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Title: Edward Snowden said aliens could be trying to communicate with us right now
Source:
The Week
URL Source: http://theweek.com/speedreads/57831 ... d-trying-communicate-right-now
Published: Sep 20, 2015
Author: Julie Kliegman
Post Date: 2015-09-20 09:33:10 by Rufus T Firefly
Keywords: None
Views: 1880
Comments: 28
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden may be in isolation in Russia, but that didn't stop him from calling into Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk podcast via robot video link Friday. The two science nerds discussed a wide range of topics — including alien life forms. Snowden described how aliens could be communicating with us this very second, even though we have no clue it's happening: So if you have an an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there's only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communication will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means. So when we think about everything that we're hearing through our satellites or everything that they're hearing from our civilization (if there are indeed aliens out there), all of their communications are encrypted by default. So what we are hearing, that's actually an alien television show or you know a phone call...is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation. [StarTalk] Mind. Blown. Snowden also spoke openly about dropping out of high school, enlisting in the military, and getting skeptical about U.S. programs. Listen to the full interview below. — Poster Comment: I believe they're already here and running things. Makes more sense than anything else . . .
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#1. To: Rufus T Firefly (#0)
Why not? We're trying to communicate with them. Hell, we even launched an interstellar satellite with information about us. "... NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2-a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth."
That's just plain sad. I thought he was brighter than that.
If you're a smart alien trying to communicate with other life forms, you don't use protected communications. You do it broadband, using the whole range of communications bands, simplest to most complex, so that other species at different degrees of sophistication will hear it and respond. There are 60 sextillion habitable earths out there, supposedly, which is a few billion in every pixel of sky. If evolution were true, the skies would be awash in chatter. But they're silent. The only intelligent creatures, or creatures at all, out there are angels, demons and God. The decades will roll on into centuries, and the skies will remain silent, because there is nobody out there anywhere. Eventually that fact will be the disproof of evolution. It is because of the belief in evolution, the certitude that it is true, that so many intelligent folks are "sure" there is alien life out there. All of the breathless efforts looking for it, it "must" be there. As the decades and centuries roll on and none is ever found or heard from, the uniqueness of life will become plainer, and all of a sudden, for everything important that we think about (blind mechanical movements of invisible things are necessary, but they are not important from our perspective - they just ARE), it will gradually become clearer that we literally ARE the center of the universe. Not geographically, but for everything biological or metaphysical. If evolution is true, that cannot be. If evolution is true, with 60 sextillion earths out there, billions in every pixel, the skies cannot be silent. It's impossible. But the skies are silent, and therefore, evolution is not true. Even the evolutionists know this, the smart ones anyway, which is why they are so eager to turn over a rock and find a worm. The silence of the skies is an ominous portent for an entire belief system. After all of the insulting and screaming is done, the skies will remain silent, and besides God, the angels and the demons, man will remain the most intelligent creature on the earth, and earth will still be the only mote of dust in the universe that has life on it. And that in and of itself is the most eloquent and terrible proof of God. The evolutionists and exobiologists are looking for something that isn't there. Let them look. There's nothing to find.
Haven't checked the link, but from the excerpt posted here, the title is not even close to accurate. Snowden is probably referring to the detection of signals possible aliens would use to communicate "privately" between members of that race, not communications they would intentionally broadcast to other intelligent life. Nothing in the excerpt presumably spoken by Snowden suggests he believes aliens are "trying" to communicate with us.
Intelligent life could certainly be rare, but it's certainly possible in our lifetimes that's ordinary, non-intelligent life could be scientifically detected outside our solar system on nearby (less than 100 light-years away) planets, as an extension of the discovery of planets, if life is there. If life does exist outside the solar system, then it would throw a monkey wrench (no pun intended) into the basic Christian-Judaic theme of creation. But just as the Church used to believe the earth was the center of the universe and the sun, planets and stars went around it, the discovery it wasn't true did not destroy the Christian faith. Faith just adopted to that fact. And so it will be the same if life is discovered elsewhere. By my thinking, what makes us spiritually special is NOT our humanity. Souls are infinitely special because souls are born of God. Souls do not come into existence as a consequence of human conception or birth. That a bio-chemical event such as conception could give rise to an immortal soul is wholly illogical, though assumed by most major faiths, simply because of the unquestioned assumption dating from the origins of religious text that our human bodies define all that we are, or at least defines the origin of all that we are. But that's not true at all. Whoever wrote the first chapters of Genesis knew subconsciously that they were of spiritual significance, yet the human brains involved couldn't figure out how it was possible. The resulting text of what is now Genesis 1 is the result of trying to rectify that paradox. It was a good try. God is not human. We are created in his image, but that has nothing to do with the human race. The human race exists solely for the benefit of us, as souls, to experience all the good and bad that comes with human existence, so we can all learn and grow, and those needs can be served by intelligent bodies of any race whether human or "alien". So it doesn't matter to me if/when life is discovered elsewhere, or if it never is. It doesn't matter if evolution is true (though I suspect it's a combination of evolution and intelligent design). We remain immortal and infinitely special, and loved, far more than portrayed even by Christian ideology.
It's not about Genesis, it's about science. NASA tells us that there are about 60 sextillion habitable EARTHS out there. Not just planets, planets that should be able to support human life. The universe is said to be old enough that two entire earlier generations of cycles like our own solar system's life expectancy have passed before, so in total there are, or were, perhaps 180 sextillion earths since the beginning of the universe. Some of them may be gone, but each that once was and that evolved life has centuries and centuries of signals coming from each planet into the ether. We see the most distant stars because their radiated energy comes through the vacuum of space to us. Radio waves and microwaves of various starts are radiated energy that move at the same speed, and come along just like the light. If we're seeing the light of distant stars, we're also getting the radiated speed-of-light radio waves of various sorts emitted by the planets around those starts. 180 sextillion is an immense number. If you pixellate the sky, as in a great planetarium, which has 100 million pixels in its hemispheric screen, and divide the number of pixels to cover the whole night sky by 180 sextillion, you discover that at each pinpoint of the sky there are not hundreds, or thousands or millions or billions, but TRILLIONS and QUADRILLIONS of earths - not planets - earths, through three solar life cycles. If evolution is true, then under earthily conditions, life will evolve. It will evolve quadrillions of time in each pixel of the sky. And some - perhaps only billions - of those places out of the quadrillions - will proceed to advanced life, and emit radio waves for some period, and more sophisticated things, and will have had billions of years to evolve past us, and to be able to communicate, etc. AND WE WOULD HEAR THAT. The sky would have as many earths out there beaming out radio waves as there are bacteria on the face of the earth. We would hear some of it. But there is nothing. None of this has anything to do with the Bible. If evolution is true, then under earthlike conditions, it MUST happen, and it MUST proceed down a path towards higher beings, and with 180 sextillion tries at it, it must have happened quintillions or quadrillions of times. Spanning billions of years. And perhaps trillions of those quadrillions used radio waves, tried to communicate with others, etc. All very much like us. So where are they? The sky would be abuzz with chatter. It isn't. That's why evolution is not true. Not the Bible. Science and logic.
Your argument is more logic than science, but interesting and good nonetheless. A couple points. I remember a few years ago someone thinking of looking for large amounts of light of a particular bandwidth as sign of intelligent activity. Specifically, they were looking for florescent lighting as it's an unnatural light. And here we are, just a few years later, and LED lighting is replacing florescent lighting. So looking for aliens using florescent lighting would likely prove as fruitless as aliens looking at earth looking for large amounts of oil lamp lighting as a sign of intelligence. Aliens with advanced tech might well not use radio waves for tons of applications as we do today. Radio waves do have the disadvantage of speed when it comes to even intrastellar communications. 2) As Snowden argues, if aliens used good encryption for everything, we wouldn't be able to distinguish those communications from ordinary cosmic noise. And that assumes the signals could even be isolated from cosmic noise. They would naturally be incredibly weak to the point of non-existent.
Not just logic, science. We're not talking about aliens. It's more than that. If you stand on a long, straight stretch of ocean beach, one that goes to the visual horizon in each direction, one is seeing a stretch of several miles of sand. If one were to count all of the grains of sand on a beach that stretched to the left and right from horizon to horizon, the beach within the range of vision, that is about one what one quadrillion looks like. With 180 sextillion earths (not planets, earths - where humans could dwell - this is based on the NASA number of what IS, then extrapolated back over three soliar-system life cycles since the beginning of the universe) out there, or 60 sextillion, at every pinprick point of the night sky you look at there are two or three times as many EARTHS, in various states of development, as there are grains of sand on the beach. If we're seeing the light from the stars about which those earths orbit, then radio waves from the planets orbiting those stars emitted as the same time as the light we are seeing would be emitted. So, all of the light we're seeing that was emitted long ago, across all epochs of the sky depending on their distance from the earth is coming to us, day by day, along with whatever radio waves may have been emitted by a planet about those stars, on that same day: light and radio waves move at the same speed. Sure, civilizations may reach a point where they don't use radio waves anymore. But they don't start there. We haven't figured out "subspace radio" or anything like that, and we've been broadcasting big booming AM station bands across the planet for a hundred years, and probably will be doing so for decades to come. Television and now telephone, also, is communicated, or was, via radio waves. When our big AM stations pump out radio signals that are heard hundreds of miles away (especially at night), we're hearing only the very bottom of those waves. Most of it ducts with the atmosphere a little while, but then heads right off into space. Someday we may go to sophisticated communications that are not on broad, open frequencies, but for us, and for every other civilization that evolves to use fire, then energy, then radio waves, there will be a century or more of open broadcast out into space, and those radio waves, continuously emitted, will be a hundred year, or two hundred year band of noise that comes off of every earth that evolves life. They'll have their point of discovering radio, and using it for a century or two, broadcasting a century- or-two-wide band of noise into space in every direction. Every such planet with life will do so. And planets reach that phase at different times. Our earth is 4 billion years old, and the universe is said to be about 12, so, 180 sextillion earths - evolving life as they must (if evolution is true), each having a, say, 100 year wide band of open radio broadcast into space at about year 4 billion. Let's do some very simple and rough math to figure out how many planets of that 180 sextillion would be in that 100 year period RIGHT NOW. Remember, that 100 year period is never gone. It radiates out across space, sending all of the shows and music of 100 years of a planet's history, before going silent. Every planet would have its century (at least) of noise, that everybody would be able to detect, once it got there, and be able to track for 100 years, until it went silent. Some have already passed the point. Others are in it now. Others will be in the future, but ALL of them whose stars' light passes this way will also have 100 years of open mic radio pass this way too. Earth is 4 billion years old. 100 years out of four billion is 2.5 x 10 to the -8, or ,000000025 of the time of the planet's existence. It's a small window in time. BUT, once a planet starts broadcasting during its 100 years - once it discovers radio and uses it for the purposes people use it before getting sophisticated, that 100-year wide band of noise will travel across space forever, along with the light of the stars. With 180 sextillion planets, each with its 100 year period, the number of planets the number of those planets passing through their 100 year period at any given point in time (assuming planets each hit that at about the 4 billion year point) would be 1.8 x 10 to the 23rd power, times 2.5 times 19 to the -8...which is 4.5 times 10 to the 15th power. So, right now, we should be in the "100 year wide" band of 450 TRILLION earths, each washing over us, with new ones coming into range of hearing every day, and other ones dropping out. We should be reading their faint, rhythmic signals. That pixellated sky of the planetarium has 100 million pixels, so each little pinpoint of the sky, out of the trillions of earths in it at various stages, should have about 450 earths in that 100 year period of open radio broadcast. The sky as a whole should have 450 trillion earths in it, near and far, whose energy is reaching us each second from its 100 years. If light and radio waves are attenuated 100,000 times by the distance of space, losses to molecules struck enroute, etc. we would still expect to detect 450 million of them. But we don't detect any. Ever. Encryption and sophistication is a very narrow-minded view. It forgets that evolving civilizations do not get to sophistication, or computers, in one step. They discover radio and television and broadcasting first, then computers, then sophistication, only later. And while 100 years is only a blink of an eye in geological time, that 100-year long "blink of an eye" is a doughnut 100 years wide that travels across space forever, to be detected by somebody who can detect it once it washes past them. NASA's number of earths is supposedly a scientific number (unless they just made it up). So, with that many planets we SHOULD be hearing a steady, and singificant, volume of faint alien radio coming from the sky, not aimed at us, but alien news broadcasts, alien music, all of the things that people did with powerful radio broadcasts for a century before anybody thought about aliens doing it. If evolution were true, and NASA is right about the number of planets, and the physicists are right about the age of the universe, then we should be hearing 450 million alien signals of various strength and age. Or at least one. But we never hear any. If evolution is true, those radio-centuries MUST exist. But apparently don't. Therefore, evolution is not true. We are alone.
Your argument is a logical argument that uses science as elements in it, but it also contains assumptions that may be faulty. It assumes that the theory of evolution would require that every earth like planet would develop life. But the chance of life developing on such world could be anywhere from 100% to 0.0000000000001 percent (or whatever). Since there is no data to give such a probability, it alone could account for life being quite sparse in the universe, but not not-existent outside of earth. It assumes that such radio signals transmitted with a few thousand watts would be detectable at distances of millions & billions of light years. Relativity is at work. Some of the universe is located 11 billion light years away, nearly the age of the universe itself. Any data from intelligent life from that distance sent 10 billion years ago wouldn't be here yet. The numbers of earth like inhabitable worlds is a very preliminary estimate by NASA. They may be well intended guesses and yet quite inaccurate. Many worlds may be suitable for microscopic life to develop, but not for more advanced, multi-celled creatures. I've heard it argued that the moon has played an important stabilization role in earth movement, without which, advanced life could not have evolved. If so, how many of these extra terrestrial worlds also have large moons? There are more issues that could be factored in as well. Bottom line, there is too much we do not know that needs to be factored into to your logic argument before its conclusion that "we are alone" can be given any credibility.
"Any" credibility? Well, no. Science is based on observation and observable fact. We HAVE in fact had microphones and antennae aimed at the sky for 40+ years. Spent a lot of money on it too. It wasn't hack science that put those things up, it was universities, serious researchers, with NASA assistance. They set up the best tech available to do the most reasonable thing: collect huge volumes of data. And I remember a few years back on a weekend there was a "link up your PC all over the world" so as to process over that weekend huge volumes of data using the largest assemblage of computer power ever put together. Truly massive amounts of data were combed, and it was sincerely hoped, by scientists who had spent years collecting this stuff, that they would find patterns in it. That was the hype too, to get everybody to link together. Now, assuming that that wasn't just some giant CIA honeypot to get access to then world's computers, years and years of real data were really processed using real criteria, and there was a lot of excitement beforehand too, hype, because many people expected that SOMETHING would be found there, because, logically speaking, it has to be there if the theories on which the tens of millions spent to build the project and collect the data for all those years had any strength. But there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing even colorable. Just nothing. And that big nothing, will all of those years of recording the sky, and all of that computing power looking to WANT to find something, is ITSELF a data point. It isn't true, then, that there is NO credibility to my argument, based on science, that we are alone. That is in fact what 40 years of data, collected in experiments designed by experts who were spending tens of millions designing experiments they were looking to find something, combed in the greatest collaborative computer effort ever undertaken, would seem to indicate - they found nothing. The "Nothing found" is significant. It is not conclusive, of course, but it is comparable to turning on the CERN supercollider, running the tests, and NOT finding the anomalies one would expect to demonstrate the Higgs-Boson. If something SHOULD be there, but ISN'T, that doesn't conclusively mean that it doesn't exist: maybe we need to design an even bigger and better experiment. But it would not be accurate to say that no credibility could be given to the argument that the Higgs Boson didn't exist. If you design an experiment well, and run it repeatedly, and you do not find the result you expect, not finding the result, a "zero result" IS a result, and it IS data - negative data - which DOES suggest that what you are looking for may not exist. Forty years of data collection and processing by competent scientists expecting to find something, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, that finds nothing is a zero result, and if we are objective, zero results in science after long, repeated experiments ARE significant. 40 years of zero results may not be PROBATIVE that there is no life out there, we may need to design different tests. But to simply dismiss the zero result as an indication that there ISN'T life out there is NOT an argument that has "no credibility". In fact, the zero result is the current state of the data. If one had to take a position, based on the current THEORY of evolution and the uniformitarian assumption, one would have to say that life would be EXPECTED to be found, that it would be highly IMPROBABLE that we are alone. That is why very serious and intelligent people take the time and the expense to get advanced degrees in exobiology - the theory indicates that life HAS TO be out there. However, from the perspective of empirical experimentation and data, if one looks at what 40 years of DATA shows, there is nothing out there. We can change the experiment, and no doubt will. Still, if one were to take a position right now, the DATA is not currently inconclusive. The data currently is that there is nothing at all out there communicating. It is not "doubtful". What we have is definitely a zero result. One cannot certainly say that an unqualified "We are alone" statement cannot be justified on the data. But one cannot say that "We are alone" has "no credibility". In fact, that IS what the data shows, currently. I myself happen to thing that the SETI experiment WAS a well-designed and well-conceived experiment. It is not hack science. It was designed by serious people, taking a very broad spectrum of information, and improved over the year. When it began, the computing power to analyze everything collected did not exist, but that has improved dramatically with time. The fact that the experiment produced NOTHING was, in fact, a surprise to the designers of the experiment. They expected to find something. But they did not. So my conclusion that we are alone is not devoid of credibility. It is a distinct, and very uncomfortable possibility. I am of the opinion that, because the test was, in fact, well-designed, credible, and gathered mountains of data, the zero result is much more highly significant than people are willing to admit. This is a zero result that has profound ramifications for evolutionary science, and for modern philiosophy and theology for that matter. It's an unexpected and uncomfortable zero result, hence the after-the-fact (40 years after the fact!) efforts to downplay the utility of the experiment or the significance of the result. More experiments will be done, because this is a zero result that NEEDS to be overturned. As long as the data is there, it is uncomfortable. It's a "Well, we know they have to be out there, so what did we do wrong in our experiment - back to the drawing board - moment." But inside, there is the tremor of doubt now: what if we do expand on the test and we STILL keep coming up with nothing. TWO zero results is more data, and more disturbing. I think the original experiment was very well designed, and that the result is in fact demonstrative of the truth: nobody is out there communicating. We would have detected it, and we detected nothing. At all. Nothing even colorable. Just flat zero. I will predict that as our lives go on and the decades pass, and we have collected more and more and more data, that it will all continue to be zero. The only "positive hits" we will get are what we've gotten before: earth signals that bounce off the moon, or an asteroid or some other object, and reflect back, and are picked up. We know that, because it's just a replay of a broadcast made some time ago, coming back at a later time. At some point, the zero result becomes more and more ominous, and the explanations to make it go away become more and more fanciful (and desperate). A zero result that goes on for a century, then two, then three, then ten, will mean we are indeed alone. And if we're alone in a universe with 180 sextillion earths, that is quite strong evidence that evolution is not true. But it will take centuries before people finally admit that.
Although there are 60 sextillion earths out there they are at so great a distance from us that any signal might take 10,000 years to get here and would be indisernible from the random movement of atoms and molecules.
Not all of them. If we can see light from the planet, we can see radio waves from the same system. With 180 sextillion out there, near and far, we should detect something, occasionally. The folks who spent ten million on SETI were not indulging in navel-gazing: it is a seriously-designed, long-term, project thought through by intelligent, highly-educated scientists aimed at detecting the existence of alien transmissions. This was not a bunch of hacks doing hack science. The results are not CONCLUSIVE, of course. But they ARE data - a zero data point result - and objective zero-data results cannot be dismissed with a simple handwave. There should be signals out there that we should have detected by the means we use. There are no signals detected by the means we used, and that is genuinely surprising. Ten plus million dollars and serious PhD's did not risk everything on a random dice roll. It was the best-designed experiment, a high-cost one too, aimed at finding an expected result. The coup-de-theatre failed to come off. That doesn't mean, by itself, that there is no alien life out there, but it certainly is the current state of the evidence produced by real scientific testing. It should not be lightly dismissed with a hand-wave because the result is undesired. People of a scientific bent have already thought through what alien life means: it means that evolution as they understand it is correct, it means that sentience arises from matter. The same minds need to work out what the OTHER outcome means: the LACK of any other life out there. That has enormous scientific implications as well.
I didn't say your logic argument lacked credibility. I only said the conclusion lacked credibility. That, only because there are assumptions factored into your logic argument that are uncertain. The history of science is filled with erroneous conclusions thought accurate, only later discovered to be erroneous due to faulty assumptions or faulty scientific tests that no one had reason to doubt -- everything from the world being flat to the rate of universal expansion slowing due to gravity instead of accelerating due to dark energy (or whatever). There are no shortages even today of scientific surprises that may explain the lack of detectable ET radio signals. As long as there's no nuclear war putting a stop to scientific progress and research, the search for ET will continue. Maybe extra-stellar life will be detected at some point, maybe it won't be within any given time frame. That it is likely that it is impossible for such life to ever be conclusively proven to NOT exist (proving a negative) is unfortunate but needs to be accepted.
There's another report out (today?) from "Space", about a scan of the closest 100,000 galaxies by heat signature, using logic that I find rather fanciful myself, but that exobiologists find compelling. You can look it up. They found nothing. Of course they're still looking. There's something else I know that gives me confidence to state the negative case with such strength, but that knowledge is personal, is dismissible as "anecdote, not data", and therefore will not be offered in a discussion such as ours.
I likewise have info that suggests ET life exists, but is similarly not logic or science based, and I don't consider conclusive, so is not appropriate for public debate/discussion. In remains one of many interesting science topics. Best to you.
Sounds like a lot of 'faith' with no evidence. To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.---Revelation 1:5b-6
Right now, believing either that ET life does exist or does not exist, both require faith.
Not really. Those who don't believe in ET life have no issues. There's no evidence so no need to have faith 'nothing exists.' However, those who cling to the possibility of ET life with no evidence exercise what is called a 'leap of faith.' They have to believe their conjecture. I find it comical that a lot of believers in ET life also self identify as atheists. Their stringent standards on requiring what they deem 'sufficient' evidence for the existence of an uncreated Creator, seem to diminish to zero requirements for ET life existence. The inconsistencies are noticeable:) To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.---Revelation 1:5b-6
I consider that disingenuous. Any belief, without proof, that things are one way or the other constitutes "faith" even if the belief is that something does not exist. And the real litmus test is whether one having faith that no life exists would readily accept correction if proof arises to the contrary, or on first impulse deny it. And why do you say the "have to" believe their conjecture? Many are simply drawing conclusions as is only natural for the mind to do.
It's not faith without evidence. Some do get proof but proof is subjective; evidence objective. That's why Christ's miracles were witnessed by hundreds and sometimes thousands. It was proof for them but the cloud of witnesses testify for future generations providing the evidence. So without evidence "belief" in something is just wishful thinking. To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.---Revelation 1:5b-6
"Faith" as that word is used nowadays, but not "fides" (the word we translate as "faith") as used in the Bible. In the Bible, fides - "faith" - means trust. You have to trust God. Faith doesn't mean belief in something. It means the very specific kind of belief that one has that his interlocutor is going to do what he promised. So, believing that aliens exist isn't faith, because no alien promised anything - there are no aliens to trust. It's simply belief. People should not use the word "faith" to mean "belief", because it doesn't mean that.
Well if you consider the stories of alien abductees as 'evidence' then you should be alarmed. Because it seems these aliens who visit us are only interested in yanking us out of bed at night take us up to the 'mother ship' and perform experiments. I mean, why all the posterior 'buttocks' probes? They travel millions of light years to do that to us! So are we spending tens of millions of dollars to try to 'communicate' with alien races which abductees say use invasive (and involuntary) procedures. Are we paying that much to get 'free' healthcare? To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.---Revelation 1:5b-6
When I watched "The Secret" for the first time, I came away with a new definition of "Faith". For me the term means knowing something is true with such completeness that it fills ever fiber of your being. Prior to that, "faith" for me meant simply a certain level of academic/mental confidence in the truth of something. But I now know the term should mean something far, far more than that. Your logic doesn't follow here. By your own stardard, if God told you aliens existed, you would have faith they exist. It matters not if aliens promised you anything, much less your having met any.
My logic follows seamlessly. If God told me aliens existed, I would trust him that aliens existed, because I trust him. It's the fact that the source of the information is God, and I trust God. In fact, I have never spoken to God about aliens, because when you're speaking to God, you are in awe so only the things that really matter to you come to you. I don't care whether aliens exist or not - to me it's a purely academic discussion. My conversations with God are difficult to relay, because they are imaged, and mind-to-mind, but they only ever addressed the things most vital to me. The sum total of the revelation I have from God is this: God made things - call it Nature - the way he likes them. He's not going to change his preferences for what I would like. And he acts on his nature through his nature, because he likes it that way. So, things are not deterministic - God controls everything - but they seem deterministic to us, because God has very fixed opinions above everything, and he loves his creation - which is really the expression of his opinions - more than he loves you or me in the particular transient state we would like to be. Put another way, if the baby crawls off the ledge, the baby must plunge to the ground and probably splatter, because God loves his gravity more than he loves the transient state of the baby. (The baby's SPIRIT is what goes on, unharmed by the death. And God is interested in the spirit - the thing he made part of the permanent harmony - not the temporary position of some atom in the string.) Every atom is where it is because of God's precise will, and every grain of sand on the beach and hair on your head, but nothing impinges on God to change his opinion about anything, ever, which is very unlike the dependent condition in which we live. We comb our hair because we like it a certain way, but it does something else we don't want and we have to adjust it. But God puts things in their positions and strums the different harmonies and the music is as he likes it, and it doesn't decay or change, for none exists to alter any of it. The interesting element is spirits, because they have their own spark of creativity in them, reflected from the creator, they are subcreators. God likes some of that. And he doesn't destroy spirits. Which is why the old bad ones also live on. Spirits are his children, and he tarries at destroying them because he loves them. God has emotions, but no "forces" impinge upon God at all. What does happen is sub- creating spirits move in juxtaposition with each other that creates tension and disharmony, which generally resolves itself by the throbbing underlying theme, which we might call "natural law" or physics, or that we might see as the great bass notes supporting the entire great music. We cannot think like God because we're so finite, but we do subcreate in emulation of our maker, each of us a prism that refracts the light differently, or a singer with a different timbre of voice in a great chorus. These are human images. That's what I learned from God. There are already plenty of sentient non-human beings in the Great Song - open the window right now and listen to the night, the throbbing base note of the crickets. They do not sing for us - they sing for mates - but as they sing together by the millions, billions and trillions, they provide a note that we enjoy - and so does God. The difference is that we hear it and appreciate the art, without recognizing that it is a note written into a symphony by a composer. It's a part we can hear and appreciate. But only he can hear the whole piece. If there are space aliens, they're singing in the Great Song also. We can't hear them. God can. Angels and Demons are aliens, to us, and of the sky not of this world. They are singing in the song, playing their part. This much I understand. And that is what God showed me and said to me - not the Great Music - that he prefers to work on his nature through his nature. He also showed me one gate of the City, high above and afar. And he pushed me for a short time into the black abyss of nothing, which was shatteringly horrific and makes me tear up. That is all. Can you do anything with this? Probably not, because you don't know how to believe it. It's why I know there is God, the City, the Abyss, and why some things are as they are - it is God's opinion. This gives me a certitude of those four things. Everything else I have to arrive at through logic, but those four things anchor where I can go, because they are empirical facts. They are not facts of much use to anybody with a different brain structure. He gave me the base key signature of my song, and so I sing it as I make it. He gave you a different key signature, and we would find trying to sing each other's music to have a bad sound taste. We want to subcreate the melody that fits us. It's why there are so many different beliefs about everything, and why it is not an affront to God that there are. What more can I say of this? Nothing, frankly. So I will sign off this particular thread and leave it be. Truth is, I am utterly indifferent to the existence of aliens, and I don't care whether we evolved or not. God is, and my life is an instrument in the Great Music. And that is all I probably ever will know as long as I am encased in this sense-dulling husk. The rest of these discussions are just entertainment.
What a benefit it would to all of us if you knew as much about astronomy and RF electronics as you know about bible thumping.
Truth is, I'm not all that interested in thumping the Bible. I'm interested in getting on with practical solutions to those things that afflict us men. The Bible is only the barest template for that: don't kill, be sexually moral, use money to elevate your neighbors along with yourself. Very basic stuff. It ought to be a rallying point for Christians, making the overcoming of the collective action problem easier, but it isn't. In fact, when I do "thump the Bible" and really get into its details, I find that Christians want to fight about it as much or more than they want to cooperate, which is pretty depressing to me. I know a great deal about tax law and other law, and once the resistance were overcome, I would find the discussion of practicalities - how PRECISELY to structure things to minimize taxes to all using group dynamics, how to intensively farm very small plots with hand tools and little labor, how to harness North American wild trees for useful foodstuffs, removing some of the economic burdens from everybody who has a tree (while improving his or her health). Other niche projects to render life easier for those with the right mindset. But people are so quarrelsome and divided that they seem destined to be herded along by people willing to use force upon them, and people with the advantage of money. This is very sad. Relative to practical human needs, astronomy is merely a curiosity. Knowledge of edible wild plants and trees, and intensive farming methods, is much more useful than knowing changeful things about the distant stars. But we never get to my hoard of useful knowledge. All we do is fight about nonsense.
In general, I do not take any issues with your take of how things work. At least as presented, it seems it has much in common with my own, which I don't mind sharing, and feel compelled to do in response. As for angels, WE are angels. All of us. Angels that have taken up residence in human bodies for the purpose of spiritual growth. When the body dies, we return to the place we came from which is a spirit world otherwise known as "heaven", which is a place with real structure and design. From there we meet up with our guides (perhaps often referred to as "guardian angels") and soul mates (which are real), review our lives and how we performed and what we've learned from it. At some point after, we prepare for new lives where we repeat the process. As growth continues through many lives, our virtues expand and become stronger. Our vices diminishing. Eventually, human incarnations are of too little value and we stop doing so, and we advance on the spiritual level, becoming guides for others that are less developed, but no less loved, though even guides continue the journey to higher levels. Under this model, so much theology makes sense it's not even funny. God doesn't stop loving us at physical death (and arguments that God for whom "all things are possible" still loves people that are burning in hell for all eternity doesn't wash with me). People aren't ever "cheated" if they die young, even as babies. Head knowledge does not determine the fate of a soul. Free will reigns supreme, so those who are born with even severe handicaps have, in fact, freely chosen that life (at the spiritual level) for the purpose of spiritual growth. Life has a very practical purpose of enabling spiritual growth *for us* instead of just being for the obtuse "glory of God". Souls are not created by human DNA, a concept wholly illogical. The reason we are loved more than animals or even the universe -- that we are angels -- makes much more sense. Such an understanding also better enables me to see others in a different light, even adversaries. Instead of a human face and body, I can see a soul on an eternal journey, struggling over the course of many lives to overcome whatever vice, or successfully exercising wonderful virtues. The idea that its appropriate to condemn others ("i.e. God has a special place in hell for people like you") for things they have done or advocated fades away, as I know they will eventually see the harm they have done to me or others and experience for themselves what his victims have experienced. Old people are not "old" per se. They only happen to inhabit a body that is nearing the completion of one earth life, which after ending will eventually be replaced with another, one day again to be an energetic toddler running around in the backyard with little friends and pets bringing joy to parents. The Christian model has God as all knowing, all wise, and all powerful. Why then, given the choice of how to design all things and make all laws, would he choose a setup involving "sin" and "redemption" where a majority of his children would perish in eternal, unspeakable agony? Why would he not choose this model I describe instead? Doesn't this model have more love, more patience (literally eternal, not expiring at death), a role for morality, and yet with complete accountability and free will? Under this model, life is completely fair, even for those born with severe handicaps, or who suffer terrible accident or loss of whatever sort. Under this model, it's so easy to see that God cannot be blamed for anything. You can't even begin to stage an argument to the contrary which is not the case under the Christian model. Under this model, God *never* becomes angry and *never* condemns anyone, as such attributes are vices demonstrating insecurity and weakness, and are not in any way descriptive of a being who is all wise and all powerful. Under this model, even death itself is hardly something to be mourned, with the sole exception of it marking the point where someone won't be in physical company, (and possibly whatever practical consequences it may bring). For the person who died, returning home to the spirit world is the best thing that ever happened to them since the last time they were there, and any such departures & separations are only temporary. Soul mates have married on earth, lived full lives, and repeated many times over centuries and millennia. So physical death is nothing really permanent as viewed in the Judaic Christian model. In a nutshell, everything makes sense. Everything. Christianity is right in many ways, but not all. Judaism / OT thinking is wrong in much more. Best to you.
Thank you. There is much in this that merits discussion. And I will do so with you, offline via private mail.
"Edward Snowden said aliens could be trying to communicate with us right now"
#2. To: Rufus T Firefly (#0)
...calling into Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk podcast...
#3. To: Rufus T Firefly (#0)
#4. To: Rufus T Firefly (#0)
(Edited)
Edward Snowden said aliens could be trying to communicate with us right now
#5. To: Vicomte13 (#3)
#6. To: Pinguinite (#5)
#7. To: Vicomte13 (#6)
#8. To: Pinguinite (#7)
#9. To: Vicomte13 (#8)
#10. To: Pinguinite (#9)
#11. To: Vicomte13 (#3)
If evolution is true, that cannot be. If evolution is true, with 60 sextillion earths out there, billions in every pixel, the skies cannot be silent. It's impossible.
#12. To: rlk (#11)
Although there are 60 sextillion earths out there they are at so great a distance from us that any signal might take 10,000 years to get here and would be indisernible from the random movement of atoms and molecules.
#13. To: Vicomte13 (#10)
#14. To: Pinguinite (#13)
#15. To: Vicomte13 (#14)
There's something else I know that gives me confidence to state the negative case with such strength, but that knowledge is personal, is dismissible as "anecdote, not data", and therefore will not be offered in a discussion such as ours.
#16. To: Pinguinite, Vicomte13 (#13)
As long as there's no nuclear war putting a stop to scientific progress and research, the search for ET will continue. Maybe extra-stellar life will be detected at some point, maybe it won't be within any given time frame. That it is likely that it is impossible for such life to ever be conclusively proven to NOT exist (proving a negative) is unfortunate but needs to be accepted.
#17. To: redleghunter (#16)
Sounds like a lot of 'faith' with no evidence.
#18. To: Pinguinite, Vicomte13, TooConservative (#17)
Right now, believing either that ET life does exist or does not exist, both require faith.
#19. To: redleghunter (#18)
#20. To: Pinguinite (#19)
#21. To: Pinguinite, redsleghunter (#19)
(Edited)
Any belief, without proof, that things are one way or the other constitutes "faith"
#22. To: Pinguinite, CZ82 (#19)
Many are simply drawing conclusions as is only natural for the mind to do.
#23. To: Vicomte13 (#21)
Faith doesn't mean belief in something. It means the very specific kind of belief that one has that his interlocutor is going to do what he promised.
So, believing that aliens exist isn't faith, because no alien promised anything - there are no aliens to trust.
#24. To: Pinguinite (#23)
Your logic doesn't follow here. By your own stardard, if God told you aliens existed, you would have faith they exist. It matters not if aliens promised you anything, much less your having met any.
#25. To: Vicomte13 (#24)
#26. To: rlk (#25)
What a benefit it would to all of us if you knew as much about astronomy and RF electronics as you know about bible thumping.
#27. To: Vicomte13, redleghunter (#24)
#28. To: Pinguinite (#27)
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