On a radio programme this week, a scientist, a geologist, talked about life on Mars. She claimed that nothing bigger than microbes could exist there because anything bigger would have been noticed/observed by us.
Has the mind of science shrunk so far that they think they know evrything that exists in the universe, that there are no off-the-scale, far out, really weird, invisible-to-the-human-range-of-senses creatures in the universe? In fact, this touches on some quite fundamental concepts of physics, concepts of the we-take-these-truths-to-be-self-evident kind, in this case the idea that the universe is the same thoughout and that the little range of substances, forces, energies etc., that are familiar to us on earth are all that is. There is much weirdness in science fiction, but what might be out there may relate more closely to the imagined beings/worlds of the imagination than to mundane extrapolations from our current earthbound knowledge.
Another problem here is the individual’'s capacity to see what is there. For example, when Captain Cook first arrived in the Antipodes, some of the natives within view of the shore simply did not see the ships. That is, the ships were so alien to them that their minds just rejected them. So, can we be sure (a) that our minds would not reject sight of some beings that are too alien and (b) that scientists minds are the best prepared to rejister the existence of the trully alien - as opposed, say, to the minds of science fiction writers, but of course it is scientists who are the front line position, in the field, telling us what does and does not exist?
Mars is a pretty infinitesimal part of the universe. She’s not claiming aliens don’t exist, just saying they’ve looked pretty closely and they aren’t there. I don’t claim horses don’t exist, but I’m sure there are none in the room I’m typing this in.
How would a scientist (or anyone) go about proving that? Why would you even believe it yourself?
Come on, this is just nit-picky. So yes, maybe there’s some infinitesimal probability that some other life-form that we can’t see exists on Mars…is that worth arguing about? Going along Only-Humean’s post, he says there’s no horses in his room. Are you going to say “Has your mind shrunk so far that you think you know everything about the universe? That there are no off-the-scale, far out, really weird, invisible-to-the-human-range-of-senses horses in your room?”
I dunno, I don’t really see the significance either way.
What if there is some multicell creature like a Tardigrade living in a water pocket under the surface? Some big deal between a single-cell space-yeast and a multi-cell space-worm?
What specific idea are they spending these billions of dollars to prove or disprove?
For example, when Captain Cook first arrived in the Antipodes, some of the natives within view of the shore simply did not NOTICE the ships.
They saw the ships but didn’t notice anything special about them, maybe it was just like background noise or such (although I am not really sure if a human couldn’t notice the patterns, the size and other features of a ship that truly standout, but anyways, just for discussion, let’s imagine they simply didn’t notice or put any importance whatsoever on the ships). So if you see a set of rocks on Mars, you see them, but don’t notice anything special about them, they are just a casual arrangement of items, with no discernible pattern according to what we are used to or what we are familiar to or how we decode the world according to what is important (mostly what is indirectly associated with potential danger or pain/pleasure denotations and such).
So maybe the rocks are really alive and all talking to each other, we would never and could never know as their language and worldview, as an alternative form of Observer, or Processor is too different from us, there is no point of contact at all between their Mind and Existence and Experience and ours, they are totally alien to us. Would you ever know ? Could you ever know without becoming even somewhat similar to them, the rocks ?
On earth we detect sound, the visual spectrum, solid matter and we detect smells, and our scientific instruments basically extend those senses to cover, for example, a wider range of spectral frequencies - x-rays, infra-red, radio waves and so on. The world i.e. our local environment, consists of energy and matter which is detectable by those senses. This is presumably no coincidence - we have evolved the right senses to detect the things of our environment. If there are other things somewhere on the other side of the universe, and we had evolved in that environment, then presumably we would have developed a different but appropriate set of senses. So, to detect aliens that come from that different part of the universe, we would need to continue our evolution in that environment where presumably we would evolve the appropriate set of senses.
However, in my post I was also considering human psychology. It is well known and well documented that humans are perfectly capable of rejecting from their awareness whatever they find too disturbing, and that might be something which is too disturbingly alien. My reference to science fiction writers supposes that in routinely contemplating, and even reaching for, whatever they can conceive of which is most alien, their minds might be more open to, and less disturbed by, alien-ness.
As to Mars, it is not our local environment because we did not evolve there, and therefore we cannot know if there is anything there that is not detectable by our range of senses.
I talk of evolution and I can foresee objections on grounds of the lenght of time it would take to evolve new senses - wee, too bad, that’s just the way it is and science will just have to be patient or abandon truth.
Why? We might just all die out. Millions of lifeforms died without evolving any awareness of electromagnetism.
In any case, Mars is similar enough to Earth that we’re not dealing with stardust-sailing energy-based life-forms. Scientists were looking on a similar-sized planet of a similar temperature and the same sun.
What’s documented is that people don’t notice unexpected things that they’re not looking for. Not that they gather lots of data specifically to search for something and then ignore the conclusion
Two things: first, in searching so very specifically scientists are blinkered and do not see what lies on the periphery of vision. (In this respect, if you know your history of science, Milliken’s Oil Drop experiment, the discovery of penicillen etc., etc., it is interesting how much of science has proceeded by accident and has relied upon scientists being open minded enough to take seriously things that seem non-sensical.) Secondly, scientists are only human. Studies by psychologists have shown that virtually the entire population of the UK (and I suspect the result would apply to the western world generally) suffers some degree of autism. The interesting feature of autism is that it lowers awareness, so that an autistic person does not see all that a fully healthy person sees and is aware of. Scientists, therefore, are unaware, even in an environment in which they evolved, of all that is going on around them - I think you mistake scientists for machines.
I think your epistemology is quite strange. What are the criteria for you, that you would consider disbelief in life on Mars to be reasonable? Or are you just not allowed to disbelieve any statements ever?
Because any meaningful data we have show it to be, and there are no good reasons I’m aware of to assume it’s not. It’s been intensively studied for decades. If you want to hypothesise that it’s different in a way that we have no means of sensing, go ahead - but you have no reason to do so. And you might just as well hypothesise that Europe is different from America in similar ways; it’s effectively believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden. You’re well within your rights to do so, but it’s not reasonable insofar as you have no evidence that points to it. And what evidence you have probably indicates the contrary.
This argument isn’t even consistent. Scientists have been open minded enough to take seriously things that seem non-sensical on one hand, but they’re too blinkered and rigid to do exactly that on the other. You contradict yourself in consecutive sentences.
Even if we accept your startling premise that everyone’s autistic (where autism itself is a deviation from a norm principally defined by western psychologists, so it’s similar to the premise that everyone’s taller than average to some extent), it doesn’t hold that scientists are any more so than the rest of humanity. It’s precisely because scientists are humans and not machines that they pick up on anomalous data. They are curious, flexible, inquisitive, and capable of lateral thinking. Which scientist wouldn’t love to discover life on Mars? I think it’s you who is guilty of stereotyping scientists.
It’s a no lose situation, if you are wrong you can say it was only a conjecture that you sought to make to provoke people, if you are right then you get loads of citations if not praise for being on the button.
Let’s face it her suggestion on the face of it seems reasonable, most scientists already think that life on mars would be extremely simple if not unicellular if it ever did exist, she can’t lose by asserting it more strongly than the masses already have suggested.
Most of you are making the typical mistakes scientists make: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; you pre-suppose the reliability of the scientific method and of science in making your judgements. I saw Richard Dawkins attempting to take down astrologers and the like on TV. To do this, basically he showed that astrology went contrary to science. This is not valid. Astrology may have its own world view, its own metaphysics, and cannot be judged by the world view of science. The fact is, that science is based on a set of beliefs that are unprovable by the scientific method. In other words, underpinning all of science are certain beliefs for which there is no evidence at all. This makes science no different from a religion. If challenged, scientists will do one of two things: they will say these truths are self-evident (unscientific) or they will say it is authenticated by its own success (invalid argument: how do they know that an alternative, perhaps truer, world view would not have been more successful.
If anyone is interested, these beliefs are principally two: first, that we live in a real material world and we are products of that world. Second, that the cosmos is dead and machine-like in that it is governed by mathematical rules. There are alternatives to both of these: we live in a virtual reality and, the cosmos is ordered meaningfully rather than mathematically.
ONLY when all possible evidence has been eliminated.
Science chose to say that “if we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”
That was actually a perversion of their instructions of, “if it has no affect, it doesn’t exist.”
In effect, Science egocentrically claimed that they can see anything and everything that has affect. But the problem with that is that their perception is always a logical deduction prone to logic deducing errors most often in the realm of philosophical understanding; epistemology and metaphysics.
For example, if Science has no definition of “soul”, they can look forever and never see it.
Upon having the correct definition, they don’t even have to look. It is automatically apparent.
Oh mathematics said that? I never heard of that guy. Doesn’t sound like he knows much about this particular topic though. Sounds like he’s more a fan of Asian aphorisms than clear and precise thought.
Well it’s correct, your example does not account for changing conditions in the medium, for example the sun is gradually warming up, and Mars is subject to input of material from Earth, it also has a deal of oxygen locked up in it’s surface, it is not therefore impossible to imagine life might develop in more favorable conditions (or indeed had and the evidence for which was destroyed say by vulcanism); unless you say in a closed environment with no changing conditions then the probability is fixed and hence the parameters never change, over time it becomes more and more certain that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. In short your informal proof doesn’t have any external input and time dimension and is hence false. Over an extended time frame maths or indeed logic does a poor job of examining possibilities in real situations where the possible natural inputs are completely unknown, because the parameters are not fixed and dependent on any conditions, unless we have absolute knowledge of all that has or will happen.
