Do you believe in Aliens?
Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Life probably exists somewhere else.
That doesn't mean they visit us in secret and there's a conspiracy to hide it.
It's two very different things
Also, life and intelligent life are two different things.
Doesn't mean they don't either. :)
I think it's likely they do. There has been so many sightings through the years and so many stories that I believe no smoke without fire, so to speak.
It's also what we would do. We (humans) would have similar strategy if we had similar technology to visit other planets.
the pentagon did release that footage back in 2020.
wont hold my breath until we actually get to know more about it, but something really appears to be going on.
I assume other life exists somewhere, because the universe is practically infinite in size, but I also assume that we will not meet them, because the universe is practically infinite in size.
Basically my thoughts. The speed of light, while the fastest thing we know, is as slow as smell on the scale of the universe. Any race of beings able to get here, check us out, and leave, would need technology that would break physics as we understand it. Not to say it's impossible, but we've now firmly stepped into beliefs, rather than anything based on observable data. Also, the notion of a race being so advanced they can travel faster than light accidentally crashing on our planet is pretty silly to me.
I like the space travel explained in three body problem. Soldering about folding up dimensions.
GET THIS MAN HIS VOTES
I mean, we could potentially see them if they're in any of the neighboring galaxies, and if they're in ours they should have arrived and turned Earth into a colony long ago. Space is big, but time is long. Loud aliens would have to be truly rare indeed for this.
I don't know, if this is worth arguing over. Depending on how far advanced you expect such a life form to be, obviously they might be capable of things that we currently consider impossible. But well, to illustrate what I mean:
The next galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy. It is 2.5 million light years away. There could be life over there right now, but we wouldn't know, until about 2.5 million years from now.
Compare that to the emergence of modern humans, which was 300,000 years ago. We didn't start sending out radio waves until some generations ago.
None of this means that it's not possible for life to have existed on some planet 2.5 million years ago, so we'd be seeing their radio waves right now, but even then, we might interpret them as background noise.
The next star is Proxima Centauri. It is 4.24 light years away. So, we could see things from there in 4.24 years, which is pretty good, although still absolute hell of a delay for exchanging messages.
But for them to actually visit us, even if they go at 1% the speed of light, that would mean they'd need 424 years of travel time. With little sunlight or other energy sources on the way.
And 1% of the speed of light is an insane 10,800,000 km/h. Compare that to the fastest man-made object, the Parker Solar Probe, which is expected to go 720,000 km/h, when it closely passes by the Sun.
Basically, we can be extremely generous with these examples and still see practically insurmountable time frames.
Worm holes could theoretically exist. Maybe a sufficiently advanced race could defy physics as we know it. But if they can't, that's a pretty good explanation why they're hiding.
Hey, I don't know if we even have to argue, your math checks out. But, is 425 years really insurmountable? The first Earth-like planets could be billions of years older than ours. IIRC Fermi himself estimated 3 million to settle the whole galaxy.
Let's go by light cones and local interval (clock time in one's own reference frame), if we are going to argue. This shit can get so confusing if we try to define "now", especially if a relativistically fast ship comes up.
I am sure there are extraterrestrial life forms. It's scientific consensus.
I do not think "the government" has proof and hides that from us.
The universe is big enough that life probably exists in other places. Anything advanced enough to reach us (an extraordinarily difficult feat) would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people, and people just want to believe in something fun to compensate for how boring modern life can be.
Never underestimate the stupidity of smart people/potential other sentient beings.
Also good to never underestimate human negativity bias, where the brain remembers bad things far more than it remembers positive things.
Look at air travel. We invented it over a century ago, and have made it safe enough that a single failure out of thousands of successful flights becomes newsworthy.
The statistical likelihood of stupid-yet-capable aliens happening to fuck up that badly is very small.
Absolutely! I mean primarily that just about any sentience that humans can conceive of is likely to experience some failure, even if down to just statistics. Even our dieties are fallible. So, it seems reasonable to expect that an intellectually superior sentience could make a mistake, leading to loss of craft to primitives like us. Then again, maybe I'm too dumb to conceive of a non-fault-prone intelligence.
Extraterrestrial life = yes. It's a big universe and the chances of us being the only life in the entire universe is slim.
Aliens visiting us = no. For the same reason as above. It's a big ass universe.
Governments being able to hide aliens from us = lol no. If aliens had the tech to travel a million light years to visit us, they'd have taken over the planet in an hour.
Anyone who thinks the government can hide anything is vastly overestimating their capabilities. They're basically keystone cops with the demeanor of storm troopers. Play benny hill or imperial march over literally any declassified CIA document and at least one of them will fit.
Lol Too long, 10 minutes?
TBF, it took 2 minutes for aliens to be worshiped as "eye in the sky" in 3bp
And that's assuming they're even interested in Earth. They'll probably start by strip-mining Jupiter and/or building a Dyson swarm around the sun.
I recognize that the universe is so vast that it's likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that's the extent of it.
I've seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don't "believe" that they do.
Really, I don't "believe" in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don't even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It's not a conscious choice or anything - it's just appears that there's a set of requirements that must be met before the position of "belief" is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of "believing" just isn't triggered, and it's not as if I can somehow force it, so that's that.
As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it's near certain that somebody would've blabbed something by now.
Beyond that though, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they're that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don't see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else's interests. That's our delusion - not theirs.
Statistically it is very unlikely that alien life doesn't exist. It's also extremely unlikely that we would ever find any unless we are entirely wrong about the nature of reality and physics.
The chances of extra terrestrial life to have visited earth is very, very small.
The chances of life to occur are small enough,
The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,
The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,
The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.
The universe is huge, there's almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.
Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.
This is a valid reading of the Fermi paradox. But just for balance I'm going to devil's advocate all over it.
Not known. At the moment the data set is one habitable planet = one occurrence of life, so the odds might be very high indeed, even approaching 1:1
They are smaller, but how much smaller is impossible to tell. What if extinction events are less frequent than they are here? What if 100% extinction events are as rare as they are here? What if intelligence is a natural point of evolution everywhere?
This one's not true. The earth is relatively young at 4 billion years compared to 15 billion for the universe. A billion year headstart is completely plausible
Agreed that the earth's position in the milky way is a bit of a galactic backwater. At 25000 light years from the centre, stars are more sparse here than they are at the centre. But our nearest star is 4ly away. We could have a probe there within half a century with our current technology if we wanted to. So I disagree on the "near impossible" part.
Can't really argue with that. Until we see some evidence, ghosts and galactic visitors are in the 'conspiracy nut' bin. But it doesn't mean life on other planets doesn't exist. There are many theories why we wouldn't have seen or met alien life if it does exist. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
Hubble expansion isn't a big factor at the galactic level. Galaxies are traveling away from other galaxies at relative speeds faster than light, but for stars within the galaxy, the scale is infinitely smaller and the expansion is so small it's difficult to even measure.
There's actually a fairly decent argument that life may have developed literally everywhere in space in the first few hundred million years of the universe, since yes it started insanely hot and compressed, but as it expanded there had to be a time period of up to a hundred million years or so, that everything outside of stars was at the proper temperature for water to be liquid. The end result being that you'll find single cellular life existing literally anywhere it possibly can.
I have coined a theory I call "Galactic spring." It's that the emergence of intelligent life is a manifestation of and synchronized by some underlying phenomena - perhaps just the natural growth in informational complexity in a galaxy-wide entanglement network. Perhaps just a matter of sufficient amounts of the needed elements being available. The specific underlying mechanism isn't that important, unless we have an understanding about the initial emergence of life to compare it to. But the theory is that there is a larger synchronizing factor.
Like spring, there are some species that may emerge early. But also like spring, the emergence of one heralds the emergence of others. Every other "the earth is the unique snowflake of the universe" theory has failed. We are simply emerging. The conditions are occurring that generate intelligent life, and there's no strong reason to believe that our circumstance in that regard is unique.
Jeremy England proposed a while back that life is just an expression of entropy increase. Interestingly, if this could be verified (I don't think it can) it would point to life being universally abundant.
That we're not special is one of the
foundingfoundational principles of astrophysics, the Copernican Principle. It goes that we aren't special, we don't have a privileged viewpoint, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It does get applied in other fields of science in one form or another, since it's more a way of thinking than a theory as such. Again, it's not falsifiable but it does seem reasonable.Interesting, but i have to disagree with "and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction."
Everywhere we look, we see asymmetry and variegation, along with instances of homogeneity and monoculture, as one thing wins out in a small domain.
So, yes, in some sense, same in all directions, but that "sameness" sure has a heck of a lot of play. And not being special, per se, doesn't mean lack of uniqueness. Even cloned plants on the same shelf have differing viewpoints, though perhaps not "privileged", unless one happens to be closer to a sunny window. But that happens.
I've also thought about life being an expression of entropy increase, but I can't say I fully agree. There are aspects of that at play - somewhat more noticeable in thought and consciousness, and the efficiency of organizing thought - but I think that an assumption of universal entropy is just another local-phenomena-first issue. Although it applies in systems we isolate from the universe as a whole, the broad tendency for substance clumps (i.e., organization) and variegation is also universal.
I suppose that's fair, since "looks the same in every direction" is a bit of an oversimplification. The principle is an assumption, rather, that we are not privileged observers, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It then follows that we should be very interested to understand why when it doesn't.
I can't agree with you that the assumption of universal entropy increase is at all unreasonable. The laws of thermodynamics appear to hold everywhere, therefore entropy must be increasing everywhere. England's extrapolation to presume that life is an expression of this law might be tenuous, but the law is pretty much ironclad. That's not to say that structure can't arise; it clearly can because: hello. But the tendency of the universe as a closed system with a one directional arrow of time is heat death. That's just a result of thermodynamics. Eventually.
What caused the initial imbalance, and what prevents it from happening again?
Nothing. It's happening, and has always been. Anything that claims the universe as a whole is deteriorating is absolute bollocks, as it requires a creation myth, just as it postulates destruction.
If the universe is anything that we currently have theories for, the universe is a strange loop.
Now you're talking about some of the biggest unsolved problems in physics :)
I don't know if it necessitates a creation myth, though. The big bang theory doesn't imply a creator, but also doesn't require a steady state.
What's this about a strange loop? I don't know if I've heard of this before.
I meant a strange attractor, but I think it also has
prostitutesproperties of a strange loop.A strange loop is a hierarchy, or heterarchy, where as you proceed 'up' the hierarchy, you eventually arrive where you started.
A strange attractor is a system which, although never quite having the exact same state, cycles around the same general set of states. One way of thinking of this is "a loop which never quite mets up with itself". An interesting example of this would be a three+ body gravitational system where the bodies are of comparable mass, and no stabilizing elements are present. Odds are very against them actually striking each other, but orbits are virtually completely unpredictable. Nevertheless, they won't eject any of the bodies, so they will always be in the same general region.
As applied to the universe, you could set the 'laws' of the universe as values on a manifold, and these 'laws' would flex and shift as the overall state of the universe changes, but the universe would cycle around within a probability niche - a strange attractor. There's also a potential it could leave that probability niche and 'fall' into, or enter into, another. One such probability niche would be the very strong tendencies of the universe - the 'laws' of the universe - as we know them.
My training is in applied mathematics, so I'm only conceptually aware of strange attractors. It's my understanding that they are chaotic systems that tend towards a stable state. As such I'm a little skeptical of the claim that the universe itself is a strange attractor, since it is broadly predictable and hence not chaotic, and it's expanding and thus not tending towards stability!
I'm referring to the laws of the universe, which have not always been consistent. A strange attractor can form states that are temporarily dynamically stable - and for something like the universe, we may not notice any small changes to 'constants,' as we are directly subject to them (including our tools of measurement). Aside from that, change is likely so slow that we may not even notice it.
Nevertheless, if the big bang is in any form to be believes, we must accept that the universe's basic laws can change, and yet they enter states where they do not noticeably change. If the pattern of the rest of nature holds (massive numbers of similar forms and structures distributed over time and space, where rough repetition along a common theme is a common theme), the universe will probably do similarly.
What would be incredibly odd would be:
Or
Either of those seem unlikely. But, of course, I live in this universe, so I could be biased. :-)
I'm incredibly fascinated by the ghost comparison. Is the probability that ghosts are a real physical phenomenon higher or lower than the probability that aliens exist or have visited us? That's an extremely interesting question, and I'm sure someone could do a statistical meta-analysis comparing the incidence of, say, UFO sightings with the incidence of paranormal experiences (if such an analysis doesn't already exist). Both questions seem like the things that should be generally empirically falsifiable (and indeed, specific instances certainly are), but humanity's curiosity about both has proven remarkably durable despite centuries of curiosity and myriad efforts to settle (negatively) both questions once and for all.
They're both so near zero as to be hardly worth considering.
The thing to think about is the fact that, in either case, ghost or alien are in any way especially indicated by the evidence. People don't see something strange and conclude aliens because they have good reason to believe from the evidence that something traveled vast distances across space, but rather they simply don't have anything good to believe right now.
Having unusual evidence that doesn't seem to point at the simple, mundane explanation isn't the same as having evidence that does point at a supernatural or extraterrestrial explanation
I'm pretty much on board, though how much anyone can agree is a matter of relativity.
We know about the closest stars and the planets within them, and based off spectrometry, we're confident the planets "close" to us haven't had life, though they might be capable.
The chances of there being no mass extinction events in the millions of years following abiogenesis is arguably smaller than surviving the five or so we've had. Given everything we know about astrophysics, we owe the asteroids a few clean hits, we have been astronomically lucky, and that's not even taking into consideration every other cause of mass extinction.
15 billion years is still considered early in the grand scheme of things, it's likely that we are the early ones. A billion years head start is plausible, sure, but it's certainly less plausible than our existence.
All of this is to say that life is rare enough without them being a stones throw away.
And this is all disregarding any possible intent behind a visit. Any being capable of space travel does not need our resources.
Unless they're sex tourists, which would explain all the anal probing.
On second thought, I choose to believe.
Wouldnt have to do it faster, just first
Wait, what?
That's like saying you don't have to drive faster to win the race, you just have to cross the line first.
Maybe more like saying "you don't have to be fastest to finish first if you get enough of a head start"?
Yupyup
I do I just wish they believed in me.
sigh
Can imagine the disillusionment aliens would feel having seen us from 10 light years away and constantly watching us as they approach until they get close enough for the data to be virtually current. I wouldnt wanna visit either. Probably be attacked on sight.
I believe there is extraterrestrial life, unless God exists. Then who knows?
I think UFOs have natural explainations, are mistakes or hoaxes, or are human technology.
I seriously doubt aliens have traveled here only to play peek-a-boo in the skies. I could sooner believe UFOs were interdimensional anomalies than aliens who traveled from another planet in the universe via space.
the gulf of space makes me think along these lines as well.
While I 100% believe that the universe is probably crawling with extraterrestrial life, I don't think any of it has visited us here.
Any alien race who had the technology to travel across the galaxy would look at humanity the same way we look at an ant hill while we're driving down the highway, we don't even notice it.
Sure, there may be some alien scientists that want to study our planet the same way that our scientist want to study ants, but what are the chances they even know about us? And is there anything interesting enough about us to distinguish us from all the other ant hills?
The potential existence of sentient life out there? Sure. Space is big.
Anything that's ever interacted with us or is likely in a position to ever be able to do so? No. Space is big.
Is there other intelligent alien life in our Galaxy? Probably. Given how fast life formed on Earth, there must be millions of other life-bearing planets, and intelligence can't be that rare, but it might be short-lived.
Are there UFO sightings? Yes, people do see unidentified flying objects. Some of them can be explained, some cannot.
Are the UFOs aliens? I don't know, I'm a "curious agnostic" on the subject.
There's a LOT of UFO sightings, and evidence from good observers, including US Navy aviators. The US Air Force continues not to cooperate, and officially denies any sightings exist. The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence, aside from Project Blue Book, is suspicious.
It's technically plausible that someone within 50-ish light years of Earth could have heard our radio, sent a ship here, and use drones or manned ships to observe us without interacting. There could also be many other explanations.
We don't know, and until the last couple years there was no effort to investigate.
That just makes me think the air force knows exactly what the UFO was because they were flying it.
With your last statemate that is not true there are records of the american government looking into this back into the sixties. Also researchers like Jacques Vallee have spent decades doing real investigation into the subject.
Governmental research. There was Project Blue Book, as I mentioned, which was inconclusive and then ended.
Inconclusive or a complete white wash like the recent AARO? And BTW those were both created by the DoD to investigate the DoD so idk what people where expecting. that's only the public stuff we know about. according to multiple whistleblowers they have had programs looking into this for awhile including AATIP and UAPTF. Now I'm not saying these guys are telling the truth but one of them went in front of congress under oath and said this. Shouldn't we look into it especially if tax payer money is being spent on this. Even when ignoring the alien part, this could be fraud on the highest level. And then there's the whole aerial safety aspect
The probability that there are no aliens is very small, considering just how large the universe is. For the same reason we will probably not get to meet them though.
Yep. The universe is so vast that alien life most certainly exists, but simply due to the distance between them and us we’ll likely never detect it. The farther things are from us, the longer it takes for light to get to us. Something 100 light years away is just that, it takes a hundred years to get to us.
Humans have been around for an estimated 300,000 years, or 1.09575e+8 days. Here are a few things that would not have been believed possible by 99.9% of the population, including the most rational and logical thinkers, only 150 years ago (54,787 days).
Technological advancements happen at breakneck speed. One mans "you can't break the speed of light" is another mans "you can't fly, humans don't have wings!"
But scientific advancements happen that change our perspective. It's likely we'll never break the light barrier, if it's as solid as our understanding makes it seem. It's less likely we'll never find a way to sidestep that barrier by manipulating other forces. Let's say we find a way to create a gravity well that encompasses a craft. The person in the craft doesn't actually feel like they're falling at infinite-G, they just happen to get from one place to another incredibly fast, passing through various states of matter unperturbed on their way. To us, it looks like they broke the speed of light. In reality, they weren't actually "moving" in the way we think of movement, thereby not needing to break the speed of light.
These advancements happen all the time. If you brought a group of the top scientists from the 1850s to be here with us today, they would have have absolutely no idea what was going on and they would believe they'd gone insane. So many paradigm shifts have happened over the last 150 years that it would be impossible to make sense of it in their (remaining) lifetimes.
I don't know if we're being visited. If we are then it's not likely they're being of another race that came here in a ship. More likely they would be mechanical or biomechanical in nature, some sort of von Neumann probes self-creating and self-spreading reconnaissance craft for an ancient (dead?) race. Or maybe they tapped into another force we don't even have a name or vague idea about yet, maybe a driving force behind consciousness.
But regardless, UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) is a legitimate field of study and I look forward to seeing it grow.
Depends on what do you mean by existence of aliens:
Some chemical/biological processes happen on other planets in the universe, that are necessary for life to exist. Or maybe there are "life" forms like viruses.
Life exists, but only in the simplest form, like single-cell organisms (e.g. bacteria).
Life exists, but only in the form of simple multi-cell organisms.
More advanced species exist, like fish or frogs on Earth, but nothing like Humans.
Other advanced species with their own civilizations exist (or existed and destroyed themselves), similar to ours, but again they might not look like humans at all.
Super advanced civilization of aliens exists, and they have tech we could only dream of.
Given that we know only one place where life naturally exists (Earth), it's probably hard to tell which one is true. But I think that it's sane to think that there are at least several other civilizations out there similar to ours, but given that our universe is relatively young, we might be the only one in our neighborhood (even on galaxy level) for now.
It's also very important to note that extraterrestrial life might not resemble our life at all, and make us reconsider what even is life.
I'm intrigued by 0. Nobody ever talks about that one. Multicellular life and complex life have independently shown up more than once on Earth, so 2 and 3 are hard to defend.
At this point, I'm beginning to think the gulf of space is too much to bridge, and if it were possible, they wouldn't bother hiding / being sneaky / probing whatever.
I'm not convinced they're visiting us. None of the reports I've seen appear credible. But non-interference is often critical to scientific study. They could just be doing a decent job at hiding from us.
If they're out there, I'd be shocked if they wouldn't visit. Our solar system has been showing life signs for 3.5B years, and technological signs for about a century or so. There aren't apparently many planets like ours around. We are a very tempting target for study.
It appears to be quite difficult to develop a spacefarring civilization. But there are credible models for sailing light beamed from stars, and even gravity surfing orbiting black hole pairs. The vast energies required for interstellar travel should be impossible to conceal. We ought to already be able to see them out there, if they're close.
13.5B years is an eyeblink in the potential age of the Universe. We developed early. Perhaps not first, but very early. Intelligence and technology are difficult and expensive to develop. Our hubris may destroy us. We might easily be alone in our local neighborhood. Technological civilizations may still be rare. But once they go interplanetary, there are few ways for such a civilization to go extinct.
I'm fairly confident they're out there somewhere. I'm sceptical that they're close. We may be the first in our galaxy, or even the Local Group. Who can say? I don't know.
Can you elaborate on these? I would like to know more.
I can't, but this astrophysicist is the one who proposed the idea. Both techniques use compatible tech. https://youtu.be/rFqL9CkNxXw?si=WkbEiTM6usQnSgyy
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rFqL9CkNxXw?si=WkbEiTM6usQnSgyy
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
As others have stated, the existence of extra-terrestrial life seems a near certainty. We know that intelligent life can evolve in the universe (QED: we exist) and given the vastness of the observable universe it seems highly probable that it's happened more than once. Limiting ourselves to just the Milky Way galaxy, again given the size and number of stars, it seems reasonably likely that there is other intelligent life here.
Have they been to Earth? This one strikes me as less likely. The universe is big, just mind bogglingly big. Even an infinitesimally small part of it, like the Milky Way galaxy is still insanely big. And as best as our current understanding of physics provides, we cannot exceed the speed of light. And even trying to approach that speed is fraught with all kinds of problems. At any significant fraction of the speed of light, bumping into tiny bits of space dust can cause real problems for spaceships (think: nuclear weapon level energies released). Even sub-atomic particles cause problems, as they will be the same as high energy radiation at those speeds. Even if those issues can be handled, there is the problem of reaction mass to get ships up to and decelerate from those speeds. Even electric ion engines need some sort of reaction mass to push against, and that has to be carried. This then runs us face first into the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. For every extra bit of reaction mass you carry, you need even more reaction mass to get everything up to speed. Eventually, you're trying to carry so much mass that the whole thing just gets unfeasible. As a related tanget this XKCD What-If gets into a lot of the same issues.
So ya, I doubt that ET has been to Earth, simply because crossing the gulf of intergalactic space would require an investment of resources which is so insanely big that no sane species would bother. And then there is the whole issue of time. Sure, at a sufficient speed and thanks to Lorentz Contraction you can actually cross the Milky Way galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, in your own frame of reference. IIRC, it's something like a single year assuming 1g acceleration half way there and a similar deceleration after the half-way point (can't be arsed to look it up. You, dear reader, have fun with that). However, to the observer sitting on Earth, it takes much, much longer. So long that the folks sending you off will be dead, decayed, fossilized and those fossils long degraded by the time you get there. When you get back, your home planet may well not exist anymore and and thing resembling your home society will have long been lost to the sands of time. Again, no sane species is going to make such an investment of resources for what is effectively no return.
But wait, what if aliens have some magic technology which lets them bypass the limitations on the speed of light? Ok well, if little green Gandalf can cast a teleport spell on Frodo the tentacled alien, then yes he can toss his thing in whatever crack he wants. But, absent any evidence to show that such magic is possible, then it's not really worth consideration.
So, does "the government" have some secret knowledge about aliens? I highly doubt it. Mostly, because I doubt such exists. But, also consider the difficulty of maintaining such a secret for decades with possibly thousands of people knowing. One of the things you learn about, when you get a US FedGov Clearance, is the concept of "Need to Know". One of the things the US Government learned during the Vietnam War was the fact that the more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to leak. If you have a ton of time and insomnia, I highly recommend reading up on Purple Dragon. Secrets leak, all the time. Yet somehow there has been a massive conspiracy around aliens visiting Earth. Oh and that conspiracy would need to extend beyond just the US Government to include other, hostile, governments. But, the only evidence we have is blury videos and crackpots. Ya, bullshit.
So ya, ET is likely "out there", the math makes it pretty likely. At the same time, physics makes it really, really, really hard for him to get here. And no international conspiracy would be able to hide such events over decades.
While i do think life exists elsewhere in the universe, I think the chances of extraterrestrial biological entities coming to our planet is exceedingly unlikely. Space is just too big, and there isn't any hard evidence that faster-than-light travel is even possible.
Although, the universe isn't just big -- it's old. There could be some ancient civilization from an ancient planet that became uninhabitable long ago. If they were technologically advanced enough to escape their solar system before things went tits-up AND were able to live multiple generations fully in space AND they just so happened to set out in our direction, I guess it's possible that they found us. Even then, i would expect any UFOs or whatever would merely be probes, not the actual biological entities themselves.
The universe has so many planets that it is unlikely that life only started on earth. However, the universe is simply too big. We are alone in the universe. And the aliens, they are alone too.
I like those last three sentences. You managed to capture the infinite size of the universe and what it means. Bravo.
Some alien life definitely exists, the universe is a pretty big place after all. There is also zero chance they have come to earth. Such conspiracies need too many people to keep silent and if the US had known about aliens Trump would have tweeted about it.
I refuse to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, even though for most humans that bar is pretty low.
When I finally “die” I’ll no doubt get kicked back out into the real world and have to plug in another quarter.
You will never die. You will watch everyone else die out over the next million or so years, and then you will be alone until you figure out how to create new people.
..story of my life.
Story of all our lives, unfortunately
So it would seem.
I do, but I don't believe we've ever been visited by them or will ever be visited by them.
i think space is too big for aliens to detect, traverse and find us... but thats just going by all known science/reality.
its most likely humans are lying/ignorant with regards to all of the alien-based conspiracies.
Yes, though I doubt any have come to visit. For one thing, although we have seen UFO's on Earth, it's awfully strange nobody has seen them through their telescopes. It's almost as if they're not a space thing after all.
Hollow Earth theory intensifies
There is absolutely other life somewhere. None of it has reached or contacted us, though
I kinda don't think there are little gray men
But I think we fundamentally do not understand what it is to be conscious. I don't think we know what is and is not conscious. I think we're limited by our brains and our dimensionality. I think there's a lot more right under our noses.
I'll just leave this here...
The Rare Earth Hypothesis
I kept waiting for the part where he's super religious, but was ultimately let down. I may have to read his book.
I mean, it would be weird if they weren't out there somewhere but I don't think the government knows much more than we do
Depending on your interpretation of the Drake equation, they are either impossible or inevitable.
Ah, the ol’ Drake Equation, providing useful input since 1961
I propose a more elegant equation called the Fifty Cent Equation:
p(A) = x
If x equals 0, then there’s no aliens. If x equals 1, there are definitely aliens. If x is between 0 and 1, non-inclusive, then maybe there’s aliens.
It’s math yo. I’m helping with math.
So you're saying it's 50/50. Half the time it works every time.
The universe is very very big. Unimaginably so. But we have absolutely no idea of how probable the appearance of life is, so we have no idea how probable is it for life to exist elsewhere. So my answer for the first question is: I don't know.
And for the second question, my answer is: haha.
In general, yes. In the expanse of space there must be life somewhere.
For fun I let myself believe they've visited earth, and that at least some UFOs were alien, but that's more of a fun "what if..." belief than anything and it doesn't impact anything beyond my imagination.
I don’t think governments are concealing anything but I think once we explore and learn where to look, we’ll find microbial life is everywhere. Maybe underground on Mars and near deep sea vents on Europa or the clouds of Venus.
I also think multicellular life and technological societies are rare, temporary, and fleeting. So, we won’t be finding them. Earth is special in that it had 1,000 conditions that allows us to exist for a brief window. But we’re cavalier about climate change when it could cause ocean acidification and end a good chunk of humanity.
There's one more thing to consider: when we think of aliens, we constantly think of those blue human-like creatures based on carbon life forms.
Most likely, alien life will be formed entirely differently: maybe it will be silicon-based, maybe something else, or a planetary mind, or something we can't even imagine.
And no, we didn't contact them yet and are unlikely to in many, many lifetimes.
Nope.
The only truly reasonable position to have on this question is pure agnosticism: you do not and cannot know if life exists elsewhere in the universe, especially intelligent life. We could, in theory, be the only intelligent species to ever evolve in this universe. Period.
Yup
As other people have said we cannot for of they do our do not exist.
That said thinking about how big the universe is, my personal opinion is they have to exist.
As for governments covering them up.... highly unlikely. They can't even cover up their dirty laundry, let alone aliens
Yes, and I think, potentially, that it could be so advanced that we don't have the ability to recognize some or all of them.
All the whistleblowers have testified under oath and were demonstrably employed by the aforementioned organizations. Further disregard would be arrogance. However, it's less about "aliens" and more about additional forms of non-human intelligence. Essentially, we are facing a new paradigm in physics. This is a positive development.
The government stuff is more about not wanting anyone to feel like they'll be ridiculed and their career will be over if they talk about seeing things they can't explain in case that thing turns out to be some new technology developed by other people. And that there might be ways the laws of physics behave to make weird stuff show up that we don't understand, so studying it could result in improvements to our understanding of physics. There's no credible evidence of aliens that has been uncovered by any of that.
You can see it in the renaming of UFO to UAP. UFO stands for unidentified flying object and never implied aliens were the ones flying the object. It was changed to unidentified aerial phenomenon because UFO did imply that whatever was seen was flying and an object when it could just be refracted light in some cases, which is neither flying nor an object.
I want to believe but there isn't a good reason to do so at this point.
And there is non-human intelligence on earth, but outside of humans it's only used for problem solving, communication, and basic tool use. I'm not even aware of any animal that uses tools to make other tools other than humans and maybe some of the other extinct hominids, which would be a requirement if you're saying non-human intelligence on earth is capable of creating UAPs. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean.
Naturally, I lack the expertise to explain things fundamentally at the moment. However, when the Pentagon says there's something we can't explain, I take that as something real. Now, if hundreds of employees testify under oath that adventurous things are happening in the organization's basements, I must take that seriously too. A false statement would mean prison for the whistleblower. The elephant is legally in the room, and there is an unresolved phenomenon. Fact. Now, this is obviously heavy stuff, and the following possibilities are on the table: a) real, b) not real, but that would have legal consequences for the whistleblowers, c) a mixture of a and b, i.e., Psyop.
Now, the employees' statements may be adventurous or not. But the basic message is that things are happening there that cannot be controlled by public authorities in the US. So they are illegal. That's the point. Ordinary people always think of aliens in such cases. That's, of course, a cliché like Mickey Mouse. The point is, we've been lied to for decades. Some people can't understand that. Or don't want to. Intelligence might not be the right word. Consciousness might be better. Animals also have consciousness, and if we truly recognized that consciousness is equal for all beings, then we would spiritually and ethically grow. I see an opportunity in this issue. These phenomena are not new, but very old.
Basically every time a major government fucks up in a way that looks really bad, they just run "Hey look, Aliens!!" to distract everyone and it works. Every. Single. Time. Like, how many times do they have to "reveal" "evidence" of aliens before people start to catch on...?
The whistleblowers are around in an amount and level of story consistency that makes me think they are grifters.
Roughly estimating, there are about 500 employees from CIA subprograms making such claims. They do so under oath and without significant financial gain. If their employer were to contradict or refute their claims, they could be prosecuted criminally in the US. This is a different quality than before, where witnesses had no connection to government agencies.
Is there a list somewhere? I've only heard about a handful, and according to Wikipedia the CIA only employs 21,575, so that would be quite a lot.
The CIA famously doesn't confirm or deny very much.
I don't know about a complete list. You also have three sources. First, David Grusch mentions 80 additional witnesses. Then there's Dr. Steven Greer, who mentions 300 to 500 witnesses in his videos. And then there's the "To the Stars Academy," which is said to be purely a CIA affair. I can't imagine that in the USA you can accuse the CIA of crimes and come from the same place. So, I consider such witnesses to be of higher value. But of course, always with caution. Once CIA, always CIA. So, targeted disinformation is also possible. But the topic has already changed. No more green men, but "there's something." Also, how the media in the US report. Once a UFO landing in Las Vegas. Then that in the Mal in Florida. Quite interesting.
Claimed witnesses mean nothing, and I have 3,000 that will back that up. /s
Three sources. That's what I was thinking, and their stories don't much up or hold constant very well. It doesn't matter what their clearance was, anybody can like dirty money (like from a book deal or appearance where they say what enthusiasts want to hear). That's actually where most spies come from, and so why the CIA exists in the first place.
One can perceive many things stereotypically. However, I don't think all UFO witnesses are bought or trying to sell books. Many just want to share their story, and in the past, they were often stigmatized and marginalized. However, that's becoming less and less common.
I mean, I've personally seen a UFO more than once. I have no idea what they were - especially the one during a thunderstorm - but I'm pretty sure they were human, just based on who normally builds things like that.
I never had a little green man visit me, and to my knowledge most the cases of that read a lot like someone's sleep disturbance or episode. The remainder are few enough I do go to lying. If one landed in a crowd in Arizona, I'd give it to you, aliens are here, but they just haven't.
Our personal beliefs are, of course, important. We defend those as well. I also found it very uncomfortable to have to let go of my scientific worldview. You get laughed at. But the flight characteristics of these things are not compatible with our physics. We need a new one with more dimensions. Then it fits again. And the phenomena have always been there. There are also different actors behind them. So far, I have understood that. I just try to put things together. It is also important to maintain one's own positivity. On the one hand, there is hardly any contact because the current human thinks very destructively. Then, of course, also recognize critically that not everything that is oversized must be good for one. The US is now looking for a narrative for that, which continues to be practical for them. But there is also the threat of abuse of power.
Capital A Aliens, all the conspiracy theory stuff? No, absolutely not. I think the people of the future will see that exactly the way we see demons, angels, djinn, all the stuff people used to believe in. It's a religious belief not science, no matter the pseudoscientific jargon it's wrapped in.
Aliens somewhere out in the universe? Yes I believe there are more planets with life, out there.
And I also believe there is Something - whatever the force is, that people used to call demons and now call Aliens, I do think it's something, I just think that people convinced it's aliens are as wrong as the people who were convinced it was whatever else in the past.
I would believe in alternate realities overlapping ours before I would believe in living organic beings traversing the vastness of space to get here, then hiding and yet talking to governments or individuals somehow at the same time.
Of course Aliens is real, I didn't imagine the movie.
Extraterrestrial life on Earth, and government coverups? Zero evidence.
Game over man, game over.
I'm open to the idea of life outside of Earth, but I'm sceptical that governments can keep them secret when they can't keep sex scandals, drug use or financial crimes by leaders secret.
I do! Perhaps alien life could even be hiding in plain sight on Earth, and someday we will discover a virus or a bacteria that looks nothing like anything else on Earth and could've hitched a ride on a meteorite!
Google water bears.
Tardigrades are animals, as confirmed by genetic analysis, and morphologically resemble what we think of as everyday animals even more closely than, say, Cnidaria (jellyfish, corals, hydras, etc.)
Yes. The older I get, the more I believe it is actually a Men in Black kind of situation.
I have something new to say about this. Hold on.
It's possible they're out there but it doesn't change my life at all one bit. My take-away is that hopefully I live long enough to get to see them for myself if they're out there, out of sheer curiosity for how intelligence could evolve from unknown circumstances.
I think it's silly to rule out alien life all together. We don't know so much about the universe. Whether extra terrestrial life has visited Earth, I don't know and I don't think anyone does.
As a metaphysical solipsist, I haven’t decided yet.
I believe in the boundless depths of the self. Beyond that I'm not sure.
Understanding why and how we're even conscious entities, assuming I believe you guys even exist, is the question that still needs to be answered regardless of aliens becoming known to us.
I am certain that intelligent life in the universe is realively common, but that there is no real way to break or even bend the laws of physics to allow for FTL meaning that the chance of one ever enountering another is basically zero unless there are more than one species of intelligent life in a single star system.
I'm agnostic. If you find the statistical probability argument for the existence of aliens salient, then by the same token you should believe that our reality is a simulation. In which case, the existence of aliens once again becomes questionable; the statistical probabilities of an infinite simulated universe are outside the realm of our current knowledge.
edit: See comment below on Nick Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis.
I don't follow how possible aliens = simulation. And what's the basis for what we experience being defined as simulation or not? Are we in a computer, or everything is a hallucination?
Sorry, I suppose people haven't heard of the "Simulation hypothesis" in philosophy.
Nick Bostrom argued that, statistically, it is more likely that we live in a simulation than not. Assume that an advanced civilization could build a machine with enormous computing power, sufficient to simulate a human mind and a universe "around" it. It follows that the number of such simulated minds/universes could be near infinite. So the probability of our actually being in a simulated universe dwarfs the probability that our reality is not a simulation.
OK I think I follow now. If one believes the possibility of aliens based on probability, then they should also consider the possibility that the universe is a simulation?
Yes, this is the idea. Although, as another noted, you can argue back and forth on whether Bostrom's argument holds.
I think that presumes simulating a universe and/or consciousness is even possible. We have no clue either way if it can be done, but we have evidence life exists, at least on Earth, so it is possible for life to exist somewhere else too. I believe aliens are more likely than us living in a simulation
Bostrom's theory relies on life being real too. If I could rephrase it, his theory is:
1 if humans can simulate a human mind in the future, they will 2 they will probably simulate their ancestors (us) 3 they will probably do it trillions and trillions of times 4 this means that out of trillions of consciousnesses, some are real humans and some are simulations 5 we are either one of the few billion actual living minds or one of the trillions of simulated minds and math says it's the latter because trillions is more. (He never says trillions, just unspecific words like "countless")
I think Bostrom is genius but I've never found this argument very interesting.
I botched that post, especially the first sentence. I meant to say that it relies on human life being real at some point, either in the present or in the past, and doesn't really rule out alien life at that point
Well I suppose it depends on your views of consciousness. Some would argue that our consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon grounded on the electrical impulses of our neurons. Personally, I'm convinced that the phenomenon need not be physical. It should be possible, with enough computing power, to model the same interactions. But I admit that if you reject this possibility, then the simulation hypothesis loses credence.
Growing up in a devout Muslim society, I was made to believe that aliens don't exist.
But I simply thought that this couldn't really be possible since there's at least a few other planets that have signs of life, surely there's a civilization in there, even if it's as smart as the animals on earth.
What planet has signs of life?
This YouTube short lists one.
I should welcome your downvotes if you're somehow not convinced enough, or if you simply hate YouTube Shorts like I do.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This YouTube short
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It says "oceans of water could exist there"
I understand the 3d animations look really cool and convincing to some people but there's no evidence here for any sign of life. They don't even have evidence for water... Just pure speculation.
Yeah, I'm probably just very very stupid.
Sure. Immigrants have that can-do attitude that makes them much more likely to become entrepreneurs and small-business owners. I've worked for several.
I just read that as "Do you believe in Asians?" and at first I wondered whether that was racist, then I went like "Nooo, Asians, go!! I believe in you!! You can do it!!"
Is this you?
https://youtu.be/3Lyex2tSUyA?si=g1RFxQfBvCS5R2Y0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/3Lyex2tSUyA?si=g1RFxQfBvCS5R2Y0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
oh. like that secret asian man fellow.
I lean towards no, which is a minority scientific position. The Fermi paradox is strong evidence against technological aliens, and of all the evolutionary history we have immediate abiogenesis is the most weakly supported. It happened early, but there's still a 10% chance of a thing randomly happening in the first 10% of geological history (to oversimplify the math).
If it's not that, it's eukariogenesis, but that seems a bit more inevitable given how cooperative bacteria can already be. The development of technology seems inevitable once a thing by chance becomes smart and dexterous enough, and every other step along the way has happened more than once. Earth-like planets are still thought to be abundant.
Edit: Oh, and no to any conspiracy. It would be really hard to hide obvious alien life, and there's no real motive for all world governments to unanimously do so. And conspiracies don't exist, because we're too disorganised to keep a huge secret for long.
I definitely believe that aliens exist, but I very much doubt that they have any interest in contacting us. I find that lot of the discussions around aliens fail to take into account the sheer vastness of the Universe.
Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.
So, after millions of years of life on Earth nothing interesting happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It's worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.
Now let's take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they're designed to look like noise.
Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don't go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.
So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small! The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.
I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We're likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space because we're adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that's most likely to be prolific in space.
Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be what we consider to be geological scales.
For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don't recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.
I really can't imagine that advanced civilizations would have much they could learn from us. We might be a curiosity at best to them, but it's more likely that they would give as much consideration to us as we do to an ant when we pass it by.
I’m sure there is intelligent life out there but if we ever cross paths is very uncertain.
Yes, the sophon is causing all the shenanigans happening on earth rn but it decided to ramp up its game.
Im open to all ideas, if there is something to this UAP phenomena I think it's more complicated than just aliens from another galaxy. Maybe its multiple factions, maybe its way more complicated then we can even comprehend or maybe its all black projects and the greatest case of fraud in world history.
Either way I think it's something we should explore more. Having high level officials say some pretty crazy shit and then just writing it off as crazies in the government seems idk also bad? Maybe we should look into why we have these trained professionals in the military saying these things. And if it's prosaic like mental illness well that needs attention obviously and if it's any of the other things well the same answer.
Idk why we just write this shit off conspiracy or not. if we dealt with it and embarrassed the liars or helped the sick wouldn't that be good?
Yes. I see no logical reason why life didn’t form somewhere else.
Duh. Have you not seen the mountains of high definition video of the alien craft buzzing around our atmosphere?
Nobody demands this level of evidence for the asteroid belt. They tell us there’s an asteroid belt, we just believe it. No problem. Big ring of rocks.
But there’s hundreds of high definition videos every day of people’s cell phones recording machines floating in the sky, literal news stories of these things, pilots, government officials, scientists all talking about them, FLIR, radar, visual, etc data and we’re all like “Nah bro it’s a spontaneous conspiracy of strangers to perpetuate a hoax across multiple continents, centuries, and walks of life”
The reason is simple: we’re in denial because it’s absolutely terrifying.
Why do these tens of thousands of people participate in the Alien Hoax Conspiracy? Why, for attention of course.
Please don’t understand me wrong. I am saying the claim that aliens are a “hoax” implies the largest and most well-coordinated conspiracy ever theorized to exist. If there is a conspiracy to perpetuate the alien hoax, it dwarfs every other conspiracy many orders of magnitude over.
Yes there’s fucking aliens. Each and every one of us has seen more evidence for aliens than we’ve seen of the existence of Osama Bin Laden, the Harlem Globetrotters, or spear fishing.
“Oh all those spear fishing videos are all CGI”
Yeah whatever bro. All those vast networks of people just cranking out CGI footage of aliens on a daily basis. You know, for the lulz. Gimme a break.
I actually agree with parts of your underlying idea, but your tone is so awful that you're convincing people to disagree with you.
You could be like : "I believe in cats because of cat videos."
But instead you're like : "What are you? Some kinda ducking idiot? You never seen a cat video? You scared of cats bro?! Small minded population can't accept cats!"
Surely you understand tone? I hope you are only like this on the internet.
Do you understand tone? Do you comprehend that there’s more to my message than “I think aliens exist”?
Yes. Like I said I agree with a lot of your points. My examples are intentionally oversimplified to avoid diluting the idea I want to demonstrate.
I hope you understand that I'm trying to help you communicate more effectively, because i think that what you are communicating is valid.
Not everything is an argument. It's important to understand when people are helping you, or you end up attacking allies. We are likely on the same side.
You’re helping me with the goal you assume I have.
It’s condescending because instead of inferring my communication goals from my message, you assume the message is poorly crafted because it doesn’t effectively reach that goal.
I was hoping to lead you do this realization indirectly, but I’ll just come out and say it: my goal with that comment was to express my feelings. Do you feel that you know how I feel about this topic, having read my comment?
That’s why I asked whether you understand what tone is. You seem to think tone is a lubricant that makes manipulating others’ opinions go easier. I disagree. I think tone is an expression of emotion.
Ask yourself honestly. Did you get a good sense of how I feel about this, from reading my comment? If you did, then I succeeded in my communications goal.
Since we’re doing unsolicited advice, I’d say take it easy on the assumptions of others’ incompetence when you’re encountering them for the first time.
Fair points.
I can't tell if you're being satirical or serious
I guess you’d have to come to your own conclusions about the logic instead of reading my intentions.
A single example please. Since that's a drop in the ocean of the amount you've stated exists, only half points will be awarded if there's a chance someone could have altered or faked it, or it's not definitely alien, and could be natural or a secret human technology instead.
I'm not afraid if they are here. They should stop dicking with cows and say hello. Clearly they don't want us dead, so they seem nice enough.
The Phoenix Lights. This isn't hi-def video, because that didn't really exist commonly, but it was witnessed by literally tens of thousands of people (whoever was out at the time, and it was during a pretty busy period).
But of course, there will be handwaving and 'disproofs' or things like 'but we can't trust nineties people to see.' Fact is, it is seen by everyone, news channels do pieces on it, and then.. ..meh. Too big to comprehend, and I've got work tomorrow.
So, half point. Definitely not fake, but don't look much like aliens, as opposed to angels, spirits, a Chinese or American research program, natural plasma objects or something else entirely we haven't even thought of.
They're UFOs, with an emphasis on U.
Fair.
Well, minus 'A Chinese or American research program'. The ability for the US or China to keep an active, capable project like that a secret for over two decades is incredibly unlikely. More unlikely than anything else postulated.
..but still, definitely unknown.
The really interesting part, though, is that it demonstrates the ability of the populous to see something with immense implications - then just shrug it off, forget, and get back to the 'normal' things.
That is interesting. The human capability for apathy is astounding. I was just talking about this in another thread on idiot-proofing things.
I think it's a trauma-avoidance mechanism. If someone doesn't register a major event, and can just continue living their known pattern, there's something (biologically) good in that, when the other option is to disrupt the pattern you use to survive.
Now that survival isn't by-and-large the issue, and we have the capacity to register and process things of great magnitude, some of us can and do. But, it's up to those who do to create an actionable course, if they want others involved. It's just not enough to shout and make sure people know - there must be an actionable course for it to truly register.
It can be hard to watch that apathy, though.
Bullshit.
Says the man named after protomolecule tech
Was supposed to be the cosmic phenomenon, but sure, why not.
So which part is bullshit?
Carl Sagan was the Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day. No contributions to science other than self-popularization.
Yet he left this lingering idea that because the universe is immense the unique preconditions required for life would necessarily appear many times. Many people assume this is a "scientific" position and just rattle it off like a pull-string toy.
I can't even begin to describe how abhorent this is. Leave. And let the door hit you on the way out.
I'm so sorry that happened to you sweetheart! Tell me where, exactly, did the bad man touch you?