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The Wow! Signal Podcast: Burst 12 - Nick Nielsen on SETI as a Process of Elimination →
Many thanks to Paul Carr for giving me the opportunity to present another spoken word production for the Wow! Signal Podcast platform. Paul noted in our correspondence that he does not agree with my argument in this presentation, so I am particularly indebted to this willingness to present material at odds with his own view on SETI. At twenty minutes long this is longer than my previous Wow! Signal Burst recordings. It could have been longer.
This spoken word production was loosely based on a blog post that I wrote some time ago, SETI as a Process of Elimination, which was part of a series of posts about SETI, including Methodological Naturalism and the Eerie Silence, Why the Fermi Paradox Must be Taken Seriously, Addendum on the Fermi Paradox, The Visibility Presumption, and Searching the Sky. In this writing of the script for this presentation, however, little remains of the original blog post except the central idea of treating SETI as a process of elimination. The several years that have passed since the original blog posts have given me a lot of new ideas and additional examples to cite.
I’m working on additional scripts for future Wow! Signal Bursts that will continue on similar themes. For example, in this presentation on SETI as a process of elimination I emphasized how this conception of SETI can demonstrate the scientificity of SETI by converging upon narrowly formulated hypotheses about exocivilizations that can be definitively falsified. Philosophers of science will immediately recognize this as a Popperian theme. I would like to follow up on this idea by employing the more sophisticated approach to falsification to be found in the work of Imre Lakatos. Lakatos was profoundly influenced by Popper, but I think it is fair to say that his approach went beyond both Popper and Kuhn, so a priority for me now is to formulate the idea of SETI as a scientific research program, following Lakatos’ conception scientific research programs.
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