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
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?
Dent Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect will certainly help us out.
Zaphod would also be nice to have around
Of course, we may be an experiment run by the mice.
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.
There are religious institutions that tell you what to think, but they are generally minor sects and not mainstream. Unless you are thinking Middle Ages where science was infantile and linked directly with religius thinking, modern theologists work with known science to decribe the world in which we live, as well as the next world to come. Science is humans trying to understand mathematically how the universe fiunctions, its origins and its end, but as we know there are limitations when we get to the edges. We will never know scientifically (or at least not any time in the foreseeable future) what existed prior to the big bang because it is far too complex. As I alluded to in an earlier post, there is more to the Universe that we don't know than what we do know. That opens the door to any consequence, including what theologists already believe through faith to be true.
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
The Fermi Paradox, I couldn't remember the name of it. That's what kind of convinced me that there is nothing out there that is hugely more developed than us.
Parra G, I wish there were more sci fi explorations of the Fermi Paradox. Or as Enrico Fermi said, where is everybody? One reason for positing the blog is because my daughter and I watched D-Day and then discussed the Dark Forest Theory, that ET stays hidden to avoid aggressive colonizer species. Douglas Adams of course gave the classic sarcastic answer to the Zoo Hypothesis, that we're being watched anyway, with the mice experimenting on us.
My bet is actually some form of the Filtering Hypothesis. Advanced civilizations might wipe themselves out before they get to come visit, or they might lose interest in physical exploring and become consumed by minimalia (like virtual reality or mindless consumption etc).
-
8
-
9
-
10
-
11
-
12
of 12 Next