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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

>What I'm saying is that there will probably be

That doesn't follow. We can always say there's things we don't know, sure, but it's not reasonable to take that as a justification for saying "Therefore maybe X", with the implication that X is somehow likely, or therefore even possible in reality. Maybe fairies. Maybe whatever. It's not a technique that can lead you to any particular conclusion. It certainly can't tell you anything about the probability of something.

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It seems awfully parochial to assume the aliens have to be far away.

There could be plenty right nearby, or right here. We don't even know what is on the sea floor, or not even very deep underground. If trees are thinking, we do not know it. Something that lives a thousand times our speed would be invisible.

If they don't interact with E-M fields, we could walk right through them, or they us. Our ground wouldn't hold them up against gravity, but they could have ground of their own, with a surface a thousand miles up, or down.

I'm not assuming anything, and I'm not the one assigning high probabilities to things conjured entirely from the imagination. That looks a lot more like making assumptions to me.

I enjoy science fiction, science fantasy and even outright fantasy too. It's fun to imagine other worlds, or how our world might have been, or might once be. Imagination is an important part of our lives; but reality consists of what is, and it doesn't care about our preferences and dreams.

In reply to ConstantVigil, who's reply got flagged/dead almost instantly.

>The basis of all creation in regards to humanities progress all starts with the beginnings of a hope or dream...

I agree, this is absolutely true, that's why I said it's so important. The fact is though that only a minuscule tiny fraction of the things ever imagined actually turn out to be true. In fact most of the time we have to be smacked repeatedly in the face by reality before we get it through our skulls that the way we imagine things are isn't the case. I'm all for keeping an open mind.

However imagining things we'd like to be true, and then constructing spurious justifications for think they are probable in the absence of any reason or evidence, is not keeping an open mind. It's the exact opposite.

(If you click on the time-posted field of a dead message, there's an option to "vouch" for it, allowing you to reply directly. Please use it sparingly.)

There's an argument that aliens are more likely near us than far away: if life on our planet got started via panspermia, then closer planets are more likely to have been seeded with our distant ancestors as well.

I love the idea of panspermia, it’s fascinating, but I think the evidence is against it. If life evolved elsewhere we would expect it to have undergone significant evolutionary development before arriving on Earth, but that does not seem to be the case. The earliest life forms on Earth were incredibly primitive in terms of their molecular construction and biochemical pathways.

The age old discussion of "if a tree fell in a forest and nobody heard it, did it really fall?"

> did it really fall?

It's did it make a sound, and revolves around the nature of what a "sound" is. The tree certainly fell.

Indeed. Is the "sound" the brain's interpretation of the vibrations and pressure waves perceived by the eardrum and auditory nerves, or is the sound those vibrations and waves in and of themselves, with no further "processing" necessary for it to be called "sound"? Perhaps we need another new word involved to differentiate the one from the other in discussing "sound"?

Ya but we do know the universe exists without any fucking clue how or why. So, it seems fine to let your mind wander a bit.

Of course, that's an important feature of the way we relate to the world, but that doesn't make whatever we imagine likely or probable as claimed.

That's a sensible position. However, the GP's remark first asserts that our understanding of physical reality is incomplete, which is not unreasonable given that we have not yet reconciled classical and quantum physics. Further, quantum weirdness has strongly underlined the inadequacy of our intuitive perception of 'reality'; it entirely confounds it. It is possible that spatial expanse (distance), for example, is a secondary order phenomena and a side-effect of our being sentient at this scale of things. Bell [1] actually remarked that in his view the reason Einstein resisted the Bohr model was that he was "very much attached to space-time".

[1]: https://youtu.be/BFvJOZ51tmc?t=222

And it's also possible that resolving the issues between relativity and quantum mechanics will have no implications relevant to FTL and such. In fact there's no particular reason to expect that it would. So we're back to just flat out speculation.

That's fine by itself, I love speculation, but that doesn't make this or that probable. It's the extending such speculation to making high confidence definitive statements, as though something's been demonstrated or proved likely, that I'm objecting to.

Yes, but it is not unreasonable speculation. Speculation is not without value.

> but that doesn't make this or that probable.

Of course, that's a given.

Cool , we're in agreement, but it wasn't a given in the comment I was originally replying to which made very strong claims about what is probable.

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