I love reading and thinking of ideas like this. I was quite the amateur astronomer as a young adult and teen because of my fascination of this subject.
I started attending churches a couple months ago and the idea of god or a god is something I can’t wrap my head around. I enjoy thinking of ideas like we’re some kind of computer simulation, or that we have been visited before and maybe have had knowledge passed on to us from other beings (imagine all we’ve lost in the library of Alexandria, technology and building methods we couldn’t even replicate with modern tech).
It’s really crazy. We’re not here for even a blink of an eye - let a group alone humans who can pass along accrued knowledge long enough to come to an understanding of all that exists.
Loads of interesting things to think and contemplate on.
I always thought the Dark Forest theory of Fermi's Paradox to be the most interesting. It's not that the universe is dead, it's that it has something so incomprehensibly horrible in it that being noticed by the Eye Of Sauron is a death sentence. Foolish Civilization get noticed and are ended and more reserved and cautious ones don't get noticed so we have no way of knowing that they are out there. I don't actually think this is particularly likely but I enjoy Cosmic horror in fiction, whether it be Lovecraft or Dead Space or The Thing or whatever so it's inherently interesting to me.
I know I’ll be dismissed as a crank right away, but bear with me.
I think the best explanation for the lack of life in the rest of the cosmos is that the Earth is located in the one spot in the entire Universe that can sustain life: the centre. Much like the eye of the storm, the calm centre of the universe’s intense cyclonic activity is the only habitable zone.
All the Flat Earth stuff lately has made it very difficult to have a rational discussion about this, but really, it is not at all bizarre that a space might have a centre, and that a particular object might be located at that centre. There is nothing at all wacky about this proposition, except that we have been conditioned since birth to think otherwise.
Unlike Flat Earth theory (which more or less popped up out of nowhere, as far as I can tell), there is a long history of high-level discourse on the question of the location of the Earth in the Universe, with the geocentric view represented by some of the greatest scientific minds of all time: Ptolemy, Riccioli, and Brahe, for example, the latter regarded by many as the most rigorous and precise astronomer of his day.
Even today, if you look into this subject, you will find many of modernity’s most celebrated popularisers of “The Science”, like Hawking, stating that the question of the Earth’s location has in fact not been settled, and that we simply prefer the heliocentric model either for philosophical reasons, out of modesty (according to Hawking), or for mathematical convenience, as Newton’s theories require us to consider the solar system as an isolated system.
But of course the solar system is not an isolated system, and it is entirely possible to model the activity of the entire Universe from the Earth’s reference frame. Such a model would also have the advantage of conforming to our everyday experience, in which the Sun really appears to move across the sky, the ground under our feet does not seem to be moving, and we are not experiencing the inertial effects of acceleration and deceleration that we customarily experience when we are passengers on a spinning object on an orbital path (such as a teacup ride at the fairground).
It would also, to the point of this article, handily explain Fermi’s Paradox.
Many of us who have been on this journey of pulling back the curtain on the dogma of modernity bit by bit will recognise a common theme: we are taught to believe that things are not as they appear to be, that we cannot trust our own senses. The Sun appears to be moving, but it is not. You don’t appear to be moving, but you are.
I propose that the Galileo story is the ur-Truth Regime. No one questions it: you are just as likely to hear the mouthpieces of modern orthodoxy pay tribute to this tale as symbolising the victory of science over religion, as you are to hear dissidents point to it as an example of how dominant regimes can be overthrown by rebel scientists and free-thinkers.
This story is arguably the capstone of our modern mythology. The odd thing is that these days Galileo would be considered just as nuts as the most ardent Flat Earther were he to come along and suggest, as he did, that the Sun is in the centre of the Universe.
Just like any aspect of the Truth Regime, the dogma on the Earth’s location falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. You'll hear the likes of Brian Cox say at one moment that Einstein showed that all motion is relative, and in the next that the Earth definitely goes around the Sun and not the other way around.
It’s a story as packed full of contradictions and question-begging as any mainstream narrative on Covid or Climate Change or anything else, but the difference is that it is utterly baked in to our culture to such an extent that it is extremely difficult for us to step back and look at it objectively. Even at such a time as this, when so many foundational assumptions are being exposed as total lies, to question the received wisdom on this crucial topic provokes only automatic defensiveness.
I say crucial because at this stage I am completely convinced that the victory of heliocentrism was the first domino in a long chain that brought us to the sorry point we are at today. They call it the Copernican Revolution, after all: the original, and grandest, revolution of all, of which all subsequent revolutions are mere echoes.
A lot of people have put forth many versions of the “X is upstream from Y” formulation, but cosmology is upstream from absolutely everything. Our entire conception of reality and of ourselves flows from our conception of the universe at the largest scale.
Our modern malaise, nihilism, is simply not possible in a reality where every tiny thing you do is of literally universal significance, but once the Earth is knocked from its perch and sent careening into the vast emptiness of space, it becomes inevitable.
For this reason, it will be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to restore meaning to the world without addressing the cosmological question. There is no man-made edifice of meaning that can maintain for long in the face of the sucking existential void. Meaning must be derived from the cosmos, not in spite of it.
Therefore, I suggest, utterly unironically, that the only true and long-standing solution to the problems of modernity is to Make Earth Great Again.
We may not be alone, but we are functionally alone. All of our observational powers are limited to our Galaxy. We haven’t detected a “Dyson Sphere” in our galaxy... yet. We actually can’t detect such an object in another galaxy.
Further, even the closest Galaxy to us is 2.5 million light years away. Therefore any “alien” from that galaxy would take 2.5 million years to even get here at the speed of light. Something that is likely impossible to do anyway.
The time and distance barriers essentially prevent species from ever interacting.
There are also 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. This increases the likelihood that an intelligent species exists somewhere in that universe, but as noted above, it is essentially impossible for there to be any interaction.
And no, faster than light travel is not a thing. And no, the speed of light is not changing.
Fermi doesn’t factor in time as a variable. Life could theoretically be abundant. Yet intelligent life in close proximity to other intelligent life, at the necessary stage of development, at the same time, I’d imagine is an extraordinarily weak probability.
I love reading and thinking of ideas like this. I was quite the amateur astronomer as a young adult and teen because of my fascination of this subject.
I started attending churches a couple months ago and the idea of god or a god is something I can’t wrap my head around. I enjoy thinking of ideas like we’re some kind of computer simulation, or that we have been visited before and maybe have had knowledge passed on to us from other beings (imagine all we’ve lost in the library of Alexandria, technology and building methods we couldn’t even replicate with modern tech).
It’s really crazy. We’re not here for even a blink of an eye - let a group alone humans who can pass along accrued knowledge long enough to come to an understanding of all that exists.
Loads of interesting things to think and contemplate on.
This was a great overview of the matter and there's nestled in there the embryo of a neupolitik: The Spaceman's Burden
I always thought the Dark Forest theory of Fermi's Paradox to be the most interesting. It's not that the universe is dead, it's that it has something so incomprehensibly horrible in it that being noticed by the Eye Of Sauron is a death sentence. Foolish Civilization get noticed and are ended and more reserved and cautious ones don't get noticed so we have no way of knowing that they are out there. I don't actually think this is particularly likely but I enjoy Cosmic horror in fiction, whether it be Lovecraft or Dead Space or The Thing or whatever so it's inherently interesting to me.
If you like the Dark Forest Theory, you might like the series "Remembrance of Earth's Past" by Liu Cixin.
Just finished reading Book 2 yesterday because of J. Burden and Luthemplar.
I know I’ll be dismissed as a crank right away, but bear with me.
I think the best explanation for the lack of life in the rest of the cosmos is that the Earth is located in the one spot in the entire Universe that can sustain life: the centre. Much like the eye of the storm, the calm centre of the universe’s intense cyclonic activity is the only habitable zone.
All the Flat Earth stuff lately has made it very difficult to have a rational discussion about this, but really, it is not at all bizarre that a space might have a centre, and that a particular object might be located at that centre. There is nothing at all wacky about this proposition, except that we have been conditioned since birth to think otherwise.
Unlike Flat Earth theory (which more or less popped up out of nowhere, as far as I can tell), there is a long history of high-level discourse on the question of the location of the Earth in the Universe, with the geocentric view represented by some of the greatest scientific minds of all time: Ptolemy, Riccioli, and Brahe, for example, the latter regarded by many as the most rigorous and precise astronomer of his day.
Even today, if you look into this subject, you will find many of modernity’s most celebrated popularisers of “The Science”, like Hawking, stating that the question of the Earth’s location has in fact not been settled, and that we simply prefer the heliocentric model either for philosophical reasons, out of modesty (according to Hawking), or for mathematical convenience, as Newton’s theories require us to consider the solar system as an isolated system.
But of course the solar system is not an isolated system, and it is entirely possible to model the activity of the entire Universe from the Earth’s reference frame. Such a model would also have the advantage of conforming to our everyday experience, in which the Sun really appears to move across the sky, the ground under our feet does not seem to be moving, and we are not experiencing the inertial effects of acceleration and deceleration that we customarily experience when we are passengers on a spinning object on an orbital path (such as a teacup ride at the fairground).
It would also, to the point of this article, handily explain Fermi’s Paradox.
Many of us who have been on this journey of pulling back the curtain on the dogma of modernity bit by bit will recognise a common theme: we are taught to believe that things are not as they appear to be, that we cannot trust our own senses. The Sun appears to be moving, but it is not. You don’t appear to be moving, but you are.
I propose that the Galileo story is the ur-Truth Regime. No one questions it: you are just as likely to hear the mouthpieces of modern orthodoxy pay tribute to this tale as symbolising the victory of science over religion, as you are to hear dissidents point to it as an example of how dominant regimes can be overthrown by rebel scientists and free-thinkers.
This story is arguably the capstone of our modern mythology. The odd thing is that these days Galileo would be considered just as nuts as the most ardent Flat Earther were he to come along and suggest, as he did, that the Sun is in the centre of the Universe.
Just like any aspect of the Truth Regime, the dogma on the Earth’s location falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. You'll hear the likes of Brian Cox say at one moment that Einstein showed that all motion is relative, and in the next that the Earth definitely goes around the Sun and not the other way around.
It’s a story as packed full of contradictions and question-begging as any mainstream narrative on Covid or Climate Change or anything else, but the difference is that it is utterly baked in to our culture to such an extent that it is extremely difficult for us to step back and look at it objectively. Even at such a time as this, when so many foundational assumptions are being exposed as total lies, to question the received wisdom on this crucial topic provokes only automatic defensiveness.
I say crucial because at this stage I am completely convinced that the victory of heliocentrism was the first domino in a long chain that brought us to the sorry point we are at today. They call it the Copernican Revolution, after all: the original, and grandest, revolution of all, of which all subsequent revolutions are mere echoes.
A lot of people have put forth many versions of the “X is upstream from Y” formulation, but cosmology is upstream from absolutely everything. Our entire conception of reality and of ourselves flows from our conception of the universe at the largest scale.
Our modern malaise, nihilism, is simply not possible in a reality where every tiny thing you do is of literally universal significance, but once the Earth is knocked from its perch and sent careening into the vast emptiness of space, it becomes inevitable.
For this reason, it will be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to restore meaning to the world without addressing the cosmological question. There is no man-made edifice of meaning that can maintain for long in the face of the sucking existential void. Meaning must be derived from the cosmos, not in spite of it.
Therefore, I suggest, utterly unironically, that the only true and long-standing solution to the problems of modernity is to Make Earth Great Again.
#MEGA
We may not be alone, but we are functionally alone. All of our observational powers are limited to our Galaxy. We haven’t detected a “Dyson Sphere” in our galaxy... yet. We actually can’t detect such an object in another galaxy.
Further, even the closest Galaxy to us is 2.5 million light years away. Therefore any “alien” from that galaxy would take 2.5 million years to even get here at the speed of light. Something that is likely impossible to do anyway.
The time and distance barriers essentially prevent species from ever interacting.
There are also 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. This increases the likelihood that an intelligent species exists somewhere in that universe, but as noted above, it is essentially impossible for there to be any interaction.
And no, faster than light travel is not a thing. And no, the speed of light is not changing.
Fermi doesn’t factor in time as a variable. Life could theoretically be abundant. Yet intelligent life in close proximity to other intelligent life, at the necessary stage of development, at the same time, I’d imagine is an extraordinarily weak probability.