odysseus2000 wrote:mc2fool wrote:And, just in case anyone thinks I'm proposing an argument, I'm not taking a stand myself, my only point being that it's not as "all known" as you imply: heck, even Prof. Brian Cox has said he thinks we may well be alone!
This sort of stuff is all "pot boiler." Stuff to bring in money for the presenter and possible encourage young people to study science but most of the folk who do this come over as insincere, trying to interest people who are not interested and making it so that any one who is interested is bored and turns off.
Ah, an ad hominem attack on experts in their fields that disagree with your ideas, eh. Classy. Of course, you weren't there to hear the discussion and equivocation in their presentations.
odysseus2000 wrote:The Sky at Night with Patrick Moore was presented for enthusiasts, the current versions are trying to get more viewers and turn off the folk who are interested and don't want a dumbed down presentation.
What has the Sky at Night got to do with the point I'm making that not everyone is agreed on the "alone" vs "not alone" question?
odysseus2000 wrote:Any statements made by the "pot boiler" folk are there to entertain the audience and any kind of statistical analysis without statistics is not science.
Science advances not on this kind of stuff but on measurements or predictions that can be checked by measurement.
A large amount of the Drake equation factors are based on science, statistics, and measurement. E.g. rates of star formation, proportions of sun like stars, binaries, etc, and, increasingly, observed information about exo-planets. (There was an interesting talk two days ago at the Royal Astronomical Society covering what we know and don't know about what would make exo-planets habitable. Shame it wasn't recorded. Sorry, I didn't take notes. *)
Of course, there are some things that we don't, and can't for now (or maybe ever) have statistics and measurements on, because all we know about technologically intelligent life is from a sample size of one, and that potentially gives an error rate of 100% -- both for
and against us being "alone". So please allow experts to have differing view on the matter without slagging them off, eh?
* for anyone interested, here's a build-your-own-earthlike-planet model that demonstrates the wide range in possible habitability from twiddling just three factors:
http://earthlike.world/ (Rendering takes a minute or two).
More "pot boiler" stuff for anyone interested in reading other views:
"
Despite knowing when life first appeared on Earth, scientists still do not understand how life occurred, which has important implications for the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe. A new paper shows how an analysis using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference could shed light on how complex extraterrestrial life might evolve in alien worlds. "
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200518162639.htmhttps://astronomy.com/news/2020/11/the-lonely-universe-is-life-on-earth-just-a-lucky-fluke