But coming up with theories with cool names based on 57 layers of other untestable theories is fun. I think we can spare a few billion dollars a year so they can have a bit of fun. Don't you want them to have fun?

>>16833030
>Either be conservative and be skeptical of unfalsifiable things like dark matter/energy until directly observed, or be loose and embrace the possibility of things like, if not le ayyys, biosignatures on exoplanets.

You fags spam "IT'S ALIENS" every time some inexplicable or unexpected data or event gets paraded around the tabloid news ecosystem. Researching dark matter and dark energy isn't the same as whatever dude weed alien shit you want to believe. Writing off observations as "it's aliens bro" has never helped us once, such as the supposed Martian canals to the strange radio signals from pulsars.

There's the unspoken implication in your post that we should consider this stupid atlas comet an alien spacecraft. Astronomers dismissing this comet as an alien craft isn't the same as you dismissing dark matter because you watched some youtube video.

>A fundamental question is what should we adopt as the default assumption.
It's not a fundamental question at all. Assuming whether or not there is dark matter has lots of impacts on things that can be observed. Aliens do not. When the abundance of life is pretty much unconstrained you don't have to make any assumption at all. It really doesn't matter what you think.
>But physicists like Brian do not insist that dark matter does not exist until discovered.
And here is where his need for an assumption becomes absurd. If you insist dark matter does not exist, then you must be sure, you must have evidence. Otherwise it is unscientific. But if actually you say it suddenly does exist once detected, then you were wrong to claim it does not exist on the basis of nothing. It is illogical to insist something does not exist until miraculously it does. That is not how real science works. instead there are degrees of evidence. It's a silly argument.
Dark matter has been much more tested than the abundance of life in the universe, because what you assume about dark matter has huge indirectly observable implications. You can test models of dark matter without a particle collier, even rejecting them just based on what we know about galaxies and structure. You can also test alternative models.

> howling like a gibbon about "muh extraordinary evidence" when someone suggests a biosignature molecule is a sign of life on an exoplanet
People are howling because the evidence in that case was shit. The original team claimed basically negligible statistical significance and reanalysis found nothing. It was pure sensationalism. People are very skeptical when someone claims to have detected something extraordinary based on shitty data.
The exact same thing has happen with dark matter, but because you're ignorant you have never heard of it. There is an excess of detection in a dark matter experiment called DAMA, which was replicated by another project. But most physicists don't believe it is real because there are many warning signs and it is not confirmed by other different experiments. In the case of dark matter there several claims of direct evidence, all not taken seriously.

> This obviously gives us a sense of self-importance and removes the urgency to invest funds in the search for evidence.
Not really. People have been looking for robust evidence of life for decades, and in the coming decades tens of billions will be spent building instruments (NASA's HWO, ESA's LIFE) specifically to look for evidence of life.
Instead of assuming it and patting yourself on the back, actually going to find robust evidence is much more difficult.