Month: September 2022

COEVOLUTION. “Life has evolved in conjunction with the rest of the universe. We are an embodiment of the same laws that have shaped the universe and our imagination is intimately correlated to it. Consciously or subconsciously we find that we converge towards these laws.” Page 7, Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information" "By Vlatko Vedral. https://lnkd.in/gH7NMvV View in LinkedIn

Cross sections through geologic time posted randomly in vertical orientation. View in LinkedIn

LIMITED SEARCHING. “If we analogously relax Fact A and assert merely that there are no alien machines in the solar system today, then its truth becomes quite uncertain because we have not done much searching for such machines.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

THE DETRACTORS. “Other variants on "Fact A" are the "Great Silence" of Brin (1983) and the "Eerie Silence" of Davies (2011), both of which refer to the more general fact that we have not yet found any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life in the universe.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

ASSUMED THOROUGHNESS. “The term "silence" in the these expressions is sometimes interpreted to mean that we have established that there are no obvious radio or other communicative signals to be found in space—i.e., that we have conducted a thorough search for signals, and concluded that there are very few or none of them.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

THE FACTS. “However, this is not the case. Despite the passage of nearly 60 years since the first radio SETI searches, very little actual searching has been done, compared to the amount needed to rule out the presence of a even a large number of "loud" beacons.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

PULL-THE-PLUGGERS. “Perceptions to the contrary abound, as many authors use the "failure" of SETI to date as evidence that we should stop looking, that we need to move to new search strategies, or that we should reevaluate the fundamental assumptions of the field.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

SIZE OF THE TASK. “Quantifying the amount of searching that has been done should help to dispel this misconception. Tarter et al. (2010), for instance, have estimated that ruling out the existence of radio beacons based on the amount of searching to date is akin to basing one's opinion on the existence of marine life on dipping a single drinking glass into the ocean and seeing if it contains a fish.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

SEARCH NULLS. “Searches for first examples of hypothesized physical phenomena proceed through a series of progressively stringent null results. The thoroughness and speed of a search are typically quantified by parameterizing the search space and calculating the volume explored.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

THE RATIONALE. “Thus, when a well-designed and -executed program "fails" to find the sought-after phenomenon, that null result can be expressed as the lower surface of the explored volume, which represents a new upper limit that future experiments can improve upon. Once the entire parameter space a phenomenon could occupy has been excluded by experiment, we can speak of the null result as being dispositive: the sought-after phenomenon does not exist.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn