![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:05 • Filed to: None | ![]() | ![]() |
This piece raises an excellent point: there’s enough evidence that we should stop treating the possibility like a joke and start investigating.
But even saying so (“typing so”?) out loud makes me seem like a crank.
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I suppose the second biggest scientific taboo is cold fusion. Now that’s a miracle I can wholeheartedly endorse more funding for.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:11 |
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A bigger taboo than Rusty Venture spending ~10 years attempting to identify and destroy the gay gene?
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:12 |
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Clearly there’s some back story here I’m missing.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:12 |
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I’m not a crazy hardcore ‘ALIENZ ARE AMONG US!” wears-a-tinfoil-hat nutbar, but I definitely aliens
exist....it’s just a numerical impossibility that they CAN’T exist with the sheer number of galaxies, solar systems and planets out there...
I cannot fathom that we, the human race, are the only ‘intelligent’ life in the entire universe. It stands to reason if we came to exist as a species, another intelligent species had to come to exist in a similar (or different) way somewhere else....there’s just no way that can’t have happened with the scale of the cosmos...
The real question is are any of them close enough to visit our solar system...?
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:12 |
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Nah
, the biggest scientific taboo is researching correlations between intelligence and lineage/DNA, for obvious reasons
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:13 |
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That’s the problem: we assume anyone who thinks they’re actually here is a crazy person. Hard to get funding to look into anything with that mentality so prevalent.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:14 |
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See, I’d bet there are more scientists quietly doing that than are looking into UFOs.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:16 |
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They most certainly COULD be here, though (despite me thinking they definitely EXIST), the sheer scale of the universe, as I mentioned means they could either be all over the place and we just don’t know it....or the next closest intelligent race is so far away the likelihood of us ever meeting them is slim.
Hard to say....I’d be scary and wonderous for us to ever make contact.
...though they’ll probably just look at Earth, see all the shit going down and, in the immortal words of Ozzy M
an, say ‘Yeah, naw.” and bugger off...lol.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:17 |
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...wut...
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:20 |
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I’ll take that bet. Most scientist would rather be regarded as quacks than racists
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:35 |
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The current state of scientific understanding says that the journey to get here is so time and energy intensive that there is almost no conceivable purpose. Also anything sent is likely artificial, not biological.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:36 |
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Don’t mind me, most of my references are from cartoons. Its one of several issues that I just don’t work on.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:38 |
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Of course, we can’t assume things unfolded any better on their planet, either. Hell, there’s always a chance they’re even MORE fucked up than we are, and are fantasizing about finding some other intelligent race out there to fix all their problems for them.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:38 |
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Sure, I don’t expect to discover aliens are here, but neither should it be verboten to ask the question and try to figure out what those videos are really about.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:40 |
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The age of the Milky Way gets us to the Fermi Paradox though. Our galaxy (other galaxies are so far away and with so little between them that it doesn’t make sense for intergalactic travel unless there’s some sort of physics breaking instant travel hack we don’t know about) is very old and nearly as old as the Universe (over 13 billion years old, or more than 3x the age of our Solar system) . Even though our Milky way is pretty big (100,000 light-years in diameter), with exponential growth and even current travel times, the entirety of the Milky Way could be colonized with near future technology in less than 100 million years (so literally could have been done hundreds of times over by now).
Since if only a single civilization decided to colonize the Galaxy, they could do it quickly (on a geological scale); however, there is no evidence that this has happened. There are some thing on the order of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, so even if technological civilizations were a one in a billion thing, there should be hundreds of them and just one could with relative ease colonize the entire galaxy.
So the real issue is: why isn’t there any proof of aliens? The most plausible explanation is a “Great Filter”, a developmental or evolutionary impediment that is so difficult that all or all but one or vanishingly few (us and/ or other contemporaneous civilizations). If there is a GF, then we have 3 options: we’re first, we’re unique , or we’re doomed. Of the three, the last seems to be the most likely.
So, there aren’t any other technological civilizations (or at least ones much more advanced than we are) and we won’t ever meet them. We might go out and find some bacteria type life out there, but it’s unlikely that we’ll get Star Trek aliens (anything that’s happened more than once wouldn’t be a GF and much past single celled organisms is very bad news for us since it would greatly increase the likelihood that the GF is ahead of us and we’re doomed).
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:42 |
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![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:43 |
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Hey, I got your reference!
“You inherited your father’s ass, Dean. Learn to love stadium cushions.”
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:43 |
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Su re, there’s reason enough to dedicate some resources into recent events, but it’s key to treat it as a UFO (heavy on the U), and not E.T. Take is something new, but not something made by other than man. Any decision that drives would be faulty.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 21:49 |
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Haha, this is too true...
![]() 07/24/2020 at 22:21 |
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Now if you think they have been visiting us, abducting a few cows, and terrorizing lonely people in small towns is another matter.
![]() 07/24/2020 at 22:50 |
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“ but hertz!” delong incoherent rant about hertz, made my brain want to explode.
![]() 07/25/2020 at 00:32 |
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Well my dad was a pilot and everyone has stories, astronauts too from what I hear.
![]() 07/25/2020 at 14:18 |
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Wow, that was a long reply, though it makes sense...
Kindof depressing though...