Extraterrestrial
The Crippling Power of the Human Mind…
Today I read an interesting article that elicited a healthy laugh from yours truly. It seems that an Irvine, CA inventor came up with a led adorned, radio controlled, reinforced foam flying toy that had local residents crying “Alien Abduction”:
Zingali, 58, was searching for help with his radio-controlled plane. Instead he found hand-drawn plans by a poster named Stringfly for something called a saucer.
“I was told – by engineers – it wouldn’t fly,” says Zingali, a former facilities specialist who recently moved to Phoenix. “There was no airfoil, no lift, no dihedral.”
He built one anyway. It flew, but couldn’t handle the wind. So he tweaked a few things and doubled its span from 18 to 36 inches. A phenomenon was born. Soon, Orange County motorists were chasing strange lights in the sky. Orange County’s Mutual UFO Network was taking calls about erratic, flying objects. And the Web site UFOinfo.com was posting reports of “glowing orbs” in south Orange County.
One 53-year-old man reported a large glowing ball that “appeared to drip fire.” It traveled about five miles in a few seconds, he said, and left an “acrid type odor” in the air. – [OCRegister.com]
OK. Lets review. What we have here is a 3foot foam toy with leds on it and a top speed of 40mph that, from observers reports, is bigger than a house, produces an acrid smell, (somehow detectable from its cruising altitude of 400ft), travels at 3600 miles an hour, and drips fire…
Amazing how our senses/perceptions can deceive us. Absolutely amazing…
UFOs baffle O.C. earthlings – [OhGizmo/OCRegister]
The Fermi Paradox rears it’s ugly head…
The Fermi Paradox refers to the apparent lack of evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life, when all other probabilistic scientific determinations would indicate that the alternative should be true, and there should be intelligent life out there.
In other words, if we assume that the way life developed on earth is stereotypical of the development of life in general, and that given the same conditions, life should developed again in the same way, then given the high probability of similar conditions existing on other planets in the universe, having existed far longer than the earth has, why have we not seen any evidence this extraterrestrial life?
At first people thought that we simply lacked the technology to detect the signs of this life, but recent scientific advancements have suggested that this may not be the case. It is an interesting dilemma. What I find equally interesting is that in spite of this paradox, the possibility that we were created, as opposed to simply springing out of some prehistoric primordial soup does not seem to have been honestly considered.
I’ve always thought this argument an interesting one, and being that I consider myself both a theist (of sorts) as well as a firm believer in science, I would offer this thought. Maybe we are still not advanced enough to detect extra terrestrial life. Or maybe theists are right, and we were all created. The absence of evidence can never be the evidence of absence, so as a scientist, in my own humble opinion, all I can honestly say is that we simply do not have enough data to rule anything out. Nor should we assume that the two are mutually exclusive…
Just a thought…
The Fermi Paradox is Back – [Slashdot]
The Fermi Paradox: Back with a vengeance – [Sentient Developments]
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