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
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If you think about the vastness of the known universe, and the physical constraints of moving living beings over near infinite distances, it's highly probably that any other existing life forms may never ever come into contact with us.
Melek, well said.
I too wouldn’t be too confident I had the answers.
Given the vast gaps in our knowledge, the vastness of the universe, and its countless possibilities, it’s plausible other life forms could exist.
Add that, along with questions about God, consciousness, and the nature of reality, dark matter, dark energy, and black holes, to the long list of things we don’t really have all the answers to.
The moral of the story, for me: keep an open mind.
Hold your beliefs with conviction, sure, aliens or no aliens, religious or anti-religious alike, God(s) or no God(s), but I’d also acknowledge that I could be wrong and let others be. There is already too much conflict and destruction in the world over beliefs and power struggles: Wise aliens would probably take one look at us and keep flying on, invisibly. These aliens, they might laugh. I used to be quite anti-religious, but I can't be that way anymore.
Certainty is easy. Humility is harder, but far easier to live with.
P.S. I haven't seen the film yet, but probably will.
My humility tells me we're not alone. I don't think aliens have visited. Though an academic colleague of mine is firmly in the conspiracy camp that visits have happened but been covered up. I can't manage to get past distrust of those conspiracy theories. But I don't think we're alone. Hopefully they won't eat us.
But what if they did, Meelk? The hypothesis is interesting enough to generate speculations about "what if"? Some what ifs are probably pointless but humans discovering life started elsewhere, we have cosmic cousins, it would be the greatest thing to happen to humanity since the last time the Eels won a premiership.
Daz, I'm fascinated by the topic. I fear I won't live long enough to get answers to what may exist out there, and that makes me a bit sad. Maybe that's the Star Wars fan in me talking.
I also think about the evolutionary history of our planet, and the significant changes life forms have gone through in that time. Imagine if we advance our technology enough to traverse the universe, and we find life on another planet, but it turns out to just be single celled organisms...what an anti-climax lol.
Meelk, I suspect if we found life on another planet and it was an amoeba or something, we would probably try to farm and harvest it to make glowing widgets to sell on street corners. Our only hope of real advancement is a species that ain't capitalist a-holes and have bigger guns anyway, so we actually sit and chat
Capitalism is the spark behind a lot of what we take for granted in modern society, so don't be too hard on it...
The vastness of space is mindboggling and so is the vastness of time. If an intelligent civilisation is say 5000 years more advanced then us ( a mere blink in time) then who knows what technologies it might develop.
They'd have a PlayStation 200 and be up to Skitz Mix 5075 by now .
Wonder if they got another season of Mr Inbetween by now.
I get that theory too, that they would be so superior to us that they would not even be that interested. But I lean towards the real constraints of time and distances.
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