Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
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.
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.
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.
Duh. Have you not seen the mountains of high definition video of the alien craft buzzing around our atmosphere?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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