Good morning John. Aliens. I love aliens.
There’s lots of reasons to, especially in fiction. Adventure
and danger and the unknown, and self reflection, and mystery,
and revelation. But the thing I’m talking about here is real
aliens, which is a very different thing. And I should
start out by saying that I think that life elsewhere in
the universe is a physical inevitability. Even if the galaxy
were not inconceivably huge, which it is, the chemical
system that is life obeys the laws of kinetics and
thermodynamics and while it is possibly the coolest,
most interesting thing, it’s not magical. Intelligent
life does not seem inevitable in the same way. It just seems
extraordinarily likely. In statistics there’s something
called the mediocrity principle. Basically if you have a sample
size of 1, chances are that that is from the most common data set.
And to some extent we have pulled one solar system out
of the hat and it has intelligent life on it. It has several species
of intelligent life. And there are some reasons to think that
like our version of intelligent life as it exists right now on this
planet is not super common, but zero reasons to think it’s unique.
But that’s all preface. The thing I want to talk about is why
do people like me, who have an understanding of how
discovery works, how science works, seem to never think that
extremely unusual things are caused by aliens.
And that’s relevant right now because there are these unclassified
videos and there’s a congressional report coming out about them,
and we do not know what they are. But they are going to be,
and have been many times, things that we really do not understand.
This has happened a lot in the history of our species and it’s often
the first step on the path to discovery. We don’t know exactly what’s
going on, we make guesses, we test them, that’s how we
end up knowing more things, and being able to do more things.
That’s how we ended up with COVID vaccines and smart phones
and in depth knowledge of the big bang. But also when
you are inside this world, you know that there are a lot of big
mysteries right now that are totally unexplained. We don’t
know what dark matter is, but it is most of the stuff.
But also we don’t know why anything exists at all.
Like why there’s matter in the universe? That’s a mystery.
We don’t know how life started on Earth. Also we
don’t know why we sleep. We don’t know why we yawn.
But here’s the thing, almost every mystery could be answered
with the word “aliens.” And that makes it a certain kind
of bad explanation. We want to understand things that we don’t
understand, that’s totally normal. And one way to do that is
to find an explanation that will explain everything.
There’s a fairly new version of this, which is that our
universe is a simulation. And whenever you see something
that doesn’t make sense, that’s a glitch in the simulation.
To me, there are two big problems with explanations that can explain
everything. First, every time we’ve ever had something go
from mystery to not a mystery anymore, it has not been
explained by something that could explain everything.
We’ve got some biggies that have explained a lot, like
natural selection and quantum mechanics,
but they haven’t explained everything. For example,
those two things don’t do a great job of explaining each other.
And the second thing, this is really important. I don’t think
it’s not aliens. I think we don’t know what it is.
It’s really important to be able to say that we don’t
know what something is without trying to immediately
explain it. Whenever we do that, whenever we encounter
something that’s completely unexplained and we immediately
try to explain it with some idea from our heads,
it’s not based on data and observation and critical thinking,
it’s based on our biases and our confusion and on
defaulting to something that could explain anything.
Things to know about these unidentified aerial phenomena:
they are moving against the wind, they are detected by
multiple sensors including human eyes. They are moving
in ways that known aircraft do not move.
Are they aircraft? They might be. They might not be.
The wrong thing to do is to dismiss these things as a joke
just because everybody’s saying aliens. In science,
and in life, you have to follow the interesting and this
stuff’s really interesting. It’s weird. And honestly
I’m a little worried that the legitimate interestingness
of this gets overwhelmed by the conspiracy theories
and the just wild flagrant guessing about sexy
things that could explain lots of other things.
But most importantly, preferring a conclusion is the
exact thing that scientists are taught to avoid.
Investigating potential explanations? Absolutely.
Figuring out new ways to gather more data? 100%.
But focusing on explanations that could kind of explain
anything have so far not helped us explain anything.
John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.