Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/31/whoopi-goldberg-thinks-aliens-are-among-us.html
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I believe that there is life and even intelligent life out there in the universe. The sheer vastness of the universe practically ensures it.
But I also believe that they are simply too far away in space and time for our paths to ever cross. The sheer vastness of the universe practically ensures it.
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Ehhh…I watch the View almost every day. The true believer on that panel is the one who asked Nanjiani the question, Sunny Hostin. Notice she immediately said, “Right?!” when Nanjiani first said he believes in aliens. The only real skeptic on that panel is Joy Behar. She’s also the only one on that panel who is remotely close to being a leftist, in spite of how the right wing talks about that show. Joy is smarter than people think she is. Of course, before she got into standup, she was a teacher.
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If we were host to such a picnic we probably wouldn’t know what to make of it; but the blatantly anomalous behavior would probably be more convincing evidence that something xeno is or was about than all the blurry pictures of allegedly high performance aircraft and accounts of cattle mutilations.
Especially if the anomalies weren’t the sort of thing that Men in Black can just bundle into black helicopters for movement to Area 51: the Zones certainly had some movable trinkets(which fairly readily trickle into the black market, at least in the book); but about the best The Man could do was build a fence around them and tell people to stay away because of all the immobile or just plain ill-behaved anomalies.
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Today is a day millions of people celebrate the resurrection of a fatherless jew and his transmutation into a purely spiritual being on an invisible elevator ride. But sure… something actually within the realm of possibility is batshit. I mean, it is waaaaay out at the edges of possibility, but a hell of a lot more probable than a middle aged zombie from Nazareth.
Also, why does Whoopie get all the ridicule when Nanjiani said essentially the exact same thing? Whoopie has said some fairly wacky shit, but I also feel like she is regularly subjected to ridicule that others saying even crazier shit aren’t.
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I wonder if an interstellar species would have to have such a low clock speed, we might actually mistake them for rocks.
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I’d imagine that such rocks would have one hell of an internal structure(compare to something like petrified wood vs. more typical minerals that may have fiddly crystal structures; even a very narrowly focused geologist who isn’t much interested in biology or whether things are alive or not can tell that something is up in the former that isn’t up in the latter); but, given interstellar distances, it might actually be more surprising than not to discover an interstellar traveler who isn’t exploiting some sort of extreme low energy state to do the job, since the only alternatives would be drive systems that are questionably comnpliant with observed physics or exquisitely efficient closed-loop systems that allow relatively high levels of activity to be maintained on a shoestring for thousands of years.
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Also, why is she getting the ridicule among the View hosts when, as I already pointed out, Sunny Hostin immediately said “Right?!” when Nanjiani said he believed in aliens. I expect right wingers on Fox to constantly ridicule Whoopi. They think she’s the devil and/or a communist. Whoopi can legitimately be criticized for many things (she’s said some borderline to not borderline at all antisemitic things over the years, somewhat ironically), but mocking her for believing in aliens is…an odd choice to me. I bet she’s not the only former Star Trek cast member to believe such things, either.
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As incredible as her career has been, she will always be Guinan to me. 
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and there it is again; the belief that humanity is something special, important enough to be watched and visited by far superiour beings.
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If highly advanced interstellar civilizations had the technology to visit our solar system it doesn’t require any great hubris to assume they might study us. Human scientists study bacteria and slime molds, that doesn’t imply we think of ourselves on equal terms with those life forms.
Whether there’s any evidence of such visitation is another question entirely.
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yes, but thats not the mindset I see here and thats exactly why I made that specific statement.
and visit us? for what purpose? do we visit the bacteria in a petridish?
Where exactly do you think the bacteria in Petri dishes come from? We don’t study microbes by staying inside and observing them through telescopes, we go out to different habitats and investigate them. I would honestly be very disappointed in any aliens that were capable of interstellar travel and didn’t think it was worth visiting other planets with life to study them…evolution is too dependent on history to be something you can model.
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fair enough.
oops.
are we, as a species, really interested in studying other lifeforms for the sake of it, or is it more that we can better exploit it for our gain if we study them?
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Dude… PLENTY of people do care about studying other lifeforms for the sake of it… why are you letting the existence of a few assholes rule your understanding of people’s motivations for doing the work that they do?
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Seriously? Some people study nature so they can exploit it. Some study it so they can learn useful things – look at this gecko climb, how does it do that sort of thing. Some study it because we can’t protect what we don’t understand. Some study it simply for the sake of wanting to understand how it works and where it came from. If you think you can reduce all of scientific investigation to some kind of profit motive then you really do not understand human curiosity at all.
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and are exploited (or they findings) by the rest of us. sorry, I just lost a lot of hope over the last few years and my understanding of (modern) humanity as a species has somewhat changed…
lot, a lot of assholes out there, they are sadly “not a few”, at least how I see it.
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