Yet another religious cult raided

[kandrathe]

SETI's endless transmissions and scannings are a method of research. You seem to be attempting to say that SETI is junk science because "scanning for transmissions cannot be proven false".

They claim to have scanned what % of the cosmos after 40 years of "research"? How long will it take to statistically find anything? They are researching based upon the premise that there is intelligence out there. It is junk science, because it is not based on any evidence. None, zip, nada. Now, as a philosophy it has validity, just as ID'ers hopefully look into things searching for the answer they want, I believe SETI scans the skies hopefully trying to find ETI. If it is not true, and they know they are searching the sky just doing open ended astronomic observation then SETI is a scam to suck science funding from wishful UFO nut jobs. Just as ID is probably philosophical wishful thinking trying to suck biology funding from right wing fundamentalist nut jobs. :)

SETI not finding anything does not falsify the possibility of there being intelligent life. It only means that nothing was found. Is the methodology therefore flawed?

Here is what SETI says about it, "The accusation that SETI is based upon a non-falsifiable hypothesis is valid only if one believes that the objective of SETI research is to prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Any experiment which adopts that goal is poorly designed, because it becomes open-ended. Better to establish a null hypothesis, which it takes only one counter-example to disprove. For example: I would hypothesize that there are no extraterrestrial civilizations that emit artificial electromagnetic radiation which can be detected on Earth, at our current level of technology. Presently (and for more than 40 years), our research supports this hypothesis. But a single confirmed detection would falsify the null hypothesis, thus lending credence to an alternative hypothesis (that we are not alone)."

So, if you really believe they have dedicated 40 years out of the 10,000 or so it will take (according to massive guess work on the Drake equation) to disprove ETI, well then I have plans for a matter transmuter I'd like to sell you. According to that hypothesis they are wildly successful! What does SETI stand for? I would like to make the hypothesis that Zaphod Beeblebrox will not appear this minute and hand me a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Dang, I was right!

What does Evolutionary Biologist Leonard Ornstein think of SETI?