"However improbable", Sherlock Holmes is often brought up in cases like this...
That quote always rubs me the wrong way. To reach certainty through deduction you need a closed domain. Assume Holmes is 100% correct about the information he has, and he has three suspects, two of whom he ruled out. Does that mean the third did the deed? No. There may be information Holmes does not have and there is really no way for Holmes to know he does not have that information.
There is life on Mars -- JPL just doesn't want to tell us. Follow this logic: 1) two planets in habitable zone - both spontaneously cause life; 2) then many or most habitable zone planets have life; 3) Of the trillions of stars in our galaxy, there must be multitudes that have hosted intelligent life; 4) we don't hear SETI signals; 5) that means SETI must have snuffed themselves out with some super-technology; 6) erg…
Here's what I think: 1. ET life formed and vanished so quickly that they didn't even get to the stage where they generate electromagnetic signals. 2. ET life formed and got to generate EM waves, but: - they're either too far from us that we haven't detected those waves yet; - they only recently got to this stage and the signals they produce have not reached us yet; - or both. 3. ET life formed way sooner than we did;…
Earth level EM waves are indistinguishable from background noise pretty quickly thanks to the inverse square law. And we've been reducing emissions, not increasing them, as we shift to cell networks rather than one to many broadcast networks of old.
Even with microbes it would be a boring rock. Anybody who thinks they want to move there should camp in Antactica for ten years, first.
And because people settled in Antartica it's no longer the miserable experience it used to be. These are pioneers, they do things that are had, they pave the way for the rest of humanity.
There is no migration to Antarctica. Nothing done by people there makes it any easier for somebody who wants to move there, because if your application for research is rejected, you stay out or set up somewhere far away.
There is no way to state something that is non-existent is actually non-existent without a bizarre contradiction.
The whole point here is that you do not know that it is inexistent and that you cannot prove it, either. 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.
Aliens don't exist. It's total lunacy.
There is more evidence for big foot, lochness monster and vampires than there are for aliens.
Science becomes corrupted when the research focuses on finding proof of and ideal instead disproving it. There are no aliens. With the money wasted on looking for aliens we could have saved millions of lives with clean water, shelter, food and education. Scientists need to stop deluding themselves and tricking congress into funding pet projects that are so far fetched they border on fraud.
"Ancient explorers should never have ventured on ships to find new lands, for the cost of that could have been used in their countries to better serve the poor" /s
If you're taking about the European explorers - they didn't - they went looking for new trade routes to lands they already knew about. It was about commerce, not exploration. Only after someone "hit it big" (Columbus) did others follow because they realized the commercial opportunities of finding "new" places.
The Polynesians sailing into the unknown Pacific is a different case, but that was most likely (based on what I've read) a situation of "the poor" venturing out to find new lands for themselves, not well funded expeditions paid for by existing kings.
The search for meaning, for answering fundamental questions and for furthering scientific progress has a value, to blame the search for aliens for the state of the world is misguided. Perhaps there are other cuts we could make that would have a bigger impact... "Total world military expenditure rose to $1822 billion in 2018" https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2019/world-militar...
I am not blaming the "state of the world" I am saying it's pure waste to spend money on researching fantasy projects. Military spending is a strawman whataboutism. It's not about "cuts" it's about sanity. There are no aliens, no proof of aliens, nothing. These programs should not have been started in the first place. If these peoples lives are so devoid of meaning that they have to spend their lives researching fanta…
I think military spending is a fair comparison topic even if not directly addressing your point, it's often argued that it's military/space progress that trickles down into improvements for 'the rest of us', though I have my doubts about that nonetheless it provides an incentive beyond the obvious subject being addressed. I take issue with 'fantasy projects', that's what science is, to distill fact from fantasy, it the fantasy in the first instance that inspires the research that provides the answer, if you're essentially saying that we have gathered enough contrary evidence and should now abandon the search and focus on home, well, I can certainly see that perspective and have felt that way at times, but to argue that because we don't know something, we should not waste money finding out the details, well, I think the Wright brothers efforts would have been dismissed as fantasy at the time, glad it did not dissuade them.
I am not blaming the "state of the world" I am saying it's pure waste to spend money on researching fantasy projects. Military spending is a strawman whataboutism. It's not about "cuts" it's about sanity. There are no aliens, no proof of aliens, nothing. These programs should not have been started in the first place. If these peoples lives are so devoid of meaning that they have to spend their lives researching fanta…
I think military spending is a fair comparison topic even if not directly addressing your point, it's often argued that it's military/space progress that trickles down into improvements for 'the rest of us', though I have my doubts about that nonetheless it provides an incentive beyond the obvious subject being addressed. I take issue with 'fantasy projects', that's what science is, to distill fact from fantasy, it t…
>...that's what science is, to distill fact from fantasy...
There is no science being done on vampires, werewolves, dragons and all sorts of other fantasies. Aliens are more fantasy than these.
>...the Wright brothers...
Birds, bugs, even leaves were flying all around them. It was not fantasy in the least. Flying was purely a technical problem.
Aliens do not exist. Spending real money in the pursuit of pretend and non-existent things is pure waste.