Well, I've opened myself up to the idea that there can be civilizations that have come and gone on any planet in this solar system at any time before the last 200 years. Fuck, they could have habitats with millions of people in space and we would never know because we have no clue where to look.
You can't just deny the existence of something because you haven't see it. That's foolish.
Yes, Russel has a lovely teapot, but he definitely doesn't have a technological civilization of teapots sharing a planetary system with us.
I mean, the first issue which kills the whole thing when you think about it is from the project rho site: there is no stealth in space. You want to hide
a single ship from something like a passive sky survey that picks up brown dwarfs, you basically need magical technology, like straight up "fuck your laughable idea of what physics permits" magical. I mean, one of the highest tech civilizations in all of sci fi are the Xeelee, going from high
Type IV all the way down to Type Omega-Minus on extended Kardashev Scales and
they don't have stealth ships unless you count folding something up inside of a pocket universe I suppose.
Accordingly you can call the hypothesis that there might be another advanced (as far as we are) civilization in the solar system falsified.
If you want to propose additional hypothetical considerations to prop up your model, well, that's on you, but if your speculation is driven by a desire to support a faulty model, rather than explaining a prior observation... maybe you should go into sci fi rather than science? New and interesting speculation is always fun in sci fi, even if it may be unfounded.
That´s not what the article says. At all.
It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support. Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted a 50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization.
But by asking if we could “see” truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced to ask about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might have on a planet
Seeing that every hypothesis exists to be disproven or proven and they did neither, I believe you have thrown down the gauntlet, sir.
No, I don't know where you got the idea that science is about proving things, but the foundations of any such claims are not very sturdy, as it is easy to fool yourself if you aren't careful.
At best an unfalsified hypothesis says this idea could be a reasonable explanation for an observation or experimental result.