UFOs & Extraterrestrial Life

Begome wrote:…. those "sightings" could simply be illusions, delusions, hallucinations, people seeking attention, military equipment being tested

There are many cases for which no prosaic explanation was ever established even after several decades. In KDR's blog, where the best informed of believers and skeptics duke it out, all the proposed explanations for Roswell were disproved, including mogul.

or even more exotic explanations like demonic activity (the latter obviously requires a certain world view).

Far less credible than ET.

All the paper does is prove how even under the assumption that some form of Darwinism is true (which is not all that reasonable these days)

Among pro biologists at least Darwinism, or evolution, has been firmly established for many decades.

the existence of technological civilizations outside Earth is rather low. Thus, the alternative explanations I've listed become more likely.

Often, the alternative explanations listed are impossible. Illusions or delusions don't leave landing traces or cause damage or injuries, nor can they be detected by radar. Many witnesses are reluctant to come forward or are otherwise very credible e.g. pilots, policemen, professors, businessmen even astronauts.
Given the great limitations of our knowledge of alien worlds, and what far advanced civilizations may be capable of, it's unwise to say on the basis of theoretical studies that ET can't be here. What really matters is actual evidence--are there anomalous sightings or other evidence suggesting or indicating aliens have arrived? To any informed, objective mind the answer is yes.

Illusions or delusions don't leave landing traces or cause damage or injuries, nor can they be detected by radar.

Inactivated weapons systems, vehicles stopped, people paralysed, body implants, &  camera footages can be added to the above. 

starman wrote:

kvs wrote:
  The fact that we have no warp ship visitations

Fact? You've disproved all of the UFO cases over the past 73 years? Dunno the method of travel but it appears they can do it some way or other.

Yes, fact. Sunshine.

You assume that warp is something tiny spacecraft like the joke "sightings" (ball lightning, blimps) can handle. There has never been a single "sighting" of
one properly sized spacecraft that would need to stay in orbit. As if aliens are immune to hard radiation so they cant travel in their Mickey Mouse
flying saucers small enough to land in someone's back yard. Even if you assume warp travel shields from radiation (GCR flux is higher outside solar systems and
stars shield the orbiting planets from a substantial part of it), the warp is not point to point and space traveling aliens will spend substantial periods at sub
light speeds.

To quickly see the problems point estimates can cause, consider the following toy example. There are nine parameters (f1, f2, . . .)
multiplied together to give the probability of ETI arising at each star. Suppose that our true state of knowledge is that each parameter could
lie anywhere in the interval [0,0.2], with our uncertainty being uniform across this interval, and being uncorrelated between parameters.
In this example, the point estimate for each parameter is 0.1, so the product of point estimates is a probability of 1 in a billion. Given a galaxy
of 100 billion stars, the expected number of life-bearing stars would be100, and the probability of all 100 billion events failing to produce intelligent
civilizations can be shown to be vanishingly small: 3.7×10−44. Thus in this toy model, the point estimate approach would produce a Fermi paradox:
a conflict between the prior extremely low probability of a galaxy devoid of ETI and our failure to detect any signs of it.

However, the result is extremely different if, rather than using point estimates, we take account of our uncertainty in the parameters by treating
each parameter as if it were uniformly drawn from the interval [0,0.2]. Monte Carlo simulation shows that this actually produces an empty galaxy
21.45 % of the time: a result that is easily reconcilable with our observations and thus gener-ating no paradox for us to explain. That is to say,
given our uncertainty about the values of the parameters, we should not actually be all that surprised to see an empty galaxy. The probability is
much higher than under the point estimate approach because it is not that unlikely to get a low product of thesefactors(such as 1 in 200 billion)
after which a galaxy without ETI becomes quite likely.In this toy case, the point estimate approach was getting the answer wrong by more than
42 orders of magnitude and was responsible for the appearance of a paradox.

The above is a straw man bait and switch. The Drake equation is not composed of nine variables in product form. And most importantly
all of the terms are not in the [0,0.2] or other fractional range. The whole point of the Drake equation is that it involves astronomically large
variables which remain huge regardless of their uncertainty that multiply the fractional variables. So Monte Carlo approaches to modeling
the Drake equation are not going to give totally different results than the maligned by the authors "point estimates".

The authors attack the f_l and f_i terms in the Drake equation and try to make it look like f_l is totally uncertain. Actually f_l is basically
equal to 1 on every Earth-like planet. Life is a chemical process. The question is how this chemistry develops into intelligent life and that
is the f_i uncertainty. I would claim that f_i and f_l are not Gaussian uncorrelated variables. f_l implies evolution and we see in the fossil
record similar life form patterns emerge over and over again to fill ecosystem niches. So evolution is not some random process that
generates a spectrum of meaningless organisms. It is a pattern constrained process that involves minimization of a Gibbs free energy.
So life forms exist on a fuzzy manifold in terms of morphology and are not some stochastic phase-space volume filling noise. This gives
rise the following question: on this fuzzy manifold is there a region for intelligent life? It looks like this probability is well above some
vanishing fraction. The critical element is to have the right environmental conditions such as those that involved the evolution of
primates on Earth. That is, a savanah and mixed forest type ecosystem with enough privation. The likely reason there were no highly
intelligent dinosaurs was because the availability of food was excessively high. There was no selection pressure for intelligence beyond
the common predator-prey levels we see today. So intelligent life is rare but not as rare as the authors try to argue.

What are your thoughts about Great Filter and Fermi Paradox?

Regular wrote:What are your thoughts about Great Filter and Fermi Paradox?

My posts above basically outline my thinking.   Long distance, faster than light travel is impossible.   This leaves SETI EM emissions as supposedly being
a worthwhile task.   I think it isn't.   I don't understand why there is a deep belief that any EM emissions from planets with technological species would
reach us without sinking into the sea of noise.    

1) All planets with atmospheres that can sustain life (i.e. thick enough) will have ionospheres.   All of them.   The local star that is sort of critical
for the existence of life makes sure of this.   So any surface EM emissions get reflected back to the surface and bounce around.   Over time
they thermalize and contribute to the IR emissions of the planet.   Some fraction escapes but that is not enough since:

2) None of the EM emissions from technological civilizations are laser-like coherent beams aimed precisely at us.   Even if they were any laser
beam diverges and thus the signal reaching the target weakens much like incoherent emissions as 1/r^2.

3) Astronomical distances are mind-numbing in their large scale.   So 1/r^2 is lethal to signals reaching us.  They will attenuate below the noise
level long before they reach us.    

In one of the above posts it was cited that the most Earth-like planets are at least 100 light years away.   The radius is then:

r = 299,792,458 m/s * 86400 s/day * 365 days/year * 100 years = 945,425,495,548,800,000 m

so the attenuation factor is 1/r^2 = 1.118781767763325963837397444371e-36

Technological civilizations emit EM in bands that are not unique and unnatural.   There are overlapping emissions by stars over the whole
technological emission spectrum.   Since there are vastly more stars than planets with technological civilizations and specifically closer to Earth
than any potential planet with aliens and the amplitude of emissions from these stars is vastly larger than from any aliens we are bloody
unlikely to discriminate any signal from aliens.    Even time domain Fourier analysis of incoming radiation will not help since we have nothing to
correlate any emission pattern with.  

SETI is basically an academic scam.   With any signal to noise ratio some tiny fraction of 1, even coherent patterns are not discernible since
there is enough random noise producing all sort of patterns.  And in fact the stars emit EM with all sorts of non-random characteristics.

One retort to my post above would be that if we aim our telescopes at specific stars then we can get much better signal to
noise. The problem is finding the alien planet with a technological civilization first. SETI does not know where such planets
are, thus they scan the sky. Which amounts to finding the needle in the haystack.

But even if we can measure emissions form "hot Jupiters" i.e. close orbit gas giants, we cannot measure emissions from
Earth like planets and rely on indirect evaluation of their existence. For example if the cross the star disk or their orbital
fluctuation effect on the star position.

Here is a pseudo-review of the subject of measuring exoplanet spectra:

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/35/12601.full.pdf

Emissions of EM from Earth are not dominated by humans. The natural emission form incoming solar radiation on the surface and
in the volume of the atmosphere dominate any signal. For example, when an exoplanet transits a stellar disk we can theoretically
measure absorption bands of gases in the rim of the planetary disk. But this signal is vastly stronger than any local emission of
EM from aliens living on the surface.

The aliens have exactly the same physics problem in finding us. So their trips in tiny flying saucers to probe human rectums are
just demented fantasies of humans. That is assuming they can reach our rear ends on a practical timescale. Traveling for millenia
to get to us is a tad too much for serious consideration.

kvs wrote:
You assume that warp is something tiny spacecraft like the joke "sightings" (ball lightning, blimps) can handle.

No way ball lightening and blimps can explain the bulk of sightings. Observed, "tiny spacecraft" needn't be capable of interstellar travel. It has long been thought they emanate from larger mother ships, and/or bases elsewhere in the solar system, in polar regions or under the sea. I don't think ET would want to send a bunch of craft from many LY away every time he wants to "buzz" Earth.

 

There has never been a single "sighting" of
one properly sized spacecraft that would need to stay in orbit.

There have been sightings of gigantic craft like one a mile or so long over the English Channel.

 As if aliens are immune to hard radiation so they cant travel in their Mickey Mouse
flying saucers small enough to land in someone's back yard.

I don't think reported ETs are naturally evolved like us but specially designed.

GarryB wrote:
Ahh come on... it is just maths... I remember one of the hoaxers showing how they did it... it is just a question of maths and a piece of rope and some sticks to flatten the crops down with... it is not hard at all…

As Friedman pointed out, there have been hoaxes in all fields. Only a tiny number of crop circles are known to have been hoaxed. There are at least two cases where an unusual object was seen making them.

Farmers don't sit watching their crops all night to make sure assholes from the city don't come out and flatten bits, so most of the time it is perfectly safe and easy.

It should also be easy to identify hoaxes since among other things there should be a trail of trampled grain leading to and from the art.

There are many cases for which no prosaic explanation was ever established even after several decades.
Often, the alternative explanations listed are impossible. Illusions or delusions don't leave landing traces or cause damage or injuries, nor can they be detected by radar. Many witnesses are reluctant to come forward or are otherwise very credible e.g. pilots, policemen, professors, businessmen even astronauts.

I agree that there are a non-negligible number of cases for which hoax or illusion etc. seems unlikely and some of the witnesses can be described as credible people, but proof by exclusion only works if you have actually excluded everything else (see below).

Given the great limitations of our knowledge of alien worlds, and what far advanced civilizations may be capable of, it's unwise to say on the basis of theoretical studies that ET can't be here. What really matters is actual evidence--

If you had actually read that study you'd have noticed that it literally has dozens of pages of appendix that is used as the evidential basis for the theoretical model. You, however, present zero evidence that their analysis is wrong. "Sightings" of "aliens" can be interpreted in a large number of ways, as I've pointed out, and understanding "aliens" as a form of "natural phenomenon" (i.e. actual, physical, intelligent organisms from another planet) carries all sorts of prior assumptions with it (e.g. usually naturalistic abiogenesis and Darwinism), which, if you're truly interested in taking an evidentialist approach, would first need to be demonstrated with evidence; the same goes for excluding alternative explanations.

Among pro biologists at least Darwinism, or evolution, has been firmly established for many decades.

Appeal to consensus and appeal to authority, which are both fallacies. Besides, the reason I posted the picture above is precisely to show that this isn't even true. Prof. Gerd Müller is one of the world's most prominent evolutionary biologists and that conference was organized by one of the most prominent scientific organizations of the world (Royal Society) and was full of the world's evolutionary biologists. On that slide he clearly affirms that major tenets of Neo-Darwinism ("Modern Synthesis") are not at all proven. That is why they are now trying to move to other theories like "extended synthesis" and "inceptive niche construction" etc...so clearly they haven't figured it out.
Of course they will publicly state that "the consensus" is that "Darwin was right", but if you dig deeper it always ends up the same, tired old circular argument ("There is no God", therefore "Darwin was right", therefore "There is no God"). This is because the science clearly doesn't support their position but they want to hold to that position for political, philosophical and spiritual reasons. Even Darwin himself, who, btw. thought that cells were simple blobs of "protoplasm" that bubbled up from the sea floor, had to admit that his theory had some problems, like his "abominable mystery" (sudden appearance of flowers in the fossil record); he thought the problem would be solved by further digging to find the transient forms, but 150 years later this still isn't the case and many more "sudden appearances" have been found. Furthermore, statistical analysis demonstrates that e.g. the fossil record for mammals is already pretty complete (they keep finding the same kind of fossils), which means the many "sudden appearances" among mammals, such as whales, will most likely not be explained by further fossil finds, which lays Darwin's assumption of gradualism to rest.
But in order to not get caught in this fallacious "my expert" vs. "your expert" paradigm, I'll just give you two simple examples to demonstrate why Darwinism can't be true:

1)
- as you may know, proteins are specially folded chains of amino acids
   - there are about 20 so-called proteinogenic amino acids that can be used, with each being coded for by 3 successive RNA bases (a "codon") in the transcribed mRNA
   - the average protein has about 150 such amino acids
   -> that means there are 20^150 possible combinations for just a single average-sized protein (far more than the number of atoms in the observable universe)
   - there are around 10^40 living beings on the planet right now (including microorganisms), which, according to Darwinism, should be mutating and evolving new proteins
   - the average rate of mutation is 1-10 mutations per genome per year, lets say 10 mutations per genome per year
   - let's give the system 1 billion years to mutate and "evolve"
   -> that means the maximum amount of combinations that can be tried by all organisms on the entire planet in 1 billion years is 10 * 10^40 * 10^9 = 10^50

This is more than 100 orders of magnitude lower than the total number of combinations for even just a single average-sized protein!

Now, you could say that you don't need to find a specific sequence in sequence-space but just one that works and gives the organism an edge in the population; the thing is that competent analyses about how rare such sequences in sequence-space are, give results of about 1 sequence per 10^80 sequences, which is still 30 orders of magnitude too low. This also demonstrates that it's clearly far too unlikely that several proteins would be "evolved" at the same time in the same organism, which is required for many mechanisms to work, as I'll demonstrate with my second example.

2)
Consider the genus Utricularia, which is the largest genus of meat-eating plant with >200 species.
- this kind of plant catches little animals under water by luring them to its traps with a sugary substance that is produced by special glands
- once the animal gets close to the glands it will touch protrusions of the trap, which is essentially a kind of bladder
- the mechanical force exerted on the protrusions will break the seal of the bladder entrance held by a very thin filament
- the bladder, which, as long as the seal holds, is under tension in a collapsed state due to special cells in its walls constantly pumping water from the inside to the outside, now "explosively" fills with water
- this strong current sucks the animal into the bladder and then the "door" closes
- other glands will now secrete enzymes into the bladder that kill and digest the animal
- this process is so efficient that the animal can be trapped, killed, digested and the trap reset in less than 1 hour; even little fish that don't fit entirely into the bladder have been observed to be "eaten" because of the strong suction and quick digestion

So, in order for this trap to work to the plant's benefit, you require a) the bladder b) the door c) the filament d) the protrusions e) the cells pumping water out of the bladder f) the cells secreting the sugary substance as a lure g) the cells secreting the digestive enzymes and h) the cells absorbing the nutrients. Those 8 components also need to be arranged in the right way, obviously.
The problem for Darwinism is this: save, perhaps, for the cells secreting the sugary substance (whose absence would still severely degrade efficiency), all the components are absolutely required for the trap to actually work and provide a survival benefit to the plant.

If even one component is missing the arrangement of cells won't provide any benefit but only waste the plant's energy.

Since wasting energy is not something that will be positively selected, you should expect all plants that have a "half-finished" trap to be negatively selected (selected out), not positively (and, of course, none of the >200 species have "half-finished" traps...they all have working traps of different sizes). So, since I've demonstrated in my first example that even a single average-sized protein is extremely unlikely to just evolve by random chance and since this trap requires a great multitude of proteins, how did it come about in the Darwinian framework?

This is, btw., what the atheistic professor of evolutionary biology in the picture I showed means by "phenotypic novelty" (new traits, like a trap) and "phenotypic complexity" (complex traits, like this complex trap).
These things cannot be explained by even the current iteration of Neo-Darwinism, so saying "Darwinism is established fact" is ridiculous...it is clearly wrong.

are there anomalous sightings or other evidence suggesting or indicating aliens have arrived? To any informed, objective mind the answer is yes.

Non-sequitur and implied ad-hominem (which is just another form of non-sequitur). "Anomalous sightings" don't automatically translate into actual aliens much less their arrival and declaring yourself "informed and objective" (implying that anyone dissenting is not) doesn't make it so, especially if your strategy of answering objections is committing fallacies.

[Demonic activity is] Far less credible than ET.

I don't think so. Consider this:
Throughout the ages, even going back to the ancient times, people have been encountering supernatural beings and witnessed their interaction with this world; these beings are not always physical but can certainly have a physical effect.
For example, the disciple Sulpicius Severus writes about the life of his teacher in the book from 397 AD "The Life of St. Martin of Tours" about a certain youth named Antonius, who became a monk near St. Martin's monastery: out of false humility, he became the victim of demonic deception; he fancied that he conversed with "angels" and in order to persuade others of his sanctity these "angels" agreed to give him a "shining robe" from out of Heaven as a sign of the "Power of God" that dwelt within the youth. One night about midnight there was a tremendous thudding of dancing feet and a murmuring as of many voices in the hermitage and Antonius' cell became ablaze with light. Then came silence and the deceived one emerged from his cell with the "heavenly" garment.
"A light was brought and all carefully inspected: the garment was exceedingly soft, with a surpassing luster and of a brilliant scarlet but it was impossible to tell the nature of the material. At the same time, under the most exact scrutiny of eyes and fingers, it seemed to be a garment and nothing else."
The following morning Antonius' spiritual father took him by the hand in order to lead him to Saint Martin to discover whether this was actually a trick of the devil. In fear, the deceived one refused to go, "and when he was being forced to go against his will between the hands of those who were dragging him, the garment disappeared."
The author of the account who either witnessed the incident himself or had it from eyewitnesses concludes that "The devil was unable to keep up his illusions or conceal their nature when they were to be submitted to St. Martin's eyes." and that "It was so fully within his power to see the devil that he recognized him under any form whether he kept to his own character or changed himself into any of the various shapes of spiritual wickedness - including the forms of pagan gods and the appearance of Christ himself with royal robes and Crown and developed in a bright red light."

Another example, this time from the book "The Life of St. Nilus of Surah" (the 15th century founder of Skete life in Russia), which even includes an abduction by the demon:
Sometime after the Saint's death there lived in his monastery a certain priest with his son. Once, when the boy was sent on some errand, "suddenly there came to him a strange man who seized him and carried him as if on the wind into an impenetrable forest, bringing him into a large room in his dwelling and placing him in the middle of this cabin in front of the window." When the priests and the monks prayed for Saint Nilus' help in finding the lost boy, the Saint "came to the boy's aid and stood before the room where the boy was standing and when he struck the window frame with his staff the building was shaken and all the unclean spirits fell to the earth."
The Saint told the demon to return the boy to the place from which he had taken him and then became invisible. Then, after some howling among the demons, "the same strange one seized the boy and brought him to the Skete like the wind and, placing him on a haystack, he became invisible." After being seen by the monks, "the boy told them everything that happened to him what he had seen and heard and from that time this boy became very humble as if he had been stupefied. The priest, out of terror, left the Skete with his son."

And another one, a similar demonic kidnapping in 19th century Russia:

A young man after his mother cursed him became the slave of a demon "grandfather" for 12 years and was capable of appearing invisibly among men in order to help the demon sow confusion in their midst.

This is attested to in the book "The Power of God and Man's Weakness" from 1908.

So you see that this UFO myth today, when it's not just lies or hoaxes or illusions or hallucinations etc., is nothing else than the devil and his demons simply using tried and tested techniques to lead people astray and spiritually (or even physically sometimes) damage them.
People today simply seem to prefer different terminology, like "aliens" and the demons, of course, know of the susceptibility of people to these sci-fi fantasies, given the scientistic, post-Christian world we live in.

Thus, as I've shown the implausibility of Darwinism and the plausibility of alternative explanations, even for the "inexplicable" aspects of "UFO / alien sightings", namely that it is either hoaxes or illusions or simply demonic activity, the fact that some evidence exists that some people saw something does not prove that it was aliens.

Of course ultimately the question becomes one of world views and their justification, since I suspect it will be hard to prove the consistency of a world view that allows for actual, intelligent alien civilizations, but I thought I'd not go straight to that topic this time to simply give some, perhaps, more interesting angles and to demonstrate why it does ultimately come down to what world view is correct.


Lastly, @kvs:
I don't really feel the impetus to defend that study since I don't agree with its basic assumptions (materialism and Darwinism) anyway, but I feel I should respond anyway, since I posted it.
Ironically it seems that you are actually the one commit the straw man: The quotation is just an example they give, not the actual values used for the model! The actual model uses estimates for the variables of the Drake equation derived from their extensive deliberations in their appendixes. Also, just out of curiosity, why is "N" not a product? It seems to me that it's the result of multiplication...not that it's really important but just curious what the exact objection is.
Furthermore, you say "life is a chemical process", which seems to assume naturalistic abiogenesis, which you haven't proven! See, e.g. this lecture by one of the world's leading synthetic organic chemists talking about why it's ridiculous to claim that naturalistic abiogenesis has been proven. So unless you've personally figured out how naturalistic abiogenesis works, your statement "Actually f_l is basically equal to 1 on every Earth-like planet." is just an ad-hoc assertion.

The aliens have exactly the same physics problem in finding us. So their trips in tiny flying saucers to probe human rectums are
just demented fantasies of humans.

they could be living in star systems a lot closer to, & made invisible to us, & bringing small craft on big mother ships. Their life spans could be Ks of years, so spending a few dozen years reaching us isn't an obstacle. What if they found a way to change the speed of light?

Tsavo Lion wrote:

The aliens have exactly the same physics problem in finding us. So their trips in tiny flying saucers to probe human rectums are
just demented fantasies of humans.

they could be living in star systems a lot closer to, & made invisible to us, & bringing small craft on big mother ships. Their life spans could be Ks of years, so spending a few dozen years reaching us isn't an obstacle. What if they found a way to change the speed of light?

So they are not life but spirits.    You believe in arbitrary variation in parameters like life span because you don't know any better.   In reality
any life is going to be:

1) Carbon based and with DNA-type genetics

2) Thus it will exhibit similar limitations to lifespan related to the breakdown of coherence in the system.   There are not
going be any 1000s of years lifespan carbon and DNA based lifeforms outside of trees. Even cold blooded reptiles
can't live for 1000s of years.

As for your claim that the mother ship is out of sight, that still leaves them the problem of traveling to Earth with small
poorly protected ships.  

All you believers have zero evidence to back up your beliefs.   At least some of us can ask the right sorts of physics questions
which none of you believers and your UFO cult can ever answer.

Begome wrote:Besides, the reason I posted the picture above is precisely to show that this isn't even true. Prof. Gerd Müller is one of the world's most prominent evolutionary biologists

Bottom line: evolution stands. OK so maybe there are some things we still don't understand about evolution. But let's not throw in the towel and revert to the dark age belief in an unseen "god" which said "presto" and everything, including man, appeared out of thin air like magic.

Those 8 components also need to be arranged in the right way, obviously…..
[b]If even one component is missing the arrangement of cells won't provide any benefit but only waste the plant's energy

Creationists have made a similar argument with regard to the human eye. Much simpler eyes like those of insects are adequate for survival, however. The Venus fly trap is simpler than the aquatic predator, yet survives. It is possible for an organism to survive with a much simpler, less efficient version, which gradually evolves greater complexity.

... you should expect all plants that have a "half-finished" trap to be negatively selected (selected out), not positively (and, of course, none of the >200 species have "half-finished" traps..

"Half finished" or simpler traps presumably existed in the past but none survive because of competition from the more derived form.

"Anomalous sightings" don't automatically translate into actual aliens

There have been a multitude of reports of humanoid creatures associated with unfamiliar flying craft. If that weren't sufficiently indicative of origins, many contacts/abductees have been told they're ET.

The author of the account who either witnessed the incident himself or had it from eyewitnesses concludes that "The devil was unable to keep up his illusions or conceal their nature when they were to be submitted to St. Martin's eyes." and that "It was so fully within his power to see the devil that he recognized him under any form whether he kept to his own character or changed himself into any of the various shapes of spiritual wickedness - including the forms of pagan gods and the appearance of Christ himself with royal robes and Crown and developed in a bright red light."

And that's more credible or rational than the idea of visiting ETs? As scholars like Ehrman note, the NT is full of inventions intended to win converts not accurately describe events and this is essentially the same.

So you see that this UFO myth today, when it's not just lies or hoaxes or illusions or hallucinations etc., is nothing else than the devil and his demons….

Don't you realize in some cases like Andreasson the phenomenon actually seemed to back christianity? I think the truth is the other way around but you should realize that even among (many) UFO skeptics, what you've posted here destroys your credibility. If you think the world is "post Christian" now just wait another 50 years…. your intelligence is wasted on a lost cause.

kvs wrote:...any life is going to be:

1) Carbon based and with DNA-type genetics

Unless advanced AI can be called life.

2) Thus it will exhibit similar limitations to lifespan related to the breakdown of coherence in the system.   There are not
going be any 1000s of years lifespan carbon and DNA based lifeforms outside of trees.   Even cold blooded reptiles
can't live for 1000s of years.

But genetically engineered life or AI might.

As for your claim that the mother ship is out of sight, that still leaves them the problem of traveling to Earth with small
poorly protected ships.  

They probably need much less protection than fragile humans adapted to an ecosphere. Or a mother ship can be very stealthy, absorbent to light and radar.

All you believers have zero evidence to back up your beliefs.   At least some of us can ask the right sorts of physics questions
which none of you believers and your UFO cult can ever answer.

UFOlogy is based on a plethora of evidence and not just testimony. As for physics as I've written we shouldn't assume our present understanding is the last word.

Bottom line: evolution stands.

"Evolution stands" does not follow from that image. If the theory can't account for phenotypic novelty, which the professor admits, then it can't account for the evolution of simple life into complex life.

OK so maybe there are some things we still don't understand about evolution. But let's not throw in the towel and revert to the dark age belief in an unseen "god" which said "presto" and everything, including man, appeared out of thin air like magic.

How simple life becomes complex life is what scientists "don't yet understand about evolution", which means they have no scientific reason to assert it as true. There are plenty of ideological "reasons", however, just like your propaganda about "dark ages"...if anything, we are now living in a "dark age" where people don't even understand basic philosophy anymore. How, in your non-theistic world view, do you justify things like knowledge, morality or even truth itself?

And I didn't say we should "throw in the towel"; it is, in fact, scientific research itself that has made Darwin look more and more stupid so I have no problem whatsoever to continue with it; but unjustified theories, like Darwinian Evolution, need to be discarded when they are disproved.
As to "everything appearing out of thin air like magic": that's not even how Young Earth Creationists see it. There are many theories surrounding how to properly interpret Genesis, some of which I've described in another thread:
First, even the Young Earth Creationists are constantly bickering among themselves how old the Earth is supposed to be, which is due to the fact that the Bible doesn't state the age of the Earth anywhere...the genealogies cannot be interpreted to be without implicit gaps for various reasons.
Second, alone the fact that the "י֥וֹם" (yo-wm) in the original text (Ancient Hebrew original of Genesis 1) is not consistently translated as "day" in other parts of the Bible (e.g. it's used to signify large periods of time of arbitrary length) makes it obvious that "yo-wm" doesn't necessarily have to be understood as a 24 hour day and thus it isn't possible to know how old the Earth is or how long the creation period really lasted in our current understanding of how space and time work. The same goes for the Hebrew words for "morning" and "evening", which can also mean "beginning" and "end"...this is because Ancient Hebrew is a very limited language that only has around 7000 words, so most words have many different meanings. And even if you were to insist on a 24-h interpretation, there are ways to make that work...read e.g. comments by physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder, who points out that time, as viewed in the context of the theory of Relativity, changes with respect to the rate at which it passes; since space and time are linked, a stretching of space also means a stretching of time. If the Standard Cosmological model is correct then the universe expanded rapidly and is still expanding, so space stretched a lot and so did time. If one were to view the passage of time at a reference point in space-time 1 sec after the Big Bang (from that reference frame), then the time that passed from "then" to "now" would be exactly 6 times 24 hours (the 6 "days" of creation)...other views, like the coherentist view, are presented e.g. here. I'm not endorsing any of those views since ultimately they are simply to satisfy a scientistic obsession created by the High Priests of the secular post-modern world; the official position of the Orthodox Church is that we don't know if creation can be modelled correctly using science (since it obviously involves the super-natural, which is inaccessible to science) and thus all such theories, including the Young Earth Creationist view, are, at best, "theologumina" (theological opinions) and will never be dogma.

Creationists have made a similar argument with regard to the human eye. Much simpler eyes like those of insects are adequate for survival, however. The Venus fly trap is simpler than the aquatic predator, yet survives. It is possible for an organism to survive with a much simpler, less efficient version, which gradually evolves greater complexity.

"Half finished" or simpler traps presumably existed in the past but none survive because of competition from the more derived form.

You don't get it. The point was that the trap simply won't work if you start making it simpler (removing parts...making it "half-finished"). Why should a non-working trap be selected for ("stick around") to "keep evolving"? The useless bundle of cells would simply be a waste of the plant's available nutrients and thus that plant, which can be thought of as having a sort of hereditary tumor, would be eliminated by natural selection, which is exactly what happens all the time in nature, which is why none of those species have non-working traps.
If an individual plant acquires a mutation that makes the trap stop working, that faulty genetic material won't "stick around" generation after generation to continue to "evolve a better trap", it will be selected out of the population and be gone forever!
Also, there is no proof anywhere of a "simpler trap" in one of that genus' ancestors and asserting so without evidence is simply wishful thinking and a "just-so story", which Darwinists constantly tell people while pretending to be oh-so-scientific and evidence-based.

There have been a multitude of reports of humanoid creatures associated with unfamiliar flying craft. If that weren't sufficiently indicative of origins, many contacts/abductees have been told they're ET.

So? I already gave you examples of demons appearing in humanoid form in my last post...why wouldn't they tell the victim that they are ET? If they told him they are demons he might start believing in God again, which is the last thing they want.

The greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince the world he doesn't exist.

And that's more credible or rational than the idea of visiting ETs? As scholars like Ehrman note, the NT is full of inventions intended to win converts not accurately describe events and this is essentially the same.

Yes it is. Bart Ehrman makes money by telling gullible little atheists that there's nothing to worry about viz. the Bible; he is an absolute joke. And even liberal scholars admit that a) Jesus Christ was a real historical person, b) that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate and c) that his grave was found empty after three days...the only disagreement is around why his grave was empty (they usually claim his followers robbed it without presenting evidence for that). Why would the apostles and his other followers, many of whom were wealthy and had a comfortable life, give all that up and accept being persecuted and tortured by the state (and eventually killed), with that activity flaring up after Jesus' death, if they didn't see him resurrect? It's completely implausible that they would do that unless they witnessed this and many other miracles.
If you'd like to actually make an argument instead of committing more appeal-to-authority fallacies, I'm happy to refute your specific claims, but simply saying "Person X says the Bible is full of inventions" is the opposite of logical argumentation.

Don't you realize in some cases like Andreasson the phenomenon actually seemed to back christianity? I think the truth is the other way around but you should realize that even among (many) UFO skeptics, what you've posted here destroys your credibility. If you think the world is "post Christian" now just wait another 50 years…. your intelligence is wasted on a lost cause.

Why should I care what some sceptic who hasn't provided any arguments against me thinks of my credibility? This is now the second time you use ad-hominem btw.. Do you even know what logical fallacies are?
And by "world" I meant the western world; the East is re-Christianizing fast and Christianity is still the world's biggest religion. In 50 years, since Russia is building 3 churches per day on average, Russia will, God willing, be fully re-Christianized and the center of civilization, while the West will be a smoking pile of rubble with gullible, atheistic and pagan trolls running around raving about seeing UFOs and aliens...that is, when they're not getting raped or murdered by Muslims, who will probably dominate those lands by then.

Since we have drifted into a discussion on evolution.   It is rather clear by now that genetics are not random noise.   This actually makes sense since
selection pressure would select for genes that control evolution.   If you can respond to an environmental change faster, you win.   Waiting for random
mutations to do the job is very inefficient.   And most developed DNA out there has rather sophisticated and effective error correction.   So people
can live in high radiation backgrounds like Iran without all dying from cancer or growing tumours like mushrooms after the rain.  

I can't find the reference, but there was a lab test where bacterial strains were subjected to environmental stresses to evaluate selection pressure.
All of the cases indicated guided evolution and not random mutation plus dieoff "evolution".   Even single celled organisms are evolved on Earth after
having been around for billions of years.   We no longer have the earliest life types that existed when organic chemistry transitioned into life.

For example, the bacteria in your sink act like independent entities at low concentrations, but form organized colonies when they multiply enough.
These colonies are not trivial masses of bacteria, but organized structures with different groups of bacteria having different tasks.   These are
clearly evolved life forms.  

But selection pressure is real and proven by the fossil record.   We have layers of lifeforms that resemble each other in form and function
spanning hundreds of millions of years.   Mammal dolphins were predated by similar life forms several times since multicellular life developed
on Earth.   This makes sense since selection is acting to push organisms to conform to their environments.   In the discussion of Earth-like
planets, there would be similar environmental regimes to those on Earth.  Thus selection pressure would come up with similar solutions
as on Earth.   There are not going to be any Kryptonians with super powers based on the colour of the local star.

Well I agree that genetics is not just random noise...there is clearly design involved.

The idea you voice (organisms guiding their own evolution) is increasingly popular with some biologists, and also compatible with some forms of Christian understanding (theistic evolution or progressive special creation) but the crux of the matter is, of course, the mechanism. The problem with a purely naturalistic mechanism based on e.g. some "guidance gene" is that it requires there to be a replicator already in place. AFAIK the simplest cell "created" (i.e. stripped down from existing bacteria) so far still had several hundreds of genes just to keep basic metabolism going. Furthermore, a key "machine" for DNA or RNA based life is the ribosome, which is way larger than your average protein and includes not just amino acids but also RNA itself...how did that come about? As I pointed out in a previous post above, even an average sized protein has a staggering amount of possible combinations and this thing is much bigger than that and I also referred to James Tour's talk, which elucidates some other staggering complexities concerning even extremely simple cells. So the "guide" seems to have to be outside of biological mechanisms.

One interesting approach is this article on what the authors term "Quantum-Idealism" (only available in German, though)...basically it's a rather well-researched (from what I can tell) effort by two scientists to propose a model of the "universe" or, perhaps better, "basic reality" as being a 2D timeless block-universe as a quantum-informational plane from which this universe (and possibly the spiritual realm) arise as holograms after decoherence events. They tie this in with simulation theory and allow (but don't push) the interpretation that either this basic reality is or contains God, whose mind simulates what we perceive as our universe somehow. I mostly skimmed over it, though, and it's a rather long essay so I can't get into the details, but I remembered it now because they refer to papers like this to say that "evolution" doesn't happen randomly but instead through quantum calculations pertaining to the entangled DNA, where beneficial (for survival) mutations have a bigger "weight" factor associated with them than detrimental ones, because they propagate in more branches of the wave function.
They also say they "postulate the ontological status of an evolutionary fitness landscape as a part of the Hilbert space, because both are separate parts of alternative possibilities"; since in this scheme the universal wave function is assumed to be "mental" (e.g. in the mind of God), the process is purpose-oriented; so basically God wants some life-form's lineage to develop in a certain way and thus it "just so happens" to get the right mutations over time; this would be counterbalanced by the general order in the universe, whose perturbation can carry risks, so these "miracles" wouldn't happen all the time, at least not on a large scale. This view would also explain why the universe is so incredibly fine-tuned for life, how it all started and how the first life came about (as well as, if tied to proper theology, what knowledge and truth is and it provides a proper basis for morality).

I'm not saying I share the view presented in that article and I seem to remember in their section on some philosophical aspects they had some issues but it's interesting nevertheless...my position is that I believe in God and His Word and Spirit as the One God (monarchically trinitarian Orthodox Christianity) and that God created the universe, Earth and life. Whether that process and the "basic reality" can ever be properly modelled scientifically or not is not something that concerns me much anymore.

GarryB wrote:Maybe the secret is actually time travel... go back in time to just a few million years after the big bang and go to any point in current space you want, and then come back forward in time and the expansion of the space time will take you to that far away galaxy that you wanted to visit...

Even though the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was satirical, it had a really great idea for a space propulsion system: the quantum improbability drive.
If what we perceive as space(-time) is an emergent quantum mechanical feature, it is possible that volume does not mean anything. In effect, the
universe has the topology of a point. Then travel from any point to another point in the universe is the same and "instantaneous". This is not
as ridiculous as it may sound.

Quantum entanglement is non-local in both space and time:

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26790)

https://scitechdaily.com/quantum-entanglement-of-independent-particles-without-any-contact-ever/

There was eye opening research on quantum entanglement in time-independent systems that gave rise to evolution of the system. So we had
effective motion in time without any time flow. I can't find the reference right now.

There is a lot of hand waving speculation about what is going on since people really do not know. But reality may be more alien than we can even
try to fathom. It may be possible to tap into this underlying non-local essence, but it may be the same problem as warping space-time. Something
only cosmic forces can do and no super advanced alien civilization can ever hope to achieve.

Begome wrote:
I already gave you examples of demons appearing in humanoid form in my last post..

"Demons" arriving in technological craft?

Yes it is. Bart Ehrman makes money by telling gullible little atheists that there's nothing to worry about viz. the Bible; he is an absolute joke.

If he's an "absolute joke" so is the bulk of recent scholarship.

And even liberal scholars admit that a) Jesus Christ was a real historical person, b) that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate

True.

c) that his grave was found empty after three days..

Dead wrong. At first Ehrman doubted Crossan's view but "that was before I researched the matter." There was no "grave." That was just another invention. Holy Joe #1 ended up as dog food.

Why would the apostles and his other followers, many of whom were wealthy and had a comfortable life,

Na, the original apostles were just illiterate peasants or fishermen.

In 50 years, since Russia is building 3 churches per day on average, Russia will, God willing, be fully re-Christianized and the center of civilization, while the West will be a smoking pile of rubble with gullible, atheistic and pagan trolls running around raving about seeing UFOs and aliens...that is, when they're not getting raped or murdered by Muslims, who will probably dominate those lands by then.

So you think there are no UFO reports from Russia? It won't be the world leader; even under Putin it's weaker vis a vis the west than the USSR.

Begome wrote:
This view would also explain why the universe is so incredibly fine-tuned for life

See The Fallacy of Fine Tuning.

...my position is that I believe in God and His Word and Spirit as the One God (monarchically trinitarian Orthodox Christianity) and that God created the universe, Earth and life. Whether that process and the "basic reality" can ever be properly modelled scientifically or not is not something that concerns me much anymore.

"Demons" arriving in technological craft?

Just read the Bible dude...demons and angels can obviously take different physical forms and even appear to use technology, such as different "machines", like large flaming wheels or carriages etc as attested to in the Bible, which obviously describes interactions with humans on a far more primitive technological level...why wouldn't demons today use the appearance of some weird high-tech-looking thing to mislead gullible atheists or even Christians struggling with their faith (there have been documented cases of this)? Obviously those "machines" would not be entirely/exactly physical, which explains why so many UFO reports characterize those things as moving in a way that seems to defy physics.

If he's an "absolute joke" so is the bulk of recent scholarship.

The bulk of Western, liberal scholarship perhaps, but those people don't even have the semblance of a coherent world view, so why would I care about their opinion? And this is just another fallacy attempt on your part...appeal to consensus.

Dead wrong. At first Ehrman doubted Crossan's view but "that was before I researched the matter." There was no "grave." That was just another invention. Holy Joe #1 ended up as dog food.

There is clear historical evidence for Jesus' grave and it being empty after 3 days, as it says in the Bible, which is also a historical document. As I already told you: "Person X says Y" is not a valid argument; if you want to argue against historical facts you need to up your game.

Na, the original apostles were just illiterate peasants or fishermen.

More ad-hoc assertions. The Bible attests that some of them were wealthy. If you're not going to bother to actually bring forth evidence (despite whining about the importance of evidence) then I won't bother to reply in more elaborate ways since it'll just waste my time.

So you think there are no UFO reports from Russia? It won't be the world leader; even under Putin it's weaker vis a vis the west than the USSR.

Non-sequitur...nothing I said leads to the conclusion that "there are no UFO reports from Russia". And the USSR was 30 years ago; you were talking about 50 years into the future, which will be 80 years after the USSR; thus, your comparison is meaningless as the entire world will be very different by then, not just the West.

See The Fallacy of Fine Tuning.

Ridiculous...read it and weep; this guy is a physicist working at CERN btw, not that it matters...this Fallacy of Fine-Tuning "argument" is just another example of the increasing desperation among atheists these days. The argument itself rests on a non-sequitur (false equivocation) fallacy, as Strauss points out in the article I linked; how ironic.

And judging by your final two smileys after the last quote there I suppose you never actually thought about the limitations of science and inductive logic. Go read about the problem of induction.

GarryB wrote:

This view would also explain why the universe is so incredibly fine-tuned for life

Fine tuned after 14 billion years.

Natural selection is as much about luck as anything else... the strong and the smart can be eliminated from the gene pool just as easily as the small and weak, so progress is slow.

The enormous variety of life on earth just shows the variability of carbon based life forms and there could be plenty of others.

In fact references to heaven and existence after death might actually refer to an energy based existence for life forms after they bodies die... we might not understand the afterlife in the same way a caterpillar does not understand flight or being a butterfly or moth.

For all we know the afterlife might just be another dimension life forms from this dimension migrate to after they pass from here.

I am more partial to quantum entanglement echoes. After life forms die, there is no step function transition to nothing. No entity in
the universe is untied to the rest of it. So the entanglement persist and dissipates on some time scale. Scientists are supposed to
laugh at things like ghosts. But then they should laughing at themselves since "there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are
dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio".