On Tuesday, January 2, 2018 at 1:05:25 AM UTC-7, Phillip Helbig (undress
to reply) wrote:

In article , Gary
Harnagel writes:

The existence of a benevolent civilization billions of years older than
ours wouldn't change YOUR worldview? Come ON!

Not in the least. Why should it? I wouldn't be surprised. The Earth
is about 4.6 billion years old, the universe about three times as old.
Civilization developed here, so I wouldn't be surprised if it did
elsewhere, but I don't know how likely it is; perhaps there is some
difficult bottlenect. It would be an interesting event, yes, but it
wouldn't change my basic worldview.

It WOULD change that of 99% of the world's population just if an advanced
civilization wore confirmed to exist on a planet around Tabby's star.

Why? How? What worldview is committed to the lack of extraterrestrial
civilization?

I was mostly thinking of born-again Christians. Their belief system
seems to be very geocentric, but there are many more Christians that
share that worldview. And then their are Muslims ... well, they (as
well as some Christians) might denounce the evidence. And then there
are those that would start new religions based upon the aliens ....

Panspermia is a hypothesis, by no means proven.

I think it's pretty solid given evidence for extra-solar comets and asteroid
impact.

No life has been found there. Organic molecules, yes. But it is a huge
leap from there to panspermia. Suffice it to say that the most
scientists in the field are not convinced that panspermia is responsible
for life on Earth.

Okay, I don't particularly vote for that one either :-)

It seems to me that we should be arguing intelligent life developed
long ago in the universe until refuted by evidence to the contrary.

Why should we assume anything?

Because we're human. It's what we DO.

Humans do many things; not all of them are correct.

But we still do them :-)

Also, there is no way to disprove the existence of extraterrestrial
intelligence.

But there IS a way to confirm it, which was the mission of Kepler and will
be the mission of the Webb telescope.

Right (and contrary to what you wrote before): if you can find evidence
of extraterrestrial civilization, then you confirm it. The reverse is
not true: while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, neither
does it mean that one should assume that extraterrestrial civilization
until proven otherwise, since one can never prove it otherwise.

Well, that depends upon your psychology. A scientist is trained to be
skeptical, and skepticism argues for your viewpoint. But ... is
skepticism the "right" position in all areas of inquiry? It has led to
hidebound resistance in the past. Each of us has developed a model of
the universe over our lifetimes that's hard for us to modify because
it's based upon what we have seen and experienced. I'm not sure why,
but mine has been undergoing some major revisions in, um, vision over
the last few years.