David Kipping

I mean, I try to, as fun as it is to get into the speculation about the definitions of life and what life does and this gross network of possibilities, honestly, for me, the strongest argument for remaining agnostic

is to avoid that bias in assessing data.

Percival Lowell I talked about on my channel maybe last year or two years ago, he's a very famous astronomer who in the 19th century was claiming the evidence of canals on Mars.

And from him, from his perspective, and even at the time culturally, it was widely accepted that Mars would, of course, have life.

I mean, I think it seems silly to us, but it was kind of similar arguments to what we're using now about exoplanets that, well, of course, there must be life in the universe.

How could it just be here?

And so it seemed obvious to people that when you looked at Mars with its polar caps,

Its atmosphere had seasons.

It seemed obvious to them that that too would be a place where life not only was present but had emerged to a civilization which actually was fairly comparable in technology to our own because it was building canal systems.

Of course, the canal system seems a bizarre technosignature to us, but it was a product of their time.

To them, that was the cutting edge in technology.

It should be a warning shot actually a little bit for us that if we think solar panels or building star links or...

whatever, space mining is like an inevitable technosignature, that may be laughably antiquated compared to what other civilizations far more advanced than us may be doing.

And so anyway, Percival Lowell, I think, was a product of his time that he thought life was there.

Inevitably, he even wrote about it extensively.

And so when he saw these lines, these lineae on the surface of Mars, to him it was just obvious they were canals.

And that was experimental bias playing out.

He was told, for one, that he had basically the greatest eyesight out of any of his peers.

An ophthalmologist had told him that in Boston, that his eyesight was absolutely spectacular.

So he just was convinced everything he saw was real.