What would you think if definitive proof of alien life emerged? Would it consign all religious thought to, as Mark Twain once predicted, the fate of a stuffed ornament in museums? How would suggestive confirmation of the principles of uniformity and plenitude - that if life can form on Earth it can form anywhere and thus will for everywhere - mix with confirmation of the principle of mediocrity (nothing special about humans)? Would mediocrity impact humans relation with technology and would plenitude turn science skyward?
Disclosure Day (2026), Spielberg: https://youtu.be/icDuEHSxE-w?si=jKBowVzx1K6IggNh
Replies
Who complained relentlessly Wiz? I looked up and you were gone!......maybe I should have looked down LOL
Wiz, the ultimate idea in big bang theory is that prior to the singularity the four fundamental forces as we know them operated differently. It may have been chaos materially and non-linearity causally. This is very different to religious explanations of deities, which stress an uncaused agent, eternal and causing itself to exist. The idea in theology is to avoid an infinite regress of causes. Physics has less trouble with an infinite regress of causes, but probably fudges it a bit by saying if the mathematical physics of pre-singularity operated on a different basis to post-singularity, pre-singularity might be unknowable to us. As I said, fudging it a bit there but it's not self-causation at least.
Most intelligent life on Earth doesn't want to be here so I don't know why we'd think anyone else wants to visit. The smartest thing a super intelligence from far far away could do is to stay far far away from us. 😁
Intergalactically I'm sure we're uninteresting, unremarkable, violent, and look pretty keen on making ourselves extinct in the foreseeable future.
Just like the drive to Wagga Wagga, we're simply not worth the trip, the time or the trouble.
Until, of course, that Earth gets in the way of an intergalactic highway. In that case we should pin all our hopes on a guy called Arthur Dent.
hahahaha
Captain, that's a classic. The entire post, including the hilarious supposition of why aliens would want to visit given how so many humans don't want to be here either.
Maybe pondering why aliens would visit has some overlap with religious discussion of whether salvation is for this mortal coil or only the afterlife? The more "leave it to the afterlife" applies, for human cultures or alien cultures, the less visiting another very material world seems a good idea?
Wiz is right here. In the Big Bang Theory, BBT has been verified via work on cosmic background radiation, quarks, quantum theory for extremely curved space time, etc. but one can ask why did the big bang occur? What was before it. And the nature of the answer is not too dissimilar to religious answers, because there is a. Element of the supernatural. It's called the Planck Epoch, and the claim is that when space time has become extremely curved, the quantum effects of gravity take over and space time is full of loops and non-linearity. Our physics ceases to apply.
Compare that to religious claims, which don't bother with causality as we empirically understand it and settle for supernatural explanations (usually involving telos or purpose).
I'm not saying pre-singularity physics and religion are equally supernatural. There is intense religious nonsense about creation and order that lacks any of the empirical causation of the entire big bang theory before you get back to "but before the singularity". The inflationary universe found by empirical work is 1000x the evidence of the creation account of BBT than religious creation accounts! But it remains undeniable that when you drill down to the "in the beginning", both science and religion hint at the supernatural. But in different ways. Religious supernatural is a giant mythology of characters. But the supernatural that comes into BBT to explain pre-singularity is very specific: non-linear causation. It's supernatural in the sense humans lack experience of it. Maybe some contenders, like string theory, which I don't understand at all, will explain pre-singularity. I'll bet on a science answer rather than let some religious institutions tell me what to think.
Not that the subject isn't worthy of deep discussion, but I think it says something when this blog is so active and yet there isn't a blog started about the State of Origin tomorrow. Seems origin of the universre has more interest than origin of the state at the moment.
lol true ....maybe we have been burnt too may times about rapping the series up in two....we have lost our interest
Strange Eel, I thought this blog would be totally ignored, but maybe asking existential questions breeds better discussions than more earthly political questions?!
The Fermi Paradox and the absolute vastness of Space I think sways me to think there may be noone but us or at the very most, there is and we will be extinct before it is proven....
Religion is hope I guess. I dont mind HEYZEUS
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