Citta said:
I think you may have put more into my post than what I put into it. I believe in aliens, I never said I didn't. Why? Because life ain't so special, and as you pointed out, given the vast size of the universe, it would actually be unreasonable not to assume alien life. What my question is, is why people insist to believe so easily based on movies and photos like the ones presented in this thread, that these phenomena can be explained by "it must be aliens!" rather than the more likely scientific explanations that are there.
What the essential problem here is, a problem that applies to so many other things in society, is how people so readily abandons logic, reason and science. This is dangerous when discussing and making decisions in more serious cases.
True.
Although, I am not so sure that people are
abandoning logic & reason... it is not clear to me that they all ever possessed those things in any great quantity.
I think a lot of people... even rather smart ones, are afraid to follow logic and reason where it leads. Even esteemed scientists are often very reluctant to follow theoretical physics where it is clearly pointing.
Think about the amount of time since Guth proposed inflation, and Vilenkin & Linde showed that eternal inflation leads inescapably to the idea of a Multiverse, that it took mainstream science to even consider the validity of this concept. After 20+ years of ridicule, theoretical physicists are finally willing to admit that the Multiverse is the only theory of existence that explains the data we see. (i.e. the expanding universe speeding up, the tiny amount of dark energy we can detect, the nearly infinite number of configurations of coiled extra dimensions at the string level etc.)
These theories didn't make less sense then, they just threatened people's sense of what is real.
I think a lot of people will refuse to follow their logic unless they are backed into a corner and have no other out.
Reading the amazing convolutions that some archaeologists go through to try and explain away things like the modular, harder than steel, multi-ton, precision craftsmanship in some of those ancient ruins that are carbon dated to times that neanderthals were the dominant life form on the planet... makes you wonder if they actually know what Occam's razor actually is.
I don't think the leap to "It must be aliens!" is valid, but equally not the leap to "It can't be aliens!"
