So, Barrack Obama decided to tell everyone that aliens are real. Being who he is — about a mile wide and a micron deep — who knows if he was told something as president, or if he is just saying it because he thinks it sounds cool. Which it would have in the 1970s. That man I swear lives in a time capsule. The problem is that he’s a “good boy” — no nothing racial. Untwist your underwear. I mean as a kid he was inclined to be compliant, agreeable and obedient — which means he was easy for his crazy mother and red diaper babies grandparents to indoctrinate.
I normally wouldn’t weigh in on “is this something he was told” == he says he never saw one — “or memorex?” but in this case I a 100% will. It’s memorex. Note the journalist didn’t follow up, which means the journalist knows it’s just Obama “being cool” and also knows he’d fall apart if asked more.
I will confess I might be biased, because I don’t believe in aliens.
Do I believe there’s life in other worlds? Maybe. But if so they will be human, either having left from the Earth in previous civilizations, before the civilization was destroyed in one of Earth’s periodic cuisinart cycles, or a Schrodinger worlds type of set up where they got themselves thrown WAY BACK in time from somewhere in our future. (In fact I came up with the setup because I was so sure when we got out there we’d find other humans going “Wassup? What took you so long.) Militating against the first is “Wouldn’t they have come back and rescued anyone who survived the whatever cataclysm, leaving the Earth without humans.
Sure. That’s a decent objections. Though there are so many ways that could not have happened, starting with “Well, they did, but the Earth is remarkably difficult to go over with a fine tooth comb, and some people got left behind. Perhaps a tribe on the level of some tribes in the Amazon now, who have no concept of numbers over three or even time progression.) By the time they reproduced enough to make themselves visible, no one was looking at Earth. And when they did there might be enough genetic difference (I mean, they might be from one of the other branches of humanity) that they are iffy on bringing us aboard, or even giving us hints. Or there could be some prohibition on going back. Or…. I mean if this happened multiple times it might not even be “or” but “and.”
Yeah, yeah, genetics. I don’t think most people realize how much in its infancy the science is. I’ve been saying this since the 90s and been proven right on most of my objections.
Never mind. This isn’t an argument about THAT. It’s an argument about aliens. I’m just saying that humans are the only aliens that I’m willing to believe in.
I used to believe in aliens, when I was very young. How young? Well, I used to play this make believe game when I was under six (we moved from grandma’s house when I was six) where I rode my tricycle around the circular part that went around the entire — I was about to say yard, but it was actually a mini-farm that produced most of what we ate in vegetables and fruit — property and played being an interstellar bus driver. And some of my patients were alien.
Somewhere around ten I fell into all the Chariot of the Gods stuff (not that one, which I always found kind of dumb and simplistic) but a dozen more plausible ones that were floating around the zeitgeist in the early seventies. I don’t know how they came into the house — the rule was if it came into the house, I read, which included everyone’s school books, and the inserts for meds anyone in the household was taking — but I suspect under my brother’s aegis since he was in his first year of engineering at the time.
Because they were more detailed and plausible than Chariots of the Gods, they ended up getting me interested in archeology, biology, space travel (though arguably I was already interested in that) linguistics, and, incidentally good at poking every theory with a stick till it screamed. it was also probably a gateway drug to science fiction.
None of which means much, except that I believe in aliens, and used to stand on the terrace atop mom’s garage, scanning the skies, hoping to see a UFO.
OF COURSE I believed in “real” UFOs. What I mean is, while I thought aliens might be difficult to understand — hence the interest in linguistics and biology — I expected them to be beings like us, the result of parallel, non-identical evolutionary processes. Creatures who bled — whatever color — and ate and probably slept too. I didn’t really believe in Star Trek aliens, though I was willing to concede VERY parallel evolution, the reason, say, that sugar gliders look like flying squirrels, while being marsupials. BUT unlike Star Trek I was fairly sure such variations wouldn’t have babies together UNLESS there was a lot of laboratory juggling. (The biology thing.)
The shine wore off it when I was 12 or so. I don’t know when the shift actually occurred in the “UFO community” because of course I was getting everything downstream, used books and usually through my brother first.
The same way I read all the books from the 40s and even 30s thinking they were contemporary — seventies — SF. Because I didn’t know to check copyrights, and we didn’t have the internet.
Anyway, the shift… At some point in the sixties or seventies, the “UFO community” — which doesn’t mean a community of UFOs but of those who believe in UFOs. The first would be more interesting — shifted from believing in what I consider sane, logical “aliens” with bodies and mechanics and their own imperatives and politics to believing in aliens who are a cross between the 1920s spiritist “spirit guides” and Roman gods. And sometimes both at the same time depending on which type of alien (I’ve done enough deep dives, usually when very ill but not ill enough for true crime — I probably should explain that in that stage I like reading absurd conspiracy theories as a sort of fiction — to know that there are people who believe in several distinct and varied tribes of aliens — honestly, they should give out baseball-like cards, there are so many — none of whom are quite corporeal, rational human beings.)
People started turning to aliens for moral guidance. Pratchett lampooned this beautifully in Good Omens, with the aliens coming down randomly to tell us to save the Earth and stuff. Which is by the way the fallacy of “more scientifically advanced means more morally advanced.” It’s also hokum, if you need to be told that.
At the same time they also believed aliens came down, randomly kidnapped women (and sometimes men. Don’t go to those sites. Just don’t) and impregnated them and that there were alien hybrids running around.
At that point the “aliens” were not at all like aliens, but something between fairies and demons and sometimes yes. And as the UFO Community got more hysterical and shrill about it (particularly the males) I headed the other way at speed.
None of the “alien actions” makes sense unless you assume some kind of paranormal is at work. And I already have a religion, and don’t believe in paranormal. Not really. I believe in normal we just haven’t figured out the rules for yet.
But I am very aware of “bad Cess” and things that grandma told me not to mess with, because not understanding them doesn’t mean we’re safe from them. On the contrary.
If you’re determined to figure out what I’m talking about — AND I SERIOUSLY ENJOIN YOU NOT TO — try The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story with the understanding that when I was alone in Colorado, trying to finish getting the house ready for sale, I decided to read some of the other books, just because it was low brain stuff, and…. well, I didn’t have enough internet to read crazy pages on the net. And I got a really bad feeling from them, and also he’s gotten substantially more reality-averse. (Yes, the links are associate links. Because if you’re going to go do the inadvisable I’ll get a few cents. Eh.) For how far you can go down crazy dangerous road, and seriously it cured me of any of that kind of thing, because you see the psychosis from the outside, try: Hungry Ghosts: An Investigation Into Channelling and the Spirit World. And as many people have noted the way that “aliens” behave in these things resemble nothing so much as fairies: Check out Jacques Vallee. With the understanding that at some point it gets super weird, too.
So why am I talking about this besides “Obama is crazy” which we all already knew? Well…
The closest I’ve come to believing in aliens as an adult has been the last ten? years in which i found myself wondering roughly this: if there were aliens who were trying to render humanity extinct and destroy us, how would they behave any differently than the current insane left? And my answer is always “Pretty much not.”
It brings in its train fears of things like “What if the puppet masters had landed, as in Heinlein’s novels? How would we know they didn’t?”
And because I’m fairly sure they didn’t, it worries me senseless for how anti-human these people have gotten.
As for the rest I stay away from the “spiritual” theories of aliens. I’m not interested in woo woo. I already have a religion. And I know a stupid thing to do when the danger sign is six feet high and glowing neon.
According To Hoyt 
Yeah, my reaction was that Obama was a bad and a muddled enough man to believe that certain things were real, and worthy of trust and respect.
I didn’t phrase it as “he would worship Goa’uld system lords, and provide them with human sacrifices”.
I suppose I should have just stuck to observing that if Obama said the sky was blue, get independent sources on that.
(HRC is apparently one of the sincere believers in UFOs.)
My opinion on real physical flying saucers is that radars are a funky instrument. False alarms are literally more probable than certain other results, and people trust radars enough from the non-false alarm times that they sometimes perceive false alarms as real.
We use the alien word as well for physical humans who are culturally alien.
Real physical flying saucers, as a hypothesis, make sense as being cultural trauma from the social interactions that came with the development of aeronautical flight. Like with the cargo cult story that floated around, it makes sense as a sort of ‘what next’, and of coping with so many cultural aliens. American style trying to map onto strangers, instead of just writing them off as being ignorable as not-people.
The perceptions and values of other cultures are not necessarily valid, and we would not be wrong to just look to our own.
Additionally, people like the academics who lose their American culture in a muddle of conspiracy theories, and who become Jew haters? They are now culturally alien enough that they are fit targets for the decolonization that some of them endorse.
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The often reports of things like “turned at a right angle like they had no momentum” brought me to conclude that whatever was seen had no mass, and was most likely an unusual high altitude electrical phenomena. A lot of UFOs could be mirage-like light and right atmospheric conditions situation.
As to the Kidnappings and probes? Close resemblance to “kidnapped and tortured by fairies” of pre industrial interpretations. I read an article about one man’s experience. Hiking in the wilderness . . . vivid memories days of alien interactions . . . but in his case, he hadn’t been hiking alone. His companions saw the close lightning strike, his collapse, carried him, unconscious out . . . Yeah, EM affect on the brain.
Yeah, I’m a little sorry that there aren’t Aliens (yet?) but . . . nope. I don’t believe it.
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No mass/momentum, like a reflection or projection? (grin)
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HRC and BHO are both the kind of people who would offer you and I up as dinner to the Reptiloid V or the Big Heads being served man, as long as they were the last ones standing.
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The American people have always been a sacrifice they’re willing to make.
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Oh, I thought he was a Goa’uld System Lord, based on the Greek Column thing he had at the DNC back in ’08. Kept expecting him to bark out “Jaffa, KREE!” or similar at some point. :-D
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Not competent enough.
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Minor Goa’uld who thought he would come to Earth and show the System Lords that he should be one of them, and was so incompetent and so bad, that they won’t take him back and insist that he remain on Earth.
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I knew a guy who just happened to know the radar frequency for the local airbase where he grew up. He taught me that if you build a light balsa wood frame at the proper length, wrap the top and part of the bottom with dry cleaner bags, spray it with a light coat of aluminum paint, and then set and light a tea light inside it, you’d not only get something that glowed, floated, and showed up on radar, it would read as some multiple bigger due to the resonant frequency. UFO.
He can’t get in trouble for that because he died a quarter-century ago. :D
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Yes, or for a little more bulk you can use a corner reflector and not need to know the radar frequency.
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Couple things.
I am not a dog fan. I prefer the Americans who like dogs to people who have so disordered a sense of American culture that they feel that they can impose their mores on others in this way. In other words, “stack up and try”. Do not try to use soft power unpersuasively where you have not actually gathered the force of arms. Frauding a mayoral election does not mean that you have the shooters to take indoor dogs away from New Yorkers.
Newsome’s team is trying to pull ‘but I am dyslexic, you cannot say the mean thing about a disabled’ card. That is PC bullcrap of a very California variety.
Newsome does not read anything that does not flatter him or his sports team of political positions, and he is also a mental cripple. I’m not sure if he did too much drugs, or if it is a simple matter of being too much inside Nancy Pelosi’s political bubble.
But, reading only Marxist historical narratives pretty much makes one a historical illiterate.
If someone had an engineering or mathematics degree, but they had somehow only managed to read marxist theories of mathematics or of engineering, then they would be illiterate as an engineer or a mathematician, no matter how prestigious the degree program, no matter how functional and well trained other graduates of that program are.
People who cannot make money in other better ways from their degree programs are maybe not actually educated. People who only know how to collect money using Marxists in government are maybe a waste of skills training. (The mistake in this condemnation is that some of these people are not ignorant, they simply have the personalities of white collar criminals, and think that gainful employment is for suckers. )
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Is New York trying to ban dogs?
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One of Mamdani’s buddies (female) mouthed off on X about how dogs don’t belong inside and should be banned from being inside. Also, that Islam was coming to NYC. The backlash was pronounced and now she’s both tried to claim it was a joke and that she’s the victim of Islamophobia.
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Not going over well.
Ricky Gervis (English comedian), posted a not-office-safe meme on X. The responses were great. Twitchy had links. I posted them to Sarah’s Saturday Memes post.
Comments were, with appropriate pictures:
“I see this and raise …”
“Don’t Tred on Me”, only instead of coiled rattler, three German Shepards.
Etc.
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In true antisemitic fashion she also blamed the backlash on “the Jews”.
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Even worse, there appear to be people piling in against dogs. It’s hard to tell how much is trolling or satire these days, unfortunately. But there are people piling in against anyone outraged on behalf of dogs.
To add to it, there appear to have been some similar statements by people with connections in the UK recently, coupled with muslims advocating for the banning of eating in public in the UK during Ramadan.
It makes me wonder if there’s an Islamic version of Journolist that’s coordinating this stuff. “This month, complain about the ownership of dogs.”
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I don’t think there’s a country on the earth that loves their pets more than the US. Even the proglodytes love their dogs and cats. No wonder there was an immediate backlash.
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Canada might be a close second. Canada is a lot dog friendlier, in general, overall. If not a restaurant, or grocery store, dogs and cats, are generally welcome (there are *exceptions, but based on where we go, only a few). Despite the more draconian service dog laws in BC and AL (province certification), there is less impact overall.
(*) Mostly safety for the dog, which we would not argue with. One exception would be airlines. Since we don’t fly, it didn’t bother us.
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And “Islamophobia” (“Islamismophobia” is very clumsy) is coming to be a more and more logical sort of response, given all of this similar… stuff, recently. (“Don’t serve pork to schoolkids, it’s not clean and so very insulting.”)
Ultimately, it’s called “being catastrophically unable to read the room” — and those screeching-loud 5 AM calls to prayer in Arabic now being (inescapably) heard in some parts of The City (while also being mysteriously immune from any “noise ordinance” enforcement, at least so far) do or shortly will come across much the same way.
It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. It’s not irrational to fear deadly-poisonous snakes, or would-be theocratic colonialists who want to turn The Big Apple into Mullah-Regimist Tehran.
(“Is it really so hard to cover up properly in public, ladies? Just be considerate!” Faugh.)
“Visualize the Mamdani-stan Reconquista!” works just fine for me. As we wait for the liberation of the ancient Land of The Peacock Throne…
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Just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean they are not also out to get you…
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There’s been some hilariously brutal public reactions along the lines of “Dogs are better than Muslims anyway” comments that has caused more lefty bleating about racism and whatnot and absolutely nobody cares. Americans love dogs and nothing can change that. It’s baked into our DNA that those foreigners who view them as unclean vermin or food are savages and barbarians who do not belong here.
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Not just leftys; Megyn Kelley is supposed to be “conservative”, and she’s giving birth to a porcupine, breech presentation.
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I do love me a conspiracy theory. Still, I had rebelled against the whole reptilian thing especially after I met the author in a pub on the Isle of Wight and he named me as one. I would know, wouldn’t I? Now, with the Epstein files and Biden Obama admin, I’m not so sure.
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–
Right? As Sarah said, “how would it look different if aliens are hiding among us and messing with humanity?” Makes one wonder. Not believe. But wonder.
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What if Marx, Rousseau and Engels were evil aliens sent to destroy us? 😮
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You mean that they weren’t????? [Very Big Crazy Grin]
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🤣
👏
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Karl Marx, with a Londo Mollari, Centauri hairstyle.
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That guy from Ancient Aliens looks like a low-born Centauri.
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“Duckets.” “Dookats.” “Centoori.” “Centauri” “Let’s call the whole thing off!”
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Low-born, or low-brow?
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Yes
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Prove they weren’t.
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All right, maybe they weren’t evil aliens themselves. Maybe they were just ordinary idiots programmed to destroy us by evil aliens. ☹️
———————————
If an action is evil when perpetrated by a corporation, it is just as evil when performed by a government.
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Sadly, I thought humans are capable of that level of evil without extraterrestrial intervention.
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How different would they have to be, to be recognized as aliens?
Once you look at people like Karla Homolka or Jeff Dahmer you realize that “alien” might not necessarily be a physical thing.
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Right? Same same.
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A big part of Obama’s personality is the need to be adored, a need which the news media worshipfully fulfilled ever since his coming out speech at the DNC. Now, nobody cares. In fact it seems Michelle gets more press with her whining, “Oh look at me. I’m a victim,” crap. Obama had one skill, saying something half his audience wanted to hear, then following it immediately with a contradictory sentence that the other half of his audience wanted to hear, and acting like he had just magically made those two things compatible–if only we’d give him the power to do so.
Given the climatistas’ track record and the ICE haters track record, I shouldn’t be amazed, but it still makes me raise my eyebrow to hear the former President of the US say aliens are real, implying that he knows this from secret documents or personal briefings if not actual conversations, and have no reporter ask a single follow-up question, not even, “Are you one?”
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Barry is in withdrawal – he got his wish to stay home in sweats while remotely feeding commands to a puppet in the Oval Office, but the puppet fell apart so he didn’t get a fourth term, and now he’s left with nothing but memories of power.
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I asked the fellow who authored Project BlueBook report a veiled question about the issue. He rolled his eyeballs up for just a second, paused, said “there are a lot of crazy people out there” but then changed the subject. My 14 year old brain took that as a “yes, but I’d have to kill you if I told you.”
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I was rather shocked the day his statement came out. Not that extra-terrestrial intelligences were apparently confirmed as real and known, but at the apparent indifference of the world to what we’ve long been told would be the ultimate culture-shock revelation that could bring down civilization as we know it.
Actually, let me be more specific about the reactions. By my rough estimates: one-quarter of people were wondering exactly how someone who, by his former position, is one of the most authoritative sources imaginable on the matter was BSing us; one-quarter of people were wondering how his minders had let him slip far enough off the leash to tell us the truth, and how fast they would, ahem, “persuade” him to explain away his statement (it took one day); the other one-half of people rolled over, flatulated, and went back to sleep.
I could say that this shows an unexpected resilience in the face of a paradigm-changing event that makes the Copernican Revolution look minuscule. I could say it shows how successful science fiction has been in its original Gernsbackian mission of preparing people for the great changes that scientific advances would bring. I fear instead that this shows that people just don’t care anymore. Yeah, whatever, what’s new on TikTok?
And the worst part is, the indifferent people were probably the smartest about the whole affair. Minus, of course, the interviewer who could not be bothered to do a follow-up question. (Yeah, he was probably on a tight script since he was interviewing a Democrat, but yeesh.)
Republica restituendae.
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a) presidents are not an authoritative source.
b) at best, some presidents can choose to report truthfully on what bureaucrats told them. Bureaucrats are not perfect information sources.
c) HRC had previously made such statements, and is not a whole lot less of an authority
d) Some science fiction writers had it as a massive shock. Saying that some science fiction writers say that there are shirtless werewolves is slightly wrong, but I have trouble finding a more accurate statemetn immediately.
e) Politicians say things to shock us, and where they are obviously inaccurate, dismissal of all statements can be an optimal strategy.
f) For politicians intent on diminishing themselves and diving into obscurity, it is a bit charitable to just say that they have lost their minds, poor dears.
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“It seems that the human race has been temporarily preempted.”
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Yes, but given that Obama is a self-proclaimed BS artist (he once boasted that “sometimes he believes his own BS”, I think everyone who heard the interview simply shrugged it off as Obama being Obama.
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My take on aliens has been heavily influenced by “That Hideous Strength,” where C.S. Lewis postulates that Earth is essentially quarantined because of the Fall. The scientists at the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) are very excited to be in touch with extraterrestrials, who lead them to do more and more inhuman acts — and who turn out to be fallen angels. The Holy Ones come in at the end to clean house. It’s very satisfying.
That being said, “It’s not always demons,” as Jimmy Akin (of “Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World”) always says. If there’s anything out there, it’s more likely to be our distant cousins. But check out his take on “Hungry Ghosts”: https://sqpn.com/2024/05/joe-fishers-spirit-guides-guides-mediumship-channeling-siren-call-of-the-hungry-ghosts/
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That Hideous Strength looks more prophetic everyday, though Perelanda is my favorite of the Space Trilogy.
I have very little bandwidth for aliens as a category outside of fiction novels, being convinced that God put me on Earth to concern myself with Earth and not worry my pretty head about the rest. That being said, I very much recommend Dr. Michael Heiser’s ‘The Portent” and “The Facade” two absolutely loony and wonderful dives into UFOs and conspiracy theory by an exacting Old Testament scholar. If Fox Mulder were an expert in the Old Testament it would come out looking like The Portent and The Facade.
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I walked out of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
That was after the aliens wrecked the lady’s kitchen and lured her toddler out of the house.
And after the aliens had driven the utility worker to the brink of insanity.
I couldn’t believe that those aliens were the great Wise Ones that the movie maker talked about.
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Supposedly Spielberg only made contact with Vallee late at a somewhat advanced stage of the filmmaking process, and Vallee, although not adverse to whatever money and publicity was coming his way from this, told Spielberg that his-Vallee’s latest research did not line up with the story Spielberg was telling. Spielberg told him he would have to incorporate that into his next film. This was a concept about a bunch of bad aliens wreaking havoc on a human family, with a token good alien. It was never made in that form, but ultimately spawned Poltergeist, ET and possibly Gremlins. I’ve occasionally wondered if the more sinister moments of Close Encounters were Spielberg trying to incorporate a bit of what Vallee was telling him into that movie without a full course correction.
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I heard he walked it back, saying he meant it statistically speaking, big universe and all, and we’d never be in contact.
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The proverbial Men In Black got to him, giggle snort…
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Interestingly, I read a fiction story (forgot the author & title) where the UFO phenomenon was the product of beings who were also the creators of stories about Elves and other mythical creatures.
These beings “feed” on human belief in those stories. They didn’t really like humans but depended on humans believing those stories.
One aspect of their campaign was the so-called “Men In Black”.
A human might witness an unusual phenomenon but before the human could forget about it, the Men In Black would show up and tell the human to “not talk about it”.
Being human, the witness would think more about the unusual phenomenon. [Evil Grin]
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Couple of thoughts: It is very possible that there is intelligent or any life on other planets circling other stars. But as a believer I have no problem in saying that they were created too. Second If we have been visited by UFO how did they get here? FTL travel doesn’t exit. Unless we throw out Physics. And there is a cause and effect problem there. Why not the simplest explanations. Our govt testing out new planes. For 40 years appxmtly the prototype B2 bombers stealth and F35 fighters are not trackable with standard radar. Add to that Russian (USSR) and Chinese, spy planes which I am sure are out there.
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I grew up near Highway 93, under the flight path between Groom Lake and Mountain Home.
Few people have seen more UFOs than I, (including one that seemed to ignore everything we know about aeronautical engineering).
And every single one had FAA compliant lights.
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Thats very interesting. I think unless I misunderstood you, that bears out what I was saying. Aliens don’t fly with FAA lights. and as a point I remember reading, more alien abductions have been reported from NYC than anywhere else. Given Our last election results not surprising.
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Wait a minute, how does that follow? Alien ships can get here from another star system using methods we’ve barely begun to dream about, but they can’t fake the correct signal lights? 🤔
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Drunken alien fratboys zooming about while stoned on Plutonian Nyborg and blinking their parking lights at the Terra-bunnies.
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While family spaceships lock the doors and tell their children to not look out the windows as they pass Earth.
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The B2 had/has the radar cross section of a walnut. So if you ever see a walnut raing at you at 575 MPH look out!
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I always looked at it this way, God wouldn’t invent a universe and not include someone for us humans to play with.
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Why not? If He is capable of creating all of existence, He could do it however He wants.
Besides, there is a whole planet full of various beings for us to play with.
Kitties are my personal favorites.
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Like, a chew toy?
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Oh good, I’m not the only one who got the creeping willies from the Mothman book. I made it halfway through, jumped to the last chapter, and turned it back into the library. I got a really, really bad sense from the story, one I’ve only had a few other times. Looking back, I think the sense was that if it was fiction, it was the kind that left a residue and gave me nightmares. If it was nonfiction, it was about something I needed to stay the h-e-l-l away from for Reasons.
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I never bothered with the actual book, but the potted summaries online sounded both creepy and…lacking in substance? The sandhill crane explanation seemed reasonable to me for the early, non copycat sightings.
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In a universe nearly 14 billion years old, filled with quadrillions of stars, and apparently at least a dozen planets for each star, I can’t believe that only ONE of those planets supports life. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the Drake Equation, the famous tool for estimating a number for intelligent species. What are the odds that the product of all of those factors evaluates to exactly 1? Very low, I’d say.
On the other hand, I can’t believe that intelligent interstellar aliens would travel to our little planet and do the stupid things attributed to them. Why would they only contact mentally disturbed people, or those from the shallow end of the gene pool? (I include 0bama in that category)
In summary, I believe that aliens probably exist, but UFOs are not alien spacecraft. As I put it in a story I’m writing, “Anything you can detect with your primitive technology is not an alien starship.”
———————————
To the Internet: Please stop making stupid people famous!
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I like the theory that earth and sol, are in some remote part of the universe surrounded by barren ocean/desert of space. Distances that any of the other civilizations avoid because if anything is out there, not worth checking into. The few that accidentally swing by only verify that perception.
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Like Oz surrounded by the deadly desert?
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Look up the phrase “Local Bubble”.
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I liked Julian May’s explanation: in her Galactic Milieu universe we are under observation as a potentially powerfully gifted but dangerously aggressive species. However, the observers were mostly from a recently (relatively) admitted species that was, “imperfectly unified,” in Galactic culture. Also fond of practical jokes. And bored. So,when all these things came together…
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Or a lot of AI generated shorts (pictures and stories) on how the universe is discovering Earth is a death world. That been flown by, maybe visited for a few days (in Canada North). Only to learn, as humans join their universities, train with their military, etc., that those supposedly squishy, naturally unarmed, beings, are dangerous. Dangerous because:
Takes some suspension of belief that all other evolved civilizations environments are more fragile with their beings having natural armor, claws, and/or teeth. Guess it is believable that lower gravity would enable them to reach space easier and faster.
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Brin’s ‘The Damned’ trilogy plays with parts of this. Humanity is discovered early in the first book, and it turns out that humans are really, really, really good at fighting. Reasons for this include the other galactic intelligent races all having hollow bones, and not getting adrenaline rushes. If your bone structure is brittle, and your opponent gets a rush of strength whenever his “fight or flight” kicks in, well…
There are also repeated mentions of the fact that most of the races simply aren’t mentally conditioned to handle combat. Just being around friendly humans causes mental stress to many of the allied races (the races that typically have large combat contingents don’t suffer from this issue).
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I believe that Alan Dean Foster wrote the Damned Trilogy. 😉
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That would explain it!
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D’oh, you’re right. I probably had Brin on the brain due to the short story I mentioned below (which iirc I found in an anthology that included another story that I know he wrote).
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What trilogy is that? I thought I’d read most of his stuff, Uplift etc.
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Because mentally unbalanced people are fun to poke?
(To be clear, I know nothing of a UFO sighting/crop circle event that occurred East of Moscow, Idaho in the early ‘90s. Nope. Not a thing.)
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Amazing what you can accomplish with some boards, stakes, lengths of cord and a working knowledge of geometry, isn’t it?
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Also: Moscow, Idaho, right next to WSU…
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Which was quite useful for Wazzu Students who wanted to drink, back when Idaho’s drinking age was 18(?) and Washington’s was 21…
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Why just Earth? One possibility is that Earth has a highly unusual core. its a very oversized nickel iron core. Due to its molten outer layer, it is interacting with Sol’s magnetic field. Thus we have a dynamo running to generate a magnetic field that is relatively powerful. This shields Earth form the solar wind, preventing atmosphere stripping and also minimizing at-surface radiation.
the Moon and Mars have cores that have “gone solid”, running out of heat, solidifying, and losing that essential high-strength filed dynamo. The resultant solid core remainder field is too weak to shield. Luna is too small to retain atmosphere for more than little, thus its surface is hard vacuum. Even the huge add of Apollo landers is gone. Mars has almost no atmosphere left, despite clearly having had enough to sustain surface water. now, its so low water and useful gasses simply strip away.
Assuming planetary evolution (versus “the Almighty made it so”), one hypothesis posits an early collision of proto-earth with a “kinda Mars” sized protoplanet. the resulting smashup liquified the whole and slopped off a chunk of the lighter stuff as “Moon” and the heavier fraction as “earth”. The resultant core-combo was mostly left to earth, thus way oversized for an otherwise simple acretion/slow-buildup mass.
it also got a great deal of uranium, which is why it is still hot enough to be partially liquid. pure residual heat would have dissipated by now, 4.5 billion years later. See also “extra” which is why ours is so robust.
If that process is uncommon, we may be the only ~1G planet with a huge magnetic and radioactive core. Thus an expected six to eight billion year “habitable lifespan”.
If that core was “normal” it would likely be going solid right about now, the field drop, the van allen belts vanish, and we would be watching Sol begin to blast away the atmosphere while also beginning to fry us all with all sorts of radiation flavors . What an awful end to current state, eh?
(Or, the above long version is how the Almighty made it so.) (no? Prove it.) (grin)
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I have recently (last year or two) seen an explanation that boils down to “the only one, so far” – that is, based on the latest star survey data, the earlier, hotter stars would be a lot tougher to get things going up to a technological civilization level due to various radiationy aspects as well as the stellar cycle within a shorter stellar lifespan, plus various nearby kabooms from the bigger ones in the early neighborhoods as are necessary to get all the heavier elements we’ve got, and as a result we are really the first place.
To my non-mathematician brain the math-for-dummies math looked not obviously wrong, so it’s at least in the running.
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Do not leave out having a gas giant almost-star orbiting outward of Earth, to sweep up such a major fraction of the comets and leftover rocks so they are not still doing a “late heavy bombardment” on us down here. A lot of the systems they’ve found in those planet hunting surveys have a gas giant right in close to the primary, where it would not do a further out liquid-water-zone planet any good at all.
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I can.
We have a sample size of one and the only thing we can say is that the chances of life in this universe are not zero. They could still be statistically indistinguishable from zero, though.
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Well, given small sample error, the error bars go from zero to one.
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If our puppet masters were the external, Heinleinian kind, we’d have spotted them already. If they’re the internal, Goa’uld, Stargate kind, most of them would get passed off as a strange, ‘benign’ lump.
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So, search for people who avoid CAT-scans and similar at all costs?
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Setesh and Hathor had that pheromone thing that could make people compliant, so get the scan after pheromoning them and then alter the images afterwards.
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Given Goa’uld beneficial effects on host physiology, the disease reasons for getting any scan would be absent, leaving only accidents. And if the host body damage was bad enough, per show canon the parasite would exit that host and dive into a handy paramedic or bystander, leaving only a weird wound channel on a trauma victim’s body for the coroner to puzzle over.
Only a deceased host who died alone in the wilderness somewhere, and then was not eaten by rampaging packs of gerbils, would ever end up with a similarly deceased parasite to be discovered.
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Another reason to avoid, “woo-woo,” like plague is that it’s bad for your health, never mind Stirling’s beneficent community of Wiccans in the Emberverse. I have known several people who are/were active Wiccans (not malicious, but comfortable with using “magic,” for personal/spiritual benefit) and they have all had major health problems. One is no longer with us.
And the woman who was running the local SCA shire into the ground was a witch, yes, witch, who definitely felt people mostly existed to give her power. The shire survived her because my beloved engineered a “color revolution,” by bringing in enough new members to vote her out of office. The last we heard, she was a complete physical wreck, also lonely, quite possibly because there were few to no people in her life she hadn’t been using for her personal benefit.
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Not directly related, but it reminds me –
Instapundit had a thing up a while back (several months to a year ago, iirc) that mentioned one of those “harmless fads” that so many people are involved in. It was either yoga or meditation, iirc. And there was a bit in there about people who are experts at it are unhappy with how popular it’s become because they believe that getting too involved in it without taking the proper precautions (which people who aren’t experts at it are *completely* unaware of) can open you up to bad supernatural influences.
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I believe there are things we have to be very careful messing about with. Back in acid glory days I had an experience right out of the Don Juan Yaqui Way of Knowledge that was no fun at all. One of my Big Island friends apprenticed to the local Kahuna and got into Hawaiian occult. It didn’t do much for his sanity. So I’ve been careful to stay away from that stuff, I have no need or desire to get closer.
In terms of woo woo, Eric Weinstein’s talk/conjectures about post-Einstein physics is pretty wild!
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If I was any sort of writer or movie maker, I would create a sequel to the 2008 movie titled “The Day The Earth Stood Still” with the title of “You left us alive, your mistake”.
If you saw that movie (or heard about the story line), you’d know that the alien visited Earth because of the “ecological damage” humans doing to Earth.
While he attempted to destroy human life on Earth, he was convinced to just destroy all of human technology. (And he was said to be the Good Guy.)
I could easily see a future Earth that rebuilt its technology and seriously went into space with new technology, just to get back at those “Nice” Aliens.
At least the original movie had a somewhat understandable message. IE “Humans don’t bring your wars & violence into our playpen.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still_(2008_film)
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Ah, but in the original movie the aliens had the same problem. That’s why they created the Gorts in the first place, and why they started warning every species that developed nuclear weapons.
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That’s true.
Which is why the first movie made more sense than the “remake”.
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Yeah, the idea of the remake is basically, “The technology that supports the population of your world is bad because it pollutes the planet. So stop using it.
No, I’m not giving you alternative technology from my super advanced civilization. Why would you ask that question?”
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“BACK TO YOUR MUD HUTS AND 35 YEAR AVERAGE LIFESPAN, YOU PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS!”
(a century later)
FROM WHERE ARE ALL THESE [bleeedldeeeedledeeeeep] HUMAN DEATHSHIPS COMING? HOW?
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Chicago Boyz had a review of the 1951 movie this morning. https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/76137.html Regardless of the artistic merit of the movie (Gort was cool), the writer was not impressed.
I now know the term “Idiot Plot”, and have a hard time disagreeing with him on those points.
I’m blissfully ignorant of the 2008 remake.
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Eric Raymond has an old blog post “The Reality of the Lizard People”
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600
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Always worth checking out! Lizard People = Sociopaths . Makes sense.
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I like to think the First Ones are out there somewhere, waiting for us go grow up enough to be worth talking to. 😛
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If aliens exist, they are so far technologically advanced they can manipulate even the things that describe us as humans. They would be among us, we would have no idea they exist, and until some future time they feel it’s necessary to let us know they exist, we can only wonder if that will happen, or they’ll wipe the board and start over.
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That’s amusing. 😉
On the other hand, what if we’re the “Elder Ones”?
IE When we get out into space, we discover that every alien species is younger/less advanced than us. [Crazy Grin]
More seriously, if there are other intelligent species out there, why should All Of Them be vastly older/more advanced than us?
The fact of the matter is that we just don’t know if there are other intelligent species out there, more advanced or less advanced than us.
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The big problem is finding an alien species. Even at the speed of light, it’s four years to the nearest star, and at current technology, the trip would take somewhere around 70,000 to 80,000 years. Either aliens would have created a ship that can sustain life for that period of time, or they’ve found a way to get around the speed limit of light. That, or aliens are some type of machine that can perform for such long periods of time. Then you have to think about “Why Earth?”. That opens up a whole different can of worms; especially when you think about the possibility we’re just in the way, and they have other things on their mind.
I’m more inclined to believe humans had technology in the past, humans being humans destroyed the civilization, and due to caution, keep their existence secret for safety.
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High relativistic speed travel is only a few years between stars. For the passengers, anyway.
The problem is that interstellar space apparently resembles the thinner areas of our oort cloud. Lots of random junk. Nearby starts essentially overlap their debris fields.
So driving really fast has some impactful consequences. Like if the ship isn’t proceeded by a -big- asteroid-sized lump of solid lead, the ship gets micro-bombarded to junk before it gets much above 0.1C. and at 0.9 C, its getting fried by relativistic particles and nuked by the occasional golfball sized icechunk. (Ice cube at 0.9 C = how many megatons?)
Thus real FTL is likely to involve some sort of cosmic bypass or “cheat”. Stargate versus stardrive. We push the gates out at 0.05-0.1C as big generation ships or automations, then we can port into systems they pass. We wont explore Alpha Centauri this century, but the kids of 3,000 AD might.
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You’re missing the point of my question. IE Why are All Aliens Vastly Older/More Advanced than Humans?
I submit that Intelligent Life may be rare in our Galaxy.
First, there’s the possibility that Life itself may be rare. IE The conditions for life to develop may depend on several factors that we know little about. (See Mailclerk’s post on why Earth.)
Second, even if Life develops on a given planet, there’s the possibility that only single-celled organisms develop.
Third, what are the possibilities that multi-celled organisms develop? Again, we don’t know what factors involved in the development of multicellular organisms.
Fourth, do any of the multicellular organisms develop intelligence? Again, this is an area that we know nothing about.
Fifth, do any of those intelligent aliens have the ability to make/use tools? At least, one species on Earth may have human-level intelligence, but can’t make or use tools (the dolphins).
Sixth, do any of the tool making/tool using species develop the concept of Science? Science allows humans to go far beyond muscle powered/animal powered technology. Mind you, it’s possible that without Science, humans could have developed Steam Powered devices.
Seventh, since we’re really thinking about Aliens that could visit Earth, there’s a question about developing Space Flight. Many societies might not think it’s worth leaving their home worlds.
Eighth, once Space Flight is developed, then we have the question of “is FTL travel possible”.
Note, none of the above has anything to do with the age of the alien civilizations. There may be older civilizations than ours and there may be younger civilizations than ours.
So, why are you convinced that the only alien civilizations are vastly older than us?
Did visitors from Space tell you that? [Sarcastic Grin]
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You don’t have to re-invent the Drake Equation; just use the original. 😛
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LOL
Well, I left off the bit in the Drake Equation about “how old a technological civilization could be”. 😀
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This. This. this.
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Odds, while I recognise that first gen stars are probably much harder to develop on.
stars like our sun have been around for 4.6 billion years and the “million” years to go from something perhaps not that intelligent to our current status is pretty close to a rounding error on that number.
I am quite willing to concede there may be not be intelligent civilisations say 5 billion years older then us but us as the oldest? No.
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Honestly, I’d be very surprised if it turns out that Humans are the Old Ones (ie the First Civilization to reach the Stars).
However, I get very tired of the idea that All Alien Civilizations Are Extremely Older Than Mankind.
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Exactly.
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Any civilization that’s younger than our own and has achieved even basic orbital space flight has had an *amazing* rate of technological progress (assuming a similar technology path, and not something surprising like the “divergent” path in one story mentioned a couple of weeks ago where nearly everyone goes to interstellar flight around the early industrial age, but we went on a different path that led us to fun things like atomics), compared to us. Not out of the question, of course, since we don’t have a point of comparison. But assuming we’re anywhere close to “normal”, something to keep in mind.
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Or what if the Industrial Revolution turns out to be an incredibly low-probability intersection of factors, so that while intelligent life is as common as dirt, most cultures never get beyond the level of Classical Antiquity. So there could be ancient civilizations, with wisdom traditions going back tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, but be virtually indistinguishable at interstellar distances from worlds that have only non-intelligent life?
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Or, the typical civilizations can’t change remotely as fast as we can… there’s an early-ish Arthur Clarke story, showing assorted standard-issue Weird Tentacled Monstrosity aliens boggled at the deserted Earth about to be incinerated by an exploding Sun, with the line (IIRC) “their first radios were now fossilized in strata a million years old” or something like.
Or, more unsettlingly, most of the (possibly few, see industrialization bottleneck) civilizations that do give themselves a capability to colonize space, simply decide not to bother actually doing it.
(Just tonight, I encountered another “the case against space” book: “Becoming Martian” — only had 5 minutes or so to skim it, but cutting to the last chapter, read “so for now the only trips to space should probably be round trips” or the close like. Grrr-snarl, especially in a time of Starship tests.
I keep wondering if there were books elaborately doubting “Should We Settle The New World” back in the late 1500s to early-mid 1700s. “A notional future ‘American’ culture might not be much like the well-ordered feudal European Christendom we know and love today” or whatever.
Oh, wait, colonization and flat-out colonialism were A Thing just then, so not too much Paralyzing Overthinking Doubt going around.
“To think of these stars that you see overhead at night,
“these vast worlds which we can never reach.
“I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that.
“It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”
— Cecil Rhodes, as quoted unfavorably in the new preface to “A City On Mars?”
He sounds better and better to me all the time.)
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Such as the Lizards in Harry Turtledove’s ‘Worldwar’ series. They are astounded that we have progressed from knights on horseback to aircraft, ships, tanks, radio and artillery in the mere 900 years since their initial survey. They are shocked to find out that in 1943 we are already developing atomic bombs on our own.
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Norton’s Star Guard – Universe shows up, states “You can have the stars but you only get to provide the function you are good at – Mercenaries.” Earth – “Sure.” In the meantime … (What? I’m going to give away the plot?) In addition, humanity, being humanity, not only does what humanity has done for eons, but anyone else who asks “How?”. The answer is “Sure.”
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One of the best authors for a number of the scenarios in this article is James P. Hogan. Start with his Giants trilogy (which starts with his debut novel). Also his “Voyage from yesteryear”, “Code of the Lifemaker”, and “Echoes of an alien sky”.
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I believe there are humans on other planets also made in God’s image. We are currently under spiritual quarantine as a planet while we undergo our mortal probation. So I technically believe in aliens I guess.
As for the current insanity of the left, I think religious explanations are sufficient without going into UFOs, abductions, body-snatchers, etc. Sometimes I wonder if there are people who have invited demons to possess them but that train of thought is so uncomfortable that I immediately redirect my mind.
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Re Barry’s thing, note his strange utterances work if he talked to one on the phone.
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or believed he had.
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He really did/does seem to believe that Marxism or at least Marxism Lite would/will work, for some appropriate value of ‘work.’ So anything’s possible there.
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”At that point the “aliens” were not at all like aliens, but something between fairies and demons and sometimes yes. ”
I’ve always been struck by the way UFO stuff rhymes so closely with the Greek pantheon’s reported activities among the mortals. Either Zeus at al. were awiens, or there’s a deep seated need in many humans to be so probed by all powerful beings.
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Do aliens exist?
I refuse to believe we are alone in the universe. That there is not some other intelligent life out there.
As I get older I increasingly believe that practical star travel may not be a solvable problem that civilisations that develop in the short term burn out before achieving it, and civilisations that go static never put the resources into developing it.
Let hope we get back on the moon before there is no one alive who has walked on the moon.
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To quote my buddy Whittaker Chambers in his jolly little tome, “Witness”, such light reading, a veritable laugh fest, everyone needs this gem. OK it’s horrifying. Anyway my buddy says it’s either Christianity or Communism. For those who prefer an Old Testament reference, it’s either the Lord or the Amalekites. Or Molochians or whatevs.
The point is if you don’t have a true G-d a false god will come for you and false gods tend to be nasty.
I don’t like this BTW, I would prefer that everyone goes to heaven and we’re all happy. My face has been rubbed into the fact that I have escaped a literal pit lately and I’m peevish about it.
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Gee, am I the only one who will say unequivocally that there are no “alien beings” out there? There are only spiritual beings on one side or the other. Why is the universe so big, then? Well, why is your house so big if you’re only maybe five to six feet tall? Maybe the owner likes it that way. Look at the Hubble and West telescopes. What an amazing looking universe we’re in. Fit for a deity, no?
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How do you know that? [Crazy Grin]
It seems to be a bit arrogant to make that statement as none of us have complete knowledge of the universe.
Of course, G*d might be reading Sarah’s blogs (among others) and chuckling at us foolish mortals.
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I could be wrong, of course, but I’m basing my statement on the lack of reference to anyone else in my religious texts.
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Why would humans on Earth need to know about G*d’s creations on other worlds?
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John 10:16 And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.
Maybe He meant humans on other continents. Maybe not.
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THIS.
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I remember reading one short story (it might have been by Brin) in which the solar system was surrounded by a gigantic crystal sphere. After the sphere was accidentally broken (and shards went every which way, including inward toward the inner planets), humanity was able to explore the greater universe. And humanity promptly discovered that all of the other solar systems were also surrounded by invisible crystal spheres that were *completely* unbreakable from the outside.
Eventually humanity discovered that four or five prior species had each broken out of their respective spheres, found themselves alone in the galaxy, got bored of waiting around for everyone else, and went to go hang out in the event horizon of a singularity, where the time dilation meant time would pass much more slowly for them than the rest of the galaxy. They left directions to the singularity in question, and an invitation for when we inevitably got bored of waiting around on our five or six worlds for anyone else to show up (or playing Elder Race, if other races did emerge on our watch).
I read an article online recently that was talking about the Fermi Paradox. And assuming that there is an active galactic civilization out there, the most basic answer might be, “There are a lot of planets out there, and they conducted their last survey only of our solar system only fifty thousand years ago, so it’s a while before they’re due back. Also, radio waves are just a passing fad for most races, and stop being used within a few centuries. So no one listens for them.”
On the UFO topic…
A few weeks ago, *dark* and early in the morning, I looked out of my window and noted some lights in the air some distance away from my apartment. I couldn’t make sense of the configuration of the lights. They didn’t look like anything I was familiar with. And it was either moving much more slowly than an airplace, or not moving at all. I was having trouble figuring that part of it out. Definitely an Unidentified Flying Object.
It was only as the sun started to come up and illuminate the object that I was able to tell that it was a helicopter in profile.
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‘The Crystal Spheres’ is indeed by David Brin, published in the January 1984 issue of Analog.
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My .02 cents os they’re demonic, or something equally malevolent and virtually indistinguishable like fairies or djinn and they definitely have human catpaws they use on Earth, like Epstein. A real alien might stink of sulfur, but it wouldn’t be driven away by prayer, as some witnesses have claimed to have done.
Assuming this all real. Which is a big if, unless you witness or experience the phenomenon yourself, I never have, so I don’t know. I’ll keep praying, just in case.
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I had a scary thought: the alien version of Hernán Cortés arrives when an Obamaesque president is in office. What would happen?
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One of my notes from LosCon says, “What if Earth is a penal colony where another planet sends their sociopaths to get rid of them?” So, sociopaths are actually aliens. One of the reasons I go to Cons is to get these ideas. :)
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Somewhat off today’s topic, very much on-topic for this blog: tonight’s video recording of Night 2 of a 2-night public summary of (part of) her new book by X’s ‘Datarepublican’ (Jennica Pounds):
https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2023944312803750301?s=20
Yes, this link does play without an X account, or it did for me; and feel free to skip to +16 min or so where the prologue is over and the show begins. Run time thence ~45 min + 30-ish min questions.
Almost eerie, how well this talk dovetails with classic ATH themes; in particular, one of her three suggested ‘things to do’ is very much ‘Build Under, Build Over, Build Around’ and is stated in almost those words. Long video but rewarding.
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And similarly, though I’ve watched much less of this one, Night 1 of the same (you can tell with a few more technical glitches/hiccups) from last night:
https://x.com/DataInterpretr/status/2023854845833461882?s=20
DR herself appears at about +14m, but her co-author also gives a talk to start.
It’s basically about ‘the blob’ and how these magically-coincidental ‘spontaneous’ lefty events are not much spontaneous or coincidental at all. With references and financial ‘wiring diagram.’
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“…if so they will be human, either having left from the Earth in previous civilizations, before the civilization was destroyed in one of Earth’s periodic cuisinart cycles, or a Schrodinger worlds type of set up where they got themselves thrown WAY BACK in time from somewhere in our future.”
Closely related, but requiring some ‘outside’ intervention by Someone or Something: kidnapped (or perhaps ‘rescued’ in their terms or the Rescuers’ or both) people from some place/time in human history, not necessarily in our past. (Someone I know is even working on a story where dinosuar-era critters are kidnapped to Far Far Away, ascend to sentience, then find their way back to Earth about… now, historically.) My ‘Walker Between the Worlds’ setting (see a vignette or five) has an off-stage set of Someones who use human intermediaries (‘Janissaries’ h/t Jerry Pournelle), and remotely control interstellar Gates; so in a sense these are aliens, but we Just Don’t Know more.
Do I expect to see a New Rome, or the traders’ planets of Sidon, Tyre, etc.? Not at all. Fun, though.
The same could even be done by supposing the Someones are humans from Way Forward in time, like, say, Poul Anderson’s Danellians from the Time Patrol series — and they then have access to, most likely, all of human history at the very least. Of course, little evidence of that either, but given good far-future tech (a la Time Patrol) that’s not much to go on.
Amazing how much there could be, even if Earth is Terracentrically supposed to be Really All That.
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I think this sums up Rev Jackson nicely:
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