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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28027 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Back to aliens again- I haven’t seen this posted yet. https://abc7.com/amp/mexico-aliens-corpses-ufos/13776957/

Tdlr is Mexico’s congress has what are claimed to be mummified alien bodies ‘with eggs inside’ which is a significant escalation if you assume they’re copying the US congress.

Now obviously I don’t believe in aliens, and it’s going to take a bit more effort than that to convince me. But one government is pushing an aliens narrative, and now a different government which has a lot of official tensions with it is pushing an aliens narrative. There’s got to be some reason governments would do aliens.

My question is why? Is it something that just makes sense to government officials?

Those "aliens" are to a nontrivial extent made of beans (common bean and adzuki bean, see page 9/13).

As to why this is happening: Because Mexico, like the US, is a Latin American country and Latin American countries have a zany, offbeat and not entirely comprehensible political culture. Mexicans are just trying to keep pace with the great neighbor.

Those "aliens" are to a nontrivial extent made of beans (common bean and adzuki bean, see page 9/13).

So what you're saying is that they're invertebrates?

The common bean isn't too surprising; Andean people buried their mummies with various foods in preparation for the afterlife, including the indigenous common bean, which could plausibly contaminate the mummy.

The adzuki and the Bos taurus are more inexplicable. Unless the aliens abducted some cows from the other hemisphere before being buried with them. Or perhaps it's bull shit.

Mexico’s congress

real reputable source there

probably a ploy to boost tourism and buzz, in which case ,a success

This whole thing is genuinely hilarious, the fact that the "mummy" bears an uncanny resemblance to E.T. and the repeated assertions by the press that scientists managed to "draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating" makes this perhaps the most unintentionally funny thing I've read in a while. Guys, I measured the velocity of a moving car using mass spectrometry, please believe my results.

At this point, I would be glad to never hear about ayy lmaos again - I'm actually interested in the topic but the ayy craze has crossed the line into sheer parody. It's particularly frustrating because there are more credible (albeit circumstantial) pieces of evidence out there they could grab onto like the Viking Lander biological experiments, but their case has hinged around ridiculous UFOlogy and eyewitness testimony and now apparently they're resorting to using ridiculous E.T. looking mummies that obviously aren't faked at all.

draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating

I had to look this up to see what was actually meant by this: I don't think even the zaniest urologist would make this claim.

Apparently, the radiocarbon testing and DNA testing were separate, unrelated tests, with radiocarbon dating suggesting a date of 1700 years ago when these poor wayward alien souls got lost in a pile of algae muck. And the DNA evidence suggest that a full 30% of the DNA specimen was "unknown" and therefore of extraterrestrial origin, since only 70% matches terrestrial sources. Presumably it's some alien-human hybrid.

And the DNA evidence suggest that a full 30% of the DNA specimen was "unknown" and therefore of extraterrestrial origin, since only 70% matches terrestrial sources. Presumably it's some alien-human hybrid.

If it is of, as the history channel says, extraterrestrial origin, which I don’t believe, the more plausible explanation would be a contaminated sample, would it not?

Contamination through and through, which is to be expected. The issue is when they suggest that the 30% unknown is alien DNA, instead of more plausible terrestrial contaminants.

How, exactly, would this alien-human hybridization even work?

This was covered extensively in the hardcore 90's documentary The XXX Files: Lust in Space

Posting a Finnish classic

This was covered extensively in the hard science 90's documentary The X-Files.

My post was sarcastic, though probably overly ungenerous to the Ayys. Most likely they would say it's extraterrestrial DNA that's been contaminated by various terrestrial sources, including humans.

You can take a sample of mud from your backyard and do a comprehensive DNA sequencing on it and end up with more unknown DNA than that.

Exactly. We do environmental genetic testing all the time in our lab, and even in the best case the results are full of "unknown" -- partly because most DNA gathered is too damaged to be identified, and partly because we don't have genetic data available for all random protists and bacteria that are swarming in every cubic millimeter of dirt.

When something is presented to a legislature, that doesn't mean the whole legislature endorses it, just that some members found it interesting enough to present. The congress has over 600 members. I'm sure most are intelligent and don't believe in aliens, but it only takes a few. And belief in extraterrestrials is popular - polls find >1/3 of americans believe - so it's very plausible some congress members just genuinely believe. Or are pandering to constituents who do, or trying to get attention. This parsimoniously explains why 'governments do aliens', without reaching for any hidden strategy. Imo, this explains every case of 'large institution endorsing UFOs', one of which I described here.

Here's a better article.

The UFO researcher [who presented this], who appears regularly in Mexican media to present his purported findings, has previously been associated with claims of discoveries that have later been debunked. In 2015, Maussan unveiled the existence of what was alleged to be an alien body unearthed in Nazca, Peru. Later, though, that "alien" discovery was debunked, and the mummified corpse was shown to be that of a human child with a head deformity, according to fact-checking website snopes.com. In fact, such elongated skulls have often been explained by anthropologists as the result of an ancient practice of artificial cranial deformation. As a part of what could be an ancient religious ritual, young children had their heads bound in cloth, rope and even wooden boards, according to snopes.com.

Both your "believe in aliens" and the linked article's headline "believe in UFOs" are really the wrong question to ask.

  • It is perfectly reasonable to believe that extraterrestrial life exists without believing that they routinely visit earth just to put stuff in the butts of truckers and schizophrenics.

  • Nonbelief in UFOs implies either that one believes that flight is impossible, or that everyone has perfect information about every single aircraft, flock of birds and cloud formation, at all times.

The linked article's question is "We have a question about unidentified flying objects, also known as UFOs. Which comes closer to your view -- [some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies, (or) all UFO sightings can be explained by human activity on Earth or natural phenomenon]?"

That’s almost exactly what I was looking for, thanks. I’m just going to assume the Mexican congress is weird enough to present a high-effort hoax every once in a while.

well those look like sculptures to me but the "scientists unveil" really makes me think, who is putting their phd on the line for that?

is this a case of journalists believing literally anything some anon is telling them?

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Maussan

the guy who is the only source on what scientists say is only a journalist with no background in science

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/science/roswell-slides-ufo-researcher-apologises-5680059

the same guy attempted an alien hoax before that was later revealed to be the body of a child

The anon in question is a hearing before the Mexican congress, which makes me think that it isn’t a random schizo.

i edited my comment as i was researching those news, found out he was involved in an alien hoax before, using the body of a child

gonna just assume he used his connections as a journalist or maybe bribery to get a congress hearing

the other thing that sticks out to me is that he said "almost a third of the DNA is of unknown origin" which, if it is an actual fossil, means its at least 2 thirds related to some species we know, probably monkeys, that would just make this a new species of monkey but not an alien

When you say you obviously don’t believe in aliens do you mean you don’t believe aliens exist, that they visited earth, or that Mexico has their remains?

Three overlapping claims count as Ayys. Here are my thoughts on all three, add yours.

  1. Life somewhere else in the universe: Very likely, it's quite possible primitive life even exists elsewhere in the solar system.

  2. Intelligent life somewhere else in the universe: Moderately likely, FERMI paradox can be resolved in a number of satisfactory ways.

  3. Intelligent life that has deliberately visited earth, in person, regularly since the middle of the 20th century: Very unlikely.

That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of intelligent life theories. Some of my personal favorites are:

5. Intelligent life exists, but not in a form that is at all comparable to life as we know it. Perhaps it exists on some other combination of dimensions, leaving only strange occurrences when their "dimensional plane"* temporarily intersects ours. Perhaps they communicate in ways that are nonsensical to us, or seem to violate laws of physics, but this is only because they are 4 dimensional, or something like that.

6. There is a highly advanced species of subterranean-dwelling creatures that occasionally surface for reasons unknown to us and occasionally kidnap or observe people. Bonus points if you can tie this to Martin Van Buren's attempted expedition to the center of the earth and the Mammoth Cave Network.

7. A second intelligent species co-evolved with humans here on Earth and is controlling us or parasitically reliant on us for some reason. Could be lizard people, could be whatever else, but the idea is usually that they maintain secret control of all the world's important institutions while the actually-human-humans are basically livestock. Opens up exciting options for baby-eating and body doubles as well.

8. A second intelligent species evolved alongside but separate from humans here on earth and is still hanging around somewhere or is extinct. This would include all the weird theories of a giant-race still living in Afghanistan, a historical race of giants that once lived in the Basque region of Spain until the Romans worked them to death, a historical race of giants that existed in the Amazon rainforest, weird goblin people that used to occupy Ireland and are now the weird goblin people that live in the caves of the Appalachian region, and so on.

* Not really sure what the term is for "the set of dimensions on which something exists." Like if something is 2D+time vs something that is 3D+time,

4. Intelligent life that has deliberately visited earth, in person, regularly since the middle of the 20th century, and it looks like a hairless hominid that abducts humans from their beds at night to do butt stuff to them: Lol.

More effort than this, please.

1 and 2 I'd upgrade to almost certain, for the usual arguments.

3 is where we drop to almost certainly not. They manage to visit Earth, breaking the known laws of physics, and start doing so at that particular time? And do it for incomprehensible reasons, consistent with neither resource accumulation nor prime directive style hands-off scientific research nor some grand intergalactic model UN cultural exchange but in a way that's essentially the equivalent of teens mooning passerbys, with a side fascination with anal probing? It seems more likely that it would be some undetectable satellite observing us for thousands or millions of years, or that they'd have immediately colonized Earth and we wouldn't even have had a chance to evolve.

I still see 3 as barely plausible simply because of the scale of the universe. Unless something physics-breaking is discovered and shown to allow for FTL travel without the need for eye watering amounts of matter and energy, or any undetected particles, there’s simply no way to have biological creatures cross interstellar space within less than twenty or so generations. I’m not even convinced that signals could cross fast enough for anything approaching a conversation. To thus suggest that aliens are here, especially given that reports almost universally say biological aliens, is to pretty much say that our understanding of physics is massively wrong.

is to pretty much say that our understanding of physics is massively wrong.

I mean this seems reasonably likely. Who says there's not a cheat out there somewhere? There's still so much we don't understand.

I think you lack imagination. Who says the aliens don't upload themselves, then print new bodies once they arrive in new locations? Not to mention it hardly seems a stretch to surmise these hyperadvanced aliens have developed immortality.

Much of it has been verified experimentally. It’s not so much that it’s impossible that we’re wrong, but that I think that absent a reason to believe very fundamental ideas ideas about physics are wrong, it’s better to assume they’re right. To do otherwise is simply positing magic-by-another-name, where there’s something we really want to be true. If I can simply ignore physics on the grounds that it might be wrong (with no evidence given that it actually is wrong) then what I’d have is magic or the force or something. After all that hasn’t been completely ruled out and there could be a cheat out there that makes a force choke possible.

I think especially with things I really want to believe, it’s much more rational to go with what we actually know to be true.

But isn’t that what people Probably thought before there was a new revolution in physics each time? Why assume we have come to the “end of history” as it were?

I still think it’s very unlikely that aliens visited Earth. The technology permitting the visit would be well beyond ours yet they crashed? Or just abducted a random stranger? Seems…unlikely

I think it's reasonably likely that we are massively wrong about the laws of physics in general. Separately, I think it's virtually guaranteed that "magic" exists. Just think about how much progress humanity has made in the last 100 years, then multiply that by a billion years. We would have to have nearly reached a totally unprecedented, super extreme technological asymptote for magic to not exist.

The specific form that magic takes is up in the air, but I expect within a few thousand years force chokes will be fairly easy to pull off under certain circumstances. Perhaps Disneyworld will truly be Disneyworld, a planet laced with nanobots just to enable that specifically.

And we do have plenty of evidence that our current model of physics is wrong, or at least incomplete. There is still no unified model. We know for a fact there is more we have yet to discover.

Our models aren’t perfect, sure, but we have done experiments and have mathematical models and so on that have been verified. And absent a very good reason to doubt them, I don’t see it as very rational to simply say “we don’t know literally everything, and it’s possible that what we know is wrong, therefore the stuff I want to be real must be possible once we figure it out.” That’s not science, that’s fantasy and speculation based on only imagination. If we don’t know that it’s physically possible there’s no reason to include such things in our speculations about either advanced aliens or our far future. We are bound by the laws of physics and if it’s not possible within physics, time cannot make it possible. A trillion years from now, F=ma will still be true as will E=mc^2. We may find work around, we may engineer safer craft that can withstand bigger forces, we may make cheap replacement parts for our bodies. But it will all be within physical reality bound by physical laws.

we have done experiments and have mathematical models and so on that have been verified.

I've seen experiments verifying modeling with the Navier-Stokes equations, finite-strain elasticity equations, Cahn-Hilliard equations for phase decomposition, Laplace-Young for surface tension ... and yet I can't help but notice that all of those equations are continuum mechanics, whereas with other experiments we've become very confident that atoms are things which exist. Set up other experiments where a critical length is in Angstroms (or just one where the Knudsen number isn't negligible, for the Navier-Stokes case) and you'll get a result where the otherwise-well-verified continuum model fails. Perhaps "All models are wrong; some are useful" is too pessimistic to be true forever, but it's a good one for now, because the idea that we have a model which is never wrong is currently false.

And that's not just a matter of engineers being lazy about avoiding expensive atomistic models. Even in the most fundamental physics, there are no mathematical models currently in existence which do not fail verification in experiments outside their individual range of applicability. The goal of finding such a model, a "Theory of Everything", is naturally at the top of our list of unsolved problems in physics, but scroll down that list and you'll find our existing models failing to fit the bill because of a number of cases that are much worse than the continuum/atomistic divide. At least atomic models converge to cheaper continuum models in the limit.

A trillion years from now, F=ma will still be true as will E=mc^2

F=ma isn't even true today, except in the special case where both are 0. It's a simplification of F=d(mv)/dt which neglects that inertial mass m is itself a function of velocity. You might say it's "mostly true" - our fastest spacecraft so far hit a speed a bit over 150 km/s, and at 0.0005c Newton is 99.99998% accurate - but the difference between "mostly true" and "relativistic effects are a thing" is where E=mc^2 came from. So at that point, I guess the question is, what would you count as "massively wrong"? If Newton got things 99.99998% right, but hidden in that 0.00002% was "there are rocks with a million times more energy than coal", does 0.00002 count as tiny or does 1000000 count as massive?

Our current theories seem to have gaps bigger than 0.00002. We've been unable to directly observe 95% of the mass-energy in the universe. Five times more than what we've observed is "dark matter", which we don't yet know the identity of but can indirectly observe via galaxy dynamics and gravitational lensing, and double that is "dark energy", which we can only infer by looking at the local shape and accelerating expansion of the universe. From a practical sense, perhaps none of that will turn out to be important - we discovered barely-interact-with-normal-matter neutrinos a lifetime ago and we haven't accomplished anything more than a little interesting astronomy with them, so the prospects for interacts-even-less-with-normal-matter technology don't look good to me - but from a theoretical sense, our best theories say there are gaping holes in our best theories! We are bound by the laws of physics, but we don't actually know what all the laws of physics are yet.

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And absent a very good reason to doubt them, I don’t see it as very rational to simply say “we don’t know literally everything, and it’s possible that what we know is wrong, therefore the stuff I want to be real must be possible once we figure it out.”

The very good reason to doubt them is that we've been consistently wrong, again and again, about what is impossible. And to be clear, I'm not saying any particular thing must be possible. I don't know how interstellar travel is possible, but given that our understanding of physics isn't perfect, it is probable that something will arise which makes interstellar travel much easier than it currently appears.

That’s not science, that’s fantasy and speculation based on only imagination. If we don’t know that it’s physically possible there’s no reason to include such things in our speculations about either advanced aliens or our far future.

Similarly, if our understanding of the laws of physics is incomplete, there's no reason to assume that it is complete when speculating about advanced aliens or our far future. Our ancestors would have had better predictions regarding humanity's current capabilities if they had posited the discovery of magic than if they had assumed technological progress was mostly complete.

EDIT: That's not to say it will ever be the case that f != ma, but from our current perspective whatever future technological advances are discovered will look to us like the laws of physics are being broken.

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there’s simply no way to have biological creatures cross interstellar space within less than twenty or so generations.

Some organisms can go dormant for long periods. Perhaps indefinitely.

I guess the idea is they’d probably have had to have set off when the earth was a very different and less interesting place without civilization on it. So the chance that they set out to visit US in particular is less likely. In fact, if you agree with (1) and think that life in the universe is common, even if intelligent life is very rare there was nothing particularly interesting about earth until a few thousand years ago, maybe even a few hundred depending on how good their space telescopes etc are, so if the journey takes 5000 years and they’re looking to meet advanced intelligent life they probably haven’t set out yet.

Depends on how common shirtsleeves environments are- you could probably have been able to tell earth was habitable like a billion years ago if you had lots of good telescopes and were specifically looking.

Using our current understanding of the universe to evaluate the likelihood of aliens seems illogical to me.

Id be willing to put my life on a bet that our understanding of physics is massively wrong (depending how pedantic you want to be on the definition of wrong).

1 and 2 are not >99% for me. 3 is probably 1% at best.

1: Agreed on "very likely," as a minimum. Would upgrade this to "virtually certain". Happily an unproveable question for all forseeable circumstances.

2: Would upgrade this to virtually certain as well. On a cosmic scale, I would say the chances of extraterrestrial life and said life being intelligent are approximately the same (ie discovering a million non-intelligent species for every one intelligent species puts us at roughly the same ratio as Earth). Also the Fermi Paradox really doesnt hold any water for me, space is really, really big, and its perfectly reasonable to assume that any intelligent species with the capability of sending and recieving interstellar communications doesnt just blast those signals in a maximally inefficient manner on the off chance they might be picked up by another as of yet uncontacted species. 3. Agreed, with the possible exception of things postulated in works such as "Roadside Picnic" where our encounters with extraterrestrials were mutually incomprehensible ones, such as some the of the many gamma-ray bursts we detect being alien communications that we are totally unable to decipher, not having gamma ray based coms.

Well I definitely don’t believe Mexico has alien remains. I am very much unconvinced they have visited earth. And I’m agnostic on whether they exist at all.

Perhaps it's the flavor of the week as far as distractions go. "It worked for the Americans, maybe it'll work for us." From what? Not a clue. Don't know what shenanigans the Mexican government are up to currently.

Perhaps it’s the flavor of the week as far as distractions go.

Well it’s not doing a very good job.

If it was getting the level of attention of say, the Kavanaugh hearings, or Russiagate, or hell even just the Hunter laptop story, then I would find it more plausible that it was a planned distraction psyop. But mainstream media has largely ignored the story aside from some perfunctory mentions of the House hearings. If it’s a distraction, then who is it supposed to be distracting, and why isn’t it being promoted more?

Is that the reaction in America or Mexico? Being a smaller nation, Mexico wouldn't need it to blow up to US proportions to distract its people.

Maybe disctracting from being a failed state.

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