At least religious people have an excuse because their belief comes from a place of suffering, no one who thinks these sci-fi fantasy concepts are real is suffering, these beliefs come from a place of extreme comfort, nobody who believes in aliens is from the global south, how many times do liars need to stand in front of governments and say “aliens are real” for there to be some kind of explicit denouncement from atheists for these absolutely non-atheistic beliefs that get a pass because they are sci-fi. PURGE THE NERDS!

  • FishLake@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    4 months ago

    Hey I get it, but it’s plain unscientific to say “almost definitely” and “there’s no way” in the same breath.

    • Darth_Reagan [they/them, comrade/them]
      ·
      4 months ago

      Aliens existing is different than Aliens having visited Earth. There are sooooo many planets, is it unthinkable to imagine life developing on more than one planet?

      • RION [she/her]
        ·
        4 months ago

        I think it's more of a semantic issue. "No way" implies certainty which we can't have in this situation, just like you can't say for certain that aliens are 100% real, just very likely real in some fashion

      • FishLake@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        4 months ago

        Yeah but that’s not how probability works. I’m sure whatever model of the universe you’re using approaches certainty for aliens. It is indeed a big, big universe out there. But that doesn’t make it so. However unlikely it is entirely possible earth is the only life harboring planet in the entire universe. We have one observable example of life in the whole cosmos.

        • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
          ·
          4 months ago

          Yeah but that’s not how probability works

          If we're going to be pedantic with terminology, the gap between "almost definitely" and the negation is impossible is actually quite small. In probability theory "almost definitely" and "almost surely" refer to events with probability 1, and while their negations are not (necessarily) impossible, they represent sets of measure 0.

          Anyway, the language you repelied to is very slightly sloppy, there's nothing "unscientific" or "scientific" about it.

          • FishLake@lemmygrad.ml
            ·
            4 months ago

            Cool. If your model is almost certain that alien life exists, then who am I to question it? I’m just some dude with a different model.

            • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
              ·
              4 months ago

              I've said nothing about models or aliens, just pointing out some facts about probability theory, since we're being extremely pedantic with language apparently. Idk why it matters that someone equated A occurs almost definitely with not(A) = nullset, but it doesn't matter that the counter in this thread is "we can determine blueshifted signals from 13 billion light years perfectly" lol