This is a question for people who either don’t believe that intelligent life exists anywhere else, or at least that it isn’t visiting earth.
Have you ever considered what it would take to convince you (assuming that aliens are in fact visiting us)?
Some possibilities:
The classic: a UFO lands on the White House lawn.
You personally see a UFO/alien up close and personal; you can tell that you are seeing something not of this earth.
Somebody that you trust completely tells you that he saw one, and can give details.
The leader of a major nation holds a press conference, and announces that his nation’s government holds evidence that aliens have been visiting us.
A well-known, respected scientist announces that he has credible evidence.
I am easily convinced so any of those would just reinforce what I already believe/know. All it took me to believe was just thinking, out of all of the sightings on earth, could one really be expected to believe every one was a lie, hoax or misinterpretation? Doesn’t compute well in my head. Same goes with the old analogy about if one does think if there are more stars with planets orbiting them than grains of sand on earth, we are the only ones? It just doesn’t make sense. I suppose I can see the view of another person who believes the opposite, but as I said, does not compute. Walter Mitty-ish Fantasy below
I would love to have the media spot a legitimate UFO (Alien) and get it all on camera and distribute it. All of the movers and shakers of the world would crap their pants though, worried about hysteria, plummeting stock prices and their money going down the drain, while I sit back and invest in EVERY private space venture. This way, the bad guys lose, I get rich and get to live out the rest of my days living in amazement and wonder.
That is some very strange reasoning. If you accept that some percentage of claimed sightings are either hoaxes or mistakes, then it’s no stretch at all to accept that they all are. We have no way of estimating the likelihood of a particular individual misreporting or inventing a sighting, so how can we begin to estimate whether or not they occur any more frequently than should be expected?
There are multiple sightings of the Loch Ness Monster over a 100 years too. Does that make Nessie real?
There is undoubtedly life out there in the Universe, but we will never meet it. Ever.
Distances are too great, insurmountable. We will never leave our solar system, nor will any alien species enter ours.
And if they did, why would they enter our atmosphere? They’re in a space ship afterall. What anti-gravity device would they be deploying that allows them to enter the atmosphere and hover over Buttcrack, Iowa?
Well, the loch ness monster is supposed to be a colony of old dinosaurs, not aliens, I thought? What does a computer virus have to do with aliens, though? Why would aliens bother engineering a computer virus to attack some primitive computers on some backwater planet in the middle of nowhere?
Also: how do you know that shape-shifters don’t control politics? If the shape-shifting technology is powerful enough, then no one would ever find out, or at least no one that can actually do anything could ever find out. What if the small groups of “nutcases” saying that there are shape-shifters controlling world politics are actually hiding the fact that there ARE shape-shifters controlling our politics or something like that?
I think you misunderstand.
I was giving separate examples of things that people believe without evidence.
I didn’t mean there was a global conspiracy involving computer hoaxes, the Loch Ness monster, perpetual motion, angels and aliens.
As for your suggestion that we are in fact controlled by shape-shifters - there have been a couple of TV series in which we were, but actual no evidence.
If I tell you that there is an alien standing behind you right now, are you going to look? :eek:
(If you did look, I have a bridge to sell you…)
Thirty years ago, it was extremely rare for a person to have immediate access to a video-recording device, and still there were a few film clips of UFO’s. Now, nearly everyone, in every country, has a highly reliable videorecorder in their pocket that can be deployed in seconds. Where are the UFO videos? There has been an incease of maybe a million-fold in the number or people who could capture images of UFOs or aliens. But an actual decrease in the number of such videos.
Regarding shape-shifting, there was an episode of “Daria” in which they discussed the prospect that many people among them in their daily lives are aliens in disguise. Jane asked “Why would a highly advanced race cross vast reaches of time and space to go to high school?”
It’s often quoted here that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Alien life has got to be a prime example for this. It seems almost unimaginable that in all the estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, this is the only one where a planet developed life.
And not ever meeting it, is not the same as never getting any evidence.
This would be the least believable alternative. I’d just assume he had a bad case of Nobel Disease, like when Kary Mullis was abducted by aliens (an event facilitated by a glowing raccoon).
The chemical element Prometheum was not discovered until WWII. But it was certain that an element with an atomic umber of 61 must exist. Even if, to this day, it were not found anywhere where humans could possibly imagine themselves ever detecting it, it would not be very close to “doesn’t exist”.
The fact of highly-probable existence trumps the human-attainable evidence of it.
As noted, this is odd reasoning. Humans, collectively and individually, have believed utterly untrue things until their death (sometimes caused by that belief). There are many explanations for “UFOs” and I have no trouble believing that yes, the millions who saw something and believed are misled and misinformed.
All it will take is one unambiguous, irrefutable piece of evidence… and no such thing has turned up in literally millennia of collecting odd things and interpreting them. Not one self-sealing stem bolt or used phaser battery, anywhere, ever.
QED, IMHO. So yes, that one piece of evidence showing up now would be (globally) life changing.
If this alien is truly alien, how likely are pix of any naked alien based on a silicon life-form going to excite you?
I will agree if your definition of “meet” is limited to a face-to-tentacle clawshake. I will not agree if you claim we will never see or hear aliens, or evidence of such. Think electromagnetic connections, not physical ones.