

Extraterrestrial life: I am a skeptic - jackfoxy
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/03/extraterrestrial-life-i-am-skeptic.html#more

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drunkpotato
I gave the article a once-over but don't have any comments on it. This is a
comment on another part of that page, the author description. I am not using
an ad hominem attack on his ideas; rather, I am addressing the disturbing
self-identification.

Describing yourself as a "conservative physicist" is rather dodgy. (From the
article it seems that conservative is used in the typical American political
sense, though the author says he's Czech.) It gives the impression that your
primary identity bound up in a false political dichotomy used as an adjective
(conservative) followed by a non-sequitur, the job name (physicist).
"Conservative politician" makes sense, it's identifying your primary
affiliation in your primary job of politics. "Conservative physicist" puzzles
me.

Does this mean that your scientific search for physics truths is bound up in
conservative ideology? Does it mean your conservative ideology is a result of
your search for physics truths? They are at different levels of reality; I'm
having trouble seeing how they are related.

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gizmo
He's just using the dictionary definition of "conservative". A physicist who
assumes new developments have little to no merit unless shown otherwise.
Contrast with a "progressive" physicist who comes up with a new radical
physics theory every month.

By analogy: a conservative programmer is somebody who would generally look at
tools like C++ and Java and .NET to solve his problems, because the tools are
proven and have well known pros and cons. A progressive programmer would be
more tempted to consider the language du jour.

~~~
gjm11
No, really, he isn't. He means it in the political sense. (He's a string
theorist, and whatever string theory is it really isn't "conservative" in the
sense you describe; not until it starts getting experimental evidence.)

See, e.g., [http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/01/massachusetts-brown-vs-
coa...](http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/01/massachusetts-brown-vs-coakley.html)
. (Or, if you share my opinion that what is called with "skepticism" or
"denialism" about anthropogenic global warming, depending on which side the
caller is on, is generally politically motivated, see about half the posts on
his blog.)

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jacquesm
Counterpoint:

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429140849.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429140849.htm)

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lutorm
I heard Frank Drake say that he thought of the "Drake equation" as a way of
parameterizing our ignorance, not as a way to "prove that there must be life".
Basically, it consists of a bunch of factors and for most of them we come to
the conclusion that we have no idea what the value is...

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mechanical_fish
The Drake equation is an awesome educational tool.

It leads you to think thoughts like this: The Earth is 4.6 billion years old.
Prokaryotic life is currently estimated to have formed 3.5 to 4.5 billion
years ago -- not really that long after Earth formed.

Now consider: Extrapolating from a few photos taken by the Hubble Ultra Deep
Field camera, scientists currently think that there are on the order of
hundreds of billions of _galaxies_ in the universe. Ours is an average galaxy,
with about 200 billion stars. That implies that there are at least 10^22 stars
in the universe.

In other words: For every single second that the Earth has been in existence,
there are about 70,000 stars in the universe. Maybe more.

So it's not exactly difficult to believe that life, however rare it may be,
probably exists in at least _two_ places in the universe. Though we may well
never know for sure.

~~~
jacquesm
The bigger question is whether it will ever happen that there are two
intelligences alive within overlapping light cones, allowing for
communication. That would be a lot easier than having to scour the universe
for civilizations that we missed.

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albemuth
That page messed up my eyes, what a horrible color choice

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DanielBMarkham
This was actually pretty good. The question here rests on types of beliefs.

I "believe" that extraterrestrial life exists, but I believe that in a
completely different fashion than I believe evolution, than I believe
cognitive therapy, or than I believe classical Newtonian physics. Different
types of things deserve different types of belief.

I believe ET simply because it seems more natural to believe that as mankind
learns to travel more, he keeps meeting other intelligences. This pattern has
held since we were lounging in trees on the savanna, and I expect it to
continue.

It's nowhere near being a scientific reason for believing -- no matter how
many terms you hang out there. It's an intuitive argument and somewhat
inductive, but mostly it's a religious one: the creative construct I just
shared appeals to me more than others I have heard.

