All ideas should be rooted in evidence. Or disbelief. Your choice.

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But isn't "disbelief" as bad as "belief?"

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

No.

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Well, Moose, if you ask me, disbelief in something approaches pseudoskepticism.

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

What scientists are those, A.Dim? Please name some of them. What, specifically, are the accepted assumptions? And why are they "accepted"? Remember, an assumption is not evidence.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

The problem with the "regulars" is that they (we?) see Planet X and the Annunaki waiting to leap out at us from every shadow. Constant "cutesy" interjections (with the obligatory ) don't do anything to quell those expectations.

This isn't a fault of the regulars. It's a bed of your own making. It's why your's may be a rather special case, and erring on the side of being abundantly clear in your ETi thoughts can only be beneficial, until you've laid those doubts to rest

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

Yes, and it's patently obvious you feel this way. But, as usual, you're cherry-picking your preferred context and deliberately misrepresenting interpretations you don't like.

Let me spell it out for you:

In the face of overwhelming evidence, disbelief is irrational. (Example: a certain population segment and the factual component of evolution, geocentricism, or genuine flat Earthers.) You go where the evidence leads.

In the face of no evidence whatsoever, or significant contrary evidence, belief is irrational. (This is the position you've taken on several points, and this is why we've been calling you on it.)

Belief in proportion to the evidence is rational.

Let me restate: In the face of no evidence whatsoever, belief is irrational. This is true regardless of the substantive claim you choose to accept. "Rare Earth" is irrational. "Lots o'aliens" is irrational. "Somewhere in between" is irrational.

"We don't know, but there's at least one" is both rational and demonstrably factual. "We can hope" is not a substantive claim, but rather a genuine opinion. Opinions are fine. Substantive claims in opinion's clothing are not.

Not that I think you'll choose to understand the distinction, but there it is. Deal.

__________________

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Of course assumptions aren't evidence.

Drake, Shostak, Grinspoon, Sagan...


And I'd have to say that the most significant assumption would be that what happened here on earth is nothing unique in the cosmos. The copernican principle.
Others might be that there is a prebiotic chemistry at work in the cosmos seemingly geared to produce Life, that microbial life may well exist in our solar system, that earth like planets around sunlike stars (but by no means precluding other types conducive to Life) are abundant, and so on.

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

And so it's ok for them (you?) to read such into all my posts?

That my friend, as I see it, is not my problem, but theirs (yours?).

Unless I am speaking directly about such things, you'll do well not to "see" such things.

Cutesy?

Oh, and yet I've seen "skeptics" and "debunkers" interject with such similarly "cutesy" remarks, and go uncontested.

There seems to be a double standard here, Serenitude.

Oh, because I am well versed in Planet X and Sitchin's work, my "bed" is such that the regulars are waiting for them to come out of the shadows?

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

Disbelief, if not held TOO strongly, can be overturned by observation of evidence. However, there are plenty of people who can ignore or rationalize anything (it's called cognitive dissonance, or pure stubbornness). Either extreme-- superstitious gullibility or blind fanaticism*-- is bad. Science means keeping an open mind.

*Have you ever noticed how closely related these two are?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Based on the available evidence, there is a real possibility that you're all being pedantic and petulant.

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This is not an idea to be tossed aside lightly - it should be thrown with great force

Here's a page of speculative fiction I have written about Abiogenesis, Lithopanspermia and the translocation of life by intelligent action. This has been directly inspired by the discussions on this bard about these subjects, and I am grateful for the inspiration.
http://www.orionsarm.com/science/Abiogenesis.html
In this fictional scenario primitive life is relatively uncommon, found only in a few star systems out of every thousand; but in a galaxy of 200 billion stars that means hundreds of millions of life bearing planets.
I have assumed that abiogenesis and lithopanspermia both occur, with abiogenesis being somewhat more common; but additionally I've allowed for the occasional instance of life being transferred by accident or design by exploring civilisations. I have called this process Translocation in the essay.

All based in speculation, I know. But can I relate this to the observed sitation in our part of the galaxy?
If a galaxy-spanning civilisation develops in the future, or has ever existed in the past, then translocation could represent the predominant method of origin of life on any given planet. Translocation would also almost certainly ensure that life is abundant in a galaxy, even if the galaxy was relatively lifeless before. But there is no evidence for translocation on our planet- not a shred of verifiable evidence of alien technology has been found in the fossil or historical record (honestly; I've looked at the case for alien influence and it doesn't hold water).
If there had been a galaxy-spanning civilisation on our world in the past we would almost certainly found something, but that is not the case. So translocation seems somewhat less likely. But that still leaves abiogenesis and lithopanspermia; I suspect they both may be fairly common, but this really is no more than a guess.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

Personally, I don't think that lithospermia can be a common occurence, for transmitting life beyond a single stars envelope. Apparently, a rock travelling between star systems would require a minimum of several million years. However during this period the target star moves into and out of the region surrounding a star that could contain such rocks. So most rocks carrying would sit out in this region until passing star happened to capture the rock. If you calculate the volume of the capturing star sweeps, multipled by the number of such stars and divide the by volume of this region, you should end up with a very small probability of capture. Multiply this by the time of capture and you end up with life needing to remain viable on a rock for billions of years...

...and all without any possible preadaption for acceleration, immortality, re-entry or life in an alien environment.

Put some numbers into lithospermia theory and you end up with figures that make Drake equation scenarios seem very plausable by comparison.

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

A scientific discussion is not worth having if individuals in the discussion are using key words and phrases so loosely that their statements are vague and meaningless.

This should be obvious.

Between stars at normal interstellar distances, that's right. But between very young stars inside clusters the numbers are slightly more favorable.
This paper about lithopanspermia in clusters is one of the sources I should have provided
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0504648
(perhaps I will now)

from that paper
So if anything I erred on the side of caution.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

Oh I don't know...

even using their numbers:
biologically active rocks per solar system = 1.5* 10^7 over 10GYr
* p.capture=10^-6
* p.impact=10^-4
* p.seed = (outside of scope of paper)
if the probability of a single rock successfully seeding a world after impacting is 100% (!) and the cluster has 1000 stars then there might be one successful seeding event in a cluster, over the 10Gyr period.

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

In the paper they give a wide estimate of the possibility of lithopanspermia, ranging from 0.001 to 1.6 events per cluster, which is perhaps a little less optimistic than the 'few' mentioned in the abstract. I deliberately adopted the optimistic end of the estimate, assuming (for the purposes of fiction) that life emerges frequently.

The number of unknowns are very high. If abiogenesis occurs frequently and early while the stars are still in the cluster then the rate of cross-infection increases. Additionally the cluster can act as a net to catch wandering life-bearing rocks; it seems possible that once a rock wanders into a tightly packed cluster and starts off a process of lithopanspermia in that cluster, several worlds might be infected in the heavy bombardment phases of planetary development in each system. This would drive up the frequency of cross-infection, if the process happens at all.

On the downside there is no guarantee that a lifebearing rock will sucessfully infect the planet it fall upon; the environment in some larger clusters is dangerous because of the hot, bright stars which are prone to explode, and life may quickly die out on many or most worlds even if a biosphere forms.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

The cluster they describe has 1000 stars within 1 parsec, this enables them to ignore the transit times between stars. Nonetheless life still requires ~100Myr for ejection and arrival. Once the rock is moving outside the cluster the time would get ridiculously huge, maybe it wouldn't be able to keep up with the expansion of space.

So even in the most optimistic lithopanspermic scenario the probability of a single successful transfer event is 1 multiplied by the probability of a single occurrence of newly evolved life surviving heavy bombardment, acceleration to 5km/s, 100myr+ in deep space of a stellar nursery, impact, and then thriving on whatever object it happens to land.

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...