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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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What I mean by without evidence is that generally when these kinds of arguments come up (and to your credit, you have given some evidence from the theories you work with) it’s done in a completely hand-waving fashion in which someone points out that the proposed mechanism for aliens coming here is in violation of well understood physics, and the other person simply replies with a variation on the theme of “we don’t know absolutely everything, and they’re a billion years ahead of us, so of course they can violate that law of physics.”

And this is why I especially as a layman think that speculative ideas that aliens or far future human civilizations will do things that violate known principles of physics are often just dressed up fantasy. We don’t yet know that other universes exist. Putting this in the end game of the Kardeshev scale as something that a trillion year old civilization can do isn’t scientific in the least. Saying that we’ll definitely have transporter beams with no real mechanism isn’t science. I’m not opposed to physicists who know what they’re talking about saying that we suspect there are things about our current theories are wrong. They can often given very good reasons to think that they’re wrong and likely have at least an inkling about what’s going wrong, and if they’re going to posit a violation of the laws would at least have a plausible way to go about it.

And I think especially for aliens this is something to be careful about because first of all, we’re obviously biased in the sense of wanting them to not only exist but wanting contact with them. We’re also biased in favor of the kinds of fantasies shown in books, tv shows and films about what this future is supposed to look like. We’ve been treated to thousands of hours of tv that feature FTL travel, laser guns and reversing the polarity as solution to all that ails a spaceship. These things color what we assume would be true about space travel. Even alien hybrid speculation is often colored by the idea that our DNA could mix with an alien’s with no issues. Except that you’re actually much more closely related to a brain eating amoeba in a lake than an intelligent alien. We’re just used to bumpy headed aliens with an alien half and a human half.