On Sun, 16 Aug 2015 18:24:42 +0000 (UTC), ceg
wrote:

On Sun, 16 Aug 2015 11:32:55 -0400, micky wrote:
Why is that a paradox?

I thought the paradox was clear by my Fermi Paradox example.

Think again. The Fermi Paradox is better stated as:
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
Much of this has its basis in theology where wrestling over the
existence of God is an international sport. A more simplistic version
is that you can't prove anything with nothing as evidence.

The corollary also doesn't work whe
"Quantity of evidence is not evidence of quantity".
In other words, just because you have a large pile of numbers, doesn't
mean you can prove a large number of things.

The problem is that the "Fermi Paradox" is the logic sucks.

"The great Enrico Fermi proposed the following paradox. Given
the size of the universe and evidence of intelligent life on
Earth making it non-zero probability for intelligent life
elsewhere, how come have we not been visited by aliens? Where
is everybody?, he asked."

No matter how minute the probability of such life, the size
should bring the probability to 1. (In fact we should have
been visited a high number of times: see the Kolmogorov and
Borel zero-one laws.)

So, what's missing? Well, it's time or rather how many solar
revolutions a civilization can exist without destroying itself or
having some cosmic catastrophe do it for them. The details are worked
out in the Drake Equation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
which computes the probability of two civilizations coming into
contact. If you happen to be a pessimist, and use pessimistic
probabilities, the probability might as well be zero. Inflating the
statistical population to astronomical proportions does nothing to
change the probabilities and certainly will not result in a 100%
chance of an alien encounter.




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Jeff Liebermann
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