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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3607 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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After occasionally reading NHI/UAP posts on X and 4chan, and of course in here when it comes up, I’ve had a thought that I’ve not seen expressed.

The conventional take is that any disclosure will have earth shattering ramifications for the religions of the world. That evidence of NHI would result in people doubting their faith, their religious leaders, and their belief that humans have some primacy in the universe. Basically that it would have catastrophic results for religion.

I expect the exact opposite would happen. I expect that materialists, “Scientists”, the “IFL Science” crowd, debunkers, and Atheists would be the ones that will be least likely at accept a new paradigm.

Religious people by definition are more open to metaphysics and they’re also quite used to a world where we have beliefs in opposition to the mainstream. I have no doubt that any NHI as a concept would be integrated into existing religion without all that much trouble.

As for the Science crowd, the existence of NHI would necessarily mean that the story they’ve defended for their entire lives is either wrong or incomplete. We’ve seen how that’s worked out on other topics recently. I expect no amount of evidence presented would ever be enough. I supposed that this would depend on exactly what is being disclosed and what beliefs are violated. Learning that FTL travel is possible would be quite different from the inter dimensional travel that’s been suggested lately. It would also depend on the exact mechanism of disclosure. If TPTB were to get the prestigious journals and community influencers on board first and in a systematic way, people would just get their normal software update so that’s they’re on the right side of The Current Thing. No different than if the Pope told us Catholics that NHI were fully in communion with the Church.

Long story short: I believe the conventional thinking that NHI would kill religion is severely outdated. Perhaps this was true at one time when religion was the dominant societal meme. No longer.

I think a lot of those people are referring to specific theories in UFO circles that the aliens would claim (truly or falsely, depending on the teller) that they have been in contact with earth for millennia and specifically invented world religions as a method of control. Not necessarily just the discovered existence of alien life in general.

Religious people by definition are more open to metaphysics

No, by definition we have much stronger commitments to given metaphysical ideas. There’s a pretty big difference.

Eh, I find that most atheists are extremely implicitly committed to the a metaphysical ontology that is just, "Oops, I have the methodological constraints of science, and I've mistaken them for an actual metaphysical ontology." When you poke them on this, they don't clarify, "No, actually, I'm not making this extremely boneheaded mistake." They're still committed to it. They just get angry that you pointed it out.

I remember someone made the claim that something was only true to the extent it was useful. To this I replied that some math concepts were discovered long before they were useful in physics, and there are still many math concepts that we don't have an application for yet. Some of these might be applied in the future, but it's not impossible that some math concepts are never useful. Does that make a valid theorem as false as 2+2=fish?

I didn't get a response back but I have wondered since if it changed their mind at all.

Might be a definition issue. Obviously I don't know the specifics of that discussion, but the person might have meant "useful" as in the "all models are wrong, but some are useful" (i.e., "useful" in the sense that they can be used to build theorems on or make falsifiable hypotheses), rather than in the sense of "having practical applications". If so, I'd be tempted to agree.

He made it clear that useful meant, "measurably impacts my day to day life, all else is mental masturbation."

For example, most historical details were also considered false, regardless of how sure we are that they really happened.

Ah, nevermind, then. Thanks for the context.

I expect the exact opposite would happen. I expect that materialists, “Scientists”, the “IFL Science” crowd, debunkers, and Atheists would be the ones that will be least likely at accept a new paradigm.

Well, we should then observe that atheists/agnostics/nonreligious would be much less likely believe in existence of intelligent aliens, compared to believers.

Do we observe it?

Religious Americans less likely to believe intelligent life exists on other planets

By comparison, roughly three-quarters of those who say that religion is less important in their lives (76%) say that intelligent life exists elsewhere. Adults who pray daily are also less likely than those who seldom or never pray to say intelligent life exists on other planets (54% vs. 80%).

White evangelical Protestants, who tend to be highly religious, are less likely than other religious groups to say intelligent life probably exists on other planets; 40% hold this view. Most White non-evangelical Protestants (65%), Catholics (67%) and religiously unaffiliated adults (80%) say their best guess is that there is intelligent life beyond Earth. Black Protestants are more divided on the topic, with 55% saying their best guess is that intelligent life exists on other planets and 44% expressing the opposite opinion. (Due to sample size limitations, this analysis does not show some smaller religious groups, including Jewish and Muslim Americans.)

Well, I think that IFL science people are likely to be shocked a bit more because I get the sense that they don’t really like science or even really understand how science actually works. What IFL-science types actually like is the ability to use the authority of “science says” to smugly push their pet theories and fantasies. So when something comes along that cannot fit into their narrative about the universe, they’re not going to be able to understand it, they’re going to be mind blown because they have no idea what science is or how it works or what exobiology is about. They think it’s Star Trek aliens with bumpy foreheads, who are just like us but higher up on the Kardishev scale.

Religion has a better chance, depending on the religion. I don’t think the Jews would care. Buddhists would see this as more life, no different from Earth life. Pagan and Hindu world views really don’t forbid aliens. Christians and Muslims might be mind blown depending on what they believe about demons and angels.

Most of the “IFL science” crowd already believe that intelligent alien civilizations almost certainly exist, at least in my experience. They just don’t believe they’ve visited earth. But that leap - from ‘they exist’ to ‘they exist and actually have visited us’ - doesn’t seem as great as you suggest.

Religion, of course, would be fine. Mormonism still exists despite what even disinterested third parties have to admit is a pretty thorough deboonking, and traditional Christianity, Islam, Judaism and so on are much more vague and make fewer easily falsifiable historical / metaphysical claims.

But that leap - from ‘they exist’ to ‘they exist and actually have visited us’ - doesn’t seem as great as you suggest.

This leap is literally measured in light years. Humanity would need a massive upgrade of its spacefaring technology to reach even the nearest star. Our furthest-reaching satellite broke down in less than 50 years and is too slow to reach Alpha Centauri even if we fired it in the right direction. A constant-acceleration drive that is also powerful enough to routinely spend enough delta-V to get close to the planet instead of hanging around Kuiper Belt? We're very far away from building something like this, but would notice a craft capable of this kind of manoeuvres.

I agree it’s a huge technological leap. I’m saying that for most of the atheist humanity fuck yeah space is cool I fucking love science crowd, aliens visiting earth wouldn’t shatter their model of the universe. (And the same, of course, is true for the religious).

How could a disinterested third party exist?? It's either the One True Church or a literal fraud. Any truly disinterested observer should be disregarded entirely--they don't understand what it is they're observing.

I mean by that someone not deeply invested in litigating the particular claims of individual Abrahamic (sub-)religions.

So, someone who's already dismissed them all as factually incorrect, then. Surely such a person should not be upheld as the gold standard of objectivity in this case.

Regarding Mormonism's deboonking or lack thereof, I put a lot more weight on the opinions of vindictive ex-mormons who feel betrayed, convert mormons who took the truth-seeking process seriously, and non-converts from any background who also took it seriously and decided Mormonism wasn't true.

NHI

We had LLMs show up with comparable-to-human levels of intelligence and the religious don't seem to particularly care.

At any rate, unless we discover a reason why traveling interstellar distances, at close to relativistic speeds or even FTL, is possible without obvious signatures, or a source of energy that accounts for the most abundant one (all those stars freely dissipating their energy into the void without doing useful work with it), I have no reason to think that UAPs are convincing evidence of extraterrestrial, advanced intelligence.

The fact we have twinkling stars in the night sky is sufficient claim against that, and if all our telescopes and space surveys are lying to us, I don't care what a bunch of sensors on a fighter jet or grainy videos claim.

all our telescopes and space surveys are lying to us

We're lying to the telescopes. The telescopes say there's something massively wrong with our model of the universe - dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe's energy. That leaves a lot of space for aliens to dwell, likely rendering stars obsolete. From energy alone, they're pretty irrelevant, merely a subset of that 5% conventional matter.

In theory we could burn wood for fuel for energy but in practice it's a hassle and inefficient compared to proper energy sources. Perhaps stars are similar. Green Man Intergalactic could make 20% returns on a Dyson Swarm but 35% on a dark energy plant, he'll choose the latter every single time.

Either stars and all known baryonic matter are peanuts compared to the real structure of the universe or general relativity is seriously broken. Regardless, we aren't in a good position to say 'there are no aliens/no FTL' given we clearly don't understand what's going on out there.

Well, LLMs are usually not thought to be conscious or moral agents in the usual sense. I assume that the religious would be more likely to have trouble with other creatures, depending on the variety of religion in question (but see C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy). If you think, for example, that it was essential that God become human, hence Jesus Christ, well, aliens might be out of luck. But if you just require obedience or something, there seems to be no problem.

Of course, many of the religious do believe in non-human intelligences in the form of angels/demons.

I’m suggesting something beyond the status quo. A continuation of more videos being released, more government officials making statements, perhaps a formal declaration by states.

That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

Do you expect "the Science crowd" (i.e. the majority of Westerners) to not believe aliens exist even if they literally Show Us The Aliens?

That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

A Russian family that had cut all contacts to civilization and lived in the woods as hermits figured out Sputnik from seeing a new "star" that moved very fast across the sky. There's a lot of very observable new things you can make happen if you want and have the technology for it.

I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

That sounds more like a failure of imagination than anything else. I can imagine several thousand different things that could convince me, or anyone with half a brain, to take the possibility of contact by aliens with interstellar capabilities seriously.

They could hijack terrestrial comms. Shoot lasers from the moon or Jupiter. Submit proofs of a dozen unsolved mathematical conjectures. Land a million drones in every major city. Detonate gigaton antimatter explosives in interplanetary space. Targeted surgical strikes on every nuclear silo. Drop a blue whale on the White House lawn. Overload our neutrino detectors and graviton wave observatories with waves encoding pi in base 10. Or just display the drive signatures of their ships slowing down from relativistic speeds, as would be obvious to any backyard astronomer unless they have a means of propulsion that doesn't emit visible radiation.

What leaves me entirely unconvinced is weird artifacts on sensors or even competent eye-witness footage. Interstellar aliens would need a very perverse and specific modus operandi for that to be their first way of making themselves known, let alone lack the competence to be so obvious.

IIRC- and take this with a grain of salt because my most advanced science class was geology for nonscience majors- every hypothesized FTL drive leaves some kind of telltale signature at the end, too. So even aliens that figured out how to make an alcubierre drive work give off a telltale signature that we should have picked up if they’re anywhere in the neighborhood.

An Alcubierre Drive has a nasty tendency to accumulate all the space dust/debris the vessel encounters along the way, which is eventually liberated eventually, as you need to smooth out the bubble of warped space-time at the end of your journey.

So the braking resembles the blast from a relativistic shotgun, I don't recall figures on the magnitude of the energy released, or carried by the projectiles, but it's probably not a good idea to point it at anything inhabited. Maybe dumping it into a star might work. Either way, I suspect we would notice if it happened anywhere important within the orbit of Pluto.

Yeah, that’s what I was referring to, but I think krasnikov tubes and the fringe-but-math-works hyperspace theories also suggest there’d be some weird anomalies at the exit- and wormholes are a weird and noticeable anomaly.

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