- #36
Ivan Seeking
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Gold Member
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LightbulbSun said:Or maybe it's because a lot of people don't wallow in every single claim being made?
It was a joke.
LightbulbSun said:Or maybe it's because a lot of people don't wallow in every single claim being made?
LightbulbSun said:So people's interest being peaked now equals validity?
russ_watters said:So what does that mean? As you often point out, UFO stands for "Unidentified Flying Object", not "flying saucer", so the existence of UFOs is a trivial fact, but at the same time the existence of UFOs tells us nothing whatsoever of value when it comes to the possibility of the existence of aliens.
The fact that you trust someone who thinks they saw a flying saucer doesn't alter the problem at all.
As you appear to understand with your statement above, anecdotal evidence is not scientific evidence. So the existence of anecdotal evidence doesn't alter what you said above: there is no scientific evidence for aliens.
The only possible thing a scientific minded person could believe is that there is no reason to believe that aliens could be visiting us.
They happen on a nearly daily basis, Ivan, you're just not paying attention (they don't always make the news anyway). The evidence is in the news and on sale on Ebay all the time. Here's evidence of God so compelling that it sold on Ebay for $28,000: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6511148/
And as you said: they don't meet the standard of science. So scientifically minded people such as yourself have no choice but to choose not to believe in aliens or alien spacecraft . Choosing to believe that they do exist is nothing more than a religion of a different kind.
The distance across the Galaxy is a function of your speed relative to it. If you are traveling through this Galaxy at 86% the speed of light then the distance across the Galaxy is only 50,00 ly rather than 100,000 ly. The spectators back home say your clocks are running half speed giving you the impression that distances are cut in half. At 1 G constant acceleration it only takes about 6 months to reach 50% the speed of light with a distance traveled of about 0.1 ly.CEL said:The Galaxy's dimensions are 100,000 ly in diameter and ~2,000 ly thick. How can you go anywhere in 20 years?
The speed of light is only a limitation of the observers watching the trip and the number of years that must pass back home.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Time_dilation_and_space_flight said:Indeed, a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel as far as light has been able to travel since the big bang (some 13.7 billion light years) in one human lifetime.
CEL said:Even if life on Earth was seeded by visiting aliens, this only transfers the problem of abiogenesis to another world. The only alternative hypothesis to abiogenesis is the religious one.
CEL said:Who says that abiogenesis occurred only once? It may have happened several times, but natural selection kept only the most successful one.
Ivan Seeking said:There is no law anywhere stating that scientific evidence is the only evidence that is logical to consider. Science is a tool, not a religion. What's more, every discovery began with anecdotal evidence.
my_wan said:You seem to presume "scientific evidence" has this well defined property called X,Y, and Z. This is not the case. A better way to state your first sentence is: Any evidence that is logical to consider is by definition scientific evidence. It doesn't even matter how much it deviates from traditional notions of scientific evidence, so long as it is logical with testable consequences.
When you say every discovery began with anecdotal evidence it appears that you are conflating hypothesis and evidence. Some discoveries began as pure imagination devoid of even anecdotal evidence. Even a hypothesis that is well supported scientifically is not evidence in itself. The evidence is provided by the testability of the consequences.
Do I need peer review to determine that my faucet leaks? The evidence is in fact scientific regardless of peer review. Do we need to repeat a mega-meteor impact for the evidence of an extinction level meteor? The evidence is in fact scientific without the need for a repeat. Only the last point might stand. "Verification" doesn't significantly differ from the notion I used when I said "logical with testable consequences".Ivan Seeking said:Absolutely false! Scientific evidence requires repeatability, duplication, and peer review. Only after exhaustive verification by many people can evidence be considered scientific evidence.
Scientific discoveries are often made by saying: Wouldn't it be neet if X. No evidence whatsoever, anecdotal or otherwise, is needed to posit such a notion. The scientific method only comes into play to determine if either X can be falsified or is falsifiable in principle. Aliens are visiting us is NOT falsifiable on the information we have at present. The only way to falsify such a statement is to determine the affirmative. It therefore is not a scientific statement unless or until aliens are visiting us is answered in the affirmative.Ivan Seeking said:False. Discoveries are made through evidence. Scientific models that account for observations are the ultimate goal of hypotheses.
my_wan said:Do I need peer review to determine that my faucet leaks? The evidence is in fact scientific regardless of peer review.
Do we need to repeat a mega-meteor impact for the evidence of an extinction level meteor? The evidence is in fact scientific without the need for a repeat.
Scientific discoveries are often made by saying: Wouldn't it be neet if X. No evidence whatsoever, anecdotal or otherwise, is needed to posit such a notion.
The scientific method only comes into play to determine if either X can be falsified or is falsifiable in principle. Aliens are visiting us is NOT falsifiable on the information we have at present. The only way to falsify such a statement is to determine the affirmative. It therefore is not a scientific statement unless or until aliens are visiting us is answered in the affirmative.
Proclaiming anecdotal evidence as evidence doesn't cut it.
my_wan said:Do I need peer review to determine that my faucet leaks?
LONDON — An American fighter pilot flying from an English air base at the height of the Cold War was ordered to open fire on a massive UFO that lit up his radar, according to an account published by Britain's National Archives on Monday.
edward said:This was in my morning paper. I'll just drop it off here.
He didn't just claim to see it. He was scrambled to intercept it.
http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/263382
They gave the source as:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
If your faucet leaks, this is a fact. If an apple falls from a tree this is a fact.my_wan said:Do I need peer review to determine that my faucet leaks?
Proton Soup said:the only "facts" in science are the axioms. everything else is data.
Ivan Seeking said:Axioms are assumptions that are considered to be self-evident.
Proton Soup said:so it was some electromagnetic phenomenon, but no one actually saw an aircraft with their own eyes?
edward said:Are electromagnetic phennomenon pick ed up on radar? Seriously I really dont't know.
You are confusing mathematics, whose foundations are axioms, with empirical sciences, like physics, biology, archaeology...Proton Soup said:the only "facts" in science are the axioms. everything else is data.
CEL said:You are confusing mathematics, whose foundations are axioms, with empirical sciences, like physics, biology, archaeology...
Axioms are not necessarily evident. If you postulate that there is only one parallel to a line through a point, this is evident and you can develop a consistent theory, like Euclid did.
If you postulate that there are two parallels to the line through the point, you have a non-evident axiom and you can develop a consistent non-Euclidean theory.
Empyrical sciences are based in observations, not in axioms.
A fact is an event whose truth can be assessed by observation, like the fall of an apple.
Data are measurements of the fact. You can measure the velocity of the fall. Based on the data you can propose an hypothesis, and if further observations confirm your hypothesis, you have a scientific theory.
Proton Soup said:i'm not confusing a thing. i didn't say axioms were data, i said data were things that are not axioms, that is, "everything else".
now, any time you make an observation, you're relying on your senses. even the things we can't sense directly are sensed indirectly with tools that were forged by humans all the way up the chain. everything we "know" about the universe is fundamentally based on how our bodies interact with it. in the end, all those facts are perceptions. we can all agree that most of us perceive the same thing most of the time, but that's as good as it will ever be.
CEL said:Again, empirical sciences don't have axioms. Data are quantifications of observations. A leaking faucet is not an axiom and is not a datum, it is a fact. If you measure the rate of flow of the faucet, this is a datum.
Proton Soup said:all faucets leak.
CEL said:If this is true, it is a fact, not an axiom.