Poll of the Day > UFOs/UAPs, they out there?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I guess "UAP" is the "peecee" way to say UFOs now since "UFO" implies woo and craziness.

Anyway, I'm pretty certain there's alien life somewhere out there in the universe. I find it extremely unlikely they've been here or know about us. And Ufologists always go on about how the discovery of aliens will "change everything". But you know how often governments acknowledge there are things flying around the planet and they have no idea what they are? And every time a government comes out and says "yes, there's aliens.", nobody cares. I find it unlikely that definitive proof of aliens will change much at all, since people still have real problems down here to worry about.

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I find it highly illogical were the only ones in the universe. I would like for people who think the opposite to tell me more about why they think that.

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I mean theres some kind of unexplained phenomenon that causes people to sometimes see weird shit. But we dont have any explanation for what it is, it could be natural phenomenon from light entering our atmosphere and doing weird shit and our minds have a way of trying to make sense of things that we dont visually understand.

I dont think its as simple as just alien crafts flying around in the sky. I think with so many smartphones there would be more footage of just regular people getting decent recordings of the stuff, and we simply dont see that.

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TrainerNeo_02 posted...

I find it highly illogical were the only ones in the universe. I would like for people who think the opposite to tell me more about why they think that.

For a lot of people, it's not so much surety that we're alone, more that:

a) Most "There has to be alien life because the universe is really big" arguments are easily refutable with actual science.

b) Even if there IS life on other planets, the logistics required for that life to be both aware of our existence and capable of traveling to Earth are absolutely phenomenal - about on par with a human being able to sail out of NYC in a canoe and randomly find England without a map, navigation tools, or any real idea of where England is in the first place.

c) Most UFO/alien theories require faith without proof.

Ultimately, it's always going to be a case of "I believe there are aliens and they're here" versus "I believe there are no aliens, or if there are they're not here", because neither side can really prove their case at the moment. A lot of it just comes down to what you want to believe.
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I've just looked out of the window and the answer is no.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

For a lot of people, it's not so much surety that we're alone, more that:

a) Most "There has to be alien life because the universe is really big" arguments are easily refutable with actual science.
b) Even if there IS life on other planets, the logistics required for that life to be both aware of our existence and capable of traveling to Earth are absolutely phenomenal - about on par with a human being able to sail out of NYC in a canoe and randomly find England without a map, navigation tools, or any real idea of where England is in the first place.

c) Most UFO/alien theories require faith without proof.

Ultimately, it's always going to be a case of "I believe there are aliens and they're here" versus "I believe there are no aliens, or if there are they're not here", because neither side can really prove their case at the moment. A lot of it just comes down to what you want to believe.

Makes more sense than I thought. I cant agree, but I do see where they come from.
Appreciated. Though I also agree with B.

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What about W.A.Ps?

Looking at how simple basic lifeforms are in their overall structure and function, its almost unfathomable to imagine that life is only on earth

I would wager that there is probably an abundance of life on other planets and moons in our solar system, maybe even on/in some asteroids. But the conditions probably dont allow for anything more than mostly basic microbes.

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Mead posted...

I mean theres some kind of unexplained phenomenon that causes people to sometimes see weird shit. But we dont have any explanation for what it is, it could be natural phenomenon from light entering our atmosphere and doing weird shit and our minds have a way of trying to make sense of things that we dont visually understand.

Plus you can always retextualize how you interpret phenomenon.

For instance, it's not that hard to think about most ghost sightings and then think about them from a different angle. What if "ghosts" aren't actually the souls of dead people lingering after death, but are some kind of "time echo"? Or feedback from a parallel universe bleeding through? Or time travelers from the future who can only partially manifest in the present? Or people who've somehow fallen out-of-sync with the normal universe and are sort of trapped between the cracks of reality? Each theory would accept the phenomena as objective real, but offer up radically different explanations for why they exist. And any of those theories could be true if their are aspects of the world we've yet to discover scientifically.

Of course, there's also the option that nearly every ghost sighting is actually hallucination phenomena that modern psychology can easily explain via concepts like expectation, sensory deprivation, or infrasound. Which wouldn't require radically new scientific discoveries as much as a simple acceptance of the idea that the human brain is incredibly deceitful (something we already know is 100% true).



Mead posted...

I dont think its as simple as just alien crafts flying around in the sky. I think with so many smartphones there would be more footage of just regular people getting decent recordings of the stuff, and we simply dont see that.

That's the same problem cryptid/Bigfoot theories ran into. Namely, that based on the number of unverified sightings and occasional photos taken when people didn't have cameras on them at all times, you'd expect a dramatic upsurge in the number of UFO (or cryptid) related photos to be taken once pretty much everyone on Earth started carrying around phones with cameras.

But if anything, the reverse is true - we tend to see proportionately fewer pictures like that now (and fewer still once you start discounting obvious photoshops or other clearly fake pictures). Which tends to lean harder into the "these things were always unreal" side of the equation.

It also doesn't help that, at least for aliens, a lot of sightings fall into a pattern where "you see what you expect to see" is a clear principle at work. For instance, people didn't really start to see "flying saucers" until 1930s sci-fi stories planted the idea into the human consciousness. People with alien sightings or abduction stories didn't really describe "Greys" until after Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the book "Communion" really popularized them - after which they sort of became ubiquitous in alien sightings. "Men in Black" claims weren't really a thing before a certain point, then suddenly they were everywhere. And so on.

You can also sort of backtrack this a bit. People in the past didn't "see" aliens because they weren't primed to think of every odd encounter as "aliens" - but they did see fairies, monsters, magic, gods, and other "fantasy" concepts, because that's what they expected to see. It wasn't until most cultures started to dismiss those sorts of ideas (and replaced them with other ideas) that those sorts of sightings started to fade out.

The show Ancient Aliens is pretty much built around this premise, attributing every odd story and event in human history to aliens, retroactively claiming that every fairy, monster, magic event, or god ever described was just how humans in the past described aliens, because they didn't understand the concept of aliens. But the easier argument is that humans have always had these sorts of stories because we've always had an infinite capacity for self-deception, and the present is no exception. Meaning our alien sightings are no less ridiculous than the medieval peasant who was utterly convinced that pixies were cursing his crops or Greeks who thought droughts happened because Zeus was mad at them.
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Mead posted...

Looking at how simple basic lifeforms are in their overall structure and function, its almost unfathomable to imagine that life is only on earth

I would wager that there is probably an abundance of life on other planets and moons in our solar system, maybe even on/in some asteroids. But the conditions probably dont allow for anything more than mostly basic microbes.

Until we can definitively find microbes elsewhere (entirely unconnected to the ones on Earth), or somehow objectively determine the exact statistical likelihood of "life" forming from organic molecules, we can't even really say that much. For all we know, it might be a statistical unlikelihood that WE exist, let alone life anywhere else.

Though it's also worth remembering that when most people talk about life on other planets, they're not really talking about simple life. They're thinking more in terms of advanced life - sentience if not sapience. Complex animal structures or full-on intelligent, technological species. Especially since that's what you'd need to justify aliens who can travel to Earth.

And for that, you're factoring in a lot of limiting variables above and beyond just "how likely is it for life to spawn?" Which is when you start getting into things like the Fermi Paradox and the Great Barrier. Not to mention questions of primacy (ie, even in a universe with a million species, ONE of them has to be "first" - and as old as the universe seems to US from our perspective, it's relatively "young". For all we know WE are the first, and we're going to wind up being the precursors/first contact for some other race eventually).

It's why the argument "There are a lot of planets that seem capable of supporting life, therefore life must exist on some of them" really isn't proof of anything. It's a supposition that could be entirely wrong for a multitude of reasons.
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