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Comment by greenthrow | Hacker News Reader

Looking for Dyson Spheres or "the Simulation" or any other highly speculative technology is anti-science. It is the opposite of evidence based. I am so sick of these non-science ideas being promulgated and given resources when there is plenty of actual science (evidence based) that needs funding.

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Science need theories. Theories can be used to look at the world in search of evidence.

We have two nice theories here. People just doing the search now.

Theories that are worth investigating should be based on past evidence. They should be attempts to explain things we have observed. If they aren't they are wild speculation, and as I said, anti-science.

Donald Knuth would love to have a talk with you about the need for theories as basis for scientific inquiry, not the opposite.

Please see this video: "Science Needs Pseudoscience to Advance": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ-031A4G1Y

[adjusts glasses] Ackshually, the article seems to be more a hypothesis than a theory.

But yes, jokes aside, hypotheses are also needed for science.

Dyson sphere(swarm, because sphere is misconstrued as solid) is based entirely on known physics and can be made with our existing technology base, just not with our current industrial base.

SETI is a valid research priority.

Unicorns are made entirely with known biology. That doesn't mean funding a search for them is a good use of resources.

SETI is a valid research priority. There's plenty of less speculative signs we can look for.

I do not want to be living in your head. Why is searching the unknown with the tools at our disposal anti-science? Because it goes against some kind of norm held by what is deemed the "scientific community"? Who even is that and why do they get to say what knowledge to pursue?

I already explained. Evidence. Looking for the unknown does not necessitate looking for a specific highly speculative technology that there is zero evidence for and zero reason to believe exists other than it's a cool idea.

It is not really a speculative technology. A Dyson Swarm is doable within our existing technological base. If we are capable of building an artificial satellite, we can build a dyson swarm.

Baloney. We can not build one that is of any use. That is the speculative part of it. Inherent in looking for it is that it's an extremely worthwhile, nearly inevitable, idea. We have zero evidence for that.

We build satellites that look at our sun. That's one part of our dyson swarm. The beauty about a dyson swarm is that it can be built incrementally over time as we find new uses for space.

Ironically, if someone were to say "this is not science" in a thread about dark matter or string theory, they'd be upvoted.

My own take is that it's not science, but engineering, in the sense that it's based on already established scientific principles. It's more like a project proposal. The unknown is not whether it's physically possible, but whether we can find a civilization that has built one.

That's no how science works. If we only use the "evidence based" approach, nobody would had been doing research on atom theory for example.

Science is a process, not a religion. And speculating, building reasoning and models, which you then try to verify, is the core of science.

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