Comment by __MatrixMan__
2 days ago
If we ever stop being excited about the possibility that poorly understood phenomena are evidence of undiscovered intelligent life the we'll have lost a part of our humanity.
2 days ago
If we ever stop being excited about the possibility that poorly understood phenomena are evidence of undiscovered intelligent life the we'll have lost a part of our humanity.
That's just bullshit. The idea that undiscovered intelligent life is a plausible explanation for such things is just the triumph of numerically illiterate wishful thinking over rational thought.
I'm not saying that it's a conclusion that we should jump to. Just that it's silly to expect people not to consider it first. It's more related to why we're looking up in the first place than any of its alternatives.
It's so ridiculous that the only reason to expend a single keystroke on it is to demolish it.
Consider what the implication would be if these are ET spacecraft. The galaxy would be absolute soaked in ETI. The Fermi argument would then bite maximally: why did we even evolve, if the galaxy has been so saturated? Why wasn't every single planet and asteroid used for colonies and resources ages ago?
It's important to realize that science fictional tropes of galaxies with everyone zooming around in spaceships having adventures are not consistent with what we observe.
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It's a triumph of humanity over rational thought. Imagining intelligent beings is a core part of being human. We do it with gods, ghosts, monsters, etc. It's exciting and it's kind of a major reason we're exploring space to begin with. If you want pure rationality, might as well kill all astronomy research because what's the point? We do it because it's exciting to discover things, not for any practical purpose.