SF writes: I’m reading Benedict XVI’s “In the Beginning” and he said something that has me thinking. According to Monod, there is in the universe not only necessity but also chance. As Christians we would go further and say that there is freedom. In any event, Monod indicates that two realities in particular did not have to exist but could have existed. One of these is life. According to the laws of physics, it could have evolved but did not have to. Indeed, he adds that it was highly unlikely that it would have come about; the mathematical probability was close to zero. Thus one may well assume that this development—the occurrence of life—happened only once, and that this one time was on our earth.
I heard once this idea. UFOs' observation stories are a cover-up story by the Government. There are weird events out there that they don't know what they are (natural, perhaps a potential catastrophe, perhaps an attack?) and, like all governments, they feel the existential urge to protect themselves. If people realized how little the people in power know about anything, their existence would be in peril. So, they create a myth, as always. To distract, to cause fear, or to cause awe and submission. That would help to preserve power, they reckon.
But the refusal to acknowledge a potential real danger (like the planet suddenly becoming flat, thus destroying both real estate equity and the powerful printed maps industry) means that the Politicians are, once again, creating an existential risk for everyone, simply because of their pathetic need to be in charge. The promotion of ignorance is a risky business.
This has obvious political implications.
But I like to take the most controversial hypothesis, the one that would make most people the angriest, like, assume God is, politically, a centrist.
Like centrists, He would like for people to kill each other less and to rob each other less, but who is he to judge, right? That would be radical attitude, untoward to his Dignity, because Centrist politics starts from the hope that one day most people may just spontaneously choose to not be idiots.
Centrism applied to UFOs means that it's best to just wait to see what happens, and hope the budget does not get too unbalanced next year. It would be nice to have a favorable interest rate on the debt, but we can't always have anything we want, we have to be realists and honor the lustful desires of the Accountants.
Therefore, a Centrist Creator of everything would prefer to remain inconspicuously ambiguous about doing anything about potential risks or being perceived as a political radical who is too sure about any belief in any domain of knowledge. (My blood pressure is raising as I write all this nonsense.)
It's not that God punishes us with bad politicians for our sins. No. It's that he blesses us with the liberty of obeying devils or follow the narrow path of sanctity. Why would anyone need a third way?
As for UFOs, I think that's just the result of domestic psyop overcapacity, and various branches of US and foreign governments screwing around.
The exciting thing about Robin Hanson's thesis that we're alone because we're the first is that we can become the Lovecraftian Elder Gods. Let's get to it people! We have Stargates to build, dangerous technologies to leave fragments of about, cities to build and leave in ruins across galaxies. We can do that for a few millions years then mysteriously disappear when we get bored. Let's make the universe strange and exciting for those who come after us.
I've said it before and will say it again... "If aliens appear on earth and they do not immediately visit a Eucharistic Adoration Chapel ... they're demons."
I'm struggling to understand. What could possibly be difficult for God to do, achieve, create? How could "factors" as defined by our little minds -- such as time, space/distance, chemistry, biology in its entirety -- how could such notions pose any challenges or obstacles to God? Even in the slightest? Asking for a friend.
I got no materialist arguments, only theological ones.
I reject the term "universe" as being self-referential ("everything we can detect") and therefore retarded.
I prefer the term "creations", and posit that a God that created over 200 kinds of nematodes and billions of galaxies each with billions of stars, probably has created other creations.
“This leads us to the Fermi “paradox”, which says that if life did arise elsewhere, then where are they? “
This sounds a lot like equating absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Yet a moment’s careful reflection can easily provide grist for the mill of logic to disprove their equivalence.
At least partially tangentially, and for theological reasons, I believe that the universe is necessarily and literally teeming with life. Those reasons have to do with why God created finite reality in the first place.
God is infinite, eternal and universal, and therefore changeless — absolute. This implies God’s changelessness and thus His perfection. But a changeless God cannot, directly, experience the process of becoming perfect, for He is existential and thus there is no time when He was not and no time when he was less than perfect.
The existence of finite reality (time and space) implies the existence of infinite potential — potential for the reunification of the bifurcation of primordial reality into personal (or personalizable) values and non-personal pattern (energy) through the ministry of mind. This reunification requires incomprehensibly vast numbers of infinitesimal reunifiers (personal existences) and is any undertaking extending to the boundaries of an infinite eternity and an eternal infinity.
This is a very high-level sketch, but it’s all I can practically fit into a comment on a blog.
Robin Hanson's grabby Aliens paper is the best reasoning on this to date, where absence is evidence of Aliens is in fact evidence of absence. Worth a read. There are multiple hard steps to get to intelligent life (biogenesis, multicellularity, etc.) and we're early in the age the universe where things are calm enough to allow getting thorough all the steps. It also implies that there are many, many planets with life at various stages but exponentially fewer at each step. As for other intelligent life nearby or here already, unlikely. And Aliens will be alien in motivation, in behaviour. There will be no United federation of planets with humanoids furnished only by cosmetic differences all speaking English. I like Stanislaw Lem's idea on this as expressed in Solaris and His Master's Voice.
I can imagine my 9th grade history teacher, Mr. Novotny, reading this article, and shouting: "Mackerel-Snapping Philosophy!" It was said that in Korea he jumped on a grenade. Nobody said if it went off or not.
After reading Rare Earth, I agreed with the author's conclusion that the probability of other complex life forms in the Universe...is very close to zero.
Having read "The Three Body Problem" series, I'm completely baffled by the folks trying to contact aliens. They all believe in evolution (or it is likely so), and in nature red in tooth and claw. All these aliens are therefore going to be the top predator, and if capable of interstellar travel, will be looking for new space, or new food - in otherwords, conquistadors.
The 3BP solution of a dark forest, where you either hide from the predators or become one yourself seems to be a likely case, assuming evolution works out there as it is assumed to work here.
I lean towards the universe having abundant life, including intelligent life, but this is course is really no more than a gut feeling combined with a sort of aesthetic preference.
Proving the total absence of other life in the cosmos, given its scale in time and space, along with the possibilities of exotic forms such as life living on the crusts of neutron stars or whatever, is of course quite impossible. Meaning that astrobiology is not strictly speaking a scientific question, according to the Popperian criterion of falsifiability at least.
I like sci fiction, but I don’t believe in aliens. No evidence that I can see. But I know that my redeemer lives. ❤️🎶
I heard once this idea. UFOs' observation stories are a cover-up story by the Government. There are weird events out there that they don't know what they are (natural, perhaps a potential catastrophe, perhaps an attack?) and, like all governments, they feel the existential urge to protect themselves. If people realized how little the people in power know about anything, their existence would be in peril. So, they create a myth, as always. To distract, to cause fear, or to cause awe and submission. That would help to preserve power, they reckon.
But the refusal to acknowledge a potential real danger (like the planet suddenly becoming flat, thus destroying both real estate equity and the powerful printed maps industry) means that the Politicians are, once again, creating an existential risk for everyone, simply because of their pathetic need to be in charge. The promotion of ignorance is a risky business.
This has obvious political implications.
But I like to take the most controversial hypothesis, the one that would make most people the angriest, like, assume God is, politically, a centrist.
Like centrists, He would like for people to kill each other less and to rob each other less, but who is he to judge, right? That would be radical attitude, untoward to his Dignity, because Centrist politics starts from the hope that one day most people may just spontaneously choose to not be idiots.
Centrism applied to UFOs means that it's best to just wait to see what happens, and hope the budget does not get too unbalanced next year. It would be nice to have a favorable interest rate on the debt, but we can't always have anything we want, we have to be realists and honor the lustful desires of the Accountants.
Therefore, a Centrist Creator of everything would prefer to remain inconspicuously ambiguous about doing anything about potential risks or being perceived as a political radical who is too sure about any belief in any domain of knowledge. (My blood pressure is raising as I write all this nonsense.)
It's not that God punishes us with bad politicians for our sins. No. It's that he blesses us with the liberty of obeying devils or follow the narrow path of sanctity. Why would anyone need a third way?
i'm too biased. but what i see is decay. and i don't see life coming out of decay / cooling / slowing
of energy levels.
and however life got on this planet, life isn't going to exist here once the sun turns into a red giant.
As for UFOs, I think that's just the result of domestic psyop overcapacity, and various branches of US and foreign governments screwing around.
The exciting thing about Robin Hanson's thesis that we're alone because we're the first is that we can become the Lovecraftian Elder Gods. Let's get to it people! We have Stargates to build, dangerous technologies to leave fragments of about, cities to build and leave in ruins across galaxies. We can do that for a few millions years then mysteriously disappear when we get bored. Let's make the universe strange and exciting for those who come after us.
I call Cthulhu!
I've said it before and will say it again... "If aliens appear on earth and they do not immediately visit a Eucharistic Adoration Chapel ... they're demons."
I'm struggling to understand. What could possibly be difficult for God to do, achieve, create? How could "factors" as defined by our little minds -- such as time, space/distance, chemistry, biology in its entirety -- how could such notions pose any challenges or obstacles to God? Even in the slightest? Asking for a friend.
I got no materialist arguments, only theological ones.
I reject the term "universe" as being self-referential ("everything we can detect") and therefore retarded.
I prefer the term "creations", and posit that a God that created over 200 kinds of nematodes and billions of galaxies each with billions of stars, probably has created other creations.
That's all I got.
“This leads us to the Fermi “paradox”, which says that if life did arise elsewhere, then where are they? “
This sounds a lot like equating absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Yet a moment’s careful reflection can easily provide grist for the mill of logic to disprove their equivalence.
At least partially tangentially, and for theological reasons, I believe that the universe is necessarily and literally teeming with life. Those reasons have to do with why God created finite reality in the first place.
God is infinite, eternal and universal, and therefore changeless — absolute. This implies God’s changelessness and thus His perfection. But a changeless God cannot, directly, experience the process of becoming perfect, for He is existential and thus there is no time when He was not and no time when he was less than perfect.
The existence of finite reality (time and space) implies the existence of infinite potential — potential for the reunification of the bifurcation of primordial reality into personal (or personalizable) values and non-personal pattern (energy) through the ministry of mind. This reunification requires incomprehensibly vast numbers of infinitesimal reunifiers (personal existences) and is any undertaking extending to the boundaries of an infinite eternity and an eternal infinity.
This is a very high-level sketch, but it’s all I can practically fit into a comment on a blog.
“Any undertaking” should have read “an undertaking”. This error was the work of Briggs’ enemies, who are also my enemies.
This is the way.
Robin Hanson's grabby Aliens paper is the best reasoning on this to date, where absence is evidence of Aliens is in fact evidence of absence. Worth a read. There are multiple hard steps to get to intelligent life (biogenesis, multicellularity, etc.) and we're early in the age the universe where things are calm enough to allow getting thorough all the steps. It also implies that there are many, many planets with life at various stages but exponentially fewer at each step. As for other intelligent life nearby or here already, unlikely. And Aliens will be alien in motivation, in behaviour. There will be no United federation of planets with humanoids furnished only by cosmetic differences all speaking English. I like Stanislaw Lem's idea on this as expressed in Solaris and His Master's Voice.
I can imagine my 9th grade history teacher, Mr. Novotny, reading this article, and shouting: "Mackerel-Snapping Philosophy!" It was said that in Korea he jumped on a grenade. Nobody said if it went off or not.
https://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387952896
After reading Rare Earth, I agreed with the author's conclusion that the probability of other complex life forms in the Universe...is very close to zero.
Having read "The Three Body Problem" series, I'm completely baffled by the folks trying to contact aliens. They all believe in evolution (or it is likely so), and in nature red in tooth and claw. All these aliens are therefore going to be the top predator, and if capable of interstellar travel, will be looking for new space, or new food - in otherwords, conquistadors.
The 3BP solution of a dark forest, where you either hide from the predators or become one yourself seems to be a likely case, assuming evolution works out there as it is assumed to work here.
I lean towards the universe having abundant life, including intelligent life, but this is course is really no more than a gut feeling combined with a sort of aesthetic preference.
Proving the total absence of other life in the cosmos, given its scale in time and space, along with the possibilities of exotic forms such as life living on the crusts of neutron stars or whatever, is of course quite impossible. Meaning that astrobiology is not strictly speaking a scientific question, according to the Popperian criterion of falsifiability at least.
Any other life that does exist is avoiding Clown World for obvious reasons.