The Big Alien Theory

I feel like a lot of people here are pontificating about something they don't understand. It smells like few people here are mathematicians, and yet they're speaking with reddit levels of hubris, attributing simpletons' logical fallacies to a published astrophysicist. Usually Hacker News is better than this. I'm myself not a mathematician, but I believe I understand his argument, and I see no fallacies. Everything he's written falls out of assuming power laws govern the pertinent quantities. In the absence…

>No matter what degree of variability is chosen, alien planets are very unlikely to be much larger than the Earth. To be specific, we can say with 95% confidence that another planet with intelligent life, such as our nearest neighbour, will have a circumference no more than 20% greater than that of the Earth. Huh? I see no justification for this. I'm firmly in the "We know nothing about aliens and won't until we get some hard data" camp. Alien…

> It's a complete myth that a single data point is inadequate for making predictions. For example, let's take Usain Bolt's 100m World Record of 9.58 seconds. Imagine that was the only data point we had regarding human running speed. Wth that one data point we could confidently make a powerful prediction, that anyone we pick from the world population will take more than 9.58 seconds to run 100 meters. We have measured countless people running the 100 meter and…

There was also discussion yesterday: The Big Alien Theory (thebigalientheory.com) 126 points by miralabs 16 hours ago | 125 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11353239