Excluding Intelligent Design Principles From the Search For Alien Life 308
KIdPanda writes "Prompted by pictures of man-made structures in the Utah desert, a SETI astronomer explains the sometimes-ambiguous difference between seeing the hand of God, alien intelligence, or nature. 'In my photographs, Shostak's SETI-trained eye — standing in for a pattern-crunching computer program — searched for an unexpected increase in visual order (or, in thermodynamic terms, a decrease in entropy caused by the rebellion of life against universal decay). A road or a tended field is mathematically simpler than a mountainous jumble or naturally varied vegetation. ... But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design."
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Objects that are designed by people (and, presumably, other intelligences) tend to be simpler than those created by nature. For example, compare the straight lines of a road with the wavy shape of a river.
Re:I mod this down. (Score:3, Informative)
For reference that's called the anthropic principle [wikipedia.org]
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
The math would agree with you.
The article fuzzily jumps between concepts like "simple" and "complex" and low-entropy, high-entropy.
An intuitive way of thinking about entropy is considering how likely a particular arrangement is to give you the overall appearance you observe. Take a forest seen from the air and imagine cutting little bits of it out with Photoshop and moving them around. You can do that quite a bit and the result isn't all that terribly different from the original appearance. Now imagine doing it with the Nazca lines, or a pattern of roads. Big difference. The cases where you see a big difference are low entropy states -- they're special and random fiddling destroys them. The forest is a higher entropy state. Randomness doesn't have as much effect.
Now consider a plain blue sky. Do the same Photoshopping. No effect at all. The sky is an even higher entropy state than the forest.
Re:I mod this down. (Score:5, Informative)
Yawn.. The creationist use science to explain plastic.
And no, oil doesn't take hundreds of thousands of years to make, it can be made in small quantities from organic matter in labs in less then 6 months. It's not economical viable to mass produce in this way or anything but it can be made.
And no, there is nothing in the creation story making the claim that the world is 4000 years old. That is a number, and incorrect number at that, which was pulled from people outside the bible who were attempting to add the ages of the key players in the bible up and estimating the age of the earth. There are a few problems with it though. Your also confusing the point of a creator who creates things. If someone or something, lets call it a GOD could create the universe, create life, create weather, water, minerals and everything else, Why couldn't he create oil too? I mean seriously, even if is took billions of years for oil to naturally occur, why couldn't the creator just create?
Anyways, your perception of creation is a little off. You see, you don't need to know how plastic is made or what processes are involved to believe in evolution or any other science. In fact, you only need to know about oil and plastic if you are doing something with it that required you to know about it. I mean seriously, how much force is needed to cause a nuclear reaction in a non-controlled environment? Don't bother looking the answer up, it doesn't matter because neither of us are working with nuclear reactions and the answer is a lot more then we have to worry about. So you believing in creation, evolution, paganism, the church of Scientology, the Flying Spaghetti monster or whatever doesn't mean you have to be able to explain someone else' concepts, misconceptions, or general ideology nor would you have to involve yourself with some deep knowledge of science either.
Re:Ridiculous argument (Score:3, Informative)
rebellion of life against universal decay
There's no "fight against entropy" here. No matter how much you can reduce entropy locally, you are FAR more greatly increasing entropy outside of your "local" system.
Re:I mod this down. (Score:3, Informative)
However, it's also nearly a tautological statement. It's not deep.
It's just ~B -> ~A therefore A -> B. No shit. It means that the universe exists and works. The same is true of any potion of the universe, including the portions that we have designed. It neither precludes nor supports the theory of an intelligently designed universe.
Re:What? (Score:1, Informative)
Take a forest seen from the air and imagine cutting little bits of it out with Photoshop and moving them around.
I assume that this is implicit but, lest anyone get confused, the information-theoretic entropy of a digital image of a forest is not at all the same as the thermodynamic entropy of an actual forest.
Re:Ridiculous argument (Score:3, Informative)
High entropy, actually. Low entropy means that very few rearrangements will remain unnoticeable, but one piece of flat, empty desert is exactly like any other, so they can be exchanged with each other without anyone noticing anything.
Again, it has high, very high entropy. Any cubic meter of ocean water (or gas giant atmosphere) can be replaced by any other, and no one will ever notice. In fact both ocean and gas giant atmosphere's are constantly being churned by storms, yet their characteristics remain the same; therefore they have high entropy.
The general rule of thump: the less features it has, and the more stable it is, the higher its entropy is.
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
if by "he" you mean the author of the summary, then perhaps yes. but if you're referring to Seth Shostak, the SETI guy, then that isn't what he's arguing at all. here's the excerpt FTA:
Re:Ridiculous argument (Score:2, Informative)
You got entropy wrong.
High entropy is what low entropy disintegrates to.
Ice crystals to water. Cities to dust. Music to noise.
Life fights this.
Man made things are LOW entropy because they have structure.
High entropy has finer and finer structure until there is no statistically significant contrast that stands out as a "feature".
This featureless high-entropy uniform blur you must have interpreted as "low entropy".
Here is a simplified rule to judge entropy:
Blend X in a blender.
- You can't call that "X" any more:
X was LOW entropy.
- You still have X in the blender:
X is HIGH entropy.
For example, if you blend an apple you got apple juice. Therefore apple is low entropy.
If you blend apple juice you still have apple juice. Therefore apple juice is high entropy.
And, please, don't take the analogy farther than it serves.