Here’s how the debate goes: If the whole of creation includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each, as astronomers think, then what if some of these stars have planets with advanced civilizations, too? Why would Jesus Christ have come to Earth, of all the inhabited planets in the universe, to save Earthlings and abandon the rest of God’s creatures?

Weidemann, a self-described protestant Christian, suggested some possible solutions. Perhaps extraterrestrials aren’t sinners, like humans, and therefore aren’t in need of saving. However, the principle of mediocrity — the idea that your own example is most likely typical unless you have evidence to the contrary — casts doubt on this, he pointed out.

“If there are extraterrestrial intelligent beings at all, it is safe to assume that most of them are sinners too,” Weidemann said. “If so, did Jesus save them too? My position is no. If so, our position among intelligent beings in the universe would be very exceptional.”

Another possibility is that God incarnated multiple times, sending a version of himself down to save each inhabited planet separately.

However, based on the best guesses of how many civilizations we might expect to exist in the universe, and how long planets and civilizations are expected to survive, God’s incarnations would have had to be in about 250 places simultaneously at any given time, assuming each incarnation took about 30 years, Weidemann calculated.

If God truly became corporeal and took human form when Jesus Christ was born, this wouldn’t have been possible, Weidemann said.

Pretty silly. For the sake of argument, if God exists and can take human form, it’s pretty likely that God can multitask.

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

The environmental issue is just one possible scenario out of many. Read the paper, it’s interesting. This is the part about Global Warming (in which the term Global Warming isn’t used):

The thought of humanity being a threat to other civilizations may seem implausible given the
likelihood of our technological inferiority relative to other civilizations. However, this
inferiority may be a temporary phenomenon. Perhaps ETI observe our rapid and destructive
expansion on Earth and become concerned of our civilizational trajectory. In light of the
Sustainability Solution to the Fermi paradox, perhaps ETI believe that rapid expansion is
threatening on a galactic scale. Rapidly (maximally) expansive civilizations may have a
tendency to destroy other civilizations in the process, just as humanity has already destroyed
many species on Earth. ETI that place intrinsic value on civilizations may ideally wish that our
civilization changes its ways, so we can survive along with all the other civilizations.

But if ETI doubt that our course can be changed, then they may seek to preemptively destroy our
civilization in order to protect other civilizations from us. A preemptive strike would be
particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become
increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering
the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our
expansion is changing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere (e.g. via greenhouse gas
emissions), which therefore changes the spectral signature of Earth. While it is difficult to
estimate the likelihood of this scenario, it should at a minimum give us pause as we evaluate our
expansive tendencies.

The people who seem most upset about this are those who think Global Warming doesn’t exist – which is not really worth debating. Because in the simplest terms: we pollute the environment, carbon emissions happen, there’s no argument about that, regardless if it’s going to shift our entire climate. An alien species may not want to see our willingness to harm to the environment reach the rest of space. You could replace “pollution” with “nuclear weapons” and have the same message.

The authors of the report could have left out “evaluate our expansive tendencies” without really losing anything, but the reaction has been a kind of case study in how people don’t react very well to this issue – and maybe that was the point. If there’s this much debate about Global Warming, given the amount of verifiable science, what sort of reaction would there be to first contact? Some would trust the science, others would debunk it or distrust it by any means necessary. The aliens could “say” or “demonstrate” they’re benevolent, but whole swaths of people would believe the opposite, no matter the amount of evidence.

It’s nice to see this issue discussed with some amount of seriousness, which is necessary if we’re ever going to leave this planet, or invite those who have left theirs. Granted, a paper from Cornell University with the phrase “ETI eats us” is amusing:

All of this might seem sort of silly, given that they’re all imagined scenarios – but the whole reaction to it is instructive. If people freak out this much about a minor scholarly paper, what would people do with actual aliens? The thought of alien contact invites either derision or mockery. It must freak people out on a fundamental level – even the non-religious. It’s like welcoming death: the death of everything we’ve come to know as normal. One thing the paper fails to mention is how the benevolent scenario could quickly turn non-benevolent – a scenario where aliens are here to help us. Given how much this issue freaks people out, Jesus-aliens from outerspace would likely drive people half or whole-crazy.

The report led me to this book, which I’ll be checking out:

He had a new disease called morgellons. The fibres were the product of mysterious creatures that burrow and breed in the body. As he read on, he had no idea that morgellons would turn out to be the worst kind of answer imaginable.

Morgellons was named in 2001 by an American called Mary Leitao, whose son complained of sores around his mouth and the sensation of “bugs”. Examining him with a toy microscope, Leitao found him to be covered in unexplained red, blue, black and white fibres. Since then, workers at her Morgellons Research Foundation say they have been contacted by more than 12,000 affected families. Campaign group the Charles E Holman Foundation states there are sufferers in “every continent except Antarctica”. Thousands have written to Congress demanding action. In response, more than 40 senators, including Hillary Clinton, John McCain and a pre-presidential Barack Obama, pressured the Centres For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) to investigate; in 2006, it formed a special taskforce, setting aside $1m to study the condition. Sufferers include folk singer Joni Mitchell, who has complained of “this weird incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space… Fibres in a variety of colours protrude out of my skin: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer – a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.”

…

In spring 2005, Randy Wymore, associate professor of pharmacology at Oklahoma State University, stumbled across an article about morgellons. Reading about the fibres sufferers believed were the byproduct of some weird parasite, but which were dismissed by dermatologists as humdrum environmental detritus, he thought, “But this should be easy to figure out.” He emailed sufferers, requesting samples, then compared them with samples of cotton, nylon, carpets and curtains. Examining them under the microscope, he got a shock. The sufferers’ fibres looked utterly different.

Wymore arranged for fibre analysis at the Tulsa police department’s forensic laboratory. Moments into his tests, a detective with 28 years’ experience of this sort of work murmured, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this.” The morgellons particles didn’t match any of the 800 fibres on their database, nor the 85,000 known organic compounds. He heated one fibre to 600C and was astonished to find it didn’t burn. By the day’s end, Wymore concluded, “There’s something real going on here. Something we don’t understand at all.”

The thing everyone’s talking about. Though it’s almost certainly fake, it’s pretty amusing how the story’s reported. From Huffington Post:

Benjamin Radford, a paranormal investigator and managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, tells ABC News the clip is most certainly a hoax, with the first “red flag” being the way the video includes an establishing shot of the landscape. “We see this in sitcoms, we see this in virtually every film in order to establish a place and scene for the viewer,” he said. “It makes sense in the context of a fake film but it does not make sense in the context of someone suddenly finding this alien creature.”

That’s why you think it’s fake? Because of an establishing shot? Struck me that the establishing shot was to establish where they were. Skeptics can be as silly as any other. I’m skeptical because if it were me, I’d poke at it with a stick.

A commenter on Disinfo translates:

-We have found it over there, lets go, look, over there…
-look, over there lies this ugliness…
-When you found it?
-About 2 hours ago… a dog smelt it…
-what the fuck…
-it is clear that it is dead… a corpse…
-…alien…
.f..k.f..k.f…….
…f.k.f..f..k….

-has been down here for a week or so…
-…if not more…

God did not create the universe, world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book that aims to banish a divine creator from physics.

Hawking says in his book “The Grand Design” that, given the existence of gravity, “the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” according to an excerpt published Thursday in The Times of London.

“Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” he writes in the excerpt.

“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going,” he writes.

There’s “no need for a God” is different than “there is no God,” but seems strange for a scientist to make pronouncements about something that’s unprovable.  But then, he’s just pontificating and it’s good book marketing – which is also strange for someone with enough money.

But stranger still when measured against the recent pronouncement that we shouldn’t talk to aliens because they’re dangerous:

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.

This is bizarrely small-thinking for such a big thinker.  As if an alien race a billion years ahead of us would have the exact same impulse as the barely-past-apes we have walking around here.

So he’s gone from “Aliens are Evil” to “There is No God” in the space of a few months.  I hope he’s trying to make waves and doesn’t know something we don’t because both premises are pretty dull.

Q: What’s wrong with existing SETI?

A: A fundamental flaw lies at the core of most existing SETI strategies. Carl Sagan popularized the appealing idea that an altruistic alien community might be obligingly beaming radio messages at us, perhaps carefully crafted to give mankind a welcome technological and sociological fillip. But that scenario will no longer wash. Even SETI optimists concede that a radio-savvy civilization within a few hundred light years is extremely unlikely (and systematic searches have spotted nothing). Suppose there is an alien community 1,000 light years away. That is still in our galactic neighborhood–the Milky Way is some 100,000 light years across. The aliens belonging to this putative community cannot know of our existence–they cannot know that Earth has radio technology and the means to detect their signals.

The reason concerns the finite speed of light. At 1,000 light years away, the aliens see Earth today as it was 1,000 years ago. Because nothing can go faster than light (it is a basic law of physics), there is no way they can know about the industrial revolution and terrestrial radio telescopes. So why would they have started beaming messages to us 1,000 years ago, when their view of Earth at that time would have been the year A.D. 10? They might detect signs of agriculture and large scale building (such as the pyramids), and they may of course surmise that some millennium soon humans would develop radio technology. But it would make no sense for them to start transmitting powerful and expensive radio messages at us until they know we are on the air. When will that be? In about 900 years time, when our first feeble radio transmissions, leaking into space at the speed of light, finally reach them.

I do not oppose traditional SETI. The astronomers are doing a great job, and they have refined their techniques splendidly. The Allen Telescope Array currently under construction will help a lot. They have my full backing. But their methodology is well adapted to searching for narrow-band (sharp frequency) continuous signals. They stick to this because they have built up a lot of expertise in that area and that is what their financial backers are paying them to do. Their systems are less well adapted, however, to what I regard as the more promising approach to radio SETI, which is to look for beacons, for example, towards the center of the galaxy, where the oldest and wealthiest civilizations are likely to be located.

Using DMT – or the radio antenna of our minds – is probably a better way of going about it.

The Shostak post unsurprisingly doesn’t mention the speculation that maybe we’ve been visited already.  That would confuse his position of looking for one kind of proof. I haven’t read this book by Leslie Kean yet, but by all appearances it’s sober and skeptical without being dismissive.  Because it’s hard to dismiss so many rational people coming forward.

Synopsis:

A group of young, mildly douchey friends are spending the weekend partying at a swanky hotel on the outskirts of Los Angeles. After a night of revelry, they are awakened at 4:27 AM by strange, booming noises. They head outside to see strange blue lights vaporizing downtown Los Angeles. When two of the characters go out to the roof to investigate, they see UFOs descend from the clouds, and other people start getting sucked off the rooftops into the ships.

So, “Cloverfield” meets “War of the Worlds.”  Curiously, L.A. seems to be the main target of aliens these days.  TABOTD takes place in L.A., as does my life.

My problem with these movies is not just that the alien story is potentially more multi-faceted than they’re here to kill us. It’s propagating a fear of the other, and trumping up the idea that it’s always a good idea to go to war with the other. That it’s playing on terrorist paranoia is not really much of an insight, but our response to terrorism is to go to war with two countries where we shouldn’t have been. But not only that – the Bush administration and the media painted terrorists as a black and white boogie men, while overlooking our own deficiencies – killing hundreds of thousands, displacing families, torture. So it’s relaxing to have a movie where an antagonist is so unquestioningly evil, but it’s also a dangerous sort of conditioning.

I find it uniquely mysterious that there were so many disaster movies in the late nineties before 9-11 – “Independence Day,” “Volcano,” “Deep Impact,” “Armageddon,” even “Titanic.” Not for a second saying that there was a conspiratorial effort to condition people, but when people said, over and over again about 9-11, “It was like watching a movie,” they’re also remembering the black and white antagonists of Hollywood blockbusters. If 9-11 was like a movie, so was the impulse to bomb the shit out of anybody after it. We’re still there, long after the death wish for revenge is gone from the country’s psyche.

I’ve written two novels about Hollywood, so I’m not just obsessed with the UFO issue, but how pop culture sculpts popular thought, and there’s so much more that could be explored about the topic of UFOs – but it’s usually covered with violence or mockery. Frankly, that’s as un-nuanced a position as the blatherings of the Republican base.

Every time I see him on the Ancient Aliens show, I implore him to cut his hair, if he wants to be taken seriously.  Does he think it makes him look more like Einstein? Not with the hair gel.

I liked this comment most:

Thousands of years ago, shamans communicated with animal spirits, then as mankind became more civilized and settled, these entities took on more defined humanoid characteristics and so we had gods and now in a technologically advanced and materialistic era, little green men in flying saucers. Same difference. This laughable need to have grey aliens be the ones who started civilization is yet another symptom of our reliance upon the physical sciences and our belief in technology being the most important thing because most of the western world is so spiritually incompetent they wouldn’t know a god if it sat in their lap.

To sum up for the atheists who are a bit slow: There are levels to consciousness and existence and levels of sentience in the universe beyond our superficial physical reality (which is a hologram composed of slowly vibrating and coagulated energy). When one is exposed to or communicates with these higher intelligences, our brains have to translate that experience into something that makes sense to us and in an era of political systems masquerading as religions that has made us spiritually incompetent, in an era of literal-mindedness and materialism, when one is exposed to these higher expressions of consciousness people no longer see gods and spirit guides and “wee beasties” but almond-eyed humanoids.

I’m in the same boat because in a universe where both God and aliens exist, you still have the question of intelligent design acting through ancient aliens. So even if we prove that ancient aliens were responsible for human evolution, there’s still the question of what’s responsible for alien evolution – which is a more important concept. There’s something weirdly Newtonian about proving the ancient astronaut theory – OK, it was alien science, problem solved.

Obviously if that were proven it would break apart our current systems of religion and science. But my guess is that we won’t figure out an answer to this question before we figure out the question of God’s existence, which will lead to a lot of interim speculation (like this post).

An interview with Zecharia Sitchin on MSNBC.com.

He suggests that Puabi was an ancient demigod, genetically related to the visitors from Nibiru. What if these aliens tinkered with our DNA to enhance our intelligence – the biblical tree of knowledge of good and evil – but held back the genetic fruit from the tree of eternal life? Does the story of Adam and Eve actually refer to the aliens’ tinkering? The way Sitchin sees it, the ancient myths suggest that “whoever created us deliberately held back from us a certain thing – fruit, genes, DNA, whatever – not to give us health, longevity, and the immortality that they had. So what was it?”

“What if these aliens tinkered with our DNA to enhance our intelligence”? Then they’re terrible scientists. Unless they wanted us to be dumb and self-destructive – which, of course, they did.  They bred us to be slaves.

Q: Are there areas where you see that new evidence has come out and the view that you’ve had has changed through the years

A: No, on the contrary, because of the evidence that is coming mostly from other fields. Let me give you an example. … The planet Nibiru is listed in countless astronomical texts from Mesopotamia. The question was debated by scholars already in the 19th century, what planet is it?…So now that we know about so-called extrasolar planets, the verdict is that an elliptical orbit is the norm.

Q: Another thing that people say is that you’re trying to read too much literal, actual history into something that was intended more as a myth, a story about the spiritual world. It would be as if someone was looking back from the future at our different cultures, and saying, “Well, God had to be like this because all these different cultures are telling the same story.” Whereas actually it’s the case that a common theme – for example, the Gilgamesh story or the story of a great flood – made its way into different cultures and doesn’t necessarily reflect historical reality.

A: Well, if that is the criticism, then it’s true. My answer to that is, so what? I take it literally, and others say I shouldn’t, so … I plead guilty.

This is my problem with him too – he takes the Bible literally, though it takes stories from other sources. Then again, there’s something so fundamentally archetypal about these stories (the flood) that ascribing truth to them isn’t entirely far-fetched. And the idea that the God of the Old Testament is the one true God isn’t all that more far-fetched than that God was a lizard from another planet.