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60% Of U.S. Believe Life Exists On Other Planets
jangobongo writes "Does intelligent life exist anywhere besides Earth? Are regular churchgoers less likely to believe life has evolved on other planets? Do more Democrats or Republicans believe in extraterrestrials? And if alien life makes contact, what should we do? These questions were asked on a poll released last week that shows that two-thirds of Americans do believe that life exists on other planets, and of that group, 90% say if we receive a message from another planet we should reply. The poll was commissioned by the SETI Institute and the National Geographic Channel."
Check out this guy who can summon UFOs on demand. Has a link to a news broadcast where they filmed him doing it. Shocked the hell out of the camera crew.
_ ID=44503
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE
Pretty cool.
-Matt
Perhaps if you were better educated and less arrogant, you would realize that your assertion is not the only possibility that can be asserted from the data.
Perhaps the other 40% adhere to the principle that Belief gets in the way of learning.
(R.A. Heinlein - "Time Enough for Love")
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
I'm confused why only 46% of christians believe that aliens exist. Is it because then they might have to consider that a god might have more to think about than their petty affairs, and that the bible might just be pretty limited in galatic terms? I always think an alien visiting earth would just laugh at the primitive beliefs of our so called 'advanced' civilisations. Interested to hear what other religions think about aliens. Would Mohammed, Jesus etc have any relevance to someone from Alpha Centauri?
I read somewhere (lost the link) that on some surveys more young people believe that aliens exist than that they will get anything from the social security system.
"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation." - Richard Feynman
It would be interesting to know how many Americans could competantly argue the existance of a statistical likelihood of such; counter the common objections (wrt the narrowness of the range of environments in which life as we know it is sustainable and the improbability of such environments being generated by chance); and otherwise take part in an intelligent discussion on the topic. Depressing, I expect, but interesting. (Actually, I wonder at the extent to which the intelligent design movement, for all of its faults, may have helped to educate folks about the improbability of randomly generating an environment where life as we know it can exist -- there's something to be said for having folks who can put up a competant counterargument).
I don't anticipate that knowing how many Americans can prove life exists beyond Earth would be particularly interesting at all. (I presume you're excluding any life in human-generated artifacts, particularly those in orbit; and Americans posessing nonconclusive evidence [ie. those involved in studying the potential and/or evidence for present or former microbial life on Mars]? If not, perhaps I'm off by a bit).
So, how about Fermi's Paradox?
I do hope aliens have been observing us for a long long time. That way, when we finally reach the stage where we can actually make contact with them (either because they find us developed enough, or we just develop far enough to find them), they can tell us what our history REALLY was like.
The chances of no life is pretty slim.
However, the fact we are pretty late in the 'cosmic timeline' would lead one to think that most intelligent life has long since died out.
But space is vast.. and anything is possible if you use large enough numbers..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A large percentage of people believe that earth has already been visited by aliens and some people believe that aliens are studying earth right now.
Exactly how much evidence do you have to prove that these statements are not true?
I don't believe them either, but I don't really concern myself with people believe things where there really isn't much evidence one way or the other. I'm a lot more worried about people believing things that are provably untrue, like, say, that the Earth is only 6000 years old...
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Suicide is killing yourself. A lot of smokers have underlying mental problems, and smoking is a form of "self-medication". Google for smoking mental illness self-medication.
here is just one result
... it makes sense - you have to be nuts to smoke.Well ya know, you shouldn't lock your mind into ancient alternatives to democracy. Why is it not acceptable to wish for something better? Democracy is just mob rule. Obviously suggesting that we should replace it with a dictatorship is a step backwards, but are there any steps forward? I personally think that for most every social issue there is a right and a wrong solution. I don't think democracy finds the right solution as often as it should (especially not the representative democracy under which us westerners live). The problem of course is that people don't agree. If we all agreed to live under a system of rules (a real system based on axioms, not case analysis) we could justify every action that our government makes mathematically. But how do you agree on the axioms? We come back to democracy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The reason more individuals take pot shots at Christians is because they are by FAR the majority in this country; almost every single elected representative in Congress is Christian.
No one is threatening the rights of Christian Americans by summarily imprisioning them; the same can't be said for those of the Muslim faith in America. Don't give me the crap about the new rise of secularists in America; take a good hard look at the US Senate/House (Hint: what state is the Senate majority leader from?) and who has more sway there before you start spouting random rebuttals about prayer in schools/pledge of allegiance. After that, think hard about those new evolution stickers.
Besides, there's no need to make fun of Muslims when there's already deep-seated hatred in this country of people from the Middle East who aren't Israeli. In short, it's very different to make fun of a persecuted minority vs. a dominant majority with powerful lobbysts.
I'm getting more and more convinced that polls can not be used as an accurate representation of a population's feelings towards something. And typically, I do my best to ignore them.
First, because I don't believe the very small sample sizes can really fully show an accurate picture of the entire population's feelings. 1,000 out of 250+ million with only a ~3% margin of error? I'm sorry, but no. (I should note that my failure to trust in the accuracy of small sample sizes, no matter how much math you throw at it, made statistics a difficult course for me).
Second, because I think polls are often constructed in such a way where questions manage to get worded so they don't really get after the original intent. I had the opportunity to work as an outside consultant a few years back for an IT build out imitative for a large public university system. As we were developing the guidelines for the build out, the powers that be brought in an polling firm. It turned out developing the questions for the survey became the most difficult and frustrating portion of the entire project. It also became very clear that the polling firm was "modifying" the intent of the questions to fit the agenda of the administration.
For example, the subject came up about putting new computers in computer labs, and the age old debate of "should we buy PCs or Macs" started up (these were non-CS labs, and it was decided by everyone against something like Linux for a number of reasons I don't want to get into).. "Aha, we'll find that out in the poll" says the administration. The question submitted to the polling company was "While in campus computer labs, would you prefer to work on a PC or a Macintosh?" By the time it went through the administration, the question became "While on campus, do you normally use a PC or a Macintosh?" A subtle difference, but important.
When the poll was finally administered, it turns out that the answer to that question reflected the percentage of PCs to Macintoshes currently on the school campuses (about 70% PC, 30% Mac). This is despite the fact that most students I spoke with would much prefer to use the PCs, but often just went to the Macs because the lines were always shorter in the Mac labs. Had the question been asked as it was written, most of us involved with the project expected we'd see more around an 85%-15%.
When I hear about polls that make statements like "60% of Americans believe there is life on other planets", I always wonder what, exactly the question they asked was. Most polls don't say this, but thankfully this one had a link where you could see what the questions actually are. The first question, the big one read:
Do you believe that there is life on other planets in the universe besides earth?
With possible answers of "Yes, No, and I don't know".
Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, not really. If I had been asked that question, I'd probably end up in the "I don't know" category. To me, the word "believe" implies certainty. I would say that it's highly likely that there is extraterrestrial life, but I really don't know for sure. Had there been an option of "Probably", or if the question was "Do you think it's likely that there is life on other planets in the universe besides Earth", I would have no problem saying yes, and I think the results would be different.
I mean, if someone asked me "Do you believe the 101 Freeway will be congested tomorrow morning during rush hour?" and only give "Yes", "No" and "I don't know" as options, I'd answer I don't know, despite the fact that unless something very major was going on that I didn't know about I'm pretty much sure that the 101 is going to have heavy traffic.
What gets me is I've been polled a few times by telephone, and ended up frustrating the pollsters because they often asked for "yes" or "no" answers to questions that needed better qualification. One I remember well was from a large alcohol company that made rum. After asking me about the fre
The Internet is generally stupid
Ignoring the fact that this is straying way off topic...
What's truly weird is how so many of us delude ourselves into believing that we live in democracies (ie. rule of the people) simply because we hold elections. The main function of an election is not to give the people a voice, but to periodically renew the governmental entity (congress, parliament, legislature, judiciary, whatever). It's a way of cleaning out the old and bringing in the new -- but it's always the same political parties in roughly the same mixture.
Even here in Canada, in one election we wiped the Progressive Conservative party off the electoral map in 1993. But all of the Progressive Conservative policies remained intact (the GST, Free Trade, the public service cuts, low inflation policy, etc. etc). Elected governments rarely contradict or rescind the policies of the previous government. In Canada and the US after a legislative election, generally 80% to 90% of the incumbents win.
Which is good for the people in power. It gives the illusion of listening to the voice of the people but doesn't disrupt the reign held on power by the parties, corporations and unions. Elections are, in fact, essential to ensuring that the powerful maintain a fresh, strong grip on power.
True democracy is not about giving the people a choice: it's about giving the people a voice. If the powers-that-be simply give people a choice, they limit what power the people have and reserve the real power for themselves.
What would a real democracy look like?
Probably the most genuine democracy would draft their legislators at random (like juries are or mandatory military service) from all walks of life and force them to go to Washington or London or Ottawa and do their duty. Namely, if any laws need to be made, make them -- otherwise, don't. This would solve many problems such as the underrepresentation of minorities and women in government. They could even remain anonymous and we could make it a crime to reveal the identity of a legislator.
Other things that would make democracy less illusionary:
* Give the vote to every citizen above the age of zero (obviously until a child was able to claim the right to vote themselves, their parents would vote for them). In most places, there is no IQ pre-requisite to being an elector and children should have the right to be represented by their government. I suspect if kids could vote (or parents voting for them) education and health care would be a higher priority. If teenagers voted, maybe we'd actually get some movement on the environment. I wonder what promises a politician would make when visiting a high-school campus if the kids there could actually vote...
* Make voting continuous -- not just once every 4 years or whatever. Register our votes and give every citizen the right to change their vote whenever they want to. Thus an incumbent could effectively be recalled any time his/her constituents lose confidence in him/her.
But those are wishy-washy measures. As long as we have any form of voting, we dilute any power vested in the people.
That would be damn cool, but some of the biggest events might have been ignored at the time.
Jesus pops to mind. Christianity didn't really take off until he was dead. Any outside observers simply wouldn't have been paying him much attention.
Or who knows - maybe the aliens were rooting for the aboriginal peoples of the Americas and concentrated all of their attention there, ignoring the rabble over in Europe.
aaaannndd...I just realized how stupid I sound throwing a fly into this most unlikely of ointments. Ah well - Submit!
Last post!
You keep using that word [Wiccan].
It doesn't mean what I think you must think it means.
...or at least we should. If "over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret" isn't good enough, then dismiss all of these as swamp gas while you are at it.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
and when they raid your IRA, what then??? people in the UK have completely lost faith in the pensions industry and the Labour government doing a raid (hitting them with a "Windfall Tax") on the pensions funds didn't do anyone any favours either...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
anyone remember the good old drake equation?
Yep. Too bad it's so often abused by people who call the abuse "science." Crichton quote:
This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.
As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion.
I can't disagree.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Any physical life forms, obeying the laws of physics as we know them cannot be too radically different from life on earth.
That's a anthropocentric prejudice, similar to thinking that Earth is the center of the universe (isn't it obvious?). Also your phrase "Because the laws of physics appear to operate uniformly throughout the Universe as far as we have observed until now, the only physical life allowed must be based on carbon, just like life on Earth" is more a guess than an established fact.
Have you seen Solaris? (the novel, not the movies). It described an alien intelligent life in the form of a whole planet: the ocean itself had evolved to react to the environment in order to sustain its existence.
That lifeform wouldn't have a need to "communicate", "feed" itself or any other action that we usually relate to life. This kind of "alien" life is what the previous poster was arguing. It has nothing to do with spirituality, the Bible or alternate planes of existence.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Thats a little harsh, don't you think. Personnally I fall into a few of the categories mentioned by the parent (I'll keep which ones to myself though) but I would like to point out that not all things deal in absolutes. There are a number of reasons someone would believe in many of the things you mentioned, many people I know believe in some form of a god and afterlife simply because that is how they were raised and it makes them feel better to belive in it. Are they wrong, who knows, does believing that way hurt anyone around them, no. The harm from beliefs come from the fanactical zealots in any side of a belief. What you or I believe is our choice, when someone starts to press their beliefs onto others is when we have a problem.
The stupidity of your average American is just about the same as the average European, we simply show it off better.
Looking at your list:
Angels
Christian theology (as in walking on water.)
God
Aliens
Bible
Witches (that can use magic to do thins)
As far as I can tell they are all beliefs people hold without reasonable levels of proof. What in your mind separates these things?