Slashdot Mirror
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."
Lol.. Tell us what you really thinks. And let all the anger out this time.
I don't know what christian pissed in your Wheaties and passed them off as coco puffs, but your letting your emotional anger cloud the conceptual message from the story. It isn't that intelligent design is real, it's that the logic behind it is real and the principles are being loosely used to determine the existance of life. At the basic level, they are saying based on the complexity of this, it couldn't be a natural occurance. An example of this might be a radio signal transmitting shakespear comming from inside the sun. There are other objective reasoning at issue too where we plant crops and build roads in generally straight lines, and so on. Nature doesn't do that quite often, take a river for instance, there are some that are straight but most of them have quite a bit of curves. Take a erosion line in a field that looks like a road or a fence line from a far distance. When water evacuated an area, it follows the path of least resistance and we know in nature that large amounts of earth (mars or whatever planet) are rarely uniform enough to create a straight line in the erosion on a scale large enough to be seen from space.
In other words, we are looking for things that wouldn't naturally occur by either stating the premise of nature isn't as prone to certain things or certain things or just too complex for it to happen naturally. In this story's context, the idea of intelligent design only refers to the context that some newly discovered thing is interpreted through or not. In other words, does this happen naturally or does it take some sort of intelligence to get it going. The principles that will convince you of it being a sign of alien life or a natural occurring will be the same that convinces a christian of ID. The article also looks at the impacts of that in how we bash on group (as you illustrated in your post) for using the very same techniques and basic thought processes that another uses. It is like telling a teen he can't get his drivers license because he will drink and drive or smoke while your holding a beer in one hand, the steering wheel in the other and have a cigarette hanging from your mouth.
I tend to agree with you in that a scrambled roadmap is very different from an unscrambled roadmap and a scrambled forest is the same as an unscrambled forest. But then we've probably been raised in similar circumstances.
Would a monkey or a hypothetical tree dwelling civilization find the scrambled forest the same as the unscrambled? Probably not because to these people each tree is unique. I would say that your distinction between low entropy and high entropy is very anthrocentric. From what I have observed, much of the natural world (or universe) has low entropy, we just discount the orderlinesss as unimportant because we didn't create it ourselves and we have no use for it.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
...The Anthropic principle isn't that far from god, that's why scientists aren't very happy to just accept that ....
Why is it, that accepting God should make scientists unhappy? Just by studying the universe doesn't tell you much more about God than studying a building tells you about its architect. All of science works just fine, whether God enters the equations or not. Creationists believe that the Bible tells us a record of how this God did it. That is NOT intelligent design, which merely asserts that there is evidence that God may be behind the universe, but doesn't tell anything about how He did it or how long it took him to do or anything else.
There are scientists who believe that there is evidence of intelligence in nature, but in no way believe that this God, if you will, is the one we read of in any particular book. Creationism and intelligent design are not the same.
All theory is gray