BrendanK wrote: Thu Jun 29, 2023 9:16 am
I don't necessarily think it's Aliens, but I do think there's maybe something that's not us (maybe future us?) that's been around forever.
There's no indication that time travel is possible, but if it was it would have some interesting implications. Free will is fucked, for starters, since being characters from a future person's history, what we will do has already happened. Which is actually ok with me as I think free will was always on pretty shaky ground, philosophically.
I don't believe that time travellers are among us, but it's easier to believe than humanoid aliens visiting us in spaceships.
Remember the opening of the movie Contact, showing our radio transmissions spreading out across the cosmos? Bit of an exaggeration. Our transmissions have travelled just over a hundred light years and they're weaker than the jokes on The Big Bang Theory. Our galaxy is a hundred thousand light years across. If our galaxy was the size of a dinner plate, our radio footprint would be the size of a crumb. Aliens are not watching our old broadcasts of The Honeymooners.
What I do know is that the human capacity for lies, hoaxes, self-delusion, confirmation bias, hallucination and believing third-hand information from people who are clearly cray-cray is easily capable of encompassing aliens, ESP, psychokinesis, ghosts, magic, miracles, cryptozoology and the other beliefs that remain stubbornly resistant to producing any concrete evidence of their existence. There is an interesting anecdote at the start of Oliver Sacks' book Hallucinations, that describes somebody's recollection of an alien abduction they experienced. And although they can remember the experience in vivid detail, they are also aware that the entire thing was a hallucination brought on by dehydration.