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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?

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.

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.

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.