Matthew Yglesias » UFO Conspiracy Theories More Popular Than Congressional GOP

Oct 21st, 2009 at 9:16 am

UFO Conspiracy Theories More Popular Than Congressional GOP

The numbers on the public option in the new WaPo/ABC poll got all the press yesterday, but there’s other interesting stuff. For example, just 19 percent of the country trusts congressional Republicans to make good decisions:

Confidence in Obama is not sky-high, but confidence in the opposition is rock-bottom. By way of contrast, 37 percent of the population believes the US government has had secret contact with extra-terrestrials.

Comments
47

47 Responses to “UFO Conspiracy Theories More Popular Than Congressional GOP”

Craig Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 9:23 am
Sadly it appears that UFO conspiracy theories are more popular than Congressional Democrats too.
DTM Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 9:27 am
The conventional wisdom, including as expressed by Matt, was that blanket opposition to Obama’s agenda was a good political bet for the Republicans. I continue to question that conventional wisdom, and think instead they are harming themselves greatly by failing to take the steps necessary to rebuild their brand.

That said, as several astute commentators have pointed out, despite their unpopularity, the GOP may make modest gains in the upcoming 2009 and 2010 elections on the strength of an enthusiasm gap plus continued economic woes. I also continue to think, however, that would be the worst thing that could happen to the Republicans, since it will likely just cause them to double down on their current strategy.

And every year that goes by, another group of young people comes into political consciousness thinking the Republicans just fundamentally suck. In general, see here for how the Republicans are doing in terms of Party ID.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 9:30 am
I hate how this is used as a comparison!

Obviously, UFO contact suffers from a lack of hard evidence. But that doesn’t mean it’s a ridiculous prospect. People conflate the jokers who think there’s proof of a massive conspiracy with people who say that it’s extremely rational to think that there is intelligent extraterrestrial life, and that it’s entirely plausible they’ve been to Earth.

I don’t know – just a pet peeve of mine. People who overstate the UFO case are obviously wrong to do so, but it’s frustrating to see belief in UFO’s paraded around as an example of “the crazy people”.

Something weird and inexplicable did really happen at Roswell. Something secret is going on at Area 51. If you take it farther than that and claim that you know it’s aliens vs. weapons testing vs. something else, then you are starting to get irrational. But if you’re open to the prospect of alien contact because you realize that it would be surprising if there WASN’T extraterrestrial life out there, that doesn’t deserve to be ridiculed.

Some day we will make contact with extraterrestrial life. For all I know it happened fifty years ago in New Mexico. Or it may happen 100 years from now. Or it may have to wait for 1,000 years from now. But the prospect of extraterrestrial contact is not irrational. Indeed, I’d argue that the refusal to take extraterrestrial contact seriously is irrational.
MP Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 9:44 am
I don’t have much “Confidnece” in things that don’t spell confidence correctly. Also, the trend to compare policy support to UFO beliefs is just cheap and debases legitimate conversation.
chris Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 9:57 am
Something weird and inexplicable did really happen at Roswell.

Only if you think a military SNAFU followed by ass-covering and stonewalling is “weird and inexplicable”. If you think it’s the military’s SOP, then there’s nothing weird about Roswell at all (except the amount of attention that has been paid to it).

Everyone in the last couple of days has seen fairly good, close-up footage of a shiny high-altitude balloon (which didn’t actually have a child in it). What would that same balloon, or a similar balloon, look like if you were seeing it from farther away, or in uncertain light? Or remembering decades after the fact what you had seen from far away in uncertain light?

The idea that the government is keeping secrets and putting out smokescreens to cover those secrets is perfectly reasonable, but the idea that those secrets have anything to do with extraterrestrial life is groundless. Secret military R&D is a more boring, but also more believable, explanation of the same events.
Phaedrus Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 9:59 am
So how low do the numbers have to go before people start considering the creation of a truly “progessive” party?
Njorl Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:01 am
Belief that there is probably extraterrestrial intelligent life that could have conceivably visited Earth is not the same as a belief that such visits occurred and the federal government is covering them up. One is reasonable, the other is whacko.
Christopher Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:06 am
People are more likely to claim to have wacky opinions when those opinions are irrelevant. It’s like belief in Astrology or Bigfoot or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Many people (for good reason) just don’t really take those survey questions seriously. It doesn’t *matter,* practically speaking, if I believe the government hides UFOs. You know that, I know that, and everybody else should know that. But it *does* matter if I trust Republicans to make the right decisions for the country’s future. The juxtaposition of these two opinion questions is just really really bad methodology.
les Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:07 am
Someone needs to explain that aliens poll to me — specifically how 54 percent of respondents believe intelligent life exists outside Earth, but somehow 64 percent believe aliens have contacted humans.

Among the answers I would except are “10 percent believe in aliens that only live on Earth now and nowhere else,” and “Mark Penn conducted the poll.”
Christopher Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:10 am
Someone needs to explain that aliens poll to me — specifically how 54 percent of respondents believe intelligent life exists outside Earth, but somehow 64 percent believe aliens have contacted humans.

Evidence supporting my comment at #8. The first belief is more plausible than the second, so more people actually try to give an honest answer to it.
Edward, the mad shirt grinder Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:16 am
If aliens have ever been anywhere in Earth’s vicinity, they got here by means of super-advanced technology beyond our comprehension that allows them to traverse vast distances. So the idea that they crashed (at Roswell, or anywhere on Earth) just doesn’t make any sense.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:23 am
Chris -
I’d agree that most UFOs are military tests. I don’t want you to misunderstand me.

But that doesn’t make extraterrestrials or extraterrestrial contact implausible or irrational. The lack of evidence SHOULD prevent people from making strong declarative statements either way. We just don’t know and so we have no grounds to be declarative.

The point is, anyone that accepts evolutionary biology would be crazy to think that there aren’t alien civilizations. Unfortunately, such a belief is dismissed out of hand, and I think that’s unfortunate.
Why oh why Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:26 am
What is the percentage of people who believe an extra-terrestrial divinity talked to a bearded dude at the top of a mountain, a few thousands years ago?
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:28 am
If aliens have ever been anywhere in Earth’s vicinity, they got here by means of super-advanced technology beyond our comprehension that allows them to traverse vast distances. So the idea that they crashed (at Roswell, or anywhere on Earth) just doesn’t make any sense.

I’m not so sure about that. A worm-hole jumping technology could easily get them here but then malfunction. Advanced technology doesn’t mean bugless technology. Think about cars – there are almost certainly more car crashes now than there were horse-and-buggy crashes. “Advanced technology” usually just means “fast technology” – it doesn’t mean things don’t break down or people are better drivers.

And to reiterate (anticipating another response like Chris’s above), I only find the idea that aliens have made contact plausible. I have no idea what happened at Roswell, I’m not claiming that that specific incident was an incident of contact.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:33 am
What is the percentage of people who believe an extra-terrestrial divinity talked to a bearded dude at the top of a mountain, a few thousands years ago?

An EXCELLENT point.

And if a super-human being did make contact with humans thousands of years ago (and yet for some reason everyone has a different story on what that being did or said), what is more plausible – that they all just made it up, or that they were visited by super-human extraterrestrial beings that had different directives, incentives, opinions, etc.

Again – I’m not saying “I know that aliens visited us and are the source of a lot of Earth religions”. I’m saying if you accept evolutionary biology and approach the issue objectively it’s very plausible – much more plausible (given our understanding of the age of the universe and the process of evolution) than religions (which few would so openly ridicule).

Did it happen? I have no clue. But it doesn’t make sense to me to dismiss it out of hand.
Cyrus Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:55 am
If aliens have ever been anywhere in Earth’s vicinity, they got here by means of super-advanced technology beyond our comprehension that allows them to traverse vast distances. So the idea that they crashed (at Roswell, or anywhere on Earth) just doesn’t make any sense.

Not really. Exoplanets have been found as close to earth as 20 light-years away. Maybe closer, I don’t know, I just got that from 10 minutes on Wikipedia, and all our methods of finding planets are biased towards huge planets around tiny stars, so if there was an Earthlike planet orbiting Alpha Centauri (the closest stars to our own) we wouldn’t know about it. And we already know how to accelerate things to significant fractions of light speed with current technology – it would require ridiculous amounts of energy, but no wormholes or warp drives or mind-bending scientific breakthroughs that throw out our understanding of physics so far. So we could have sent probes to Alpha Centauri or the closest verified exoplanet that would get there in the next century or so.

I’m not saying that would be a good idea, just that it’s already possible to reach other planets with our existing technology, and we are obviously not above building space probes that end in ignominious crashes. All else being equal – which is, obviously, a big caveat – alien probes crashing on Earth are as plausible as our probes crashing on Mars.
Duvall Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 10:57 am
This makes perfect sense. The government conspiring with alien visitors from another world is merely improbable; congressional Republicans making good decisions for the country is completely impossible.
Cyrus Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 11:05 am
I hate how this is used as a comparison!
Obviously, UFO contact suffers from a lack of hard evidence. But that doesn’t mean it’s a ridiculous prospect. People conflate the jokers who think there’s proof of a massive conspiracy with people who say that it’s extremely rational to think that there is intelligent extraterrestrial life, and that it’s entirely plausible they’ve been to Earth.

“People” who? The only person I see doing this is yourself. Yglesias links to a CNN article, citing a poll where 37 percent reportedly believe that aliens “have contacted the U.S. government”. Well, if they have, then that would indeed be a massive conspiracy, just because the general public doesn’t know about it. If you want to hang your defense of them on the differences between Yglesias’ word “believes”, CNN’s vague paraphrasing, and your own “think there’s proof”, fine, but it looks like a very weak defense. To me, it looks like the poll shows either that Christopher is right in comments 8 and 10, or that there are a lot of genuine conspiracy theorists out there.
Poptarts Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 11:07 am
If aliens have ever been anywhere in Earth’s vicinity, they got here by means of super-advanced technology beyond our comprehension that allows them to traverse vast distances. So the idea that they crashed (at Roswell, or anywhere on Earth) just doesn’t make any sense.

My view is that Earth is an insane asylum for a super advanced alien civilization and they wiped our memories of this basic fact. This explains the Republican party and the boy in the balloon and much else.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 11:30 am
Cyrus -
I’m not critiquing Yglesias – I like the post. I just get frustrated with the general tendancy to dismiss taking UFO’s seriously, and the lack of serious consideration of these issues. That’s nothing against Yglesias or how he’s presented the data – it’s just me railing against a broader phenomenon.
soullite Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 11:34 am
That’s stupid. No matter how advanced technology becomes, accidents will always be part of life. This is as idiotic as the “Humans will never evolve!” BS that got spewed back in the panda discussion. This just isn’t how science works. You can’t remove all risk, it’s not actually possible.

That “secret contact” number is floating high because a lot of people will believe anything at all you say about the government. As far as they are concerned, the government is an evil beast that exists only to serve the interests of the elite. They’d believe you consorted with devils and demon-gods if asked about it.
Ken Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 11:39 am
Why oh why @13 wrote: “What is the percentage of people who believe an extra-terrestrial divinity talked to a bearded dude at the top of a mountain, a few thousands years ago?”

Let me put in a plug for Jason Colavito’s “The Cult of Alien Gods.” He convincingly traces von Daniken, Sitchin, and similar ancient-astronaut writers back to H.P. Lovecraft.

Oh, and Poptarts @19: The lawyers from Scientology are on line one…
Wednesday Open Thread : Delaware Liberal Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 12:01 pm
[...] Heh – it looks like Matt Yglesias had a similar idea. His statistic – 37% of Americans think the U.S. government has had contacts with extraterrestrials. [...]
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Ken -
Let me put in a plug for Jason Colavito’s “The Cult of Alien Gods.” He convincingly traces von Daniken, Sitchin, and similar ancient-astronaut writers back to H.P. Lovecraft.

OK, and Jules Verne predicted air conditioning, cars, space exploration, and television.

Does the fact that something was previously conceived in the human imagination have any relevance to the actuality of the claim?

I wouldn’t peg any declarative statement on alien-astronaut perspectives. But what is more plausible – that evolution happens, and that an evolved species with a million year head start on us could have interacted with humans, OR that people all around the Earth universally came up with elaborate stories about contact with advanced supernatural beings, or EVEN MORE implausible, that all these humans did actually interact with advanced supernatural beings.

Besides, even if supernatural beings do exist, that fits my definition “extraterrestrial”. A real being, that somehow transcends the four dimensions we’re familiar with. How is that not an extraterrestrial?

I don’t know – you put up a number that says “70% of Americans believe that a supernatural being became a human, was killed and raised from the dead” and nobody bats an eye. I don’t think they SHOULD bat an eye – nobody should be ridiculed for holding that belief. But it’s fundamentally a story about an extraterrestrial contact. But if a poll says that X% of Americans believe in aliens, people chuckle. Aliens – organisms that presumably evolved the same way we did – are more implausible than spirits which to this day are still pretty poorly defined.

All von Daniken does is reconcile the two – and provide an explanation for why universally people came up with these very detailed spiritual contact stories, that often involved people coming down in vehicles from the sky. I don’t personally fully buy into it, but I wouldn’t dismiss it as laughable either. Certainly no more laughable than Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any other belief in a higher being.
chris Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 12:20 pm
54 percent of respondents believe intelligent life exists outside Earth, but somehow 64 percent believe aliens have contacted humans.

The first question is only about the present, but the second includes the past. So aliens could have contacted humans in the past and then gone extinct, which I could see being consistent with something von Daniken-ish. (Clearly, the decline of old-school religion is because the “gods” have stopped visiting.) I don’t believe it myself, but it’s at least possible.
Curly Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Do we really need to over-share our ET fantasies here?
Look, I desperately wanted astronomers to find signs of extraterrestrial life when I was 13 — hell, I still do. But it’s a pretty huge leap to go from “there’s biological life out there, possibly quite a lot of it” to “there’s intelligent, technological, persistent life within a few dozen light years.” One is practically demanded by the Drake equation. The other? Not so much. So yeah, there were probably microbes on Mars back the day, maybe still are inside Europa and Enceladus. But the likelihood of our encountering another civilization before we (or they) go bust is depressingly low.
Average American Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 2:20 pm
“As far as they are concerned, the government is an evil beast that exists only to serve the interests of the elite.”

I haven’t seen much in the way of convincing evidence over the last 30 years that they’d be wrong…
roac Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 2:23 pm
May I interrupt the UFO discussion to underline the point of the original post?

In the nine months since the inauguration, Obama’s favorable rating on this question is down 22 percent. Congress(D) is down 24 percent. Congress(R) is down 33 percent. And yet the group wisdom of the punditosphere seems to be that the Democrats are having a bad year, and the Republicans are having a good one!

Of course this may be a good thing, to the extent that it encourages the bad guys to keep up what they have been doing.

(I estimated the numbers from the bars to do the calculations. The actual numbers are apparently a click away, but I’m feeling lazy.)
soullite Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 2:24 pm
HP Lovecraft hardly invented the idea. Google Tiamat, Ymir, Chronos, Kraken, Leviathan/Ziz/Behemoth, the Re’em, Jormagandr, etc. Mythology is replete of beasts dwelling in the earth and the seas waiting for their opportunity to rise up and devour us all. The idea that this world once belonged to ancient and powerful beings, and that the entire age of man rests on them remaining defeated, is a common theme in human mythology. Particularly European mythologies.

Lovecraft just made them fun, and found a way to fit these beliefs into a more modern world. Don’t think he created them. Anyone who did research on a subject like this and only went back to lovecraft wasn’t doing a very good job for some reason or another.

This isn’t an endorsement about ancient astronauts or interdimensional hell-gods. It’s just a statement. Personally, I think that cosmic horror is basically one of the oldest forms of story-telling. Humans love to be afraid of the dark, and we love terrifying ourselves and eachother at the thought of what’s squirming just beyond the shadows. We always have, ands I think we always will.
Poptars Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Oh, and Poptarts @19: The lawyers from Scientology are on line one…

The existence of Scientology is another example of why I think we’re on a planetary insane asylum, kind of like how Australia started off as a penal colony.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Curly -
But that’s exactly the problem. Your “there’s biological life out there, possibly quite a lot of it” gets drowned out by all the “there’s intelligent, technological, persistent life within a few dozen light years” B.S. that gets propogated.

I’m not sure why contact is such an extraordinary possibility for you, though. We’ve done so much in the last hundred years technologically – I can’t even begin to conceive of where the next thousand will leave us. And civilizations that are a million years ahead of us are absolutely inconceivable. So even if w’ere talking about civilizations several galaxies away, I’m not sure how you conclude that the chances are “depressingly low”.

It’s a great big question mark – but an important question mark that too many people are simply dismissing.

And even if you put all questions of alien contact aside – simply THINKING of this sort of stuff impresses upon the thinker the importance of ensuring that human civilization becomes interplanetary. That’s the real importance of these discussions, I think. If we are not alone – we need to get out there! If we ARE alone – it’s that much more important that we get out there so we don’t put all our eggs in this one fragile basket!
Max424 Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 5:57 pm
@31 Daniel Kuehn: “And even if you put all questions of alien contact aside – simply THINKING of this sort of stuff impresses upon the thinker the importance of ensuring that human civilization becomes interplanetary. That’s the real importance of these discussions, I think. If we are not alone – we need to get out there! If we ARE alone – it’s that much more important that we get out there so we don’t put all our eggs in this one fragile basket!”

Yup, and we need to treat our fragile basket a little better so we “can get out there.”

The way things are going now, the only way we are going to make contact with aliens is if they do indeed visit us. And you know what? The aliens better hurry.
Max424 Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 6:15 pm
DTM: “And every year that goes by, another group of young people comes into political consciousness thinking the Republicans just fundamentally suck”

I’d like to see a breakdown of these newly minted Independents. Clearly, a majority are disaffected Republicans -breakaway sane people and libertarian wannabees. But what percentage are Democrats to the left of the Democratic Party? I consider myself an FDR-type democrat, which puts me WAY to the left of the Party and forces me, quite frankly, to identify myself as an Independent -when interrogated by authorities.
Hector Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Ah, the old extraterrestrials gambit. Now that sophisticated Santa Monica cocktail partygoers no longer believe in the God of the Athanasian Creed, and in angels and devils, they believe in aliens crashing at Roswell instead. How much more reasonable…..NOT.

As G.K. Chesterton once said, when men stop believeing in God, it isn’t that they believe in nothing, it’s that they believe in everything.

Re: Something weird and inexplicable did really happen at Roswell. Something secret is going on at Area 51.

Do you want to know the secret? The secret is that U.S. government officials at Area 51 are cruising into Vegas, buying coke and hookers with your tax money, and then laughing at the fact that the American populace believes they spent that money investigateing downed alien spacecraft.
Hector Says:
October 21st, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Re: or EVEN MORE implausible, that all these humans did actually interact with advanced supernatural beings.

I don’t find that implausible at all.
Jesse M. Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:19 am
@Daniel Kuhn: One basic problem with the “aliens have visited Earth” scenario is that it’s fabulously unlikely that alien intelligence would evolve at just the same time intelligence evolved on Earth, so if this happened at all it’s very probable they’d be millions of years more advanced than us. And any millions-of-years-old civilization of interstellar travelers is almost certainly going to be advanced enough to have self-replicating von neumann probes which for a very small initial investment of energy and construction can spread throughout space and multiply each time they reach a new solar system. Once you have such probes it’d be easy to program them to use materials they find in new systems not just to build copies of themselves, but also to engage in all sorts of megascale engineering projects (also see the alien constructs section of wikipedia’s article on the Fermi paradox) like Dyson spheres (or on a smaller scale, big automated construction projects on the surfaces of planets/moons in any solar system they visit) which would have observable effects if they were anywhere in our vicinity. The sci-fi idea of aliens who visit us secretly but haven’t left any really obvious signs of their continuing presence in our neck of the woods for millions of years seems very implausible (your argument about even advanced ships being crash-prone is also unconvincing, the reason cars crash a lot is because they’re manually controlled by easily-distracted apes, I think a millions-of-years-old civilization would have been able to solve the problem of computer-controlled vehicles which can avoid randomly crashing into things).

The point is, anyone that accepts evolutionary biology would be crazy to think that there aren’t alien civilizations.

Alien civilizations out there somewhere in an infinite universe? Sure. But alien civilizations anywhere in the sphere with a 50 billion light year radius around us that constitutes the observable universe? My guess is probably not, or at least none that made it to the point of interstellar travel. There are any number of aspects of our own evolutionary history (and of the conditions on our planet) that could plausibly be quite unlikely and rare even on planets where life does arise, see The Great Filter and the Rare Earth Hypothesis for a discussion of some plausible candidates.
Kropotkin Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:33 am
Looks like the Congressional GOP needs to start offering free anal probes like the Grey aliens supposedly give.

And I think it’s possbile that aliens have/are visted/ing earth, though probably unlikely. I can’t imagine some intelligent sort of creatures traveling all of that way just to cause mischief and generally hang out without trying to make contact with us.

My pet theory is that what are commonly reported as UFOs could be time travelers or inter-dimensional travelers. But that’s kinda fanciful, it’s probably a bunch of hooey anyway.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:49 am
Hector -
RE: “I don’t find that implausible at all.”

What I meant was that each story of supernatural interaction is true – that I find implausible.

Either:

1. None of the supernatural storytelling is true and they all just made up stories with common thematical elements of people visiting from the sky (highly implausible)

2. None of the supernatural storytelling is true but contact with natural beings from the sky did occur, which lead to thematically similar stories (more plausible)

3. All but one of the supernatural storytelling is true, and all the others made it up (this is what I’m saying seems really implausible – because it’s basically a version of #1),

4. All the supernatural storytelling is true and it’s just permutations of the same common, single supernatural event (I suppose more plausible… but it would render the differences between distinct religions meaningless), or finally

5. All the supernatural storytelling is true (the most implausible of all five.

Of the five options for the diversity of world religions, I think #2 and #4 are the most plausible.

Oh, and for the record I’ve never been to Santa Monica and I’ve only been to a couple cocktail parties in my life, I’m not an atheist (more of a deist I suppose), and that GK Chesterton quote is ridiculous. Why would people believe in nothing? It doesn’t make sense Hector. Chesterton is just trying to sound “deep”.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:56 am
Jesse -
von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres are all very interesting but they presuppose the energy constraints that humans are familiar with and the dimensional constraints that humans are familiar with (ie – three dimensional space plus uni-directional, non-maleable time). It’s quite possible that these things constrain extraterrestrials, but if we are open to the prospect that they have a million years head start on us, I have no clue why you’d assume that these constraints are binding for them.

Who needs von Neumann probes when you have a wormhole?

“(your argument about even advanced ships being crash-prone is also unconvincing, the reason cars crash a lot is because they’re manually controlled by easily-distracted apes, I think a millions-of-years-old civilization would have been able to solve the problem of computer-controlled vehicles which can avoid randomly crashing into things).”

Wow, talk about unconvincing! So let me get this straight – you’re arguing extraterrestrials are constrained by energy scarcity and the dimensional constraints that humans face but they’re NOT constrained by mistakes, failure, frailty, etc.? That doesn’t make sense.

As for rare earth stuff… keep in mind that those sorts of things ensure that life similar to life on earth won’t evolve. That doesn’t mean that OTHER sorts of life won’t evolve.
Hector Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:30 am
Daniel Kuehn,

I think that the real answer is a combination of #4 and #5, but closer to #5. Not all accounts of experiences with the supernatural are true, but many of them are, and I think many of those were separate experiences (most of them may have involved distinct angelic or diabolic spirits other than God, which accounts for differences in the experiences).

I think I have much better reason to believe in angels, demons, the devil, and God (ontological/rational, experiential, scriptural, traditional) then I do in purported extraterrestrial visitos.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:47 am
I think I have much better reason to believe in angels, demons, the devil, and God (ontological/rational, experiential, scriptural, traditional) then I do in purported extraterrestrial visitos.

1. How is “tradition” a reason?

2. Same with scriptural… sort of… I suppose my question is “how do you identify the part of scripture that is more than just ‘tradition’, and therefore reasonable evidence”

3. You’re calling your position #4 and #5, but it’s really #3 because you’re saying “oh, everyone had supernatural contact but if they don’t believe what I believe they talked to angels or demons”. If that is your position than you’re saying that only one of all the supernatural accounts is accurate, and it is your account. That isn’t #4 or #5, Hector – that’s #3 and it’s quite a claim. And on what do you base that claim? Fundamentally you base it on the fact that someone told you it happened and you can think up an ontological framework that doesn’t directly conflict with it.

All extraterrestrials require is an understanding of the evolution of live and a recognition that there’s nothing inherently special about our planet (yes it has rare qualities – but there’s no reason to think that what happened here couldn’t happen elsewhere). Rationally speaking, that’s much easier to embrace than the sort of mental gymnastics you have to do to build your life around an old book.

Look – I grew up religious and my twin brother is actually getting a doctorate in theology now and is still very religious. I have great respect for religion. What I don’t have respect for is specious arguments that exhibit a very conspicuous convenience.
Jesse M. Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:19 am
Daniel Kuehn wrote:
von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres are all very interesting but they presuppose the energy constraints that humans are familiar with and the dimensional constraints that humans are familiar with (ie – three dimensional space plus uni-directional, non-maleable time).

How do you think they “presuppose” those things? A species that can travel through additional dimensions of space or engage in the sort of spacetime engineering needed to build wormholes and such would find it absolutely trivial to build things like von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres, and to engage in even more advanced feats of megascale engineering on a galactic scale. And no matter how advanced they are, as long as they are not supernatural beings who can break the laws of physics they’ll need energy, why wouldn’t they seek to reengineer the cosmos around them to take advantage of most of the available energy (the idea behind Dyson spheres, for example) rather than letting all but a small fraction of it go to waste?

Wow, talk about unconvincing! So let me get this straight – you’re arguing extraterrestrials are constrained by energy scarcity and the dimensional constraints that humans face but they’re NOT constrained by mistakes, failure, frailty, etc.? That doesn’t make sense.

I didn’t say anything about “not constrained by mistakes, failure, frailty” etc, you’re putting words into my mouth. I was just making the rather more narrow point that the navigation of large vehicles is something that an advanced civilization could easily automate, so random crashes due to pilot error wouldn’t happen, and thus belief in something like the Roswell crash is just goofy. If we humans put every computer in the world to work independently on something like a simple arithmetic problem, the chance that the majority answer would be incorrect should be fantastically tiny, and I imagine that a millions-of-years-old civilization could fit far more computing power than currently exists in the entire world on board a space ship.

As for rare earth stuff… keep in mind that those sorts of things ensure that life similar to life on earth won’t evolve. That doesn’t mean that OTHER sorts of life won’t evolve.

You presuppose that the basic laws of physics don’t heavily constrain the possible types of life that could arise. There are some good reasons to think that the laws of physics make the chemistry you’d need for living organisms fairly unique, for example alien life would probably be carbon-based since you need complex stable macromolecules to store genetic information and form molecular machines, and aside from carbon-based molecules the main other plausible candidate is silicon-based molecules, but the idea of silicon-based life runs into a number of problems–see here and here. Also see articles pointing out problems with phosphorus-based life, boron-based life and nitrogen-based life. If carbon-based molecules are taken as the only likely basis for life, a lot of the biochemistry involving these molecules requires a solvent, and it’s hard to find any good alternatives to water–see this article on why there don’t seem to be any very good alternatives to water as a solvent, and this article on the possibility of life that uses ammonia as a solvent, and the problems this leads to.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:28 am
“How do you think they “presuppose” those things? A species that can travel through additional dimensions of space or engage in the sort of spacetime engineering needed to build wormholes and such would find it absolutely trivial to build things like von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres”

Oh definitely! I’m not saying that dyson spheres and von neumann probes wouldn’t happen – they certainly would. I’m saying there’s no reason to believe that those will be the flagships of exploration that will first make contact with us. In other words, if aliens are a million years ahead, probes will hardly be the biggest gun in their arsenal of exploration. It is a very human perspective to think that it would be.

“thus belief in something like the Roswell crash is just goofy”

And this is a good point for me to reiterate that I’m not convinced that there was an alien crash at Roswell. It was an interesting occurance and I have no clue what really happened, but it hardly occupies much of the time I spend thinking about extraterrestrials.

You presuppose that the basic laws of physics don’t heavily constrain the possible types of life that could arise.

I don’t presuppose anything by reserving some skepticism about rare earth theories. I’m simply suggesting that your position relies on certain presuppositions. I’m just saying it’s possible life will emerge in other forms – I’m not attaching any degree of probability to that. I’m open on that question – I’m just pointing out that your position requires more presuppositions than a position of openness on the question of the commonness of life.

I’m a novice when it comes to all these issues and questions, but I think you also have to consider the prospect that again the life you’re talking about is grounded in four dimensional existence. Part of the explanation for “supernatural” experiences may be that other beings exist and operate beyond four-dimensions.

I’m just saying I don’t think we can decisively say either way, from our limited vantage point.
Hector Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Re: 3. You’re calling your position #4 and #5, but it’s really #3 because you’re saying “oh, everyone had supernatural contact but if they don’t believe what I believe they talked to angels or demons”.

I think that very, very few people have ever had direct experiences of God, except when He revealed himself through His Son. I think that most experiences of the divine, historically, were mediated through angels. And some spiritual experiences are of demonic or diabolic origin. I think Molech was a diabolic power, for exemple.

Re: Same with scriptural… sort of… I suppose my question is “how do you identify the part of scripture that is more than just ‘tradition’, and therefore reasonable evidence”

_All_ scripture is simply codified tradition. Tradition is ontologically prior to scripture, after all, and is equally as reliable as scripture. As the saying goes, the Church gave us the Bible, not the other way round. Ultimately it comes down to whether you find the tradition of the Christian church convincing, self-consistent, and rationally compelling, and whether you think it’s more likely to be reflective of divine revelation or human invention. I go for the ‘divine revelation’ myself.

As for the likelihood of extraterrestrials, look that’s just silly. I personally think it’s likely that life exists on other plannets, but I’m not fool enough to think that’s a scientific conclusion. You can’t draw any conclusions about the probability of life evolving from a sample size of one. You can’t draw conclusions about _anything_ from a sample size of one. There might well be a million planets with conditions as salubrious and favourable as Earth, and only one of them developed life- ours. We simply don’t know. And in the absence of any similar planets to compare our Earth with, the last couple factors in your Drake Equation are simply wild guesses that say more about what we want to believe then about what we have ’scientific’ grounds to believe.

And I think the idea of life based on ammonia or hydrogen fluoride as a solvent is, in a word, silly. Those solvents are not particularly similar to water other than that they do hydrogen bonding. And I think the idea of building ‘organic’ molecules on any basis other than carbon is also silly.
Daniel Kuehn Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:20 pm
RE: “I think Molech was a diabolic power, for exemple.”

What reason do you have for thinking there is such a thing as Molech, and why do you think he is demonic (I assume by “diabolical” you mean he is a demon or some sort of lesser spirit).

WHY do you believe this? What reasons do you have? It’s more or less clear what you believe. I’m wondering why.

RE: “I go for the ‘divine revelation’ myself.”

But WHY? And since it’s ultimately human interpretation that delivers all divine revelation, on what basis to you distinguish human invention from human mediated divine revelation? And how do you justify denying (or minimizing to demons and angels) similar claims by others without submitting an argument that makes your own position untenable?

RE: “but I’m not fool enough to think that’s a scientific conclusion.”

Well me neither – it’s a logical conclusion that’s drawn from scientific conclusions about life on Earth. I have a statistical background – so the Drake equation is useless on it’s face in my mind (as you say, drawing from a sample of one) – but it’s useless on it’s face as an estimator. That doesn’t mean the logic doesn’t apply.
Beating a Dead Elephant : Deep Brain Diary Says:
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:51 pm
[...] Belief that the US has had contact with Extraterrestrials — 37% [...]
Ancient Astronaut Theory » Blog Archive » Matthew Yglesias » UFO Conspiracy Theories More Popular Than … Says:
October 24th, 2009 at 12:00 am
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UFO Conspiracy Theories More Popular Than Congressional GOP

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