ET Visitors: Scientists See High Likelihood

Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar.

Fermi’s brooding on the topic was later labeled "Fermi’s paradox". It is a well-traveled tale from the 1950’s when the scientist broached the subject in discussions with colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Thoughts regarding the probability of earthlike planets, the rise of highly advanced civilizations "out there", and interstellar travel -- these remain fodder for trying to respond to Fermi’s paradox even today.

Now a team of American scientists note that recent astrophysical discoveries suggest that we should find ourselves in the midst of one or more extraterrestrial civilizations. Moreover, they argue it is a mistake to reject all UFO reports since some evidence for the theoretically-predicted extraterrestrial visitors might just be found there.

The researchers make their proposal in the January/February 2005 issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS).

Pick up any good science magazine and you’re sure to see the latest in head-scratching ideas about superstring theory, wormholes, or the stretching of spacetime itself. Meanwhile, extrasolar planetary detection is on the verge of becoming mundane.

"We are in the curious situation today that our best modern physics and astrophysics theories predict that we should be experiencing extraterrestrial visitation, yet any possible evidence of such lurking in the UFO phenomenon is scoffed at within our scientific community," contends astrophysicist Bernard Haisch.

Haisch along with physicists James Deardorff, Bruce Maccabee and Harold Puthoff make their case in the JBIS article: "Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation".

The scientists point to two key discoveries made by Australian astronomers and reported last year that there is a "galactic habitable zone" in our Milky Way Galaxy. And more importantly that Earth’s own star, the Sun, is relatively young in comparison to the average star in this zone -- by as much as a billion years.

Therefore, the researchers explain in their JBIS article that an average alien civilization would be far more advanced and have long since discovered Earth. Additionally, other research work on the supposition underlying the Big Bang -- known as the theory of inflation -- shores up the prospect, they advise, that our world is immersed in a much larger extraterrestrial civilization.

Given billion-year advanced physics, might not buzzing around the galaxy be possible?

Even today superstring theory hypothesizes other dimensions... which could be habitable Universes adjacent to our own, the researchers speculate. It might even be possible to get around the speed of light limit by moving in and out of these dimensions.

"What we have done is somewhat of a breakthrough," Haisch told SPACE.com. "We have pulled together various recent discoveries and theoretical issues that collectively point to the strong probability that we should be in the midst of one or more huge extraterrestrial civilizations," he said.

Haisch said that superstring dimensions and wormhole and spacetime stretching possibilities address the "can't get here from there" objection often argued in view of the interstellar, point-to-point distances involved. Also, diffusion models predict that even a single civilization could spread across the Galaxy in a tiny fraction of the age of the Galaxy - even at sub-light speeds, he said.

Can the scientific community bring itself to consider any evidence coming from mysterious sightings of strange things by the public?

In large measure, the scientific community seemingly has eyed ET visitation as far from being serious stuff to cogitate over. Why so?

"The dismissal has several causes, all reinforcing each other," Haisch responded. "Most of the observations are probably misinterpretations, delusions and hoaxes. I have seen people get confused by Venus or even Sirius when it is flashing colors low in the sky under the right conditions. Having been turned off by this, most scientists never bother to look any further, and so are simply blissfully ignorant that there may be more to it," he said.

Deardorff, the lead author of the JBIS article, points out in a press statement: "It would take some humility for the scientific community to suspend its judgment and take at least some of the high quality reports seriously enough to investigate…but I hope we can bring ourselves to do that."

According to Haisch, there is a motivation not just for scientific tolerance of the UFO issue, but a strong scientific prediction that there ought to be some genuine ET signature in the data.

"This potentially changes the relationship of the UFO phenomenon to science in a significant way. It takes away the ‘not invented here’ prejudice, pointing out that a ‘yes’ to ET visitation is exactly what side our current physics and astrophysics theories would come down on as the most likely situation," Haisch concluded.

[Kevin OMalley:] If you study any of the creationist/evolutionist threads here on FR, you'll quickly discover that it is acknowledged the chances of a polypeptide forming from a lower amino acid are 1 in "trillions & trillions", to use a former liberal scientist's mannerism (Carl Sagan).

No... What is "acknowledged" is that anti-evolutionists keep posting these bogus calculations, and then many Freepers point out where they're flawed. It's also acknowledged that this doesn't stop the anti-evolutionists from posting the same crap again next week as if no objections had ever been raised before...

And what in the hell is a "lower amino acid" -- you're not even making sense here.

The chances of getting accidentally synthesized left amino acids for one small protein molecule is one chance in 10^210. That is a number with 210 zeros after it! Such probabilities are indeed impossibilities. The number is so vast as to be totally out of the question.

Nice straw man you've got there. You're calculating something that most likely is "impossible" in a statistical sense (even though you're garbling it when you try to say it -- "accidentally synthesized left amino acids" are the *easy* part...), but it's a bait-and-switch since that "something" you're calculating is *not* among the many scenarios being considered for abiogenesis. You're modeling the wrong process, and then dishonestly using it to declare *any* kind of abiogenesis beyond possibility. Nice try.

For example, you've completely failed to take into account RNA-bootstrapping of protein formation via ribozymes, among many other alternative routes to protein formation.

Here's a less simplified overview of a workable abiogenesis scenario, based on recent research in biochemistry and reverse-engineered processes in living organisms:

Note that protein synthesis doesn't come into it until much later -- it doesn't spring forth from full-blown prebiotic chemistry, as your calculations simplistically (and incorrectly) presume.

So please -- go learn actually something about the subject before you attempt to critique it. You really, *really* don't know what you're talking about, and I (and others) have better things to do than keep correcting this sort of comic-book "analysis" that creationists and other anti-evolutionsts are so fond of using as a substitute for actually knowing something about the subject.

To begin your education on this one topic, start here:

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations
Borel's Law and the Origin of Many Creationist Probability Assertions

Then be sure to read the primary references, followed by becoming conversant with the current research on the matter. If I can do it, you can too.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html

ROFL!!!!!! Do you even *read* your own citations? That link explains in detail how *faulty* are all the common "probability calculations" that anti-evolutionists wave around to "prove" the "impossibility" of natural abiogenesis. Even your own excerpt which you provided in your own post disagrees with the assertion you made in that post and your prior one. Here it is again with the significant parts highlighted:

Hubert Yockey's article "Self Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory" in Journal of Theoretical Biology 91 (1981) pp. 13-31 (this is an extension of work done by him in 1977 in vol. 67 of the same journal). The objective of his paper is not to prove special creation (he actually rejects such theories as useless), but to argue that alien life is so improbable that we ought to shift science to draw talent and funding away from projects like SETI and into "research on the origin of life." In his own abstract, he presents his conclusion as "belief in little green men in outer space is purely religious not scientific." But his assumptions are as faulty as those made by creationists, although his approach is much more sophisticated--and above all, he does not generate any actual estimates of probability. He tries to argue that only 10^5 arrangements of a protein 100 amino acids long, out of a total possible 1.26 x 10^130 arrangements, are of concern to biology, if we assume a 4-bit code. Though he does not state this explicitly, this means the odds against life starting, if it had to start with just such a protein, would be 1 in 10^125.

And you sort of "forgot" to quote the NEXT HALF OF THE SAME PARAGRAPH, which immediately goes on to say:

Though this is not his argument, creationists have tried to spin it that way. But this is not allowed for two reasons: Yockey assumes exactly and only 20 kinds of amino acids are relevant, but life might be possible with any combination of any number of the thousands of kinds that can exist in nature--the mere fact that life on our planet got settled on a certain twenty does not entail that this is the only way it can be done [1a]; and he also assumes that exactly and only 100-amino-acid chains are relevant, but life could have been begun by any number of possible chains of many different lengths, and Yockey does not sum all the relevant combinations of all the possible naturally-occurring chain lengths which may be self-replicating--he only solves this for the 100-amino-acid chain.

Later, your same link writes:

[...] he makes bold claims such as "the belief that...any...protein could appear by chance is based on faith" (257), yet fails to have brushed up on his research: for the tetrahymena discovery refutes such a claim, and he never addresses it. [...] But this calculation is moot, since we need to know the chance of any viable replicating protein arising, not just one specific protein. His approach is like proving that he is most unlikely to win the lottery and therefore the lottery can never be won, when in fact someone wins the lottery on a regular basis. What we want to know are the odds of some protein winning the lottery, not the odds of a specific protein doing so. Thus his number is moot.

So hey, thanks for providing material that torpedoes your own position, and supports mine.

Thank you for the last word, that is very thoughtful of you. I'm not used to being in this position, usually I am the one who has to let the other have the last word. That’s an interesting last jab, that “irrationality” thing, especially in light of your lack of acknowledgement or refusal to survey the facts in front of you. It strikes me that science itself is becoming an irrational pursuit, requiring specialists with PhD's to debate the fine points back & forth. That's more evocative of ancient Persia and Stargazers than the Age of Englightenment.

This isn’t a myopic approach as much as it might be limited by time constraints. I’ve been fascinated by this topic for a short while, but I am not a biologist/geologist/geneticist, which is where most of the latest arguments end up.

“I gave you my inductive reasoning.”
***You did not give me inductive reasoning, you only gave me a reiterated opinion.
The following is the first hit I received on Google for "Inductive reasoning".

Characteristics of Deductive Reasoning
Logical Fallacies

V. Characteristics of Inductive Reasoning
Unlike deductive reasoning, Inductive reasoning is not designed to produce mathematical certainty. Induction occurs when we gather bits of specific information together and use our own knowledge and experience in order to make an observation about what must be true. Inductive reasoning does not use syllogisms, but series of observations, in order to reach a conclusion. Consider the following chains of observations:

Observation: John came to class late this morning.
Observation: John’s hair was uncombed.
Prior experience: John is very fussy about his hair.
Conclusion: John overslept
The reasoning process here is directly opposite to that used in deductive syllogisms. Rather than beginning with a general principle (People who comb their hair wake up on time), the chain of evidence begins with an observation and then combines it with the strength of previous observations in order to arrive at a conclusion.

VI. Generalization
The most basic kind of inductive reasoning is called induction by enumeration, or, more commonly, generalization. You generalize whenever you make a general statement (all salesmen are pushy) based on observations with specific members of that group (the last three salesmen who came to my door were pushy). You also generalize when you make an observation about a specific thing based on other specific things that belong to the same group (my girlfriend’s cousin Ed is a salesman, so he will probably be pushy.) When you use specific observations as the basis of a general conclusion, you are said to be making an inductive leap.

You only gave the option of chance and Divine intervention. But you already know all that. Perhaps it's not myopia, rather, simple irrationality.
***Martin Gardner wrote an interesting book which would be instuctive here: “Fads & Fallacies”. Your preoccupation would qualify as an amusing deception in his book. There’s nothing irrational here other than your refusal to appropriate the facts. Please answer the Drake equation considerations.

Fads & fallacies Martin Gardner
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0486203948/103-9036467-3465432?v=glance

To: Kevin OMalley; ConservativeDude; PatrickHenry; Zon
No... What is "acknowledged" is that anti-evolutionists keep posting these bogus calculations, and then many Freepers point out where they're flawed.
***Cool, thanks for responding. That reinforces one of my positions, which is that big science is becoming a necessarily highly inductive and specialized pursuit more along the lines of a religion. Our society is becoming more like Persia under the Stargazers with each passing year. What you should know is that I am not a biologist/geneticist, but I invite their comments. My comments would be limited to pointers on inductive reasoning. Please, by all means, feel free to take on the study that was mentioned and tell us all why SETI is worthy of our tax dollars in light of the Drake Equation modifications. This is not a creationist thread. Please give us the actual figures that are pertinent here. What I note from the differing views on what should go into the Drake equation is that it stops becoming a deductive pursuit and becomes more inductive because all the data are not in. When scientists argue with scientists over what the data really means, usually there are some baseline data that both sides rely on. I’m not interested in debating the creationist/evolutionist issues on this particular thread.

It's also acknowledged that this doesn't stop the anti-evolutionists from posting the same crap again next week as if no objections had ever been raised before...
***As I noted, this is not a creationist thread, so feel free to tell us what the pertinent figures should be and why the esteemed scientists who are spending our tax dollars are not wasting them.

And what in the hell is a "lower amino acid" -- you're not even making sense here.
***Sorry about that, I was proceeding from memory and I am not a biologist/geneticist. You seem to have figured out what the gist of the controversy was.

The chances of getting accidentally synthesized left amino acids for one small protein molecule is one chance in 10^210. That is a number with 210 zeros after it! Such probabilities are indeed impossibilities. The number is so vast as to be totally out of the question.
Nice straw man you've got there. You're calculating something that most likely is "impossible" in a statistical sense (even though you're garbling it when you try to say it -- "accidentally synthesized left amino acids" are the *easy* part...), but it's a bait-and-switch since that "something" you're calculating is *not* among the many scenarios being considered for abiogenesis.
***I pulled if from the www as a representation of the controversy. Thanks for setting us all straight. As I noted, I’m not a biologist/geneticist. There is a triangulation going on here. Many people will read through threads like this and decide for themselves. I notice that evolutionists seem to have a lot of scorn for people who aren’t experts in their particular field, but when they run up against folks who are experts, the dialog tends to evolve into one of those finer point discussions similar to theologists who discuss how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Such digressive discussion furthers my point that science is becoming a religion. That’s the first part of this inductive triangle. The second part is the science that was relied upon for getting federal dollars so that we could do the SETI program. When renowned scientists such as Stephen Hawking start acknowledging that the odds against abiogenesis are astronomical, it makes your average conservative look askance at the money being spent on SETI. The third part of this triangle is in the evolution/creation debate, which is full of acrimony. I don’t have time to get into it for now, just lurking on that one for the time being, but I do think that eventually some baseline data will be agreed to by both sides. It’s the baseline data inside the inductive triangle that I’m interested in.

You're modeling the wrong process, and then dishonestly using it to declare *any* kind of abiogenesis beyond possibility. Nice try.
***It’s not dishonesty, it’s more like… someone who isn’t a biologist trying to explain biology. But I welcome your inputs, and please take your scorn elsewhere or you will be operating outside of that inductive triangle.

For example, you've completely failed to take into account RNA-bootstrapping of protein formation via ribozymes, among many other alternative routes to protein formation.
***As I stated, I’m not a biologist. But your comments towards the record are welcome. It may take me awhile to chase down what it is you’re saying but eventually I should be able to figure it out or someone else might take you on.

Here's a less simplified overview of a workable abiogenesis scenario, based on recent research in biochemistry and reverse-engineered processes in living organisms:

Note that protein synthesis doesn't come into it until much later -- it doesn't spring forth from full-blown prebiotic chemistry, as your calculations simplistically (and incorrectly) presume.
***Please provide the new factors which would be input into the Drake equation.

So please -- go learn actually something about the subject before you attempt to critique it. You really, *really* don't know what you're talking about, and I (and others) have better things to do than keep correcting this sort of comic-book "analysis" that creationists and other anti-evolutionsts are so fond of using as a substitute for actually knowing something about the subject.
***Perhaps you need to take that up with the author who was arguing against SETI funding, which is my position. If you really, really think they don’t know what they’re talking about, tell us where they're wrong. Tell us where Stephen Hawking is wrong. Tell us what numbers should be put into the Drake Equation.

To begin your education on this one topic, start here:
Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations
Borel's Law and the Origin of Many Creationist Probability Assertions
Then be sure to read the primary references, followed by becoming conversant with the current research on the matter. If I can do it, you can too.
***Cool. Just need the time, that’s all.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html
ROFL!!!!!! Do you even *read* your own citations? That link explains in detail how *faulty* are all the common "probability calculations" that anti-evolutionists wave around to "prove" the "impossibility" of natural abiogenesis.
***What can I say other than THANK YOU for going on the record. As I said earlier, that reinforces one of my positions, which is that big science is becoming a necessarily highly inductive and specialized pursuit more along the lines of a religion. Our society is becoming more like Persia under the Stargazers with each passing year. But what you should know is that I am not a biologist/geneticist, but I invite their comments. My comments would be limited to pointers on inductive reasoning. Please, by all means, feel free to take on the study that was mentioned and tell us all why SETI is worthy of our tax dollars in light of the Drake Equation modifications. This is not a creationist thread. Please give us the actual figures that are pertinent here. I may not be a biologist today, but eventually someone will take on this issue which strikes average readers as a bit of gobbledegook.

Even your own excerpt which you provided in your own post disagrees with the assertion you made in that post and your prior one. Here it is again with the significant parts highlighted:
***Please address the Drake Equation, the inductive points being brought up, my contentions and the MAIN POINT of this article. I’m fascinated by the fact that scientists can argue for and against both sides on these points. I just need it on the record, one way or another and I can chase it down eventually. For your benefit I have preserved it:

The objective of his paper is not to prove special creation… but to argue that alien life is so improbable that we ought to shift science to draw talent and funding away from projects like SETI and into "research on the origin of life." In his own abstract, he presents his conclusion as "belief in little green men in outer space is purely religious not scientific."

Though he does not state this explicitly, this means the odds against life starting, if it had to start with just such a protein, would be 1 in 10^125.
And you sort of "forgot" to quote
***I didn’t forget anything, this isn’t a creationist thread, it’s a SETI thread. But you gave me a good start. Note that I did use the 10^125 figure, so please address that issue. If you continue to utilize scorn, you push the debate outside of the inductive triangle and you end up feeding the general impression that science is becoming a religion.

the NEXT HALF OF THE SAME PARAGRAPH, which immediately goes on to say:
Though this is not his argument, creationists have tried to spin it that way.
***Well, as I have stated, this isn’t a creationist thread, so please take your creation/evolution arguments elsewhere if you are not going to give us the figures to insert into the Drake equation and waste all of our time. For the benefit of others, I will excerpt what I perceive to be the crux of the matter:

“… might be possible … life could have been … “
This cagey language is more suitable to a religion and suggests that both sides are simply postulating.

Later, your same link writes…
***by all means, please explain this tetrahymena discovery, why the 20^6 figure isn’t what we insert into the Drake equation, and, while you’re at it, why some of the Creation science literature is worth considering when tax dollars are at stake but it isn’t worth considering when something else is at stake. I won’t be able to comment on your position because, as I stated, I’m not a biologist/geneticist, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t get someone who knows what they’re talking about. So, by all means, please comment for the record for the benefit of the gallery.

So hey, thanks for providing material that torpedoes your own position, and supports mine.
***By all means. Thanks for going on record.

145 posted on 01/14/2005 9:00:40 PM PST by Ichneumon
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