Re: seti@home WILL NOT WORK

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Wed, 07 Jul 1999 22:17:22 -0500

Darin Sunley wrote:
>
> You forget, negative results count in science too. Even if Seti@Home
> firmly establishes that all the radio noise on whatever frequencies
> they're scanning is meaningless noise, this at least gives us some firm
> lower bounds regarding the probable distribution of technological
> civilizations.

Absolutely, positively right! I wish I'd thought of that. Yes, absolutely. We may *think* that there's nobody to talk to Out There, but confirming that theory is an absolutely legitimate scientific endeavor - the hypothesis has to be tested.

The Singularity is not a religious principle. Ergo, the idea of extraterrestrial signals cannot be blasphemous.

-- 
           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
        http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS           Typing in Dvorak          Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians   Heading for Singularity   There Is A Better Way