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A comment on First Evidence of a Planet in Another Galaxy. Parent comment

Re:First Evidence of a Planet in Another Galaxy by Voloskaya on Friday September 25, 2020 @11:48PM (#24596255)
> We do have a choice: not to make hasty generalizations.

I don't think anyone is making a generalization in the sense you seem to be implying. No one is saying: given our current observation we have concluded that we are (or not) the only ones around. Things are being discussed in term of likelyhood, not in term of certainties.

> You can say next to nothing about a bin of balls from one sample.

You can definitely say something: That there are 99% likelihood that the urn was filled with 99 red balls and 1 green ball, and 1% that it was the other way around.

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Re:First Evidence of a Planet in Another Galaxy by willis936 on Saturday September 26, 2020 @12:13PM (#24599839)
You can only say that the likelihood of a red ball is at least 1% and the likelihood of a green ball is 99% or less.

We can say the universe can support life because here we are. We can say nothing of how common it is other than it has occurred at least once in 10^24 planets over 10^9 years. It’s difficult to overstate how insignificant this amount of data is in a statistics sense.

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