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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I think this is the impetus of “fake news” stuff, aliens just don’t have credibility to anyone aware of the vast distances of space. It’s been the realm of cranks forever because as much as the public loves space operas, the only way to transverse the distances involved in a single human generation is to suspend physics.

What aliens are great for is hiding or faking technology on earth. People in the early 1990s saw stealth bombers and believed the were seeing aliens. I would assume that if I wanted to hide a genetic experiment on humans, aliens might well be a useful disguise.

What makes you confident that it is actually impossible to travel faster than the speed of light? Humanity does not know everything about physics that there is to know.

I think the existence of the ability to travel faster than light which is known to at least one alien species drastically worsens the fermi paradox. With faster than light travel, massive galactic empires can form in (astrologically) insignificant timescales and why we haven't heard/seen them is more inexplicable.