Under-Polar Ice Cap Lake Imaged on Mars

NoCoPilot wrote:

Unprovable -- unproved -- not a whole lot of sunlight there.

Your references just demonstrate that you don't know what you're talking about. If you are a math graduate looking for a research topic, you sit around with your peers tossing off ideas. They're called conjectures. Every mathematical theorem starts off as a conjecture, unproved - until someone proves it.

Uh-huh. And nobody's gonna drill 2 km under the Martian surface in OUR lifetimes, so any conjecture about life on Mars will remain unproven.

_Howard wrote:

I actually spent a bit of time pondering whether or not I should us the word conjecture, just to avoid the shit we have here. I guess I made the wrong decision.

What was your other choice? Just curious. To me it sounds like a logic puzzle, not a vocabulary problem.

There was no other choice. Conjecture is the proper word, but I knew that it could be intentionally misinterpreted as a distraction from the matter under discussion.

_Howard wrote:

-109.3

Have you figured out your error here yet?  You were using Earth's atmospheric pressure.

_Howard wrote:

Conjecture is the proper word

As good as any.  It has a colloquial use outside of its mathematical meaning but it still means about the same: an unproven theory.

NoCoPilot wrote:

so any conjecture about life on Mars will remain unproven.

Hopefully forever -- since proving it, one way or the other, would be "knowledge without application."

NoCoPilot wrote:

Have you figured out your error here yet?  You were using Earth's atmospheric pressure.

Yep. I made a mistake. Should have use 6 mbar.

NoCoPilot wrote:

so any conjecture about life on Mars will remain unproven.

Hopefully forever -- since proving it, one way or the other, would be "knowledge without application."

Many people value knowledge on its own.

Russell's teapot. It's impossible to DISPROVE that life exists everywhere, therefore we must all assume it does.

In a post-rational world.

Haven't You got that backwards?

Assuming that "Life exists everywhere" is an unfalsifiable claim.

Russell wrote:

...the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.
...
[I]f he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, that was too small to be seen by telescopes, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.

Um, right you are. "The burden of proof lies with the person claiming life exists everywhere."

Thank you for coming around.

I don't believe anyone here has made the claim that life exists everywhere.

And I have not "come around," I was merely pointing out your misunderstanding of Russell's Teapot.

Translating the pidgin, he says what you've been saying, and makes the same unjustified leap at the end.

That article is a complete crock of shit.