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Notes -
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Long story short: I believe the conventional thinking that NHI would kill religion is severely outdated.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.
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.
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).
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