Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
Makes me wonder what the psychology and politics of anti-extraterrestrial beliefs and rules are. It&#x27;s very plausible other beings exist, but what necessary axioms disintegrate if a society comes to believe in aliens, and why is it important to isolate and shame people who suspect it?<p>I can see how our dominant moral systems are rooted in the idea of human primacy and a single One supreme being. Recognition that we can appeal to super beings to intervene on our behalf could arrest our evolutionary intellectual development by causing our civilizations to optimize for pleasing said beings,  instead of organizing ourselves to elevate human minds that enable a more natural and free evolution for our species. There may be some evolutionary rule about life where a species only evolves along degrees of freedom and our  development becomes arrested when we optimize for the constraint of appealing to the discretion of super beings, sort of like domesticated animals vs. wild ones.<p>To adapt to co-existing with a technologically advanced species, you would need a conceptual or moral degree of freedom and agency beyond them, which made peaceful and free co-existence possible, and provided some basis for principled equality of life. (an agreement on a One god whose will has been revealed them as well would go a long way, and as an idea, could secure our ability to evolve independently of our advanced co-habitants. This may be the rational evolutionary case for monotheism, as a necessary condition for moral agency across significant differences.) The most obvious consequence of introducing a new super being species would be how we would organize ourselves and relate to each other around them, and not just find increasingly subtle ways to murder each other to secure their favoured status.<p>If humans forfeited our moral agency by optimizing for becoming subjects of these super beings, we would be putting responsibility on the super beings to govern us, and arrest our own evolutionary development.<p>Maybe the anti-extraterrestrial people have a deeper understanding of this. Or they just recognize, maybe the arrival of such a species would irreconcilably polarize us all between those who could sustain their own moral agency in the face of a superior power, and those who give it up to optimize for material animal ingroup security, and the ensuing war would wipe us all out - or the aliens would do it for us. Maybe it will take another couple hundred years for them to really arrive as we&#x27;re not quite fully baked from an evolutionary perspective, and we need to be on average more intelligent than we rather obviously are now.<p>I&#x27;m sure they laugh at our nuclear energy use and social media as being the civilizational equivalent to trepanation  though. I wonder what their jokes are like.