Excluding Intelligent Design Principles From the Search For Alien Life

KIdPanda writes "Prompted by pictures of man-made structures in the Utah desert, a SETI astronomer explains the sometimes-ambiguous difference between seeing the hand of God, alien intelligence, or nature. 'In my photographs, Shostak's SETI-trained eye — standing in for a pattern-crunching computer program — searched for an unexpected increase in visual order (or, in thermodynamic terms, a decrease in entropy caused by the rebellion of life against universal decay). A road or a tended field is mathematically simpler than a mountainous jumble or naturally varied vegetation. ... But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design."

Comments

Yeah...except not

[paiute]

The "inky blackness of space" is only simple if interpreted by a spectrally-limited human eye seeing only a tiny part of it from a distance. Space is crammed with a chaotic mess of strange crap on the macroscale and a lot more weird junk on the micro. Quasars, dark matter, nebulae, dark energy, black holes, virtual particles, gluon soup, quarks....

I will, as they say on the Internets, fix that for you:

If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is in no way evidence of design.

Re:Yeah...except not

[MyLongNickName]

Thank God we have someone like you who, through only reading a Slashdot summary, can point out all the holes in his logic.

Where are their hyptheses?

[cromar]

Obviously, ID fails to impress us with its (lack of) logical hypotheses. I would like to see the ID crowd come up with an actual science that could predict whether something was created by an intelligence (and predict what "level" of intelligence created it). At least it would lend them some credence and provide a factual basis for their (and our) arguments.

Re: Where are their hyptheses?

[Black Parrot]

We humans think that self-replicating cells arose randomly from the "primordial soup" of the early oceans. Yet, despite science and technology's efforts we have not come even within light years of building any sort of machine that can take bare elements and make a copy of itself, which in turn copies itself etc. How is it that we can intelligently attribute to chance and time what we cannot do ourselves?

God, what a stupid post.

1) What are you going to do in a few years when the artificial life people do get their self-replicating metabolizing systems working. (Somehow I doubt that you've seen the literature on the topic.)

2) We can't do lots of other stuff that happens naturally; what's the problem with us not being able to create life in a test tube (yet)?

3) Whence the argument, "we smart guys can't even do it, therefore some intelligent designer must have"?

Don't you creationists ever think?

Re:What?

[Futile Rhetoric]

Is "more orderly" the same as "simpler"? Is higher entropy less simple than lower entropy? I would answer "no" to both questions.

Re:Entropy favors simplicity

[im_thatoneguy]

Good point. Efficiency is a better way to put it.

And one huge source of efficiency is to not unnecessarily modify the environment around you. Sustaining a highway takes an enormous amount of work. Doubly so in a mountain pass. It can be much much more efficient to build a mountain road that's mostly under ground to avoid fighting the constant battle with the elements. It also makes it largely invisible.

Why terraform a planet when you can just change the settlers to easily survive on it.

Opposite of intelligent design

[Geoffrey.landis]

This argument seems to get the Intelligent Design argument backwards. The ID people argue that complexity can't arise from simplicity, and thus complexity is the signature of design. This guy seems to be arguing that simplicity is the signature of design.

Neither one is particulary a good argument. Complex things can arise from simple ones-- a snowflake can arise from water vapor. And simple thing can arise from complex ones: water vapor can arise from a snowflake.

In either case entropy increases, and heat, ultimately, is dissipated into space.

Re:I mod this down.

[Bloke down the pub]

attempting to add the ages of the key players in the bible up and estimating the age of the earth. There are a few problems with it though.

You mean problems apart from literally believing a book that's been through several translations from extinct languages and wasn't written down at all until many generations after the events allegedly happened?

Re:What?

[Futile Rhetoric]

Intelligent life would change its surroundings to better suit its needs (survival first and foremost). It is of course possible that it could be different, that is, if this life was fundamentally different from ours in that it did not arise from a process of natural selection, if it lacked the means to change anything about its surroundings (in which case intelligence would be of no selective value whatsoever and must have arisen spontaneously, randomly), or if its surroundings as formed by natural forces are utterly perfect for its needs (in which case, again, I would argue that intelligence isn't likely to arise).

These options sounds exceedingly unlikely to me. No, we're not bound to catch an intelligence like that, any more than we are to catch intelligent rocks on our own planet. Such an exercise is best reserved for the likes of Deepak Chopra; science on the other hand is based on extrapolation of what we (think to) know.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

A hypothetical tree dwelling civilisation would try to reign in the forces around it. A tree village would look differently from a forest, and I daresay, the scramble test would most likely show that as well.

The problem is that humans are horrible at detecting patterns which fall outside of the ones we prefer or are familiar with.

For example what would you say if you drew the following playing cards from a deck?

* 2 4 6 8 10 Q

* A 4 9 3 Q 10

You'd probably conclude that the first is definitely ordered and the second is near-random.

In fact, both are ordered in a very precise way. They are the elements of the sequences f(x) = (2*x) mod 13 and g(x) = (x^2) mod 13, respectively, x in [14,19].

There are an insane amount of "ordered" sequences (c.f. http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/index.html), each one no more "random" than any other, given the appropriate context. Just because humans like x*2, and can pick it out easily, that doesn't mean that an alien species wouldn't find x^2 "more aesthetic" (or the Fibonacci sequence, or the digits of pi base 23 ...)

Another concrete example. An RSA encrypted message sure looks like random noise, and to any third party swapping bytes around it doesn't *look* like it significantly changes the file. However, if you do have the key, the shuffling turns a well ordered and precise message into gobbledy-gook.

The alien civilization may impose order on the world, but it may be order "not as we know it." We have to have quite a bit of hubris to think that our ways of ordering things are the only ways of doing so.

Re:Ridiculous argument

[Endo13]

It's actually really simple. ID can never be proved or disproved because we're stuck inside the object in question. To accurately determine if something is the result of design or chance, you have to be able to have a perspective outside the object to compare it with other objects. Since we can't get outside our universe to see if there are other universes (and if so, compare them to ours) we have no way to know for sure. Ours could be intelligently designed from top to bottom to look random to us, and we'd be none the wiser.

So it all boils down to whether or not you want to believe in a "someone" (ie. God) that's always existed, or matter that has always existed. But you will never in this life know for sure whether you're right or wrong.