Extraterrestrial civilizations: When all else fails, try Bayesianism
From ScienceDaily: Could there be another planet out there with a society at the same stage of technological advancement as ours? To help find out, EPFL scientist Claudio Grimaldi, working in association with the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a statistical model that gives researchers a new tool in the search for the kind of signals that an extraterrestrial society might emit. His method — described in an article appearing today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — could also make the search cheaper and more efficient. … The advantage of Grimaldi’s statistical model is that it lets scientists interpret both the success and failure to detect signals at varying distances from Earth. His model employs Bayes’ Read More ›