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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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There is overwhelming evidence that aliens are here observing Earth, and have been for some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

What if anything do you make of the fact that we are not alone in the universe, much less alone on this planet?

  • -43

Ok, the big hole in ‘the aliens are here’ is, well, that this is one case where absense of evidence is literally evidence of absense. Any method by which aliens could approach the earth would be visible to amateur astronomers, every researcher in the world, every military and government more sophisticated than say, Sudan’s, etc. This is true even if you allow for a bunch of fringe physics and exotic effects- an Alcubierre drive or heim theory spaceship should leave an otherwise inexplicable signature that is readily observable by an enormous number of institutions and individuals on earth, to say nothing of an interstellar torch ship(and Annunaki from Nibiru still need a torch ship even if we ignore that a tenth planet can’t be habitable for temperature reasons).

There being aliens requires either a Truman show level conspiracy that goes beyond anything David icke and Alex Jones and the guy with the hair on the history channel could come up with if you locked them in a room full of drugs, or Star Trek level difference in the laws of physics.

Any method by which aliens could approach the earth would be visible to amateur astronomers, every researcher in the world, every military and government more sophisticated than say, Sudan’s, etc.

They could have sent a robot probe millions of years ago, with instructions to observe and nothing else. Basically a more sophisticated version of the Mars rover. There's no "approach" we could see, because it approached long ago. And if it's small, and moving at high speed through the atmosphere and ocean, that would still be pretty hard to spot. Look how hard it was to find that Malaysia Airlines plane that went off course, for example.

Why would you assume "aliens" not "previous Earth civilization" in that case?

Because there's no evidence of a previous Earth civilization, and it would raise strange questions? Whereas the Fermi Paradox is a pretty famous question of "wait, logically there probably should be aliens, somewhere..."

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

If advanced civilisation, comparable to ours, existed on Earth millions years ago - then we would likely fail to detect it.

Ok that's a bit more scientific than the "ancient aliens" stuff I expected. Still seems pretty speculative though. How is it we have fossils from the dinosaurs, but not anything from this much more recent civilization?

Definitely speculative, merely discussion how in this case lack of evidence is quite weak sign that such thing never existed - and we may still find something!

For that thing: dinosaurs are existing (and continue to exist, to be strict "non-avian dinosaurs" if often used) for about 240 000 000 years.

You can have civilisation appear and collapse in thousands of years.

We have entire species living not even single fossil. In fact, vast majority of species left not even single fossil.