Interesting that Sagan is being cited. He was promoting the plausibility if not probability of extraterrestrial life back when it was considered fringy. Now, forty-fifty years on, it is considered likely. He was tolerated at the time by colleagues since he was one of them, but that was about all. A good analogy could be made to the situation now with Goodall. Do I “think” Sasquatch exists? Nope. I don’t. Am I going to arrogantly claim it to be obviously, moronically false? Nope. I am not.
One of my science heroes, probably #1 if not #2 after Darwin, is Lynn Margulis. (Connections with Sagan being coincidence here.) The strongest proponent of what was marginalized and even ridiculed, the endosymbiotic origin of the eukaryotic cell, something now considered standard in biology texts. Along with James Lovelock she is the coauthor of the first published paper on the Gaia hypothesis, which I am only sharing to put the following in context: there is a good quote from John Maynard Smith, noted evolutionary biologist, which is worth reflecting on, no matter what conclusion you come to:
“ Every science needs Lynn Margulis… I think she is often wrong, but… she’s wrong in such fruitful ways. I’m sure she’s mistaken about Gaia, too. But I must say, she was crashingly right once, but many of us thought she was wrong then, too.”
“It is probable that some forms of life exist outside of our solar system” was most certainly not a “fringy” belief in the scientific community during any point in Carl Sagan’s life, and certainly not when he published The Demon Haunted World in 1995.
Hell, H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds almost four decades before Sagan was even born. Scientifically literate people have been pondering the plausibility of extraterrestrial life for a long, long time.
None of those are good analogies, though. All those hypotheses had good evidence of their plausibility, were widely suspected to be true in the scientific community, and the evidence got stronger the more they tested. It’s a dramatic false equivalency to compare any of those to Big Foot.
Big Foot is the opposite- the initial evidence was oral heresy, the only physical evidence was all shown to be intentional hoaxes, and the more people have looked over the years, the worse the hypothesis gets.
You are describing a belief system where nothing can ever be false because there can always be some nook somewhere where Big Foot can be hiding. A Big Foot of the Gaps argument, if you will. Science rejects hypotheses when the evidence doesn’t pan out, and it stopped panning out a long time ago on Big Foot. There’s no reason to continue indulging resources in the idea any more that a teapot orbiting Mars.
Careful there. Ad hominem attacks are against the BBS community guidelines.
You don’t seem to be reading what I’m writing. As I said a few different ways, it’s not arrogance to say, “okay, the evidence was never very good and isn’t getting better, so we can safely reject it.”
I’m going to bow out of this thread now, because I don’t believe you are debating in good faith. I did my best and I wish you well.
This is probably an important point. Like, when Europeans first came to North America, the idea that there was a great ape somewhere there was entirely sensible to them consider. The continent unexplored…although locals would have known a hell of a lot more about different regions…and any understanding of the movement of the continents and spread of different groups was a long way away. Heck, some people expected to find mastodons because extinction was still being debated. I suspect that it is so often called a missing link goes with the idea that it might be a relict of human evolution, which could have happened anywhere.
Now we have a reasonable survey of the continent, know great apes evolved in the Old World and human ancestors in particular in Africa (and incidentally, that some people are still so insistent on missing links elsewhere makes me wonder how much good old fashioned racism plays into this, the way creationism does to sauropods). It’s hard to imagine an entire population of apes, along with all their traces, going completely unnoticed.
The Neotropics like Ecuador are a little better, but still leave the question of how they got there, because we actually have a surprisingly good hominid fossil record too.
If a time traveller told me biology is going to have a few more shake-ups comparable to symbiogenesis…which, incidentally, originated with Schimper and Famintsyn who are sadly almost never credited next to the reprehensible Merezhkovsky…I would not be surprised. They should diminish over time, but biology is definitely far from done yet.
The geography of large conspicuous animals at the family level, though, seems a hell of a lot further along. There are so many mysteries and wonders left in the world if you care to look for them. As I’ve said to people, I suspect every single person who went looking for Mokele-Mbembe walked past some new and remarkable species, except they didn’t care because it wasn’t an implausible sauropod. That’s a really sad thought to me.
In the exceptionally unlikely case that someone finds a New World ape that isn’t a human, we can always revisit things…but why are people so intent on clinging to such an unlikely hypothesis when there is so much more out there?
“Bigthirtypointfoureightcentimeters” does come trippingly off the tongue. Just a thought.
I am sorry you feel that way about my comment. Perhaps you can reflect on what you had written, before I wrote that? Specifically, you wrote: “Be open minded, but not so open that your brains fall out.”
Is that less ad hominem than what I wrote? Doesn’t that imply that only an “idiot” would disagree with your point? Maybe I am an idiot; I don’t think Jane Goodall is…
And I wish you well too!
Can you cite someone other than a sci fi writer?
Do you honestly believe that sci-fi writers were the only scientifically literate people to think extraterrestrial life was likely before 1995??
Why do you think NASA put those golden records on the Voyager probes back in the 70s? Why do you think SETI has been around since 1980? Nikola Tesla suggested radio could be used to communicate with hypothetical beings on Mars in 1896. Astrophysicist Frank Drake started a systematic effort to search for signs of alien intelligence in 1960.
It is true that “Extraterrestrial beings have visited/are visiting Earth!” remains a fringe theory, but “there is likely some form of extraterrestrial life in the vast unknown universe” has been a pretty mainstream scientific position for a long time.
It has been an existent but at the same time marginalized belief within astronomy and astrophysics until fairly recently. I think that is an honest and fair assessment.
It’s not that most astrophysicists thought extraterrestrial life was unlikely. It’s just that they didn’t see any evidence of it nearby, so most people in the field focus their research on studying the observable universe and keep the E.T. stuff on the back burner until such a time someone finds direct evidence warranting further research.
That’s the thing though.
Bigfoot as a concept only dates to the 50’s. It doesn’t roll out of some earlier speculation about New World great apes.
It starts with that well exposed hoax, the rumor and hearsay follow. And critically as originally conceived it was as singular creature in the monster mold.
All of the sciencish and natural history end of it bolted on later.
Even the “native legends” you hear about aren’t really part of the story before hand. Most things people point at bear no resemblance to Bigfoot as popularly conceived. Mostly referring to plainly spiritual or non-physical beings, if they’re real references.
The one that is actually connected, and gives us the name “Sasquatch” mostly only got tied in later as well. It has to do with accounts published by a J. W. Burns, a government worker at a British Columbia Indian Reservation. He claimed to have collected local accounts of the mysterious Sasquatch, and published a bunch of sorta tall tale style stories in newspapers in the 20s.
Those had been republished in the 40’s. It’s possible, but unconfirmed, that Ray Wallace (the Bluff Creak hoaxer) was inspired by them. Otherwise people made the connection decades later.
Problem being these native accounts deal with giant humans. They aren’t described as hairy, ape like, or even all that mysterious. They live in villages, resemble other first nations people, speak an intelligible language, trade with other people.
Apparently there’s some documentation outside of Burns, but it’s unclear how much he created himself. Or even how far back these stories go, not all of them even involve giants.
By the time Bigfoot arrived in the 50’s, the idea of a lone “wild man” or missing link was already the realm of pulps and side shows. Not anything the least bit plausible. The concept didn’t shift over to undetected population of apes until about the 70’s and that idea was about as unlikely then as it is today.
I very much agree. Why bother clinging onto the belief in it, or the vociferous, convinced denial of it? Both seem kind of odd to me really.
But entirely incorrect. @Brainspore cited a few examples in the post that preceded this one, demonstrating that this assertion is untrue. Why did you ignore them?
Okay…I think you’ll find that to be what people in the field say themselves.
Here is an excerpt from Extraterrestrial Life and our World View at the Turn of the Millennium by Steven J. Dick: (apologies for formatting it is copied from a pdf and got a bit messed up! but in case you do not want to go to the source here is the relevant passage as well as the author’s bio).
Bio: an astronomer and historian of science at the U.S. Naval
Observatory in Washington , o.c. He is the President ofComrnission 41 (History
of Astronomy) of the International Astronomical Union, and author of The
Biological Universe (1996) and L!fe on Other Worlds (1998) , both published by
Cambridge University Press.
*So anathema was the subject of other worlds that even historians of science avoided it until the 1970s. I well remember when I proposed to write the history of the extraterrestrial-life *
debate as a doctoral dissertation in the Histo ry of Science Department at Indi
*ana University, I was initially told there were two problems: it wasn 't science, and *
*it had no intellectually significant history! To the department’s credit, I was allowed *
*to proceed with the dissertation anyway, and thirty years, several dozen planetary *
*systems, and some thousands of pages o f history later, both of those stumbling *
*blocks have been largely removed. There is no doubt now that the subject has :11l *
*intellectually significant history, although a few still argue about whether o r not *
*it is a sci ence) One sti ll hears the phrase that exobiology is a "science without a *
*subject."That, in my view, is a misunderstanding of the nature of science; science *
must sometimes search for its subject.
I am “people in the field.” And knowing a little something about the history of the field of astrobiology, I disagree with his take. Maybe that was his experience; it was by no means universal.
I think that we need to look at things in terms of the probability of existence given the likelihood of evidence of existence arising in the event of existence given the parameters involved.
When we talk about life on other planets, we are looking at the vastness of space with untold billions upon billions of planets, some of which have been found likely able to support life as know it. We can say that there is a high probability of life on at least one planet that is not earth (without going into UFOs, which are another matter entirely).
By contrast, with Bigfoot, we are talking about a cryptid in the confines of the Pacific Northwest with no explanation of how or why such an animal would be there (does it hybernate in the winter?) and no evidence to suggest that it is there (how many would need to be living in a population to sustain the species? and how likely would evidence be with such a population?), so I think that we can say that the probability is extremely low and hardly worth considering.
Note that I am not saying “obviously and moronically false.” The probability of Bigfoot’s existence is not zero, but not all non-zero probabilities are the same or worthy of equal consideration.
I agree completely with everything you write here, without exception, particularly your last sentence! I think if you go back through anything I wrote here, I never claimed the existence of Bigfoot is probable, even remotely. I do not think it is probable at all. I also would not say that someone’s “brain had fallen out” (not your words, someone else’s, but one of the things I had replied to) if they held open the possibility - Jane Goodall included. She has actually been saying this for a long while. There is an interview on Science Friday folks could check out if they want to hear her in her own words on it. That’s all.
Glad that you had more positive experience! You probably know this then but for the benefit of others reading, if you look at the history of belief in extraterrestrial life, as a broad arc (which of course is a generalization by definition), you can point to some ancients who hypothesized it but in general it was not popular. Aristotle opposed the idea and the dominant strain of Western thinking opposed it. (Not sure at all about non-Western cultures which is a whole other discussion!) The idea began to gain favor after the Copernican Revolution for obvious reasons, and continued along that arc until hitting a real height of popularity in the late 19th and early 20th century (thus Wells, Tesla, etc.). It then fell mostly out of favor and was fairly marginalized, until the 70s really and Sagan (and lesser known colleagues) can be thanked for that. Sounds like you disagree with that last part - that it fell out of favor after the early 20th century; I suppose we’ll just have to disagree on that and I acknowledge the subjectivity in it but still feel it to be an overall accurate statement.
This is all quite tangential to the post, the thread, and my main point which is pretty simple and straightforward really, agree or disagree, but since I was challenged on it…
I’m not talking about my own anecdotal experience. I’m talking about history. But you know this. Attempting to minimize my point through passive-aggression while evading its substance is just bad faith.
I’ll snip the man-splaning until this point:
You’ve now tripled-down on a point that has been addressed several times already, and shown to be false. Belief in extraterrestrial life was not “marginalized” until Saint Sagan spread the gospel in the 70s, and the history of the field of exobiology (now astrobiology) demonstrates this. Planetary protection protocols have been part of every planetary and lunar mission since Sputnik generated concern regarding backward contamination. Hardly the sign of a “marginalized” field.
Yet you won’t let it go, despite being shown to be wrong on this and other points repeatedly. Weird.
Yeah, I should’ve taken your example, @VeronicaConnor. You were right.
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