Aliens… Yes or No?
Is anybody else convinced that aliens exist? So what if Scientologists believe in the alien god Xenu? Why is that so much crazier than christians believing in ghosts?
I believe in aliens and ghosts, but if I am going to try and be rational about it, the alien is much more likely than a ghost. And no, I am not talking about just any sort of extraterrestrial life including bacteria, nerd. I am talking about some sort of creature that can walk/swim/fly around.
But why is an alien such a hard thing to grasp? Aren’t we aliens? An alien is just a creature living on some planet flying around, just like us. If you can believe that we exist, why is it so hard to imagine that an alien could? And what line of reasoning can reject an alien, but accept the concept of a ghost? There is no basis for that. It doesn’t even make sense.
As said in that Jodie Foster movie, what a waste of space if there are not aliens. The concept of infinity blows my mind. But then to think that all of infinity is wasted on life here on earth is rediculous. All those rocks and shit flying around space for all of infinity for no purpose?
Also – for people that don’t believe in any sort of religion and are strictly science/evolotion guys (Parker) what do you think would be happening if our Earth wasn’t conducive to evolution and we never happened? Would rocks just be flying around in space, and no living being would ever be here to experience it? Just a bunch of bullshit outer space stuff would be here for eternity and no life? That would be wierd.
I will be much more surprised if at some point in my future I see a ghost than if I see an alien.
Monday, March 10 at 7:20 am
“what line of reasoning can reject an alien, but accept the concept of a ghost?”
In my opinion is that a persons worldview is also their reasoning (or lack of reasoning). People want to believe ghosts exist because that means there is an afterlife and therefore they live on forever, god thinks they are special etc. etc. Whereas if aliens exist, maybe they are not really special, maybe Earth or Sol is not the centre of the universe. Sometimes peoples irrationality leads them to reject possible existence of aliens and sometimes peoples irrationality leads them to believe aliens are only interested in what is up their bum.
Monday, March 10 at 9:24 am
Well said antisciencecynic. I agree.
Monday, March 10 at 5:59 pm
The fact that no one besides TV producers have attempted to put out a testable hypothesis on the existence of ghosts should pretty much settle the ghosts debate. There’s been what, hundreds of years of testing of the most haunted places in the world with nothing to show for it.
You could argue the same for aliens, we are constantly searching for an intelligent technical alien civilization and haven’t found one. But there are about half a trillion suns in our galaxy alone, and we don’t know which ones to look at. We just finally found the first planet in a “habitable zone” LAST YEAR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_c ). So we are really just getting started at even finding where to look. After we find it, whether it is in 5 years or 1000 we will say, well shit that was stupid of course there is life, look how big the Universe is.
The problem of if we will find it was best summed up in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos:
“It is very hard to be sure. There may be severe impediments to the evolution of a technical civilization. Planets may be rarer than we think. Perhaps the origin of life is not so easy as our laboratory experiments suggest. Perhaps the evolution of advanced life forms is improbable. Or it may be that complex life forms evolve readily, but intelligence and technical societies require an unlikely set of coincidences – just as the evolution of the human species depended on the dmise of the dinosaurs and the ice-age recession of the forests in whose trees our ancestors screeched and dimly wondered. Or perhaps civilizations arise repeatedly, inexorably, on innumerable planets in the Milky Way, but are generally unstable; so all but a tiny fraction are unable to survive their technology and succumb to greed and ignorance, pollution and nuclear war.”
Sadly, from our experience his last point seems the most probable.
Monday, March 10 at 6:12 pm
And if you believe in ghosts and aliens, then are there alien ghosts? I assume so. Ghosts do not seem to be constrained to earth either, so I assume human and alien ghosts are all partying in the cosmos.
Monday, March 10 at 6:16 pm
And Parker – maybe we don’t know where to look for ghosts? I mean, they probably live in another dimension, not in a haunted house.
And we all know that alien force fields are impenetrable by nuclear bombs, so I see nuclear war as an unlikely answer to their lack of survival skills. More likely is their rapid consumption of non-reproducible recourses
Monday, March 10 at 8:26 pm
They live not in a haunted house? Then you tell me who the hell is making all those scary moaning noises Kevin, huh? An alien?
Monday, March 10 at 8:34 pm
Probably your mom…. getting it on with an alien ghost.
Monday, March 10 at 8:42 pm
God Damnit Kevin. I am trying to hijack this discussion, as I do with every one no matter what the topic is, and turn it to being about the future of the human race as we know it and all I get are your mom jokes.
Tuesday, March 11 at 9:37 am
I know Parker’s mom is the one making the moaning noises at my house….