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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

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

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

ANALOGY. “Wright et al. (2014) noted that his assumption fails for the only technological species we have an example of: humanity. The ratio of the timescales for humans to cross the Earth to the age of the technology that enables such travel is small: today for aircraft, it is roughly 10(-4 ) days over decades, but even a thousand years ago it was under 10(-3) years over millennia. Despite this, most spots on Earth show no obvious signs of humans or our technology. “ https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

PREMISE TO “FACT A”: “One of the central assumptions behind the significance of "Fact A" to SETI is that any spacecraft arriving in the solar system would result in the permanent settlement of the Earth.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

FERMI PARADOX. “A particularly trenchant formulation of this inconsistency is that of Hart (1975), who dubs the fact that there are not aliens on Earth now "Fact A." This fact is supposedly surprising because the time for an exponentially growing population to travel to every star in the Galaxy under even rather conservative assumptions of the feasibility of interstellar travel is short compared to the age of the Galaxy. Many have used this and similar articulations of the Fermi Paradox to argue that the entire endeavor of SETI is a "waste of time".” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

SUPERORGANISM. “It is argued here that bacteria are essentially modular organisms where the bacterial cell, microcolony, and macrocolony are modules of different levels of complexity analogous to modules of macroorganisms.” https://lnkd.in/dS-m-D7 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends focused on an interesting article about how thoroughly we have searched for signs of life in the cosmos, concluding that our searches have been minuscule compared to the search space needed to be explored. And this article only deals with searches for advanced life forms capable of emanating obvious signals, rather than biological life forms, where the search history has been even more woeful. We are left with the obvious question: why has mankind been so willfully uncurious? View in LinkedIn

UPPER LIMIT ISSUE. “However, at the beginning of a search, typical upper limits are far from dispositive and can even seem absurdly high. For instance, the first upper limits on the flux of solar neutrinos were much higher than the expected flux, and indeed a reviewer of the paper describing the experiment amusingly commented:” 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