251–260 of 268 posts
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Things may get pretty shitty for them, but if I could wager on such a thing, I'd wager on the species surviving.
who would you collect from if you wagered against, and how would you take it with you?
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But they are looking for it. Science demands evidence for your claims. If x could be due to a, but also b, c, d, maybe e, you can't say x = a until you've proved that x ≠ b, c, d, e.
"However improbable", Sherlock Holmes is often brought up in cases like this...
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it's not even entirely a given that we are the first, as it's unlikely any evidence of a small tribe of sentient dino villagers for example would persist to the present day.
Like a petal on the flower, or an apple on the tree, it's likely that planets fruit at about the same time.
Even if each of those events were actually inevitable, planet size, radiation received from host star, exact chemical makeup of atmosphere/oceans and any number of other variables could affect the time scale for a planet to fruit.
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The biological plausible explanation is that there simply has not been enough time for other civilizations to form up. It took us 4 billion years to reach civilization from primordial goo. Apparently not many planets remain habitable that long. It does not matter if you have a trillion planets if they don't remain stable long enough.
In all the vastness of the universe, “we were the first” is a stupendously implausible hypothesis compared to “we were the only”.
If it is difficult for civilizations to develop, then our existence is so implausible already that being the first is not such a leap.
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What is your evidence that there are no aliens, then? Proving a negative in a virtually infinite universe looks like an uphill struggle, don't you think?
Exactly. You can't prove a negative, so there are no aliens. There is not a single shred of evidence _ever_ found to support one iota of research funding. It's science fiction run amok.
That's self-contradicting.
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I thought life on earth favoring a particular chirality was supposed to be primarily because of like common ancestors and stuff. If you flipped the chiralities of everything, would stuff no longer work? Or, I guess really my question is, would it be nearly impossible for life on another planet to use the opposite chirality instead?
The test is not for right chirality, it's for any preferred chirality. Non-life is half and half at random.
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Exactly. You can't prove a negative, so there are no aliens. There is not a single shred of evidence _ever_ found to support one iota of research funding. It's science fiction run amok.
> You can't prove a negative, so there are no aliens. That's self-contradicting.
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> You can't prove a negative, so there are no aliens. That's self-contradicting.
There is no way to state something that is non-existent is actually non-existent without a bizarre contradiction.
You only need to find a single instance of aliens to prove that aliens exist.
You need to carefully analyse the whole universe and not find anything to prove that they do not. Proving a negative is hard.