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submitted 5 months ago by Cameri@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.

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[-] Carrolade@lemmy.world 30 points 5 months ago

The universe is big enough that life probably exists in other places. Anything advanced enough to reach us (an extraordinarily difficult feat) would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people, and people just want to believe in something fun to compensate for how boring modern life can be.

[-] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 5 months ago

would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people

Never underestimate the stupidity of smart people/potential other sentient beings.

[-] Carrolade@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Also good to never underestimate human negativity bias, where the brain remembers bad things far more than it remembers positive things.

Look at air travel. We invented it over a century ago, and have made it safe enough that a single failure out of thousands of successful flights becomes newsworthy.

The statistical likelihood of stupid-yet-capable aliens happening to fuck up that badly is very small.

[-] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 5 months ago

Absolutely! I mean primarily that just about any sentience that humans can conceive of is likely to experience some failure, even if down to just statistics. Even our dieties are fallible. So, it seems reasonable to expect that an intellectually superior sentience could make a mistake, leading to loss of craft to primitives like us. Then again, maybe I'm too dumb to conceive of a non-fault-prone intelligence.

this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
110 points (92.3% liked)

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