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A comment on Why We’ll Have Evidence of Aliens–If They Exist–By 2035. Parent comment

Re:Why We’ll Have Evidence of Aliens–If They Exist–By 2035 by sillysaurus3 on Thursday October 05, 2017 @02:52PM (#15411648)
I've never understood claims like this. For all we know, the universe could be infinite. Yes, that would mean the universe contains an infinite amount of energy and that we'd find dopplegangers of ourselves if we travel far enough, but we can't be sure it's not true. We can't even be more or less confident in one hypothesis vs another.

Articles like this would be more persuasive if they had qualifiers like "Within our observable universe."

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Re:Why We’ll Have Evidence of Aliens–If They Exist–By 2035 by liberte82 on Thursday October 05, 2017 @02:54PM (#15411664)
A lot of people don't realize just how much bigger the universe might be than "the observable universe".
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Re:Why We’ll Have Evidence of Aliens–If They Exist–By 2035 by goatlover on Thursday October 05, 2017 @03:49PM (#15412069)
The size of the universe is irrelevant to SETI, since they're just trying to detect alien civilizations in our neighborwood, which would mean the Milky Way.
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Re:Why We’ll Have Evidence of Aliens–If They Exist–By 2035 by PoachedSausage on Thursday October 05, 2017 @03:32PM (#15411953)
I thought it had been established that the universe, as a (hyper)volume of spacetime is finite?

That doesn't mean infinity isn't lurking somewhere beyond though.

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Re:Why We’ll Have Evidence of Aliens–If They Exist–By 2035 by posterboy on Thursday October 05, 2017 @04:21PM (#15412293)
Maybe in theory but I don't think that's something that could be empirically verified. An axiomatic theory is rather a working assumption, because anything else is mathematically intractable. How could anyone understand something that's too big to understand?

My impression is that Multiverse Theories are a fad playing on semantics.

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Re:Why We’ll Have Evidence of Aliens–If They Exist–By 2035 by posterboy on Thursday October 05, 2017 @04:06PM (#15412189)
> For all we know, the universe could be infinite

if an infinite number of trees fall and and nobody is there to hear it, do they make a sound?

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