I think the faith part comes in because we obviously don't have any concrete proof of intelligent life visiting earth. We have some good observations from legit sources, but no smoking gun that we know of at at least. So then you have to look at the numbers -- in our normal little solar system we have a vast biological wonderland here on earth with intelligent space faring humans ruling the roost. In addition there is a strong probability that there is also some sort of life on Mars, Europa, Io, Titan, and several others. So in our very typical solar system there is an abundance of life including self aware intelligent beings taking their first short journeys off the planet. Using our galaxy alone it is then statistically impossible that there are not other intelligent beings far in advance of us that have figured out how to travel across interstellar space. Why wouldn't some of them be interested in studying our world just as we study the Amazon or the deep waters of the Pacific ? If we can keep from destroying ourselves at our current technology expansion rate interstellar travel is not that far off. Can you imagine what we will be capable of in a thousand years ... ten thousand ?
this logic, while i'm in agreement with you, is a lot like the logic that supports intelligent design theories.
I think ID leaves open that possibility. It doesn't describe the creator, it just suggests there was design in putting it all together.
As I understand it, ID says, with relation to the universe, that the variables to sustain life and even the universe as we understand it are so many and the margins of error so small that there must have been some intelligence in its design...which implies some sort of creator. What I hear you saying, and I hear UFO people say all the time, is that there are soooo many planets out there in the universe that there must be life out there somewhere. Those seem to be borrowing from the same brand of logic, as I see it. I don't wanna ruin the thread, though.
It's inverted. One says, we're so unique that the probability is so small it implies god! The other says we are so not unique there is a high probability of other life. Not the same.
Wait...there are different "schools" of ID. Some come out of biology. That would be like the ones you're mentioning...though I don't know they'd limit a creator to creating life on only one planet. Frankly, i don't think i've ever read any commentary like that. They just say that the single cell is far more complex than originally thought...so the idea that we moved from pure simplicity to complexity starts to fall down a little bit when we discover that. But ID talkers/thinkers who come out of physics and cosmology talk about forces of gravity and how tiny tweaks one way or the other make it so that life is insustainable...or cosmological constants where if tweaked to a 100 million billionth place, the universe would fly apart or if tweaked a 100 million billionth the other direction the universe would collapse...or the strong nuclear force where if its tweaked by 1 part in 10 thousand billion the whole universe is hydrogen. SOOOOO...from that data they infer intelligence. Because the chances seem too ridiculous to them to assume it was an accident. And that very same thread of logic is applied to aliens by UFO-ologists. That the numbers are sooo great, that to them it seems nearly impossible that there's not life out there somewhere. Some will say more than just "some life" and say that it must be overflowing with life. It's guessing based on numbers. It's inferring more than we can see by looking at numbers. I'm not arguing with either side. I just find the logic to be similar if not exactly the same.
Max, 1) The "small probability" touted by ID advocates may not be that small, given the enormous amount of mass, time, interactions, etc. The "large probabilites might imply more life elsewhere" argument mitigates the ID argument, to a certain extent. Think of it like this: a) It take 10,000 things to go perfectly right to make a cell! b) These 10,000 things have the potential to have happened 1 billion times. 2) Fundamentally, the difference in logic is not to do with the probabilities, but with the conclusions. "ludicrously small probability" as a (poor and non-falsifiable) quantitative argument for god is not the same as saying "life could be elsewhere because the universe is so vast."
Saying they use the same type of logic is not saying that they arrive at the same quality conclusions. I hope you know me well enough by now to know I'm not trying to prove the existence of God to you with some scientific argument. I don't give a damn about that. Really. It just seems to me that both groups are looking at numbers and probabilities and inferring something unknown from those numbers and probabilities. I'm not telling you God exists by saying that. I'm not telling you aliens don't exist. I'm not arriving at any conclusions...just looking at the logic used by both groups and I find them to be remarkably similar.
Some questions: If we know there are aliens out there with the capability to destroy earth at any given moment (even though they consider us too insignificant to care at the moment), would the world politics change at all? Would there be more true cooperations? Would people really care?
Fair enough. I'd argue that "inferring something unknown" is a rather poor way to describe a postulation that life could exist elsewhere in the universe, but it's all semantics, and as you pointed out, silly.
Let's not go there. I kick ass in starcraft. =]. But yeah, u guys are funny. the posts on if the aliens were gay were hilarious. thanks for the laugh. I also agree that they are either government aircrafts or actual aliens. I've watched a lot of history channel and discovery channel on this subject and I must say that I think they are actual aliens. If the U.S. Government had such technology, I'm sure humanity would be enslaved.
You should base zero conclusions on any topic from anything the History Channel presents! Seriously. I love love love the History Channel. Wildly entertaining. But being objective isn't entertaining.
I've been told that but I'm still young and naive. Also, I base it on the many episodes of alien sightings they report all over the world, not what "experts" believe. Either way, there have been countless "witnesses and victims" that date back to the early 1900s and because of that, I do think it's proof something out of the ordinary is going on...and I want to go with actual aliens...it makes me feel safer.
good point. if we don't get it together i don't think the vulcans will be willing to make first contact, despite what star trek says. i think the real key is if spock believes in ID or evolution.
My guess is that governments think the people will panic, and that governments will collapse. Maybe all this slow leak of info is to lesson the blow when all is revealed. DD
Look at a full moon, and then consider that when Hubble looks through a FOV 1/10 that size, there are an estimated 150,000 stars for every human on Earth that can be seen in that tiny slice of sky. That's only what can be seen with 80's technology, there are likely many more than that. Life might be a miracle, but if you spend some time trying to comprehend these numbers.... it seems to me impossible that the miracle of life hasn't happened many times over. Probably within every single speck of sky, and yet probably not anywhere near us. Each speck is a galaxy like our own Milky Way, which has an estimated 200 Billion stars.
