Re:Discovery of peculiar modulations in a small fraction of ...
by thingexplainer on Thursday October 20, 2016 @03:30PM
(#12755344)
Regarding your first point, the trouble (at least in this instance) is that this logic doesn't apply when you're looking for Roger Waters and calling everyone in the phone book with his name. Each time someone picks up the phone it probably won't be the person you're looking for, but you certainly had reason to believe they could be.
They didn't find a strange phenomenon and point out it might be ETI, in which case you're right, the hypothesis wouldn't make sense until you had ruled out basically everything else. They made a hypothesis about what ETI would look like, looked for it, and claim to have found things that could fit the bill.
Re:Discovery of peculiar modulations in a small fraction of ...
by api on Thursday October 20, 2016 @03:38PM
(#12755401)
It's easy to prove if we were to ever receive, say, a string of Fibonacci numbers followed by their sum.
* It is improbable.
Say I hear what appears to be a human being, but whom I cannot identify. It may be Roger Waters, there's nothing supernatural here, there's no reason why it couldn't be him. Yet, there are so many other people around that this hypothesis is totally useless: it very likely isn't Roger Waters, so I'm better off without it.
* It is very hard to prove / disprove
Intelligent, technologically advanced beings could very probably generate a wide variety of signals, so it is hard to prove that a certain signal cannot be generate by them; we also have no idea how the "typical" ET signal looks like, so the hypothesis doesn't really help us in furthering our analysis.