[pixl97]

Supernovas go off all the time, we would not use them as a standard candle if the did not.

If you gather a bunch of data on that supernova, you have evidence that supernova exploded. You don't have data on the nature of supernovas until you capture a wide range of them.

[throwawaymaths]

I apologize, I'm not claiming that no aspect of supernovas is observed more than once!

But so if you see something particularly unusual about that supernova (which happens a lot), it might be non reproducible, and you just have to live with that fact.

For example, multimodal observation of gravitational waves is still n=1

[pixl97]

But most of these things are expected to be 'reproducible' given a long enough observation frame. For example when LIGO comes back online I expect we'll see more multimodal observations of grav waves soon enough. And the galaxy is filled with trillions of stars so over time the likelihood of equivalent behavior approaches 1. Most of these things are just chemistry following the entropy curve.

When 'intelligence' is involved it can be a little more tricky as we tend to pull some tricks that seemingly violate entropy at least on a local scale (that is systems at the local scale can become more ordered), which means it can take a lot of effort to the thermodynamic path a system took to get into its current configuration.

[throwawaymaths]

Are they? Do we expect to see another "wow" signal?