Discovering Martians Could Be Disappointing | Hacker News Reader

Discovering Martians Could Be Disappointing

nautil.us

24 pointsdnetesn10 comments

It's odd, I see a clickbait headline like "why (this and that)...", I start reading and expect an answer to the question right away. If there isn't one in the first three sentences, I scroll down and see 'this shit is long', and I'm not so interested in finding the answer.

Point is, the title will get me to click on the article, but it's probably very detrimental to my desire to actually read it.

Maybe you're addicted to random payouts. 1% of the time it is worth it. For example, District 9 could have the exact same title, but that's highly entertaining.

point is, if you ask me to read a novel, don't give it heading that makes me expect to read three paragraphs.

The main disappointment would be that it would make us more likely to disappear as a civilization, since life is then less likely to act as the great filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

I wonder what finding life away from Earth would do to the creationism crowd.

Probably not much?

I mean, I guess it would depend on the specifics of the life in question, but it does not seem to inherently contradict anything, from any thing that immediately comes to mind.p

(Speaking as a creationist)

I would expect absolutely no change at all. If you're able to ignore science, then why believe that a robot is actually on Mars anyway. Why believe that the magic box that you connect to the computer exists at all. If you're going to ignore science, then why would you try to rationalize at all. It's not like we put the smart kids in computers, engineering, physics, maths, chemistry, and physics; but then put the 'special' kids in paleontology. To believe a book over hard science because you were told to demonstrates a lack of critical thinking and a propensity to self delusion. I would expect a headline in a Christian blog to be "Scientists fake Mars life" or some other such nonsense.

> I would expect absolutely no change at all. If you're able to ignore science, then why believe that a robot is actually on Mars anyway.

You don't need to go that far. I don't think many creationists question whether we have a robot on Mars, or many other scientific claims that don't involve the distant past. I see no reason why extraterrestrial life has any incompatibilities with creationism, apart from the already-existing incompatibilities between scientific consensus and creationism (namely, the age of the Earth and evolution by natural selection).

God created life on Mars for Reasons.

Seems like a pretty simple thing to reconcile.

They already ignore the fossil record as evidence of human evolution, which is accepted by an overwhelming majority of the scientific community as completely valid.

I think any amount of evidence will have no effect on them.

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