Complex Numbers

Revisited: "The Trouble with Quibbles"

As usual for Sunday entries these days, I selected an older entry at random to take a second look at. This time, I didn't land all that far in the past, just over a year (one year being my minimum for these exercises), and found this: "The Trouble with Quibbles" 

Being relatively recent, the linked article,   from Vox, is still up, and I didn't see any indication that it's been revised since then.

I will therefore address, primarily, my own thoughts at the time.

Quibble 1: "Intelligent." I've railed on this before, but, to summarize: What they really mean is "technology-using."

I have, in fact, bitched about this sort of thing on numerous occasions, and for reasons I go over in that entry. But, even apart from the tiresome jokes about humans not being intelligent, we know of other intelligent life on Earth: octopodes, dolphins, cats, crows, etc. It took entirely too long, from the perspective of our time as a species, to recognize these intelligences. Our communication with them is limited in scope; those species are related to us, so you'd think there would be enough common ground to establish a dialogue, but no. How much worse might it be to communicate with someone from an entirely different genetic lineage?

Of course, there's always the most basic form of communication: violence. I know it's fashionable to think that any culture advanced enough to get to the stars will have put all that behind them, but I'm skeptical. We certainly haven't. Humans fear the Other, and there's probably sound evolutionary reasons for that, but nothing would be more Other than space aliens. To them, we're the space aliens.

We're looking for signs that some extraterrestrial species has developed communication or other technology whose effects we can detect. This technology would indicate what we call intelligence, but not all intelligence develops technology. One might even successfully argue that it's kinda dumb to invent technology.

Quibble 2: UAP may be more or less silly than UFO, but I believe it to be a better fit.

UAP may have less baggage than UFO, but we have a history of taking new, neutral terms and giving them the same encrustations of connotation that we give the old terms. Like how "retarded" started out as a value-neutral term to describe humans of lower intelligence (see above), to replace words like idiot, cretin, and moron, which had turned into insults. Then "retarded" turned into an insult, and some say we shouldn't be using the term at all. Well, that's special.

Point is, I give UAP (unidentified anomalous (originally aerial) phenomena) about five more years before they have to come up with something new because UAP studies have taken a turn for the edge of the world.

And I don't doubt that there's something to study. Sure, there are hoaxes; there are always hoaxes, like with Bigfoot, but they're probably not all hoaxes. I just don't jump straight to the conclusion that if there's a sighting of something that can't be immediately identified, it must therefore be aliens. That's just retarded.

Quibble 5: What's the first thing we did when we started exploring space? Sent robots, not people. No reason to assume hypothetical aliens wouldn't do the same.

This can probably be nitpicked because some of our early ventures into space were crewed: first person in space, first human on the moon, etc. Still, Sputnik (not really a robot but not living, either) preceded Gagarin, and lunar probes preceded Tranquillity Base, and since then pretty much everything outside of Low Earth Orbit has been a robot.

Well, that's all I'm going to expand on today. My thoughts haven't changed much in the 14 months since that entry, and we have found no extraterrestrial life, intelligent or otherwise, during that time, so the search continues.