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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4055 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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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.

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