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In the wake of Obama’s on-air revelation that he believes in aliens and Trump’s move to declassify government UFO documents, UnHerd invites two world experts to make the best case for hope and doubt about extraterrestrial life. Michael Shermer, Skeptic magazine founder and author of the new book Truth (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Truth-What-Find-Still-Matters/dp/142145372X), and Harvard astronomer Prof. Avi Loeb ask: are we alone in the universe?
Zaphod got it. Who’s interested in some monkeys ?
Think.
How would a dollop of protozoa go about looking for human intelligence ? Well, obviously by trying to sniff our some smelly methane because thats what all life produces (correct)
How would a bat go about looking for ET ? Well, obviously by trying to hear ultrasonic squeaks (yes and no)
How would humans detect a science that they haven’t discovered yet ?
Sorry, but we are just slime.
“If there are aliens they will be a million years ahead of us” – quite.
Crikey – you make a lot of assumptions…
If you have billions of years youcan assume anything you like
Except time does not really exist
The answer is no.
There are no aliens.
Why? Because the aliens that we can imagine do not exist.
But there are certainly aliens we cannot imagine.
How can I be certain ? Because I have the whole realm of possibility (infinite) outside of human imagination (finite)
Therefore there are aliens?
Yes. But not ones that we can imagine. Think of an intelligence which has no material substance. Like a psyche.
Well done Avi for showing up the lack of curiosity and openness in many universities, where clutching onto old pearls for pay, pension, peer prestige and promotion rule the roost. Who knows: What lies around the corner may re-order the world, as this whole issue appears to be tightly linked to aspects of consciousness and non-human intelligence. There perhaps lies some hope for us and our lost leaders as we preside over the destruction of this planet and fight the tide of the human spirit and our awakening – for reasons as baffling as they are likely doomed to failure. There is already evidence for something else and others, beyond and perhaps here: as a starter at least do some deeper reading and watch The Age of Disclosure – a recent pay documentary that may even raise a sceptic’s furrowed eyebrow. The UAP issue has had a bad rap for many reasons, not least over security during the Cold War and fears among leaders of societal ontological shock. Now’s the unwrap.
The biggest losers, however this unfolds, will be the world religions, which will be shown up in their true light: the result of misunderstanding, then compounded down the ages by the desire to control and exploit others by the unscrupulous.
Our main hope is to escape that paradigm, lest it prove to be too much of a shock to the collective psyche.
What dross. School boy stuff.
Any basic understanding of physics demolishes this twaddle.
Only our very basic ‘clever ape’ physics.
This is what a mid-life crisis looks like for a tenured Harvard astrophysicist—bored of the endless routine of advising grad students and chairing committees in relative obscurity, the lure of click-baiting one’s way to public attention is as tantalizing as it is to a teen blogger. I’ve seen this a few times in my career as a physicist and it never ceases to feel sad and pathetic. I’ve stopped even watching his highly predictable and scientifically mendacious output. “Better a frontal lobotomy than Avi Loeb in front of me”.