Writes Joel Achenbach, in "UFO Mania Is Out of Control. Please Stop. Sorry to disappoint you, this science writer says, but there’s zero evidence of aliens" (WaPo).
August 23, 2021
"UFO skepticism can sometimes be mistaken for anthropocentrism, a kind of biological arrogance...."
"The believer says to the skeptic, 'So you think in all the universe, among billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars and untold numbers of planets, we humans are the only form of intelligent life?'
An adjunct to this is the assertion that, among intelligent beings in the universe, humans are likely relatively primitive, since we’ve only been around for, what, 100,000 years or so, and the Old Ones out there may be billions of years ahead of us.
It would actually be reassuring, at a deep existential level, to know that interstellar space travel is possible. That it’s something we might do someday. Alien visitors by their mere existence would imply that we can overcome our worst instincts (war, hatred, pollution, Twitter) and survive. It would be nice to know that the kind of intelligence humans possess, and which gives rise to technological civilizations like ours, won’t always backfire, that it’s not only a nifty evolutionary adaptation in the short run but something that’s durable. The aliens give us hope. In fact, in many UFO narratives that’s why they’re here, to help us along and save us from ourselves. They’re a little bit like angels.
What’s more anthropocentric is to assume that human beings are so fascinating that aliens want to visit us and study us. The aliens seem a bit obsessed with us.... Some UFO narratives imagine that we have something the aliens are missing. Like: feelings....."
Writes Joel Achenbach, in "UFO Mania Is Out of Control. Please Stop. Sorry to disappoint you, this science writer says, but there’s zero evidence of aliens" (WaPo).
Writes Joel Achenbach, in "UFO Mania Is Out of Control. Please Stop. Sorry to disappoint you, this science writer says, but there’s zero evidence of aliens" (WaPo).
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So what are you saying? No more anal probing?
What the hell do I do out in the woods on a Saturday night now?
We've seen the videos from the military on Tucker. Who are we going to believe: Mr. Expert or our own lying eyes?
Mere speculation can be met by more mere speculation. "Aliens would be more advanced than us" is met by "We're the most advanced" without anyone able to prove which is correct one way or another. The same with the rest of that about aliens being able to overcome pollution, war, hatred - what proof do you have for that other than wishful thinking?
They do not know, they are speculating, and they are projecting their own desires and fears in their speculations worse than the men who wrote old maps with "Here Be Dragons" written in the blank areas.
There's also zero evidence of quality journalism at The Washington Post, yet there you are.
Reddit has an ongoing storyline, in subs like Writing Prompts, about humans being unbelievably robust and violent compared to other spacefaring species. And Earth animals scare the alien visitors, too. Written from the perspective of the aliens, of course, because their disgust and horror forces admiration for human resilience and the humans' coexistence with bears,feral hogs and housecats.
Incredible number of words to say something completely obvious. People tend to fill in the gaps on missing information, and tend to use the familiar to do it. Aliens are (relatively) familiar, because we've all read books or seen movies about them. Subtle misfunctions by instruments and such are less familiar, but that's a much much simpler explanation.
It's anthropogenic to think aliens are physical beings in vehicles. The current craze are artifacts seen in new detectors.
That's not what Tucker said!
Unless they decide to eat us. Oops.
Another scifi trope is that some aliens consider us an acceptable form of protein.....Jesus is a kind of heavenly being who visited us earthlings and blessed us with His superior understanding of the workings of the universe and how to escape the trappings of mortality. In a neat reversal, He didn't visit the earth to consume us as tasty snacks, but rather to offer His body and blood for our nourishment.
One of Jesus' lesser known sayings is in John 10:16: "And aother bsheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be cone fold, and one shepherd."
Just sayin'.
"Zero" is slightly too strong. We don't have direct evidence, but that's not to say we don't have indirect evidence of something that might be explainable by "aliens".
Robin Hansen has been doing a lot of writing on the subject. He doesn't say UFO's are a fact, he just says it's not crazy and is worth thought and analysis: UFOs - What the Hell?.
"It's anthropogenic to think aliens are physical beings in vehicles."
Good point, but "anthropogenic" is the wrong word.
The climate activists are living in your head.
Not physically!!!
how's the saying go?
If you won't believe in GOD, you'll believe, in ANYTHING
If we're debating zero evidence dystopias, I say better a climate activist living in your head than an alien probing your anus.
It’s anthropogenic to think "anthropogenic" is the wrong word.
I think it is very possible that aliens exist. I think it is almost impossible that they have visited us. People just don't realize how far it is even to the nearest star and how much of a limit the speed of light is. Nothing can go faster and a ridiculous amount of energy is required to even get close to that speed. At the speed of the Space Shuttle, it would take more than 50,000 years just to get to the nearest star.
"Warp drive" does not exist, and according to Einstein and everyone since, cannot.
Not for nothing, but if the Chinese and Russians and pretty much anyone living out there in the hills with a computer can offer up opinion columns to our major media, and we use those as proof of election engineering, claiming that those articles swayed an election, can you not consider that a more advanced civilization would think it child's play to 'arrange' a series of 'expert' columns to claim they don't exist?
I know our world is filled with crazy humans. No doubt about it, we see examples of it daily, hourly. And that makes it hard to discern the truly otherworldly from the run-of-the-mill crazy horseshit we are fed daily. But if and when it happens that aliens show themselves, there will be nothing for us to do about it anyway except hope they treat their playthings nicely.
I often wonder if there comes a point with intelligence where it is no longer adaptive in evolutionary terms. That is kind of the buried lede in the movie "Idiocracy." Maybe the idiots take over before the problems of interstellar space travel can be overcome.
Why does the WaPo want to control what everyone thinks about everything? Should we all just have profoundly un-curious points of view, and just agree with the Media? Because they're never wrong?
I suspect the reported cases of objects “defying the laws of physics” by accelerating more rapidly than our understanding of physics says is possible is actually some sort of optical anomaly caused by the atmospheric phenomena category mentioned in the report, thermal fluctuations in the atmosphere that distort and project images of distant objects into the field of view of the observer. Such optical effects could also affect other types of electromagnetic signals associated with the visual signal.
I don't find it implausible at all that we are the only living beings in the universe with this level of technology. I don't find it implausible at all that the Earth is the only place in the universe with multi-cellular life forms. The truth is that we really don't know what numbers to plug into the Drake Equation, and we may never know.
In the alien matrix they used to study him, Howard was only dreaming about the anal probing.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The aliens don't want us to know too much too soon and will mask their activities accordingly and plant in certain people's minds the belief that they aren't real. Along the lines of: "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn't exist" (Baudelaire and Keyser Soze).
Also: "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)
Read The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. It’s a brilliant science fiction trilogy that uses the Prisoners Dilemma to explain why you don’t ever want to come to the attention of a more advanced alien race.
If there is life out there (and I would think that the odds are that there is), we are so distant from each other that we are effectively alone. Of course, the distance could be in time, not just space. It's no easier to cross billions of years than it is trillions of miles.
I have a question for people who believe in other intelligent life in the universe and are Christians - do you think that Christ had a separate incarnation on each planet with intelligent life? Is this a weird question or is it something you've thought about?
Hundreds of years ago people saw demons and witches, now they see aliens.
I'm agnostic on the issue, but wouldn't be that surprised if evidence of alien life was found somewhere someday.
"Sorry to disappoint you, this science writer says, but there’s zero evidence of aliens"
Sorry to disappoint you, but all you've shown is that you're a crappy "science writer" who doesn't understand the nature of "evidence".
You (the science writer being quoted, not Althouse) could claim "there is no good evidence", you could claim "there's not enough evidence for a reasonable person to believe", you could claim "there's not conclusive proof". What you can not claim without immediately disproving yourself is that "there is no evidence."
We'll add this article to the "more evidence that 'experts' are worthless" scrapbook.
People never grasp how big space is.
Its so big that travel between solar systems is impossible. Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or 671 million miles per hour. That means that if you built a space ship that traveled 6.7 million miles an hour, and could travel to the Moon and back in approximatly 30 seconds. Or could go round-trip to MARS in 2 days...
it would still take you 400 YEARS to get to Alpha Centauri. That's why Saucers from outer space are impossible
'So you think in all the universe, among billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars and untold numbers of planets, we humans are the only form of intelligent life?'
Maybe. Probably. But I don't know. And you don't either. And it's unlikely we ever will.
Or to quote Enrico Fermi's famous reply: Where are they?
It's a paradox to think that aliens will be somehow perfect, or a lot better than us, yet they will be obsessed with us, not able to leave us alone. Not only does the human male in Avatar want to fuck blue girl, but she wants to fuck him and teach him to respect nature and such. Cool! A bit like Billy Jack. This is oddly reminiscent of the gods in Homer. Why don't they just enjoy life on Olympus? Why do they screw around with the Trojan War, take on human shapes to persuade or fuck humans, etc.? Could it be that because we die, nobility and sacrifice have a meaning that is not available to "the immortals"? Do they actually envy us?
Sorry, sci fi. If the future brings both robots and aliens, will these developments be basically positive for us or not? The unoriginal answer is: that depends. Scientists, like Swift's Projectors, will be pro-robot and pro-all kinds of experiment. If the lab blows up, the survivors will emerge covered in soot, like Wile E. Coyote, and demand funding to get going again. It is not the machines themselves that will be out of control. Same with aliens: some humans will no doubt become pro-alien, almost no matter how good the aliens are. Part of the yearning for a different future is the thought that human nature so far just isn't good enough.
That incredible scene in one of the Alien movies. I think the ship is a prison ship, grim in many ways. It turns out they don't even have enough weapons to fight the monster which of course is loose. Bad alien. As survivors (so far, eventually of course it's just Ripley) stand roughly in a circle to decide what to do, the ship suddenly starts up with a jerk, and gets in motion. An inexperienced person asks: what's going on? Answer: if the computer gets no direction for a specified period, it directs the ship to go on a prescibed route. Q: what route, where are we going? A: Earth. Q: Earth? That shithole? For some people, no matter how bad space is, it will be better than earth.
Thought experiment I read about years ago (related to one of the arguments as to why aliens, if they exist, may be so rare). Assume technology progresses (as I think it will) to the point that any 10 intelligent people, were they to desire the destruction of civilization, could bring it about through a coordinated effort (not the annihilation of the species, just destruction of civilization). What are the chances that a race such as humans can get past this dilemma.
We just had a few people screwing around in a lab in Wuhan kill over 4M people (so far). And they were not even trying. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six tackles this kind of scenario. A bunch of environmental fanatics decide to wipe out most humans with a manufactured disease. Nothing implausible about the scenario.
If the UFO phenomenon was due to space-traveling aliens, then how is it that they can travel distances measured in light years but do not already possess stealth technology? The US is developing cloaking technology for tanks but these space travelers don’t already have it? And why do they care about our anuses? Couldn’t they get the same physiological information by probing grizzly bears?
Or perhaps they already tried grizzlies and decided to stick with humans?
It is almost impossible to think we are the only intelligent civilization in the universe. It is almost impossible to believe any intelligent civilization would travel here physically. In my view it is much more likely that a radio (or radio-like) message would be the first contact. Less likely is a robotic visit. A physical visit by intelligent aliens seems ludicrously unlikely.
I think intelligent civilizations in the universe are numerous but so sparsely spread that, from our point of view they may as well not exist at all.
So you think in all the universe, among billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars and untold numbers of planets, we humans are the only form of intelligent life?
Very likely, yes. Why? BECAUSE SCIENCE.
Mere numbers mean nothing, even billions and billions. There are billions and billions of grains of sand, but none of them are alive, much less intelligent life. The fact is that most stars don't have planetary systems. Those that do are too old, meaning that they were formed too early in the history of the universe to create the necessary atomic elements, and others are too young to have those elements form into organized fashion. Of those that have the necessary elements, few stars produce the necessary range of light and heat, and very, very, very, very few planets are the necessary size or the necessary distance from the star to have the necessary temperature. Few have the necessary atmosphere or water and fewer still have the necessary moon to exert gravitational forces that affect water levels and climate, etc. All that and more just to have the necessary underlying physical and chemical and electric conditions. All in a universe where the physical law is that entropy tends to increase.
Then there is the whole practical impossibility of the spontaneous animation of matter (matter suddenly becoming "alive") that is also reproducible. And the further near impossibility of that life becoming more and more complex. And of that life that does become complex, the near impossibility of life becoming sentient, with the ability for real thinking, not to mention the necessary physical attributes to create and use tools, like something as simple as opposable thumbs, or senses such as sight and hearing and smell and touch.
The fact of the matter is that the chance of life on Earth happening as a mere natural process is like winning the lotto everyday for 100 years. Possible? Sure, theoretically there is a minuscule chance. By far, however, the more likely hypothesis, the theory that overcomes all reasonable doubt, is that the universe and life on Earth did not "just happen" as a physical accident, but was in fact planned and created by Someone greater, Someone who is not part of the universe but is Being Itself.
Howard—aliens as an intelligent extra-terrestrial virus infecting populations and manipulating humankind’s efforts to control the virus.
The rapid development of Life may depend on a small, not too water rich (temperature range for solid/liquid/gas, inner range of habitability zone to expose land), double planet (extremely low probability) w/tectonic plates & a magnetic field; within the "habitability zone" of a sufficiently metallic (3rd/4th generation), relatively quiet (yellow/white dwarf) sun, with a not too slow/fast rotation rate, a Jupiter (to act as shield for the inner planetary zone) & a circular galactic orbit, in a quiet part of a quiet galaxy. Reasonably getting off the planet means it can't be much more massive than Earth. That may be no more than 1 or 2 per galaxy. If the production of phosphorus varies widely as a function of the size of the supernova that seeded heavier elements into a new star system, so might the likelihood of life in the system. Life gets very difficult w/o abundant phosphorus.
Here is your typical picture or video of a UFO: blurry and photographed at a distance so you can't make out exactly what you are seeing, sometimes at night with lights moving in strange ways but you can't make out what it is. Aren't any of these aliens ever ready for their close ups? In all the thousands of video and pictures of UFO's you would think just one would fly towards the photographer and we call look at it and say for sure "yep, that's a flying saucer alright."
Until proven otherwise, I will assume that, to the extent any aliens exist, and for which there is no current proof, they are insect-like driven by insect politics. They would probably look at Earth and deem it an insect planet since, according to The Smithsonian, "In the world, some 900 thousand different kinds of living insects are known. This representation approximates 80 percent of the world's species."
900,000 insect species and only one human species? That's an insect planet.
I kind of enjoy the discussion. I'm still thinking the few that can't be explained are some kind of military black ops system. I always like the memes that say when aliens go past the earth they lock their doors.
You can still believe that there is indeed other intelligent life out there and yet also believe that none of them have visited earth. Our current knowledge of physics tells us that even to get to the nearest star is a nigh on impossible task. If faster (or at least close to) speed of light travel is impossible, then we, and all the other intelligent life forms, are pretty much stuck in their own star systems.
The guys in charge of this part of the galaxy have a lot of planets to ride herd on. They came by here 80,000 years ago, set down in Kansas, then around Ayers rock. Nothing to see, so they left. They'll be back in another few thousand years though.
There may not be evidence of aliens, (at least, none disclosed by the powers that be), but there is evidence of inexplicable aerial activity in our skies. Which is to say, it cannot be ruled out that alien vessels may be the source of this aerial activity.
Heck, we have put our exploratory probes, rovers, a helicopter, and men, on various planets, moons, and asteroids in our solar system. It is entirely feasible that more advanced aliens could be observing us with drones or actually visiting us in manned craft. Certainly, the available evidence is more compelling that aliens are observing or have visited us than that a supernatural being created the universe, which masses of apparently rational folk accept without qualm.
I am fully aware that no hard evidence is available to prove aliens are in our vicinity, but I like to think they are, and so I indulge myself in the idea that aliens are here (or near), fully aware that it is only a fancy (at this time)
Thank you Icepilot.
Once upon a time I thought that life elsewhere in the universe was likely just given the numbers. But so many things need to line up exactly in the right order at the right time just for their to be a tiny chance at life that it is very, very probable that we are alone in all the universe.
It's not anthropogenic to think that aliens would be very interested in studying us. After all we're spending billions looking for some sign of life on Mars. Finding just a microbe there would be a sensation. And we go to great lengths to not affect any potential life on Mars.
So, it's not that wild of a theory to think that a more intelligent life form on another planet would send information gathering probes to Earth and would try to do so in a manner to not disturb life here - including trying to not make us aware of their presence.
"The aliens give us hope. In fact, in many UFO narratives that’s why they’re here, to help us along and save us from ourselves. "
In other words, they are here "to Serve Man":
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734684/
Yancey Ward: I don't find it implausible at all that we are the only living beings in the universe with this level of technology. I don't find it implausible at all that the Earth is the only place in the universe with multi-cellular life forms. The truth is that we really don't know what numbers to plug into the Drake Equation, and we may never know.
There are some statistically sophisticated approaches to the Drake Equation — I plowed through this one a couple years ago. I can't claim anything like sophisticated comprehension, but I did find it persuasive.
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high ex ante probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations.
We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude.
This makes a stark difference. When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial ex ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it. This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe.
(para breaks added for readability)
Roger Sweeny and Mark have already covered this ground well, but if I may add my $0.02 as an avid amateur physics student:
1. To the best of our current understanding, there are no novel fundamental particles elsewhere in the universe. What you see (in the Standard Model of Particle Physics) is what you get.
2. There are only two fundamental particles capable of constructing information-processing systems we would classify as "complex nervous systems," carbon and silicon. So anything we would recognize as "intelligent life" would necessarily be carbon- or silicon-based.
3. We have a pretty good handle on how carbon and silicon are produced as byproducts of the Big Bang, star lifecycles, etc.
4. We have a pretty good handle on the evolutionary history of the one example of intelligent life we have—the physics, chemistry, biology, physiology... of it.
5. We therefore assert that the universe must be approximately as old/large as we observe it to be in order for any intelligent life form to have evolved once.
6. Even if this thesis is incorrect, carbon and silicon indisputably have mass, subjecting them to the laws of General Relativity, meaning that interstellar travel of such life forms is impossible per the comments about the energy requirements to accelerate a given mass to a relevant fraction of lightspeed coupled with the longevity limits of such life forms.
The strongest probabilistic conclusion, taking the entirety of modern science into account, is—we're it. We're the ballgame.
"Once upon a time I thought that life elsewhere in the universe was likely just given the numbers. But so many things need to line up exactly in the right order at the right time just for their to be a tiny chance at life that it is very, very probable that we are alone in all the universe."
Nonsense. As others here have said, the vastness of the universe is greater than we can conceive. Given the astounding numbers of galaxies, each with astounding numbers of stars, many or most of which probably have planetary systems, I feel certain life is quite common in the universe. Now...it is possible intelligent life, (as we use the term), is rarer, given that intelligence is not a necessity for life to thrive, but I have no doubt there is intelligent life throughout the universe. It is possible life exists on (or within) planets and moons in our own solar system.
'Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or 671 million miles per hour. That means that if you built a space ship that traveled 6.7 million miles an hour, and could travel to the Moon and back in approximatly 30 seconds. Or could go round-trip to MARS in 2 days...
it would still take you 400 YEARS to get to Alpha Centauri. That's why Saucers from outer space are impossible'
I think your math is off on the moon thing...you are using a speed which is 1/100th the speed of light. If light takes 2.5 seconds to get to the moon and back (it does), your ship would take 100 times longer, or about 250 seconds...
I don’t know. My husband and I aren’t even UFO skeptics: we just couldn’t care less about the subject.
But.
Driving to Atlanta one morning not long ago, at sunrise, still facing north, there was this glowing long metal bar, vertical, high up in the sky. It hovered for a long time, then shot sideways at an astonishing speed and disappeared. Similar sightings were reported all over the city. We discussed it and asked around a bit (we’re near a Ranger training camp and know some law enforcement), but, nada.
And we still don’t care about or think about UFOs, but we completely agree (and he, at least, is the farthest thing from histrionic) that thing was a UFO. It hasn’t changed the way we think of things religious or metaphysical, but we agree: that there was one dang UFO.
As Hey Skipper pointed out, the problem with the Drake Equation is all the unknowns. While we have a good handle on the number of stars and a statistical data set for the number of stars with planets, pretty much everything else is a wild ass guess. Given those unknowns, the equation is just a fun formula to play with.
Robert Cook: "Nonsense. As others here have said, the vastness of the universe is greater than we can conceive. Given the astounding numbers of galaxies, each with astounding numbers of stars, many or most of which probably have planetary systems, I feel certain life is quite common in the universe. Now...it is possible intelligent life, (as we use the term), is rarer, given that intelligence is not a necessity for life to thrive, but I have no doubt there is intelligent life throughout the universe."
"Science" in 2021.
Bill Bryson wrote that Life wants to be, but apparently it doesn't want to be much.
We, us puny little apes, may be the consciousness of the Universe, it's only sentient witnesses. That would be awesome.
Aside from the likelihood of intelligent life appearing elsewhere, the Can't Get Here From There problem is insurmountable.
It is one thing to throw some number at the wall as to how long it will take to cover the distance between stars at some near relativistic speed.
Fine. But, once getting there, you have to stop.
How?
Some time back, the AF announced they had cleared 96% of to-then outstanding UFO puzzles by matching them with known flights of developmental aircraft, some of which are now familiar.
This means they weren't from outer space. But it also means those people who said they saw something actually saw something and it wasn't swamp gas or swans with the sunset on them just so.
Ruppelt's old "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects" is interesting. Two things stood out. He took the ten best reports to Wright-Pat intel center and the conclusion was "intelligently controlled". End of chapter. Nothing further.
Also, having quite the budget, apparently, for a Major, he assembled a panel of shrinks. "War nerves" "mass hysteria". The days of duck&cover, Conelrad PSA on television or radio, air raid sirens tested at noon on Saturdays.
"'Science' in 2021.
Not at all. My opinion, 2021.
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