ARCHIVE: Signals from space aliens or random chance?

[Johnny]

Apparently for you folks the more complex something is the more likely it was generated randomly, and the less complex a pattern is the more likely it was generated by intelligent life. Go figure!

Do you really think it's that simple?

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Do you really think it's that simple?

In comparison to a picture of Marilyn Monroe Juggling Fish being generated via random pixels, or a tennis ball passing effortlessly through a brick wall, or a self replicating living cell..... yes... extremely simple compared to those things.

 

[scparmy]

Depends on the understanding of the person hearing the sounds. The bible I read makes it very clear that "Man" is made in the image of God. Meaning we have a mind, emotion, and will, a soul, and spirit? Something that other created beings do not possess. There is never any mention of anything, or anyone living on another planet. In fact man is God's only creation, created in his image. Consider: if God created any other beings, why did he not choose to save them? Angels are not saved. Makes no sense to me..

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Depends on the understanding of the person hearing the sounds. The bible I read makes it very clear that "Man" is made in the image of God. Meaning we have a mind, emotion, and will, a soul, and spirit? Something that other created beings do not possess. There is never any mention of anything, or anyone living on another planet. In fact man is God's only creation, created in his image. Consider: if God created any other beings, why did he not choose to save them? Angels are not saved. Makes no sense to me..

I am not making the case for aliens. Instead I am testing the intellectual honesty of folks who often claim that extremely complex things are the products of random chance. Yet as we have seen in this thread each and every one of them would attribute intelligence to the somewhat simple signal from space.

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

Actually, your chances of winning the lottery are 100% if you buy the right numbers and 0% if you buy the wrong numbers. Buying 500 billion sets of numbers does not increase your chances if none of them have the winning numbers.

:bang: :bang: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

I gotta tip my hat to you :e4e: That's the stupidest and funniest thing I've heard all day. I can't wait to show the folks at Dawkins.

FYI: there is no such thing as chance if you have a priori outcome information as implicit in your statement.

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

I am not making the case for aliens. Instead I am testing the intellectual honesty of folks who often claim that extremely complex things are the products of random chance. Yet as we have seen in this thread each and every one of them would attribute intelligence to the somewhat simple signal from space.

All you're demonstrating is your honesty, intellect, or both and I assure you it isn't flattering.

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Da-scoreboard....

Da-scoreboard....

I'd accept that as conclusive evidence of intelligent life.

Mark Mr Jack down for attributing the signal to intelligence.

I'd probably be inclined to believe it was intelligent life.

Count Layla in for intelligence being the source of the signal.

I would say intelligence.

Mark PlastikBuddha down for attributing the signal to intelligence.

I would believe it, seeing as background interference from stars would not form itself into anything resembling a coherent coherent sentence.

Mark Pekkle down for attributing the signal to intelligence.

I (and a whole lot of other SETIsts) would be ecstatically happy at what (barring any later disproof) was our first recognized extra-solar contact.

Mark ThePhy down for attributing the signal to intelligence.

Given the terms of the scenario I'd say it was a genuine signal.

Mark Granite down for attributing the signal to intelligence.

the probability that such a string of letters (which depends on the letter coding method of the sender that you did not specify) could have appeared by chance , even in the entire 14 billion years of the Universe, is miniscule

Mark FedUpWithFaith down for attributing the signal to intelligence.

Because at some level we all make the judgment call that it is more likely there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe beaming us a signal than it is that the signal was randomly generated without any sort of selection mechanism in place.

Mark Johnny down for attributing the signal to intelligence.

as a reasonable man, would not only assume intelligence behind it but that said intelligence has intimate and privileged knowledge pertaining to us.

Mark Edmond_Dantes down for attributing the signal to intelligence.

Not a signal dissenter. :think:

 

[Nathon Detroit]

All you're demonstrating is your honesty, intellect, or both and I assure you it isn't flattering.

Hey moron, it's called a conversation. We have those on forums (heck it's the very purpose of a forum).

If you don't like to engage in conversations... don't! I don't remember twisting your arm.

Many folks like to converse with one another, ya know... explore the circus of ideas. Yet conversations don't appeal to everyone and maybe you are one such zombie.

Why is it every time you post all I can think of is Squidward Tentacles?

 

[Johnny]

In comparison to a picture of Marilyn Monroe Juggling Fish being generated via random pixels, or a tennis ball passing effortlessly through a brick wall, or a self replicating living cell..... yes... extremely simple compared to those things.

No, do you think the issue is really as simple as evolutionists accepting the complexity of the cell as a "random event" while simultaneously claiming that a simple space message as requires an intelligent agent? We are not stupid, and your argument is not new (Paley beat you by more than a hundred years, and Aquinas before him). If evolution simply consisted of random events with no selection mechanism and no way of integrating varying degrees of successful events into the evolutionary pedigree, the intelligent design proponents might have a point. But it's not that simple. Life replicates with varying success, and those random messages which provide a non-random result (reproductive advantage) are integrated into the gene pool. The result is a non-random and highly complex message which looks intelligently designed but is in fact the result of a blind process. Creationists often overlook the power of such a process, but researchers are exploiting the very same principles using evolutionary algorithms to create novel solutions to problems in a wide variety of fields. Some of these solutions are even more efficient than human solutions. One might, with the same power of reasoning, claim these algorithms must have been intelligently designed.

The point is very simply that evolution, although powered by a random process, is ultimately a non-random event. The output of any random process with a non-random selective criteria is, by definition, non-random.

To be incredulous that evolutionists would attribute a message from space to intelligent life while simultaneously attributing life in all its complexities to a natural process is, at best, rooted in ignorance of evolutionary theory and modern science, and at worst, disingenuous.

As FedUpWithFaith put it,

So the likelyhood of Knight's message occuring by chance does increase as you integrate conjoint probability over time - every day as long as there are new signals being monitored. But without any mechanism to select particular random signals, letters, or words in a non-random manner, like evolution does (acting upon each separate or conjoint random mutation through natural selection) the chances of conjoint occurance increases extremely slowly over time relative to a deterministic process like evolution. Such discrepancies arise and grow exponentially the more complexity you insist be embodied into one event. If scientists said that in order for evolution to work a large number of different mutations all had to occur simulateously without any natural selection process in-between I would agree that the theory was nuts. But that ain't the theory.

If you and Knight thought this was all some ingenious trap to catch those of us who understand and accept evolution then you've just been hoisted by your own petard. I didn't need any "atheistic faith" (LOL) to do it either - just reason and logic and a little bit of intelligence.​

 

[SingedWing]

I am not making the case for aliens. Instead I am testing the intellectual honesty of folks who often claim that extremely complex things are the products of random chance. Yet as we have seen in this thread each and every one of them would attribute intelligence to the somewhat simple signal from space.

Extremely complex things happen by random chance all the time in your body. It's a huge chance machine. Nothing intelligent directs amino acids into a ribosome. Heat does it and heat is random. Well, as random as it gets here on Earth.

Ohh but how did the ribosome get there? How did trillions of ribosomes get there when you started out as one cell? Does God take time out of his schedule to tailor each one or is this chemistry?

Do you believe in ATP generation in the membrane of the cell by chemical action?

here is how it works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP_synthase

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

Hey moron, it's called a conversation. We have those on forums (heck it's the very purpose of a forum).

If you don't like to engage in conversations... don't! I don't remember twisted your arm.

Many folks like to converse with one another, ya know... explore the circus of ideas. Yet conversations don't appeal to everyone and maybe you are one such zombie.

Why is it every time you post all I can think of is Squidward Tentacles?

I love conversations when there is an honest thinking person on the other side. And when there isn't I love watching as I help them make a fool of themselves.

 

[ThePhy]

Well, it isn't "my" scenario it was my professor's scenario which all of you seemed to think was completely reasonable (on the other thread).

Furthermore, I did come up with a more "easy" scenario.... I came up with the very simple message from space that would be dramatically less improbable than generating a picture of Marilyn Monroe juggling fish via random pixels.

And so far its a clean sweep, every single one of you has admitted you would be comfortable admitting that the signal was generated intelligently and not randomly.

Apparently for you folks the more complex something is the more likely it was generated randomly, and the less complex a pattern is the more likely it was generated by intelligent life. Go figure! :doh:

Clean sweep yes. The part is then you take our agreement with your scenario and stretch it to mean things none of us agreed to. We agreed that intelligent life was the most likely cause of your signal. You are the one, not us that then stretched that result. A statement from you like “When the signal was received the length of time SETI had been tracking signals would play no part in the determination if the signal was generated randomly or by intelligent means” is not only something WE DID NOT SAY, in fact several of us have argued just the opposite. How about not taking our answers to a very specific question and pasting it all over conclusions that do not follow from your question.

My simplified MM scenario is not nearly as complicated as the one you proposed. We looked at yours and responded (honestly – as you asked). Can you do likewise to my simplified version?

 

[Stripe]

My simplified MM scenario is not nearly as complicated as the one you proposed. We looked at yours and responded (honestly – as you asked). Can you do likewise to my simplified version?

27²¹¹ < 256^640x480

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

Yet as we have seen in this thread each and every one of them would attribute intelligence to the somewhat simple signal from space.

Knight,

Since you didn’t dispute SUTG’s math earlier in this thread it is intellectually dishonest of you to describe your signal as “simple” in this context.

It may be simple to you, but as SUTG quite ably demonstrated it is not simple from a statistical coincidence point of view. Let me remind you:

If we assume that the signal stream is all lower case letters, commas, spaces, and periods, we sill still have enough characters to generate Knight's hypothetical message. His message is 211 characters, with 29 possibilities for each position, so I'd say it is pretty unlikely. :chuckle: A random string of 211 characters from the character set would have a one in 29^211 chance of being Knight's message.

There you have it, or at least pretty close. The messages in a continuous stream of characters could be any length, not just 211, so I think the probability of a similar message randomly occuring would be higher. I'll agree to ignore that.

So, if they only looked at 10,000 characters, and their equipment was not faulty, there was not a hoax, etc., and my only two choices were random event or signal from aliens, I'd go with the aliens. If they looked at 29^1000 characters, I'd be surprised if they didn't find Knight's message.

Actually, SUTG acknowledges that he is overestimating the probability but he didn’t bother to go through it. When you consider the bandwidth and redundancy of information required for SETI to recognize, bin and characterize a signal in bit-wise terms, especially in view of the frame shift problem, you add several orders of magnitude more uncertainty. SUTG overlooked the fact that you have to encode each of the 29 characters into bits. You can’t just send the letter “A” – you have to encode it. You could use Morse code which is pretty efficient but it is very susceptible to frame shift error – one bad bit and the whole message is ruined (SETI is geared to look at repetitive unusual signals repetitively and find matches). At a minimum, that stretches the required character encoding by at least a factor of 4. So 100^211 is a very conservative estimate. Since I prefer scientific notation that’s 10^422. in case you don’t know, that’s a 1 with 422 zeros after it – bigger than a googleplex (10^100).

OK, now according to wikipedia SETI can monitor 8 million channels simultaneously with a resolution of 0.05 Hz after stabilization. That 20 bits per second but that applies to each bit and there are 221x3= 663 bits. Therefore, it would take SETI at least 30 seconds to get the message in any particular viewframe. Therefore, performed continuously, SETI can recognize 16 million messages like yours per minute if they exist. That’s 960 million/hour, 23040 million/day, and 8.4 x 10^12 per year. To make the math easy I’ll be even more conservative – let’s say 10^13 per year.

So you’ll have a (10^13)/(10^422) chance per year of seeing your signal by random occurrence. To get to just a 50% probability of seeing a signal due to chance alone you’d have to watch SETI’s monitoring for approximately 10^400 years.

I’m pretty tired and in case I erred I don’t mind using SUTG’s number of 29^211. Gee, I’ll even be more generous to you and say it’s only 10^211. That would still mean it would take 10^198 years to have a 50% expectation of seeing your signal by chance.

Not such a “simple message” is it pal? We take our intelligence for granted but statistically, even seemingly simple messages encode a lot of information.

 

[Stripe]

Knight,

Since you didn’t dispute SUTG’s math earlier in this thread it is intellectually dishonest of you to describe your signal as “simple” in this context.

It may be simple to you, but as SUTG quite ably demonstrated it is not simple from a statistical coincidence point of view. Let me remind you:

Actually, SUTG acknowledges that he is overestimating the probability but he didn’t bother to go through it. When you consider the bandwidth and redundancy of information required for SETI to recognize, bin and characterize a signal in bit-wise terms, especially in view of the frame shift problem, you add several orders of magnitude more uncertainty. SUTG overlooked the fact that you have to encode each of the 29 characters into bits. You can’t just send the letter “A” – you have to encode it. You could use Morse code which is pretty efficient but it is very susceptible to frame shift error – one bad bit and the whole message is ruined (SETI is geared to look at repetitive unusual signals repetitively and find matches). At a minimum, that stretches the required character encoding by at least a factor of 4. So 100^211 is a very conservative estimate. Since I prefer scientific notation that’s 10^422. in case you don’t know, that’s a 1 with 422 zeros after it – bigger than a googleplex (10^100).

OK, now according to wikipedia SETI can monitor 8 million channels simultaneously with a resolution of 0.05 Hz after stabilization. That 20 bits per second but that applies to each bit and there are 221x3= 663 bits. Therefore, it would take SETI at least 30 seconds to get the message in any particular viewframe. Therefore, performed continuously, SETI can recognize 16 million messages like yours per minute if they exist. That’s 960 million/hour, 23040 million/day, and 8.4 x 10^12 per year. To make the math easy I’ll be even more conservative – let’s say 10^13 per year.

So you’ll have a (10^13)/(10^422) chance per year of seeing your signal by random occurrence. To get to just a 50% probability of seeing a signal due to chance alone you’d have to watch SETI’s monitoring for approximately 10^400 years.

I’m pretty tired and in case I erred I don’t mind using SUTG’s number of 29^211. Gee, I’ll even be more generous to you and say it’s only 10^211. That would still mean it would take 10^198 years to have a 50% expectation of seeing your signal by chance.

Not such a “simple message” is it pal? We take our intelligence for granted but statistically, even seemingly simple messages encode a lot of information.

How far off topic are we going to get? The degree of complexity in the message is a non-issue. The point is, when and why does one acknowledge an intelligent source?

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

How far off topic are we going to get? The degree of complexity in the message is a non-issue. The point is, when and why does one acknowledge an intelligent source?

Sometimes it's hard to tell if some people here are serious. Granted, one of the points of my post was to demonstrate that Knight either does not understand or is not being honest about the complex nature of his proposed message AND the implications that has for its likelyhood by chance.

If my math above is correct I've just given you the probabilities that the message could be produced randomly rather than produced by intelligence. That chance is vanishingly small, not just today and tomorrow and this year but for the next trillions and trillions of years. So if it can only be random or from intelligence only a fool would pick by chance.

My post is completely on point.

 

[Stripe]

Sometimes it's hard to tell if some people here are serious. Granted, one of the points of my post was to demonstrate that Knight either does not understand or is not being honest about the complex nature of his proposed message AND the implications that has for its likelyhood by chance.

If my math above is correct I've just given you the probabilities that the message could be produced randomly rather than produced by intelligence. That chance is vanishingly small, not just today and tomorrow and this year but for the next trillions and trillions of years. So if it can only be random or from intelligence only a fool would pick by chance.

My post is completely on point.

Uh .. OK. I don't think you appreciate the fact that Knight was comparing the likelihood of his message as opposed to the likelihood of certain other events .. but thanks anyway ..

 

[Redfin]

Is there a time frame in that experiment that it's more probable you will get your result?

This is the 2nd time you've asked, and I haven't seen anyone answer yet (as of post #93).

YES, there IS a time frame (TF) in that experiment that it's more probable you will get your result.

TF2, when TF2>TF1. (> means "is greater than")

I believe this is what Layla was trying to say, way back when.

:think:

 

[Stripe]

27²¹¹ < 256^640x480

27²¹¹ = the number of ways 211 characters can be arranged

which is less than

256^640x480 = the number of ways a 256 colour image can be arranged in 640 by 480 pixels.

Still think you have a relevant point?

 

[Stripe]

This is the 2nd time you've asked, and I haven't seen anyone answer yet (as of post #93).

YES, there IS a time frame (TF) in that experiment that it's more probable you will get your result.

TF2, when TF2>TF1. (> means "is greater than")

I believe this is what Layla was trying to say, way back when.

:think:

The amount of data sets you have available is irrelevant. The point is how and why do we come to the conclusion that a specific one is from an intelligent source. If you agree that it is more likely over a greater time period then you are admitting that any message, no matter how intelligent looking, could be the result of random effects.

The idea that something is more probable over a greater amount of time ignores the fact that we all recognise an intelligent source.