UAP/UFO thread - Non-Human Intelligences

[ZenHalfTimeCrock]

Another one of Pasulka's publications that I enjoyed:

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

I feel like I've made this point on here before but as it seems to be back in vogue... I see a lot of people make the argument "the universe is so vast and beyond our comprehension, the odds are that there must be some other life out there."

From a purely statistical standpoint, this is actually not a very robust argument at all. It's a kind of mental trap or fallacy that intuitively feels correct, but doesn't hold water. Humans are really not very good at understanding extreme odds intuitively.

We have a sample size of one. So we cannot infer anything about the odds of life occurring without knowing intimately the mechanism through which life comes to be (which we know a bit about, but safe to say we are far from understanding fully). It could be very common, it could be rare but not so rare we won't find, but it also could be so incredibly rare that the odds of life occurring are the same order of magnitude small as the universe is large.

Put it this way, say you shuffle a deck of cards and deal it. The odds that all the cards come out in perfect order - all hearts Ace to King, then all diamonds Ace to King etc. is about 10^68. That's way more than the number of planets in the observable universe. There's a very real possibility that the odds of intelligent life occurring are at that level of magnitude. So if you shuffled a deck of truly random cards on every planet in the entire universe, and dealt it every second for the entire time the universe has existed, you'd be unlikely to see a perfect deck dealt even once.

There's this thing called the Anthropic Principle. We look around and say, "Well, we're here, so how unlikely can it possibly be? If we're here, then it must be common." But what this perspective misses is that if the conditions were different and we weren't here then we wouldn't be able to even ask that question in the first place. To enquire about the frequency of life in the universe, you necessarily need to exist to begin with. In both a universe where there is intelligent life on every planet, and a universe where we are the only ones, we would be thinking exactly the same thing - the actual probability in play has no impact on that way of thinking.

So this is the reason that, while I know it's not common to think this way at the moment, if people ask me "is there life out there?" I have to concede, the chances are there actually might not be. And I have no good evidence to suggest otherwise.

Unless of course you believe Lue Elizondo...

 

[denislawsbackheel]

Superb post

 

[Marklr]

I feel like I've made this point on here before but as it seems to be back in vogue... I see a lot of people make the argument "the universe is so vast and beyond our comprehension, the odds are that there must be some other life out there."

From a purely statistical standpoint, this is actually not a very robust argument at all. It's a kind of mental trap or fallacy that intuitively feels correct, but doesn't hold water. Humans are really not very good at understanding extreme odds intuitively.

We have a sample size of one. So we cannot infer anything about the odds of life occurring without knowing intimately the mechanism through which life comes to be (which we know a bit about, but safe to say we are far from understanding fully). It could be very common, it could be rare but not so rare we won't find, but it also could be so incredibly rare that the odds of life occurring are the same order of magnitude small as the universe is large.

Put it this way, say you shuffle a deck of cards and deal it. The odds that all the cards come out in perfect order - all hearts Ace to King, then all diamonds Ace to King etc. is about 10^68. That's way more than the number of planets in the observable universe. There's a very real possibility that the odds of intelligent life occurring are at that level of magnitude. So if you shuffled a deck of truly random cards on every planet in the entire universe, and dealt it every second for the entire time the universe has existed, you'd be unlikely to see a perfect deck dealt even once.

There's this thing called the Anthropic Principle. We look around and say, "Well, we're here, so how unlikely can it possibly be? If we're here, then it must be common." But what this perspective misses is that if the conditions were different and we weren't here then we wouldn't be able to even ask that question in the first place. To enquire about the frequency of life in the universe, you necessarily need to exist to begin with. In both a universe where there is intelligent life on every planet, and a universe where we are the only ones, we would be thinking exactly the same thing - the actual probability in play has no impact on that way of thinking.

So this is the reason that, while I know it's not common to think this way at the moment, if people ask me "is there life out there?" I have to concede, the chances are there actually might not be. And I have no good evidence to suggest otherwise.

Unless of course you believe Lue Elizondo...

The human mind does like to fantasize, though.

 

[flook]

I feel like I've made this point on here before but as it seems to be back in vogue... I see a lot of people make the argument "the universe is so vast and beyond our comprehension, the odds are that there must be some other life out there."

From a purely statistical standpoint, this is actually not a very robust argument at all. It's a kind of mental trap or fallacy that intuitively feels correct, but doesn't hold water. Humans are really not very good at understanding extreme odds intuitively.

We have a sample size of one. So we cannot infer anything about the odds of life occurring without knowing intimately the mechanism through which life comes to be (which we know a bit about, but safe to say we are far from understanding fully). It could be very common, it could be rare but not so rare we won't find, but it also could be so incredibly rare that the odds of life occurring are the same order of magnitude small as the universe is large.

Put it this way, say you shuffle a deck of cards and deal it. The odds that all the cards come out in perfect order - all hearts Ace to King, then all diamonds Ace to King etc. is about 10^68. That's way more than the number of planets in the observable universe. There's a very real possibility that the odds of intelligent life occurring are at that level of magnitude. So if you shuffled a deck of truly random cards on every planet in the entire universe, and dealt it every second for the entire time the universe has existed, you'd be unlikely to see a perfect deck dealt even once.

There's this thing called the Anthropic Principle. We look around and say, "Well, we're here, so how unlikely can it possibly be? If we're here, then it must be common." But what this perspective misses is that if the conditions were different and we weren't here then we wouldn't be able to even ask that question in the first place. To enquire about the frequency of life in the universe, you necessarily need to exist to begin with. In both a universe where there is intelligent life on every planet, and a universe where we are the only ones, we would be thinking exactly the same thing - the actual probability in play has no impact on that way of thinking.

So this is the reason that, while I know it's not common to think this way at the moment, if people ask me "is there life out there?" I have to concede, the chances are there actually might not be. And I have no good evidence to suggest otherwise.

Unless of course you believe Lue Elizondo...

That's a good argument, but is only relevant if you adhere to the principle that there is only 1 "mechanism through which life comes to be". As soon as you accept that there are (possibly many) such mechanisms, your analogy falls over.

Sticking to the deck of cards analogy, I can't do the math but I suspect that if you ignore suits, then the chances of a perfect deck (ie cards in the right order but suits ignored) increases manyfold.

 

[Blue and true]

I feel like I've made this point on here before but as it seems to be back in vogue... I see a lot of people make the argument "the universe is so vast and beyond our comprehension, the odds are that there must be some other life out there."

From a purely statistical standpoint, this is actually not a very robust argument at all. It's a kind of mental trap or fallacy that intuitively feels correct, but doesn't hold water. Humans are really not very good at understanding extreme odds intuitively.

We have a sample size of one. So we cannot infer anything about the odds of life occurring without knowing intimately the mechanism through which life comes to be (which we know a bit about, but safe to say we are far from understanding fully). It could be very common, it could be rare but not so rare we won't find, but it also could be so incredibly rare that the odds of life occurring are the same order of magnitude small as the universe is large.

Put it this way, say you shuffle a deck of cards and deal it. The odds that all the cards come out in perfect order - all hearts Ace to King, then all diamonds Ace to King etc. is about 10^68. That's way more than the number of planets in the observable universe. There's a very real possibility that the odds of intelligent life occurring are at that level of magnitude. So if you shuffled a deck of truly random cards on every planet in the entire universe, and dealt it every second for the entire time the universe has existed, you'd be unlikely to see a perfect deck dealt even once.

There's this thing called the Anthropic Principle. We look around and say, "Well, we're here, so how unlikely can it possibly be? If we're here, then it must be common." But what this perspective misses is that if the conditions were different and we weren't here then we wouldn't be able to even ask that question in the first place. To enquire about the frequency of life in the universe, you necessarily need to exist to begin with. In both a universe where there is intelligent life on every planet, and a universe where we are the only ones, we would be thinking exactly the same thing - the actual probability in play has no impact on that way of thinking.

So this is the reason that, while I know it's not common to think this way at the moment, if people ask me "is there life out there?" I have to concede, the chances are there actually might not be. And I have no good evidence to suggest otherwise.

Unless of course you believe Lue Elizondo...

First of all, brilliant post.

But I believe we exist because our planet is in a Goldilocks zone. Just the right distance from our sun. So shouldn't the question be what are the odds of another planet/rock being a similar distance from another respective solar body? I'm not a mathematician, bit given it's believed there are trillions of stars in the universe, what do we reckon the probability is of another rock being a perfect distance from a star? High? Low? Again, I'm not a mathematician but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest there may be another in it's own Goldilocks zone; and I use the term "own Goldilocks zone" because we have no way of knowing if life has flourished under slightly different conditions that brought us here; such as temperature, abundance of a certain gas, etc.

Me personally? I want life to exist elsewhere, mainly because it would be a crying shame if we are the only ones in a canvas as vast as the universe. Comparatively, we are not even a grain of sand, we are subatomic. And it would be pretty sad if we fuck it up and all we're left with us is a vast, uninhabited space of nothingness.

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

That's a good argument, but is only relevant if you adhere to the principle that there is only 1 "mechanism through which life comes to be". As soon as you accept that there are (possibly many) such mechanisms, your analogy falls over.

Sticking to the deck of cards analogy, I can't do the math but I suspect that if you ignore suits, then the chances of a perfect deck (ie cards in the right order but suits ignored) increases manyfold.

I'm not making the point that there is only one mechanism for life, or that the odds of life occurring are as infinitesimal as 10^68. I'm simply saying we don't know that this is not the case, we have no evidence that is robust enough to counter that possibility.

And until we do know, any argument as to the balance of probabilities necessarily has to be based on assumptions. But these assumptions are often subtle, they feel intuitive, and so people don't realise they're making them. An argument like that is not based on logic, it's based on a feeling. A feeling which may prove correct. But until we find evidence, I choose to defer.

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

First of all, brilliant post.

But I believe we exist because our planet is in a Goldilocks zone. Just the right distance from our sun. So shouldn't the question be what are the odds of another planet/rock being a similar distance from another respective solar body? I'm not a mathematician, bit given it's believed there are trillions of stars in the universe, what do we reckon the probability is of another rock being a perfect distance from a star? High? Low? Again, I'm not a mathematician but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest there may be another in it's own Goldilocks zone; and I use the term "own Goldilocks zone" because we have no way of knowing if life has flourished under slightly different conditions that brought us here; such as temperature, abundance of a certain gas, etc.

Me personally? I want life to exist elsewhere, mainly because it would be a crying shame if we are the only ones in a canvas as vast as the universe. Comparatively, we are not even a grain of sand, we are subatomic. And it would be pretty sad if we fuck it up and all we're left with us is a vast, uninhabited space of nothingness.

To be clear - I agree, it would be immensely sad if we were alone. I would love to find other life out there, and if we gather enough information on other planets, the type of which you mention above, then our understanding will improve (the James Webb telescope is helping us do just that and is a true scientific marvel).

I have a physics degree so I can tell you with absolute certainty we know of many planets in the Goldilocks zone you describe. Which is great, but it doesn't tell us what else is needed. Atmospheric conditions? Chemical compositions? Temperature (which is more than a factor of distance to sun)? Size of the planet? Does there need to be an amount of electrical potential in the atmosphere, like lightning storms? Or water? etc. etc.

There could realistically be a long list of things that have to be absolutely perfect for life to come about. That list could be long and precise, it could be more forgiving. I hope it is the latter, but it is just a hope.

 

[Really_here]

assume they've been mentioned already but I read Erich von Däniken's books years ago and enjoyed them.

 

[Johnny Mars Bar]

In my view, the chances of intelligent life in the universe equal to or more advanced than our own is 100%. In an infinite universe there must be infinite possibilities so it must be the case.

So, the chances of a civilisation of such advanced technical capabilities that they can reach earth must also be 100%? Maybe not, as breaking the speed of light barrier also requires infinite energy, according to Einstein at least.

My hunch is that Einstein was right, and it’s impossible no matter how much you evolve and develop your tech. Physics is physics.

They’re all out there, we just can’t hear each other yet.

So I don’t believe aliens are on earth, no. But I am entirely convinced that our neighbours are ‘out there’.