The government’s eagerly anticipated report on UFOs came out yesterday — all nine pages of it. And it seems to have been a disappointment to almost everyone reading it. There was no grand alien reveal, jut a bunch of videos of “unidentified aerial phenomena” the government has been unable to explain. It leaves behind many more questions than answers.
Consider the Daily Stormer’s head Nazi Andrew Anglin one of the unimpressed.
In a post today, he offers his thoughts on aliens, the nature of the universe, and Jews. Let’s just start with the aliens.
“I know this whole thing is a big hoax,” he writes.
Here’s the deal: all of these videos come from the government.
Nearly every single person on earth has a camera in their pocket at all times in current year. And yet we do not see people recording these supposed UFOs. We only see the government recording them.
Then the government comes out and tells you about these videos they recorded, and you’re supposed to say “why is the government hiding this from us???”?
It’s absurd.
That’s not actually the worst argument I’ve run across on the topic of UFOs.
“There are no aliens.,” Anglin concludes. “There is apparently an agenda to shill fake aliens at people.”
At this point Anglin seems to take a huge bong hit. (Allegedly.)
Everything these days is a hoax. The entire world is based on hoaxes. The Holocaust hoax is the moral foundation of our society, while the global warming hoax and the coronavirus hoax are offering the structural framework.
Well that’s all completely wrong.
There is a decent chance they are going to go on TV and claim that aliens have contacted the United Nations and told them to give people more vaccines and teach critical race theory to transsexual infants.
I’m no prophet, but I feel safe in predicting that they’re not going to do this.
In a weird digression from his main topic, Anglin also predicts that
The only place you are going to have freedom of speech is China. Period. China is the last frontier of humanoid civilization.
Sorry, I was so surprised at that theory that I fell off my stump.
At this point, it seems, Anglin has recovered enough from his bong hit (allegedly) that he starts to make some sense again. At least on the subject of aliens. Not so much everything else.
But yeah – there aren’t any aliens. This is stupid. You can’t travel through space, it’s too far. It would take thousands of years to travel through space. You could potentially do that if you wanted to colonize another planet. You would have to send frozen embryos and then have robots birth them in artificial wombs. It is possible and I basically think it should be done at some point, actually. But there are no “visiting aliens” coming here, and I don’t think aliens even exist at all.
At this point, Anglin sets aside his bong and takes a big swig from a Venti cup full of Ayahuasca. (Allegedly.)
I’m just going to go all the way: all physical matter, including the infinity of space, is a projection of the collective human consciousness. Spirit preceded matter, and it is our consciousness that is holding reality together.
Our consciousness. That of human beings.
We are the only intelligent life in this universe because it is our consciousness that created this universe.
We have turned it into a Hell because we rejected Christ.
It could just as easily be a paradise.
Far freaking out, I guess.
Anglin then turns to history.
The demon-worshiping Romans killed our Saints and fed our people to lions as the pigs cheered, and we took Rome with the power of faith.
We can do that again. It’s not really even difficult. You just have to want it and then do it.
When it’s over, and every knee bows, there is going to have to be a permanent solution to this thing with the Jews.
Well that was an abrupt, but sadly not unexpected, turn at the very end there. Anglin is, after all, a Nazi piece of shit, the kind of Nazi who jokes about bringing about another “final solution” even as he denies that the Holocaust was real.
When the aliens come, let’s just hope they send him to some shitty planet where he can reflect on his life and the choices he made.
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@ Alan,
I’m now picturing Earth-as-giant-safari, with aliens happily snapping photos of the big lizard creatures to stick in their photo albums and bore their relatives with. (And this is only thinly related to the topic overall, but if you want to see adorable aliens you should check out Strange Planet; you may already know about it: https://www.instagram.com/nathanwpylestrangeplanet/ )
@ Surplus,
I’m sorry you have to deal with that. I doubt there’s much you can do, though. Best of luck and I hope it gets sorted soon.
Freedom of speech in China? This is a new low.
Regarding the UFOs, I read an article by a guy who really hopes they’re real and looks into all halfway-credible reports. One was in Chile and was scrutinized by their military and such. “Inexplicable!” was their report after 2 years. It took people online a couple hours to identify it as Flight #123 on XYZ Airlines, headed for wherever. He’s debunked a lot of these supposedly-for real videos. It’s mostly bad infra-red footage, cameras doing auto-rotate, and the like. Occasionally drones.
I read about the essay Chris Carter (creator of The X-Files) wrote about how he thinks none of this is aliens, but it was in the NYT and I don’t do paywalls. But if that guy thinks it ain’t aliens, it ain’t.
And in regards to that, I’m reminded of the entirely delightful episode where Alex Trebek (RIP) appeared as a Man In Black. “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space'”, with the titular character played by Charles Nelson Reilly (RIP). Stands completely alone.
It’s possible that life is common, but more complex life is rare and tool-using sophonts even rarer.
I recall reading a paper on the Fermi Paradox that proposed that if there were n “hard steps” along the way to a civilization capable of sending SETI signals and/or launching interstellar robot probes, and the average time for the life on any particular planet to unlock all of the hard steps was much longer than the planet habitability lifetime, planets that “got lucky” would be rare, and on them the start of habitability/life on that world, the hard steps themselves, and the end of habitability would all tend to be about equally spaced through time.
In my own thinking about this I’ve come to the conclusion that there may actually be two separate “starting guns” and not just one. Liquid water and the presence of a replicator would be the first, but the second would be the ability of life to colonize land, which is difficult until the planet has a good shield against cosmic radiation.
In Earth’s case, the first starting gun would have been about 4Gya, but the second only about 500 million years ago — about the same as the start of the Phanerozoic Eon. The cause being the core cooling enough for iron to start freezing out and forming the inner core. It’s thought the Earth only started to have a strong, stable magnetic field once the inner core had begun to form.
I propose there are two hard steps, and that both of them involve information transmission innovations that greatly accelerate the effective pace of evolution. One hard step must occur between liquid water and the loss of the magnetic field; and that is eukaryotic sex. In planets that “make it” to having complex eukaryotic life and multicellular life in particular, that step would come midway between those endpoints. For Earth that means halfway from 4Gya to about 500 million years in the future, when the core will finish solidifying. The hard step would be about 2.5Gy after 4Gya, or 1.5Gya, which is right about when we estimate the last common ancestor of plants, animals, and fungi lived. That might be the ur-sexual-eukaryote.
Why is eukaryote sex a hard step? Bacteria have been f-plasmidding, picking up random loose DNA strands, and swapping lysogenic phages since the Hadean. But bacteria have a very simple genome structure with only one chromosome. Eukaryotes developed a complex bundling system with multiple chromosomes, and a complex machinery (the mitotic spindle) for getting an even distribution of chromosome copies into the daughter cells when dividing, so that almost always the two new cells each get exactly one copy of each chromosome of the parent.
Now add the need for some kind of recombination to that. The mechanism of meiosis with crossover must be even more complex to work most of the time and produce catastrophic errors (fragile X, Down syndrome, etc.) only rarely, and that level of reliability is a prerequisite for sexual reproduction of multicelled organisms. So, that last common ancestor of the three great multicellular kingdoms of life would have needed this capability.
Why is it necessary to have sex? Because it makes evolution parallel instead of serial. In an asexual population, if some organisms have beneficial mutation A and others have beneficial mutation B, you don’t get one with both A and B until either the B mutation happens independently a second time in an A possessor, or vice versa. With sex, all it takes is for an A possessor to get busy with a B possessor and some or all of their sprog will have both. Or put another way: we have a complex organism with tons of beneficial mutations accumulated over the N generations since its last pond-scum-like ancestor. If it’s asexual and always has been then these mutations all must have occurred among just N ancestors. If it’s (binary) sexual it gets most or all of the beneficial mutations in 2^N – 1 ancestors, a much larger number of ancestors, and thus of mutations. It’s likely far more complex an organism than its asexual counterpart. The time scale for evolving complex things like dinosaurs and trees is reduced to its logarithm, important when planetary habitability lifetimes are finite if you want to maybe get sophonts before the magnetic field era ends.
I thus consider meiosis-with-crossover to be a strong candidate for a “hard step” without which a planet evolves only pond scum.
Note that this is an information-distribution innovation, as it allows the beneficial-mutation-A line to acquire B from the beneficial-mutation-B line instead of having to reinvent it.
As for the second hard step, this one would be halfway from magnetic field onset to magnetic field termination. Funnily enough, all our current data says that the time for that second hard step is now. Give or take a few million years.
In fact that hard step must have just happened, geological-timescale-speaking. For we are on the other side of the Fermi divide; we have in fact sent a few tentative SETI signals, though nobody appears to have been at the targeted stars to receive them (though, in a few cases there hasn’t been sufficient time for a reply to get here yet, barring FTL travel).
So what is it? I’d propose that one signature characteristic of a hard step is that, just before it’s achieved, there should be a bunch of organisms all bumping up against a “glass ceiling” that gets broken by the hard-step-achiever.
What do we see around us that are almost like us but seem trapped by a glass ceiling? The other known Earth sophonts: corvids, proboscids, and the nonhuman great apes, in particular. All have lineages that are highly social, imitative, intelligent and creative, and engaging in tool use. But none are building civilizations or so much as taming fire. What gives?
What do we have that they don’t?
Language. The ability to transfer what we have learned horizontally. Brain f-plasmids. Lateral meme transfer. Knowledge-sex.
It’s the same character of advancement as meiosis-with-crossover, a way for one lineage to spread what it has learned throughout a species instead of keeping it in just the one family. And if meiosis-with-crossover is a firecracker, language is a nuclear bomb. It creates a whole new order of evolutionary process that operates on an orders-of-magnitude faster timescale than genetic recombination, and allows it to leverage the whole population (potentially) to incubate innovations, just like meiosis did.
And we got it as little as 20,000 years ago, though some think 200,000 or a bit more. A geological eyeblink. And right about midway through the Earth’s core’s solidification process, just as expected.
So, sex and language. These are the keys to the stars, and they’re rare enough we’ll probably find mostly pond scum out there, and the odd planet with trees and dinosaurs and even apes, but very very few with sophonts like us, or whatever sophonts like us become given great reaches of time. Keep in mind we have another 500 million years (or more, if we spread beyond Earth) to evolve our descendants at a speed that is vastly accelerated from what went before. The “singularity” arguments that anything that’s had much longer after passing that barrier than we’ve had will be nigh-unrecognizable and impossible to anticipate do seem likely to hold water in light of this. Especially since we make further, huge information-sharing innovations at an accelerating pace now: writing; movable type; the telegraph and radio; the Internet.
Whatever happens in the very near term (probably bad), in the longer term something truly new is evolving under the sun. What strange things will eventually arise? We are to them as the paramecium is to us, in complexity and capability, though clearly not in moral weight.
I used to think that it’s very likely that there have been dozens-hundreds-maybemillions of life-as-we-know-it getting a bit of a start and then petering out at some point. There may also be many places where life very much like our setup got well advanced – but we’d never get to know about it.
Firstly the whole process might have begun and ended there before Earth had even started its own journey along our life path. Can’t be introduced to someone who’s no longer there.
Secondly, the problem with stars as suns. There may be places galore with oceans teeming with super brainy beings but they have to stay under water to avoid being fried by radiation on land. After all, life on earth didn’t crawl out of the oceans until the way was cleared by the Great Oxygen Event* getting rid of 90+% of the then existing species and, most important of all, stuffing the atmosphere so full of oxygen that we acquired our ozone barrier to radiation allowing plants and animals to survive on land.
Thirdly, Earth isn’t just in the “Goldilocks” orbit around around our sun. You’ll also notice that we treat collisions with meteors and Other Large Bits of Rock circling the sun as rare and unusual. In other apparently similar systems, meteors and other planetary debris constantly sweep through the orbits of close-in planets around their suns.
Our kindly neighbour, Jupiter*, did a fantastic cleanup, vacuum, sweep and hose off of all the junk left over after the planets formed. The region that previously supplied the meteors that pummelled Earth for millions of years – and in other solar systems continue to do so – is now pretty clear of anything seriously sizeable and dangerous. We’re not just lucky to dodge them, they’re not even there. Jupiter crashed into them and, in many cases, completely obliterated them neatly making the whole solar system more congenial for life on the inner planets. And we won that lottery as well.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
*Jupiter. I can’t find it just now but Brian Cox did the best exposition of this I’ve seen in one of his 4-5-6 episode TV doco series.
@Cyborgette
I didn’t. That’s one hell of a stretch for one cynical comment about the state of humanity these days. Don’t even try to pin that kind of nastiness on me, thanks.
@ Full Metal Ox:
”The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” sponsored by Petri Wine, didn’t go quite that far, but announcer Harry Bartel* in the framing segments did try to detour the conversation into the merits of Petri sherry with enough frequency that Watson (Nigel Bruce) occasionally called him on it.
*Later the best Archie Goodwin in the Nero Wolfe radio series
@ moggie
This is what happens when you leave your camera on the ‘Bigfoot’ setting.
@Mostly_Lurking
Claiming humanity is a disease erases the power structures that are responsible for most human misery, and for the destruction of the environment. It also tars the oppressed with the sins of their oppressors. So yes, it’s absolutely a naive and bigoted take.
@GSS ex-noob:
I read about the essay Chris Carter (creator of The X-Files) wrote about how he thinks none of this is aliens, but it was in the NYT and I don’t do paywalls.
Then here’s a bypass: https://archive.li/uUKIU
@Surplus
Evolution doesn’t work that way.
One thing we got lucky with on Earth is that we have accessible resources that allowed us to develop technology. It won’t matter how capable of doing similar things you are if your planet is resource poor.
@Cyborgette
You’re still projecting all kinds of nastiness I would never say or imply and I’m honestly quite offended by it. I basically said aliens would be smart to avoid us right now because people are pretty terrible (largely due to said oppressors), and you’re acting like I want to kick off the Fourth Reich. Maybe they really should avoid us, because heaven forbid someone willfully misinterprets what they try to say. Then a war gets started and humanity gets the Death Wave Cannon. I’ve never seen such a bad faith interpretation of something I’ve said, and if that’s going to continue to be your argument, I’m done with this conversation.
@GSS
That’s a fantastic episode. Maybe I should watch it again to get my mind off this.
Screw Chris Carter, though. I’ve lost all respect for him after the latest butchered attempt to revive the series, how he treated Scully, and daring to suggest the series could continue without her (or Mulder).