Sasquatch Israel
By 
One thing that fascinates me is the belief that aliens have visited the Earth recently, and that “the government” knows this and is hiding the evidence. The former belief at least seems to be extremely common:
Nearly half (47%) of Americans believe aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth at some point. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say aliens have visited Earth (51% vs. 41%).
Americans are almost evenly divided on whether aliens have visited Earth in recent years: 42% say they definitely or probably have and 41% say they definitely or probably have not. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe aliens have visited Earth in recent years (45% vs. 39%).
Lots more nonsense at the link if you’re inclined to get out of the boat.
Barack Obama was messing around on the internet this weekend, and had to post a clarification as a result:
Obama sat down with podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen for an interview that was released Saturday.
Toward the end of the interview, Cohen asked Obama a series of questions in what he called a “lightning round” — starting off strong with the question most Americans want the answer to: “Are aliens real?”
“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” Obama responded nonchalantly.
Cohen then went straight to his second question, asking the former president what the first question was that he wanted answered when he took office in 2008.
With a laugh, Obama replied: “Where are the aliens?”
I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!
We’ve talked about the Drake equation at LGM before, so I’ll just throw out some philosophizing as I launch a final assault on the north face of the Uxbridge Road:
(1) I’m going to quibble with the assertion that “statistically” the “odds are good there’s life out there.” I think the technically correct — the best kind of correct — statement is that we have absolutely no idea what the odds are, since almost all the values one would need to plug into a statistical equation, Drake or otherwise, remain completely unknown. And of course even assuming that the odds are good, there are still many many parsecs between “there’s life out there” to even the possibility that advanced civilizations exist, let alone have visited our planet.
(2) There’s a moment in Jurassic Park, which is a movie I’ve only seen once, but this scene really stuck with me, when philosopher-scientist Jeff Goldblum intones mystically “life found a way” or something like that, when the dinosaurs get out of control and start chomping the investment bankers. I believe that something like that notion informs the belief that is likely or highly likely or practically certain that there’s other life in the universe. In other words, a lot of people hold vaguely teleological beliefs that “life” is a kind of life force in the Bergsonian sense (does anyone even read Bergson any more I wonder?), as opposed to the orthodox materialist neo-Darwinian view, which is that terrestrial abiogenesis was a random accident of chemistry, not some Hegelian unfolding of the Immanent World Spirit coming to know itself via the marination of the primordial soup or what have you.
The significance of this distinction is that if you reject any teleological explanations, there’s really no reason to assume that said random accident of chemistry necessarily ever happened more than once, anywhere. To assume otherwise we would need some actual theory of abiogenesis, which we don’t have, which is a fancy way of saying we don’t have the faintest fucking idea of how any of this happened, which, as I understand it, is the current state of scientific knowledge in re the subject.
This doesn’t even begin to get into the further question of what the odds are of hypothesized abiogenesis elsewhere developing from peptide chains or whatever, to single-celled organisms, to Keeping Up With the Kardashians. And, after you’ve assumed the almost infinite number of cosmological can openers to get you to the end of that process elsewhere, you have to make a zillion further assumptions about technologically advanced life forms figuring out how to actually engage in interstellar travel — something that we’re a million miles away on that helicopter day from being able to do ourselves — then actually doing so, then stumbling randomly onto just this one of the several hundred billion stars in our own own cozy little galaxy at this precise historical moment, more or less.
(3) What all this adds up to, I think, is that it’s fair to say that while we have no idea at all whether life exists elsewhere in the universe, you can still make the most wildly optimistic assumptions about every single part of the the processes that would make it possible that aliens could have visited the Earth at all, let alone recently, and still conclude quite reasonably that the odds of this having happened are, practically speaking, indistinguishable from zero. Which in turn is to say that the belief that it’s likely we’ve been visited by aliens recently is every bit as irrational as believing in a flat Earth or similar.
That this belief is so widespread is therefore quite interesting in itself, as illustrated by the freakout over Obama’s essentially anodyne though in my view inaccurate remarks about the statistical probabilities involved.