Two of my coworkers frequently mention shows like “Encounters” or “Ancient apocalypse” or whatever. I’m not the best at debating or forming arguments against these though I do feel strongly that bold claims require better evidence than a blurry photo and an eyewitness account. How do you all go about this?
Today I clumsily stumbled through conversation and said “I’ll need some evidence” and was hit with “there’s plenty of evidence in the episode ‘Lights over Fukushima’”. I didn’t have an answer because I haven’t watched it. I’m 99% sure that if I watch it it’s gonna be dramatized, designed to scare/freak you out a little and consist of eyewitness accounts and blurry photos set to eerie music. But I’m afraid I just sound like a haughty know-it-all if I do assert this before watching.
These are good people and I want to remain on good terms and not come across as a cynical asshole.
(Sorry if language is too formal or stilted. Not my native tongue)
That’s fair, thanks. Reading this and other comments I think I’m taking this too seriously and furthernore, they’re having fun. It feels silly now to have asked but still, bouncing this off of strangers helped. I can only echo chamber in my own head.
I tried to engage them with exoplanetary research. I am also in the camp that surely we are not alone in the universe. Why assume we’re special in a seemingly homogenous universe? I am looking forward to humanity finding their first reliable biomarker in space.
I guess we’re just excited about the same thing, really.
Cool! The exo-planetary stuff and astronomy is interesting to me. I’m loving the data we are getting from JWST. There was recently an article about possible biological chemical processes on a faraway planet. The asteroid sample NASA collected also contained the building blocks for life. Not too long ago, we got to see the first picture of a black hole. There’s just so much out there to explore.
I wonder if we would even recognize other intelligent life if we found it. Could we figure out how to communicate? We can barely recognize intelligent life on Earth. Humans eat octopus and it’s one of the most intelligent creatures we are aware of. We still look right past them.