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NotActuallyALonghorn

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  1. See the bolded. We have no way of knowing how long our civilization might last, nor do we have any way of knowing how long any other theoretical civilization might last. To claim that our civilization has only existed for an insignificant amount of time, and therefore any other civilization in the universe has also existed for a comparatively insignificant amount of time and they wouldn't be likely to overlap has no basis in logic or science. It is just blowing smoke up one's own ass.
  2. We have no idea of knowing how long an intelligent civilization will last. We joke about Idiocracy becoming reality, and for good reason, but the fact is that in the history of civilizations on Earth, every time one has died out, it's technology and breadth of knowledge did not die out with it, even if it was sometimes set back a bit. All we can say that there is a probability of greater than zero that civilizations will last at least as long as ours (assuming we then define civilization as the entirety of the dominance of one species at any given place). If civilizations last indefinitely, then the time scales actually work to the benefit of the chance of there being extraterrestrial contact on earth.
  3. If the claim that we should see evidence of alien visitation on earth was extraordinary, then there wouldn't have been something many prominent scientists proposing solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Because most of them accept that life should be abundant enough that we should see evidence of it. If you accept the premise of the Fermi Paradox, then Occam's Razor suggests that the simplistic solution is that life has visited Earth and we simply haven't found satisfactory evidence for it. Suggesting that Unidentified Aerial/Anomolous Phenomena might be evidence of such a visitation is not extraordinary unless you claim to have solved the Drake Equation and have calculated that such an event is an improbability, something that puts you into conflict with a significant number of leading scientists. So that leaves us with the task of investigating such phenomena to try and explain it. The majority of such cases can be explained fairly easily. There is a small, but not insignificant, number of cases, however, that defy explanation. One of the interesting things that came out of Project Blue Book, was that the better the quality of data they had for a sighting, i.e., trained military observers, radar data, photographs, etc., the less likely they were to be able to find an explanation for it. Given that a significant number of scientists believe that life should be common enough enough in the universe that we have detected it elsewhere if not seen evidence of it on earth, it is not unreasonable or extraordinary to theorize that some of these unexplained phenomena may in fact be the evidence of said life. To use your fish example, we should not look at a murky pond, stick a finger in the water at the edge, swirl it around, and then proclaim that there aren't any fish, when we know that science says there should be. If someone then comes along with a sonar fish finder and shows little shapes moving around under the water, we shouldn't then claim that the shapes must have some other sort of explanation and refuse to consider that there could be fish unless sonar boy sticks his finger in the water and then pulls it out with a fish latched onto the end.
  4. I didn't realize we have so many government documents detailing them covering up evidence of sasquatch and actively making the topic a subject of ridicule. Because while we may not have the kind of evidence you want for UFO's or UAP, there is quite a lot of evidence of the government actively covering up the subject and working to discredit those who have studied it.
  5. Extraordinary claims brah. Just don't ask them for evidence that the claim is actually Extraordinary. Because to prove that the claim is actually extraordinary they would have to do a bunch of math with a tone of unknown variables and extrapolate that out from a sample size of one.
  6. We have already theorized ways in which one could traverse space time faster than the speed of light from an outside perspective, and we have done the math to prove that it is possible, but requires an amount of energy beyond our current capability. So to say that the laws of physics refutes the possibility of other civilizations developing ways to do so is simply not true.
  7. Why are you thinking on a timescale of millions of years when there are star systems billions of years older than ours? You are also making the underlying assumption that you have an idea of what technology will look like millions or billions of years from now. That's long enough for multiple intelligent species to go extinct and new ones to take their place.
  8. I mean, on one hand, we have skeptics saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (which isn't exactly scientific; some of the most extraordinary claims of science merely have an abundance of ordinary evidence), and then on the other hand citing the Firmi Paradox. But those things are kind of mutually exclusive. The Firmi Paradox says that life should be common enough, and so many star systems old enough, that there should be an abundance of life advanced enough to traverse our solar system. We should be seeing evidence of it. So why turn around and say that those claiming evidence of it are making extraordinary claims? Those claims should be quite ordinary.
  9. Not just released, but leaked and then later acknowledged to be real. But I'm sure someone will be along shortly to cherry pick the data and say that our pilots can't read the SA radar that is simple enough for a third grader to read...
  10. There's a big difference between saying something exists and that statistically it probably exists. He definitely walked his answer back a bit.
  11. Child sex trafficking president trump isn't interested in hearing from his victims, but neither were any of the other previous presidents who could have done something. It's pretty obvious that the current administration is as rotten as it gets, but why would you selectively take out one statement that condemns the current administration to make it seem like the previous ones are less culpable in the cover up? Burn them all down. Y'all keep saying that the difference between the R's and the D's is that the D's are willing to let everything air out. And then you go on to emphasize how the R's aren't interested in hearing from the victims when the D's clearly aren't as well. They are all completely rotten and need to go.
  12. I feel like this post is an attack and discredit to our very own beloved @CleverNickname .
  13. The sewing machine never completely replaced what a seamstress or tailor could do. It merely made a product that was inferior, but good enough. Even almost two hundred years later, a sewing machine cannot match the strength and adaptability of a backsewn seam, but it can make a seam that is significantly less durable significantly faster. It cannot sew a buttonhole as elegantly or as durable as a quality hand finished buttonhole. It's actually a pretty decent metaphor, but not for the reason the author intended. And the other thing it kind of ignores is who exactly was running those machines. The seamstresses and tailors who knew how to cut the clothes didn't loose out on their jobs, their productivity merely increased by orders of magnitude. Yes, that meant extra money going into the pockets of the folks running the operation, but it did not run them out of a job.
  14. You celebrated the demise of your first child?
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