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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."
They assume intelligent life on other worlds would be trying to reduce chaos. I wonder how they arrive at this conclusion, since the only known intelligent life we've found so far seems to rather enjoy creating it in great quantity.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Objects that are designed by people (and, presumably, other intelligences) tend to be simpler than those created by nature. For example, compare the straight lines of a road with the wavy shape of a river.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
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.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
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.
The math would agree with you.
The article fuzzily jumps between concepts like "simple" and "complex" and low-entropy, high-entropy.
An intuitive way of thinking about entropy is considering how likely a particular arrangement is to give you the overall appearance you observe. Take a forest seen from the air and imagine cutting little bits of it out with Photoshop and moving them around. You can do that quite a bit and the result isn't all that terribly different from the original appearance. Now imagine doing it with the Nazca lines, or a pattern of roads. Big difference. The cases where you see a big difference are low entropy states -- they're special and random fiddling destroys them. The forest is a higher entropy state. Randomness doesn't have as much effect.
Now consider a plain blue sky. Do the same Photoshopping. No effect at all. The sky is an even higher entropy state than the forest.
Neither did the article.
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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?
Yawn.. The creationist use science to explain plastic.
And no, oil doesn't take hundreds of thousands of years to make, it can be made in small quantities from organic matter in labs in less then 6 months. It's not economical viable to mass produce in this way or anything but it can be made.
And no, there is nothing in the creation story making the claim that the world is 4000 years old. That is a number, and incorrect number at that, which was pulled from people outside the bible who were 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. Your also confusing the point of a creator who creates things. If someone or something, lets call it a GOD could create the universe, create life, create weather, water, minerals and everything else, Why couldn't he create oil too? I mean seriously, even if is took billions of years for oil to naturally occur, why couldn't the creator just create?
Anyways, your perception of creation is a little off. You see, you don't need to know how plastic is made or what processes are involved to believe in evolution or any other science. In fact, you only need to know about oil and plastic if you are doing something with it that required you to know about it. I mean seriously, how much force is needed to cause a nuclear reaction in a non-controlled environment? Don't bother looking the answer up, it doesn't matter because neither of us are working with nuclear reactions and the answer is a lot more then we have to worry about. So you believing in creation, evolution, paganism, the church of Scientology, the Flying Spaghetti monster or whatever doesn't mean you have to be able to explain someone else' concepts, misconceptions, or general ideology nor would you have to involve yourself with some deep knowledge of science either.
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?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
...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
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.
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.