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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

>We cannot learn anything about aliens until we find them"

>The above statement might sound reasonable, and intuitive, but it lacks justification. Standing on its own, it’s just a piece of dogma.

well let's try the following statement then

1. Most things that are learned about are observed to exist before being studied.

There are rare items of knowledge that are cogitated upon first and found to exist later, but in general things that you learn about will be like most of the things that you learn about - they will be observed as existing and then be studied.

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> Most things that are learned about are observed to exist before being studied.

Is this true at this point for physics and astronomy? I have no idea what the relative proportion of discoveries are "this was predicted to exist and we found it!" vs "whoa this is totally unexpected." I suspect that there's also a ton of things in the middle, where an anomalous reading that doesn't directly show the existence of something but does show the deficiency of a theory then leads to corrections in the theory which then result in another cascade of predictions of existence from the theory.

All of engineering is determining what could exist independently of anybody having seen it before or not. If your statement were true, we would live in a very boring world.

But anyway, speculation based on probabilities over distributions that we don't know is useless. We can only speculate based on knowledge we have.

A lot of math is done by working on conjectures that take time to prove or disprove.

Conjectures in math are based on observations and intuition gained from related observable things. Specifically they seem to be statements about properties of things already known.

Allowing the word "related" to do a lot of heavy lifting, I'd say that it is the same for aliens.

No conjectures in math are called theorems and they are based off of made up assumptions called axioms. Whether the axiom is true from an observational standpoint is irrelevant to math.

For example euclidean geometry is observably not true. Einsteins General relativity shows that the observable geometry of our universe is not euclidean. Yet the field of euclidean geometry is still intensely studied and a valid mathematical field.

I should be getting paid for this.

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