Anyone under the influences of paranoia, generally lead their lives based on fears & negative thinking. Higher levels of consciousness learn to grow beyond those primal fears, and see more positives in the world around them. Individuals who achieve those higher levels of consciousness rid themselves of their own ego, & see all life & all reality, increasingly as one interconnected integral whole, with nothing to fear at all. Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, & others like them are good examples. I am convinced that any form of interstellar travel REQUIRES individuals who have attained a high level of consciousness as a prerequisite. That's one (not the ONLY) reason I'm convinced they are non-hostile & non-threatening.
There is also the obvious reality that IF they were here and hostile, we would already be enslaved or extinct.
No more than wishful thinking. Why is it you imagine high intelligence is necessarily accompanied by selfless enlightenment? To even begin speculating on something as unknowable as alien intelligence is in itself vain. We don’t know and it may be too late when we to find out by direct contact. This may not be because we’ve encountered an evil entity but, as you hope, this higher alien intelligence recognises the montrous nature of our species and realises that if we start to colonize the galaxies it would be a disaster just as it was on this planet.
1. It's more than wishful thinking. High intelligence is NOT equivalent to high levels of consciousness. Intelligence is simply the ability to learn. Higher levels of consciousness is the innate ability to see & feel the connections of seemingly unrelated things or forces around you as unified & working together in complex ways. The very act of doing this forces the private ego aside, for it is recognized as a barrier to understanding or connection with that whole you feel around & within you. It's' hard to explain, and impossible for anyone lost in ego to understand or relate to. But it is powerful when experienced. I am convinced no life form is capable of interstellar travel unless these states of consciousness are reached first, and no one who has reached this state of consciousness will willingly or intentionally harm an entire species or the planet that species lives on. Instead, everything would be interrelated & interconnected & working as one, right along with you, the consciousness visiting them. One (not the ONLY) reason I feel this way, is that interstellar travel cannot be done in any individual's lifetime unless done thru quantum means, and consciousness controls the quantum universe.
1. Answered in previous post. 2. The most powerful response I can give you on this idea, is that ETs have been here for a very long time--thousands of year--since at least the stone age of Mankind. If they wanted to take over the Earth, they've had plenty of time & opportunities to do that. But they have chosen not to. Indeed, there are evinces that they have helped us as a species to advance & develop at various times in our history & pre-history. They may be partly responsible for our genetic evolution from apes. But, they are certainly no THREAT to us. 3. I do agree with your post here in that WE are the dangerous element in the human meets ET story. We have been & remain warlike in our nature, & warfare would be antithetical to any being practicing higher levels of consciousness. While I personally support a strong, active space program, I am hoping ETs will find a way to prevent us from taking warfare into space. I am also hopeful they'll reveal themselves to the general public soon, in spite of concerns that many of us won't be able to adapt to the reality that we're not the only intelligence in the universe.
I guess my biggest problem is that if all of this evidence was as definitive or concrete as proclaimed then there wouldn't even be a discussion about it. The scientific community would acknowledge the existence of ET. Ask the scientific community about Black Holes, they will say Black Holes exist as a fact, even well prior to a couple months ago when we had the first picture of one. They say that because they have the evidence to back it up and no respectable Astronomer or Astrophysicist would deny the existence of Black Holes. Same with the Big Bang Theory or even Gravity Waves. All of these things have evidence, they are not hypotheses they are theory and/or facts that are accepted by the scientific community. Aliens provide way more evidence than any of the aforementioned. Supposedly there are actual space craft visiting Earth or possibly even here on Earth as well as documentation, testimonies, and even dead Alien bodies. That is LOADS of evidence, way more than any complex math equations required to confirm a black hole without ever seeing one. Yet with all of that evidence very few respectable scientists will say that Aliens have visited Earth let alone we have some dead ones in a vault somewhere. Like that picture shown earlier, that's a pretty clear picture of a Gray which means somebody got up close and personal with that fellow and snapped a pretty clear close picture. It's either dead or we've let him go by now or something. Where was that taken? Was it in a military facility? A lab? Or just a random guy stumbling across that little guy in the woods one day? If it was in some sort of facility then there were samples taken of it, no facility on the entire planet would have access to an Alien lifeform and not have at least a tissue sample taken before releasing it. Present the sample to a team of accredited Astrobiologists, or even professional medical labs, test it from a 3rd party and tell us the results. If there's a dead body we have then even better. Allow 3rd party scientists or doctors to study the creature and publish the results. That is how real science works and how pretty much most other things work. No team of scientists can just state something as fact without presenting the results to the broader community to allow for further testing and validation. That is why "Ancient Astronaut Theorists" are dismissed as pure pseudoscience and not real science by the rest of the scientific community because none of the evidence they have even comes close to validation.
As a lifelong amateur scientist, I totally relate to your post. I agree with everything you said. But there's more to the picture. In the late 1940's, under the Truman administration, a policy was drawn up to handle the increasing UFO sightings of the time. There were several elements of that policy that went into great detail, but I'll just mention a few. 1. Gather information of sightings from witnesses 2. Find some plausible explanation other than Extraterrestrial 3. For military personnel, get signed agreement, under duress if necessary, NOT to discuss their experience with anyone as a matter of national security 4. Allow some civilian witnesses to publicly relate their experience, but if too many believe them, take covert action to discredit the witnesses & spread doubt or even make fun of them 5. For scientists interested in pursuing studies of UFOs professionally, pressure them to back off. If unsuccessful, deprive them of research funding &/or discredit their research &\ get them fired & barred from hiring in other locales. There are more items listed in the government paperwork released under the Freedom of Information Act. There are videos that cover this subject on Youtube. The UFO/ET issue has been treated by government(s) around the world as higher than top secret, while governments have denied interest in the topic for decades. There's been increasing pressure to change that since 1991, with some success. Only recently--late last year--the Navy Dept has begun releasing some video showing fighter jets chasing UFOs during training exercises off California (2004) & off our Atlantic coast about 2015. I hop[e it's a sign they're beginning to open up a bit. But even today, there's only one university in the world offering degrees in UFO Studies, and it's located in Norway. The coverup has been remarkably successful & still is.
I certainly understand what you are saying. I guess to me and my overly skeptic brain everything you said does seem plausible but just not probable. And I think it has more to do with the nature of the subject we are discussing. This isn't like keeping military secrets in regards to new technologies or weapons or something. We are discussing the greatest discovery in the history of humanity here. "Are we alone" is literally the biggest question of humanity as a whole regardless of religion or nation or anything. The definitive answer to that question would have huge implications worldwide which is why I could honestly understand why many governments would try to keep that answer under wraps if they could. There would be all sorts of chaos worldwide from all walks of life whether it be social or religious or political if it were proven that humans on Earth are not alone. I mean hell just imagine in the US what would happen with the religious population if ET were proven real, there would be riots. So as a government if I had proof of ET would I release it to the public? Honestly....I don't know. I sit here as what I believe to be a fairly rational guy and I'm honestly not sure if the public has the maturity as a whole to handle information like that. Even with it being the greatest discovery in history I fear the implications of releasing such information so if all of this is actually true I certainly would understand why the powers at be do their best to hide it. That's governments though, the scientific community is on a quest for truth and I just don't know if they would collectively hide something like that if they had the proof. As an amateur scientist you know how this works, scientists don't tend to view themselves along national lines the way governments do. The scientific community as a whole would be super excited if a Chinese scientist discovered life on Mars or something. American scientists would be equally thrilled, but the American government would be pissed off that it wasn't America who discovered it. I will admit that I'm not just sitting here wearing blinders that I refuse to remove. There have been a few pieces of evidence regarding ET that I've seen that has left me saying ok seriously what the hell was that. I was actually living in Arizona during the Phoenix Lights incident and I remember very vividly standing in my yard looking up at that saying "what in the hell....". I have a thorough knowledge of aviation (its my job) and I still stood there racking through my brain trying to figure out some rational explanation as to what the heck I was looking at. To this day I still don't exactly know, my skeptic brain quickly runs to it being something the base was messing around with, but the other half of my brain says well I know aviation and I have never seen nothing like that before... So I guess in my case whenever I see evidence of ET I tend to conclude that it's something humans are doing that I just don't personally understand. Now if somebody asks me to explain it I'll openly say I have no idea, I'll still lean towards it just being some military stuff that we are experimenting with but I can't definitively say that it's NOT ET either...
What if the ETs don't have oil on their planet, so they were forced to find other fuels? Clean fuels, super fuels? And that's why they are more advanced than us? They don't understand that oil is one of the best fuels out there, pollutive though it may be.
That has been a school of thought in physics...sort of. But now Quantum Cosmologists argue that when I observe something, it is my wave function that collapses, and not that of the object observed. One of the most popular arguments was that even microscopic forces due to gravity cause the collapse, and others argue there is no "collapse" at all. And my cats don't like any of it! Mention Schrodinger and they're out of here.
In other words, beware thought experiments. Back to square one though; the vanity of our species imagining we’d be of much interest to aliens. I suspect the only reason they’d bother is the recognition our advancing lethal technology manifested along with our species innate arrogance and war mongering indicated we should be collectively euthenased before we spewed out into the galaxies/other universes.
Thought experiments supported by models and evidence. The paradoxical nature of the quantum world is no thought experiment. "Anyone who understands Quantum Mechanics hasn't studied it long enough" - Richard Feynman.
Models and evidence whose outcomes are unpredictable hint at a universe as a construct we aren’t meant to penetrate beyond a certain point. How and why it could be ‘constructed’ that way is another question, one I suggest religion can’t answer.
The how and why are called space-time and inherently limit humans due to our senses and current understanding. Whatever the Big Bang was created what we see and experience as reality, which may not be the same within the space and time we dwell in eventually.
‘. . . .the space and time we dwell in eventually”? Is that something we have to look forward to or am I misunderstanding?
What outcomes are you claiming to be unpredictable? There certainly are areas where we don't have a level of understanding that allows us to make perfect models. But, modeling IS an absolutely necessary part of how we make progress in understanding our natural universe. Also, I don't see a reason to be worried about the depth of our understanding of our universe. Mankind has made gigantic progress. And, I don't see a reason to believe we won't continue to learn.
Well in all reality we have no idea how ET would view us seeing as though we only have a sample of 1 when it comes to understand how sentient intelligent beings act. So we obviously try to apply our own rationale to other possible beings because we have nothing else to go off of. Our nearest Alien neighbors could be so advanced that they look at us with our advancing lethal technology and laugh saying how cute our little nukes are to them with their planet obliterating Death Star style laser weapons or something. Or we could be the Big Dog in the Milky Way and our nearest neighbors are some sentient intelligence beings just figuring out how to make fire. Or any number of random theories. The most likely scenario in my opinion is that the galaxy let alone the Universe is so stupid huge that there are intelligent civilizations all over the place but they are governed by the same laws of physics as we are meaning unless they sort of knew exactly where to look they wouldn't even know we were over here. And even if they found us unless they figured out something about physics and FTL that we don't understand yet then it's not like they can really get over here to bother us anyway. Not for a very long time at least. Just think about it, we sort of know whats in our stellar backyard nowadays. Through spectroscopy and atmospheric analysis we can sort of tell if there was an advanced civilization in the Alpha Centauri system or ones close by. If they were around our level of advancement post industrial or further then we'd more than likely be able to tell. Well if they are sort of like us and live on one of the rocky planets like we do and aren't some completely unimaginable species living in gas giants or something. Basically anything that can get to us in any reasonable amount of time likely doesn't live that close to us or is really good at hiding their signatures. If they are out there beyond what we can detect and they can get to us then we better pray we are "interesting" and not "threatening" because even if they were in Alpha Centauri and could reach us then we're pretty much at their mercy. Even with all of our advanced nukes and killing technology we still can't get people past the Moon. If they can get themselves 4+ light years then yeah we're dead if they wished it so. I personally hope that ET either doesn't know we're over here or doesn't have the ability to get over here and say hi. That's a risk way too great to play around with because whoever shows up at our doorstep has us by the balls the second they show up in our Solar System and there is nothing we can do about it.
Have you ever interacted with an octopus or a border collie? I do however share you apprehensions about the outcome of any interaction with aliens.
Both actually lol. The octopus had a weird fascination with my scuba mask and decided he needed it more than I did and proceeded to steal it off my face and retreat back into his little cave lol. I am interested in the animal kingdom to some extent, but that's me as a sentient human being. I enjoy viewing wildlife but at the same time I pay pretty much zero attention to ants as I walk down the sidewalk. I guess what im saying is that we have no real idea how Aliens would react to us if they ever met us. We as humans love to believe ourselves special in some way and think that since we would surely be fascinated to meet another alien species then they would be equally fascinated with us. We judge everything based on our own own beliefs because at the end of the day our own beliefs is all we actually have. A sample of 1, Earth. For all we know there could be a full blown Star Trek esque galactic federation in the Milky Way arm next to ours who is fully aware that we are over here but sees the little humans on their little blue planet the same way I see ants as i walk to my mailbox. We would sort of hope that we are interesting enough to be spoken to because that's how we humans look at the Universe, we'd be ecstatic if we so much as found microbes on another planet. But we very well may not be and could very well be so primitive in regards to everyone else that we are to them what ants are to us.
I don't believe they existed in our past or present. It was a higher being, God, that created the Universe. Not Aliens. If there is life in another planet, they were created by God. I wish their were other inhabited planets more advanced than we are. Perhaps with knowledge of the after life. But I think the chances of that are slim. When you really think about it our existence is remarkable. Our purpose for existing hard to fathom. Despite science it is still unexplained.
Why does there even have to be a ‘purpose’ to our existence? Why do you imagine God to be a higher being? He/she/it could simply be more powerful than anything we imagine yet lower in decency and rationality. The God of the Old Testament certainly is.
I enjoyed your post & fully relate to the dilemma you describe. I'm also impressed that you saw the Phoenix Lights, which are still regarded as one of the most difficult events for UFO skeptics to explain away. Literally thousands of people saw them, including two close friends of mine. I would have loved to have seen them myself. Lucky you. The government under Truman established a higher than top secret group to manage the initial effort to control awareness of UFOs & ETs, in 1947. It was called the "Majestic 12," and it may still exist today. Over time, it became more & more severed from government control & hidden within the famous black ops. Skeptics regard all this as just another "conspiracy theory," but I'm no conspiratorialist, and I've seen the Freedom of Information paperwork released that described the Majestic 12 & their policies toward the public learning about UFOs & ETs. It's not pretty. The reason for the secrecy may have originally been fear of public riots, but after years of Star Trek, Star Wars, ET, & many other movies showing ETs, I suspect humanity is reasonably comfortable with the idea of them existing--though perhaps less so with the idea that they're here now. I personally believe we'd adjust fairly quickly to that fact. I think the reason disclosure has been blocked for so long isn't fear of the public response so much as Black Ops' desire to back engineer captured ET technology & use it for nefarious purposes here on planet Earth. Anyone having that technology could literally "control the world." For me, that's a far more scary thought than having ETs here openly.
