Can you imagine that someone this clear-headed was ever the President of the United States?
- I am selling my family farm because I don't want there to be a perception of influence.
to:
- I am keeping all of my companies and property and will be charging the Secret Service which has the duty to protect me room and board.
That said, the whole UFO thing is pretty ridiculous --- it's _hard_ to bring an object which is under power and moving at speeds which allow interstellar travel into our solar system at a relative velocity which allows interaction --- witness ʻOumuamua which despite being "just" a dead chunk of rock was detected and photographed.
(I’m on the side of “we will die out before ever interacting with intelligent alien life”, but I still think it’s non-zero.)
Wait, which UFO thing are you referring to? Carter never thought it was anything extraterrestrial, he stated that he assumed it was a natural or man-made event. Are you saying it’s strange that some people believe in aliens?
- velocity --- it would need to be moving quickly and would have to decelerate (requires energy) to do more than pass through
- life support/technology requirements and attendant heat signature --- interstellar space is _cold_ and not conducive to either, so requires on-going energy output
- size requirements --- basically, an entire ecological system needs to be moved around --- how many trees does one person require to produce sufficient oxygen for them to breathe? (a quick search has an answer from 1--8)
&c. See Kim Stanley Robinson's recent novel _Aurora_ for a well-researched examination of this.
With our technology, we could easily avoid being seen by a hunter-gatherer society.
Do you imagine that your society does not have similar blind spots?
How much arrogance there is in the modern Euro-centric world. Because the society has explored beyond what our grandparents believed possible, suddenly we are the pinnacle of the Universe.
Consider for example the "one-electron" hypothesis --- a far simpler take on it is that the electron is a fundamental particle and that we are nearing an end-game of understanding sub-atomic physics and realizing Einstein's dream of a grand-unified theory --- the universe doesn't seem to be shaped and formed so as to allow for FTL, so one instead needs to work within the bounds of converting mass to energy.
Who said anything about life? A machine-intelligence could operate a tiny craft. And even a biological, think brain in a jar, doesn't need that much space. Astronomers cannot find or disprove the existence of Planet X in the ort cloud, an object at least several times the size of earth. An entire civilization could be out there and we wouldn't notice.
1) life may take different forms, some of which we probably haven't even dreamt about
2) life is not necessary for inter-stellar probes to exist. In fact it probably makes more sense to make these things entirely artificial
I agree.
This isn't anything new, but I suspect it has to do with a much more fractured sense of national identity, and shared core values.
That engenders a "us vs them", "take what is mine" attitude, from top to bottom.
He was not the president we deserved, but he was the president we needed.
‘The term “October surprise” was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election.
To forestall such a scenario, Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with representatives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid leading to a deal supposedly finalized in Paris in October in which a future Reagan administration would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the election.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-...
In US politics it really is true with one political party that every accusation in a confession.
Carter is straight up the best individual person we have elected in 100+ years. Glad to see at least HN agrees that he was based.
Meanwhile, Reagan was wealthy, the Bushes were oil wealth, Romney was a very wealthy Bain founder and CEO, and Trump obviously.
One of our known scientific facts is that we know our understanding physics is incomplete (namely, QCD and GR are incompatible), so obviously we can never put 100% confidence into Carter's negative claim.
This is just Epistemology 101, and totally uncontroversial.
For all people, our perceptions are influenced by what we expect to see. European explorers attributed "lost white tribes",[0] and native people saw dragons instead of sailing ships. No doubt many of their people said those who saw dragons were the "clear headed" ones!
Maybe (just maybe!) we should remember our history, and think twice before being hasty with confident-sounding "End Of History / End Of Knowledge" style pronouncements.
By this line of thinking we can never put “100% confidence” into anything at all.
But our understanding of physics will never be “complete”, therefore this is just a cheap argument to say we must assign every claim a non-zero chance of being true.
> This is just Epistemology 101, and totally uncontroversial.
You’re mincing claims, jumping from obscure physics to “Epistemology 101” and trying to lump it all together as “totally uncontroversial”, but it’s really just an attempt at moving the goal posts with fancy language and big words.
It doesn’t change the fact that the original claim clearly has some factual inconsistencies, such as the way the date of the encounter doesn’t even match other records of the event or even appear to be in the same season at which the event occurred, or that none of the other people present appear to have come away with similar observations.
Talking about physics and GR and QCD and Epistemology 101 doesn’t change anything. It’s just superfluous jargon.
>But our understanding of physics will never be “complete”
You (and all others) conflated my argument with the tired old trope that all knowledge 'might' be wrong. Yes I agree: yawn.
However in this case we actually have positive knowledge that our current physics must be incorrect. This is a far far stronger epistemic claim, of course.
Funny how for something so uncontroversial, it can be so controversial to remind people of it!
>fancy language and big words
>the original claim clearly has some factual inconsistencies, such as...
That is not an "end of knowledge" style pronouncement, merely shorthand to avoid having to tack an "as far as we know" onto every single statement we make. Because we can known next to nothing with certainty. I don't know I'm speaking to a person and not an automaton for example, nor do I know I'm not a brain in a vat. It'd be very tedious if I had to caveat everything I said, however.
Carter explained that he is not using the word to describe racism, but the desire to acquire, occupy, confiscate and then to colonize Palestinian land.
Source: https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2008/january/cartervisit.html
The problem is that that is not apartheid. Apartheid “separateness” is explicitly a racist ideology and about forcing people to live in separate lands, not about colonizing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people
[1] It is worth noting that we also don’t use the word apartheid to describe the actions and regimes of older times that we see all over the world.
So saying: “But they did it to a different people, dozens of generations ago” is not admissible as a justification for the crime of apartheid for the ICC. In fact the crime of apartheid has no clauses for any justification, at all, under international law.
Here is a list of countries that have been accused of apartheid:
- China
- India
- Iran
- Israel
- Malaysia
- Myanmar
- North Korea
- Nigeria
- Qatar
- Saudi Arabia
- Soviet Union
- Sudan
- United States
I would be interested to know whether any country, other than South Africa, has been found guilty of the crime of apartheid by the ICC and what the repercussions for said regime had been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_apartheid_by_co...
> "The crime of apartheid" means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;
So yes it is a racist ideology, but it doesn’t need the perpetrators to be explicitly racist. The fact that the oppressed Palestinians are of a different racial group as the oppressors, and the policy is to maintain a domination of one racial group over the other, that means this counts as apartheid.
“I didn’t mean to be racist” is not an excuse admissible to the ICC
That said, The Rome statute would not become international law until 22 years after Carter was no longer President. And would never be ratified by neither the USA nor Israel. Though interestingly Palestine has ratified it.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/1979-vela-in...
...of our contemporary civilization. If you think objectively about it, there is no reason for the technological level of any potential alien visitor to be in a range that we can understand - solely for the act of traveling great distances that are required to reach a distant star, they would need to have discovered physics paradigms far beyond our understanding today.
Us trying to 'interpret and judge' the technological level of such a civilization today would be akin to a never-contacted tribe seeing a helicopter and deducing that it cant be real because 'people cant fly'.
No, they wouldn't. Modest progress in engineering and cultural adaptation, would produce generation ships large enough to sustain a human colony capable of traversing the galaxy on the scale of thousands of years. On the other hand, we could launch a ChatGPT-enabled* probe to arrive at Proxima Centauri in about a century with today's technology.
If you think objectively about it, "physics paradigms far beyond our understanding today" do not necessarily exist. Or if they do, they will not necessarily contribute significantly to our ability to traverse interstellar distances. While it is hubris to assume that we know everything; it is foolhardy to assume that there is gold at the end of the rainbow.
* note that ChatGPT is rather pathetic compared to intelligent life; but it's what we can ship today
This is an excellent example of 'thinking inside the boundaries of our paradigm'. Other civilizations may have discovered paradigms that allow them to traverse the galaxy in days, and even in seconds.
> If you think objectively about it, "physics paradigms far beyond our understanding today" do not necessarily exist.
That's what was said in the mid to late 19th century. Then quantum physics was discovered. It was already 'outside' our understanding then, and it still is. We take some things 'just as they are' and accept them, like quantum entanglement. We think we explain them through some unproven theories to avoid admitting the fact that they upended our earlier paradigm of how things are.
A lot of the things that are observed in the ufo phenomenon can be similar things if they are actual extraterrestrial civilizations 'observing' us. 'Shape changing' ufos, ufos that travel in a speed that no creature can withstand etc.
And by thinking within the boundaries of our paradigm, we can conclude that this particular combination of technology and culture has not spread throughout our galaxy.
> Other civilizations may have discovered paradigms that allow them to traverse the galaxy in days, and even in seconds.
If that is physically possible. Which we have fairly strong evidence against.
> That's what was said in the mid to late 19th century. Then quantum physics was discovered.
Right! Physicists found evidence to support revolutionary findings, and it was believed because other physicists reproduced the evidence for themselves.
Keep your mind open, but not so open that your brain falls out. By all means, there is more physics to discover, but pinning one's hopes on superluminal spacetravel without a shred of evidence is folly.
> A lot of the things that are observed in the ufo phenomenon can be similar things if they are actual extraterrestrial civilizations 'observing' us. 'Shape changing' ufos, ufos that travel in a speed that no creature can withstand etc.
Yeah, I love science fiction, too. It's really fun. But you're so frothy about the possibility that physics is wrong, that you aren't considering that a small number of poorly-instrumented observations are wrong.
Yep, its basically what the relevant xkcd comic explains:
> If that is physically possible. Which we have fairly strong evidence against.
We don't. Our science is not all-encompassing.
> superluminal spacetravel without a shred of evidence is folly.
This sentence and your sentences preceding this one contradict. Solely the very concept of quantum entanglement broke all the preexisting notions about how existence worked. Its something that shouldn't have happened according to all the 'hard' evidence we had beforehand.
Apparently, the evidence we had before wasn't so 'hard'. Just like how the evidence we have currently is not.
> But you're so frothy about the possibility that physics is wrong
Leaving your choice of words aside, physics is !regularly! wrong just like all the other sciences.
But overall, a pretty middling presidency in terms of actual accomplishments.
- "I know I saw something that violated my laws of physics, but my knowledge of physics prevented me from believing it (was a physical object/ was real/ was actually behaving in the physics-violating way I saw)." or
- "From my knowledge of physics it was clear that aliens could not get here, so whatever I saw could not have been their craft."
or something else?
I think your take is fair, but it's just another interpretation like mine. Otherwise how it's taken or presented could be totally different to how it's intended.
> I don't think he deeply considered how different alien physical objects could behave with far advanced science, then decided how to feel about that.
No but he could have considered more on reflection then provided an answer that was the result of that. Hahaha! :) This discussion between us is like proof of why it's important to consider.
We don't want Jimmy Carter to be a puppet for whatever ideology or theory, we want to know what we thought. Hahah! :)
But I also reflect that maybe these sort of statements where it's ambiguous isn't that important to consider, because you can't really know, ya know what i mean? :) Hahah. So funny you say over analyzing but then we get down into analysis of it hahahaha! :)
I think the way that the Republican party treated (both then and now) a southern, small family farmer who served in the military and taught Sunday school is one of those ironies that shows what values the Republican party actually believes in. And this has obviously only accelerated massively since Trump.
"I really like Carter's presidency because he was a good person."
"Oh so you must hate Clinton."
"Well, you can't judge a president based on his personal life."
"..."
But maybe I'm old-fashioned like that.