251–260 of 366 posts
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If yes, where does their dna (or the equivalent of it) comes from? You are just kicking the can a bit further.
Somewhere else! Dna is too marvelous for evolution, it cannot have originated here!
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I see no issues with telling tribes or ancient cultures or fledgling species if their beliefs about reality are incorrect. Otherwise those faulty beliefs could lead the species to extinction.
Thats precisely backwards. Extinction threats on Earth come from the "modern" cultures not the ancient ones.
> Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips its logic on its head: “Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” So long as there’s a chance that 1I/2017 U1 is an alien probe, we’d be fools not to pursue the idea. “If we acknowledge that ‘Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-techno…
> I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be. Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career. As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect o…
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I mean - it's called Dark Forest, but if you will look at any documentary, even dark forest is full of life. You will hear crickets, you will hear owls, you may see fireflies. The theory has catchy name, but even the earth's nature disproves it.
If you read the three books, you realize that the true message is that if you're considered a possible threat to an advanced species, they'll annihilate you, otherwise you'll be left alone. Maybe every other species which knows about us knows we can't even leave our own planet/moon right now, the most we can do is send useless robots to other planets over 30 years.
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I thought the idea that there are gazillions of advanced aliens has been pretty much disproven by the fermi paradox. If there are gazillion, at least one out of all the diversity out there should have already colonized the entire galaxy and evidence should be plentiful.
According to the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin the Fermi paradox is solved by the certainty that if an alien civilization announces its presence to the rest of the universe, one of the gazillions of other advanced alien civilizations is sure to destroy it. So they keep quiet.
As soon as the article mentioned von Däniken in a serious light I stopped reading. von Däniken is a fraud and embezzlement convict and has admitted to fabricating lots of his fantastical stories and has no place in serious scientific research. I should have expected less from a lifestyle magazine, I guess.
It’s not aliens. Nothing can convince me that there’s any practical way to travel the distances between the stars. If you don’t agree then I think you fundamentally don’t grasp how incomprehensibly vast those distances are. I absolutely believe in life in other worlds but there’s no way to travel from star to star.
Isn't your point of view quite arrogant though? By arrogant I mean that your POV assumes that we basically know everything (or almost everything) there is to know about space-time. Sure there is nothing practical that we know of today, but when it took our ancestors 6 months and 50% chance of dying to cross an ocean, going to the moon or sending a probe in outer space probably seemed similarily absolutly impossible t…
It's more than that, it's outright harmful for our evolution. Instead of "nothing can convince me" and "you fundamentally don’t grasp" it may be more productive to focus on the (however little) probable possibility, i.e. "we haven't found a way yet".
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I doubt that this was anything but a natural object. That said, our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. It may take 100k years to get there, but it could be done if we wanted to. Theoretically, sending a tiny probe within a human life time isn't that far out of reach. I don't think we can discount the general possibility based on our own capabilities, limitations, and motiv…
>our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. Yet we haven't sent anything. Maybe aliens are the same. Maybe they don't have the political will to send anything. Maybe they have their own climate change, or insane leaders to deal with. Or maybe not, maybe they've developed a virtual universe and are living in that instead of exploring the physical one. I find the assumption that…
But we have, quite a few of them actually, and 2 have left the solar system. It's just that none of them will come close to any star for a few hundred thousands of years.
> Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips its logic on its head: “Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” So long as there’s a chance that 1I/2017 U1 is an alien probe, we’d be fools not to pursue the idea. “If we acknowledge that ‘Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-techno…
This is either very obtuse or very disingenuous on Loeb's part. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to establish them as true. But that doesn't mean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to investigate. You investigate the claims in order to see what kind of evidence there is for them. I would expect the actual peer-reviewed paper, which unfortunately this article doesn't link to (I hate when pop science articles do that), to lay out in more detail what the evidence is and why Loeb thinks it establishes his claim.