This American Life -- Fermi's Paradox

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https://www.thisamericanlife.org/617/fermis-paradox

First post I started in a dog's age.

I was listening to This American Life the other night before bed. For anyone who doesn't know, This American Life is a basically a liberal, yet fairly even keeled presentation of "stories" and commentary on American life. They cover everything from racism, politics, science, psychology, with occasional takes on magic, death, etc. But they present as very science based. Very skeptical.

So in this podcast there is a physicist lamenting Fermi's paradox. If there are aliens, then where are they all. And he spends about 20 minutes whining and crying about how we are alone in the universe and there are zero signs of intelligent life elsewhere. 

For this guy: The only other intelligent life he can seem to imagine would travel in a physical space ship to Earth. 

And he is a physicist. And though he claimed to be obsessed with the possibility of alien life he had apparently not read any of the literature surrounding "UFOs". 

I'm not that widely read on UFOs and "the other." I may have read 50 or so books. But I've listened to probably 1000's of hours of discussion and interviews on the subject. I have the Faded Discs archives and have listened to that material with interest. I've also spent countless hours pondering the relationship between such apparently diverse subjects as astral projection, NDEs, lucid dreaming, alien abduction, sleep paralysis, magic, reincarnation, non-local transfer of information in such events as after death communication and the UFO or "other" subject.

I'm fairly skeptical. I don't hold a firm opinion one way or the other about what underlies the juncture of these phenomena. But I think it is hard to deny that there is a deep mystery involved.

It always surprises me when an intelligent mainstream voice seems utterly ignorant of any of the subject matter surrounding these issues. And then spouts their opinion as if it were "The Very Voice of Reason."
(This post was last modified: 2018-07-11, 05:35 PM by chuck.)
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A familiar, difficult experience for me. My pattern is usually: bewilderment/incomprehension > disorganizing feelings of intense helplessness and rage > aggressive fantasies > frantic yet ineffective efforts at self-regulation through inappropriate recourse to substances and sexual activity.

Ah, good times.
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