I was speaking with an old friend this very morning and had a brainstorm. It came as a bolt from the blue — as most brainstorms do.
People who believe in UFOs, aliens, bigfooums and chupa-whatnots are being skeptical!
Let me say that say that again. The people who believe in conspiracies, sinister oozings, strange – strangers in black suits, aliens, witches, ghost and the entire zoo of paranormal phenomena are being skeptical. In fact they are far FAR more skeptical than you or I (assuming you don’t really believe in such things.)
In fact, people who believe in paranormal stuff are being arch -MEGA-SKEPTICS!
Wow! It all fits!
Here’s what I’m talking about. Lets say that , you go to work each day. Come home, feed the kids, kick back and watch a little TV have a brew or six. You are normal (other than a drinking problem.) l am I right? You accept that perhaps the current administration sucks, the local ball club stinks, lite beer is OK and that reality TV programming is an awful festival of people being nasty to each other (or maybe you like that crap.. I don’t know!)
But the rest of you, the people who believe the space brothers are coming tomorrow to save ourselves from ourselves. You who believe smellier cousins of man even now, fight to survive in our dwindling Federal Parks and Forest System. You who think strange monsters lurk in vast unexplored places deep beneath the Earth’s crust. Those who believe the idea that a garrulous collage drop-out and science fiction writer could do psychological research and come up with the secret of everything. Those who sit around hoping that they will suddenly be transported to heaven. Those who think they are the chosen of God. You who think you can silence free speech.
You are far more skeptical than I!
You see, I don’t believe as you do. I’m not skeptical of the world as you are. I’m accepting of the status quo as Alfred is oft to say. At least so much that I cannot change more than a small portion of it.
Your skepticism takes you into worlds of reality that I can only imagine. I say this with utter sincerity because the world some of you travel in resides only in my imagination. They are not real worlds to me! They are figments, bumps in the night that have logical explanations–all. They are things that I dream about. Things that I investigate.
UFOs as phenomena is real enough. I’m simply not skeptical enough to assign more than a minute possibility that they be more than just unidentified aircraft or some other damn thing. Skeptical people look at UFOs and say , “ That’s GOT to be an alien spacecraft. Skeptical people reject the common-sense notions that we don’t know about everything flying around up there. We don’t understand everything there is to know about weather or how light reflects off of say, bird bellies. We don’t really know how a decoy flare or twenty of them might look after being ejected out of military plane. These things might look like nothing, or birds or weather or planes.
Or if you are very very skeptical, they might just look like aliens.
Skeptical of the real world that is.
Share and enjoy!
Well-presented and thought-out, I must say.
While not a supporter in the extraterrestrial hypothesis (the current religiously-fervent dogma among ufologists) or many of the other smaller pseudo-religious perspectives on many fortean and unsolved mysteries researchers, I have to say that your perspective in this piece is quite balanced and well-presented.
Of course, gorillas and pandas were once cryptids, monsters of myth and legend, and homo floresiensis was apparently a non-human (yet non-ape) humanoid who lived in caves. But the world is still filled with mystery, and the various perspectives help to fill it with wonder, and perhaps enliven and lighten the lives of some.
We’ve had our disagreements from time to time, but I think your point of view is important, and you’ve just made some good points. I’m not in complete agreement with all of them, but hey! that would be boring.
Keep up the good rabble-rousing,
W.M. Mott
Hey Mike, thanks for stopping by!
I’ve think the very moment we lose our sense of awe and wonder of the world is the same moment we are ready to fit our last suit! The same with questioning and same with rabble-rousing. No one ever advanced in this world by taking what another person says as cannon. Be it religion, politics or this stuff! Back and fourth debate and exchange of ideas is essential. We all learn that way–we all benefit.
And our horizons are only as far as we can see.
We’re also limited by our current knowledge-base, which is always growing. In fact, human knowledge is now on an exponential growth curve (both good and bad). Who knows where it will end up? I think as much about us being “too smart for our own good”, i.e., creating strange matter in a lab that will gobble our planet, or nanotech run amuck, or whatever, as I do on other matters. All of those things are very real possibilities, and ten or twenty years ago they would have been scoffed at as fantasy or science-fiction–pipe-dreams. I certainly don’t remember being asked for my vote on decisions to play with strangelets or create potential “mini-black holes” in a lab setting (an unbelievably arrogant and presumptive type of thing for a handful of human beings to do “just to see what will happen,” in my opinion).
Debate is always good, and dogma (from any quarter) is not. Logic and facts matter; interpretation matters. Common sense is also a pretty darned good tool no matter what direction one leans toward.
What bothers me are the flame-throwers out there (and I’ve met a few): those with various “isms” to promote, who color everything with what seems to be a self-serving coat of sanctimoniousness. I know that’s usually a term reserved for religion, but it fits ufological, cryptozoological, or any other fortean (and sometimes scientific) brand of dogmatism.
I hope we can get to the bottom of the various mysteries of the universe, but I also hope that we can handle the depth pressures when we get there.
I tend to agree with the basic tenets of this direction of thought (I.E.) that we are advancing too swiftly. We face wave after wave after wave of change, each coming faster and stronger than the last. It’s said that there is more information contained in the daily edition of the New York Times than an average person learned in a year, 100 years ago. We are awash in a sea of information; the average computer user has millions of times more information at their fingertips than the average non-computer New York Times reader.
One has a choice of becoming arrogant in the middle of all this, or becoming more humble, realizing that we don’t know everything and we are likely to never know e everything. If there is a god-creator than he/she/it understands the utility of open ended systems. We need to start learning just how big all of this is compared with our little niche here on the Earth.
So the argument ultimately spirals back into the other direction, should we limit our information growth to preserve our lifestyle? Is it proper to cut off one or more streams of advancement? For example, it will soon be possible to log onto a Cafe press server, order a coffee mug to your specifications and have the physical piece pop out of a printing device. The mug will be made of a combination of carbon based material which will most likely survive until the sun goes nova.
There’s no question that such a device will create mounds of indestructible junk (like we already don’t have those,) but will the consequences in the minds of the engineers and marketers of such things outweigh their utility? It’s not human nature to think along those lines. And this is nothing in comparison to advent of biological machinery.
The flip side of this argument goes thusly, can we afford to stop advancing and what will be the long range consequences to such a stratagem?I think? We must advance, we must learn to live off planet, move ourselves into the solar system using whatever means we have at our disposal. We use atomic power to get loads into orbit, hang cables back to the surface and start building. We copy ourselves into machines to live in space. Get the whole mess self-sufficient, it will grow and thrive.
Our other alternative is to circle the wagons, pull back to the planet Earth and await our inevitable death as a species.
Or, I suppose we can choose to wait around for the space brothers to intervene, that defaults us into choice number two if the space brothers choose to leave us alone, or if they don’t exist. If aliens do exist than they seem to have many of the same problems we have, worse even!
We have to progress. We have no choice to do otherwise. But we sure can’t wait on any “Ascended Masters”, “Beneveolent Space Brothers” or “Galactic Councils” to help us out.
Other things can cause changes in the whole equation of our future, like pandemics, natural disasters, and so on. Our problems may ultimately be driven by the stress we place on our own environment due to the exploding population on this planet, and nature has a way of adjusting any system that gets out of whack. Not condoning disaster, but just making an observation.
If we end up dealing with such an event or events, leaving the planet may be forestalled or delayed. There are also elements we don’t know enough about yet, such as the effects of prolonged space travel on the various system of the human body, and so on. We only have theories and guesses, and probably pretty crude fixes, at this ponit. We’ll have to jump from rock to rock as quickly as possible once we fling ourselves out there in a serious way.
As for the other topics in this thread, I tend to be somewhat skeptical of skeptics and their so-called skepticism….
Skepticism, too, can become a form of dogma. If you can avoid that, then you will be moving toward a unique position on the skeptical side of things.
Keep up the good work on your blog. You’re providing some balance to the other extremes that are out there.