Even with nuclear power, getting "near light speed" is still quite difficult. Basically, to accelerate a mass to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, you need to expend on order of the same mass equivalent in energy (equivalently, moving at relativistic speeds means your kinetic energy is similar to your rest mass energy).
Nuclear processes, either fission or fusion, only actually "convert" a small fraction of the "fuel" mass to energy. This is a huge amount of energy compared to chemical reactions, but quite modest compared to what you'd need for a relativistic-speed rocket. No fission- or fusion-powered rocket could carry enough fuel to get very close to the speed of light.
If we could generate, store, and react large quantities of antimatter (something not within the current technological horizon), the task would still be quite difficult --- think multiple tons of antimatter for even a small probe craft, and orders of magnitude more for something that could carry humans. If you expect to be able to stop at the other end, things get harder still.
In other words, even traversing few-light-year distances at faster than decades, if not centuries, per light year is a daunting task; impossible with current fusion (and even theoretical fission) drives, and still challenging even if you could handle tons of antimatter.
Right, because a high-level government conspiracy with the complicity of the FBI would lack the resources to produce appropriate fake photos to support their deception, thus the FBI's inability to release conclusive photos indicates this was a false-flag attack. Logic!
That's the kind of guy I'd trust because I could directly relate to him and know that he's honest
The "I'd vote for the guy who affably presents the characteristics of my social group, because I could relate to him" crap is exactly what gets the worst kind of charlatans elected. Today, there's lots of people who are married with kids and go to church, so folks win votes by looking "married with kids and claims to go to church," the nice neighborhood guy you could hang out with --- ignoring the fact that all his actual policies will rob your nice suburban middle class family blind to stuff the pockets of billionaires. But he's a nice regular guy like me, so that's what counts.
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
The government posts "most wanted" pictures for heinous crimes quite often, usually without dire consequences for either the perpetrator, or idiot members of the public getting themselves killed trying to nab violent psychopaths. I suspect these two have already gone into hiding --- they won't be obvious to the general public. But who they were and where they lived before the crime will be discovered really fast. However, I can see this type of situation getting messier in the future --- suppose the "unofficial crowd sourced intelligence gathering" had identified "suspects" on public message boards within 30 minutes of the incident (which I don't see as out-of-the-question for future incidents); then things could get awfully rough for any vague look-alikes in the area.
The problem of ruling by the majority is that minority interests get overlooked (see gay marriage).
OK; let's consider gay marriage. Marriage equality is being won in places where popular majority sentiment sides with it. I don't see cases where the tiny electoral class boldly stands up and says "well, I know 70% of our constituents are bigots, but we won't tolerate them oppressing the ~10% of society who are gay." In other words, minority interests are overlooked in either case; it still took popular majorities (not high-principled elected representatives standing against the ignorant masses) to make change.
This seems to be a general trend: I cannot think of one case of "tyranny of the majority" when that same stance was not also strongly backed by the elites in electoral office. The idea of protecting minorities through representative legislature is simply a lie --- only on-the-ground mass movements that gather actual majority popular support make progress (even though the geographic location of the masses might be non-uniform, e.g. civil rights advances being "forced" on the South by national politicians representing "Yankee" majorities).
Tyranny of the Majority is not a good thing; neither is Tyranny of the Minority. Placing more power in the hands of the populace (versus a tiny elected elite supposed to "protect the minority," who always turn out to be "the minority of the wealthiest and most powerful interests") can fix Tyranny of the 1%, while not exacerbating Tyranny of the Majority (which already happens anyway).
I think the problem is larger and more systematic than you make out. Citizen "apathy, ignorance, and fear" isn't created in a vacuum from the personal character flaws of individual citizens. These are shaped by the pervasive propaganda influence that a wealthy ruling class can wield over the entire citizenry --- an art refined to a science over the past century. When every news channel, every radio station, every newspaper and magazine advocates on behalf of the ruling class (even while providing the appearance of choice, on less critical matters, between factions of the Capitalist Party) --- even citizens who make a decent effort to be well-informed and civic-minded are left crippled of the ability to think outside the frameworks set by their corporate masters (and "respectable, educated" citizens become unwitting tools advocating the protection of corruption). Rather than starting at the ballot box, the real "battle" to be won is that of education (countering and subverting the dominant narratives that shape public acceptance of the system); without laying this foundation, no worthwhile change (by voting or other means) will be achieved.
If voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal.
Good luck with your patent. However, I have the suspicion that a business plan based on "use my own body in direct competition against the digestive and excretory systems of maltreated caged animals" may not work out so well as you hope --- that's a race to the bottom I wouldn't want to contest.
Yes. I also remember all the tehcno-optimists opining on how the coming new wave of technology would uplift the common man, rending the old chains of power and privilege and corporate servitude. Instead, wealth and power is ever more concentrated than before, and corporate control of every aspect of our lives even stronger. Jobs are harder to get and lower paying. By any measure besides the diagonal size of our TVs, standards of living are falling for the overwhelming majority. So I'm not exactly an optimist that embracing the next wave of megacorporate-controlled technology is really going to be particularly beneficial to society.
Advantages/disadvantages to genetic traits tend to be quite asymmetric. There aren't "super good" genes in the "plus" category that are both rare and confer a big positive genetic advantage when they come together --- since evolutionary pressures assure that any "big plus" traits get spread around to the whole population (it's unlikely that your close family group exclusively has some "superman genes" unavailable from mates from the wider population). However, there are lots of rare "super bad" gene combinations, that cause really terrible results when they (rarely) come together.
This may not be quite as pleasantly easy money as you think, if you want to reach high enough production levels to retain paying customers. Each pound of roasted beans starts from 15-20lbs of coffee cherries, which you will need to force feed yourself and hold down for a couple days of fermentation. So, I'm guessing it would take you at minimum two weeks of "processing time" (seven 2-day batches), in which you force-feed yourself ~2lb of coffee cherries and constipation-inducing medication, wait 2 days without eating other foods while your gut churns on fermenting pulp. Then you get to crap out the lumpy slurry, and start the process again (probably with a few day recuperation time). So, you'd be "more than happy" with two weeks of forced gorging, indigestion, constipation, fasting, and diarrhea for $1000? Your day job must be pretty awful.
So, if I were king of a shy advanced civilization, I'd try to hide by turning my home system into one of the most intriguing scientific objects in the universe, that every other highly advanced civilization would devote immense research efforts to seeking out and understanding, instead of blending in with all the boring regular matter brown dwarfs. Definitely what I'd do. Any shy advanced civilizations want to make me king?
No, the first models won't be recording all the time; no they won't hide anything. By the time Google enables recording, it'll be perfectly in the open and normal ("what kind of tinfoil-hatted nutter would care about a few frame grabs in return for all these nifty free services?") --- and it won't matter what your personal privacy votes are, because your visiting house-guests will record your life and habits for you. People choose to pay for stuff all the time --- and still get ads/tracking/intrusiveness added in to paid products. If it's a conspiracy to think that gGlass will follow the same patterns of increasing advertiser pervasiveness as TV, ebooks, music, games, credit cards, magazines, search engines, etc., then I guess I am a conspiracy nut.
As your "At least in Germany" caveat notes, this is highly dependent on jurisdiction (for the legal definition) and cultural norms (for the "eww-that's-gross" definition). In the US, for example, definitions vary at the state level, and first cousins are forbidden to marry in some states. Also variable is how laws cover adopted/step-parent (no biological bloodline) family members.
Battery life is only a minor technical hurdle, being steadily surmounted. Whatever can record for a couple hours today will be able to record all day in a few years. Anyway, Google probably doesn't need/want continuous video (yet); a frame grab every few seconds will give them a perfectly good sampling --- where you are, what brands and products you look at, what things you own, who you talk to --- on a highly granular few second basis; capturing 24FPS probably wouldn't add much more. Oh, and all those rentable/ownable things without ads: now diminishing in availability, to be replaced by the new trendy "cloud" model where everything you have is rented and streamed under whatever new terms the corporate conglomerates decide to impose on their users today.
Remember how Netflix took a couple decades to arrive after cable was already fully ad-ridden? Remember how the general public today still doesn't know how to fully ad-proof their browsers and root their cellphones, so even if a few uber-nerds slip through the cracks, Google will still have succeeded at further pushing omnipresent privacy invasion on the general public? gGlass is "just a front end for the smartphone" that gives them direct "push" capability straight to your eyeballs, and constant recording from, even when you're not whipping out the phone for intentional use; I see plenty of scope for creeping abusiveness.
I save a bunch of money by not watching TV in the first place. But that doesn't mean that I don't think others should have better choices than whatever the corporate oligopolies offer them.
Remember how Cable TV started out with no advertisements, to give people a good reason to plunk down big wads of cash every month for stuff like what they got free over the airwaves? Remember how short that lasted, once cable acceptance picked up? This no-ads/tracking thing is just a phase to get Google Glasses in front of everyone's eyeballs; then we'll get ads full blast.
But they promised it was perfectly safe! Thanks to corporate self-reporting (since we can't spend money on pesky government inspectors for health and safety risks), this same plant had filed a report with the EPA saying they had no fire and explosion risks, in response to a slap-on-the-wrist fine for not filing a risk-management plan in 2006. What sort of commie would refuse to trust corporations to properly self-report environmental and safety issues?
I know limit theory addresses this "formally" (I actually picked up a BA in mathematics along my way). My point was that people often say "oh, Zeno's been 'solved' mathematically" and point to limits --- but these actually don't address the full philosophical nuances of the paradox, because they skirt around the "hard" part (actually "doing" an infinite sum) and instead "leap" to the answer (based on "hey, it's close enough no matter how picky you get."). With regard to the philosophical question: "can you perform an infinite set of actions?" (regardless of reference to time), mathematical limit theory begs the question by starting from the "answer" (the limit, which pre-assumes you *can* "do" an infinite sum), then proving that answer is "correct" in a delta-epsilon sense (avoiding confronting any actual infinities). The mathematics of limits is incredibly useful on its own, but I don't think resolves all the philosophical difficulties posed by Zeno's paradoxes.
Zeno's paradox is slipperier than just being unresolved with respect to physical spacetime. Even from a pure philosophical/mathematical perspective, it's still quite vexing. For example, ask a mathematician to do the infinite sum 1/2+1/4+1/8+...+1/2^n+..., and you will discover they are quite lazy: they will absolutely refuse to actually sit there and sum up an infinite number of terms. Instead, they'll try to weasel out: "can't we just agree that 1 is close enough? No matter how small your definition of 'close enough' is (don't be a jerk and say '0'), I can get you that close to 1 with a finite number of terms." So, mathematicians avoid doing what Achilles apparently can: actually summing an infinite number of terms. Instead, they come up with a cop-out: "let's just call it 1, 'cus that's formally close enough, and we'd rather go get some beers than stay here summing up all infinity terms. You know Achilles actually gets there anyway, so quite arguing and come have some beer."
Hey Spaham, there's a visitor for you out in the hall --- says his name is Zeno. You might need to go out and help him --- he seems to be having some trouble making it to the door.
With the current information available, we don't know if this was even a particularly "smart" preparation of ricin. Perhaps the letter was loaded with ultra-high-purity lab-grade weaponized ricin. On the other hand, maybe the envelope contained a couple smashed up dried castor beans (enough to give the senator a nasty stomach ache if he ate the entire contents). Low-grade ricin-loaded sludge (plenty to set off the highly sensitive poison detectors) doesn't take a biochemistry genius to produce.
I think you need to add one more key component to your scientific philosophy to distinguish it from similar religious claims: 4) laws discovered by observation are easily communicable to other people
Many religions will claim that through "religious observation" (participation in the rites, prayers, behaviors, etc. of the religious community), the "laws of God governing the universe" are "discovered". Many individual religious adherents will claim that, through their "spiritual development" and "mystical experience" from "religious observance," they personally see with ever greater clarity proofs of the divine power ordering the cosmos. However, such "proofs" remain intensely personal, and the only way for another person to "be enlightened" is to embark on their own life-long "spiritual journey" ("I know the truth... but I can't just explain it; you have to experience it for yourself").
The "communication component" of "scientific philosophy" is a key distinction from the "personal discovery of objective Truth" in religious practice. Perhaps I personally have to become as "pure and spiritual" as a great religious guru to "discover" the truths evident to him; however, I don't have to be as smart as Einstein to see how Einstein's relativistic theories describe observable features of the universe. Over time, scientific concepts that once could only be understood by the few most enlightened scientific minds become communicable and accessible to an ever greater range of people --- a high school student today can learn Newton's orbital mechanics.
Nothing is "wrong" with "unlikely states," because normative judgments like "right"/"wrong" don't particularly apply in scientific analysis of theories. An unlikely state is, however,... unlikely. Maybe you can find a different theory in which said state isn't so unlikely (i.e. a theory that more finely predicts the observed universe); maybe you can't --- but if you're going to bother trying to find better theories at all, "unlikely" observations provide promising starting points for closer scrutiny.
Slashdot Mirror
Even with nuclear power, getting "near light speed" is still quite difficult. Basically, to accelerate a mass to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, you need to expend on order of the same mass equivalent in energy (equivalently, moving at relativistic speeds means your kinetic energy is similar to your rest mass energy).
Nuclear processes, either fission or fusion, only actually "convert" a small fraction of the "fuel" mass to energy. This is a huge amount of energy compared to chemical reactions, but quite modest compared to what you'd need for a relativistic-speed rocket. No fission- or fusion-powered rocket could carry enough fuel to get very close to the speed of light.
If we could generate, store, and react large quantities of antimatter (something not within the current technological horizon), the task would still be quite difficult --- think multiple tons of antimatter for even a small probe craft, and orders of magnitude more for something that could carry humans. If you expect to be able to stop at the other end, things get harder still.
In other words, even traversing few-light-year distances at faster than decades, if not centuries, per light year is a daunting task; impossible with current fusion (and even theoretical fission) drives, and still challenging even if you could handle tons of antimatter.
Not overly pedantic; point well taken. Consider my post above thus edited so far as Slashdot allows.
Right, because a high-level government conspiracy with the complicity of the FBI would lack the resources to produce appropriate fake photos to support their deception, thus the FBI's inability to release conclusive photos indicates this was a false-flag attack. Logic!
That's the kind of guy I'd trust because I could directly relate to him and know that he's honest
The "I'd vote for the guy who affably presents the characteristics of my social group, because I could relate to him" crap is exactly what gets the worst kind of charlatans elected. Today, there's lots of people who are married with kids and go to church, so folks win votes by looking "married with kids and claims to go to church," the nice neighborhood guy you could hang out with --- ignoring the fact that all his actual policies will rob your nice suburban middle class family blind to stuff the pockets of billionaires. But he's a nice regular guy like me, so that's what counts.
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
-- Jean Giraudoux
The government posts "most wanted" pictures for heinous crimes quite often, usually without dire consequences for either the perpetrator, or idiot members of the public getting themselves killed trying to nab violent psychopaths. I suspect these two have already gone into hiding --- they won't be obvious to the general public. But who they were and where they lived before the crime will be discovered really fast. However, I can see this type of situation getting messier in the future --- suppose the "unofficial crowd sourced intelligence gathering" had identified "suspects" on public message boards within 30 minutes of the incident (which I don't see as out-of-the-question for future incidents); then things could get awfully rough for any vague look-alikes in the area.
The problem of ruling by the majority is that minority interests get overlooked (see gay marriage).
OK; let's consider gay marriage. Marriage equality is being won in places where popular majority sentiment sides with it. I don't see cases where the tiny electoral class boldly stands up and says "well, I know 70% of our constituents are bigots, but we won't tolerate them oppressing the ~10% of society who are gay." In other words, minority interests are overlooked in either case; it still took popular majorities (not high-principled elected representatives standing against the ignorant masses) to make change.
This seems to be a general trend: I cannot think of one case of "tyranny of the majority" when that same stance was not also strongly backed by the elites in electoral office. The idea of protecting minorities through representative legislature is simply a lie --- only on-the-ground mass movements that gather actual majority popular support make progress (even though the geographic location of the masses might be non-uniform, e.g. civil rights advances being "forced" on the South by national politicians representing "Yankee" majorities).
Tyranny of the Majority is not a good thing; neither is Tyranny of the Minority. Placing more power in the hands of the populace (versus a tiny elected elite supposed to "protect the minority," who always turn out to be "the minority of the wealthiest and most powerful interests") can fix Tyranny of the 1%, while not exacerbating Tyranny of the Majority (which already happens anyway).
I think the problem is larger and more systematic than you make out. Citizen "apathy, ignorance, and fear" isn't created in a vacuum from the personal character flaws of individual citizens. These are shaped by the pervasive propaganda influence that a wealthy ruling class can wield over the entire citizenry --- an art refined to a science over the past century. When every news channel, every radio station, every newspaper and magazine advocates on behalf of the ruling class (even while providing the appearance of choice, on less critical matters, between factions of the Capitalist Party) --- even citizens who make a decent effort to be well-informed and civic-minded are left crippled of the ability to think outside the frameworks set by their corporate masters (and "respectable, educated" citizens become unwitting tools advocating the protection of corruption). Rather than starting at the ballot box, the real "battle" to be won is that of education (countering and subverting the dominant narratives that shape public acceptance of the system); without laying this foundation, no worthwhile change (by voting or other means) will be achieved.
If voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal.
-attributed to Emma Goldman
Good luck with your patent. However, I have the suspicion that a business plan based on "use my own body in direct competition against the digestive and excretory systems of maltreated caged animals" may not work out so well as you hope --- that's a race to the bottom I wouldn't want to contest.
Yes. I also remember all the tehcno-optimists opining on how the coming new wave of technology would uplift the common man, rending the old chains of power and privilege and corporate servitude. Instead, wealth and power is ever more concentrated than before, and corporate control of every aspect of our lives even stronger. Jobs are harder to get and lower paying. By any measure besides the diagonal size of our TVs, standards of living are falling for the overwhelming majority. So I'm not exactly an optimist that embracing the next wave of megacorporate-controlled technology is really going to be particularly beneficial to society.
Advantages/disadvantages to genetic traits tend to be quite asymmetric. There aren't "super good" genes in the "plus" category that are both rare and confer a big positive genetic advantage when they come together --- since evolutionary pressures assure that any "big plus" traits get spread around to the whole population (it's unlikely that your close family group exclusively has some "superman genes" unavailable from mates from the wider population). However, there are lots of rare "super bad" gene combinations, that cause really terrible results when they (rarely) come together.
This may not be quite as pleasantly easy money as you think, if you want to reach high enough production levels to retain paying customers. Each pound of roasted beans starts from 15-20lbs of coffee cherries, which you will need to force feed yourself and hold down for a couple days of fermentation. So, I'm guessing it would take you at minimum two weeks of "processing time" (seven 2-day batches), in which you force-feed yourself ~2lb of coffee cherries and constipation-inducing medication, wait 2 days without eating other foods while your gut churns on fermenting pulp. Then you get to crap out the lumpy slurry, and start the process again (probably with a few day recuperation time). So, you'd be "more than happy" with two weeks of forced gorging, indigestion, constipation, fasting, and diarrhea for $1000? Your day job must be pretty awful.
So, if I were king of a shy advanced civilization, I'd try to hide by turning my home system into one of the most intriguing scientific objects in the universe, that every other highly advanced civilization would devote immense research efforts to seeking out and understanding, instead of blending in with all the boring regular matter brown dwarfs. Definitely what I'd do. Any shy advanced civilizations want to make me king?
"Green" + "Capitalist" = "Capitalist"
No, the first models won't be recording all the time; no they won't hide anything. By the time Google enables recording, it'll be perfectly in the open and normal ("what kind of tinfoil-hatted nutter would care about a few frame grabs in return for all these nifty free services?") --- and it won't matter what your personal privacy votes are, because your visiting house-guests will record your life and habits for you. People choose to pay for stuff all the time --- and still get ads/tracking/intrusiveness added in to paid products. If it's a conspiracy to think that gGlass will follow the same patterns of increasing advertiser pervasiveness as TV, ebooks, music, games, credit cards, magazines, search engines, etc., then I guess I am a conspiracy nut.
As your "At least in Germany" caveat notes, this is highly dependent on jurisdiction (for the legal definition) and cultural norms (for the "eww-that's-gross" definition). In the US, for example, definitions vary at the state level, and first cousins are forbidden to marry in some states. Also variable is how laws cover adopted/step-parent (no biological bloodline) family members.
Battery life is only a minor technical hurdle, being steadily surmounted. Whatever can record for a couple hours today will be able to record all day in a few years. Anyway, Google probably doesn't need/want continuous video (yet); a frame grab every few seconds will give them a perfectly good sampling --- where you are, what brands and products you look at, what things you own, who you talk to --- on a highly granular few second basis; capturing 24FPS probably wouldn't add much more. Oh, and all those rentable/ownable things without ads: now diminishing in availability, to be replaced by the new trendy "cloud" model where everything you have is rented and streamed under whatever new terms the corporate conglomerates decide to impose on their users today.
Remember how Netflix took a couple decades to arrive after cable was already fully ad-ridden? Remember how the general public today still doesn't know how to fully ad-proof their browsers and root their cellphones, so even if a few uber-nerds slip through the cracks, Google will still have succeeded at further pushing omnipresent privacy invasion on the general public? gGlass is "just a front end for the smartphone" that gives them direct "push" capability straight to your eyeballs, and constant recording from, even when you're not whipping out the phone for intentional use; I see plenty of scope for creeping abusiveness.
I save a bunch of money by not watching TV in the first place. But that doesn't mean that I don't think others should have better choices than whatever the corporate oligopolies offer them.
Remember how Cable TV started out with no advertisements, to give people a good reason to plunk down big wads of cash every month for stuff like what they got free over the airwaves? Remember how short that lasted, once cable acceptance picked up? This no-ads/tracking thing is just a phase to get Google Glasses in front of everyone's eyeballs; then we'll get ads full blast.
But they promised it was perfectly safe! Thanks to corporate self-reporting (since we can't spend money on pesky government inspectors for health and safety risks), this same plant had filed a report with the EPA saying they had no fire and explosion risks, in response to a slap-on-the-wrist fine for not filing a risk-management plan in 2006. What sort of commie would refuse to trust corporations to properly self-report environmental and safety issues?
I know limit theory addresses this "formally" (I actually picked up a BA in mathematics along my way). My point was that people often say "oh, Zeno's been 'solved' mathematically" and point to limits --- but these actually don't address the full philosophical nuances of the paradox, because they skirt around the "hard" part (actually "doing" an infinite sum) and instead "leap" to the answer (based on "hey, it's close enough no matter how picky you get."). With regard to the philosophical question: "can you perform an infinite set of actions?" (regardless of reference to time), mathematical limit theory begs the question by starting from the "answer" (the limit, which pre-assumes you *can* "do" an infinite sum), then proving that answer is "correct" in a delta-epsilon sense (avoiding confronting any actual infinities). The mathematics of limits is incredibly useful on its own, but I don't think resolves all the philosophical difficulties posed by Zeno's paradoxes.
Zeno's paradox is slipperier than just being unresolved with respect to physical spacetime. Even from a pure philosophical/mathematical perspective, it's still quite vexing. For example, ask a mathematician to do the infinite sum 1/2+1/4+1/8+...+1/2^n+..., and you will discover they are quite lazy: they will absolutely refuse to actually sit there and sum up an infinite number of terms. Instead, they'll try to weasel out: "can't we just agree that 1 is close enough? No matter how small your definition of 'close enough' is (don't be a jerk and say '0'), I can get you that close to 1 with a finite number of terms." So, mathematicians avoid doing what Achilles apparently can: actually summing an infinite number of terms. Instead, they come up with a cop-out: "let's just call it 1, 'cus that's formally close enough, and we'd rather go get some beers than stay here summing up all infinity terms. You know Achilles actually gets there anyway, so quite arguing and come have some beer."
Hey Spaham, there's a visitor for you out in the hall --- says his name is Zeno. You might need to go out and help him --- he seems to be having some trouble making it to the door.
With the current information available, we don't know if this was even a particularly "smart" preparation of ricin. Perhaps the letter was loaded with ultra-high-purity lab-grade weaponized ricin. On the other hand, maybe the envelope contained a couple smashed up dried castor beans (enough to give the senator a nasty stomach ache if he ate the entire contents). Low-grade ricin-loaded sludge (plenty to set off the highly sensitive poison detectors) doesn't take a biochemistry genius to produce.
I think you need to add one more key component to your scientific philosophy to distinguish it from similar religious claims:
4) laws discovered by observation are easily communicable to other people
Many religions will claim that through "religious observation" (participation in the rites, prayers, behaviors, etc. of the religious community), the "laws of God governing the universe" are "discovered". Many individual religious adherents will claim that, through their "spiritual development" and "mystical experience" from "religious observance," they personally see with ever greater clarity proofs of the divine power ordering the cosmos. However, such "proofs" remain intensely personal, and the only way for another person to "be enlightened" is to embark on their own life-long "spiritual journey" ("I know the truth... but I can't just explain it; you have to experience it for yourself").
The "communication component" of "scientific philosophy" is a key distinction from the "personal discovery of objective Truth" in religious practice. Perhaps I personally have to become as "pure and spiritual" as a great religious guru to "discover" the truths evident to him; however, I don't have to be as smart as Einstein to see how Einstein's relativistic theories describe observable features of the universe. Over time, scientific concepts that once could only be understood by the few most enlightened scientific minds become communicable and accessible to an ever greater range of people --- a high school student today can learn Newton's orbital mechanics.
Nothing is "wrong" with "unlikely states," because normative judgments like "right"/"wrong" don't particularly apply in scientific analysis of theories. An unlikely state is, however, ... unlikely. Maybe you can find a different theory in which said state isn't so unlikely (i.e. a theory that more finely predicts the observed universe); maybe you can't --- but if you're going to bother trying to find better theories at all, "unlikely" observations provide promising starting points for closer scrutiny.