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> 2 - Aliens are everywhere, but we cannot perceive them We can detect neutrinos with advanced instruments. We've never had an evolutionary reason to do that.

by feoren 4y ago

> 2 - Aliens are everywhere, but we cannot perceive them We can detect neutrinos with advanced instruments. We've never had an evolutionary reason to do that. There's really just no room for this explanation. Energy and mass are one and the same. If we can detect neutrinos, but not these intelligent aliens that are everywhere, it means that they don't occupy physical space, don't have mass (and therefore must move at C only), don't use energy, don't send signals to one another, don't accelerate or decelerate, aren't involved in chemical reactions, don't interact with any of the particles we do, don't perceive light, etc. etc. At that point, they basically don't exist in our universe. It's not enough to say "but ants don't know we exist!" -- first of all, yes they do. Secondly, you're really saying that intelligent ants who formed an advanced society, had a scientific revolution, and built instruments capable of determining the number of moons on Jupiter, still would not know we exist. That is clearly ludicrous. And this doesn't even solve the Fermi paradox! There's clearly plenty of "room" for aliens that are "somewhat similar" to us; that is, they actually are made of protons and neutrons, etc. Where are all those aliens?

saiya-jin 4y ago
So many incorrect statements and assumptions... our current footprint would be unrecognizable from few hundred light years to even a bit more advanced civilization looking straight at our Sun. So yes there very well may be aliens just like us technology wise say 200 or 2000 or 2000000 light years away and they nor we simply wouldn't know. We don't know what we don't know from physics, the arrogance of thinking we get it all was there numerous times and it was always a wrong emotion, we even realize it for our current theories. There may be quantum entanglement communication, higher dimensions, strings or basically anything your nor my mind can't even come up with right now. Just like cavemen simply couldn't come up with general relativity even if it was all happening right in front of their eyes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ASalazarMX 4y ago
Imagine if it turns out sentience can arise in stars, gas, dust, or minerals. Maybe they won't be advanced civilizations, more like animals we can't recognize as creatures even when they're in front of us. We might even start mining them, as eyelash mites mine us without comprehending us.
rendall 4y ago
> We can detect neutrinos with advanced instruments... "We can detect things we were not evolved to detect" is a non-sequitur, a true statement that does not refute the original speculation. Because we can detect some things we were not evolved to perceive, does not mean we can therefore perceive aliens. It's a difficult concept to communicate. Empirically it's literally meaningless. Even the concept of meaningful vitiates discussion of this idea. Everything we are is perception, pattern recognition, threat assessment, problem solving. That there might be something important in our environment that we are simply not built to respond to is far easier to reject outright than to consider. This is why it's my favorite resolution to the Fermi Paradox, because it is so challenging to consider. Our cognition has evolved only slowly compared to our rapid technological advancement. Perception is not simply detection, but also cognition. Though we detect such previous unknowns as neutrinos and invisible electromagnetism and peculiarities of quantum physics, we think about them differently than that with which we are familiar only with expensive and difficult training, and even then it's arguable that we are modeling reality itself or modeling only our limited perception of reality. In short, while we are impressed with our abilities to understand our reality, we are still constrained by our evolved cognition to think effectively only about living by hunting and gathering in Earth-like conditions.

by feoren 4y ago

saiya-jin 4y ago

So many incorrect statements and assumptions... our current footprint would be unrecognizable from few hundred light years to even a bit more advanced civilization looking straight at our Sun. So yes there very well may be aliens just like us technology wise say 200 or 2000 or 2000000 light years away and they nor we simply wouldn't know. We don't know what we don't know from physics, the arrogance of thinking we get it all was there numerous times and it was always a wrong emotion, we even realize it for our current theories. There may be quantum entanglement communication, higher dimensions, strings or basically anything your nor my mind can't even come up with right now. Just like cavemen simply couldn't come up with general relativity even if it was all happening right in front of their eyes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ASalazarMX 4y ago

Imagine if it turns out sentience can arise in stars, gas, dust, or minerals. Maybe they won't be advanced civilizations, more like animals we can't recognize as creatures even when they're in front of us. We might even start mining them, as eyelash mites mine us without comprehending us.

rendall 4y ago

> We can detect neutrinos with advanced instruments... "We can detect things we were not evolved to detect" is a non-sequitur, a true statement that does not refute the original speculation. Because we can detect some things we were not evolved to perceive, does not mean we can therefore perceive aliens. It's a difficult concept to communicate. Empirically it's literally meaningless. Even the concept of meaningful vitiates discussion of this idea. Everything we are is perception, pattern recognition, threat assessment, problem solving. That there might be something important in our environment that we are simply not built to respond to is far easier to reject outright than to consider. This is why it's my favorite resolution to the Fermi Paradox, because it is so challenging to consider. Our cognition has evolved only slowly compared to our rapid technological advancement. Perception is not simply detection, but also cognition. Though we detect such previous unknowns as neutrinos and invisible electromagnetism and peculiarities of quantum physics, we think about them differently than that with which we are familiar only with expensive and difficult training, and even then it's arguable that we are modeling reality itself or modeling only our limited perception of reality. In short, while we are impressed with our abilities to understand our reality, we are still constrained by our evolved cognition to think effectively only about living by hunting and gathering in Earth-like conditions.