I agree with everything you’ve said, but still maintain the millions of years equivalent is the more likely scenario.
Firstly, obviously we have the fact that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old. So even if things like a 3rd generation star are a requirement (and it may not be), as far as we know the window of opportunity for life is still 8 or 9 billions of years wide. All of human history is a fraction of a blink of an eye on such timescales.
So really it comes down to what the limits of knowledge and technology are. Maybe we’re close right now, so even a species millions of years ahead of us would be technologically not far ahead.
But I doubt that very much. Many of the fields where we know the most are we surest that our knowledge is incomplete – fundamental physics, cosmology etc. And these are the fields that will have significant implications on how a species may travel through space and interact with us.
My own field of neuroscience…we know for a fact we’re complete newbs in this area with our understanding of many aspects of consciousness still essentially “It happens in the brain…somehow”.
Imagine us interacting with a species with a deep understanding of all such phenomena. Forget merely influencing us, they would likely be able to blow open our perception of the world in ways we can’t even conceive of.
As others have said, just some evidence. Not something that can’t be explained, there’s plenty of terrestrial phenomena that can’t be explained. Something that can be explained and the explanation strongly indicates alien origin.
Any of the situations described by the OP would pique my interest, and I’d really love to believe, but I’d have to remain very skeptical in all until seeing some very clear evidence repeatedly tested over time.
I think there have been world leaders in the past who have made dubious claims of alien encounters,* so I’d need more than a press-conference announcement to believe that Klaatu was among us. *(Didn’t Boris Yeltsin once make such a claim? I know Jimmy Carter did.)
I wouldn’t believe a trusted friend or family member’s word alone, but I might be concerned for their mental well-being.
As for a personal close encounter, I’d probably doubt my own sanity, or wonder if I was being pranked.
As for an announcement from a respected scientist, it would depend on that scientist’s field of expertise and the nature of the evidence presented. I’d be super excited to see the evidence, but even scientists are prone to human error.
As others have pointed out, the idea that the supposedly large number of reported encounters should be cause enough for belief is fundamentally flawed. We know, for certainty, that some of those claims have actually been hoaxes, and we can determine with relative certainty that some can be attributed to misinterpretation of either natural phenomena or man-made devices. We can also speculate, on reasonable grounds, that some are likely to be the result of hallucination or delusion or some other human foible. These are things we can confidently take as evidence to counter claims of alien/UFO sightings, based on our understanding of the world and human nature.
On the other hand, the likelihood that in the vastness of time and space an intelligent species has managed to reach us and yet insists on playing coy, somehow avoiding the detecting technology of the experts while buzzing the occasional station wagon on lonely highways, is slimmer than a Pringles chip.
That’s not to say that intelligent life isn’t out there.
I take it as a statistical certainty that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and a statistical impossibility that we will ever meet it.
I think “too far” a fair summary of a major part of the problem. The vastness of space precludes the likelihood of anything visiting us from another star system.
But the other part of the problem is the vastness of time. If you think about the relative brevity of our species’ existence, or even the existence of life on this small planet in the mind-boggling scale of time from the universe’s beginning until now, it is vanishingly unlikely that our timeline would coincide with that of a more advanced extraterrestrial civilization that just happens to have perfected interstellar travel in time to pay us a visit before our brief candle flickers out.
I agree that there are gaps in our knowledge of physics and cosmology–but I personally don’t think that those gaps are big enough to hide much magic in.
I’ll never forget a line in some Cracked article talking about aliens.
I want to say the article was about how aliens aren’t what you think they are, or that the reality is much different than fiction, or something like that.
The writer said “If aliens have the ability to travel these millions of light years’ distance, they would be so far advanced from us that they wouldn’t even bother with us. They would want no more contact with us, and pay no more attention to us, than we do with bugs on Earth.”
Here’s the right way to approach any extraordinary claim (something supernatural, UFOs, psychic ability, and the like), in my opinion:
As with any claim of extraordinary events, there are a few possibilities:
Those making the claim are lying (hoax).
Those making the claim are not lying, but are mistaken (hallucination, etc.) or deceived.
Those making the claim are not lying, but the phenomenon has a natural explanation.
Those making the claim are not lying and the phenomenon is real.
In any randomly selected extraordinary claim, it’s reasonable to assume that 1, 2, or 3 are far, far more likely than 4.
This goes even when you yourself are the witness – you know if you’re lying or not, but you may have been deceived by a hoax, you may have hallucinated it, or you may have witnessed a natural occurrence that you mistook for something supernatural or alien. In general, for any given claim, there are many other explanations that seem far, far more likely than “aliens visited Earth”.
It doesn’t 100% rule out the possibility, but I think that’s the right way to approach this.
Quite so. And yet so many people leap right to number 4 without the slightest consideration of 1 through 3. Or consider that 1 and 4 are the only two possibilities.
This is the kind of thing that bugs me when I turn on the Discovery channel and find some paranormal/alien discovery BS complete with eerie music, shaky cameras and earnest eyewitnesses being interviewed in darkened studios.
I also don’t think there’ll be magic; though much of their technology may look that way to us.
I certainly wasn’t arguing from a “What the bleep do we know” perspective, where we can just jettison everything we know about the universe.
But technologically I think there is a lot of leeway even if our knowledge of physics is close to complete*.
At the least let’s agree on this: there could be no “war” between humans and ETs. If, hypothetically, they’re big on genocide, they could probably wipe us out before we were even aware that they exist. It wouldn’t make for a good movie, but it’s much more plausible.
And if I were a betting man, I’d bet heavily against the proposition that our knowledge of physics is close to complete. Yes, the predictive power of our models is tremendous. But within my lifetime the terms dark matter and dark energy have been coined. Maybe I’m fortunate enough to be born as humanity turns over the last page of our physics book. But I think it’s more likely that this is just another page – indeed the start of a new chapter.
And that’s just physics. In many other fields the known unknowns are huge.
If Hillary was president, there would be a lot more to go on.
As a devout believer in UFOs and Aliens she corresponded with other believers and promised them to open up all classified records dealing with this sort of stuff.
Sadly, the present incumbent is uninterested in Unsolved Mysteries of the Great Encounters with the Unknown.
Yeah, but when he was governor Bill used to take long walks alone in the Arkansas woods at night, and he told her he was attempting communication with unknown strange.
We treat bugs so badly because they’re pests/when they’re in our homes/etc.
Think of it less like that and more like this.
You go on a vacation, you’re walking down the sidewalk and next to you is a blade of grass. What do you do? Just walk past it. Who cares. It’s a friggin blade of grass.
If there were as many assumed sightings of UFO’s today as there were claimed to be in the 70’s and 80’s (as reported by grocery store mags), I would say that claims extraterrestrial visits to earth are FALSE. For the sheer reason that , the overwhelming majority of earth’s population is equipped at all times with a pretty damn good still and video camera to catch those ET siting’s.
If every single confrontational encounter on an airline over a 2 week period is recorded and posted to YouTube, then I’m sure that every legit UFO encounter would be posted there as well.
Hold on…I don’t think you can compare belief in UFO’s to Santa Claus AT ALL. No one but loonies and children claim Santa is real or that they have seen him.
Whereas with UFO’s you can go to Youtube right now and view all manner of crazy shit that moves through sky as no manner of craft should be able to move*. NOW…combine that with any number of personal anecdotes (including friends you trust)…shit astronauts have reported seeing, and then just a ‘gut feeling’
And add all that up and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say, “I believe either that we are being observed by alien life, or that our military has some crazy-ass inertia dampening technology at their fingertips”
That is of course accounting for filtering out hoaxes, natural phenomena…etc…Personally I file UFO’s under “I woudn’t be surprised in the least”
And i fully accept the rights of people to demand a more stringent litmus test than what I’ve listed.
On a related note…have you ever asked anyone if they believe in God and they literally sit there and go “Mmmmmmm” before answering? As if they’re deciding right then and there depending on how they feel that moment? My dad would do that. On the topic of the Devil though he was very swift to laugh and go “No.”
