I’ve been meaning to start a GQ thread, and this thread has inspired me to finally do so: I Need a Semantic Defense from Alien Attacks!
Probably Bigfoots from Mars.
Seriously, has there ever been a thread more appropriate to your user name?
“Why do the Earth people laugh when we say ‘Take me to your leader’?”
There is a book on them, “The Great Airship Mystery,” which is fascinating since it so closely mirrors UFO reports, including close encounters. The pilot supposedly hailed from New England, not Mars. I think that if some guy actually had been sailing around back then we’d know today.
But are there a large group of people out there arguing that vamps and zombies actually exist and that they have been visited by them?
I don’t think the two are connected at all.
To answer the OP, it’s because the preponderance of evidence (including all the stuff we have looking away from the planet that we didn’t have in the 50s-80s) is mounting against current alien visitations. Hell, we can’t even get a verifiable signal.
It may be worth noting that the “little green men” flying through the air via strange vehicles is sociologically only a small step beyond “witches” (and warlocks and whatever other names you give to devil/demon-possessed neighbors) flying through the air via broomsticks and other familiar objects retasked for amazing purposes. Basically, as the world progressed from medieval parochialism to Christian colonialism to a fully-mapped globe and the weakening of the catholic hegemony and then to the renaissance and enlightenment periods of mapping the stars and planets and chemo-mechanical inventions, the ‘face’ of the unfamiliar and frightening unknown shifted from Hebrew xenophobia to Christian demonology to secular exo-planetary phobias.
I would offer for debate (or someone’s research) that there are/were two major results from this progress:
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As the religious and philosophical foundations shifted from ‘God’s [The Gods’] love and all of creation is focused on Man*’ to ‘this is just one of many suns in the galaxy’ it became easier and easier for us to imagine the possibility of other planets with other humanoids – maybe more advanced than us, as well.
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As belief in devils and demons (largely) gave way to trust in science and technology – as well as ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ in them – the target entity for our nebulous fear, loathing, and blame shifted from women controlled by evil incarnations to aliens lacking sympathy or familiarity with human cultures, practices, biology, et cetera. And some of this, I suspect, came from a type of self-reflection of our own activities in regard to other species on the planet. We’ve routinely taken samples of every animal and mineral and vegetable we’ve encountered in order to dissect, probe, study, and experiment with – not out of malice but out of curiosity – but we’ve rarely given much thought to how those samples feel about the honor of being subjected to our interest. If we do it to worms and wombats, what can we expect if some other species does the same to us?
But we’ve got lots of technology (the Internet and ubiquitous video-capture technologies in particular, as mentioned above) and we’ve done tons of research and experiments and calculations and we’re figuring out that
A) there are earth-like planets ‘out there’ but they’re tough to find
B) the conditions encouraging the evolution of life up to spacefaring capabilities are even more rare – the relative instability of our planet+ has fostered the evolution of the life forms upon it.
C) the limits of physics and energy exploitation, combined with the incredible odds of directing a spacecraft to our particular star, plus the prohibitive time required to traverse the distance to the next planet (much less the next star, cluster, galaxy, etc.) just tend to make the chances of meeting a sentient extraterrestrial being (regardless of body format, intelligence level, or even disposition) dishearteningly slim. In other words, even if there are alien life forms on other planets, there’s little reason to believe they would be able to visit us, even if they knew about us and wanted to be friends.
–G!
*…and not necessarily extended to women :eek:
+In medieval and earlier times, this would be heresy, as religious doctrines tend to assume the gods created everything in a final unchanging form.:dubious:
Well, Gloria,
Just because you’re right
Doesn’t mean everyone else is wrong.
–Edith Bunker (All in the Family) to her daughter
Alot of the “visited by Aliens today” crowd still lies on as the “Ancient Aliens” crowd. It became too hard to fake modern times anal probings, so the focus changed to “our ancestors are imbeciles who needed magical faeries from space to teach them everything. See look how this cave painting must be an alien who looks just like what we envision one as now!”
The hell with UFO’s. Bring back biorhythms!
It’s actually the opposite. There are good quality UFO images and films everywhere, taken from everything from ISS feeds to iphones.
The trouble is no matter how good they are, no matter how many alleged eye witnesses there are - they can all in the digital age be dismissed as fakes.
I’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff that seems authentic but I just say ‘fake’ because, well it almost certainly is.
It’s hard to actually imagine what apart from a mass Independence Day scenario could meet the criteria of being ‘geniune’ when absolutely anything can and will be faked or if not then can easily be the misidentification of something unknown.
And it’s all made even easier by the way the media treats the topic. There are cases where something is absolutely huge national news in Mexico or China and gets no mention at all or gets treated as a ‘funny stuff in Abroad-Land’ by the media.
Yes, although I cannot quote it. Basically newspapers literally making shit up.
That’s the gist I recall from my readings long ago. One paper writes a sensational story and others, and the public, pick it up as ‘true’ - a Seattle windshield-pitting event fifty years earlier.
I always forget and then find it funny that the craze originated in my hometown. <fx Edgar> Figures. </fx>