Posts tagged ‘aliens’

May 21st, 2008

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

The word on the street is that in June the Large Hadron Collider will open a stargate for aliens to invade Earth.

A Stargate? Cool. That’s so much more potentially interesting than most of the other predictions. An alien invasion isn’t necessarily a bad development. It could be a good thing for humanity.

Having said that I have to admit that I enjoy reading science fiction, especially hard sci-fi. I know that the odds favor the possibility that some sort of life exists elsewhere in the galaxy. There’s only one good reason I can think of to not believe in alien life, and I agree with that reason.

There’s no evidence of life existing anywhere else in the universe. There’s evidence that suggests that’s at least possible. But at this point in time there’s nothing that positively supports the notion that life has ever existed anywhere but here on Earth. For that reason, I am free to conclude that it’s equally possible for there to be no life anywhere but here. And I am quite comfortable thinking that. That life exists solely on this one planet accounts for all the evidence we have at the moment regarding life in the known universe, and adds a degree of importance to our lives. Instead of fretting about how “alone” that makes us in the universe, I prefer to focus on and emphasize the fact we have each other, we have us.

That’s why it’s so important to me to stand for peace and harmony, and end to the divisions between people. I would that every human could only perceive other humans as humans, nothing else. No other criteria. If you’re human you’re human. If you’re not human, you’re another species. We are all on this ride together. (We’re also all stearing in billions of different directions.) We are yet too immature a species to have developed a strong inter-species bonding. We focus on the differences rather than the commonalities, to our general discredit.

Doomsday cults and those whose religion takes delight in focusing on the complete (and frequently prayed for soon) distruction of mankind are anti-humans. They dislike their own species. In fact they openly and brazenly declare themselves removed from the rest of humanity. They take egotistic pride, and joy born in ignorance, in the fact that they are not an animal. They have invented a new species based on philosophical beliefs. Homo sapian christianus, Homo sapian muslami, etc. Their philosophical beliefs are responsible, in part, for retarding the advancement of the human race simply because they’re so widespread. Religions and superstitions are holdovers from our not-all-that-distant past, but they’ve become an albatross around the neck of humanity.

If non-believers can have titles like the believers have, then I’d consider myself to be a prophet of atheism. I’m not militant, I don’t usually harangue theists unless invited to do so, but I’d rather focus on the positive effects of ridding oneself from preconceived, mired-in-the-past attitudes. Like it or not, we’re headed into the future. We will never in our lifetimes be able to return to the past, even the last minute. We are irrevocably advancing in time.

I’m also an advocate of basing one’s beliefs as much as possible on what you do know to your personal degree of satisfaction to be reality. I advocate people accepting the future as inevitable and getting their brains wrapped around the idea that what’s past is past and we need to be concerned and involved with our own species’ future.

Otherwise all those dommsayers will get the satisfaction of having their potentially self-fulfilling prophesies come to pass, taking us all with them.

Jack Eber Carlson

March 26th, 2008

Two reasons more people believe in gods than aliens

These may not be the only reasons more people believe in gods than aliens, but they’re the most obvious to me.

Since we have as much supporting evidence for the existence of aliens as we do gods, you’d think both would be equally embraced. Yet they aren’t, because…

…our interest in the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe is fairly recent. (Only in the last few hundred years have we come to better understand the requirements for life to exist. Only in the last century have we developed the means to explore the universe in such a way that the conditions that would permit life to exist might be detected. Within the last century we’ve come to accept that space flight is possible.)

…the reward for believing in gods is substantial while believing in aliens doesn’t have any pay-off. (Nearly every religion offers a reward for belief. Forgiveness for transgressions, eternal life, community with other believers, peace of mind, the belief you are loved and cared about. Belief in aliens doesn’t promise any benefit, temporal or eternal.)

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