Posts
What is the big deal about this?
I don't understand why so many expect to find extraterrestrial intelligence. Yet the lines are drawn, and rigidly maintained. An army of dewy hopefuls confronts a flinty-eyed contingent of sceptics and there seems to be no talking across the lines.
It's the quality of hope that perplexes me, the longing for finding "comrade souls" across the vast light years of inhospitable terrain.
What I don't understand is, if it is out there, how do they think we would recognize it if we saw it? If there isn't much intelligence to speak of on earth, why do we expect to find it out there? Aren't they concerned that if there IS intelligent life, we wouldn't be seen as reaching the bottom rung minimum for participation? We'd probably be shipped off to zoos as a curiosity, a kind of missing link.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
At first I thought you were talking about Freedom's Place. :) With all of the frantic debate over illegal immigrants, could you imagine the furor there would be over extraterrestials. Shades of Men in Black.
well tim, seems to me that there's lack of intelligence enough to go around.........
but on further reflection, it IS a funny image!
let them read this blog Hayden
http://lyricflight.blogspot.com/
expect a knock on your door, lights flashing. your microwave going on by itself. I love the movies Hayden.
ahh, rauf! I think Jake would bark up a storm if ET came to the door - then go hide under the bed!
Good on you for writing this post on Valentine's Day!
Many funny encounters on Wednesday! A few even proposed to live on the same spaceship!
you better be careful or you'll wake up under a dome on trafalmadore.
I think we have probably already been examined by extraterrestrial beings who too were looking for intelligent life "out there." I don't think us squishy sacks of self-propagating chemicals qualified.
We are the only ones. A long time ago, I was inspired by a TV programme to read an erudite book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle which explained that in order to support this extremely unlikely phenomenon of life, and in particular human life, it takes a universe the size of ours just to provide the conditions for such life in one tiny part.
The Weak Anthropic Principle states that all our observations are biased by the selection effect of our own existence. We are not gods looking down on the cosmos, but parts of it with apparatus to be conscious of it.
The Strong Anthropic Principle states that the Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history. (because we are here!)
actually, yves, I'm not buying it. and, since science reverses itself with a big "ooops" every few years, I don't have to. But then, I don't believe that humans are the most intelligent beings on this planet, only the most destructive and most obsessed with manipulating their environment.
It wasn't long ago that we "knew" life couldn't thrive in the superheated steam and water of the vents far under the ocean. Then we went and looked and found that life was thriving.
I also think we use the word intelligence too narrowly.
You have every right to not buy it, and in a way i don't either but I find myself with a kind of loyalty to those scientists (who were controversial at the time and almost forgotten twenty years later) just because I read the book. Such is the irrationality of our beliefs. We are faithful to our own, despite reason.
Post a Comment