The conspiracy thread from yesterday inspired this. This thread is pretty general. Discuss all things weird, strange, unexplained and down right creepy in this thread. It’s nearly Halloween and I would love to hear your personal stories of creepy things happening, theories you hold, cryptids that you like, have seen or want to talk about, good shows to watch, discussing the Dyatlov Pass Incident, etc. It’s a high strangeness thread. From Ghosts to Aliens, I want it all.

    • Provastian_Jackson [he/him]
      4·
      4 years ago

      "nearby" is literally anthropocentric. As in human centered. I asked, "proximity to what?" You answered, "humans"

      Literal anthropocentrism is the proximity to humanity.

      My overall point is: it's not wrong of you to think in these terms. I'm human and when I think of "near" , I think of near the planet we live on. I'm talking about relevant to the ET question. When we're asking about ET's and our strategic aims as communists, I think we might want a concept of "near" that sets out to be as inclusive as possible.

      asking if aliens are nearby isn’t really a “bourgeois” question, it’s just a practical question.

      I think it absolutely is bourgeois (so Relativity says there's no center point, and at once all things are valid in thinking of themselves as the center point. Through all space and time. Across the entire universe. And like it's just a practical question that "nearby" just so happens to be roughly the distance our currently conceived equipment can see? That's bourgeois scienceism af homie). And we could also litigate "practical", like what is the radius of "practicality" mapped out in the sky ...but maybe later lol

      I mean we look for signs of industry, spacefaring, radio usage, etc. because that’s all we know how to look for. It is possible that there are aliens that aren’t this way, but they probably wouldn’t be able to leave their planet, and so they’d be harder to search for from a distance.

      see, the thing is it's LIKELY that there are aliens that aren't that way. We aren't looking for them because we literally aren't able to articulate the hypothesis for them. That's the ONLY reason.

      Our sample size is 1 compared to the entire universe. I'm saying it has more to do with our inarticulateness than positivism. And Marxists can excel at articulating non-anthropocentric systems.

        • Provastian_Jackson [he/him]
          2·
          4 years ago

          anthro= human. Centric = center. To make a point that "nearby" is anthropocentrism, I'm suggesting that the most literal way I can think of to parse the word would be placing humans in the center of the space they live in. I mentioned as a way of illustrating how "nearby" is clearly anthropocentric.

          But it's not important.

            • Provastian_Jackson [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              I'm not saying it's completely irrelevant. I think we should devote resources to things in proportion to their likelihood of changing the results. And when I say WE I'm not talking about humanity, because humanity doesn't have a singular motivation and skillset. NASA probably should continue to search for aliens as they see fit.

              I think nearness is irrelevant for us, our faction. For one, if NASA pings aliens, it's like we all ping aliens. There is also a chance that humans are surrounded by signs of alien life all the time and the problem is a failure to recognize it. There is also a chance that humans notice an alien life but are never able to understand it or dialogue with it. Nearness might turn out to matter a great deal or not at all. We don't know. There is literally no way to assign probabilities.

              It’s a practical concern more than an effort to arbitrarily prioritize humans over the extraterrestrials.

              every prioritization is arbitrary when you don't have the vaguest idea the possibilities.

              since it's always an arbitrary decision, we should be the ones making it. Marxism is involved in understanding social systems and interactions with environments. I don't see how we're not relevant in this except arbitrary bourgeois decisions