09-22-2007, 05:48 PM
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#31 (permalink)
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Playing With Fire
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
I'm all for research into what is beyond our galaxy, but to focus on finding life isn't sound science; it is a hope. We should focus on what we find and try to understand it. If we find life, so be it, but it is a waste of resources to do so as a primary mode of research.
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It isn't sound science in your opinion. Although SETI uses scientific methodology......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI
Quote:
SETI advocates note, among other things, that the existence of intelligent life on Earth is a plausible reason to expect it elsewhere, and that individual SETI projects have clearly defined "stop" conditions. The collection and processing of data, the first order of business, and the refining of those data streams, in the case of SETI through algorithm optimization, has not been considered by many of these detractors. Concerning the latter argument, the justification for SETI projects doesn't necessarily require an acceptance of the Drake equation. Science proceeds through hypothesis. If one were only to take what was at face value observable, many many scientific phenomena never would have been discovered. In addition it should be noted that the Drake equation by itself is not an hypothesis and hence it is not even supposed to be testable. The equation can serve as a tool in formulating testable hypotheses.
The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is not an assertion that extra-terrestrial intelligence exists, and conflating the two can be seen as a straw man argument. There is an effort to distinguish the SETI projects from UFOlogy, the study of UFOs considered to be pseudoscience by many. In Skeptical Inquirer, Mark Moldwin explicitly made the distinction between the two projects, arguing that an important discriminator was the acceptance of SETI by the mainstream scientific community and that "[t]he methodology of SETI leads to useful scientific results even in the absence of discovery of alien life."
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__________________
Syriana...have you ever tried liquid MDMA?....Liquid MDMA? No....Arash, when you wanna do this?.....After prayer...
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