It’s so baffling and gratuitous that I can’t suspend my disgust long enough to get to the rest of the film. Huge heaping dose of ‘what the fuck?’ here.

~hallie

There is a big problem here, Antinous. You and I cannot agree on that. While I consider myself to be a happy mutant, I have read tons of SF, I care about human rights and and civil liberties, and I have lot in common with the average Boinger, I was raised in a completely different society. Native blood is running in my veins, along the black and white. I am a mongrel. A cultural one, too, and even if we have a mostly westernized society, a lot of our native heritage is still here, disguised, but present and powerful. And, sadly, a lot of it is crap, mere superstition, exactly as valid as the Spanish heritage concerning religion. So, you are telling us that it is OK to call bullshit and superstition some things, but no others that are equally absurd? Is that valid for me too? What about for an atheist Yanomamo or an atheist Pemon? Can they say “those rituals are mere superstition”?

I agree, there might be a component of racism in such declarations. But not necessarily, and I think it is too extremist to go straight to shoot to the person that makes such arguments, even less if those arguments are being told along other criticizing major religions. That really stifles debate.

Of course, I might be babbling crap and the positions that we have might be too different to be reconciled, and I might be too obtuse to see what is really racism. But, I still cannot grok American attitudes to race. That is the most alien part of American culture to me. Intellectually, I understand it, and I have managed to avoid a faux pas now and then, but emotionally, is completely absurd to have different groups of people with different rights to use different words. But again, I recognize I might be insensitive.

I did not, and would not, ever do such a thing. But, nice attempt at moving the goalposts.

What I said was it provides interesting possibilities. If you patently rule them out, that’s purely your issue.

I have no axe to grind with SETI…perhaps Shermer more than SETI. Funding source is irrelevant-I was asked what else could be done if not SETI…that’s what I’d do instead.

But please go for it, and listen for the next 20 years…you’ll get your alien says SETI. What’s the basis of that? WTF indeed.

My guess is much like the UFO communities constant “they are going to land soon!” this will never materialize.

“If that’s the case, then the electromagnetic spectrum operates similarly there as it does here. Listening for radio waves at least has a scientific basis and is a potential for positive evidence.”

Hmmm, so “they” have ears or machinery that work off of vibrational frequency, that process the waves of audible sound just like us huh? Yeah ok. Scientific basis or not, there’s plenty of wild speculation there.

Until you address the culture-bound pedestrian idea of aliens using communications we could possibly hear – I can not take you seriously either. So we’ll leave it at that.

Have a good day.

As for the ongoing debate about the issue of racism in the video, personally I’d say that the clip was a very bad choice and to me it did seem racist. That said, I also agree with Greg London’s argument that he has the right to express his own opinion on the matter. As much as I dislike the way he phrased some of his earlier posts, I believe he was bang-on with his argument against Antinuous/Moderator.

If Greg’s post was:
“an unsupported and hegemonic attempt to stop discourse” what was Hallies? Look at her post:

“I’m sorry, but I can’t watch even the entire first minute of this video…”
“It’s so baffling and gratuitous that I can’t suspend my disgust long enough to get to the rest of the film.”

She dismissed the whole video because she disagreed with one clip. I actually agree with her that the clip seems racist and I still think her comment is ridiculous. If Greg is guilty of “attempting to stop discourse”, then Hallie is too. Fair is fair.

As for people who feel that their religious beliefs are threatened by this type of thinking, I would say that your beliefs cannot be threatened, only your influence on other people can.

You can believe in whatever god you want. Just don’t use that god to try and “prove” something in science.

Evolution versus creationism is the ultimate example of this. The world started out with various religious explanations of how life began on earth. It wasn’t until relatively recently that science began to push back against those religious-based stories and start to come up with empirical-based theories.

If you don’t want to work on Sunday, or you want to pray at certain times during the day, or you want to avoiding eating certain foods during certain times because of your religious beliefs, that’s your choice.

But if you think that religion has been neutral towards science and science is the big bully in history, then you haven’t been paying attention.

http://www.skepticreport.com/skepticism/baloneydetectionkit.htm

And please pound the Catholicism out of her.

justpassingthrough, [citation needed]

My point was that Greg’s statement was an unsupported and hegemonic attempt to stop discourse.

Seriously, you guys sound like the Grand Inquisition holding court. She is a witch! Bind her limbs, stop her mouth and burn her! She has not the true faith!

Now you fire the guy who said 2+2=5 is not defective and get one who can do math.

me: “You can believe in whatever god you want. Just don’t use that god to try and “prove” something in science.”

shadowfirebird@36: Yes! Exactly! Don’t you think that that is an idea worth communicating to people who don’t count themselves as atheists?

Uh, yeah, I don’t see why religious people would have a problem with that, unless they’re religious people who use their religion to explain evolution or some other topic better explained by science. The thing is you seem to be presenting this as if it is science’s problem for telling religious people to back off. for thousands of years, people used religion to explain why it rained, why it snowed in teh winter, why people got sick, why crops did or did not grow, why people suffered tragedies, and only in the last couple hundred years has science made any serious foothold in human consciousness.

Science says “We can explain why it rains.” And religious people who think their god makes it rain get all bent out of shape. How the hell is science supposed to deal with that other than to say, no, you’re completely and absolutly wrong?

The issue isn’t scientists saying “science can explain this”. The issue is generally those subset of religious poeple who refuse to give up the myth that their god somehow did it.

Should scientists simply say, ok, you’re right, it’s god? Stop blaming scientists for a problem created by the religious fanatics.

Moriarty: You don’t really “prove” anything in science.

That isn’t the language of a scientist.

Anon@41: It bothers me that people take a useful tool such as the scientific method or skepticism and then say things like “That’s why the religious should be forced to sit down and be quiet.” Forced?

Yeah, when it comes to why it rains or how life started on earth, people using religion to explain it should sit down and shut up. In your defense of the usefulness of religion you’ve managed to completely avoid anything that might reflect badly on religion. It’s the bad uses of religion that peope should be forced to give up. And yeah, “forced”, as in with the force of law demanding a separation of church and state kind of force.

Forced as in the kid in Minneapolis who was ordered by a judge to undergo chemotherapy when his parents argued that god would heal him.

If you don’t want to acknowledge that religion has had negative impacts on the world, then you’re not really engaging the conversation, you’re engaging in a strawman.

tdawwg@43: Hadn’t known that about nuclear reactors: can you cite that? Were they all retrofitted and made safe following the Chernobyl disaster?

The design of the Chernobyl plant was a design that was never used in America. It’s a very bad design. American nuclear plants are not designed anything like the plant in Chernobyl. They never needed upgrades or retrofits because they were never like chernobyl in teh first place.

it would be good of you to show where new developments in the technology, practices, etc., of reactors have lessened, or done away with, the potential threats of human error

It would be good if you’re going to make assertions about American nuclear power being no different than Chernobyl that you actually knew what you were talking about before you made that false assertion.

Don’t be spreading lies and then tell others that we have to educate you.

I’m thinking you would fail question 10, that there is some personal beliefs driving your position about nuclear power that has nothing to do with empirical evidence.

Try reading about nuclear power from the evidence first, not from your beliefs and fears about it, and see where the evidence points you.

Take a look at all the poisons that coal mining and coal burning electrical plants produce and get back to me. Oh, and solar just isnt’ cheap enough. Wind has some decent numbers, but what do you do when the wind stops? What do you do when the sun goes down? We don’t store gigawatts of electrical power so you can use it later. We can’t. We produce it as we need it. That’s all we can do. That’s the restriction we’re working with.

If you come up with some high temperature superconductors for storage and transmission, then sure, you might be able to cover Arizona with solar panels of some kind, store power during the night, and transmit it across the US without much loss. But that’s non-existent technology. Plants take years to build. We have to build based on what we know and can do now, not based on what we imagine might be possible some day.

Excuse me?
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/04/humans-predicte.html

Yeah, ok.

“It’s absurd to draw this false equivalence between SETI and UFOlogy. The former is grounded in the scientific method. The latter has to explain away a mountain of negative evidence before it can even get off the launchpad. Why no artifacts? Why no bodies? Why do UFO abductees come back with messages of peace and harmony, but never fundamentally new insights into any field of science?”

You assume that I believe that the UFO phenomena represents something extraterrestrial. I do not. However I do see it as some sort of external manifestation. Of what? Who knows, but not a productive question at this early a stage.

“It’s perfectly reasonable for SETI to only search the “sort of communications that we can detect”. Honestly, what’s the alternative?”

Well, I mean we could feed a lot of people for what SETI spends. Or devote it to the space program. I interviewed one of the scientists working on the solar sail not long ago, and I’m sure that could use the money. The way to find life is to devote time to getting out there and looking.

Again, it’s a very pedestrian answer to say that any alien civilization out there even might be using anything we can detect. Most people don’t seem to get their head around the idea of a culture developing completely separate from the confines of their own culture-bound mindset.

Completely alien. Not a shred of similarity. Possible? I guess anything is, but to me it’s science fiction. Any advanced civilization out there is likely as Carl Sagan once said -far stranger and more bizarre than we could ever imagine.

I completely agree with you on the idea of no solid evidence to the typical UFO-nut info. However, there is a phenomena there-and not all of it is negative evidence. The problem is labeling a particular case “unknown” is not an option for most legitimate scientists who look into the subject. Most already have their mind made up after seeing the 60+ years of UFO “research”-which amounts to a knee jerk reactive answer or theory of the extraterrestrial. There’s no evidence for that, again, I’m with you there.

I would say to look into Jacques Vallee’s work for more interesting possibilities. Not at all your fault, but the UFO phenomena to more than a few of us in the interested category, is not what the general public thinks. More and more people are seeing a connection to consciousness and the nature of perception. Trust me, I see where everyone comes from when the subject of UFOs comes up….the majority of what has been publicly touted is absolute garbage. There is however a large body of interesting data.

This not only provided BS detection skills, but also provides some antibodies against advertising (which is just another form of propaganda).

Highly recommended, if anyone needs such a thing.

As does nearly any other activity I can think of (for example, thinking doesn’t really involve *you* using physics, but physics is going on in your head).

Seems kind of unnecessarily scornful of a minority group’s spiritual values, especially if his goal is to get people to think more critically/skeptically or to foster a greater interest in science.

Folks should look into to Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of Nonoverlapping Magisteria.

“I think that any scientist that claims they know everything or that anything they don’t know doesn’t exist knows nothing of science.”

I certainly think that the legal criteria for what constitutes science excludes a lot of what scientists actually do. It certainly excludes string theory.

My feeling is, science education in this country is already in too bad of a shape to start pushing people and their beliefs out the door. If science wants to have something relevant to say to modern culture, it needs to begin with the commonly held understandings of modern culture and work from there to more scientific understandings.

If you take Dawkins’ line, yeah you get to prove how smart you are, but you don’t convince anybody. The question to me is not finding the most effective put-downs to be used against, say, creationists–but how to lead people to ask scientific questions of their own.

“SETI people think that a culture which has evolved completely separate from earth, all human interaction and thought processes, as well as possible environment alterations…would use some sort of communications that we can detect.

That, is not science. That’s as culture-bound an idea as the idea that UFOs represent a extraterrestrial presence. There is no more evidence for the UFO phenomena as an E.T. culture, than for the SETI goal.

I find Shermer to be yet another ideologist, like many of the UFO proponents. All have forgotten one simple thing: this is an experience, not an ideology. The people, not the phenomena make it that way. Anyone bothering to take more than a casual look will see that the UFO phenomena is not new, and not culture bound to the current time in history. But it’s also been unquantifiable.

Is it real? Who’s to say, when there’s not enough information about any given experience in that arena. Examine what surrounds the phenomena, such as the anti-structure and marginality. Stop asking why, and ask what happens surrounding the phenomena.

As far as Shermer, I’ve seen him time after time try to “refute” all sorts of UFO accounts, clearly without all the factual data presented. Not particularly scientific. And, this is the face of SETI. There is no more supportive data for his endeavor of listening for E.T. than there is for the existence of an advanced culture visiting us in flying saucers (especially when we don’t know what flying saucers even represent). Shermer has never seen a UFO, so how is it he can speak so authoritatively on events and a phenomena he admits he’s not very informed in.

There’s a difference in an opinion, and an educated one. Shermer seems to ignore that when it comes to the UFO question.

Science in some departments, as far as I’m concerned have been nothing but a long running set of contradictions. As McKenna said, “every branch of science has physics envy”. However now, physics is telling us that our Newtonian physics is in for serious revision.

It’s not particles it’s waves, well, not exactly…it’s both…ummm, what we really mean is…

And you realize quickly that some science is being shook by it’s thin neck. Scientific collapse? I don’t like to think so…but I wonder what the next incarnation will be.

The shoe fits. Many millions of people are willing to think it was silly for our ancestors to believe that magical faeries in the sky talk to them and guide their lives– as long as nobody criticizes OUR magical talking sky faeries, who are of course very real.

Print versions:

http://www.scribd.com/people/documents/1502051/folder/100648

You fail question 8, providing only negative data. And based on how strong your reaction is, I’m inclined to think that you would fail question 10, that there is some personal motivation going on here.

As for the distinction between SETI and ufo-ologists, I’ve never heard SETI come out with an official statement saying that life exists on another planet. UFO people have.

Listening for a signal isn’t the same as saying the signal must be there. There is an entire realm of “not knowing yet” that we must operate within.

As a lay person, I have no access to astronomical data (for instance). There is no way I can examine such data to prove or disprove the existence of (say) a remote planetary system.
Moreover, I couldn’t understand the data even if I had it.

Some scientists lie. Falsify data, etc etc for whatever reasons — political, profit.

Bottom line: on many issues, I am just going to have to trust somebody else on most matters. I think most people are in the same position. No one can understand everything.

====
It seems to me that most proponents of “baloney” tend to dwell in the trivial: bigfoot, bending spoons, magical crystals, ETs, and on and on.

That should perhaps be the 11th baloney detection principle. Does the claim have any real importance?

Look. OBVIOUSLY science is not perfect. It is, however, the best source of information within its realm. Complaining about how “scientists used to say this, now they say something totally different!” is missing the point entirely. The fact that models are overturned and replaced with better ones is the exact reason why science works, and why it is different from religion (or politics).

(Also, not to derail, but the guy talking about nuclear power has his facts seriously wrong. For example, at no point does coolant water come in contact with radioactivity. Ask yourselves what the basis is for your belief that nuclear power is so dangerous. Seriously.)

WTF???

From the opening section for SETI’s entry in wikipedia:

“The United States Government contributed to SETI early on, but recent work has been primarily funded by private sources.”

If you’ve got a problem with some rich people from Microsoft giving SETI a couple million dollars so they can keep doing what they’re doing, maybe you should write Balmer a letter and tell them to stop making private donations.

Basically, I think you’ve got some weird personal thing against SETI. Deal with it, cause right now, it’s making you make patently false statements and oddball claims.

And if you wanna play the “we shouldn’t spend any money on program (blah) as long as people are starving”, then you’re making a purely nonrational emotional pleading case. Stop it. Anyone who owns a TV, a computer, a cell phone, a car, or any other non-essential equipment, does not get to tell other people what is essential.

I would say to look into Jacques Vallee’s work for more interesting possibilities.

Also from wikipedia: “Vallée has suggested a multidimensional visitation hypothesis. This hypothesis represents an extension of the ETH where the alleged extraterrestrials could be potentially from anywhere. The entities could be multidimensional beyond space-time, and thus could coexist with humans, yet remain undetected.”

The guy may have a day job as a scientist, but that right there isn’t any kind of science. It’s completly unfalsifiable. And there isn’t any way to find positive evidence either. It’s nothing but speculation. It doesn’t even qualify as a hypothesis.

We can look at distant stars and tell they’re made out of the same elements that we have here. If that’s the case, then the electromagnetic spectrum operates similarly there as it does here. Listening for radio waves at least has a scientific basis and is a potential for positive evidence.

Vallee’s got nothing to prove or disprove his speculation. And if his speculation were true, that aliens simply travel from other dimensions, then he has to explain why no aliens have wanted to make contact with anyone on earth other than to do anal experiements on rednecks on some deserted road.

SETI assumes that if we want to make contact with aliens, that there is at least possibility that other aliens want to make contact with us. But they assume normal physics, that faster-than-light travel is impossible, and the only way to communicate is through radio waves that last long after tehy were sent.

If Vallee’s speculation were true, that aliens could multi-dimensional into our space with no effort, why has none done so on any scale? None have come here for peaceful purposes, for war-like conquering purposes, to use our resources, nothing. Vallee’s got a speculation that makes no sense. It assumes the existence of dimensions we cannot detect in any way.

SETI at least assumes the world is as we know it now, and then tries to figure out if there were life on another planet, how might we detect them.

If you want to fund Vallee to build Buckaroo Bonzai’s rocket truck to explore the 8th dimension, and possibly find Red Lectroids imprisoned there, by all means, its your money. But if you want to compare Vallee’s speculation to SETI’s scientific approch, I cannot take you seriously.

11) Which episode of Mythbusters did they cover the topic in question?