25 ms·

There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. This includes scientists and other professionals who ought to kn

• Fezzik 4y ago
  The close-minded approach is to accept someone’s fantastical claim because you want to, or just because the claim is being made, when the claim is contrary to mountains and centuries of evidence. The open-minded take incorporates all the possible evidence to reach the most likely conclusion. And the conclusion is never, so far, either aliens or magic. It’s just silly to conclude that an observation that has no immediate natural explanation will not be explained naturally and is, instead, the work of aliens or magic. Especially in light of the fact that everything we have explained, thus far, has had a natural explanation.
  • vinaypai 4y ago
    It's US chauvinism that leads people here assume that any advanced tech beyond our capabilities must be magic or aliens. The US isn't the only country with secret military research projects.
    • vinaypai 4y ago
      To be clear the advanced tech doesn't actually have to be manoeuvering in amazing ways. It could be an electronic warfare system that messes with sensors to make it appear so.
      • revscat 4y ago
        My worst fear is simply an advanced technology that provides a means to remotely trigger action potentials at will. At that point anything is possible.
        • 8note 4y ago
          Like a phone call?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    > The close-minded approach There are many ways to be close minded. Whose accepting someone's fantastical claim and what claim is that? Its mostly people speculating and acknowledging that its unexplained.
  • danenania 4y ago
    I don’t think aliens and magic belong in the same category though. Magic/supernatural by definition is contrary to physical laws and scientific understanding. But the existence of aliens would in no way contradict any physical laws or scientific consensus. It would be a shock, obviously, just like it was a shock when we discovered that other galaxies exist, or black holes, or that nuclear fission is possible. If intelligent aliens do exist and are close enough to us to be detected (or to detect us), which is certainly possible and maybe even probable, then we’re likely going to find out about them someday. Is that what’s happening now with these UAP? It seems that we don’t know yet, but it’s as unscientific to throw out the aliens hypothesis a priori as to insist it’s definitely aliens and no other explanation is possible.
    • LarryMullins 4y ago
      Magic that works isn't called magic, so magic not working is basically tautological. Inscribing intricate patterns on crystals to summon non-human intelligence you can converse with? That's not magic, that's computer engineering and science. It's not magic, because it works. Magic is whatever hasn't been demonstrated to work. Transmuting lead into gold? That was magic until we figured out nuclear physics, then it became not magic. Aliens haven't yet been demonstrated to exist, so they're in the same domain as fantastic claims that haven't yet been demonstrated to work. Magic.
      • danenania 4y ago
        Aliens haven’t been demonstrated to exist, but we have seen that life exists in the only solar system we’re capable of closely observing. We humans have a long history of erroneously assuming that we’re the special case. Magic implies we have no idea of how a phenomenon is possible, but we know perfectly well that the existence of aliens is possible. They’re like black holes or gravitational waves before we found physical evidence for them, not magic.
        • LarryMullins 4y ago
          There's a whole lot of seemingly rational and well grounded theorizing about why aliens should exist. But there's no evidence for it, despite many years of looking. At a certain point, when you can't reconcile observed reality with your beautiful theory, you've got to question the theory. That's the essence of science, discarding theories that cannot be reconciled with observed reality. It may be the case that advanced life capable of sending radio signals or traveling the stars is so exceedingly unlikely to form that even life on earth was a freak fluke of luck. Remember that life on earth got stuck in the mono-cellular stage for billions of years. There was no assurance it would ever get past that stage. And the number of stars in the universe is a weak rebuttal to this line of thinking, since it only takes a handful of independent "one in a million" chances to create a a probability so stupidly small that it makes the number of stars in the entire observable universe seem mundane.
  • ricardobeat 4y ago
    “Conclusions so far” based on what? This is exactly what this is about. Nobody is asking for a leap-of-faith belief in aliens, but allowing science to happen. Let videos of whatever weird phenomenona be released and studied. Add more sensors or whatever is needed to explain what pilots see. Maybe send a scientist or two up there to figure out what’s going on.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • hackerlight 4y ago
    > The open-minded take incorporates all the possible evidence to reach the most likely conclusion. But that's not what's being done per the article. The evidence isn't even being looked at because of the aforementioned closed mindedness.
  • hnfong 4y ago
    The closed-minded approach is to say we know definitely that you're right/wrong. The open-minded approach is to say: maybe we don't know everything, we shouldn't jump to conclusions, rather we should wait for more evidence so that we understand the situation better. It doesn't matter whether it's aliens, magic, or new scientific discoveries.
• pixl97 4y ago
  For the longest time we didn't know the lightning event we now call sprites occurred. Pilots had said they saw such things bit without evidence at the time no one had any idea if they were real or not. Probably plenty of other explainable events that we've not captured yet out there.
  • the6threplicant 4y ago
    And when we had the evidence we changed our minds. Just like it should be. So the question should be why are so many people believing in aliens when there is so little evidence for them?
• ceejayoz 4y ago
  It is important to be open minded to the possibility of mundane explanations for these observations.
  • pmarreck 4y ago
    Of course, but at what point does this become a futile exercise tantamount to "gaslighting"? You know, "you didn't actually see what you think you saw."
• smiley1437 4y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (Sagan Standard)
  • pmarreck 4y ago
    Exactly how many eyewitness accounts, devoid of good physical evidence, constitute "Evidence" with a capital "E"? If this number is "infinity" for you, that is unreasonable.
    • smiley1437 4y ago
      It would require an extraordinary number
      • pmarreck 4y ago
        OK so assuming all the witnesses' accounts are in reasonable concordance (the broad strokes are fairly identical in account), what is that number? I had a funny showerthought the other day- Imagine that orgasms never existed, but a human had one one day and had to explain to others what it was and that it was real and how it felt. This person would be ENTIRELY not believed. Now let's assume this 1 person became 10, 100, 1000. At what point do you reasonably have to start to wonder if orgasms are, in fact, real?
        • doodlebugging 4y ago
          >I had a funny showerthought the other day Haha. Okay. That's a great lead-in. >At what point do you reasonably have to start to wonder if orgasms are, in fact, real? Is your audience male or female? Going by anecdotal tales, for some it could be an experience akin to an alien encounter.
          • pmarreck 4y ago
            Hah! Unfortunately, yes!
    • 4y ago
• joe_the_user 4y ago
  What's "fantastical" about unexplained lights? I mean, I GN an adult Dungeons and Dragons centered on multiple worlds and I love considering different worlds and how they might work. But the people who extrapolate the unexplained to a claim that there's some fantastical things that science is suppressing seem so starved for "the fantastical" that they're distorting the entire situation. Science isn't there to squash your fun. Science doesn't deny that uncertainty is a constant part of ordinary human experience - scientifically established positions are merely a reliable tip of an iceberg of uncertainty.
  • hackerlight 4y ago
    > What's "fantastical" about unexplained lights? The claim in the article is stronger than just "lights". He used the word "objects" which suggests these UAP are being detected on multiple modalities.
• nvarsj 4y ago
  Yeah, exactly. Galileo was persecuted for stating the earth revolves around the sun. Anything fantastical is immediately seen as taboo and this still happens today. I personally find UAPs/UFOs fascinating. There's some unexplained phenomema going on and no one knows what it is. There's a massive taboo around claiming aliens/intelligent life, which makes it a subject few will admit to or investigate seriously. Then you have things like Fermi's paradox, a thought experiment that shows it is unlikely for the universe to only have 1 intelligent species in it. Most likely there is some natural phenomena behind all of this, but I really hope it's something more interesting.
  • the6threplicant 4y ago
    This is a ridiculous way of looking at things. Galileo was persecuted by The Church not other scientists who supported him. Fermi's paradox isn't what you've stated. Listen to the scientists. Not the politicians. Not the military.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  Every time one of those fantastic items gets explained, it's always mundane and boring, and never dampens the enthusiasm for the next one. I recall one about B+W photographs of "wood elves" taken around 1910 or so by a couple girls. The girls insisted it was genuine. Photographic experts declared the photos were genuine and could not have been faked. When the girls were in their 80's, they finally confessed that the "wood elves" were drawn on paper, cut out, and propped up with sticks. They took photos of it with a brownie camera. They laughed with glee at the credulous people who took it seriously (because they so wanted to believe in wood elves).
  • joe_the_user 4y ago
    And two more details; * Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes was one of the boosters of the photograph. This sounds weird but there's about an Arthur Conan Doyle book that relates to reality in messy detail. There's generally no deducible explanation of random events, they're just random. And so the method of "excluding all other explanation" is generally worthless in trying to look at single events - actually "shit happens". * I would claim that virtually anyone looking at the elf/fairy pictures today will see ... cardboard cutouts. Their two dimensionality is obvious when I look at them. But they fooled the people of their day because photography was quite new and people's visual processing had not adjusted to it.
    • LarryMullins 4y ago
      Read Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World with this fairy incident in mind and the character of Professor Challenger will make a lot of sense. tl;dr: man mocked by the scientific majority gets completely vindicated.
    • wpietri 4y ago
      > I would claim that virtually anyone looking at the elf/fairy pictures today will see ... cardboard cutouts. And this is such an important point. The UFO evidence is always the latest thing that can't be easily explained. But our skill at explaining keeps growing. There will always be things we can't explain yet. And some people insist on filling those gaps with aliens, gods, and monsters. One tell for me here is that the paranormal/supernatural/space alien incidents don't get more confirmed over time. E.g., if there were an artifact like the Antikythera mechanism [1] that continued to become more exotic as science advanced, that'd be interesting to me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
• nyolfen 4y ago
  number of times in the last century weird stuff has been revealed to be aliens: 0 number of times in the last century weird stuff has been revealed to be classified projects: dozens, hundreds?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• jmyeet 4y ago
  > There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. Two things: 1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; and 2. The burden of proof belongs to the one making the claim, not on the other side to refute the claim. Anything in the realm of "new physics" (eg claims such objects defy inertia and accelerate at a rate that would kill any person) or extraterrestial origin is certainly an extraodinary claim. Extraterrestial origin is the easiest to dismiss because of just how extraorindary such claims are. An awful lot of hand-waving happens when you point out the fundamental problems and timelines with interstellar travel just because people want it to be true. Claims like "we once thought it impossible to go to the Moon" are no argument at all. I've seen nothing that comes close to the standard of extraordinary evidence.
  • thefaux 4y ago
    I am not making any claims about whether or not these phenomena are extraterrestrial, I truly have no idea. But suppose that there is a civilization that is dramatically more advanced than ours. Perhaps they have uncovered deeper laws of physics that allows them to develop technologies orders of magnitude more powerful than our own. To such a civilization, our technology might seem as rudimentary as stone age tools seem to us. We could say less about their technology than our distant ancestors could have said about ours. This civilization could be so advanced that they have the means to communicate with us without our being able to measure it with our present technologies, but they could nevertheless influence people's thoughts much as the gravitational pull of the moon creates the tides. If this were true, their influence would likely be felt long before we had the technology to detect it. But once we did detect it, we would realize we have been under their influence for a long time (perhaps predating the formation of our civilization). We would also immediately feel silly for having hubristically assumed that we are the peak of intelligence. We have these fantasies of colonizing mars and beyond and yet we fail to have the imagination to consider that perhaps it's all already been colonized. We could be the children of our interstellar ancestors. Perhaps much like we fantasize about sending some kind of seed of humanity to a terraformable planet, our ancestors already figured this out and we are the fruit of the seeds they sent out from their home eons ago. I am not claiming that this is the truth (in fact I am sure what I wrote is wrong in some important ways that are beyond me) but it is just as extraordinary to me to assume that there isn't anything out there wildly more intelligent than us (or the most powerful ai we can dream up) as it is to assume that there isn't.
• csomar 4y ago
  I am not. However, I do not accept a closed-minded alien. The alien is interested in particular US military installations but not in me? Okay, maybe not me, but wouldn't the pyramids be more interesting? This makes it boils down to 1. sensors artifacts, 2. US military program not shared with all pilots or 3. another country collecting data on US.
  • LarryMullins 4y ago
    Pilots promoting what they know to be sensor artifacts as aliens, to prank the public.
• ninjagoo 4y ago
  > There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. This includes scientists and other professionals who ought to know better. The thing is, in science, as Sagan so succinctly put it- Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Evidence. One landing in a public area, now that would be evidence hard to ignore.
• Slighted 4y ago
  >what fringe idiots believe. You just contradicted the rest of your post.
• wpietri 4y ago
  > There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. Is there? I doubt it. Think about the time and money costs of all the "seems fantastical" stuff that turned out to be bunk. Then compare it with the losses from "seems fantastical" stuff dismissed too soon. I'd bet the former is orders of magnitude larger. Or just think about it from an individual perspective. People have lives to lead, things to do. I could spend the rest of my life looking at reports of psychic phenomena, for example. Or I could look back at the literal century of people investigating the claims and finding nothing but charlatans and fools, say, "good enough", and get on with my life. If the kooks actually find something good, I say it's their job to demonstrate it clearly, not mine to debunk all their failures. Should society devote some small fraction of its energies to investigating fringe stuff? Sure. You never know when you'll strike gold. But I'm happy to argue that time and money sucked up by it currently is well over any sort of demonstrable ROI.
• Neil44 4y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof
• the6threplicant 4y ago
  What do you want people to do. I see lot of "close minded" people looking at the evidence and concluding that it's not enough evidence to conclude aliens are visiting us. It looks like these UAPs are everywhere but the evidence is so low level that I wouldn't even conclude they aren't just planes or ducks instead.