Timeline for If we encounter what appears to be an advanced extraterrestrial technological device, would the claim that it was designed be falsifiable?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 7, 2023 at 19:10 | comment | added | causative♦ | @CriglCragl Sure, it could have been placed there by humans secretly. Actually that's probably the most likely explanation for an artifact on Mars that appears to be of extraterrestrial origin. | |
| Jun 7, 2023 at 18:41 | comment | added | CriglCragl | There are other alternatives than aliens or evolution, surely. | |
| Jun 5, 2023 at 21:04 | comment | added | causative♦ | @Mark Yes, the prediction is, under the assumption X was designed, you would never find sufficient evidence of evolution. There are positive predictions as well - that you would find sufficient evidence of it being designed if you looked in the right places, e.g. looked through the patent library of the alien civilization that you propose made it. It's very hard to directly falsify though, because even with lots of evidence of machine evolution through natural selection it would still be very hard to completely rule out an alien somehow manually intervening at some point in the process. | |
| Jun 5, 2023 at 20:07 | comment | added | Scott Rowe | Maybe humans are randomly designed self-reproducing machines. | |
| Jun 5, 2023 at 18:43 | comment | added | user66156 | What I mean is that, you are basically suggesting one possible way to find out that the object was not designed, but in so doing you are making a case for the falsifiability of ID as well. Is your position that ID is falsifiable? And there is also the issue that there is no positive prediction being made in favor of the design hypothesis, only a prediction about a competing hypothesis (evolution). | |
| Jun 5, 2023 at 17:24 | comment | added | user66156 | But what would be the testable prediction in that case? The testable prediction would be "If X was designed, you would never find sufficient evidence of evolution"? Because that's exactly what ID proponents claim. | |
| Jun 5, 2023 at 17:21 | history | answered | causative♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |