You said: About aliens and UFOs and anal probes, I don't know that we are all entitled to have an opinion about everything; I don't form them about things where I'm igno…
About aliens and UFOs and anal probes, I don't know that we are all entitled to have an opinion about everything; I don't form them about things where I'm ignorant. Often of course I just follow the experts. They are useful that way so long as one is aware of possible vested interests and qualifications.
As far whether aliens exist or not and if they do what they might be like, I think we are all ignorant and are therefore better off keeping out mouths shut. However, since we are all on fairly the same level, I suppose wild-ass guesses don't hurt so long as we don't get too committed to them.
My guess is that they don't exist, at least in any form and distance we are ever likely to understand and actually encounter. Otherwise, they would long since have been here, and they aren't. There are, in addition to that, rational difficulties that have been pointed out in the evolution of such beings that would seem to imply they are going to be incredibly rare. My guess since of course the probability factors are at this point pretty wild-ass and may kick us hard some day.
In a few centuries I trust we will have a much better handle on things. What if it turns out we really are effectively alone? What conclusion would it be appropriate for us to draw? The conclusion might be, "Oh, wow, we have a deep responsibility here to preserve life and spread it to the rest of the universe." Nonsense.
Claude responded: Your instinct to resist that conclusion is worth examining.
Your instinct to resist that conclusion is worth examining. The leap from "we're alone" to "therefore we have a cosmic responsibility to spread life" is doing a lot of unexamined work.
For a start, it assumes life's continuation and spread is inherently valuable — that more life, or life in more places, is straightforwardly good. But that's not obvious at all. Life involves enormous suffering. Spreading it might just be spreading suffering across a larger canvas. The universe getting along fine without biology for billions of years doesn't obviously constitute a problem requiring correction.
There's also a suspiciously self-serving quality to that conclusion. "We're rare, therefore we're cosmically important, therefore our survival and expansion is a moral imperative" happens to align perfectly with what we'd want to believe anyway. It's the kind of reasoning that starts from a desired conclusion. Finding out we're alone wouldn't logically compel any particular response — it's just a fact about distribution. Facts about rarity don't automatically generate obligations.
The honest answer to "what should we conclude if we're effectively alone?" might simply be: nothing in particular, at least nothing cosmic. It would be an extraordinary and humbling fact. It might increase the case for being careful with what we have, but that's a fairly modest and local conclusion — essentially just "don't be reckless with the only example" — which is a long way from a grand civilizational mission.
The grander versions of that conclusion tend to smuggle in assumptions about purpose — that the universe has a direction, that life is its point, that we're its appointed custodians. Which is just theology with the serial numbers filed off.
You said: My "nonsense" at the end was to say what you said.
My "nonsense" at the end was to say what you said.
Claude responded: Apologies for missing that — you were ahead of me.
Apologies for missing that — you were ahead of me. Your "nonsense" was already doing the work of dismissing the cosmic responsibility conclusion, and I spent several paragraphs laboriously arriving at the same place you'd already reached in one word.
You said: The universe is said to be so big something has to be out there.
The universe is said to be so big something has to be out there. To me that's a non sequitur, but even if they are, they are almost certainly so far away and so different that we will not encounter them nor understand them if we do.
Claude responded: Yes, size doesn't imply accessibility or comprehensibility.
Yes, size doesn't imply accessibility or comprehensibility. The argument from sheer scale is really just an appeal to intuition — big space, therefore company — which doesn't actually follow. A very large empty room is still empty.
And even granting existence somewhere, the two barriers you point to are probably insurmountable independently, let alone together. Distance on cosmological scales isn't just a lot of miles — it's a fundamental physical constraint, and there's no particular reason to think it's negotiable. Then the comprehensibility problem on top of that: something that evolved under radically different conditions over billions of years on its own separate path might be so alien in every sense — cognitive, perceptual, whatever passes for its concerns — that "encounter" would be almost meaningless. We might not even recognize it as the relevant kind of thing.
The popular imagination tends to picture aliens as essentially us with different foreheads, which says more about the limits of human imagination than about likely biology. The real thing, if it existed, might bear no more resemblance to that than we resemble a bacterium — and we share a planet and an evolutionary history with bacteria.
So the whole conversation about aliens tends to be conducted as if the interesting question is whether they're friendly or hostile, when the prior questions — reachable? recognizable? — are almost certainly already answered in the negative.
You said: As far as any responsibility we might have regarding an empty universe, we did not ask for it to be there.
As far as any responsibility we might have regarding an empty universe, we did not ask for it to be there.
Claude responded: Exactly.
Exactly. Responsibility generally requires some act of will or choice that creates an obligation. We didn't create the universe, didn't arrange its emptiness, and didn't volunteer for any custodial role. Finding yourself contingently alone in a large space doesn't generate duties any more than being the last person to leave a party is obligated to clean up a mess they didn't make.
You said: Although, to counter that, it might be said that we wouldn't be here if it weren't there.
Although, to counter that, it might be said that we wouldn't be here if it weren't there.
Claude responded: Fair point, but gratitude and responsibility are different things.
Fair point, but gratitude and responsibility are different things. Even if you accept that we owe the universe something for the conditions that produced us, it's not clear what that debt would consist of or who it's owed to. Obligations generally require a creditor.
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