocket »

resource0x wrote: post #167
openasocket wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just science, I can think of an example from pure mathematics. Cantor's work showing the uncountability of the real numbers was derided by prominent members of the mathematical community for decades. This despite the fact that he was able to boil down his argument into a proof so simple it's taught in introductory undergraduate classes. Now, this was at a time when mathematicians were still trying to rigorou…

Bad example. Cantor's theory is controversial to this day. "Classical logic was abstracted from the mathematics of finite sets and their subsets …. Forgetful of this limited origin, one afterwards mistook that logic for something above and prior to all mathematics, and finally applied it, without justification, to the mathematics of infinite sets. This is the Fall and original sin of Cantor's set theory." -- Hermann…

I wouldn't really consider Weyl as an example of a modern day critic, considering he died in 1955. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a modern mathematician that rejects the diagonalization argument, outside of finitists, which are pretty far from the mainstream. I mean the proof that there is no bijection from a set to its power set is pretty straightforward and constructive. I'm pretty sure the proof is valid even in intuitionist logic.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#206

Post by sailingparrot »

trestenhortz wrote: post #97

It’s not aliens. Nothing can convince me that there’s any practical way to travel the distances between the stars. If you don’t agree then I think you fundamentally don’t grasp how incomprehensibly vast those distances are. I absolutely believe in life in other worlds but there’s no way to travel from star to star.

Isn't your point of view quite arrogant though?

By arrogant I mean that your POV assumes that we basically know everything (or almost everything) there is to know about space-time.

Sure there is nothing practical that we know of today, but when it took our ancestors 6 months and 50% chance of dying to cross an ocean, going to the moon or sending a probe in outer space probably seemed similarily absolutly impossible to them.

As time passes thinking that we know everything is necessarily less and less wrong, but it's hard to know how wrong we still are today.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#207

Post by jvanderbot »

jwally wrote: post #178
johnisgood wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Even PubMed is ridden with ridiculous stuff. PubMed! To give you an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068791/ Thankfully we can do our own research, see by whom it has been cited, in what journal it has been published, and so forth. You can easily tell that this is quite an unimportant and incredible one. Of course you could tell it yourself after having read it that it is nonsense.

Are there any guides / heuristics on how a layperson can evaluate technical literature? For example my mother-in-law is starting to micro-dose lithium and cited this article as evidence: https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2020/12/lithium-and-a... Which cites 19 medical journals. The website itself reeks of bullshit, but how can I tell if the journals it cites are valid or just woo?

examine.com

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#209

Post by erklik »

time0ut wrote: post #177
trestenhortz wrote: post #97

It’s not aliens. Nothing can convince me that there’s any practical way to travel the distances between the stars. If you don’t agree then I think you fundamentally don’t grasp how incomprehensibly vast those distances are. I absolutely believe in life in other worlds but there’s no way to travel from star to star.

I doubt that this was anything but a natural object. That said, our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. It may take 100k years to get there, but it could be done if we wanted to. Theoretically, sending a tiny probe within a human life time isn't that far out of reach. I don't think we can discount the general possibility based on our own capabilities, limitations, and motiv…

>our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system.

Yet we haven't sent anything. Maybe aliens are the same. Maybe they don't have the political will to send anything. Maybe they have their own climate change, or insane leaders to deal with. Or maybe not, maybe they've developed a virtual universe and are living in that instead of exploring the physical one.

I find the assumption that aliens have the same drive or desire as some humans to explore the universe rather crazy. It seems like we want a better versions from the heavens somewhere to tell us, it'll be okay, don't worry, here's the blueprints to fix all your issues. It's easily possible that aliens are opposite, wanting to focus on their issues and fix them rather than looking out to the stars for some hypothetical better version of themselves.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#210

Post by GlennS »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #64
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #35

> Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips its logic on its head: “Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” So long as there’s a chance that 1I/2017 U1 is an alien probe, we’d be fools not to pursue the idea. “If we acknowledge that ‘Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-techno…

There seems to be a giant mismatch about what side is open minded. People who think its most likely aliens think it’s closed minded to assign that low probability, presumably because we’re this tiny corner of the universe. People who think it’s most likely not aliens Think it’s closed minded to assign everything else low probability, presumably because aliens are a tiny corner of everything else. Is it a misapplicati…

I think it's more that we know human nature, and we can see that people who believe we've been visited by aliens are engaging in story telling, not science.

They're working back from the conclusion they want to be true, when they should instead start by weighing the evidence.

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