Yes it is interesting, I can find Quantum mechanics and your childish dismissal of my interest in UFO’s interesting at the same time.
No it wasn’t.
If it was a flying object and has not been positively identified, isn’t that de facto evidence that UFOs exist?
Given that a possible next step in our evolution is to digitize ourselves and abandon our own physical bodies would we even recognize an advanced civilization?
We probably wouldn’t recognize any form too much more advanced than our own. So it’s likely anyone wed recognize is about as primitive as we are and thus subject to the same limitations.
I’m skeptical.
Really? Where did you get this from, and how possible would you say this is?
UFOs exist, and they will always exist, because of observation errors.
If and when we finally make first contact with an alien civilisation, they will also have their own stories of UFOs. These stories may be very different to ours, depending on the sensitivity and details of their sensory equipment, but (just like our stories) their sightings will be due to observation errors.
It can lead to some unfortunate issues and fallacies, not just for this, but where ever excessive tribalism between flag waving cranks and skeptics comes into play.
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Neither argument from authority nor the converse is true. Many authorities are unqualified or corrupt, but even perfect and correct authorities still need to provide evidence. We don’t care that they are right, we need to understand why. On the other hand, if a non authority, a crank, or a unicorn says something, that doesnt mean that it is wrong. Even at either extreme, it is unlikely to find anyone who manages to be perfectly right or wrong.
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Real life doesn’t take sides, and isn’t all or nothing. Just because some rumor about your car model being a fire hazard turned out to be wrong, and a bunch of weirdos are still worried it’s going to blow up, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to stop wearing seatbelts. Crazy fears are not evidence against normal precautions.
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Tribalism is a particularly stupid and hypocritical behavior for people claiming to be rational or truth seeking.
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Relying on a dismissive attitude is a really bad habit, regardless of your team. It is literally, prejudice. Making assumptions before or instead of actual investigating.
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Regardless of how correct you might be, excessive immaturity clashes with whatever regard that might have otherwise afforded you. And being a dick is still being a dick, even if you have evidence then other person is a bigger dick.
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It gives people incorrect and occasionally antithetical ideas about what science really is and is supposed to be for and about. In some cases, it perverts popular conceptions of science into a brand name or religion.
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It helps no one to do bad things for a good cause.
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Conceptualizing any domain as some kind of bipolar conflict harms awareness of other important issues under the same topic by focusing on the sensationalist ones
[hijack] This cartoon? [/hijack]
Ancient Astronaut Theory is just racism looking for justification for itself.
Pretty much. The question of the existence of any given cryptid has pretty much been solved. Even in the case of the Yeti… I mean, c’mon, this is what the top of Everest looks like. The crowd has formed a line, and you bet every last one of them is carrying some form of camera, because who climbs to the top of the world and doesn’t take a selfie? The idea that these things exist is more or less completely untenable - the evidence we’d expect to find just isn’t there.
Big yikes.
A middle ground is that UFOs DO exist, but they are not aliens from another planet.
Taking away misidentified natural phenomena, known aircrafts, illusions, hoaxes, and ignorance, we are left with cases which COULD be:
- Secret government projects (from any country)
- A weird natural phenomena
- An unclassified life form
- A unlabeled psychic projection/unknown mental power of humans
- Signs we are living in a simulation
- Spillover from another dimension/time period/land of fables
As for the notion that with the advent of smart phones, we would have already captured one, we did- there are hundreds of “lights which move in a weird way” videos.
Yes, that’s the one (I had remembered the protagonists as fighting over the flag instead of a map of the United States).
Relevant piece in the Skeptical Inquirer about what prompts people to report UFO sightings (articles authored/co-authored by Joe Nickell* are almost always worth reading).
*he’s also an authority on “spontaneous human combustion”. If there’s a middle ground on that issue, perhaps it’s that people can spontaneously become mildly singed…
You missed one
- Humans tend to misidentify and misunderstand things in a common and recurring way.
Currently this is just talk from silicon valley. Elon musk talked about it in some interview about the idea that our own reality is a simulation. Along with some discussion of acheiving immortality through digitization.
How possible would I say it is?
Hell idk , conciousness transfer doesn’t seem impossible, given enough sophisticated equipment and assuming that our conciousness is actually the sum of our thoughts, memories and traits.
Who knows, just speculating about what one possibility of an advanced civilization might be.
Numbers 4, 6 and possibly 5 are not potential answers-they are just other questions that need their own topics. It is like saying that if you don’t think the tooth fairy is leaving money under the pillow, other possibilities are:
- The Easter Bunny
- Santa Claus
- Either of those from an alternate universe
edited to add: Those other possibilities are NOT “middle ground”-they are merely other wrong answers.
Used to be all we had was low-res fuzzy pictures of cloud-like objects from a few amateur photographers. Now, everybody has a camera phone so you would expect to see a crapload of clear UFO pictures…but what we get instead of craploads of “lights that move in a weird way”(funny how those UFO pilots switched from large fuzzy objects to flirtly little lights just as our technology advanced). An aircraft at night coming your way looks like it isn’t moving at all, then it turns, reflections off a window or windshield of a passing headlight, taillight, star, moon, jogger wearing reflectors or flashing lights etc.-any of these probable answers.
Why don’t you link to the very best “light that moves in a weird way” you can find(don’t need to see the hundreds of others-“quantity” and “quality” are spelled differently for a reason) and show us what you’ve got?
I’m confused about this “middle ground” stance.
Are we supposed to not require evidence for fantastical claims any more, or are we supposed to pretend that it exists then go on from there?
As observed above, one of the clearest indications of bullshit phenomena (ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot, Nessie, cold fusion, insert your fave here) is the way the “evidence” in support of them only seems to exist at the extreme limits of detectability. Even when instruments improve, the evidence retreats to the margin where it always remains.
An argument advanced above that while some UFO sightings have obvious explanations, there remains a small number that can’t be explained. The absence of a clear explanation is because of the poverty of the evidence in those cases - details too vague, etc. Richard Feynman made the point clearly that the “unexplained core” argument won’t fly. He rhetorically asked how many armed robberies there were in the US each year. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? How many were solved by police? 80%? Doesn’t mean aliens did the rest.
If scientific skeptics are to learn something from UFO conspiracy theorists, UFO conspiracy theorists need to start following the scientific method and testing the null hypothesis and not their preferred hypothesis.
It is unrealistic to expect scientific skeptics to abandon the scientific method, as using the scientific method is what makes them scientists.