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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I’m pretty much convinced it’s not aliens. The physics we know doesn’t support the idea of ships fast enough to make interstellar travel plausible without generation ships.

This is much weaker "evidence" than you think. One possible explanation is that "aliens" are results of an AI driven Von Neuman probe that was activated by some human technological advancement a few decades ago. It jumpstarted factories somewhere in Ooort cloud producing more and more advanced technology that visits us, on its mission as programmed by some long dead civilization.

Similarly, no evidence of structures or signals is not evidence of nonexistence. We did not even map our own system, it is still possible that there is undetected planet X in our own solar system, we know nothing about interstellar space or other star systems.

Agreed, except to note that there's no need for aliens to be hiding in the Oort cloud - mobile and under the ocean somewhere would likely do just fine, along with a number of other close-to-home alternatives. And that the absence of observed radio signals can be explained as well by 'there are superior options for interstellar communication and aliens use those' as 'there are no aliens sending signals'.

I’m not saying that it’s evidence aliens don’t exist, however, I think the point that I’m mostly aiming for here is that “things that are asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” And until some new sort of evidence shows up, there’s little reason to put aliens anywhere in the picture. Now if we find something, that’s when I’d start taking aliens seriously as a phenomenon. But until then, all we actually have are bizarre suppositions used to either get around or negate the problems that exist. On the evidentiary side, to be absolutely clear we have no evidence of life, let alone intelligence. Now you’re correct that we haven’t looked everywhere, but again, we have nothing that would make us think there are aliens. Likewise, we have no evidence of anything unusual going on in the Oort Cloud or AIs. As far as the evidence goes, we have one planet with any kind of life, and while we’re on the cusp of AGI in my estimation, but that’s it. Likewise, our understanding of physics is probably primitive compared to what we will know a thousand years from now. But, until we have a good reason to discard what we know about astronomy, physics, biology, and robotics, I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that we are wrong about any particular topic in science, you can’t just a priori toss it when it comes to aliens, or if you want to, provide an actual reason to doubt the stuff we know or think we know.