New Study: Aliens Could Attack to Stop Global Warming
As Allahpundit says, "It's come to this." I'm not sure what's worse, taxpayers funding a CDC warning and emergency preparedness plan for a zombie apocolyse, or this:
A team of American researchers have produced a range of scenarios in which aliens could attack the earth, and curiously, one revolves around climate change.
They speculate that extraterrestrial environmentalists could be so appalled by our planet-polluting ways that they view us as a threat to the intergalactic ecosystem and decide to destroy us.I'd be more concerned if aliens read the Global warming-aliens paper. That might be a genuine reason to stomp on us. No intelligent life here.
The thought-provoking scenario is one of many envisaged in a joint study by Penn State and the NASA Planetary Science Division, entitled "Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis."
The study is indeed thought-provoking. It has provoked thoughts such as:
1) 'Why are we paying for this sh*t?'
2) 'Why do we let crazy people publish in science journals?'
3) 'If I see one of the authors walking toward me, should I walk, or should I run, to the other side of the street?'
It divides projected close encounters into "neutral," those that cause mankind "unintentional harm" and, more worryingly, those in which aliens do us "intentional harm."Not bad for speculation about something for which there is not a shred of evidence. One is just as justified in publishing a paper about 'Etiquette in e-mail correspondence with Garden Fairies' or 'Negotiation strategies with the Sandworms of Dune'.
Extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) "could attack and kill us, enslave us, or potentially even eat us. ETI could attack us out of selfishness or out of a more altruistic desire to protect the galaxy from us. We might be a threat to the galaxy just as we are a threat to our home planet," it warns.Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the authors' speculation is that aliens have exactly the same concerns as... a trio of lefty-green scientist assh*les. Who knew that aliens are... are... liberals. Just like climate scientists! Convergent evolution. I would add that space aliens may also express concerns about Rick Perry's exaggerated economic record in Texas. And aliens seriously hate Sarah Palin.
Perhaps the wisest strategy to protect ourselves from liberal environmentalist aliens is to encourage more batsh*t scientific papers about the global warming apocalypse. When I was in college in New York City (during the crime wave of the 1970's), some of my friends planned to act crazy if they saw someone who looked like a mugger, on the theory that even people prone to assaulting you are likely to leave you alone if they think you are crazy. We should engrave this whack-job paper on a Carl Sagan-type plaque and blast it into space. My hunch is that aliens--even lefty green kook aliens-- would leave really crazy civilizations alone. We could dodge the apocalypse by convincing an alien menace that we were all liberals.
One such scenario is the stuff of many a Hollywood blockbuster, a "standard fight-to-win conflict: a war of the worlds." But another might resonate more with fans of Al Gore's documentary film "An Inconvenient truth."Maybe Gore can interest fans in investing in his new AAMSHF (Anti-Alien Military Defense Hedge Fund), available by formal prospectus only. He's made hundreds of millions off hawking AGW scam investments. Time to move on to other pastures.
It speculates that aliens, worried we might inflict the damage done to our own planet on others, might "seek to preemptively destroy our civilization in order to protect other civilizations from us."We should offer Al Gore as a sacrifice. Maybe it will placate them.
Apparently, the study was conducted with a scientist affiliated with NASA, but is not sponsored or produced by NASA itself.
NASA is involved in its own AGW scamming, but hasn't formally diversified to AGW-SETI scamming just yet.
This stuff is easy to satirize, but it is a window into science, circa 2011. The public's reaction should be straightforward:
No individual who had anything to do with this cr*p 'science' should ever again have any funding from any public source. All three authors should be fired for publishing gross pseudoscience, the journal editors should be fired and driven out of science, as should the reviewers.
If these jerks want to push their b.s. materialist-atheist-nature religion, they can do it on their own dime. Maybe they can get grants from the Church of Scientology. Scientologists could give global warming kooks personal assurances from Xenu that there will be no alien attack.
The people who push this garbage are hucksters and frauds, and taxpayers should cut them loose.
Don't those science-fictionists know that Salmonella will obliterate any aliens who dare set foot on this planet?
ReplyDelete:-)
Allahpundit... I remmber his name from American Atheists list in Wikipedia. Funny I thought he was a political commenter.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, what are your takes people.
I mean... I seriously doubt that Man-Made Global Warming is real. Global warming MIGHT be real, since the Earth is in Dynamic Equilibrium, these colds and hots through History are "Natural", as in they are caused by our relation with the sun and the dynamics of the two celestial bodies ( Sun and Earth ); The Moon should play some role as well.
I mean truly complex problem, with all sorts of possible Models, scenarios, and unfortunately hard to conclude stuff from Observation.
Paul Davies, the physicist who was considered nice enough to religion to win the Templeton Prize (more lucrative than the Nobel Prize, and you need not to have to share it with 2 others) heads a body which is to advise governments if and when SETI succeeds. it's unlikely that SETI will succeed because it assumes that any ETI will be like humans, and we've been doing a lot of listening and virtually no talking,with just a little very soft whispering from our radio and TV transmissions.
ReplyDeleteLaugh at scenario planning if you want. It's sensible to make plans for all eventualities. Even the CDC study on the Zombie Apocalypse was useful, because it can be carried over to other scenarios, such as an outbreak of an epidemic. For example, what should you do if a patient is admitted to your hospital with Ebola and you're a doctor? Answer: Run as far and as fast away as you can (only joking).
Sorry, global warming is happening. It's sensible to make plans. Even if it turns out that half of it is 'natural' (something I doubt) we still have to make plans to adapt.
And as I've noted before, energy security is something that is going to have to be of concern to us. Our present standard of living has been based on having abundant cheap energy.
We've used up more than half of the known oil reserves, the most accessible and cheapest to exploit. There may be unknown reserves available, such as in the Arctic Ocean, although the technology to tap that is not known yet (imagine a large ice floe being driven by a 30 knott wind against an oil rig, an example of an irresistible force meeting an unmovable object).
Fossil fuel reserves are finite. Once you burn them, you can't recycle them. Also oil and gas reserves have to form in highly specific geologic strata, so they potentially could form and then be lost. Coal, being solid, once formed tends to persist, so we've got more coal reserves, but as I've previously noted, it also contains trace amounts of toxic heavy metals, so it's badly polluting, and should be phased ou for that reason.
@bachfiend:
ReplyDeleteWhy is the inference to space alien existence and malice acceptable in science, but the inference to intelligent design in nature not acceptable?
Michael,
ReplyDeleteBecause the visible Universe contains around 10 to the 22nd power stars (1 followed by 22 zeros) and hence, by the 'Law of Large Numbers', the chances of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe is very high. Whether it's malevolent, or even if it's capable of getting here (special relativity benign what it is) are extremely moot points.
ID is incoherent. When you work out a theory, let me know. ID is currently God as the serial incompetent creator.
Well surely the Aliens out there must have a HUGE technology that can use huge amounts of energy, and must be really passionate about our planet.
ReplyDeleteNow I think that UFO studies is far more acceptable than ID because UFO has religious implication only to a small amount of people. ID ... has a huge religious implication for HECK loads of people.
Why don't we make a philosophical discussion about ID and ND ( Neo-Darwinism ) or Modern Synthesis ( MS ).
I mean I know places like Evolution News and Views, has sort of that point, but they never actually discuss the thing syllogism, which IMO helps a lot to get a conclusion.
What you people say ???
Edward,
ReplyDeleteYou still can't get around the fact that with special relativity to travel anywhere near the speed of light to make travel between stars feasible would require enormous amounts of energy. Science fiction works either with implausible physics (or at least completely unknown ones) or more plausibly with generation (each voyage taking more than one generation) or robotic ships.
UFO studies are completely implausible. I mean the ones based on the premise that ETIs are already here and engaging in alien abductions, not the SETI ones. Ost of the UFO proponents are being fooled by conspiracy theories and hypnopompic and hypognognic hallucinations (which have been used as evidence for both ghosts and demons too).
OK, when ID gets a theory, then we can have a philosophical discussion about it, otherwise it's just musing about how incredible it is that the Earth's atmosphere is transparent to visible light, which just happens to be the wavelengths human photoreceptors are sensitive to. If human photoreceptors were only sensitive to UV-B, then we'd be blind. How incredible is that?
For your last question XD which was very amusing. I dunno. What are the initial conditions of the system we are talking about ?
ReplyDeleteI mean incredible is so much connected to probability XD, maybe if we were talking about Lamarckism playing some hole in Evolution, I would say that is far from being incredible, but if in the other haaaannnnd we are talking about sheer luck. DAMN THAT IS INCREDIBLE IN BIBLICAL/ASTRONOMICAL/GOOGLENOMICAL proportions XD.
@bachfiend:
ReplyDelete[Because the visible Universe contains around 10 to the 22nd power stars (1 followed by 22 zeros) and hence, by the 'Law of Large Numbers', the chances of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe is very high.]
We have an intelligent life N of one. We don't know how life arose here, so we have no way whatsoever of estimating its emergence elsewhere.
Your belief in extraterrestrials is a religion. It is your faith, based on no evidence whatsoever. It is a bizarre manifestation of atheism and materialism. Baylor sociologist Rodney Stark has shown that atheists are much more likely to believe in extraterrestrials than religious people are.
[Whether it's malevolent, or even if it's capable of getting here (special relativity benign what it is) are extremely moot points.]
Belief in extraterrestrials is the moot point. It's a belief of a bizarre cult, of which you are a member.
[ID is incoherent. When you work out a theory, let me know. ID is currently God as the serial incompetent creator.]
ID is the answer 'yes' to the question to which Darwinism is the answer 'no'. The question is: is there evidence for design by an intelligent agent in biology. The coherence of Darwinism rises and falls with the coherence of ID.
Michael,
ReplyDeleteI don't 'believe' in the existence of ETIs. I just accept that with the enormous numbers of stars in the visible Universe, the chances of ETIs are very high.
We don't know how life arose here but we do have very good ideas. Think hydrothermal vents.
A lot of Christians (perhaps not you) exclude the possibility of ETIs because of the belief that 'God sent his Son to be sacriced for our sins' as a sign of our special relationship with the ineffable.
ID is incoherent. There is no evidence for intelligent design in biology. Were you asking a question?
@bachfiend:
ReplyDelete[I don't 'believe' in the existence of ETIs. I just accept that with the enormous numbers of stars in the visible Universe, the chances of ETIs are very high.]
Multiplying an unknown quantity (the likelihood that life will emerge on a planet)by a very large number yields... an unknown quantity. The statement "the chances of ETI's are very high..." isn't based on any known quantity. It could be practically 1, or practically 0, or anything in between. So your assurance that ETI exists is faith. Materialist/atheist faith.
[We don't know how life arose here but we do have very good ideas. Think hydrothermal vents.]
Another day, another theory. You don't know how life arose.
[A lot of Christians (perhaps not you) exclude the possibility of ETIs because of the belief that 'God sent his Son to be sacriced for our sins' as a sign of our special relationship with the ineffable.]
I don't speculate. I see no theological principles involved, and I don't make speculations about nature without evidence. We have no evidence for ETI's, and no data on which to base rational estimates.
[ID is incoherent. There is no evidence for intelligent design in biology. Were you asking a question?]
Here's the question: how can you assert that ID is incoherent, and at the same time assert that there is no evidence for it? If one can adjudicate the presence/absence of evidence, then the theory is coherent.
I find the assertion that ID is false and not testable very very funny.
The assertion that there is "no evidence" for God, or design in biology, or whatever, merely tends to demonstrate that the one making the assertion is incapable of weighing evidence on two sides of a question. Even Dawkins asserts that biology is the study of things that appear to be designed for a purpose. Where I come from, the appearance that something is the case gets weighed as evidence that that something is, indeed, the case.
ReplyDeleteNotice I said, weighed not triumphantly stated as being decisive. Is there evidence that Darwinism is true? Sure, only a fool or Bachfiend's counterpart on the other side of the question would state otherwise. Weighed against the evidence for ID, would I say that it is decisive? Hell, no. But I'm not so ignorant and incapable of weighing evidence that I would obnoxiously assert that there is no evidence for it.
I leave that to ideologue hacks.
Michael and Matteo,
ReplyDeleteWhen I stated that there's no evidence for the existence of a god or gods (let alone your brand), that was your opportunity to jump in and provide some evidence. And what did you do?
And Michael, science has only been looking at the origin of life for 150 years, and has known about the hydrothermal vents with their rich biospheres for only about 20 years.
Christianity's explanation of the origin of life in Genesis (heck, Jesus referred to Adam and Eve as real people) has been around for over 2,000 years and it's demonstrably false.
ID is incoherent and there's no evidence for it. There's no contradiction because they are different qualities.
And just because there's no evidence for ETI doesn't mean that they don't exist. There could be an ETI in the Andromeda Galaxy right this moment, and even if they sent a tightly focussed powerful radio beam directly at the Earth, we wouldn't know about it for 2.5 million years.
Bachf
ReplyDeleteMatteo said "The assertion that there is "no evidence" for God, or design in biology, or whatever, merely tends to demonstrate that the one making the assertion is incapable of weighing evidence on two sides of a question"
This is correct.
Atheism on the other hand, is stuck with "nothing created everything".
Wow, feasible hypothesis if ever there was one huh?
Thermal vents? ROTFL.
And you pretend to be looking at real evidence for your inane position?!
The whole thermal vents nonsense is already a dead duck scientifically.
No problem for atheists, because they believe! They have blind faith.
Hey, bach while you're presenting BS and lame assertions instead of evidence, why don't you present to us the huge evidence for life being shipped here by aliens in rockets?
Or being formed "on the backs of crystals".
Or how about the other Darwinian dead duck, the RNA world?
----
ID is incoherent? Prove it.
Talk about trying to reverse the facts!
Atheism is the most incoherent, groundless and useless stance ever conceived.
"If there were no God there would be no atheists."
Your materialist stance is unsupportable because you have zero evidence for it.
Atheists can ONLY DENY all evidence for God, as you love to do, (all while pretending to be logical); they can never present any valid argument for a "no god" position.
Algorithmic information can only come from intelligence. Yet that's what all living organisms are made by.
Meta information can only come from intelligence. DNA/RNA mean anything to ya? Apparently not.
ID is an extremely good theory based on abductive reasoning applied to evidence in biological information processing systems.
That alone should suffice, but no, deny deny deny, anything that points to an intelligence underlying the universe must be denied - and then lied about.
Gary H,
ReplyDeleteWhat makes you think the hydrothermal vent hypothesis is dead? It's fact that the environment around the hydrothermal vents is extreme; high water pressure, high temperature, normally highly toxic chemicals, with freezing conditions just a very short distance away. It's difficult to see how life could have got there unless it actually formed there. Did the Intelligent Designer decide to create life there as a tour de force effort, knowing very well it would take humans thousands of years to send probes there?
What's 'abductive reasoning'? I know what inductive reasoning is (it's what's used in science, taking real data to arrive at a conclusion). I know what deductive reasoning is, taking a premise, which may not be true, but is assumed to be true, to arrive at a conclusion by logic. Deductive reasoning is used in ID (god exists) and philosophy.
I don't accept the RNA world as an explanation for the START of life. I also don't accept pangenesis as the explanation for the origin of life on Earth.
It's up to those who assert the existence of something invisible to provide evidence for its existence (such as a god), not for those who reject it to provide evidence for its absence. Russell's orbiting teapot springs to mind here. Someone insisting that there's a teapot orbiting the Sun near Mars would have to provide evidence. The onus wouldn't be on skeptics to provide evidence of its absence.
By the way, what does ROTFL stand for?
Interesting, I didn't know that the writer of this often read blog lives right down the street from me here in Kingsburg. Hanson taught Classical Studies while I was working my way through my chemistry degree at CSUF. I took some classes from the department and as Matteo has written about, I had to confront the "Big Kahuna" The Church. Everyone should have to sort out at least three things in their life: Christ Jesus, science and The Catholic Church.
ReplyDeleteJesus and science I have come to terms with. The Catholic Church still gets out the closet and chases me around the house every now and then. I remain a conservative Evangelical Anglican.
God's blessing on you Michael.