I used to ascribe to the Drake equation, but in the past few years my guess aligns more with the two gentlemen who speak between 11:00 and 15:45 in the video.
Drake’s equation may be right, it may be wrong, but one unintended “trick” within it is the tyranny of numbers. It features nearly limitless opportunity and nearly infinite time, so no matter what numbers one plugs in intelligent life seems inevitable*. Life began on our planet and evolved to intelligence, and us. There HAVE to be so many planets with resources and temperatures similar to ours, many formed long before ours was, therefore there must be countless planets with intelligent life, many far advanced of us.
But that ignores the countless variables that all went a certain way to get us where we are. The Earth was just fine for billions of years (at least one billion) with no life on it. Amino acids, cells, multi-cellular organisms. We haven’t yet figured out how to spontaneously create them and we really have no idea how likely or unlikely they are to evolve. Could be that, given the ingredients of the early Earth they are inevitable or it could be that they independently require complex, unrelated coincidences. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth a lot longer than humans have. If a large asteroid didn’t strike the Earth around 65 million years ago would mammals have evolved to where we are today?
Intelligence isn’t a particularly desirable trait, evolution-wise. The vast majority of species on Earth appear to have no consciousness or ability to think beyond programmed instinct and they do just fine. In the case of humans, bi-pedalism was necessary to free up our hands to evolve to do fine motor skills. They are myriad evolutionary tricks human women had to evolve to bear offspring with our equivalent brain size through hips conducive to bi-pedalism. It’s such a trick that human children are born absurdly premature, like marsupials. (Our skulls aren’t even fully formed, to allow for fetal heads to get through the birth canal.) Human children are born at least a year before they can walk and feed themselves. Humans are at tremendous risk the first several years of their lives. And, the birthing process is so precarious human women suffer a high rate of mortality in child birth, compared to other species. Had our primate ancestors been near any reasonable predator when these traits developed we would have never gotten to our large brain to body mass ratio. And there are countless other evolutionary flukes that have to happen to get from amoeba to homo sapiens sapiens.
And then, we have at least 100,000 years where humans were perfectly happy with almost none of the technology necessary to communicate or travel outside our planet. George Washington could easily talk battle strategy with Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan. It took some unique, amazing insights into the nature of electricity that spurred most all the technological innovations we enjoy. A Maxwell or Ohm or Edison or Tesla dies in that difficult, human childbirth process and we could still be living like Washington or Caesar. Or one of the many plagues that swept the planet wipes us all out in 1300, or, or, or…
There are a lot of unrelated, bizarre, disassociated coincidences, meteorological events, disasters, random mutations… that have to happen to make humans and get us to where we are. Kurzweil and Ayala may very well be correct.
*I should add, the Drake equation isn’t bad, it’s actually quite good. It’s a fairly valid way of addressing the question mathematically.
We are constantly finding new species here on Earth that have left no trace before they were found. So, why not other “Beings” out in the vast reaches of Space.
The person was fully-vaccinated, so of course the response is to introduce vaccine passports and get everyone another shot of the shots that didn’t make any difference already. Sigh.
I’d like to think that my postings here on the subject of UFOs—scoffed at though they have sometimes been–might have provoked this line of inquiry.
Second, I think that it is significant that—at this particular moment–this serious, legitimate TV series is taking a serious, high level look at the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the issue of “Aliens.”
The outcome of this first stab at serious inquiry, though, is a very frustrating–“on the one hand, on the other hand” result.
However, I think the overriding thing to be kept in mind is that all of these various expert’s opinions are full of “ASSUMPTIONS” about how things are and behave, and what is possible and likely–and all of these assumptions are based on exactly one reference sample of behavior, biology, historical development, and technology—us.
Aliens are by definition “Alien,” different.
So why should we assume that any of their motivations and behaviors, the imperatives that drive them—if they even have “imperatives” as we understand them—and the technologies they use, should be the same or similar to ours, be recognized for what they are, and be comprehensible?
Kurzweil declares that “technology grows exponentially” and, thus, any major alien technology we see out in the Universe would therefore be obvious.
But what if technology doesn’t always grow “exponentially” but at all sorts of different rates, in fits and starts, in some areas and not others?
Kurzweil assumes that we would recognize such alien technology when we saw it, but what if such technology were based on such to us undiscovered and/or radical principles that we would not be able to recognize it?
Why should we assume that there are any signals as we understand “signals,” signals generated by some technology we would recognize—that would be on the part of the Electromagnetic Spectrum that we expect them to be on, or even on that particular Spectrum at all?
The general assumption—based on human motivation and behavior–is made throughout that any aliens would want to communicate with us.
But why should we assume that any aliens would necessarily feel a need to communicate with us, particularly if they were far in advance of us?
Then, there is the question of whether we would recognize aliens if we encountered them.
Why should we assume that aliens operate in the same few dimensions we do, are likely to be carbon based and solid, have minds that work in some fashion akin to ours, and work at the same clock speed that ours brains do?
As I have written here on a number of occasions, I believe the evidence for the existence of UFOs as actual physical objects is now overwhelming, and that their capabilities point to them as not being of human construction.
I note everyone’s ignoring of this accumulating evidence, and David Brins’s immediate, facile, and contemptuous dismissal of any of the recent developments concerning UFOs—developments that I believe have sparked this program’s discussion of the issue.
A half way decent first try, but far too dismissive of evidence, slick, and facile to be a real attempt at understanding.
If you are worried about [a large war] happening between Ukraine and Russia, this news article thinks that such a war is unlikely.
(p.s. although the site that owns this article is named, Air Force Times…,The US Air Force does not own, or run, that website. )
The Drake equation is an interesting thought experiment, but it’s basically a string of variables, and the value of most of them is arbitrary. You can get it to give you whatever answer you want just by making the right assumptions.
The Fermi paradox suggests that some of our assumptions on this question are incorrect. As Francisco d’Anconia pointed out, contradictions don’t exist in the real world. If you think you have found one, check your premises. You will find that at least one of them is wrong.
One possible explanation for the apparent absence of alien civilizations is that we happen to be the first to develop in this part of the galaxy. Somebody has to be first. Why not us?
Is there any aspect of the 1970s we don’t have to plough through again? What’s next? Terrible haircuts, bell bottoms, and repellent graphic arts?
Though not the subject of the book, Nick Lane’s The Vital Question speaks to the question of the arrival of complicated life.
Simple prokaryote life theoretically is easier to arise. Eukaryotes are stubbornly difficult to conceptualize.
Dr. Chaotica,
Seems plausible considering the age of the Universe and the fact that several stellar cycles were needed to cook up all the star dust from which we are made.
The only variables in the Drake Equation for which there are plausible estimates are the numbers of stars and “habitable” planets. The rest is pure guesswork, and if any of those other variables are 1 in 10 to the 100th power, then…….
Rufus, Snow, and the good Dr, all bring up good points.
My take on the video and the larger subject: The SETI investigators focus too much on actual visitation vis-a-vis the Fermi paradox. They seem to be avoiding the main focus of their own SETI research in the attempts to find ET radio and light signals. There have been some great papers in recent years about detecting our civilization. Even our earliest radio signals are now out about 100 light years, and our current technology would allow us to detect a similar radio source. Keep that in mind.
Drake equation: has become much more firm in the past 20 years due to the continuing discovery of extra solar planets. When the equation was first formulated such was not known. I think it can now be stated that almost 100% of stars have planets, and a much higher percentage of those planets than previously thought may be in the Goldilocks zone and of the right size.
Biologists: goes back to our discussion a few days ago. All the biologists I know who discount any ETI are also strict Darwinists. As such, I can see their argument as to intelligence being a low probability event, but as we know Darwin has major issues. HT to Rufus.
Snow shows the basic flaw in Kurzweil’s argument.
I have no real conclusion. Drake equation, to me, is still persuasive. But the Fermi question is looming larger for SETI as they move to more focused “listening” etc based on extra solar planetary discoveries instead of just random searching, though that is still important. Another 50 years of silence may mean we are alone, or maybe quarantined.
P.S.–Perhaps not really off topic.
Looking at and considering the evidence, I am coming around more and more to the idea of “Intelligent Design” i.e. God, a creator, as the explanation for the existence, complexity, and functioning of both us and of the Universe.
There are, for instance, the couple of dozen fundamental physical constants i.e. constants like Avagadro’s Number, the masses of fundamental particles, Molar gas constant, Gravitation constant, Permeability of vacuum constant, etc. –which, as I understand it, would–if any one of them deviated by a
minute percentage from their current values–have resulted in a Universe devoid of Life.
As one more recent piece of evidence, check out these animations of how aspects of our cells work, and consider how likely it is that these interlocking and cooperating intricacies could have come about merely by random chance.
The argument for mandating vaccines has totally disconnected from any kind of logic if it ever had any.
On one hand they hysterically talk of how the dread new variant evades the vaccine and then on the other hand say vaccines must be mandated to fight the dread new variant.
I will not be getting a booster at this time and I will not be going anywhere that requires vaccine passports and will think real hard about ever visiting any locality in the future that requires them even if they someday lift them.
It is the moral duty of anybody who truly loves freedom to resist these at all turns.
Also it doesn’t get much media coverage here but the creeping authoritarianism of mandates in Europe has led to almost daily protests of varying sizes in just about every European country.
I subscribe to the notion that simple, generally monocellular life may be relatively rather common in the Universe. I wouldn’t be at all surposed if we find some kind microfossil evidence of archaea on Mars for example, since billions of years ago it evidently had a liquid water ocean for a time. My guess is that the more complex life becomes, the rarer it becomes. And my guess is that very complex life (such as tetrapod vertebrates) is extremely rare, and intelligent life is perhaps a 1 in a trillion sort of thing.
I think these are reasonable guesses based on what we know about the abiogenesis and evolution of life on Earth. As most of us no doubt know, Earth is estimated to be something like 4.4 billion years old. There’s pretty strong evidence for simple life appearing fairly early on, perhaps before 3.9 billion years ago. It may have even arisen multiple times and been wiped out during the Late Heavy Bombardment period. At any rate, we pretty sure that very simple life in the form of microbial mats was pretty much the only life for billions of years on Earth… from something like 3.9 billion to about 1.85 billion. Then Eukaryotic cells arrived followed by another billion years of incremental increases in complexity until the Cambrian explosion about 580 million years ago when complexity really accelarated.
But essentially it took billions of years for life to begin to look anything like it does today. This suggests that there are perhaps several unlikely events (or “great filters” as they’re referred to in the Fermi Paradox) that need be be crossed for complex life to appear and flurish.
And even if you have complex life for an Intelligent civilization to arise may likely be even rarer, since I’m skeptical that “intelligence” is an inevitable consequence of complex life in and of itself.
Interesting comments from the Democrat governor of Colorado.
‘You don’t tell people what to wear’. What a novel concept.
Regarding radio signals from other systems. How much is the inverse square law as it effects EM strength at play here? And how much is natural EM drowning out other signals? And then realize , in this Galaxy, Sol and Earth are out in the suburbs in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy.
When radio telescopes are looking back towards the inner system, the natural background EM is potentially huge!
When I was in the military, we had gone to the Singar radio systems, which rapidly FREQUENCY hop across a number of frequencies within the same conversation, in order to avoid eavesdropping by the enemy. How much is that potentially at play here?
And what if advanced civilizations have harnessed WHATEVER the signal is that Quantumly Entangled particles use to communicate? And what if they have figured out how to transmit and receive those signals without physically entangling those particles at the same lab? We would not be able to detect that with present theory or technology.
When I have more time after work I want to comment on this topic to greater extent, but one thing I want to clarify here is that the idea that man is the pinnacle of the living part of creation is NOT a Biblical doctrine. I get frustrated with some of my fellow Christians who maintain this , since the Bible itself identifies man as being lower than the angels.
I think that the argument that our vast beyond comprehension Universe has been around for so many billions of years up until now that there would likely have been sufficient time for any number of technological civilizations to have arisen and fallen in the past, somewhere in the Universe, cannot just be dismissed.
Moreover, neither given the cataclysmic physical history of the Earth–volcanism, earth quakes, floods, meteor impacts, ocean, ice cap, and glacier shifts–can the possibility be cavalierly dismissed that predecessor high civilizations might have existed in Earth’s deep past, but that the evidence for their existence has just been destroyed, and/or is now buried under seas, ice, or earth.
“…or maybe quarantined.” Heh.
Oh, and there was no information about how old the victim was or any co-morbidities they may have had. Since it’s Epoch Times, I assume they’re not the ones omitting that information.
Bryan Lovely,
The all important died ‘with COVID’ as opposed to ‘from COVID’ is going to take on even more importance with the new dread variant if cases are milder.
Look, a paradox is a paradox because TWO APPARENT TRUTHS come to completely different conclusions. Most of the “explanations” of Fermi’s paradox assume life is common everywhere, AND there is no evidence for life anywhere else but here. Wrong.
There is tons of anecdotal evidence for life elsewhere! We just chose to laugh at it. Is there any perfect evidence? No, apparently not, but there is a shitload of imperfect evidence, tens of thousands of instances of it, and the only way it doesn’t count is if it as ALL FALSE! But if EVEN ONE is NOT false, there is no paradox!
But we are too busy laughing and mocking to bother looking, so we continue to wring our hands over a paradox that may not even exist.
Have there been hoaxes? Hell yes! Have there been misinterpretations by the untrained? Oh yes, thousands of them! Do these explain every instance of what appear to alien spaceships seen by thousands of people… NO! It only takes one, and the Fermi Paradox goes poof!
“… the Bible itself identifies man as being lower than the angels…”
Well, um, it’s not altogether clear…since apparently (depending on whom you speak to, or rather, communicate with) humans may be considered to be HIGHER—or at least potentially higher—than the angels because humans have FREE WILL (well, except maybe for behaviorists).
Though all too often we abuse that Divine gift (as it were) and make the darnedest choices, whereupon we may list, sink or turtle. (Of course, we can always right ourselves, or at least try….)
To be sure, one’s theo-philosophical mileage may vary. (And of course, Lucifer and his not-so-merry minions do present a conceptual challenge…but then only for some.)
jon baker,
Artificial radio signals are relatively easy to detect compared to the natural background. The SETI uses complex filters along with computer algorithms to hunt out potential artificial signals from the background. And with increasing in computing power and also digital electronics the process is much much improved since the inception of SETI in the 1960s. Add to that the SETI At Home project which utilizes personal computers as a massive parallel data processing platform for signal searching. Like I mentioned we have the means now to detect the rudimentary radio signals from almost a 100 years ago from earth, so if an equivalent technology level civilization is within “hearing” distance we should find it. Of course SETI is currently limited, and rightfully so, to the Milky Way. The farthest parts are only 100,000 ly away, so within the billions of stars within the MW, one should expect maybe someone developed a civilization within the past 100,000 years? Still nothing though.
But your point about QM entanglement communication is a possibility as its already being experimented with regard to cryptology. If we figure it out then maybe it could be added to SETI.
This whole UFO debate , IMHO, is asinine.
Sort of like the debate about “does science support / refute the existence of God.”
First off, if alien life exists and have visited earth, their technology must be so advanced that the constraints that human / earthbound physics requires simply does not apply to alien life.
They must have figured out ways to travel faster than the speed of life, etc., – to defy human developed physics – to be able to traverse “light-year” distances far faster than human-developed physics permits.
Secondly, why should these aliens want to contact humans? Who says that should be on their agenda? Maybe they have no interest in chatting it up with their version of pre-pre-prehistoric life forms.
After all, do humans wish to communicate with worms or ants? (though I wish I could actually communicate with cats and dogs ).
There are billions of galaxies containing billions of stars; what makes anybody think that amongst these billions and billions of stars and their planets, planet earth is the ONLY planet that was/is capable of supporting intelligent life?
Forget the math; math only provides the odds depending upon the assumptions behind the math.
During and since WWII there have been many, many bizarre sightings by military and commercial pilots of objects that simply cannot be of human origin.
And even if 50% to 80% of these sightings are “explainable,” what about the other 20% to 50% ??
And what about those folks on the ground – normal folks, not inebriated or hi on dope – that have seen un-explainable objects in the sky (like I have.)?
Are they all hallucinating?
Why would the US military / government, or the UK , classify as secret many of these bizarre events if they are all phony-baloney or logically explainable? Why would they even bother investigating these sightings if they know they are all baloney?
They wouldn’t.
And if these bizarre sightings are flying machines developed by the USSR or USA or UK or…. any of these nations would never have to engage in policies influenced by external threats to their sovereignty of any kind.
After all, they have the technology that nobody on earth has.
There would be no need for a NATO or a Warsaw Pact military alliance.
There would be no need for, say, the USA , to spend billions developing the next generation fighter plane or bomber or nuclear sub, etc.
Alien life does exist and they have visited earth.
Obviously, they have no interest in chatting it up with primitive human life forms.
Get a grip.
By the way, the occurrence of a near zero event does not mean that something is impossible or difficult to accomplish.
If 500 fair coins are tossed, one at a time, one after another, and the exact sequence of heads and tails recorded, the probability of repeating that exact sequence of heads and tails is (1/2)^50; that is 1/2 to the 50th power, which is a number very very very near zero, but not quite.
Or put another way, this experiment would have to be repeated 1 / (1/2^50) times – a very very very large number of times – to have a high probability of reproducing the original outcome.
And to produce that sequence the first time could easily be accomplished by a child or someone in a drunken stupor.
An very improbable event need not be difficult to produce.
What would be HIGHLY improbable would be reproducing the initial highly unlikely event.
Re: ETI / Kurzweil
I find Kurzweil’s arguments persuasive.
When I was younger and pondering the issue, I wasn’t nearly so articulate, but it seemed to me that if ETIs existed in large numbers, *some* would have had sufficient impact on the galaxy that we would have noticed.
My analogy was an Earth ant encountering a shopping center. The ant wouldn’t know what a shopping center was or where it came from, but it would notice the shopping center wasn’t the rocks, ground or plants it usually experienced.
As humans we look out into the galaxy and we see nothing but wilderness.
Perhaps not all ETIs would choose to expand their technology that far, but absent special pleading, some would, just as humans are doing today.
As Fermi asked, “Where are they?”
“I believe the evidence for the existence of UFOs as actual physical objects is now overwhelming, and that their capabilities point to them as not being of human construction.” Snow on Pine
So overwhelming that only the willfully blind can deny it.
However, that many sightings also confirms a strong interest in humanity, as you don’t keep visiting someplace with which you have no interest. Which suggests the simplest explanation is the correct one, namely that we are indeed under a quarantine. Certainly a wise precaution given the human race’s immaturity.
Another factor being the “Prime Directive” an encapsulation of the historical principle that contact between a highly advanced civilization and a more primitive one generally has “unfortunate” consequences for the less developed civilization.
While also suggesting that the frequency of sightings is meant to psychologically prepare humanity for first contact.
If correct, one day in the not too distant future, a scene out of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” may appear with a spacecraft landing in DC (or Beijing). Hopefully, we won’t shoot the alien cosmonaut trying to gift humanity the cure for cancer.
jon baker,
“In my father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.” KJV, John 14:2-6
@Art Deco
to quote A.D./you:
“Is there any aspect of the 1970s we don’t have to plough through again? What’s next? Terrible haircuts, bell bottoms, and repellent graphic arts?”
Amen to that!
I lived through part of the 1970s, the first time…, with its: Abba music, the Jackson 5, string art, the Love Boat, + re-runs of I Dream of Jeanie. Phooey to all of that!
ONCE through the 1970s was enough, thank-you-very-much! 😀
Good find Neo – thanks for posting. A subject that has fascinated me for a very long time.
TR,
A man saying, “phooey” to Barbara Eden, whether in first run or re-runs, is an alien concept to me!
Barbara Eden is 90 years old. Yikes!!!!
“My analogy was an Earth ant encountering a shopping center.”
The theory of natural selection believes that lots of mutations happen, billions at the cellular level.
Most mutations to living creatures are unfavorable and they don’t survive, much less pass on.
But, once in a while….. and there’s where selection comes in.
The evolutionary niche is defined by two metrics; more safety than outside it, and more nutrition inside it if only because nobody else got there.
The presumption is that all niches will be filled, given the number of mutations which may move in the direction of allowing mining the niche, or better than others, or improving the utilization.
And nutrition is energy. One is sunlight. We can assume that any life will evolved to use the local sun for energy, and the higher you go, the less those next to you will get and…you win. So we have trees. And trees will have energy–leaves, shoots, nuts, fruits. They will reward those who can get there. We have birds, squirrels and such like. And primates.
Useless characteristics will be selected against–see Behe–and so big brains in giraffes will take up nutrition and other physical resources and thus be selected against since the giraffe can’t do anything with it. He pays for it and it does not pay him back.
Primates, on the other hand, can do things with their hands…and sometimes feet…and sometimes tails. So it pays them to have bigger brains since they can actuate their hot, new ideas. Their hot, new ideas are about manipulating the environment. And it appears that octopods are pretty bright.
And once a species is set on a road…mutations away from it disappear and those improving it succeed. So intelligence is good and more is better and the physical limits to “more” are not particularly vexing.
Joke question. How long from the beginning of the use of metals to interstellar flight? About 9500 years. Chalcolithic started about 9500 years ago and Voyager left the solar system just a couple of years ago. Now, nobody wants to ride Voyager, but the fact is that, rusty and dusty, it’s motoring through interstellar space. And somebody, sooner or later, may find it.
Why metals? Because technology up to that time involved breaking stuff and then, sometimes, putting it back together another way…hafting a stone ax head, for example. Metals involve changing a state of a thing so that it cooperates in becoming something else…copper ore leaching actual copper which cannot be seen in or visualized in the ore. Then poured into a mold. New way of thinking.
That said, Fermi is an issue. Even if C is the limit, some version of Voyager must be out there floating around from a civilization so ancient no traces remain. About the only way we’ll know is if one of our spacecraft
Too bad we can’t get around C as the sci-fi business does, simply by announcing “hyperdrive”.
But maybe…..
Consider this. The universe is billions of years old. The length of time humans on Earth have had technology to search for other life forms is a blink of an eye. The idea that intelligent life with technology exists is based on our own experience. And the mathematical odds that other life must exist somewhere out there. But maybe we are unique, or we are at this stage and no other life forms are. Maybe there were other similar civilizations, but they have all failed for one reason (They all adopted Communism – the deadly myth) or another. (They developed such powerful weapons they destroyed themselves.)
And, with tongue in cheek, consider this. All other advanced civilizations learned to use fossil fuels for energy. You know what happened? They destroyed themselves with runaway climate change. 🙂
Or they discovered nuclear weapons and couldn’t resist using them. Thus, destroying their civilization. And whatever life that, followed resisted technology because they remembered what had happened before.
The idea that many life forms would develop technology equal to or greater than ours is an assumption that can be disputed in many ways. As Rufus pointed out, the dinosaurs ruled the Earth much longer than humans have existed. And their demise was the result of the Earth being struck by an asteroid – an accidental occurrence that opened things up for mammals. Maybe other planets have never developed large populations of mammals and intelligent life. So much of our development has been the result of fortuitous occurrences.
The possibilities for failure to develop an advanced civilization, or that whatever civilizations that might
have developed eventually failed, are fairly high.
@Rufus T. Firefly,
Heh, heh, heh!
*Putting on a posh-sounding voice, like Beauregard the dog, from Pogo comics* …my apologies to yourself, and other Barbara Eden fans, out there. 🙂
Like an expertly done, + very delicious, chocolate mousse- sometimes I must take both of these things, in small doses.
( Wait a minute. Did I just compare Barbara Eden to chocolate mousse? That didn’t come out quite right.) 🙂
To
Snow on pine! I was so glad to read your post! I have long felt that there was more life out there than us! I am a Christian but I think the Lord may have given us the gift to “seek out new life”, sorry about the Star Trek reference But felt it was true!
physicsguy,
What is the estimated maximum distance Seti is believed able to currently detect from an alien radio station operating at the upper power range of current commercial radio stations, given the inverse square law and EM signal strength? It would seem to me that the AM side, which relies on modulating the strength of the carrier signal would loose the detectable weaker sections of the signal over interstellar distances , creating gaps in the signal, before FM signals of the same strength.
And would Seti even recognize something like the military’s rapid frequency hopping signals? Or would that show up as pieces of disjointed noise?
If the aliens used two parallel signal waves , two different FM or two different AM signals, or a combo of the two, perhaps to relay “Stereo” information, would Seti, even recognize those as being part of one stream of information?
As far as the 70s… I lived through them in my 20s. My political change happened in the middle of that time. I remember good times and bad, but as I look back I can say the same for each decade of my life. My wife, who I married in 2001, 20 years of bliss so far, I first met in the mid 70s so I can’t knock a decade that brought her first into my life except that I should have married her then but I was too stupid to see it.
70s had some good music, some good movies, and I had good friends who still are my friends 40-50 years on. For me, compared to the 60s, the 70s were a nice smooth ride flowing into the 80s which were amazing.
S. Allen,
As a Christian, I have long been annoyed with fellow Christians who dismiss the idea that there could be other life out there as an article of faith. I see nothing in the Bible that would require me to dismiss the idea of alien life.
And the observable universe is so, so big…
I love this discussion! Thanks to all who have chimed in.
One quick, question. About a decade ago I took another look at this and decided the Earth’s tilt on its axis is likely a huge factor in the evolution of intelligent life and whether that intelligence is used inventively.
Anyone else agree?
There is different kinds of intelligence, also. What if an alien civilization is really good at art, such as painting, drawing, and music, but lacks technological smarts? Would we ever hear from them?
What if they have no usable metals accessible on their planet to use and their entire societal infrastructure is built with wood and stone, even though they have the brains to utilize metal, they lack access to it, thus they never develop what we would call technology? Would we ever hear from them?
@ 16:42
Cosmo-theology.
Of course what is being discussed is not theology broadly and per se, but what the NASA goofy imagines alien life would mean for Christian Theology.
1, And then of course he further assumes that what he imagines Christian theology to be somehow implies that aliens must be assumed to have immortal souls too for some obscure reason;
2, and that that assumption necessarily impacts Christian belief because … some unstated reason …
3, and as such (having immortal souls or personal destinies) would in principle be in need therefore – and additionally deserving of, if “in need” – of salvation … for some other unstated reason …
4, and that they necessarily therefore as aliens are not simply bundles of calculating, material world manipulating, appetition – and as aliens, as alien from us at a bare minimum as are squid or dragon flies. All this assumed too, for some reason.
Smirk here and push your glasses up your nose NASA boy.
Hell, excuse me … Heck, that fact that some human beings might have immortal souls does not even imply that all men must have immortal souls … much less that alien “life” defined as intelligent or not must be more than sacks of matter.
But of course we somehow know that “intelligent” dragon flies would mean the end of the salvation dogma, because, well, all dogs go to heaven too ,or some crap that emos like to believe.
NASA guy is probably one of the most stupid examples of a supposedly informed man I have seen in a long, long, while.
Yeah, maybe aliens would disprove Christian doctrines somehow. But not on that moron’s implicit premisses.
Rufus,
What’s your reasoning regarding a world’s tilted axis affecting intelligence?
@GB:
Without even scrolling up to read what Rufus said: Seasons!
A predictable ecology with harsh times and easy times coming around like clockwork every year selects for planning and executive function. If I don’t gather my acorns while the sun is shining and instead go fishing, I’m going to starve in February.
Smartest populations on the planet apart from a subset of those Always With Us are Northern Europeans and North-East Asians.
A predictable harsh ecology (Australia, Arabian peninsula) selects for ability to fit into a niche.
An unpredictable harsh ecology (Sub-Saharan Africa) selects for ability to breed like there’s no tomorrow. Note that it’s very difficult to starve (before modernity and its complications) in this environment — but it’s very easy to get taken out by pathogens and the wildlife. Be happy today because tomorrow who knows what could happen even if you *did* plan?
A predictably pleasant ecology (e.g. Central Thailand where can plant rice year-round and have to dodge falling mangoes, durians, coconuts) selects for about as much intelligence and executive planning function necessary to manage water rights — All the SE Asian Hindu Buddhist Deva Raja cultures were very top down for that reason. Not entirely unlike Ancient Egypt — though I imagine the Annual Nile flooding created all kinds of logistical issues which were a spur to selecting for smarts in the priestly elite.
This is all recycled Ed Dutton and Michael Woodley. Coherent, I think.
GB,
Zaphod has the gist of it, or at least a portion of it. As Zaphod writes, seasons select against those who are not good at planning and delaying gratification. I think it’s also a necessity is the mother of invention, thing. With Zaphod’s example of Central Thailand, why bother to invent anything? Your needs are met by dint of your latitude and longitude.
Zaphod,
The last 500 years or so is one thing,
and yet, those “ Northern Europeans” were the “ Barbarians” according to the ancient Romans?
In antiquity, as opposed to modern times, it seems the lands bordering the Mediterranean were on the cutting edge of technology in the West. Crossroads of civilization, technology and war….( I am not taking into account whatever was going on in ancient China.)
I realize that there are planting seasons even in Greece and Rome and Jerusalem…
Great core video and set of comments! Thanks all!
JimNorCal: thanks for the mention of Nick Lane’s The Vital Question. The Amazon reviews suggest I probably need to reread Life Ascending before buying and reading The Vital Question. Plus I need to avoid confusing Nick Lane with Nicolas Wade!
Perhaps along with repeatedly watching the videos mentioned by Snow on Pine several times to stay oriented to Lane’s discussion. Great visual effects and learning tools achieved in those videos, with great effort, I am sure.
I believe Galernter (along with Doug Axe and Stephen Meyer) are wrong in their calculations of protein forming complexity, but I am not educated enough right now to really refute their views. I suspect that the roles of catalyzing substrates, micro pores, and/or self catalyzing RNA (or RNA precursors?) has not received as much attention as it deserves.
Your needs are met by dint of your latitude and longitude.
Rufus:
Or as Jimmy Buffett sang:
_______________________________
With these changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes
Nothing remains quite the same
The earth tilting, seasonal planning contribution to intelligence seems reasonable, but let’s not forget that many animals survived seasons via hibernation, migrations, etc., based on instinctual solutions rather than frontal cortex ones.
Another candidate is the parallel development of a suitable hominid voice box, language, and the particular brain elements required to implement them all, …. clearly a major opportunity to improve survival in a predatory world.
@jon baker:
I think It’s no surprise that Western Civ kicked off around Fertile Crescent (pretty much same deal as Egypt with a bit less annual flooding) and then Med. Note that the Med is not an entirely balmy environment. You still have to make some effort with Agriculture and there is seasonality albeit not as extreme as in the Deep North. The need to deal with managing seasonal planting and harvesting and dealing with flood control is just enough of a civilizational goad without being likely to snuff everyone out before they got it sorted.
Selection for IQ was obviously going on long before the development of Agriculture (although traits can selected for deliberately or by fortuitous happenstance much faster than you might think — Where did French Bulldogs or Ashkenazi Rabbinical Dynasties, South Indian Brahmin subcastes such as the Iyers emerge from in in a blip in the fabric of evolutionary time?).
As for your ‘Barbarians’… Well Spain was Visigothic after it was Roman. Vandals in North Africa, IIRC. Arians, IRRC with priests, bishops, scribes, the works… They didn’t overrun the Roman Empire painted blue and naked.
The Vatican has been cool with aliens for some time now:
_______________________________________
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures.
I’ve run into UFO advocates who believe Christianity would collapse if E.T. were proven.
I’ve got news — it’s pretty much already handled.
I love this thread.
Just wanted to add some observations.
I believe it was Stephen Jay Gould who noticed that over time animals seem to be getting smarter and smarter, based on the brain mass to body mass ratio. It seems to be more advantageous to be smarter in general.
I think that dinosaurs were actually on the cusp of starting civilization. Oviraptors were at least as smart as modern day parrots and crows; plus they had opposable thumbs!
They might never have become civilized because they still had pointy teeth and didn’t really need to make tools.
I also find interesting the idea that if dinosaurs did actually create a civilization, we might not ever see evidence of it. What evidence lasts after 65 million years? A car left in the woods pretty much disappears into dust after 50 years.
@jon baker:
Not inconceivable that high IQ can evolve for some environmental / group selection reasons in a particular group in a particular place and then only really burst out into prominence when introduced into more fertile soil.
Euro Ice-People Blonde Beasts (I jest) may not have invented Civilization, but once it was a going concern, they were well-positioned to take it over and (eventually) do a pretty good job of improving upon it (until recently). Contrast and compare with Islamic Conquests — it’s a bit unfair to say that all they did was strip mine the conquered cultures and run them into the ground… but in the end they didn’t do all that much and stagnated.
Since it’s Be Nice to the Ashkenazis Minute, I’m not going to use them as an example here. Instead think that South Indian Brahmins didn’t invent jack @#$% having any relevance to the world we live in at beginning of C20. Now go look at the C-Suites in Silicon Valley and it’s full of them. Their religious/cultural/marriage rules were selecting for high IQ … Once others invented computers, internet, etc… now you probably can’t stick your head outside in Sausalito without a whiff of curry on the breeze.
Rufus and Zaphod,
I suspected that would be the rationale. I agree that having to buildup a surplus to survive harsh winters necessitates certain cultural values like long range planning and delayed gratification.
As for intelligence, the data point in contradiction to that theory is that no great civilizations arose in Canada and South Africa. So longitudes 40°-50° north and south of the equator are an insufficient explanation. Plus the civilizations arising in the fertile crescent and Mediterranean contradict a cold winter climate being the determinate factor.
As Jared Diamond in “Guns, Germs and Steel” demonstrated, cross-cultural fertilization in the horizontal direction is the dominant Factor. South America and Africa are vertically oriented.
In addition, as Thomas Sowell points out neither South America or Africa have long vertically oriented rivers, the earliest path for trade and the cross-cultural fertilization that follows trade.
Oh… and De Nile is a (Vertically Oriented) River in Africa 😛 Lake Victoria is plenty Sub-Saharan.
I’d suggest you also take a look at the skinny blue lines on a map of China.
At the very least there are exceptions to this hypothesis.
In a recent interview Lou Alizondo mentions being shown an account at the Vatican Library which records observations by Romans some 2,000 years ago of fiery “shields” hovering in the sky that followed Roman legions from one battle to the next.
So UFOs have been with us for a long, long time.
The bright, shining aspect of this thread is its mention of Barbara Eden. Jeannie was a wonderfully upbeat beauty, and the actress who created the character is so appropriately named. Of course the show was silly, but did this young male care? Not a whit. She is warm memory from my very happy childhood.
As for all this “life elsewhere in the cosmos” stuff, it makes me sleepy. I long ago adopted the mindset that we will all finally know the unknowable once we pass from this life . . . or we won’t. Only one way to tell and while I’m sure it will be fascinating when it happens, I hope fervently that for me it happens many years hence. Another way to put it – I hope to read much more Neo before I assume room temperature.
P.S.– Perhaps a more well known example of ancient UFO sightings is that of the “Battle of Nuremberg” from 1561.
Starting in, possibly, the Dakotas, northern Minnesota, and West Virginia, you can, with a shallow -draft boat get to New Orleans. With tributaries and their tributaries, that covers a lot of North America.
I like Conquests and Cultures by Sowell better than Guns, Germs and Steel. I noted on the jacket of the latter that it was going to, in some sense, strike a blow against racism. Noted some planted axioms, planted by omission/suggestion, which dodged embarrassing questions.
Been said that North America–say, the US, anyway–didn’t develop large organized polities is that it was too fat. If you didn’t like the local arrangements, you could move thirty miles and still find water and decent soil.
On Google Earth, the surface roads in grid fashion run from souther Ohio out to western Nebraska, from Montana to Texas. Plunk your viewer down on one of those roads…grain to the horizon. Even the hilly areas, much of the Old South and Appalachia, have their “coves” and valleys
If I had to believe someone about UFOs it would be Lou Alizondo, the former head of ATIP, and Chris Mellon, a former DOD Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence—the two leading well credentialed former government insiders pushing for more disclosure of information about UFOs.
These are two knowledgeable and credible people who, from all indications, certainly seem to believe that there are Aliens about.
And so do I.
Lou Alizondo has said that the two questions that ATIP, the Pentagon’s formerly secret UFO research organization he ran, was trying to answer were–1. what were the capabilities of these UFOs, and 2. what were the motive or motives behind them—why were they here, and what were they doing?
ATIP did come up with the “five observables” as a way to organize and understand the common capabilities of these UFOs, so the capabilities question has started to be answered, if not the how.
But the other major question, that of motives, has remained the question that has not been answered.
However, as Alizondo has said, as a military organization ATIP was naturally trying to determine if UFOs posed a military threat.
Science Fiction writers have given us a whole host of possible motives for aliens and their craft to be in our solar system, in our skies, on this planet Earth and increasingly, it appears, “up in our face”–some beneficent, some malevolent, and some in between.
As some view them they could be our “elder brothers,” trying to guide us along a safe path toward maturity.
Or, perhaps, we have something that they want or need, perhaps desperately so—something unique to us perhaps, or some particular element or compound, some mineral or plant, or genetic material.
Or, perhaps they have settled here, or are scouting out a place to settle.
Perhaps they are just bored and nosy, and are here observing us and our antics just for their own amusement.
Perhaps there is some sort of “Prime Directive” which allows them to observe but supposedly bans them from interfering in our development in any very visible and major way, or perhaps they are here with no other motive than to conquer and/or to enslave us, and to take whatever they want, either by subtle means of influence or persuasion, or simply by force.
Or, perhaps, as Alizondo has also hinted–given the variety of configurations, colors, behaviors, and sizes of reported craft–there are a number of different races/civilizations of ETs here, each vying with the others; each one of these races of beings pursuing their own agendas.
Alizondo has been very effective at dropping little hints in the various statements he has made, another such hint that aliens “might have been here for a very long time.” Thus, Alizondo’s reference to the ancient Roman document he was shown at the Vatican Library I referenced above.
Could Aliens have been here on the Earth for thousands or perhaps even many tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, and only just recently decided to show themselves and/or we just recently developed enough to be able to observe them?
Could these “Aliens” actually be the remnants of a high technology civilization that developed here on Earth in our deep past?
As for motive could their motives be so “alien” that we are unable to identify or to understand them?
My money is on us–here on Earth, or in our Solar System–having something that these Aliens need and want.
Snow on Pine,
I wonder if some of these UFO sightings are by creatures who dwell primarily in one of the other supposed dimensions that some of the string theorist believe may exist, but we cannot perceive with our natural senses.
That would be a kind of Sci-fi type theory.
A religious oriented theory might suggest these aliens dwell primarily in another dimension we do not normally see with our eyes. What religions might call the “ supernatural”, which is in some ways what Sci-fi calls a parallel or maybe “ out of sync” universe that is all around us but we do not normally perceive it?
As electricity first came to manufacturing, the machines, many of them, had an arc during the process. Electric arcs broadcast the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
And so we have a machine banging away with an arc every half second starting when?1880? That timing would seem artificial, possibly. How sensitive are the other guys’ SETI?
We blew various spectra all over in early radio and Morse. Then more, some fairly narrow beams starting in WW II radar. Not until sometime after that did we start blasting huge energies out into space, looking for missiles and so forth.
Going back to my hypothetical machine arcs, that’s 140 years, a radius. So we have a sphere of artificially modulated radiation(s) nearly three hundred light years across. If you wait until anti missile radar, say maybe 130 light years across.
Covers a lot of cubic.
Problem is, if C is a limit and there’s no way to get around it a la the scifi guys’ “hyperdrive”.
In terms of who gets smart and who doesn’t, the point is whether you can use your brain well enough that it pays for itself and a little over.
The late F&SF writer Poul Anderson posited a civilization of centaur-like critters talking some human friends about how much tougher it was to go hi-tech if you can’t scamper around like monkeys. For example, how would you build, much less sail,a sailing ship if nobody can get higher than standing on the deck. Yeah. Run blocks up there…..to haul on. And if a rope comes loose? And….
Perhaps the Aliens synthesize an immortality drug from something found only in human rectums.
I used to ascribe to the Drake equation, but in the past few years my guess aligns more with the two gentlemen who speak between 11:00 and 15:45 in the video.
Drake’s equation may be right, it may be wrong, but one unintended “trick” within it is the tyranny of numbers. It features nearly limitless opportunity and nearly infinite time, so no matter what numbers one plugs in intelligent life seems inevitable*. Life began on our planet and evolved to intelligence, and us. There HAVE to be so many planets with resources and temperatures similar to ours, many formed long before ours was, therefore there must be countless planets with intelligent life, many far advanced of us.
But that ignores the countless variables that all went a certain way to get us where we are. The Earth was just fine for billions of years (at least one billion) with no life on it. Amino acids, cells, multi-cellular organisms. We haven’t yet figured out how to spontaneously create them and we really have no idea how likely or unlikely they are to evolve. Could be that, given the ingredients of the early Earth they are inevitable or it could be that they independently require complex, unrelated coincidences. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth a lot longer than humans have. If a large asteroid didn’t strike the Earth around 65 million years ago would mammals have evolved to where we are today?
Intelligence isn’t a particularly desirable trait, evolution-wise. The vast majority of species on Earth appear to have no consciousness or ability to think beyond programmed instinct and they do just fine. In the case of humans, bi-pedalism was necessary to free up our hands to evolve to do fine motor skills. They are myriad evolutionary tricks human women had to evolve to bear offspring with our equivalent brain size through hips conducive to bi-pedalism. It’s such a trick that human children are born absurdly premature, like marsupials. (Our skulls aren’t even fully formed, to allow for fetal heads to get through the birth canal.) Human children are born at least a year before they can walk and feed themselves. Humans are at tremendous risk the first several years of their lives. And, the birthing process is so precarious human women suffer a high rate of mortality in child birth, compared to other species. Had our primate ancestors been near any reasonable predator when these traits developed we would have never gotten to our large brain to body mass ratio. And there are countless other evolutionary flukes that have to happen to get from amoeba to homo sapiens sapiens.
And then, we have at least 100,000 years where humans were perfectly happy with almost none of the technology necessary to communicate or travel outside our planet. George Washington could easily talk battle strategy with Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan. It took some unique, amazing insights into the nature of electricity that spurred most all the technological innovations we enjoy. A Maxwell or Ohm or Edison or Tesla dies in that difficult, human childbirth process and we could still be living like Washington or Caesar. Or one of the many plagues that swept the planet wipes us all out in 1300, or, or, or…
There are a lot of unrelated, bizarre, disassociated coincidences, meteorological events, disasters, random mutations… that have to happen to make humans and get us to where we are. Kurzweil and Ayala may very well be correct.
*I should add, the Drake equation isn’t bad, it’s actually quite good. It’s a fairly valid way of addressing the question mathematically.
We are constantly finding new species here on Earth that have left no trace before they were found. So, why not other “Beings” out in the vast reaches of Space.
UK reports first death of someone with the Omicron variant: https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/uk-confirms-first-death-with-omicron-covid-19-variant_4154043.html
The person was fully-vaccinated, so of course the response is to introduce vaccine passports and get everyone another shot of the shots that didn’t make any difference already. Sigh.
I’d like to think that my postings here on the subject of UFOs—scoffed at though they have sometimes been–might have provoked this line of inquiry.
Second, I think that it is significant that—at this particular moment–this serious, legitimate TV series is taking a serious, high level look at the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the issue of “Aliens.”
The outcome of this first stab at serious inquiry, though, is a very frustrating–“on the one hand, on the other hand” result.
However, I think the overriding thing to be kept in mind is that all of these various expert’s opinions are full of “ASSUMPTIONS” about how things are and behave, and what is possible and likely–and all of these assumptions are based on exactly one reference sample of behavior, biology, historical development, and technology—us.
Aliens are by definition “Alien,” different.
So why should we assume that any of their motivations and behaviors, the imperatives that drive them—if they even have “imperatives” as we understand them—and the technologies they use, should be the same or similar to ours, be recognized for what they are, and be comprehensible?
Kurzweil declares that “technology grows exponentially” and, thus, any major alien technology we see out in the Universe would therefore be obvious.
But what if technology doesn’t always grow “exponentially” but at all sorts of different rates, in fits and starts, in some areas and not others?
Kurzweil assumes that we would recognize such alien technology when we saw it, but what if such technology were based on such to us undiscovered and/or radical principles that we would not be able to recognize it?
Why should we assume that there are any signals as we understand “signals,” signals generated by some technology we would recognize—that would be on the part of the Electromagnetic Spectrum that we expect them to be on, or even on that particular Spectrum at all?
The general assumption—based on human motivation and behavior–is made throughout that any aliens would want to communicate with us.
But why should we assume that any aliens would necessarily feel a need to communicate with us, particularly if they were far in advance of us?
Then, there is the question of whether we would recognize aliens if we encountered them.
Why should we assume that aliens operate in the same few dimensions we do, are likely to be carbon based and solid, have minds that work in some fashion akin to ours, and work at the same clock speed that ours brains do?
As I have written here on a number of occasions, I believe the evidence for the existence of UFOs as actual physical objects is now overwhelming, and that their capabilities point to them as not being of human construction.
I note everyone’s ignoring of this accumulating evidence, and David Brins’s immediate, facile, and contemptuous dismissal of any of the recent developments concerning UFOs—developments that I believe have sparked this program’s discussion of the issue.
A half way decent first try, but far too dismissive of evidence, slick, and facile to be a real attempt at understanding.
If you are worried about [a large war] happening between Ukraine and Russia, this news article thinks that such a war is unlikely.
Please give it a read:
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2021/12/13/full-on-russian-invasion-and-threat-to-us-troops-in-ukraine-unlikely-right-now-experts-say/
(p.s. although the site that owns this article is named, Air Force Times…,The US Air Force does not own, or run, that website. )
The Drake equation is an interesting thought experiment, but it’s basically a string of variables, and the value of most of them is arbitrary. You can get it to give you whatever answer you want just by making the right assumptions.
The Fermi paradox suggests that some of our assumptions on this question are incorrect. As Francisco d’Anconia pointed out, contradictions don’t exist in the real world. If you think you have found one, check your premises. You will find that at least one of them is wrong.
One possible explanation for the apparent absence of alien civilizations is that we happen to be the first to develop in this part of the galaxy. Somebody has to be first. Why not us?
Is there any aspect of the 1970s we don’t have to plough through again? What’s next? Terrible haircuts, bell bottoms, and repellent graphic arts?
Though not the subject of the book, Nick Lane’s The Vital Question speaks to the question of the arrival of complicated life.
Simple prokaryote life theoretically is easier to arise. Eukaryotes are stubbornly difficult to conceptualize.
Dr. Chaotica,
Seems plausible considering the age of the Universe and the fact that several stellar cycles were needed to cook up all the star dust from which we are made.
The only variables in the Drake Equation for which there are plausible estimates are the numbers of stars and “habitable” planets. The rest is pure guesswork, and if any of those other variables are 1 in 10 to the 100th power, then…….
Rufus, Snow, and the good Dr, all bring up good points.
My take on the video and the larger subject: The SETI investigators focus too much on actual visitation vis-a-vis the Fermi paradox. They seem to be avoiding the main focus of their own SETI research in the attempts to find ET radio and light signals. There have been some great papers in recent years about detecting our civilization. Even our earliest radio signals are now out about 100 light years, and our current technology would allow us to detect a similar radio source. Keep that in mind.
Drake equation: has become much more firm in the past 20 years due to the continuing discovery of extra solar planets. When the equation was first formulated such was not known. I think it can now be stated that almost 100% of stars have planets, and a much higher percentage of those planets than previously thought may be in the Goldilocks zone and of the right size.
Biologists: goes back to our discussion a few days ago. All the biologists I know who discount any ETI are also strict Darwinists. As such, I can see their argument as to intelligence being a low probability event, but as we know Darwin has major issues. HT to Rufus.
Snow shows the basic flaw in Kurzweil’s argument.
I have no real conclusion. Drake equation, to me, is still persuasive. But the Fermi question is looming larger for SETI as they move to more focused “listening” etc based on extra solar planetary discoveries instead of just random searching, though that is still important. Another 50 years of silence may mean we are alone, or maybe quarantined.
P.S.–Perhaps not really off topic.
Looking at and considering the evidence, I am coming around more and more to the idea of “Intelligent Design” i.e. God, a creator, as the explanation for the existence, complexity, and functioning of both us and of the Universe.
There are, for instance, the couple of dozen fundamental physical constants i.e. constants like Avagadro’s Number, the masses of fundamental particles, Molar gas constant, Gravitation constant, Permeability of vacuum constant, etc. –which, as I understand it, would–if any one of them deviated by a
minute percentage from their current values–have resulted in a Universe devoid of Life.
As one more recent piece of evidence, check out these animations of how aspects of our cells work, and consider how likely it is that these interlocking and cooperating intricacies could have come about merely by random chance.
See for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4 or https://trinityanimation.com/blog/biological-animation-cellular-structures/
or https://dnalc.cshl.edu/resources/3d/08-how-dna-is-packaged-advanced.html
The argument for mandating vaccines has totally disconnected from any kind of logic if it ever had any.
On one hand they hysterically talk of how the dread new variant evades the vaccine and then on the other hand say vaccines must be mandated to fight the dread new variant.
I will not be getting a booster at this time and I will not be going anywhere that requires vaccine passports and will think real hard about ever visiting any locality in the future that requires them even if they someday lift them.
It is the moral duty of anybody who truly loves freedom to resist these at all turns.
Also it doesn’t get much media coverage here but the creeping authoritarianism of mandates in Europe has led to almost daily protests of varying sizes in just about every European country.
I subscribe to the notion that simple, generally monocellular life may be relatively rather common in the Universe. I wouldn’t be at all surposed if we find some kind microfossil evidence of archaea on Mars for example, since billions of years ago it evidently had a liquid water ocean for a time. My guess is that the more complex life becomes, the rarer it becomes. And my guess is that very complex life (such as tetrapod vertebrates) is extremely rare, and intelligent life is perhaps a 1 in a trillion sort of thing.
I think these are reasonable guesses based on what we know about the abiogenesis and evolution of life on Earth. As most of us no doubt know, Earth is estimated to be something like 4.4 billion years old. There’s pretty strong evidence for simple life appearing fairly early on, perhaps before 3.9 billion years ago. It may have even arisen multiple times and been wiped out during the Late Heavy Bombardment period. At any rate, we pretty sure that very simple life in the form of microbial mats was pretty much the only life for billions of years on Earth… from something like 3.9 billion to about 1.85 billion. Then Eukaryotic cells arrived followed by another billion years of incremental increases in complexity until the Cambrian explosion about 580 million years ago when complexity really accelarated.
But essentially it took billions of years for life to begin to look anything like it does today. This suggests that there are perhaps several unlikely events (or “great filters” as they’re referred to in the Fermi Paradox) that need be be crossed for complex life to appear and flurish.
And even if you have complex life for an Intelligent civilization to arise may likely be even rarer, since I’m skeptical that “intelligence” is an inevitable consequence of complex life in and of itself.
Interesting comments from the Democrat governor of Colorado.
https://twitter.com/aginnt/status/1470239611506999301
‘You don’t tell people what to wear’. What a novel concept.
Regarding radio signals from other systems. How much is the inverse square law as it effects EM strength at play here? And how much is natural EM drowning out other signals? And then realize , in this Galaxy, Sol and Earth are out in the suburbs in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy.
When radio telescopes are looking back towards the inner system, the natural background EM is potentially huge!
When I was in the military, we had gone to the Singar radio systems, which rapidly FREQUENCY hop across a number of frequencies within the same conversation, in order to avoid eavesdropping by the enemy. How much is that potentially at play here?
And what if advanced civilizations have harnessed WHATEVER the signal is that Quantumly Entangled particles use to communicate? And what if they have figured out how to transmit and receive those signals without physically entangling those particles at the same lab? We would not be able to detect that with present theory or technology.
When I have more time after work I want to comment on this topic to greater extent, but one thing I want to clarify here is that the idea that man is the pinnacle of the living part of creation is NOT a Biblical doctrine. I get frustrated with some of my fellow Christians who maintain this , since the Bible itself identifies man as being lower than the angels.
I think that the argument that our vast beyond comprehension Universe has been around for so many billions of years up until now that there would likely have been sufficient time for any number of technological civilizations to have arisen and fallen in the past, somewhere in the Universe, cannot just be dismissed.
Moreover, neither given the cataclysmic physical history of the Earth–volcanism, earth quakes, floods, meteor impacts, ocean, ice cap, and glacier shifts–can the possibility be cavalierly dismissed that predecessor high civilizations might have existed in Earth’s deep past, but that the evidence for their existence has just been destroyed, and/or is now buried under seas, ice, or earth.
“…or maybe quarantined.” Heh.
Oh, and there was no information about how old the victim was or any co-morbidities they may have had. Since it’s Epoch Times, I assume they’re not the ones omitting that information.
Bryan Lovely,
The all important died ‘with COVID’ as opposed to ‘from COVID’ is going to take on even more importance with the new dread variant if cases are milder.
Look, a paradox is a paradox because TWO APPARENT TRUTHS come to completely different conclusions. Most of the “explanations” of Fermi’s paradox assume life is common everywhere, AND there is no evidence for life anywhere else but here. Wrong.
There is tons of anecdotal evidence for life elsewhere! We just chose to laugh at it. Is there any perfect evidence? No, apparently not, but there is a shitload of imperfect evidence, tens of thousands of instances of it, and the only way it doesn’t count is if it as ALL FALSE! But if EVEN ONE is NOT false, there is no paradox!
But we are too busy laughing and mocking to bother looking, so we continue to wring our hands over a paradox that may not even exist.
Have there been hoaxes? Hell yes! Have there been misinterpretations by the untrained? Oh yes, thousands of them! Do these explain every instance of what appear to alien spaceships seen by thousands of people… NO! It only takes one, and the Fermi Paradox goes poof!
“… the Bible itself identifies man as being lower than the angels…”
Well, um, it’s not altogether clear…since apparently (depending on whom you speak to, or rather, communicate with) humans may be considered to be HIGHER—or at least potentially higher—than the angels because humans have FREE WILL (well, except maybe for behaviorists).
Though all too often we abuse that Divine gift (as it were) and make the darnedest choices, whereupon we may list, sink or turtle. (Of course, we can always right ourselves, or at least try….)
To be sure, one’s theo-philosophical mileage may vary. (And of course, Lucifer and his not-so-merry minions do present a conceptual challenge…but then only for some.)
jon baker,
Artificial radio signals are relatively easy to detect compared to the natural background. The SETI uses complex filters along with computer algorithms to hunt out potential artificial signals from the background. And with increasing in computing power and also digital electronics the process is much much improved since the inception of SETI in the 1960s. Add to that the SETI At Home project which utilizes personal computers as a massive parallel data processing platform for signal searching. Like I mentioned we have the means now to detect the rudimentary radio signals from almost a 100 years ago from earth, so if an equivalent technology level civilization is within “hearing” distance we should find it. Of course SETI is currently limited, and rightfully so, to the Milky Way. The farthest parts are only 100,000 ly away, so within the billions of stars within the MW, one should expect maybe someone developed a civilization within the past 100,000 years? Still nothing though.
But your point about QM entanglement communication is a possibility as its already being experimented with regard to cryptology. If we figure it out then maybe it could be added to SETI.
More on Colorado Democrat governor Jared Polis.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/13/one-democrat-governor-admits-the-covid-emergency-is-over-if-you-get-sick-its-your-own-darn-fault/
This whole UFO debate , IMHO, is asinine.
Sort of like the debate about “does science support / refute the existence of God.”
First off, if alien life exists and have visited earth, their technology must be so advanced that the constraints that human / earthbound physics requires simply does not apply to alien life.
They must have figured out ways to travel faster than the speed of life, etc., – to defy human developed physics – to be able to traverse “light-year” distances far faster than human-developed physics permits.
Secondly, why should these aliens want to contact humans? Who says that should be on their agenda? Maybe they have no interest in chatting it up with their version of pre-pre-prehistoric life forms.
After all, do humans wish to communicate with worms or ants? (though I wish I could actually communicate with cats and dogs ).
There are billions of galaxies containing billions of stars; what makes anybody think that amongst these billions and billions of stars and their planets, planet earth is the ONLY planet that was/is capable of supporting intelligent life?
Forget the math; math only provides the odds depending upon the assumptions behind the math.
During and since WWII there have been many, many bizarre sightings by military and commercial pilots of objects that simply cannot be of human origin.
And even if 50% to 80% of these sightings are “explainable,” what about the other 20% to 50% ??
And what about those folks on the ground – normal folks, not inebriated or hi on dope – that have seen un-explainable objects in the sky (like I have.)?
Are they all hallucinating?
Why would the US military / government, or the UK , classify as secret many of these bizarre events if they are all phony-baloney or logically explainable? Why would they even bother investigating these sightings if they know they are all baloney?
They wouldn’t.
And if these bizarre sightings are flying machines developed by the USSR or USA or UK or…. any of these nations would never have to engage in policies influenced by external threats to their sovereignty of any kind.
After all, they have the technology that nobody on earth has.
There would be no need for a NATO or a Warsaw Pact military alliance.
There would be no need for, say, the USA , to spend billions developing the next generation fighter plane or bomber or nuclear sub, etc.
Alien life does exist and they have visited earth.
Obviously, they have no interest in chatting it up with primitive human life forms.
Get a grip.
By the way, the occurrence of a near zero event does not mean that something is impossible or difficult to accomplish.
If 500 fair coins are tossed, one at a time, one after another, and the exact sequence of heads and tails recorded, the probability of repeating that exact sequence of heads and tails is (1/2)^50; that is 1/2 to the 50th power, which is a number very very very near zero, but not quite.
Or put another way, this experiment would have to be repeated 1 / (1/2^50) times – a very very very large number of times – to have a high probability of reproducing the original outcome.
And to produce that sequence the first time could easily be accomplished by a child or someone in a drunken stupor.
An very improbable event need not be difficult to produce.
What would be HIGHLY improbable would be reproducing the initial highly unlikely event.
Re: ETI / Kurzweil
I find Kurzweil’s arguments persuasive.
When I was younger and pondering the issue, I wasn’t nearly so articulate, but it seemed to me that if ETIs existed in large numbers, *some* would have had sufficient impact on the galaxy that we would have noticed.
My analogy was an Earth ant encountering a shopping center. The ant wouldn’t know what a shopping center was or where it came from, but it would notice the shopping center wasn’t the rocks, ground or plants it usually experienced.
As humans we look out into the galaxy and we see nothing but wilderness.
Perhaps not all ETIs would choose to expand their technology that far, but absent special pleading, some would, just as humans are doing today.
As Fermi asked, “Where are they?”
“I believe the evidence for the existence of UFOs as actual physical objects is now overwhelming, and that their capabilities point to them as not being of human construction.” Snow on Pine
So overwhelming that only the willfully blind can deny it.
However, that many sightings also confirms a strong interest in humanity, as you don’t keep visiting someplace with which you have no interest. Which suggests the simplest explanation is the correct one, namely that we are indeed under a quarantine. Certainly a wise precaution given the human race’s immaturity.
Another factor being the “Prime Directive” an encapsulation of the historical principle that contact between a highly advanced civilization and a more primitive one generally has “unfortunate” consequences for the less developed civilization.
While also suggesting that the frequency of sightings is meant to psychologically prepare humanity for first contact.
If correct, one day in the not too distant future, a scene out of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” may appear with a spacecraft landing in DC (or Beijing). Hopefully, we won’t shoot the alien cosmonaut trying to gift humanity the cure for cancer.
jon baker,
“In my father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.” KJV, John 14:2-6
@Art Deco
to quote A.D./you:
“Is there any aspect of the 1970s we don’t have to plough through again? What’s next? Terrible haircuts, bell bottoms, and repellent graphic arts?”
Amen to that!
I lived through part of the 1970s, the first time…, with its: Abba music, the Jackson 5, string art, the Love Boat, + re-runs of I Dream of Jeanie. Phooey to all of that!
ONCE through the 1970s was enough, thank-you-very-much! 😀
Good find Neo – thanks for posting. A subject that has fascinated me for a very long time.
TR,
A man saying, “phooey” to Barbara Eden, whether in first run or re-runs, is an alien concept to me!
Barbara Eden is 90 years old. Yikes!!!!
“My analogy was an Earth ant encountering a shopping center.”
One of my favorite scenes is like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLZW8Deq8vE
Couple of notes: Gelernter doesn’t think the math works. Interesting discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noj4phMT9OE&t=25s
The theory of natural selection believes that lots of mutations happen, billions at the cellular level.
Most mutations to living creatures are unfavorable and they don’t survive, much less pass on.
But, once in a while….. and there’s where selection comes in.
The evolutionary niche is defined by two metrics; more safety than outside it, and more nutrition inside it if only because nobody else got there.
The presumption is that all niches will be filled, given the number of mutations which may move in the direction of allowing mining the niche, or better than others, or improving the utilization.
And nutrition is energy. One is sunlight. We can assume that any life will evolved to use the local sun for energy, and the higher you go, the less those next to you will get and…you win. So we have trees. And trees will have energy–leaves, shoots, nuts, fruits. They will reward those who can get there. We have birds, squirrels and such like. And primates.
Useless characteristics will be selected against–see Behe–and so big brains in giraffes will take up nutrition and other physical resources and thus be selected against since the giraffe can’t do anything with it. He pays for it and it does not pay him back.
Primates, on the other hand, can do things with their hands…and sometimes feet…and sometimes tails. So it pays them to have bigger brains since they can actuate their hot, new ideas. Their hot, new ideas are about manipulating the environment. And it appears that octopods are pretty bright.
And once a species is set on a road…mutations away from it disappear and those improving it succeed. So intelligence is good and more is better and the physical limits to “more” are not particularly vexing.
Joke question. How long from the beginning of the use of metals to interstellar flight? About 9500 years. Chalcolithic started about 9500 years ago and Voyager left the solar system just a couple of years ago. Now, nobody wants to ride Voyager, but the fact is that, rusty and dusty, it’s motoring through interstellar space. And somebody, sooner or later, may find it.
Why metals? Because technology up to that time involved breaking stuff and then, sometimes, putting it back together another way…hafting a stone ax head, for example. Metals involve changing a state of a thing so that it cooperates in becoming something else…copper ore leaching actual copper which cannot be seen in or visualized in the ore. Then poured into a mold. New way of thinking.
That said, Fermi is an issue. Even if C is the limit, some version of Voyager must be out there floating around from a civilization so ancient no traces remain. About the only way we’ll know is if one of our spacecraft
Too bad we can’t get around C as the sci-fi business does, simply by announcing “hyperdrive”.
But maybe…..
Consider this. The universe is billions of years old. The length of time humans on Earth have had technology to search for other life forms is a blink of an eye. The idea that intelligent life with technology exists is based on our own experience. And the mathematical odds that other life must exist somewhere out there. But maybe we are unique, or we are at this stage and no other life forms are. Maybe there were other similar civilizations, but they have all failed for one reason (They all adopted Communism – the deadly myth) or another. (They developed such powerful weapons they destroyed themselves.)
And, with tongue in cheek, consider this. All other advanced civilizations learned to use fossil fuels for energy. You know what happened? They destroyed themselves with runaway climate change. 🙂
Or they discovered nuclear weapons and couldn’t resist using them. Thus, destroying their civilization. And whatever life that, followed resisted technology because they remembered what had happened before.
The idea that many life forms would develop technology equal to or greater than ours is an assumption that can be disputed in many ways. As Rufus pointed out, the dinosaurs ruled the Earth much longer than humans have existed. And their demise was the result of the Earth being struck by an asteroid – an accidental occurrence that opened things up for mammals. Maybe other planets have never developed large populations of mammals and intelligent life. So much of our development has been the result of fortuitous occurrences.
The possibilities for failure to develop an advanced civilization, or that whatever civilizations that might
have developed eventually failed, are fairly high.
@Rufus T. Firefly,
Heh, heh, heh!
*Putting on a posh-sounding voice, like Beauregard the dog, from Pogo comics* …my apologies to yourself, and other Barbara Eden fans, out there. 🙂
Like an expertly done, + very delicious, chocolate mousse- sometimes I must take both of these things, in small doses.
( Wait a minute. Did I just compare Barbara Eden to chocolate mousse? That didn’t come out quite right.) 🙂
To
Snow on pine! I was so glad to read your post! I have long felt that there was more life out there than us! I am a Christian but I think the Lord may have given us the gift to “seek out new life”, sorry about the Star Trek reference But felt it was true!
physicsguy,
What is the estimated maximum distance Seti is believed able to currently detect from an alien radio station operating at the upper power range of current commercial radio stations, given the inverse square law and EM signal strength? It would seem to me that the AM side, which relies on modulating the strength of the carrier signal would loose the detectable weaker sections of the signal over interstellar distances , creating gaps in the signal, before FM signals of the same strength.
And would Seti even recognize something like the military’s rapid frequency hopping signals? Or would that show up as pieces of disjointed noise?
If the aliens used two parallel signal waves , two different FM or two different AM signals, or a combo of the two, perhaps to relay “Stereo” information, would Seti, even recognize those as being part of one stream of information?
As far as the 70s… I lived through them in my 20s. My political change happened in the middle of that time. I remember good times and bad, but as I look back I can say the same for each decade of my life. My wife, who I married in 2001, 20 years of bliss so far, I first met in the mid 70s so I can’t knock a decade that brought her first into my life except that I should have married her then but I was too stupid to see it.
70s had some good music, some good movies, and I had good friends who still are my friends 40-50 years on. For me, compared to the 60s, the 70s were a nice smooth ride flowing into the 80s which were amazing.
S. Allen,
As a Christian, I have long been annoyed with fellow Christians who dismiss the idea that there could be other life out there as an article of faith. I see nothing in the Bible that would require me to dismiss the idea of alien life.
And the observable universe is so, so big…
I love this discussion! Thanks to all who have chimed in.
One quick, question. About a decade ago I took another look at this and decided the Earth’s tilt on its axis is likely a huge factor in the evolution of intelligent life and whether that intelligence is used inventively.
Anyone else agree?
There is different kinds of intelligence, also. What if an alien civilization is really good at art, such as painting, drawing, and music, but lacks technological smarts? Would we ever hear from them?
What if they have no usable metals accessible on their planet to use and their entire societal infrastructure is built with wood and stone, even though they have the brains to utilize metal, they lack access to it, thus they never develop what we would call technology? Would we ever hear from them?
@ 16:42
Cosmo-theology.
Of course what is being discussed is not theology broadly and per se, but what the NASA goofy imagines alien life would mean for Christian Theology.
1, And then of course he further assumes that what he imagines Christian theology to be somehow implies that aliens must be assumed to have immortal souls too for some obscure reason;
2, and that that assumption necessarily impacts Christian belief because … some unstated reason …
3, and as such (having immortal souls or personal destinies) would in principle be in need therefore – and additionally deserving of, if “in need” – of salvation … for some other unstated reason …
4, and that they necessarily therefore as aliens are not simply bundles of calculating, material world manipulating, appetition – and as aliens, as alien from us at a bare minimum as are squid or dragon flies. All this assumed too, for some reason.
Smirk here and push your glasses up your nose NASA boy.
Hell, excuse me … Heck, that fact that some human beings might have immortal souls does not even imply that all men must have immortal souls … much less that alien “life” defined as intelligent or not must be more than sacks of matter.
But of course we somehow know that “intelligent” dragon flies would mean the end of the salvation dogma, because, well, all dogs go to heaven too ,or some crap that emos like to believe.
NASA guy is probably one of the most stupid examples of a supposedly informed man I have seen in a long, long, while.
Yeah, maybe aliens would disprove Christian doctrines somehow. But not on that moron’s implicit premisses.
Rufus,
What’s your reasoning regarding a world’s tilted axis affecting intelligence?
@GB:
Without even scrolling up to read what Rufus said: Seasons!
A predictable ecology with harsh times and easy times coming around like clockwork every year selects for planning and executive function. If I don’t gather my acorns while the sun is shining and instead go fishing, I’m going to starve in February.
Smartest populations on the planet apart from a subset of those Always With Us are Northern Europeans and North-East Asians.
A predictable harsh ecology (Australia, Arabian peninsula) selects for ability to fit into a niche.
An unpredictable harsh ecology (Sub-Saharan Africa) selects for ability to breed like there’s no tomorrow. Note that it’s very difficult to starve (before modernity and its complications) in this environment — but it’s very easy to get taken out by pathogens and the wildlife. Be happy today because tomorrow who knows what could happen even if you *did* plan?
A predictably pleasant ecology (e.g. Central Thailand where can plant rice year-round and have to dodge falling mangoes, durians, coconuts) selects for about as much intelligence and executive planning function necessary to manage water rights — All the SE Asian Hindu Buddhist Deva Raja cultures were very top down for that reason. Not entirely unlike Ancient Egypt — though I imagine the Annual Nile flooding created all kinds of logistical issues which were a spur to selecting for smarts in the priestly elite.
This is all recycled Ed Dutton and Michael Woodley. Coherent, I think.
GB,
Zaphod has the gist of it, or at least a portion of it. As Zaphod writes, seasons select against those who are not good at planning and delaying gratification. I think it’s also a necessity is the mother of invention, thing. With Zaphod’s example of Central Thailand, why bother to invent anything? Your needs are met by dint of your latitude and longitude.
Zaphod,
The last 500 years or so is one thing,
and yet, those “ Northern Europeans” were the “ Barbarians” according to the ancient Romans?
In antiquity, as opposed to modern times, it seems the lands bordering the Mediterranean were on the cutting edge of technology in the West. Crossroads of civilization, technology and war….( I am not taking into account whatever was going on in ancient China.)
I realize that there are planting seasons even in Greece and Rome and Jerusalem…
Great core video and set of comments! Thanks all!
JimNorCal: thanks for the mention of Nick Lane’s The Vital Question. The Amazon reviews suggest I probably need to reread Life Ascending before buying and reading The Vital Question. Plus I need to avoid confusing Nick Lane with Nicolas Wade!
Perhaps along with repeatedly watching the videos mentioned by Snow on Pine several times to stay oriented to Lane’s discussion. Great visual effects and learning tools achieved in those videos, with great effort, I am sure.
I believe Galernter (along with Doug Axe and Stephen Meyer) are wrong in their calculations of protein forming complexity, but I am not educated enough right now to really refute their views. I suspect that the roles of catalyzing substrates, micro pores, and/or self catalyzing RNA (or RNA precursors?) has not received as much attention as it deserves.
Your needs are met by dint of your latitude and longitude.
Rufus:
Or as Jimmy Buffett sang:
_______________________________
With these changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes
Nothing remains quite the same
–Jimmy Buffett, “Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56nHBah7mdE
The earth tilting, seasonal planning contribution to intelligence seems reasonable, but let’s not forget that many animals survived seasons via hibernation, migrations, etc., based on instinctual solutions rather than frontal cortex ones.
Another candidate is the parallel development of a suitable hominid voice box, language, and the particular brain elements required to implement them all, …. clearly a major opportunity to improve survival in a predatory world.
@jon baker:
I think It’s no surprise that Western Civ kicked off around Fertile Crescent (pretty much same deal as Egypt with a bit less annual flooding) and then Med. Note that the Med is not an entirely balmy environment. You still have to make some effort with Agriculture and there is seasonality albeit not as extreme as in the Deep North. The need to deal with managing seasonal planting and harvesting and dealing with flood control is just enough of a civilizational goad without being likely to snuff everyone out before they got it sorted.
Selection for IQ was obviously going on long before the development of Agriculture (although traits can selected for deliberately or by fortuitous happenstance much faster than you might think — Where did French Bulldogs or Ashkenazi Rabbinical Dynasties, South Indian Brahmin subcastes such as the Iyers emerge from in in a blip in the fabric of evolutionary time?).
As for your ‘Barbarians’… Well Spain was Visigothic after it was Roman. Vandals in North Africa, IIRC. Arians, IRRC with priests, bishops, scribes, the works… They didn’t overrun the Roman Empire painted blue and naked.
The Vatican has been cool with aliens for some time now:
_______________________________________
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures.
–“Vatican: It’s OK to believe in aliens”
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24598508
_______________________________________
I’ve run into UFO advocates who believe Christianity would collapse if E.T. were proven.
I’ve got news — it’s pretty much already handled.
I love this thread.
Just wanted to add some observations.
I believe it was Stephen Jay Gould who noticed that over time animals seem to be getting smarter and smarter, based on the brain mass to body mass ratio. It seems to be more advantageous to be smarter in general.
I think that dinosaurs were actually on the cusp of starting civilization. Oviraptors were at least as smart as modern day parrots and crows; plus they had opposable thumbs!
They might never have become civilized because they still had pointy teeth and didn’t really need to make tools.
I also find interesting the idea that if dinosaurs did actually create a civilization, we might not ever see evidence of it. What evidence lasts after 65 million years? A car left in the woods pretty much disappears into dust after 50 years.
@jon baker:
Not inconceivable that high IQ can evolve for some environmental / group selection reasons in a particular group in a particular place and then only really burst out into prominence when introduced into more fertile soil.
Euro Ice-People Blonde Beasts (I jest) may not have invented Civilization, but once it was a going concern, they were well-positioned to take it over and (eventually) do a pretty good job of improving upon it (until recently). Contrast and compare with Islamic Conquests — it’s a bit unfair to say that all they did was strip mine the conquered cultures and run them into the ground… but in the end they didn’t do all that much and stagnated.
Since it’s Be Nice to the Ashkenazis Minute, I’m not going to use them as an example here. Instead think that South Indian Brahmins didn’t invent jack @#$% having any relevance to the world we live in at beginning of C20. Now go look at the C-Suites in Silicon Valley and it’s full of them. Their religious/cultural/marriage rules were selecting for high IQ … Once others invented computers, internet, etc… now you probably can’t stick your head outside in Sausalito without a whiff of curry on the breeze.
Rufus and Zaphod,
I suspected that would be the rationale. I agree that having to buildup a surplus to survive harsh winters necessitates certain cultural values like long range planning and delayed gratification.
As for intelligence, the data point in contradiction to that theory is that no great civilizations arose in Canada and South Africa. So longitudes 40°-50° north and south of the equator are an insufficient explanation. Plus the civilizations arising in the fertile crescent and Mediterranean contradict a cold winter climate being the determinate factor.
As Jared Diamond in “Guns, Germs and Steel” demonstrated, cross-cultural fertilization in the horizontal direction is the dominant Factor. South America and Africa are vertically oriented.
In addition, as Thomas Sowell points out neither South America or Africa have long vertically oriented rivers, the earliest path for trade and the cross-cultural fertilization that follows trade.
Oh… and De Nile is a (Vertically Oriented) River in Africa 😛 Lake Victoria is plenty Sub-Saharan.
I’d suggest you also take a look at the skinny blue lines on a map of China.
Here’s one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze
Those Inscrutable Orientals had to go and *dig* themselves a 1700km long vertical river so they wouldn’t feel uncivilized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)
At the very least there are exceptions to this hypothesis.
In a recent interview Lou Alizondo mentions being shown an account at the Vatican Library which records observations by Romans some 2,000 years ago of fiery “shields” hovering in the sky that followed Roman legions from one battle to the next.
So UFOs have been with us for a long, long time.
The bright, shining aspect of this thread is its mention of Barbara Eden. Jeannie was a wonderfully upbeat beauty, and the actress who created the character is so appropriately named. Of course the show was silly, but did this young male care? Not a whit. She is warm memory from my very happy childhood.
As for all this “life elsewhere in the cosmos” stuff, it makes me sleepy. I long ago adopted the mindset that we will all finally know the unknowable once we pass from this life . . . or we won’t. Only one way to tell and while I’m sure it will be fascinating when it happens, I hope fervently that for me it happens many years hence. Another way to put it – I hope to read much more Neo before I assume room temperature.
P.S.– Perhaps a more well known example of ancient UFO sightings is that of the “Battle of Nuremberg” from 1561.
See https://medium.com/the-mystery-box/the-strangest-day-in-human-history-ufo-battle-over-nuremberg-69d04e9e177f
Starting in, possibly, the Dakotas, northern Minnesota, and West Virginia, you can, with a shallow -draft boat get to New Orleans. With tributaries and their tributaries, that covers a lot of North America.
I like Conquests and Cultures by Sowell better than Guns, Germs and Steel. I noted on the jacket of the latter that it was going to, in some sense, strike a blow against racism. Noted some planted axioms, planted by omission/suggestion, which dodged embarrassing questions.
Been said that North America–say, the US, anyway–didn’t develop large organized polities is that it was too fat. If you didn’t like the local arrangements, you could move thirty miles and still find water and decent soil.
On Google Earth, the surface roads in grid fashion run from souther Ohio out to western Nebraska, from Montana to Texas. Plunk your viewer down on one of those roads…grain to the horizon. Even the hilly areas, much of the Old South and Appalachia, have their “coves” and valleys
If I had to believe someone about UFOs it would be Lou Alizondo, the former head of ATIP, and Chris Mellon, a former DOD Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence—the two leading well credentialed former government insiders pushing for more disclosure of information about UFOs.
These are two knowledgeable and credible people who, from all indications, certainly seem to believe that there are Aliens about.
And so do I.
Lou Alizondo has said that the two questions that ATIP, the Pentagon’s formerly secret UFO research organization he ran, was trying to answer were–1. what were the capabilities of these UFOs, and 2. what were the motive or motives behind them—why were they here, and what were they doing?
ATIP did come up with the “five observables” as a way to organize and understand the common capabilities of these UFOs, so the capabilities question has started to be answered, if not the how.
But the other major question, that of motives, has remained the question that has not been answered.
However, as Alizondo has said, as a military organization ATIP was naturally trying to determine if UFOs posed a military threat.
Science Fiction writers have given us a whole host of possible motives for aliens and their craft to be in our solar system, in our skies, on this planet Earth and increasingly, it appears, “up in our face”–some beneficent, some malevolent, and some in between.
As some view them they could be our “elder brothers,” trying to guide us along a safe path toward maturity.
Or, perhaps, we have something that they want or need, perhaps desperately so—something unique to us perhaps, or some particular element or compound, some mineral or plant, or genetic material.
Or, perhaps they have settled here, or are scouting out a place to settle.
Perhaps they are just bored and nosy, and are here observing us and our antics just for their own amusement.
Perhaps there is some sort of “Prime Directive” which allows them to observe but supposedly bans them from interfering in our development in any very visible and major way, or perhaps they are here with no other motive than to conquer and/or to enslave us, and to take whatever they want, either by subtle means of influence or persuasion, or simply by force.
Or, perhaps, as Alizondo has also hinted–given the variety of configurations, colors, behaviors, and sizes of reported craft–there are a number of different races/civilizations of ETs here, each vying with the others; each one of these races of beings pursuing their own agendas.
Alizondo has been very effective at dropping little hints in the various statements he has made, another such hint that aliens “might have been here for a very long time.” Thus, Alizondo’s reference to the ancient Roman document he was shown at the Vatican Library I referenced above.
Could Aliens have been here on the Earth for thousands or perhaps even many tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, and only just recently decided to show themselves and/or we just recently developed enough to be able to observe them?
Could these “Aliens” actually be the remnants of a high technology civilization that developed here on Earth in our deep past?
As for motive could their motives be so “alien” that we are unable to identify or to understand them?
My money is on us–here on Earth, or in our Solar System–having something that these Aliens need and want.
Snow on Pine,
I wonder if some of these UFO sightings are by creatures who dwell primarily in one of the other supposed dimensions that some of the string theorist believe may exist, but we cannot perceive with our natural senses.
That would be a kind of Sci-fi type theory.
A religious oriented theory might suggest these aliens dwell primarily in another dimension we do not normally see with our eyes. What religions might call the “ supernatural”, which is in some ways what Sci-fi calls a parallel or maybe “ out of sync” universe that is all around us but we do not normally perceive it?
As electricity first came to manufacturing, the machines, many of them, had an arc during the process. Electric arcs broadcast the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
And so we have a machine banging away with an arc every half second starting when?1880? That timing would seem artificial, possibly. How sensitive are the other guys’ SETI?
We blew various spectra all over in early radio and Morse. Then more, some fairly narrow beams starting in WW II radar. Not until sometime after that did we start blasting huge energies out into space, looking for missiles and so forth.
Going back to my hypothetical machine arcs, that’s 140 years, a radius. So we have a sphere of artificially modulated radiation(s) nearly three hundred light years across. If you wait until anti missile radar, say maybe 130 light years across.
Covers a lot of cubic.
Problem is, if C is a limit and there’s no way to get around it a la the scifi guys’ “hyperdrive”.
In terms of who gets smart and who doesn’t, the point is whether you can use your brain well enough that it pays for itself and a little over.
The late F&SF writer Poul Anderson posited a civilization of centaur-like critters talking some human friends about how much tougher it was to go hi-tech if you can’t scamper around like monkeys. For example, how would you build, much less sail,a sailing ship if nobody can get higher than standing on the deck. Yeah. Run blocks up there…..to haul on. And if a rope comes loose? And….
Perhaps the Aliens synthesize an immortality drug from something found only in human rectums.
In evidence, I offer this Independence Day clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdhuAYlHVO0