Alien cover up

[Anomalocaris]

No, no credible evidence of alien having visited earth simply means it can not be asserted that aliens have in fact visited earth.   It does not mean it could therefore be asserted that aliens in fact did not visit earth.

[dyresand]

I wasn't being serious when i wrote this i meant
for it to be a hypothetical.

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

Trust me, there are no aliens.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Trust me, there are no aliens.

Don't be daft. Of course there are aliens. In a universe as vast as this one, chock-a-block with planets, it borders on intellectual perversity to state that ours is the only planet with life on it.

Boru

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

No, no credible evidence of alien having visited earth simply means it can not be asserted that aliens have in fact visited earth.   It does not mean it could therefore be asserted that aliens in fact did not visit earth.

By the same token, we should hold out the possibility that honeybees are fluent in Sanskrit - simply because there's no evidence that they speak it doesn't mean that they don't. One might as well assert the possibilities of leprechauns, hobbits, sharks manufacturing bowler hats, or pandas composing long, involved discourses on the moral conflicts inherent in Dostoyevsky.

Whether or not aliens have ever visited our planet isn't a logic puzzle. Physical phenomena require either physical evidence or compelling arguments, neither of which is present in the case of alien visitation. When I ask, 'Do you believe that ETs have ever visited Earth?' and I get a yes, I'm immediately going to ask 'Why?'. If the answer to that question is, 'Because there's no way to prove they haven't', I'm going to hit my respondent repeatedly over the head with a critical thinking textbook.

Boru

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

Trust me, there are no aliens.

Don't be daft.  Of course there are aliens.  In a universe as vast as this one, chock-a-block with planets, it borders on intellectual perversity to state that ours is the only planet with life on it.

Boru

Well, Imagine you came across a gazillion water bottles all empty but one.
You look at the one bottle that is filled with water and you do the math - there are at least a gazillion bottles here, so if there is water in one of the bottles then there must be water in at least another bottle.

Yeah... no.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Don't be daft.  Of course there are aliens.  In a universe as vast as this one, chock-a-block with planets, it borders on intellectual perversity to state that ours is the only planet with life on it.

Boru

Well, Imagine you came across a gazillion water bottles all empty but one.
You look at the one bottle that is filled with water and you do the math - there are at least a gazillion bottles here, so if there is water in one of the bottles then there must be water in at least another bottle.

Yeah... no.

You're looking at it rather too simplistically.  Instead of simply a gazillion water bottles, imagine that some of those water bottles exist in conditions conducive to condensation.  Suppose further that only a tiny fraction of your water bottles exist in such conditions, say around 1/10 of one percent.  Since I'm not entirely sure what 0.001 of a gazillion is, let's opt for 'trillion' instead (the idea of a trillion planets doesn't seem terribly far fetched).  Ok, so 1% of a trillion is ten billion.  One tenth of that is one billion.

Your claim that out of a billion bottles existing in conditions conducive to containing water none of them will contain water is impressively stupid.  If there are a billion planets conducive to life, the odds are decidedly in favour of life appearing on at least a few of them.

Yeah...yes.

Boru

[ignoramus]

Pool, your fuzzy logic is now completely out of focus.

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

Consider if there were 50 total planets.
Consider earth is one of this 50 planets.
So we have 49 planets remaining.
Each planet will have a 50-50 chance of having intelligent life in it.
So 50-50 chance for each planet of 49 planets leaves you with a 50-50 chance of life in these 49 remaining planets overall.
But if you consider earth, which has life in it, then the odd are no longer 50-50 as we have at least 1 planet with life. Which would mean that the probability of aliens in the 49 remaining planets are now higher.
But wait, some people from earth does some space travelling and find out that 3 of the planets have no life in them.
Then these 3 planets no longer have a 50-50 chance of having life in them, they have 0 chance of having life in them.
That leaves us with what? 50 planets with 1 planet we are sure there is life and 3 planets we are sure there is no life.
So that means the probability is now staked against the existence of aliens, one which increases as we find more planets with no life in them.

Face it, there are no aliens. We are alone. There's no point in waiting.. Quite sad actually.

[Anomalocaris]

No, no credible evidence of alien having visited earth simply means it can not be asserted that aliens have in fact visited earth.   It does not mean it could therefore be asserted that aliens in fact did not visit earth.

By the same token, we should hold out the possibility that honeybees are fluent in Sanskrit - simply because there's no evidence that they speak it doesn't mean that they don't.  One might as well assert the possibilities of leprechauns, hobbits, sharks manufacturing bowler hats, or pandas composing long, involved discourses on the moral conflicts inherent in Dostoyevsky.

Whether or not aliens have ever visited our planet isn't a logic puzzle.  Physical phenomena require either physical evidence or compelling arguments, neither of which is present in the case of alien visitation.  When I ask, 'Do you believe that ETs have ever visited Earth?' and I get a yes, I'm immediately going to ask 'Why?'.  If the answer to that question is, 'Because there's no way to prove they haven't', I'm going to hit my respondent repeatedly over the head with a critical thinking textbook.

Boru

Er, no.  We have a good working knowledge, based or an enormous sample, readily further expandable to virtually any size we wish when we wish, of the amount of neurological complexity required to be capable of being fluent in Sanskrit.  We also have a good working knowledge of the basic requirements for any sound producing organ to allow speaking Sanskrit.  It is not that we didn't find basis for any in honey bee.   It is we found there are no basis for any in honeybees.  Therefore we might conclude there is multiple lines of profound and muturally support line of evidence of the absence of the ability to be fluent in Sanskrit in honey bees. Further, if some undetected flying critters out there do speak Sanskrit, we might conclude they must possess such a vast difference from honey been that they can't possibly be honey bees or closely replayed to honey bees. So we can say honey bees can't speak Sanskrit.

We have no such evidence of absence of alien visitation.   Only absence of evidence.  

Furthermore, We have no idea what sort of evidence a real visitation would leave. We have no idea how many potential visitors there are. We have no idea at what point in earth's 4.6 billion years they might have visited. So we are not in any sort of position whatsoever to pronounce whether some evidence we can detect ought to be there, or ought to have already been found and understood, if aliens had been here.

It's not only the absence of evidence, it is the absence of working knowledge of what evidence to expect.

As the trope goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.