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Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#21

Post by brk »

daveslash wrote: post #12
jl6 wrote: post #5

What seems amazing is that it isn’t covered in more sand and sediment. It would take such a small thickness of covering to hide it from view forever.

I wonder if it could have gone through cycles of buried/uncovered? I don't know anything about the waters off Florida other than they experience periodic hurricane events.

Very likely. I am in the west coast of Florida, and storms can really shift things around quite a bit. Passages between some of the small islands can open or close after a decent storm. Sandbars come and go, etc.

The waters tend to be a little deeper on the east coast, which would tend to lessen the effects of large shifts, but over a timespan of nearly 40 years it is very likely the piece had been covered over at some point.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#22

Post by realgeniushere »

_yb2s wrote: post #16
skissane wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is true, doesn’t it follow that there are (very rare) universes where unlikely events happen so often that anyone in such a universe would effectively observe a different probability distribution of events? The thing is, if the theory is true, how do we know we are not in such a universe? We can say it is extremely unlikely because they are very rare - but we say it is “unlikely” and “rare” because we assume th…

If you insist on using old fashioned logic to reason when in a probabilistic universe where that kind of reasoning is only an approximation, you can say that the universes you are talking about don't exist. They are such a small fraction of possible universes, that you can safely 'know' you aren't in any of them without checking.

This comment misses the point and just plays with the meaning of “know”. Not that epistemology isn’t interesting, but parent was referring to absolute certainty (contingent on your senses being accurate, of course).

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#23

Post by xboxnolifes »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #13
_yb2s wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen very often. The odds of a specific event like this are astronomically small, but there is an even more astronomically large number of different possible unlikely events. The sheer number of possible events is orders of magnitude greater than the odds of individual unlikely events, causing them to occur regularly. The universe is a really weird place, wher…

Like separate rolls of a single dice, I thought the occurrence of one event has no affect on the probability of another?

What are the odds of you winning the lottery? Now think of how many people win the lottery every year.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#24

Post by skissane »

realgeniushere wrote: post #22
_yb2s wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you insist on using old fashioned logic to reason when in a probabilistic universe where that kind of reasoning is only an approximation, you can say that the universes you are talking about don't exist. They are such a small fraction of possible universes, that you can safely 'know' you aren't in any of them without checking.

This comment misses the point and just plays with the meaning of “know”. Not that epistemology isn’t interesting, but parent was referring to absolute certainty (contingent on your senses being accurate, of course).

Not sure which parent you mean, but if you mean my comment, I wasn't talking about absolute certainty at all. Rather, I was attempting a reductio ad absurdum against theories which talk about the probability of different universes within a multiverse. Nothing I said is an argument against probabilistic reasoning/knowledge limited to the confines of this universe only.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#25

Post by [deleted] »

_yb2s wrote: post #17
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like separate rolls of a single dice, I thought the occurrence of one event has no affect on the probability of another?

Indeed, but I think you might be misunderstanding what I said. Think of the universe as a nearly infinite number of dice rolls all independent and in parallel. Any possible rare combination of dice rolls will actually be happening constantly.

[deleted]

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#26

Post by gerdesj »

_yb2s wrote: post #6
wwwtyro wrote: post #2

The odds of this seem astronomically small.

Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen very often. The odds of a specific event like this are astronomically small, but there is an even more astronomically large number of different possible unlikely events. The sheer number of possible events is orders of magnitude greater than the odds of individual unlikely events, causing them to occur regularly. The universe is a really weird place, wher…

Sir Terry Pratchett often declaimed in his novels that "Million to one chances happen one times in ten".

The statistical terms used are completely wrong but the intention is clear: weird shit happens.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#28

Post by Alan_Dillman »

vikingerik wrote: post #14
wwwtyro wrote: post #2

The odds of this seem astronomically small.

The odds of this group of people, on this day, finding this piece of the shuttle, are of course astronomically small. The odds of some group out of millions of people, on some day out of ten thousand since the incident, finding some piece of debris out of thousands, are considerably higher. This is the multiple-endpoints fallacy. You only notice the events that happened after the fact, you never notice everything tha…

Exactly.

This is why it is dumb when people say "The odds against life arising at random is astronomical."

It did happen, therefore, the convoluted path to life wasn't what the skeptic speaker thinks it was.

Multiple-endpoints fallacy and overly anthropomorphizing reality also makes a fool out of the Drake Equation, and the idea of "The Great Filter" is dumb too.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#29

Post by gleenn »

wwwtyro wrote: post #2

The odds of this seem astronomically small.

How far did the Challenger blow up off the coast? Maybe not that far. I bet the trajectory also could possibly bias towards the sea in case of an emergency for a less dramatic landing. Wouldn't want a shuttle landing on a building either obviously.
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