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- Опубликовано: 27 май 2021
- Is it aliens? Probably not. Why? Because we don't know almost everything, and finding an explanation that could explain almost anything doesn't recognize that there is a whole lot we don't know. We are so extremely biased toward thinking our current knowledge is a complete set of knowledge but it really, really isn't.
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I love that UFO is a term that literally means "we don't know" but has somehow become synonymous with "ALIENS!!!"
I love that UFOlogist is a recognized word with no sensible pronunciation. Feels fitting
To be fair "aliens" is basically "we don't know but we think it has something to do with a living creature".
@@danieljensen2626 "I'm an alien, a legal alien. I'm an Englishman in New York"
@@danieljensen2626 this is so true, i never thought about that before!
It's now been changed to UAP (unidentified ariel phenomenon), right?
At 3:37 Hank confirms that aliens are, indeed, sexy.
Ampersand confirms
I’m MOSTLY excited about discovering aliens because at least one species has gotta be hot.
Waiting to meet thick zeta reticulian gf
Katherine Green is a lucky woman ♡
"I saw an alien. I saw him doing...sexy stuff. With his sexy alien wife." - Shane Madej
When scientists don't know something, why don't they just google it? Works for me every time.
Maybe in future this will be industry standard for testing hypothesis. Imagine how the debates will be when desperately people comparing their Google searches😳☹️
That's what sets scientists apart from programmers.
Counterpoint: it didn’t work for me last night when I was trying to find out if the concept of an military outpost on an island existed before WW2. All I got were “here’s a list of modern military bases on islands”. (Being a writer is annoying sometimes when google give you just enough of NOT what you want...)
google is obsolete. use yahoo or bing.
@@claireglory i just write my question on a rock, throw it out my window then wait for an answer to appear on it and be thrown back inside
The Area 51 raid was unsuccessful because we didn’t have Hank and John to enlighten the guards to get them on our side
facts.
Here's a second reason why the Area 51 raid was unsuccessful. People don't want to schlep all they way out into the middle of nowhere just to be gunned down by armed soldiers for committing a serious felony.
@@WarrenGarabrandt calm down son it’s just a joke
@@yt_me Uhh, well the definition of success there was supposed to be that the truth was actually to be brought out ...here. And yet it remains "out there".
People do know what Area 51 is though, right? It was a site where the U.S. military built a spy plane to take pictures of Russia.
“I don’t know” is often the most honest and mature answer to many scientific questions and when I hear it from scientists it often helps me to trust them more.
Conversely, when scientists are faced with a mysterious phenomenon, trying to a priori explain it away/mock people without doing any investigation makes me trust them less.
Glad to see Green is open to study UAP more. It’s worthy of our attention.
also don't forget: "i was wrong and got new information, now this is the conclusion: ..."
Is the earth a globe or flat? I don't know.
Now bask in honesty and maturity, peasants!
"I don't know." is one of the most honest answers human have.
The more you know, the more aware you are of what you don't know.
Reminded me of the “pseudoscience works to prove, science works to disprove” thing, then I remembered I learned that from you in crash course philosophy! We can find ‘evidence’ for anything when we’re looking for it.
Thats InTeReStInG
Vsauce's latest video talks about how our ability to reason developed as a social function. We use it to explain our current beliefs rather than shape our beliefs according to existing evidence.
@@redjr242 Oh wow. Gonna have to watch that, sounds super interesting
Confirmation bias
I love that
“Good morning John. Aliens.” What an excellent start to a video
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for a second I wondered "wait is this gonna be how I find out aliens have been discovered" and tbh I couldn't pick a better person to hear it from
"Extremely Unusual Things" sounds like another Hank book title.
*Tightens belt*
"Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT MAGIC" - Tim Minchin
Had snippets of this beat poem in my head a bunch of times during this video
Yes!! Me too!
Totally! Was thinking much the same :D There's a lot of crossover here...
For the curious, it's "Storm" by Tim Minchin: comedian, pianist, actor, and creator of the "Matilda" musical.
Somewhere on RUclips there's a fantastic animated version of this poem.
I always think about how the definition of magic has changed over the years. For example, the fact that electricity can be controlled and manipulated using metal and complex ideas can be broadcast worldwide using glass and light, are pretty magical. Yes, they require engineering and nuanced systems to work, but so do most fictional spells/potions. I think unless you’re tied to the idea that magic equals “unexplainable” or “I wave a wand and and something just happens,” science in some ways is our reality’s version of “magic.” It’s just once we figure out how to pull something off, it moves from “magic” to “science” in our brains. If an alien lived on a planet that didn’t have conductive metal, fire or glass, decided to read a book about us, they would go “woah what a complex magic system.”
Logically, that means magic might exist but it is impossible to explain. In mathematics, there are proofs that certain conjectures cannot be resolved as true or false.
What I got from this video:
Hank: Why do we yawn?
Answer: Aliens
We do know why we yawn. It's too cool your brain down. It's a heat sink.
@@PatrickPecoraro you misspelled “aliens” bro
Why do we sleep? To facilitate alien abductions. We're nice like that. Gotta do a solid for those sentients out there.
"Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop. Just because science doesn't know the answer doesn't mean you can just fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you!" -Dara Ó Briain
I love Dara
The scientific SKILL of being able to say "we don't know what this thing is. We have no preconception of what it is or is not. We will do these things to try to figure out what it is." - this is SO incredibly difficult. Human brains like patterns. We want things to fit together. Including all possibilities, excluding no possibilities, is HARD. What are these things we see? Well, we don't know. Let's test things. HARD.
Good point. It’s frustrating though. I think I know only one other person who’s comfortable with “we don’t know”. Most people just roll their eyes like I’m the stupid one. “Well, what do YOU think it is then???”
I guess there was never a time when most humans were comfortable with being on a road to discovery. Look at the extensive systems of myths we created to explain our world, taking shape way back from the beginning.
Of course, you could see that skill as really the "pattern" of not categorizing something immediately. With practice, the pattern is established.
My supervisor always tell me that "I don't know" lends far more credibility to someone who pretends to know everything.
"Focusing on explanations that can kinda explain anything have, so far, not helped us explain anything" - These are the sort of sentences I subscribed for
John: makes a podcast / book chapter about how aliens in pop culture gave him extreme anxiety in childhood
Hank: good morning John I love aliens
Breaking news: Man who writes fiction about aliens likes aliens.
A take like this is exactly why I respect Hank as a Science Communicator.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” - Carl Sagan
Stellar quote.
Can be applied to multitudes of things that matter.
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
That Sagan quote is nonsense. Why? look around your room. Do you see an elephant? No? therefore, there is no elephant. Absence of evidence of an elephant in your room IS clear, unambiguous, and undeniable evidence off an absence of an elephant in your room.
@@davidonfim2381 No... You made an example in which the two line up, but the quote is not saying they can never both be true. The quote is saying that they are not the same thing. So if you don't see aliens, that doesn't mean you can say "the are no aliens because I don't have any evidence for them!"
@@brixan... That's a fair point. technically, you are correct, the quote could be taken to mean that “Absence of evidence is not *necessarily* evidence of absence”. That meaning is not excluded by the quote. However, the vast majority of people (I'd say it's nearly universal) interpret the quote as saying that "absence of evidence cannot be taken as evidence of absence", and that is what is nonsense.
@Sam Garcia-Piccione That's totally wrong. An argument from ignorance is saying that because you don't know something, you therefore DO know it. For example, saying that because we can't explain certain phenomena, that we therefore CAN explain them by saying it's aliens.
That is entirely different from what we are talking about, which is whether the lack of evidence can give us information about the presence or absence of something. The lack of evidence for something is NOT the same thing as ignorance- it is often (not always, just often) actual, usable knowledge about something. If there was an elephant in my room, there would NECESSARILY be evidence of it being there. Elephants are large physical beings that reflect light, make noise, take up volume, smell, etc. The lack of evidence of an elephant being in my room (which is well-lit enough, I can see all of it, etc) is all the evidence that is required to conclusively prove that there are no elephants in my room. If there was an elephant in my room, there is absolutely zero doubt that there WOULD be evidence of it being in my room. Since we don't see that evidence, that constitutes evidence for there not being an elephant in my room.
I'll also point out that you didn't even understand my example. I wasn't talking about the existence of elephants in general (which obviously do exist, so it would be unbelievably stupid for me to claim that elephants don't exist), my example was about the presence/absence of things in my room.
Another thing I should point out is that evidence=/=proof. Evidence is something that alters your assessment of the probability that something is or isn't true. The fact that you don't have evidence for some things SHOULD indeed alter your assessment of the probability of those things being true or false. My elephant in my room example is just a particularly strong example of when that kind of evidence should conclusively settle a question.
@@davidonfim2381 @David Enrique all it says is that X is not Y, not that it isn't "necessarily" true. Even if they have the same truth value (as in your example), they still aren't the same. Both need to be justified individually. Your interpretation is correct, the former cannot be taken as evidence for the latter. If I don't see an ant in my room and I have no evidence for one being there, I think you'd agree that isn't evidence AGAINST an ant being in my room. Ants are hard to see in a room, like aliens in a vast universe
I'm about to graduate from college for engineering and every so often I worry I'm going to be a bad engineer because when people ask me questions I oftentimes don't have answers for them. Then I am reminded at times like this that the whole point of science and engineering is not knowing answers but finding answers.
More than that being the whole point of science, I feel like that’s the whole point of being an engineer specifically. “How do we get from this cliff to that cliff?” “I don’t know... give me three hours and a pencil + ruler....”
“How do we live higher off the earth?” “I don’t know, give me some time and I’ll design a way!”
So many of the build it youtube videos I watch are like “I didn’t know how to do this but, but my engineer friend figured it out!!”
Saying "I don't know" when asked about changes to a design keeps bridges from collapsing.
Love getting a notification just saying “ailiens” I was like HECK YEAH
Same 😆
I know! 😂😂 I was so excited
*hell
I have to explain to people that there's a practically infinite gap between "There are no aliens" and "There are aliens currently who know of us and have visited us and we don't already know about them"
Like don't get me wrong, aliens contacting us would be awesome (and terrifying), but some people see the idea that statistically there must be other life in the universe and sprint with it haha
As i've said to people on reddit - if we had all our SETI program equipment sitting in the Alpha Centauri system we probably wouldn't notice that there are humans on earth, even with how much we scream into the void. If we spent even a little bit of energy practicing EMCON (Electro Magnetic Containment, to decrease how visible we are), we could probably hide from an observer on PLUTO with our current tech.
Space is big and mostly empty.
"We don't even know why we yawn."
How dare you, Hank‽
I don't buy the "statistically there must be life on other planets" argument. Hank mentioned the mediocrity principle, but doesn't that just mean that IF there is other life, it's probably like us? It doesn't mean that there actually is other life. The entire thing could just be survivorship bias, right? Like the only reason we get to think about the prospect of other life is because we are ourselves alive. I don't quite no how to articulate it, but suppose we were the only life. How would anything be different? I'm not sure it would.
@@danielgysi5729 The basic idea is that even if the conditions which create and support life are unfathomably rare, the universe is also practically infinite. Therefore, life must exist elsewhere. Obviously this is an oversimplification, but the idea is that it would be more strange for there NOT to be alien life that exists
@@Alwayz114 exactly. Alien life almost certainly exists. Sentient space-faring life, on the other hand, may be even rarer. We're not sure why only one species in all the hundreds of millions of years of life on earth has developed that.
In about 100 years we've gone from "because God" as the most common "explanation" for mysteries, to "because aliens." Not sure if that's progress.
I think so, one is theoretically possible.
In the last 10 years the explanation has been "essential oils"
@@HouseMDaddict or lack thereof
People believing in aliens is significantly better than people believing in the Abrahamic god. So... yeah to some extent that would be progress if it was true.
*Gods*
Just to include multiple periods.
I wish I could upvote the quote "it's ok to say I don't know what it is". But I suppose upvoting this video will have to do for now.
I always admire Hank's reasonable and level commentary on things. For someone that has a hard time finding words to describe. Thank you, Hank
"Observation: You couldn't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs." - Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Things people explain as aliens could also be explained by *_time traveling humans._*
UFSMs: Unidentified Flying Spaghetti Monsters
Especially if every possible timeline exists in a multiverse. In that case if time travel is at all possible then at least one of them will be doing it and visiting us.
Obviously, because of the Jeremy Berimy timeline, sometimes things happen always and never both backwards and forwards in time. So of course we're always seeing time travelers but we can never know what they are because they don't exist. Time knife
I’m hoping for time travel over alien encounters. I want a raggedy man to tell me to run....
Or just .... earthlings that broke away during the last extinction event only to return after we are here (and after evolving elsewhere / differently). That makes no time traveling assumption and no assumption about superluminal speed. Would also fit with any evidence of bipedal humanoids if any was confirmed.
There's a guy called Isaac Arthur, y'all might find his videos mildly interesting about the Fermi paradox and whether or not intelligent aliens are likely (although we can't know with certainty) to exist.
He also did a vid explaining the footage. It is really well done and gives the info so you can answer it yourself.
Personally my somewhat cynical solution to the Fermi paradox is that there are actually loads of intelligent civilizations in the universe but physical laws prevent any civilization from ever really being detectable from outside their solar system or from detecting other civilizations. And if faster than light travel is impossible it's pretty likely that no civilization will ever leave their own solar system in a significant way.
I mean if a civilization with our current technology existed on Proxima b (the absolute nearest possibly habitable planet) we would not be able to detect them.
Isaac Arthur is like the professor of a master class on writing Sci-Fi and practical engineering in the space age at the same time.
@@danieljensen2626 Isaac Arthur does a lot of videos on all aspects of the Fermi Paradox and space travel including the points you just mentioned.
forever terrified at the fact that I was mid-yawn when hank said "we don't know why we yawn"
Love the argument that no "explanation that could explain everything" has ever turned out to be the actual explanation to something important - that's something I never thought about, but it's a really compelling argument.
I think using "aliens" as an explanation for everything also severely underestimates the hard work and ingenuity of the human race, i.e. using aliens as an explanation for how the pyramids were built, or the Easter Island heads. People are smart and have always been coming up with smart, new ways to do things; explaining everything away as aliens discredits and underestimates the hard work of actual people.
These things defy the laws of physics as we know it. People didnt make them
@@Paul-ks7nx
Uhh, no it doesn't? The pyramids can be built by just stacking blocks on top of other blocks.
@@PitLord777 I’m referring to the UFOs lol
@@Paul-ks7nx
Oh.
Then if I’m assuming correctly of what you’re saying is it everything that is unknown is known because men built it or made it that includes the unidentified flying objects no I think you got somethings wrong and backwards
I saw the title in the notification and came running to see if the thumbnail was gonna be hank recreating the ALIENS meme
Replace "aliens" with "God" and you've actually just explained why I'm agnostic. Not ruling out a higher power, but a thing that explains everything we don't understand yet isn't useful to me as a way to frame the universe.
I think most people that call themselves atheists would in reality consider themselves agnostic if they were talking with someone who also thought deeply and rationally about the concepts. Atheist just means more that you're not currently/actively considering the existence of God. You would have to be pretty arrogant to blatantly proclaim that there is absolutely no possibility of a higher power, or magic, or aliens. None can be disproved at the moment, and none can be disproved. But I don't actively wonder if magic exists. But if someone shoots a fire ball at me one day I might change my mind.
@@corbans5796 Agnostic and Atheist are not mutually exclusive. You can be an agnostic Atheist. Or even an agnostic theist.
The popular thing these days is to argue that there's no such thing as agnosticism. You either believe in a higher power/s (various theisms) or you don't believe in higher powers (weak atheism) or you believe there are no higher powers (strong atheism).
Sitting on the fence with there could be a higher power falls into the weak atheism category.
Congrats on being that atheist that feels the need to go around telling people they’re an atheist lol
@@Paul-ks7nx haha true maybe I am 😅
I just love how Hank talks about three mysteries that could not have aliens as an explanation and follows up with “almost every mystery could be answered with the word aliens~.”
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The weirdness we ascribe to dark matter and "How Life Started" are commonly answered by "Aliens." But yeah, yawning...probably not aliens.
Idk, you could explain literally everything as aliens if you wanted to depending on what properties you're willing to ascribe to the aliens. (And given that they're inherently unknown there's no real limit on that.) Maybe dark matter is really just aliens pushing star systems around galaxies in a way that pleases them with some kind of undetectable quantum vacuum drive. Maybe aliens put life on Earth. Maybe aliens from a different universe created matter in this universe. Maybe quantum mechanics is tiny nano-aliens pushing things around so we can't predict how they'll behave exactly. Maybe natural selection is really just aliens determining how and when animals reproduce when we're not looking. Maybe RUclips is really just aliens forcing us to have audio/visual hallucinations that we convince ourselves we chose to have. Maybe Hank and John are successful at so many different things because they're aliens.
I'm surprised you don't think that aliens could explain those mysteries. I mean, Aliens are currently an explanation some people use for explaining "mysteries" that could not have been explained by aliens. Dark Matter could be alien tech. Life could have started on earth because it was seeded by aliens (you see conspiracy theories saying as such in some circles). Things existing could also be explained by giant spaghetti aliens... Aliens is a catch all, because it is a vague and amorphous concept, you can create whatever idea of alien you need to explain the thing.
Could the released videos be aliens? Yes, they could. Is it likely? Ironically for the same reasons that alien life is so probable makes it extremely improbable aliens are causing our UFO phenomena. Space is so mind bogglingly huge that interstellar travel is hard. That said, Hank is right, presupposing or ruling out an explanations at this stage would not be a methodical scientific process, it would be giving into a bias.
@@vlogbrothers but if you sit still long enough....it could be.
Correct me if I'm wrong: the mediocrity principle does not really work when discussing the likelihood of life emerging. Being self-aware, and therefore alive, is a precondition for being able to KNOW whether you are alive.
Imagine I gave you a bag filled with a hundred marbles, 99 red, and one blue, and I had you pick marbles at random and to write down your results, but ONLY if it was a blue marble. If you looked at the data as it was recorded, you couldn't really come to any conclusions about the composition of the bag, because you could only collect data in an unlikely circumstance.
If we assume that life is extraordinary, there is no conceivable way a "sample size of one" could ever comprise of the most common iteration of the data, because "no life" cannot judge whether or not it is alive. A sample size of one can ONLY ever be from a system that does have life.
And thus we have the Anthropic principle.
/scrambles for StatCrunch 🤯
Yes, I was wondering the same. But apparently even the wikipedia article and the astronomers cited in it got it wrong.
@D. F. I think the argument is that the observer is also life.
@D. F. The premise is that if you're self-aware, then you're alive, not the other way around. I suppose that could also be incorrect, but I think we have enough knowledge of it to say that the mediocrity principle doesn't necessarily apply to the existence of life. It certainly doesn't apply to the existence of self-awareness.
When you get a notification from Hank that says "Aliens" you have to drop everything
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I was in the middle of watching another video when the notification popped up and I clicked with no hesitation
What I learnt from this video:
1. *WE DON'T KNOW* much.
2. Science is fascinating.
3. *WE DON'T KNOW* most of the things.
4. Hank Green is sooo fun to listen to.
5. *WE DON'T KNOW* the answer to a lot of questions.
6. Hank still has his map of Narnia!!!
"good morning John!
....aliens"
Hank is the most peculiar alien I've ever seen.
I have to agree
"we don't know why we sleep!! we don't know why we yawn!!!!"
Aliens.
Hank calling aliens sexy is very on brand but also hilarious
I think it's really important to realize that a lot of the "impossible" video that's come out in the last few years are pretty obviously relatively mundane objects just viewed from really unusual vantage points(like through an infrared camera on a targeting pod carried by a fast moving jet). It's instructive to realize how much of how we see the world is just a reflection of our previous experiences.....and also how headlines lie.
What we do know is that sections of the government have a history of not informing the public when new technology is developed. We know that countries develop better technology to gain an advantage over one another.
This has nothing to do with history, this is simply a logical conclusion based on "the government must protect the people". If everyone was trustworthy there would be no reason to hide anything, but as you can very clearly see not everyone in the world or within a country is trustworthy and as such information must be hidden.
You can follow this and even ask yourself what kind of information is going to be hidden and for how long. For example, it is very clear that alien contact would not be hidden at all as it does not really make sense. You can also clearly see this in the history of possible discoveries of aliens by scientists (for example the Wow signal). If the government cared, they would have prevented these from ever seeing the daylight, but the government knows that a distant alien discovery is not going to be useful for hiding.
When it comes to UFOs on the other hand, there are many things that need to be hidden. Like for example military programs that you don't want to reveal to other countries. There's also incidents that you don't want to share with the people of your country either (for example Wikileaks). If someone accidentally records some new military jet that's testing a special maneuver, then obviously they don't want this material to get into the hands of (potential) enemies. This also explains why most of these secret UFO sighting are in the US and not for example in Europe or in China. The US cares a lot more about their military and technological improvements to it than any other country in the world. So any technology that could be useful for advancing their military will be held back for the public for a certain time so that enemies don't also get the same technology or find a way to beat it.
I have never agreed with every single individual second of a video more, ever.
My dad (RIP) had told me for over 50 years that UFOs are real. He worked on an aircraft carrier during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and knew a lot of the pilots. They described these things they had seen to him, and he was absolutely convinced they saw something that couldn’t be explained. I always took his stories about them with a grain of salt...but this sounds just like the objects the pilots saw. (I wish he was still alive, because he would feel totally vindicated.)
I've been waiting for this!!! Thank you!
We don't know if they're aliens, but we definitely want them to be.
Nah it has to be aliens, there’s no other explanation
@@Paul-ks7nx
Yea. Obvious invasion goin on.
"The most elementary and valuable statement in science; the beginning of wisdom is: I do not know." - Lt. Cmdr. Data - 2365 AD
Hank is an alien. He can explain ANYTHING.
Hank, the second airforce video is a duck or goose. It's apparent speed is caused by parallax and the speed of the aircraft filming it at a distance.
This kind of reminds me of people using the “Mandela Effect” as an excuse for misremembering trivial details, especially the ones who believe it has to do with parallel universes leaking into each other. They’re so afraid of saying they don’t know or that they were wrong that they just have a catch-all “solution” to turn to.
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0:39 But surely we're not picking the solar system randomly. In fact, we are 'picking' one from those that have intelligent life, because only the ones that have intelligent life can be the first one sample, because intelligent life is needed to do the sampling, and it must observe its own solar system before any others. So the fact that our 'sample' solar system has it tells us nothing?
We aren’t picking our solar system randomly, we live in it, but from a God’s eye perspective it’s a random solar system with an earthlike planet with the potential to develop intelligent life. Therefore at galactic scale (the scale req. to understand our place in the galaxy) the mediocrity principle applies.
Hope that makes sense :)
Having just finished my first stem degree, i can say without a doubt the hardest thing ive done in science is try to identify WHICH questions to ask. The questions that lead to scientific exploration are not just "what is this weird thing in the sky? ", theyre also questions like "how can we figure out what this thing in the sky is?"
Like, for example, those two things don't do a great job of explaining each other.
Not sure why that was such a FUN spark of cognition in my head. I love Hank's thought processes!
Hank said: yawn.
I yawn.
I definitely WANT aliens to visit Earth, but I just can't reasonably believe that they already have. As far as UFO's go, I'm with SETI.
Do you want to be in some museum orbiting Vega or something? 😂
@@twonumber22 God, I would love that hahaha
@@danielrockett4434 Well then please tell them you're the only member of your species and Earth is total bummer.
Why not? What’s stopping them?
@@bsbg-lifts There's lots of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. My favorite is Virtual Reality.
This is why I've used UAP instead of UFO when talking about this topic. UFO is too synonymous with aliens, and I feel like that just disqualifies the discussion from the start. It's sad, but very true.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamed about of in your philosophy.”
This is one of those vlogbrothers vids that I need to watch a few times to make sure I really understand, bc I know Hank’s making an important point but my brain gets twisted on itself trying to comprehend everything.
Then, I remember that Hank had to not only understand but communicate back this info in under 4 mins or less.
I want to point out the importance of distinguishing science and religion. I'm a religious person, so I believe in things that I cannot prove---I have faith. Faith has no place in pure scientific methodology, and that's okay. Likewise, trying to prove a religion scientifically is, so far as I know, a fruitless exercise, and that's okay.
I think the most important thing is to actively think about where religion and science touch and where they diverge. I think of it as a difference in questions. Science can answer questions like "*how* did my body come into existence, and how does it stay alive?" Religion can answer "*why* am I within a body, and why am I alive?" The two subjects meet at a fascination with the way the human body works.
I guess philosophy is the intersection between religion and science. And superstition is an improper application of religion to science..as for improperly applying science to religion? A word doesn't immediately occur to me, but I know that it's exhausting to deal with as a religious person.
Maybe improperly applying science to religion is called heathenism. XD
finally, another religious person in this comment section ❤️
Thank you for expanding upon the conversation you had with John on the Pod.
“Flagrant guessing of sexy things” 😂😂😂 ily Hank
does anyone else find it mildly comforting to think there may be a more advanced species out there? Clearly, if they progressed past the point we are at as a civilization, there must be hope for us to overcome our challenges.
But we haven’t found any. Which means we could be alone in the universe, destined to choke ourselves out beneath a cold steel sky like the countless other deceased extraterrestrial invertebrates never to make first contact
@@jiffylou98 Fair point it is possible we are approaching the great filter of civilization, and the reason we have yet to encounter extraterrestrial life is that our present challenges are insurmountable. That can also be an oddly comforting thought, it would mean we have progressed as far as a civilization possible can making us among the most successful species in the known universe.
If they could cooperate a bit better I think they'd overcome out challenges easily. However, if their evolution was driven by survival/competition likes ours then we might be screwed.
Hank! Or John! One of the two of you, can you please talk about vancouver island's old growth being cut down. Our media isn't covering it, our national outlet even fired the freelancer that was reporting on it, we passed 100 arrest of protesters and observers the other day. Even the bigger news outlets reporters are being harrassed now. Please, this needs talking about and is being actively suppressed.
I wonder if i add plus here will it go up the comments
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Ty caro
It’s so hard to say “I don’t know” without spending a night tossing and turning over the possible answers and then feeling frustrated when the rational side says “you don’t know. you won’t know right away. you might not know ever. now go to sleep.”
Brain does not work that way most times.
I like Hank and John for the same reason I like books. They help me find words things in my head that I don't yet have words for.
You can tell a lot about someone by how they react to something they don't understand. They either do everything they can to reinforce what they already believe to be true, or they do everything can to refute what they believe might be true.
I think taking the middle ground is what we should be aiming for, waiting for more evidence and not being opposed to the facts if it is or isn't something otherworldly is a reasonable response/approach.
People will go to great lengths to deny that it’s aliens. It shatters their wold view and they can’t handle it
You could pretty much replace the word "Aliens" with "God" in this concept, and it wouldn't change much. Good video.
The same inner child part of my brain that has been so overwhelmed by all these new revelations is SO comforted by Hank Green jumping in the ring to say "it's ok to say we don't know"
You two were my highschool classes, all of them pretty much, now you are still apart of my life in my adult years, you guys are amazing keep up the with the knowledge!!
I’m looking forward to this.
It didn’t disappoint
Mediocrity principle does not apply here, since the sample was not randomly chosen. Only a solar system with intelligent life can harbor life that asks if there is alien life in the universe.
EDIT: Even Wikipedia got it wrong. The same logic would imply that, just because you, who is asking the question which the largest group of animals on earth is, are human, the largest group of animals on earth would be humans.
I don't know about that. I know a smattering of unintelligent living beings that ask that question and will tell you they know the answer, and then explain how that alien life built the pyramids.
“It’s really important to be able to say that we don’t know what something is without immediately trying to explain it.”Holy sh*t. This may be the most accurate, wonderfully understated, point I’ve heard since...I don’t know. When. 🙏
As much as I appreciate having new things to think about and question about the way I think about things, it's also very satisfying to have things I think about put together so nicely.
Indeed, it is ok to not know everything. I wish everyone could embrace this so fervently.
Hank what’s your opinion on E.T ( the movie ) ?
It was pretty good. Not enough transformers, though.
Today is my birthday. Coincidentally the one thing I wanted most was for aliens to show up today or make the news. Thank you for posting a video about them!
This reminds me of the time my mother in law asked me what I think happens after we die. I don't believe in religion, magic or a 'creator'. The question took me back for a second, how would I know? Why does she think I have any way of knowing that? I'm not going to just guess at something I have no way of knowing. Did she think I would just make up an answer for something I didn't know? Finally after mulling it over, I told her "I am not so arrogant as to pretend I have an answer to that question. I guess we'll all have to find that out the same way eventually."
Based
I my goal was to be SETI scientist for a long time. I fucking love aliens.
This sort of thinking is why I consider myself an agnostic.
I've always found it strange that my atheist friends argue against Christianity by saying that science hasn't found evidence for it. (I understand why they don't make the same argument to our pagan and Buddhist friends, but that's another topic, and I don't blame them.) I'm a Christian, and I appreciate and believe in science just as much as they do. Hank said he doesn't think aliens can't be the answer, and I think that's the right stance. It isn't impossible, and it's worth considering. It just isn't a terribly useful path to pursue at the moment. So why has skepticism become practically synonymous with atheism? If you're going purely by science, surely agnosticism is a much more sensible stance.
Depends on whether you mean agnostic in terms of deism or in terms of theism. Christianity, like all other theisms, implies a lot more than just the belief that there exists a god. Very litteral interpretations of the Bible will yield things like creationism that are easily debunkable because they go directly against observable fact. Of course this represents like a super tiny fraction of believers so it would be a clear mischaracterization to say that there is very strong evidence against theism in general or variations of christian theism in particular, but it would also be dishonest to say that the only evidence against theism is the lack of evidence, which would indeed be pretty weak evidence.
Now obviously it will always be quite subtle because positive evidence will always be against a specific aspect of theism rather than the entire set of beliefs, but at least it's reasonable to say that some theisms are objectively more wrong than others from a scientific standpoint.
No one cares ur an athiest bro
"I don't think it's not aliens" Imma be real witchu that's all I wanted to hear
THROWBACK! Your Letter to the Aliens video is the first Vlogbrothers video I saw (via WIMP.com), and what convinced me to finally start paying attention to RUclips so I could subscribe to you directly. :D
I still can't process the fact that when pentagon released real UFO footage everyone ignored them. Like I know corona but c'mon we could've pushed them to share more!
If it was convincing footage, homeworld security would be number one priority, and space force would not be such a joke.
I mean they did it. It just wasn’t much and the tapes and transcripts had already leaked :/
I thought the opposite happened and everyone had become fixated on them.
NO EDGE
Oh that's a good throwback
Circling back to this because it's one of my favorite things to wonder about:
Over the last few years the Navy has patented some really weird stuff (publicly, which is extra weird) that would - if they're based on real technology - explain a ton of modern UFO sightings (and also change the world drastically).
High-temperature superconductors, gravitational wave generators, compact fusion reactors (the size of a car that would put out at a minimum the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant), and high-energy electromagnetic field generators. Also a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft” claimed to be able to “engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level” by seemingly bending the laws of physics as we know them. They've been dubbed 'the UFO patents'.
There's a chance that they're a counterintelligence plot to get our rivals to dump money into researching impossible technology. The Navy had to fight to get them approved because they were so out there, and one of their arguments is that China is making advances with the same technology. 🤷🏼♀️
This is the best response to the recent news about UAPs that I have heard so far. Whether you are trying to explain the phenomenon or trying to debunk it there is no good reason to bring up aliens.
I’m an aerospace engineer and I want them to be alien craft so I can learn about how they work but also I’m already terrified of space politics 😬. Anyway, happy Friday everyone
I hope everyone who sees this is having a good day and if you aren’t i hope it gets better soon 💖
how nice.. tsk tsk..,
interesting... 👀
We need more scientists looking at this and continuing to remind us, it’s not aliens until it is. Calling this aliens is going to make it disappear, I hope that doesn’t happen too.
Aliens/flying saucers are essentially a modern version of ancient-folklore. Different cultures have for many thousands of years believed in 'sky-spirits' - powerful, otherworldly beings that are either benevolent or cruel and live in the sky. In the Christian tradition (and as far back as ancient Egypt) there are powerful-winged messengers (angels and/or devils), but different forms of these exist in several Native-American groups - the Above People of the Blackfoot, the Wakinyan of the Sioux. The creator God of many religions lives above us in the sky. During trance rituals, the San hunter-gatherers of southern Africa, who are linguistically and genetically the oldest human group alive, claim they turn into birds, fly up to the sky along golden threads and encounter powerful spirits. These experiences are similar in some ways to certain psychedelic trips.
I always find it interesting how UFO is often synonymous with Aliens but the U literally stands for "unidentified"
Kinda hoping that if aliens are real this is how I find out
Same
Just wrapping up 'Axiom's End', so I also have aliens on the brain. At this point, I'm like: Sure. Why not?
I had an instructor in my masters who taught about the cognitive theory that when we encounter new information we enter a state of dissonance, and then our brain has to resolve that dissonance by either assimilating it with things we already know, or accommodating our understandings and mental architecture to incorporate that new knowledge. To me "it's aliens" sounds a lot like just assimilation. The key, however, my instructor said, was to try as much as possible to just sit with dissonance without trying to resolve it, because *that* is the when the learning is actually happening.
You could also apply this to the god of the gaps fallacy.
Came here to say just that
YES! This.
How nice to see just "Aliens" pop up on your screen and immediately think Hank Green
Hank: Is it aliens? Probably not. Why? Because we don't know almost everything, and finding an explanation that could explain almost anything doesn't recognize that there is a whole lot we don't know.
Me: Right. Interdimensional beings then.
"In science and in life, you have to follow the interesting." God I love this.
"Almost every mystery could be answered with the word...."
From this point forward in the video, you could could replace the remaining instances of the word "aliens" with the word "God" and nothing would really change. I personally find it bit frustrating that Hank can put together a well-mannered yet critical video about credulity regarding aliens, yet similar criticism about credulity regarding the divine is somehow uncouth or off limits. It seems to me that both the truth value and predictive value of each is identical, yet the rules for discussion of each topic is very different.
I recall a very old vlogbrothers video where Hank equated the question "do you believe in God" to a blind person asking "what color skin do you have?". I'd suggest that the question is much more similar to "do you believe in aliens", but I can't shake the feeling that Hank (and others) would view one question as somewhat hostile and view the other as a genuine effort to judge the thinking processes of the person being asked.
I promise that I'm not trying to start a flame war here and I don't intend any offense. If anybody disagrees with my reasoning then I'm more than happy to learn where I'm wrong but, asking kindly, I'd rather not be yelled at.
@@Lady_Kitsune09 Thanks for taking the time to write. I too fear the vitriol of the youtube comments section, so fingers crossed.
In my experience, religion primarily tries to answer questions that are unanswerable. Death isn't something that we typically come back from, so we can't know what comes after it. We can't tell what happened before the big bang, so it's near impossible to know why it happened.
If the scientific process can't answer a question, I don't see a problem with using God as an answer - or using the simulation argument for that matter. Personally I'm not interested in those questions, but if they keep you awake at night and God works as an answer to you I don't see a problem with it.
But aliens are used to explain away some very answerable questions, like how the pyramids were built. That's the problem. Believing in aliens is perfectly reasonable (as Hank said, it's very likely that intelligent life is out there), but using aliens as an excuse to not look into a question is a problem.
Also there is a very fuzzy barrier between religion, culture and identity. That's why the question would seem hostile. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing, but there you go.
Hmmm... I have thoughts but they aren't in a good order, and I am not sure where I fall on this. I'll have to come back later if I get my thoughts on order. I definitely see where you're coming from, and to an extent very much feel this, as someone who was raised as an atheist and have yet to come across something that others described as divine or even spiritual that I would not describe as a confluence of things - perhaps many that are very much unknown to us - relationships and such, that does not seem like it could come down to chemistry, physics, maths. I think it's beautiful, honestly. Like, I get struck by awe and wonder in a way that seems like how many others may feel about the spiritual by the combination of science, the "in between things" (relationships between two people, or two neurons, or two atoms, versus the relationships between many people, or many neurons, or many atoms... systems, really), and the yet-unknown. I can never know that a god, or gods, or spirits do not exist, and that's okay, but my belief comes down to the fact that I think it's more complicated and al-so more simple than that. On the other hand, I have some unorganised thoughts as to why 100% equating belief in aliens to belief in a diety, dieties, or spirits might be a bit tricky. Some might be history, culture, community, how wide-spread do belief is... but like I said, my thoughts are not yet organised on this, and I don't know where exactly I fall on the issue yet. Thanks for the food for thought!
To sort of jump off someone else's reply, believing in aliens has never been part of anyone's fundamental belief system for why anything in the world exists or happens, including themselves. Believing in aliens to explain things is believing in an intelligence that is more or less just super-human, but doesn't give any answers to the great questions of, say, why bad things happen to good people, what the purpose of existence is, what is moral and what is not, what happens after death, etc. Religions, at least, have something to offer to existential questions and to give a guidebook to life and tell us, ultimately, if what we're doing is right or wrong and what our purpose is. There's also a comfort in the idea that there's a guiding hand for your life and an answer to everything in the end, which aliens certainly do not provide.
People's entire lives can revolve around what their religion tells them to do and not do, what's right and wrong, and what they should be focused on in their lives. Calling that into question suggests that the system their entire life is based on and the moral code they try to live by is laughable. Believing in aliens doesn't even touch that.
I'm not sure if I just went on a tangent or helped answer your question at all, but it's what I got.
I think that humans just struggle with the concept of not knowing. It's like instead of accepting that we don't know things, we just want to latch on to ANY explanation.
Love these videos that are just him rambling about science. Keep em coming.
Aliens or not, it's pretty cool that I don't even know Hank and yet he still takes the time to personally address me in these videos...