S2E3: Why UFOs Matter

The UFO phenomenon has huge implications for almost every field of human endeavor. We consider the biggest areas of impact.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

What the UFO? I'm Caleb. I'm going to talk today about why UFOs matter. What's the big deal? Sometimes when I'm talking with friends, they say this is cool, but why do you care about this stuff? And a part of me feels like it's obvious. So I'll start with why I think it's obvious. But then when I thought about it a little deeper, more deeply, I came up with a bunch of different reasons that this matters to me and that I think it matters in general. So I'm going to go through these and see if they resonate with you. I've got 10 reasons here.

Speaker 1: 0:36

Number one is just that it's interesting. It is so interesting. There's so many different details about UFOs. They go off in so many different directions. There's so many different details about UFOs. They go off in so many different directions. There's so many cool possibilities and cool questions. It's fun, it's scary, it's highly compelling, it's intricate, it's complex and there's a ton of unknown material. So it's just fascinating on its face. That's reason number one.

Speaker 1: 1:03

Number two democracy. Democracy really matters. The liberal government ideal that we all have access to the same information and that we all have equal footing under our shared agreements of law is a beautiful construction of the human spirit, and maybe of conscious spirits in general across the cosmos, and it's really been stymied by our efforts to stop people from coming to grips with this issue. If you get into it even a little bit, you find pretty quickly the trail of breadcrumbs lead to a really serious cover-up over a long time you know just about 80 years and not only in the United States but around the world. All of the major governments that know anything about this have kept it really secret, and I think it's not too hard to imagine why they might do that to preserve their own sense of authority and ostensibly to avoid sparking mass panic. But at the same time it's not morally ideal and I don't think it's especially defensible unless there's something going on that we can't currently know, something really creepy like sort of a hostage situation where higher power beings have our lead government officials in some sort of blackmail entanglement. That almost doesn't bear thinking about. But for the world that we all want to live in, but for the world that we all want to live in, democracy is vital, and freedom of information is a big part of that. Scientists should have access to all the data, and it's a boon for democracy that we're starting to get more public discussion around this very interesting subject.

Speaker 1: 3:15

Okay, three is epistemology, the study of knowledge matter, because they've revealed to us yet again that humans are not great at updating their scientific priors. In fact it tends to happen really slowly and then all at once. I just started reading this book, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, so maybe we'll do a book report on that another time. But if you've read that and know more about that than me, then you're already familiar with this hypothesis about the way science works through herky-jerky, radical updates as opposed to steady, smooth progress, and I think we tend to imagine that we're making that incremental forward motion. But in fact it's much more like these big step changes where we've all embraced a new theory of the way the world works and then we hang on really tightly to that theory and people defend it sort of patriotically until a new, better theory really truly blows it out of the water.

Speaker 1: 4:17

And I've been thinking a lot about Darwin and Galileo in the context of this question just how do people come to grips with a really radical new way of seeing the world? And I think the answer is slowly and not particularly well, and then all at once and resoundingly. So we're sort of in the foot-dragging phase, but it's starting to feel like we're coming to the end of that, and I guess a part of what's interesting about UFOs is recognizing that this is really hard for people. It's really hard on an individual level, it's very hard on an institutional level, and if you're into this subject at all, you've probably noticed that some of your friends and family just kind of can't engage with this, like they sort of hit a wall, and that's revelatory of the way that we all onboard knowledge. One of my smart but cautious friends said honestly to me that he was just kind of waiting for somebody he really trusts to tell him this is real, and by that he didn't mean me, he meant like a popular media figure that he listens to and already thinks of as a careful, intelligent person. And so the topic, just like any scientific revolution, has revealed, I think that we're much more tribal in terms of how we decide what to believe than we wish we were and then we should be. It would be great if we lived in a world where everybody confronted the evidence and made their mind up based on the logic that flows from that evidence. But in fact we live in a world where people will reject or resist or just ignore logic that doesn't comport with their existing worldview, unless they absolutely have to accept the new thing, which eventually they will, because we'll hit a collective tipping point. But until then we're all sort of taking cues from each other out of the sides of our eyes, and this is one of the hardest parts about the UFO subject, I think, right now. So we're going to have to continue to find ways to push against it, and a lot of people are doing that way better than I am. But here's me pitching my shovel in that direction.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Astronomy I'm going to call that number four Pretty obvious why that's a big deal with regard to UFOs. If it's really the case that there are complicated advanced civilizations around a couple or maybe many or even most other stars or way out in the blackness of space, that is freaking fascinating and it's very likely that many of these beings know way more about astronomy than we do. Also, there's some set of priors in astronomy that is probably going to be upended by learning about UFOs, like radio transmissions and Dyson spheres and maybe even von Neumann probes, dyson spheres and maybe even von Neumann probes some of our theories about the way that interstellar creatures might build energy or build machines or explore the universe could be wrong and we might need to update those priors. Some scientists recently have been starting to find some signatures that they think might represent the possibility of Dyson swarms, which are basically collections of technology around a star to harvest energy. So I don't need to belabor this point.

Speaker 1: 8:00

Ufos are very big for astronomy, biology maybe, even more excitingly, biology is going to explode with this information. Like we've already been salivating over the prospect of just finding like a microbe on Europa. The idea that we might find a few dozen advanced intelligent species moving around pretty much at will is thrilling, but it also raises tons of super exciting questions and tantalizing possibilities about the way biology works. Like, for one thing, convergent evolution maybe suggests that human like forms are quite natural. Uh, it could be the case that a lot of these things are bipedal and have hands and feet, like we do, and heads, like we do, because that's a very natural form for evolution to take. It could be that it's just like a super convenient structure for life forms, a common form factor. It could also be that we're way more related than we thought. Like there could be a tree of life that's a jazillion times bigger than we thought it was, and that our microbes on Earth started from basically an active set of microbes that were evolving on other places and we're all part of a big soup that we don't know.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Then, intriguingly and a little bit spookily, there's this fascinating possibility that we might be hybrids, that some part of human DNA might be connected to visitor DNA from other worlds, and maybe that happened accidentally or incidentally, and then maybe some of it or most of it happened on purpose. You know, maybe there are more intentional genetic structures in human history than we have previously imagined. That would be, I think, super weird for us. In a way, actually just thinking of this now, it would be sort of a synthesis of the scientific and religious worldviews, because religions have long held that some kind of creative force gave rise to humankind's specialness and science has said no, no, that's silly, we all come from animals, but maybe there's an intelligent force that is also naturally evolved that could bring those two ideas together. That's a little goofy, and the darker side of this is maybe there's been an ongoing hybridization project that is sort of a creepy, slow invasion type behavior. Maybe it's not as creepy as that and it's a little more innocent and alien visitors are just kind of merging with our gene lines, like they merge with all the gene lines that they find throughout the galaxy or the broader cosmos.

Speaker 1: 10:51

I recognize that that sounds like the craziest part, but if you're deep in the streets on UFOs already, you've probably gotten to the hybrid idea and no longer dismiss it out of hand. I guess I want to parenthetically say and this is another topic but there's a whole bunch of stuff in UFO world that just seems really weird and there is a natural tendency to avoid confronting this super weird stuff just on the grounds that it's very weird. But that's not always a great reason to throw something out and in fact, when you're confronted with evidence that something really weird might be happening, it's more rational sometimes to believe that weird thing is happening on the grounds of the evidence that you've been presented with than it is to reject the possibility of the weird thing happening merely on the grounds that it's very weird. I learned about a really cool philosophical principle today called the indifference principle, which is, if you don't know what the chances are that something might be real or true or happening, reason dictates that you should assign maybe a 0.5 to it, which is like a 50% chance. If you don't know, then maybe you call it a coin toss if you really have no data. And that's, I think, counterintuitive for some people, especially in the UFO space. People tend to assume if we don't have any evidence then we should set the probability really low, like 0.00001. But philosophical reasoning would suggest that in fact, if you don't have great evidence one way or the other, you should maybe assume that it's just about even and start with an intuition that it's right around a coin toss. So I guess that all kind of falls in the bucket of epistemology again.

Speaker 1: 12:39

How do we know things and UFOs are a fascinating subject to explore in that context these things go how are they generating this amazing energy? How are they moving without sonic booms and without crushing their occupants or internal machinery? How do they change direction as rapidly as they do and then suddenly stop, ascend and descend with the insane accelerations they have? And then, even more exciting than all those things, can they get to the speed of light or maybe faster? This is like really for me and maybe you, maybe most people here like one of, if not the single most interesting question about the UFO space are warp drives real? Can we actually get faster than light travel? Because if we can, then all the rules we thought existed about the potential for civilization in the galaxy and the cosmos beyond change radically. If we can bop around, we might be part of a much bigger, more complex web.

Speaker 1: 13:53

I'm going to come back to this, but physics is one of the most exciting areas of scientific inquiry and it's probably one where we've made at least a little bit of progress. At Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and whoever else has these things, we're presumably at least trying to learn how they're generating this energy and doing these amazing things, and I think there's reason to believe that we can learn a lot more when we take these things out of the hyper-classification box and expose them to the freshman smoking pot at MIT. That's how we're going to move this scientifically forward, but it's also going to involve opening the door around the world, which is both really exciting and kind of scary. Like, for example, the United States and Russia advanced the world technologically by moving into space together, but they sort of did it in scary competition with each other and it's kind of wild that that eventually resulted in shared trips to the International Space Station. But it all happened with the lurking threat of nuclear annihilation, which is obviously terrifying, and we really haven't overcome that yet. So that's another really big subject that UFOs invite us to ask. Basically, how can we upgrade our civilization to fit in with this more advanced technology, let alone the more advanced civilization which I'll talk about in just a second.

Speaker 1: 15:23

But springboarding off of the physics, let's just hit a few more things. One is climate change. The climate crisis that Earth is heading into, where every year is just the new hottest year in millions of years, is very scary. I'm a techno-optimist. I think we're going to make it through this, but billions of people will be displaced and millions of people will die and really bad things are going to happen in all sorts of ways and all sorts of places. While we get our shit together to start greening the world economy and moving into a sustainable, abundant future that is not based on poisoning our air, which alone kills hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people every single year Just air pollution. So connecting these dots the physics we can learn from UFOs could really help us solve a lot of these problems. If we had borderline unlimited energy, we could move all the ocean water. We want to any places where people are dealing with water scarcity, which is like half the world. Something like 2 billion people are in dire straits for water and like 4 billion people are in areas where water is scarce at least. So we could solve a ton of problems, save a ton of lives, just by applying energy to moving water where we need it to keep people alive. Then we could use this unlimited energy to pull carbon out of the air and filter out the other noxious stuff that we've put up there, and obviously we could use it to replace the noxious emitting fossil fuel power generation that we've been using for a hundred years. So there's a real urgency behind this aspect of the UFO question conundrum.

Speaker 1: 17:22

Subject scientific area of inquiry and I don't think it gets enough play. So I'll explore that a little bit more in the future and I hope that you think about it too. But it really kind of takes the subject off the mere academic shelf and moves it toward the realm of actual, serious productivity, like stuff we could do. That would make the world way way better, especially if we didn't use it to blow each other up. So, pivoting from that to geopolitics, the world we live in currently is a mess. We've done a lot of really great stuff.

Speaker 1: 17:58

We've come a really long way, but it's tragic and awful that we're still brutally killing each other at mass scale. It's sort of diminutive to even say this, or de-minimizing. It's silly to say this in the context of the awfulness, say this in the context of the awfulness, but it's like embarrassing on some level. It's the. The tragedy is far worse than this feeling of embarrassment, but it's it's. It's upsetting and sad that we haven't gotten our act together to stop doing this, to work out our differences without killing each other at large scale. We're we're still clearly doing that. We're still stuck in that mode.

Speaker 1: 18:42

So if you were a super being from a million years in the future or from a civilization that was a million years more advanced than us and you were thinking about whether to give us star hopping technology, you might look around the planet and say well, they're poisoning themselves to death and they're still brutally invading each other and they can't even be civil about their policy conversations. Everybody's trying to tear everybody apart all the time. I know that's a much smaller problem than the brutal warfare, but the point is we still have a lot to do spiritually and culturally communally. We have a long way to go, and I think we all know this, but everybody's sort of at a loss for how to move forward Not everybody. There are people who are trying to move us structurally forward, but this is another area that I think UFOs kind of shine a light on and encourage us to think about. Because if we can get to a better place structurally, us to think about, because if we can get to a better place structurally, civilly yes, spiritually we can earn the right to inherit this technology that is being dangled in front of us and to develop it peacefully for the benefit of all, instead of just destroying each other more efficiently.

Speaker 1: 19:58

And there's some possibility also in this geopolitical bucket that visitors from other worlds might help unify the idea of earth people. It might create a kind of global identity for our species, a spatial identity, if you will, that we currently lack sorely. And this is something Ronald Reagan talked about a couple times at the UN a little bit cryptically, and it's also something Christopher Mellon has written really almost poetically about that. This is one of the big reasons for us to advance disclosure is that we should all recognize our common humanity, and it's going to be easier to do that in the face of a genuine other who makes us realize that we have more in common with each other, and then we'll have to get to the next level. So this is a good transition to my last point, which is cosmic civilization.

Speaker 1: 20:58

So one of the most beautiful but also kind of dazzling and almost overwhelming aspects of the UFO world is this recognition, or at least glimmering possibility, that all of humanity might be basically living in one room of an apartment building in a small town that's a part of a sprawling urban area in a big country, in a world. So there could be a huge galactic civilization out there. There might even be intergalactic civilizations, and if beings who know how to use science really can move faster than light, then we're going to find that out someday and we're going to get to participate in some way in this galactic civilization, in this cosmic culture, and that should broaden all of our horizons in a really exciting way, about as profoundly as you could imagine about a million times more interestingly than finding a microbe on a nearby moon, finding that we're just part of a vast complex web of interspatial politics, discovering our cosmic sociology and seeing how we fit into that it's an incredible invitation. It's a really fun thought experiment and it broadens our view from just recognizing that we're humans and we should all come together to thinking about the goals of conscious creatures on the grandest possible scale. What could we all want together? Should we try to have some intergalactic government? Is there already such an organization? Is there a whole of universe intelligence that we can tap into and access, connect, grow, even learn from? And then I suppose that beckons to a layer of reality beyond even this, that it's likely that far more advanced beings know much more about. This is a good outro. So we tend to think about or I tend to think about UFOs as being way more advanced technologically, and that seems to be true. But it also stands to reason that if a species is a million years ahead of us, then if there are real aspects of the spiritual world that we don't understand, like souls and psychic bonds, and like ethereal consciousness, spirit guides, higher selves, gods who knows If any of that stuff is real or all of it is then it's likely that a civilization who's a million years ahead of us will know more about that than we do, so they can open us into that spiritual world and help us learn way more about it. Maybe call that the metaphysics to go with our physics exploration.

Speaker 1: 24:02

So that turned out to be 11 things if we include this spiritual geometry or geography or exploration of any kind at the end. Just to run it back down. One it's interesting and fun. Ufos are fascinating on their face. Two they press us to consider how to have a better, more transparent, liberal democracy. Three they force us to consider epistemology and our currently slightly laughable means of reaching consensus about scientific discoveries and updating our understanding of the world. Four they open the floodgates of astronomy, beckoning us to new discoveries and potentially opening up parts of the universe we used to think we'd never even be able to access because they're moving away from us too fast, not if we can use faster than light travel.

Speaker 1: 25:01

5. Biology just got way more interesting. Do all living beings have DNA? Are there different kinds of DNA? Are we related to lots of other creatures in the universe?

Speaker 1: 25:12

Six, physics Can we has warp drive, please? We has now we go where and blow planets up, or better, settle them and make abundant peacefully? That went a little off the rails. Can we have unlimited energy? Can we make way faster planes? And can we go underwater and build civilizations there, could we move planets, could we possibly hold the universe together instead of watching it condense into another big crunch and start with a new Big Bang? You know, maybe there's like intergalactic infrastructure getting built somewhere by beings who are way, way more advanced than us, or maybe they've hacked a simulation and figured out how to pop out of the matrix and they're working on how to improve base reality. That would be fun too. Seven climate change almost seems small by comparison to the simulation, but it's getting real hot in this sim world that we're in and we could fix that if we had better physics.

Speaker 1: 26:18

Eight geopolitics, because we could all come together better or at least improve our relationships with each other, and also we should consider the ways in which UFOs might make that challenging. It's possible that we will fracture even further and try to curry favor with different alien races. We should look out for that. So geopolitics is interesting, not just because it could be really good, but because it holds potential pitfalls. I guess nine is cosmic civilization. Six, seven, eight, nine. Yeah, nine is cosmic civilization. We're just a small set of a vast web. Maybe there's a big organizational structure, maybe there are lots of different sort of galactic countries and there's no overarching government. Maybe it's anarchy, maybe it's highly organized, maybe that's been in flux and we have so much to learn. There might be like galactic history books we can all download and then, on a higher level, we can think of ourselves as being interested in contributing to cosmic culture. That's a really cool aspiration. That was never even worth considering until UFOs blew the walls of our reality, way back to the edges of the universe, and I guess this is 10. Counted these wrong? Eight, nine, all right, yeah, sure, so 10 is the spirit world.

Speaker 1: 27:51

Maybe there's just way more information about the nature of reality out there and our more advanced visitors are going to be able to key us into this. Some people on earth have been exploring this diligently for years and there are lots of interesting stories out there, so maybe that's something we'll explore in the future. If you are interested in that, let us know. It would be really helpful if you could share this with anybody, if you liked it at all. Since you listened all the way to the end, it seems like you're probably digging it.

Speaker 1: 28:25

If you feel like it, you could support us on our Patreon page, which is WTUFO. You know Patreon and also sharing, is just like incredibly helpful. Telling anybody about it, posting this episode on any of your feeds would be super helpful, but over and above that, we'd really just love to hear from you. So find us on X at WTUFO show and you can comment at us there, and I think in the podcast feeds there might even be an option to text us, which is weird. No one's tried that yet, but theoretically that should be possible. So if you do that, please clearly announce yourself so we know you're not spam artists, and tell us what you're interested in. Also, on YouTube, you could leave a comment and just tell us which part of this is the most compelling for you or if we missed some really interesting angle that you think about constantly and the UFOs have led you to. All. Right, that sounds like plenty for today. Hope you enjoyed it. Keep watching the skis. Ufos are real. Have a great day. Bye.