You may not have meant this by your comment, but in general I find a related analysis common among atheists, that religious people believe what they do because it feels good. I find that's often wrong, and when generally applied condescending, as if atheists are simply more emotionally mature. On the contrary many religious people will tell you they believe what they do because it seems to them to be true.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
One might consider the existence of the universe extraordinary evidence (for the existence of God).
That said I think we can mostly agree that based on what we know so far, "aliens" is a fairly implausible explanation for any given unexplained phenomenon. Where ever you fall on that debate, I don't think it has anything to do with religious beliefs except as far as the biases of the people who conduct these psychology studies goes.
Albert Einstein was once asked to clarify his faith, here is his reply:
“Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.”
I read this often and maintain the attitude that scripture, science, art are all branches of the same Tree.
Have you considered that having a tree where one of the branches lets you believe things based on little, bad, or no evidence, and those beliefs are then unable to be challenged, which leads to you being able to make laws based on those beliefs, is not a great idea? I sure wouldn't eat an apple from that tree!
This applies to all of the most visible proselytizers of religion, politics, economics, operating systems, and text editors, among others.
But we have 4.543 billion years worth of evidence showing that life REALLY likes to live. To get from a single celled organism to me typing to you over the internet tells me there's probably something universal to this process.
To me it's a lot more "Main Character Syndrome" to suggest we are wholly unique and alone in the universe. We are the special chosen species that made it out of an infinite number of probabilities. Sounds insane.
Intelligence as we commonly refer to it is not a given in evolution. Evolution seeks forward propagation of genetic material, it doesn't seek an "intelligent" state.
It's reasonable to assume there is life elsewhere in the universe. It's quite a bit more of a stretch to assume there is _intelligent_ life elsewhere in the universe, aside from the problem of defining what intelligence is.
There are an estimated 8.7 million species on earth. The common interpretation of intelligence puts the ratio of intelligent-to-non-intelligent species we know of at about 1:8,700,000. Nothing I've seen in the literature on evolution suggests that evolution will lead to intelligence under than definition. Mammals led to humans, and only after the dinosaurs were wiped out by a mass extinction event.
So while I can't say for sure that intelligent life is more or less common at a universal scale, it makes far more sense to assume the rest of the universe and the mechanics of evolution are consistent with what we see on Earth. I don't think we'd be that unique in the cosmos, which seems to me to be an egotistical thing to think, anyway.
Or maybe it happens all the time. But with only one sample, we have no data either way.
Sure we do, that one instance of life pushes the needle in favor of life. A fun exercise is to imagine or visualize the concept of nothingness, as far as you can take it. Eventually you realize even the "idea of nothingness" negates the meaning of "nothingness." You reach a paradox in awareness that you're incapable of resolving because to do so would mean the idea didn't exist in the first place. Applying it to life, the existence of life negates the existence of no-life, and increases the probability in our favor.
Functionally I think life is more commonplace than anyone realizes, and we're probably just incapable of understanding life outside of our perception of reality.
Given that life exists, here are two possibilities: life is common but we just haven't seen other life yet, or life is unique and necessarily we're it. Since those two possibilities look exactly the same to us, what data can we have to prefer either one?
If we ever did see other life, then we could be confident that it's everywhere. But without seeing it, we don't know. We can only guess, according to our personal preferences.
In fact, I'd go further. Compared to not looking at all, looking for life and not finding it increases the likelihood that we're alone. Maybe not by that much, since astronomy isn't all that good yet, but the more we look without finding, the more rare we'll know life to be.
Humans evince resistance to an obvious reality, we can't know what is unknowable, that is to say, that which we are incapable of experiencing. I can't know what another person experiences let alone some living entity built according to some alternate template.
Logic dictates a conclusion that other life likely exists in the universe. Also the odds favor that we can't know what it is given the intrinsic limits to what humans are capable of knowing.
But if you accept that the Dyson Swarms are a likely outcome then we have a while bunch of negative data points in systems within even thousands of light years of us.
That then brings into focus the hypothesis about Dyson Swarm. Such a thing can be built incrementally, requires no material stronger than stainless steel and requires no energy tech beyond solar power. It is a massive engineering challenge to be sure but not requiring new physics is significant.
This doesn't account for the fact that you don't know what - if any - benefits do exotic materials and funky physics might bring if they exist and are feasible to exploit. The benefits might be so much larger than Dyson Swarms, that it would be wastful\unnecessary to use Dyson Swarms, except maybe as a hobby or as a low tech fallback for civilizations like camping enthusiasts and survivalists. Why bother with stars when you have tech to live in the 21 dimensions that those born-yesterday biologicals can't even sense yet ?
The Dyson 'Paradox' doesn't strike me as much of a paradox, imagine if a group of ants looked at the sky and wondered why aren't extraterrestials building tunnels inside the moon's regolith like ants do on Earth. It's just assuming too much. It's of course a valid scenario, it just isn't the only one.
You seem keen to make fun of dogmatic people but attaching a hypothetical concept which is so trivial and fringe to your mental model seems like pretty dogmatic behavior. If you’d never heard of a Dyson Swarm, like the vast, vast majority of people haven’t, would your view of extraterrestrial life have significantly changed?
The problem as I see it with this area is it's been far too stigmatised, so no researchers would ever dare touch it for fear of being labelled conspiracy theory believing nutcases. That sentiment is now dying off thankfully and we can start to find out what on earth is going on.
Why are you convinced by a hobbyist with no academic background? He is a retired video game programmer.
We don't have extraordinary evidence therefore it's not possible that it's anything weird doesn't seem very scientific.
Because there isn't sufficient evidence to open them in the first place. Might as well claim it is unicorns and dragons, you don't have any evidence it isn't.
The process isn't hey look at that, must be aliens.
Relative to what? Other pilots who fly the same aircraft? All fighter jet pilots in the Navy? All pilots of all types of navy aircraft?
> Simply putting your head in the sand or attempting to debunk this documented phenomena with patently absurd explanations like "a lens flare" or "it was only Venus" isn't good enough for thoughtful people.
So yeah I'm nitpicking that the poster inserted an invented fact that these were the Navy's "top pilots" to support their position while being a dismissive jerk.
He or she deserves no better.
I don't think it is an invented fact. Top is ambiguous and has to refer to >50 percentile at a minimum. A commander of a squadron of f18s in the navy that graduated the navy's top gun program is most definitely above the 50th percentile (I would argue he would be in a very elite group of pilots that is much better than just half of others).
I definitely don't support condescending comments, but you too were dismissive.
There are multiple plausible hypothesis to explain these things, just dismissing the whole conversation as not worth discussing or being impossible seems very unscientific.
The thing that bothers me the most about this sort of discussions is that it's all done on "paper"[1]. It would be helpful to actually release a balloon, or whatever object you think it was, and check if you can reproduce the glare and other sensor data.
If it's very easy to reproduce then we can be more confident in that explanation and probably nail down more detailed characteristics of that object. Once we have that we can look where this object could've come from. For example, if it points to a balloon, did a company/organization lose a balloon in that time frame? Once we have all this info we would have an explanation that's more robust than someone saying: "It might be possible this and potentially that"
This requires money, time and the hardware. So I guess it's unlikely that will ever happen.
[1] Not saying it's useless. Those calculations and/or simulations are very useful to limit the types of objects it could be.
It's very normal to not be able to prove what caused an event. This morning I heard a sound, it sounded pretty much exactly like a car horn, but maybe it was something else. We'll probably never know.
It's an excellent point that any organization serious about determining the cause would be conducting experiments, I can go honk some car horns and see if I find one that sounds similar. It doesn't seem like that happens with "UAP research", or the US Navy
There’s still a huge engineering gap between our current tech and the theoretical possibility of a Dyson Swarm. I don’t find it at all implausible that such a thing would need too much energy, effort, collective will, or some other resource, to make it practical. There could still be plenty of stealthy sub-Dyson civilizations, or even supra-Dyson civilizations that have found it in their interest not to be detectable.
Robin Hanson has the most plausible ET hypothesis to explain these UFO observations. Basically it goes:
1) Life only evolved once in the galaxy.
2) However it spread to one or more stars its system of origin through the process of panspermia.
3) This sister planet that shares a common life origin with us evolved an advanced civilization that predates ours by 10-100 million years.
4) However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres, this sister civilization developed a highly anti-growth world government.
5) They've sent local probes or outposts to study us because we're interesting as a sister branch in the tree of life, and also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms.
This explains why we have spacefaring ETs poking around but no resource gobbling Dyson spheres expanding through the light clone. If civilizations were widespread, then almost certainly one would be gobbling resources. But if there are only two civilizations, ours and theirs, it's quite believable that the earlier of the two fell into an anti-growth world government.
The very early universe was relatively warm. Simple or even complex life could've evolved and spread through parts of the Universe with relative ease given the much shorter distances. It seems highly unlikely though given the rarity of metals (in the astronomical sense; meaning anything other than hydrogen and helium) and the likely needed timescales. This probably means at best it was organic molecules of some level of complexity.
There are later versions of this where panspermia occurred much more recently, either intentionally or not.
Whatever the case it's all unprovable speculation. If we ultimately the same unlikely patterns repeating on different wrolds then I guess we can revisit.
So how recent in this hypothesis did this occur? There are fossil records for people going back millions of years. Are we talking all life? Or just people? If it's all life then we need to go back billions of years, at which point we're just talking about spreading amino acids. Such a connection will be similar to our fraternal bond with bananas.
> However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres
This seems unlikely. Why? Because the tech for a Dyson Swarm is basically stainless steel, solar panels and the ability to build things in space in large quantities. The last one is significant of course but is largely gated on the high cost of getting things into orbit, which is something likely to plummet in the coming centuries.
Saying we could build a self-sustaining orbital within 1,000 years I don't think is a stretch. Only industrial scale separates building 1 and building a million.
But there's another problem: people often neglect the energy cost of interstellar travel. It's... massive. And this is even assuming you solve the reaction mass problem. Interstellar travel almost seems predicated on a Dyson Swarm simpsly to have sufficient energy.
> ... also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms.
This is a well-trodden avenue of thought on the Fermi Paradox. What if alien civilizations just stop growing? If there's 1, sure that might be possible. But what if there were 1,000? Would they all follow this path? It gets increasingly unlikely that not one would grow significantly. Non-growth civilizations would be at an extreme disadvantage with another who has vastly more energy and matter at their disposal. Like you almost have to grow just in case someone else does.
But all of this just seems like highly selective curve overfitting to reach the desired conclusion that UFOs are alien in origin.
It is, and I cannot stress this enough, entirely unhelpful for you to ascribe it to main character syndrome or compare it to the belief in an omnipotent God.
If sources of truth in human societies like governments and scientific institutions would stop lying or misleading people nearly constantly then you could call conspiracy people lunatics, or fringe. But you simply cannot.
Not only are people being lied to, but they are being actively disinformed for "their own good." There are massive socializing forces that have taken an active role in manipulating society based around the idea that they know better.
And the ironic part is that, to a degree, they do know better. People act stupid in groups and have important information WITHHELD for various reasons that make it impossible to discern the truth.
If you want to start minimizing the amount of bullshit beliefs that people hold, supernatural or otherwise, you can start by tearing down the systems that are used to create false narratives which push people into those beliefs.
It seems like the tendency to accept a higher power in control of your life and the world leads to believing in other earthly powers being able to exert vast control over the world.
But seriously, I assume all these types of people have this sort of localized, my-version-is-the-right-version theories, since they do the exact same thing with their religion.
Dyson Swarms are only plausible if your society is still stuck in an exponential growth mode. It assumes technological advancement, but stagnant sociological development, or perhaps even worse; pathological development, like a hegemonising swarm.
I think that many UFO theories make the same mistakes. They assume high tech aliens with low tech motives.
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way
The fact that we can come up with the idea of a Dyson Swarm doesn't mean that not finding any in our observations results in we "being alone in the galaxy". It's also Main Character Syndrome, in a way.
Even discarding the idea of alien life being so different from ours that we wouldn't recognize it even if we were looking right at it, and assuming a "human like civilization", it's perfectly possible for there being unknown physics to us that make the idea of a Dyson Swarm unnecessary. Using our own civilization as an example, in the 1950s and 60s we did all of our data broadcasting over radio waves, and built huge powerful antennas that screamed about our presence to the wider universe. People then thought "well, if we're broadcasting all this stuff, where are the alien broadcasts? why can't we hear them? we must be alone in the galaxy". Fast-forward to now. Our current tech allows pretty much all communications to be over cables, and we're being much less wasteful with our emmiting; our radio emissions are diminishing over time.
So, not a century has passed, and already newer technology has proven our assumptions of alien life wrong. Why would it be any different with Dyson Swarms? You can't know how more advanced technology looks like, you can only extrapolate with what we have now.
Since we haven't been able to build such a thing I think it's fair to say it requires something or other that's exotic to us.
What I do find interesting is the overlap between people who buy into various conspiracy theories and people who are religious, were religious or would otherwise be likely to be religious.
There’s some fascinating psychology here and I think it boils down to a combination of wishful thinking and the comfort derived from there being a Grand Plan rather than just a collection of random stuff that just happens.
“Can’t be explained” is typically “hasn’t been explained yet”. Lack of an explanation is nothing more than that. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I approach this from the other direction. Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way and even if we aren’t it requires an awful lot of hubris to suggest a species would spend the considerable effort and tens of thousands of years to come here and hide.
Like this is Main Character Syndrome at its finest.