Tyson’s version of morality is supported by references to powerful unseen beings, who will someday appear and set the world right. But this is “science,” not “religion.”
There is no God except the aliens, and Tyson is their prophet.
Here’s another good one:
On some issues, I’m a staunch Conservative — like curtailing greenhouse gas emissions so that we can Conserve the environment
For someone who claims to love science, he seems to be a devout member of the Church of Global Warming.
We should answer Tyson based on his belief system…
If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.
So you will not be running for office anytime soon?
Some claim the USA is a Christian nation, compelling me to wonder which assault rifle Jesus would choose: the AR-15 or AK-47.
Definitely the AK47, which is less accurate but more reliable than the AR15. Jesus hits what he shoots. Oh, and the question mark is a shifted forward slash.
He’s Jewish so it would probably be a Tavor or Galil.
Only on his mother’s side. So I’m thinking he would use a hybrid between a projectile weapon and a lightning bolt, which sounds like it would be some sort of hypervelocity rail gun.
For someone who bashes people for believing in God he seems to be pretty much hard on the dogma that aliens have to be some sort of pacifist retards. Which is quite doubtful.
Like the other guy said natural selection itself precludes against that being a likely scenario. Although it is pretty hard to figure out a reason to spend inordinate amounts of energy to visit someplace else unless we figure out some way to make interstellar travel cheaper.
…unless we figure out some way to make interstellar travel cheaper.
Priceline?
I don’t think natural selection precludes anything like that. Natural selection came up with what you see in the following video — a bunch of tasty birds cleaning a crocodile’s teeth in perfect safety. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd6GcQrkMDM
Natural selection resulted in that crocodile. Earth will be in rubble, but at least the alien conquerors will have very shiny teeth.
I think studying the evolutionary history of predation (and alternatives, like symbiosis) is one approach to thinking about whether aliens are likely to be conquerors.
But I think another approach is political: why doesn’t the United States conquer other countries any more? On the one hand, folks here believe that Iraq wasn’t invaded for its oil (and I completely agree with that), but on the other hand, they seem to believe that conquering and plundering is inevitable. Or, alternatively, nevermind Iraq. Why doesn’t the USA conquer as many countries as it can? Andrew lives in New Zealand, which seems like a nice place, it would easy for the USA to conquer it, so why doesn’t it have any interest in that?
If, to everyone’s surprise, Viking 1 had been carted off by green bipedal Martians carrying spears, do you think Gerald Ford (and the US presidents who followed him) would have decided to conquer Mars?
You haven’t been following the discussion, have you, Bob?
Tyson believes that humans, as a species, are uniquely evil — *unlike* every alien species. That’s the opposite of your claim.
As for New Zealand, they have a military force of 14,000 people today — and nearly 150,000 during World War II. They’re also part of the ANZUS Treaty with the United States. They do not believe pacifism will protect them.
From early in 1940, New Zealanders began to live in fear of attack or invasion, first by the Germans and later by the Japanese.
Where does Tyson make this claim? I saw his tweet, where he imagines that the aliens approach the humans who are killing each other over “land, politics, religion, & skin color” and ask what is wrong with them.
I didn’t see him claim that aliens who stay at home don’t fight, I didn’t see him claim that aliens who come visit wouldn’t fight for other reasons (such as self-defense). I didn’t see him say anything about humans being unique. I think you’re reading him wrong.
The aliens who Tyson imagines act just like today’s USA does, when we see lesser countries fighting over those issues. Today we don’t fight over land, politics, religion, or skin color (although we’ve done so in the past), and when we see warfare for such primitive reasons in places like Northern Ireland or Somalia, we ask “what is wrong with you?”
—
As for aliens: my position is that we really can’t predict, and processes like natural selection and politics are far too open-ended to guide us. I think some here are too confident about what they see as the natural course of things.
Edward, I’m not making a claim about New Zealand. I’m making a claim about the United States. I’m pointing out that the most powerful country on Earth isn’t currently a conquering nation. While we devastated Iraq, we are proudest of Iraq’s purple-thumbed voters, and we didn’t steal their oil, and more importantly, we generally don’t go conquering or even devastating other nations, like New Zealand, even when we could.
And perhaps relevantly, it was the non-conquering United States who firt explored the outer solar system (along with Europe in the case of Huygens). Maybe not getting wrapped up in fighting over “land, politics, religion, & skin color” provides more of an opportunity to go exploring outer space.
Why won’t aliens be like the United States?
Everyone else understood what Tyson meant. Either you didn’t understand, or you’re engaged in your usual sophistry.
In either case, please take it up directly with Dr. Tyson. It’s not my job to interpret for you.
“Today we don’t fight over land, politics, religion, or skin color (although we’ve done so in the past), and when we see warfare for such primitive reasons in places like Northern Ireland or Somalia, we ask ‘what is wrong with you?'”
I’m sorry, but I doubt that this is even close to what NdGT was talking about.
One need only look at the news to understand that the current narrative in this country, especially within the United States, is all about White People Killing Black People with Impunity. Based on that, he is actually referring to the Rampant Racism that “plagues” this nation.
The remainder of the narrative treats the US as Imperial Lords, regardless of the facts. We are Evil-doers who rape, torture, and pillage in order to establish regimes in lands whose religion and politics differ from ours and take their natural resources. I’m not sure where you’ve been lately, but US Racism and US Imperialism have been the dominant topics of the news for the last few months, if not years.
Bob-1 is taking Tyson completely out of context.
Tyson is writing in English. His words are addressed to Americans. He does not write about Russia or China (for example) in such terms. In fact, he is outraged that stupid redneck Americans don’t want to cooperate with Communist China in space.
Bob-1 says:
But I think another approach is political: why doesn’t the United States conquer other countries any more?
Ha ha! Yes, all countries in the world should be welcome to do that sort of “conquering” to any other country, if, in exchange, they’d be willing to not do any of the old-fashioned kind of conquering. Think how happy the South Vietnamese would have been if North Vietnam had only tried to “conquer” it in the way that the USA, via Victoria Neuland’s phone call, conquered Ukraine. You noticed that the name of the elected President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, wasn’t even mentioned in Neuland’s phone call?
And I loved his character. He phrased his beliefs in the most self-refuting form possible. The movie’s not exactly “right-wing”, but it’s one of the most left-targeting satires I’ve ever seen.
More nonsense from Neil: Seems to me, as long as we don’t program emotions into Robots, there’s no reason to fear them taking over the world.
An algorithm has no emotion, nor does it need to ‘take over the world’ to be dangerous even to the point of our extinction. It just requires humans to put them in enough control to do us harm… ever hear of a bug? That’s when intentions and reality diverge. Like Neil’s ‘objective’ reality.
The good new is a system that dangerous is unlikely to ever come to be. It requires more coordination of effort than humans to date display. Although we are certainly foolish enough for it.
Programming robots with the current left wing environmental ideology could lead to robots exterminating humans.
Apparently, Tyson didn’t read “Small Talent for War” (or whatever its correct title was) all the way to the end.
Hadn’t seen this before, but they really telegraphed the punchline.
Heh. I thought the episode had been based on a short story. I suppose Tyson’s attention span probably prevented him from watching it far enough to get the point.
That was excellent. I’m a huge fan of the original Twilight Zone, but the 1980s version had some great moments in its own right.
Somebody who is on Twitter needs to send that link to Tyson.
Aw, don’t be so hard on Neil. When the aliens finally do come, he is going to die in the first wave.
Let’s not forget that Tyson was one of the “experts” recruited by the White House to advise on the Bush Vision of Space Exploration.
People in DC think he’s really, really smart when it comes to policy.
Why doesn’t the United States conquer other countries any more?
Anymore? You mean like the Louisiana purchase? Or Alaska? What country have we ever conquered? Which includes absorbing it into our own? Perhaps Hawaii? Puerto Rico? No. Neither the Spanish-American war nor events in Hawaii wars of conquest.
In WW-II we stationed millions of US troops in Great Britain, and now they speak English over there.
Well, sort of. They have a lot of weird expressions, and don’t know how to spell. Like why add that superfluous “u” after the “o” in words like “honor”? But as long as they’re from the major cities, you can usually make out what they mean.
Ummm, Rand, might you be forgetting the Cockney accent? Nice people, but their accent is almost impossible to understand.
Oh, Cockney’s no problem. Try to figure out what someone from York is saying.
…or Brooklyn…
York. New York. It’s all the same to a girl on her own in the big city. (Adapted from Johnny Dangerously.)
Did Bob mean Concorde?
I was thinking of the Philippines. If you disagree, so much the better, as my question is why is everyone so sure aliens won’t be at least as benign as the United States?
How benign are we to ants?
An excellent rhetorical rebuttal, but if we take question seriously, it has a reassuring answer: we kill ants when they invade our homes, but we otherwise leave them alone, and as a result, ants are flourishing in the United States. Furthermore, we would strive to keep any endangered species of ant from going extinct. No species of ants need such protection in the US, but Australia does have an endangered species of ant (“the Dinosaur Ant”), and just as the powerful USA hasn’t conquered or even merely nuked defenseless Australia, the Australians haven’t wiped out their endangered ants.
It’s as if he’s looking across the surf, desperately searching for a shark he can jump.
Neil is a space advocate, an outreach guy. And very successful in that role. OF course “aliens” would be nothing like us, we won’t even be able to judge if they are hostile or friendly, because they will ignore us like we ignore ants. He uses “aliens” as a projection for values about how we humans should live together.
I don’t understand why anyone in the space community bash him. Is it because they are religious, i.e. delusional irrational and plain wrong? The meaningless rumblings in the Bible rather than human space flight, aha. Is the truth too much to handle for the fooled christians? If you believe in something which cannot be refuted by anything which happens in reality, then you are wrong. Neil is polite enough to advise you about that fact.
I bash him because he is an ignorant religion basher, who makes shit up about people he doesn’t like and then, when called out on it, “apologizes” in the most weaselly manner.
And you are omniscient and know everything about the universe? I find the Bible allegorical, but as a guide to living, it certainly beats the secularist view. In fact, the ideas in Christianity is what gave us the Western View (human rights, equality, anti-slavery, women’s rights, etc.)
And although this video is fictional, it certainly betrays those global warming fanatics. Many thought it was actually funny.
Neil is a space advocate, an outreach guy. And very successful in that role.
Successful? By what metric?
NASA hasn’t achieved any of the goals set out by the Aldridge Commission which Tyson served on 10 years ago. His more recent “Penny for NASA” campaign is a silly joke, which has no chance of being funded. What has he successfully advocated?
I wouldn’t even call Tyson a space advocate. He does not advocate for much of anything except a larger NASA budget. He’s opposed to suborbital spaceflight, which he does not consider “real” space exploration. He’s opposed to deep-space exploration of deep space by non-governmental parties, because according to his “reading of history” private enterprise never undertook exploration on Earth (a claim not supported by actual history books).
Yet, those things are much more likely to happen than Tyson’s dream of NASA sending him to Europa. So how, exactly, is he effective?
If you believe in something which cannot be refuted by anything which happens in reality, then you are wrong. Neil is polite enough to advise you about that fact.
Tyson’s belief that the aliens agree with his politics cannot be tested against anything in reality, because we have no evidence that the aliens exist, much less any data on their political views. It is a religious belief, just like Chistianity. The difference is that Christians don’t claim that their religion is based on science, as Tyson does.
“I think studying the evolutionary history of predation (and alternatives, like symbiosis)”
Symbiosis with a predator isn’t really an alternative to predatory behavior. It does, however, enable it. Human life requires the destruction of other life, either plants or animals. Someday, maybe we can grow meat in a vat but it doesn’t look likely we will do away with killing plants and in any case, it takes resources to either which have to come from someplace. It is impossible to have zero impact on the environment and it shouldn’t be considered evil to be alive or to expand as all other living organisms and a lot of inanimate objects do.
Competential, there are many so called christians that are easy to ridicule, but true christians are to be known because they are reasonable (more fundamentally because they do not war with one another regardless of the country they live in… no christians in Nazi germany killed others… those that did were not christians according to the bible.) Hebrews 11 is the scientific method as it applies to faith (which distinguishes it from gullibility.)
Your misunderstanding of christians is perhaps because you don’t know any… they walk a very narrow path and are hidden among weeds.
NdGT breaths nitrogen.
Tyson’s version of morality is supported by references to powerful unseen beings, who will someday appear and set the world right. But this is “science,” not “religion.”
There is no God except the aliens, and Tyson is their prophet.
Here’s another good one:
On some issues, I’m a staunch Conservative — like curtailing greenhouse gas emissions so that we can Conserve the environment
For someone who claims to love science, he seems to be a devout member of the Church of Global Warming.
We should answer Tyson based on his belief system…
If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.
So you will not be running for office anytime soon?
Some claim the USA is a Christian nation, compelling me to wonder which assault rifle Jesus would choose: the AR-15 or AK-47.
Definitely the AK47, which is less accurate but more reliable than the AR15. Jesus hits what he shoots. Oh, and the question mark is a shifted forward slash.
He’s Jewish so it would probably be a Tavor or Galil.
Only on his mother’s side. So I’m thinking he would use a hybrid between a projectile weapon and a lightning bolt, which sounds like it would be some sort of hypervelocity rail gun.
For someone who bashes people for believing in God he seems to be pretty much hard on the dogma that aliens have to be some sort of pacifist retards. Which is quite doubtful.
Like the other guy said natural selection itself precludes against that being a likely scenario. Although it is pretty hard to figure out a reason to spend inordinate amounts of energy to visit someplace else unless we figure out some way to make interstellar travel cheaper.
…unless we figure out some way to make interstellar travel cheaper.
Priceline?
I don’t think natural selection precludes anything like that. Natural selection came up with what you see in the following video — a bunch of tasty birds cleaning a crocodile’s teeth in perfect safety. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd6GcQrkMDM
Natural selection resulted in that crocodile. Earth will be in rubble, but at least the alien conquerors will have very shiny teeth.
I think studying the evolutionary history of predation (and alternatives, like symbiosis) is one approach to thinking about whether aliens are likely to be conquerors.
But I think another approach is political: why doesn’t the United States conquer other countries any more? On the one hand, folks here believe that Iraq wasn’t invaded for its oil (and I completely agree with that), but on the other hand, they seem to believe that conquering and plundering is inevitable. Or, alternatively, nevermind Iraq. Why doesn’t the USA conquer as many countries as it can? Andrew lives in New Zealand, which seems like a nice place, it would easy for the USA to conquer it, so why doesn’t it have any interest in that?
If, to everyone’s surprise, Viking 1 had been carted off by green bipedal Martians carrying spears, do you think Gerald Ford (and the US presidents who followed him) would have decided to conquer Mars?
You haven’t been following the discussion, have you, Bob?
Tyson believes that humans, as a species, are uniquely evil — *unlike* every alien species. That’s the opposite of your claim.
As for New Zealand, they have a military force of 14,000 people today — and nearly 150,000 during World War II. They’re also part of the ANZUS Treaty with the United States. They do not believe pacifism will protect them.
From early in 1940, New Zealanders began to live in fear of attack or invasion, first by the Germans and later by the Japanese.
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/second-world-war-at-home/challenges
Where does Tyson make this claim? I saw his tweet, where he imagines that the aliens approach the humans who are killing each other over “land, politics, religion, & skin color” and ask what is wrong with them.
I didn’t see him claim that aliens who stay at home don’t fight, I didn’t see him claim that aliens who come visit wouldn’t fight for other reasons (such as self-defense). I didn’t see him say anything about humans being unique. I think you’re reading him wrong.
The aliens who Tyson imagines act just like today’s USA does, when we see lesser countries fighting over those issues. Today we don’t fight over land, politics, religion, or skin color (although we’ve done so in the past), and when we see warfare for such primitive reasons in places like Northern Ireland or Somalia, we ask “what is wrong with you?”
—
As for aliens: my position is that we really can’t predict, and processes like natural selection and politics are far too open-ended to guide us. I think some here are too confident about what they see as the natural course of things.
Edward, I’m not making a claim about New Zealand. I’m making a claim about the United States. I’m pointing out that the most powerful country on Earth isn’t currently a conquering nation. While we devastated Iraq, we are proudest of Iraq’s purple-thumbed voters, and we didn’t steal their oil, and more importantly, we generally don’t go conquering or even devastating other nations, like New Zealand, even when we could.
And perhaps relevantly, it was the non-conquering United States who firt explored the outer solar system (along with Europe in the case of Huygens). Maybe not getting wrapped up in fighting over “land, politics, religion, & skin color” provides more of an opportunity to go exploring outer space.
Why won’t aliens be like the United States?
Everyone else understood what Tyson meant. Either you didn’t understand, or you’re engaged in your usual sophistry.
In either case, please take it up directly with Dr. Tyson. It’s not my job to interpret for you.
“Today we don’t fight over land, politics, religion, or skin color (although we’ve done so in the past), and when we see warfare for such primitive reasons in places like Northern Ireland or Somalia, we ask ‘what is wrong with you?'”
I’m sorry, but I doubt that this is even close to what NdGT was talking about.
One need only look at the news to understand that the current narrative in this country, especially within the United States, is all about White People Killing Black People with Impunity. Based on that, he is actually referring to the Rampant Racism that “plagues” this nation.
The remainder of the narrative treats the US as Imperial Lords, regardless of the facts. We are Evil-doers who rape, torture, and pillage in order to establish regimes in lands whose religion and politics differ from ours and take their natural resources. I’m not sure where you’ve been lately, but US Racism and US Imperialism have been the dominant topics of the news for the last few months, if not years.
Bob-1 is taking Tyson completely out of context.
Tyson is writing in English. His words are addressed to Americans. He does not write about Russia or China (for example) in such terms. In fact, he is outraged that stupid redneck Americans don’t want to cooperate with Communist China in space.
Bob-1 says:
Really?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QxZ8t3V_bk
R7 Rocket,
Ha ha! Yes, all countries in the world should be welcome to do that sort of “conquering” to any other country, if, in exchange, they’d be willing to not do any of the old-fashioned kind of conquering. Think how happy the South Vietnamese would have been if North Vietnam had only tried to “conquer” it in the way that the USA, via Victoria Neuland’s phone call, conquered Ukraine. You noticed that the name of the elected President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, wasn’t even mentioned in Neuland’s phone call?
Pierce Brosnan was in Mars Attacks?
Yes he was. 🙂
Youtube clip
Brosnan becomes a literal talking head.
And I loved his character. He phrased his beliefs in the most self-refuting form possible. The movie’s not exactly “right-wing”, but it’s one of the most left-targeting satires I’ve ever seen.
More nonsense from Neil: Seems to me, as long as we don’t program emotions into Robots, there’s no reason to fear them taking over the world.
An algorithm has no emotion, nor does it need to ‘take over the world’ to be dangerous even to the point of our extinction. It just requires humans to put them in enough control to do us harm… ever hear of a bug? That’s when intentions and reality diverge. Like Neil’s ‘objective’ reality.
The good new is a system that dangerous is unlikely to ever come to be. It requires more coordination of effort than humans to date display. Although we are certainly foolish enough for it.
Programming robots with the current left wing environmental ideology could lead to robots exterminating humans.
Apparently, Tyson didn’t read “Small Talent for War” (or whatever its correct title was) all the way to the end.
Hadn’t seen this before, but they really telegraphed the punchline.
oops… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbT1fCHOjfI
Heh. I thought the episode had been based on a short story. I suppose Tyson’s attention span probably prevented him from watching it far enough to get the point.
That was excellent. I’m a huge fan of the original Twilight Zone, but the 1980s version had some great moments in its own right.
Somebody who is on Twitter needs to send that link to Tyson.
Aw, don’t be so hard on Neil. When the aliens finally do come, he is going to die in the first wave.
Let’s not forget that Tyson was one of the “experts” recruited by the White House to advise on the Bush Vision of Space Exploration.
People in DC think he’s really, really smart when it comes to policy.
Why doesn’t the United States conquer other countries any more?
Anymore? You mean like the Louisiana purchase? Or Alaska? What country have we ever conquered? Which includes absorbing it into our own? Perhaps Hawaii? Puerto Rico? No. Neither the Spanish-American war nor events in Hawaii wars of conquest.
In WW-II we stationed millions of US troops in Great Britain, and now they speak English over there.
Well, sort of. They have a lot of weird expressions, and don’t know how to spell. Like why add that superfluous “u” after the “o” in words like “honor”? But as long as they’re from the major cities, you can usually make out what they mean.
Ummm, Rand, might you be forgetting the Cockney accent? Nice people, but their accent is almost impossible to understand.
Oh, Cockney’s no problem. Try to figure out what someone from York is saying.
…or Brooklyn…
York. New York. It’s all the same to a girl on her own in the big city. (Adapted from Johnny Dangerously.)
Did Bob mean Concorde?
I was thinking of the Philippines. If you disagree, so much the better, as my question is why is everyone so sure aliens won’t be at least as benign as the United States?
How benign are we to ants?
An excellent rhetorical rebuttal, but if we take question seriously, it has a reassuring answer: we kill ants when they invade our homes, but we otherwise leave them alone, and as a result, ants are flourishing in the United States. Furthermore, we would strive to keep any endangered species of ant from going extinct. No species of ants need such protection in the US, but Australia does have an endangered species of ant (“the Dinosaur Ant”), and just as the powerful USA hasn’t conquered or even merely nuked defenseless Australia, the Australians haven’t wiped out their endangered ants.
It’s as if he’s looking across the surf, desperately searching for a shark he can jump.
Neil is a space advocate, an outreach guy. And very successful in that role. OF course “aliens” would be nothing like us, we won’t even be able to judge if they are hostile or friendly, because they will ignore us like we ignore ants. He uses “aliens” as a projection for values about how we humans should live together.
I don’t understand why anyone in the space community bash him. Is it because they are religious, i.e. delusional irrational and plain wrong? The meaningless rumblings in the Bible rather than human space flight, aha. Is the truth too much to handle for the fooled christians? If you believe in something which cannot be refuted by anything which happens in reality, then you are wrong. Neil is polite enough to advise you about that fact.
I bash him because he is an ignorant religion basher, who makes shit up about people he doesn’t like and then, when called out on it, “apologizes” in the most weaselly manner.
And you are omniscient and know everything about the universe? I find the Bible allegorical, but as a guide to living, it certainly beats the secularist view. In fact, the ideas in Christianity is what gave us the Western View (human rights, equality, anti-slavery, women’s rights, etc.)
And although this video is fictional, it certainly betrays those global warming fanatics. Many thought it was actually funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATTknP8t7JU
Neil is a space advocate, an outreach guy. And very successful in that role.
Successful? By what metric?
NASA hasn’t achieved any of the goals set out by the Aldridge Commission which Tyson served on 10 years ago. His more recent “Penny for NASA” campaign is a silly joke, which has no chance of being funded. What has he successfully advocated?
I wouldn’t even call Tyson a space advocate. He does not advocate for much of anything except a larger NASA budget. He’s opposed to suborbital spaceflight, which he does not consider “real” space exploration. He’s opposed to deep-space exploration of deep space by non-governmental parties, because according to his “reading of history” private enterprise never undertook exploration on Earth (a claim not supported by actual history books).
Yet, those things are much more likely to happen than Tyson’s dream of NASA sending him to Europa. So how, exactly, is he effective?
If you believe in something which cannot be refuted by anything which happens in reality, then you are wrong. Neil is polite enough to advise you about that fact.
Tyson’s belief that the aliens agree with his politics cannot be tested against anything in reality, because we have no evidence that the aliens exist, much less any data on their political views. It is a religious belief, just like Chistianity. The difference is that Christians don’t claim that their religion is based on science, as Tyson does.
“I think studying the evolutionary history of predation (and alternatives, like symbiosis)”
Symbiosis with a predator isn’t really an alternative to predatory behavior. It does, however, enable it. Human life requires the destruction of other life, either plants or animals. Someday, maybe we can grow meat in a vat but it doesn’t look likely we will do away with killing plants and in any case, it takes resources to either which have to come from someplace. It is impossible to have zero impact on the environment and it shouldn’t be considered evil to be alive or to expand as all other living organisms and a lot of inanimate objects do.
Competential, there are many so called christians that are easy to ridicule, but true christians are to be known because they are reasonable (more fundamentally because they do not war with one another regardless of the country they live in… no christians in Nazi germany killed others… those that did were not christians according to the bible.) Hebrews 11 is the scientific method as it applies to faith (which distinguishes it from gullibility.)
Your misunderstanding of christians is perhaps because you don’t know any… they walk a very narrow path and are hidden among weeds.