Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 734: An Existential Problem in the Search for Alien Life

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. recording live from glory old studios in chicago and beyond This is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political,

and there are no aliens. That seems unfair, Tom. There's none that we found, I don't think. There are none that we found. Evidence of absence is not, you know. Don't necessarily know that. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I will say there's no compelling evidence

that we found them at all. That's for definite sure. Well, we're going to talk about it in some detail. We read some articles from the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and from Discover Magazine. I will tell you, Cecil, you sent me a bunch of options to read. I chose the Discover Magazine one because it's bitchy. Oh, it is.

It's super bitchy. It's just bitchy, and I thought it was funny. The other two are a little more like state and serious. In fact, I would say the Atlantic article is very philosophical. I like the Atlantic article a lot. Really interesting. I think we should start there because one of the things, you know, the three articles, the big broad strokes articles here, the Atlantic article is called an existential problem in the search for alien life.

And the real big broad strokes here is, do we really even know what life is and how do we know it fits in that bucket? And so we'll talk about that in a second. I just want to sort of get the big strokes out of the way here, but that's what that article is about. So we don't even, they're positing that we're not even really sure if we can define what life is. Then next, you know, we'll talk about the five alleged alien artifacts that were actually rocks, spark plugs, and dolls. And if you're watching, you see our favorite thing in the world is the Spirit Halloween ET that was on sale and got melted in the microwave. The thing that they were trying to pass off at the Mexican Congress as an actual alien.

And then the final article, the one that actually spawned it all, is from the Washington Post, what we actually know about aliens according to science, and that's talking a lot about SETI, and we'll finish up with that. But I really want to start, I think, with this article on the problem of what actually life is and how to define it. And I thought this was a real challenging article

from the Atlantic talking about how, you know, we can certainly hold a flower up to a rock and say one's alive. But when it comes to looking out into the universe, it's a lot harder than that. Yeah, and even here on Earth, they make the point that even here on Earth, it's difficult for us to put in definitional parameters that work every time.

I remember being in biology classes like a million moons ago, and there was, at the time at least, in the 90s, there was real debate about whether viruses are alive. viruses are alive. Viruses do a lot of alive type things, but they do not contain DNA, for example. And they do not have other characteristics of life, but they have some of the characteristics of life. So like there's real conversation about like, do we even know on earth? Here on earth, do we know what life really means? There's constant conversation about how do we know when life has ended? There was a, there's an article that I read the other day, and it's really interesting

about human organ transplant and a new technique for human organ transplant basically is like, all right, well, when the, there's basically two ways we decide someone's dead. One, when the brain stops doing brain stuff and one when the heart stops doing heart stuff. And they're basically like, look, we can get a lot more organs if we decide that when the heart is dead, the patient is dead, then we go in and we clamp off the

brain to make sure that there's no possibility of consciousness. Then we restart the heart. Then we restart and recirculate blood. We can get a whole lot more organs out of this meat machine. Seems, I don't know.

And there's a lot of controversy. I'm a little worried about that. Well, you're not the only one. A lot of bioethicists are really worried about that.

I feel really uncomfortable in my pants. Yeah, man. But it's like, they couldn't restart this guy's heart, right? So, like,

this person is dead. Their heart was not able to be restarted. But then they're like, well, let's just make sure the brain doesn't have a little feeling, feeling. And then they like clamp that off to make sure. And then they're like,

now, if we circulate blood through the heart won't beat, but circulating blood through pumps, we'll keep all the rest of these organs like fresher, longer, and we can get more out of them. There's a, there's a, there's a logical part of my them. There's a logical part of my brain.

There's a logical part of my brain that when I hear that, I go, no, that's fucking perfectly logical. Absolutely logical. And then there's another part of my brain that's going, don't do that. Yeah, man. What are you doing?

What do you mean clamp off the brain? What do you mean clamp off the brain? I am the least qualified person to make this decision. I'm not a bioethicist. I don't have any. I've never even dabbled in it, so I don't have any dog in this hunt, but there is definitely two

sides of me in this. There's the logical side, and then there's the other side that's like screaming, what is happening right now? Yeah. So it's like, it's this fascinating moment where like, we don't know on earth what is alive, what isn't alive, when life starts and stops yeah

these are like questions we have not built definitions around that work that seem like real functional like nasa has like a definition but it's sort of like yeah so it's it's yeah yeah you sort of shrug at it like okay maybe rocket scientists came up with it. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So if we're going to look outside of Earth, all of our earthly ideas about what is life shouldn't inform the question about what is alive not on Earth. Yeah. At least not fully. Sure.

And yet it's sort of like imagine a color you haven't seen. Sure. You know? Yeah. And it's like your brain just starts to spin in circles. And like I get all fizzy and then like the smoke comes out of my ears and i can't fucking even and i just bend over then they clamp off my brain and my fucking kidneys get shipped off to fucking roanoke or

whatever the other thing that it points out to me you know they also mentioned too in this article about you know when we're searching for life somewhere, we might, and it might not have been this article, might have been a different article where they're saying, when you're searching for life somewhere, you might not find life or see life, but you might see things that indicate life, right? So life made this, or this is what life needs in order. So there's other markers there. There's other markers there. And they talk about that in the sense that like, you know, a cell phone, right? When we talk about a cell phone, a cell phone is a indicator that there was life somewhere.

The cell phone itself isn't alive, but we know that life had to make it. So when we search the universe, we can hopefully maybe see something that would, you know, whether it's close by on Mars or somewhere else where we can see that life made something. So there's an interesting pull there. And then it also just showed me too, like how hard science really is, right? Like the sort of pop sci and the sort of just talking about things in a, in a very general colloquial sense is easy.

Yeah. The real, real hard, difficult science, like just seeing how hard it is just to define one thing. Yeah. How hard that is to know whether or not something is alive is one of those things that like,

when you think about the science behind all this UFO stuff, When you think about the science behind all this UFO stuff, that's something that no one has the rigor for outside of real science. Everyone else just wants it to be true. The armchair internet guy? Yeah. Absolutely not. I read that part, Cecil, where it's like, well, part of what we're looking for, like you you said is all of the things that are associated with life and one of the one of the things they bring up is this chemical in the like clouds of venus that this chemical generally our understanding is this chemical only exists as a byproduct of

living processes and there was a moment brief as it was where it was thought that it was discovered in the uh acidic clouds around venus and then later it was discovered where it was thought that it was discovered in the acidic clouds around Venus. And then later it was discovered that no, it wasn't. It was a data processing error, basically. But there was a moment of brief excitement. But then I got to thinking a little bit like, I don't know how to say this differently. It feels watchmaker-y to me. I see what you mean. Do you know what I mean? Sure, no, I totally mean it.

The creationist argument is like, well, I look around at all of these people and I think if there's all of this, then how can there be a watch without a watchmaker? And there's this sort of sense that I get that while I don't think it's wrong to look for the evidence of life and posit life backward from it, it also feels really much like positing a watchmaker to me. Do you know what I

mean? Yeah. And so, and like, and I think there's a point at which that- I wonder if we hate that because we know where that leads. We know where that argument leads. I wonder if we fight that because we know that that's the intelligent design. Right. That's the intelligent design like fallback. But I also know that there's a point at which that's absurd. Sure. You're absolutely right. If I train my...

If I built a super telescope that could see 1,800 light years away, like see visually 1,800 light years away, and I trained my eye 1,800 light years away, like see visually 1800 light years away. And I trained my eye 1800 light years away through this fucking magic telescope. And I saw not life, but, you know, skyscrapers and roads and, you know, cars, and they were all abandoned. It would be absurd for me not to posit life at one point, right? At the very least.

But like, so there's a point of absurdity in that same thing, but I still feel like, oh man, like assuming the watchmaker, that feels weird. Yeah. That feels like, oh no, man, like we're not doing that here. Yeah. But is it because the context? Yeah.

And I don't have that answer. It's tough. It's tough to, you're definitely, the things that they're searching for are these, you know, I think a lot of stuff that they're searching for

are like superstructures, right? Things that you could see from here that would be those superstructures, a Dyson type sphere or something like that. There was even initially when the web went up, there was people who were saying

that they were finding things like that and turned out they weren't actually at all. But there was rumors initially about that sort of thing that they were able to see really far away and also really far back in time and able to see something that would resemble something that would lead us to believe that something created it. But it turned out it was all bullshit. It wasn't true. created it. But it turned out it was all bullshit. It wasn't true. And so, but I do see where they're coming from and I see what is making them think about life outside of our, and even, you know, you had said it, life inside of our earth is even not terribly defined, but looking outside for life outside. And they were also saying too, like,

we don't really know what alive means here. That certainly means that anything we didn't, we don't know how to encounter and we didn't encounter, we would be able to pick it out of a lineup. Right. Because, you know, life could be very different. And then, and, and that is, that's another thing too, that I think gets lost on the UFO because I want to drag it back into the UFO thing because that's really what this is about is the popularization of aliens in our culture and then recent resurgence of aliens in the news. This is all about, the UFO thing is all about

making us try to believe that we have been visited or are currently being visited by extraterrestrials, by, by aliens of another world. And one thing that that never takes into account is, is it alive? And does it, does it act in a way that, you know, we've never seen before because every single alien looks literally just like us, but a little tiny different. Right. They're a fucking Romulan or they're a Vulcan or they're, you know, they're an ET. They have two legs, two arms, five fingers. They have to be able to sit in a makeup chair. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. I mean, they're literally just like a fucking, they don't look any different at all. Yeah. And it's so funny because like,

I've always thought like, you know, they're like, oh, we're looking and, you know, there could be water on this planet. Like, and I'm always thinking like,'re like, oh, we're looking, and there could be water on this planet. And I'm always thinking, well, water is what we need for life. But maybe the only reason we need water here on Earth for life is because we evolved on a watery planet. So of course, the evolutionary pressures would yield something that required water.

This was what was available. But is there no possibility that some other chemical composition? We always seem to have this, like, oh, there's water. Water is the essential characteristic for life. And I'm always like, it's the essential characteristic for life on Earth

because Earth is mostly made out of water. So like, fucking no shit, Sherlock, right? But like, is it impossible to presume that there's, and maybe it is, maybe I don't know enough to even know. And that's the thing is maybe you don't know how deep, how necessary water is for what we consider life. Right, and like, is there some other consideration of life that would like fit a sulfur-based compound?

Sure. I don't fucking know. And your point is really the right point, right? Is that this work is too hard. It's too complex, too quickly for lay people to sink their teeth into. There's an intersection, you know, it's no accident that science was originally philosophy, right? That science is really an outgrowth of the philosophical sciences. And there is still that like intersection between science and philosophy that we have to wrestle with in terms of like, what does life mean? Sure. That's not, that's not purely a scientific question. There's no mathematical equation to figure that out.

Yeah, and like if we get to that point, if we get to a point where we can answer that question, it will only be because we've examined what we can't yet know. And I think that's a really fascinating point. It's a terrific article. Yeah, no, it's a beautiful article. Really interesting. And I think it calls into question

the perfect backdrop for this entire discussion which is if the scientists don't know why does the guy who's posting this on strange earth reddit right right why does he know yes why does this other person who's bringing this fucking completely fake made up fucking toilet paper dummy to fucking the Congress in Mexico. How does he know? Right. And the answer is, is because it's all made up. Because it's made up.

Yep. Because it's fucking made up. Because they took what they already know and they weirded it up a little bit. And let's- That's all they did. And let's look at that article and talk about each one of these pieces. Okay. Each one of these pieces in this article,

they talk about five different things. I got to pause. Yeah. On the right-hand side, guys, for Discover Magazine, under Related Content, I want to read this sub-headline. It's a clickbait story.

Could translating whale songs help us find aliens? Oh, just like the Star Trek. You ever see the Star Trek where they were calling down to Earth and the whale stopped communicating? So they sent this big giant ship to Earth. And it's sending these waves of sound to the Earth. And they're crashing into the Earth. And they're like destroying structures

and it's crazy and it's because it needs to penetrate super deep into the ocean to talk to the whales but we killed all the whales so Star Trek has to go back in time

to save two whales and they bring them back in a ship. They go back in time. This is amazing. You've never seen this? It's called The Voyage Home maybe? No, I didn't You've never seen this? No. It's called The Voyage Home, maybe?

No, I haven't seen this. You got to see it. It's so like a product of its time too. It's 100% the 80s. There's a scene in it, Tom, where a guy has one of those giant boom boxes. Remember these? Yeah.

He's on the train and he's got this giant boom box and he's rocking out. And I think it's Spock or somebody, or somebody tells him to turn it down and he won't. And And I think it's Spock or somebody tells him to turn it down and he won't. And then Spock walks up and knocks him out

and he shuts it off with his head. It's such a great, it's such a cheesy, terrible movie. You should watch it. I know I'm going to get a million messages from the Trekkies

who absolutely love it. It's super cheesy. I loved it as a kid. I haven't seen it in a couple of decades. I have only seen the most recent Star Trek movies. No, this one is older.

This one's with Shatner and Nimoy and the guy from Twitter. What's his name? George Takai. George Takai, the guy from Twitter. I knew him as a guy from Twitter more than I knew him as a guy from Star Trek. So it's got all those people in it that are very- RG Star Trek. Very like the original Star Trek cast. And's got all those people in it that are, you know, very, very like the original Star Trek cast.

And they're doing movies. And this was in the 80s that they ran this. Maybe early 90s. No, it was 80s. It was definitely 80s. Late 80s that they ran this movie. And it's a story about how the whales, we couldn't communicate. They couldn't communicate with the whales, so they sent a ship to be like,

hey, where'd the whales go? We were to them and so it's it's what did they have to say to the whales it was so important well it's it's over really fast the end of the movie i'll spoil it for you the end of the movie they let the whales out the whales get out and they're like hey go away they don't they don't say it because the whales shit out some whale song and then the the ship goes cool and just disappeared. That's literally the end of the movie. Like that's amazing. It's the, it's, it's a really,

it's a really dumb plot, but it's, but it's also really cute too. So like, I kind of love it. It's kind of, it's, it's really cheesy.

It's total Star Trek cheese. Well, we're right there on discover magazine, right? Yeah. Translating whale. So translate. Yeah,

no, that's, that's, it is literally the plot of one of the Star Trek movies. Jesus Christ. So let's get back to this article. So the Kosso artifact, this was a,

guys went out and they were looking through geodes. They were cutting geodes open and they cut one open and inside they find a little bit of porcelain wrapped around a little bit of like aluminum or steel of some kind

and they don't, they can't figure it out and they're like, oh my God. And they don't, they can't figure it out. And they're like, oh my God. And they actually looked at it and they said, well, there was a mining operation there and it probably just got stuck somehow. And in,

in, we don't even know if it was actually in the geode or not, but they said they, they they've analyzed it and it's actually a spark plug. It's like literally a spark plug for 19, the 1920s that was used in a mining operation in that place. So they either found

it outside of a geode or somehow like it got caught in something that made it feel like it was in part of a rock but it actually wasn't. It was literally a spark plug. And like the thing that I learned that I think is the most important thing is that there is a whole like

collectors group of old spark plugs. Like it's a hobby to collect old spark plugs. I learned that from this article. And they're just like, send it off. And like, yeah, no, that's a 1927 mining equipment spark plug. That's amazing. What a fucking, I love like unbelievably niche collections. Yeah. Where someone's like, yeah, I collect old spark plugs. Okay. It feels so CSI. Right. To have something like that where they look up on the computer and be like, oh, we need a spark plug expert. Yeah.

Oh, wait a minute. There's a whole fucking like subgroup of people that collect spark plugs. All right. So the next one. The next one is the Klerkstorp Spheres. Say that again because it's so much fun. Klerkstorp spheres. Love it. Klerkstorp. Now here's another great example of exaggeration when it comes to description. Oh my God. Yes. So people will say these spheres are absolutely perfect spheres. And then you look at them and

you're like, what are you on? They look like little blobs and that's what they are. They're just carbon that's collected and that's all it is. Yeah. We've like, we've tell this story all the time and I don't know why we tell it. We tell this story that like nature doesn't make straight lines and like, oh, in nature, there's never a square. Absolutely not true. And it's like, there's lots of shapes. Like,

nature's big. Nature makes circles and spheres and squares and triangles and nature makes all kinds of shapes, man.

Like, does it make the sorts of like, like, like perfect geometry shapes that like we build with? Sometimes, yeah.

Does it do it super duper often? Not really. So that's why it looks really anomalous to you. But every time they find this, they're like, whoa, did you see these straight lines on the ocean floor? And you're like, yep. There's an explanation for them. And then they explain them. And there's some science guy does, not Tom.

And you're like, oh, all right, well. But we've bought this idea that like oh nature doesn't make no straight lines nature can't create a circle and you're like nature makes lots of shapes man nature does lots of stuff if everything is included nature does lots of stuff it did it all it turns out yeah there's a use of language that talks about the perfect or the extraordinary, right? So when you talk about, whenever we see UFO lights, right? Whenever we see UFO lights, it's always about how fast they went. There's never one going like 22 miles an hour. I know, right? There's never one that's just like hanging out. I'm on economy mode. It's just idling and just hanging out.

And they do on occasion, but when they move, they move faster than anything we could ever imagine, which makes us realize that's not just a plane or a helicopter, it's something else, right? That's what our brain is saying, it's something else. It can't just be something that's made here. And this is the language we use around the extraordinary, is we say that's something that can't occur in nature. It cannot happen. And then you're just like, no, it absolutely can. And it

does all the time. And that light that you saw was probably just a reflection or something else that made it look like it was something that was moving really quickly, but it really wasn't. So, but we use that language all the time. We do. And we're also like extremely bad at judging things like distance and speed. Sure, yeah. So like, and my wife was telling me a story just the other day. She grew up on an Air Force base in Oklahoma

and in Texas. But like, she was telling me this story of like the great big transport. So it was an Air Force, Air Force thing, Air Force base. And they had those enormous like C-130 transport planes that, like, they put tanks and shit. Sure, yeah, yeah. Fucking enormous.

Makes, like, a 747 look like a paraglider. Yeah. And she said when they take off and land, it looks like they're not moving. Because we're used to seeing small planes, and relatively, they move quickly. But she said, like, when you watch them in the sky, they seem like they're going like two miles an hour. They're going very fucking fast. They're going all the very fast.

They're an airplane taking off at speed, right? They have to go fast. But they look slow. We're just bad at this. Like when we start looking at shit in the sky, we don't have reference and markers anymore. So we have no idea how big this cloud is or that one. We like all that reference material is gone.

And now we don't have fucking any idea. It's like, we're looking at something that could be going 300 miles an hour. We're like, it's barely moving. And you're like, it's big. Yeah. You just are used to seeing things that are small farther away.

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tea-spilling, shade-throwing podcast. I was downtown one day and I was walking to a place and I saw a couple people looking in the air. And so,

what do you do when you see people looking in the air? You look to the air too. So you look. I look too. And I stopped sort of where they're at people looking near you? So you look, I look too. And, and I stopped sort of where they're at and I'm looking and I see what they're looking at. They're looking at a red, something red. It's daytime. And it's just, it's just moving across very high up across in front of, uh, in, in front of like skyscrapers in the middle of Chicago

and very high up. We're talking 60, 70 stories up, just moving like this. And I go, and I don't know if I said, or they said what, if they could figure it out. And then a guy walking by, because I think all of us gawked at it for maybe two or three minutes. We're all just looking and trying to see it.

We can't really see it. You're trying to figure out what it is. And it's also hard to tell how close it is, right? Because you see the backdrop, but you don't know how close it is. You're not seeing a shadow on something. So you don't know how close it is in relative to position to you. And a guy walking by just sort of very quickly walking by, he's like, it's a balloon. And then he just kept going. And he was right. Once you looked at it, it was a helium balloon that someone had let go. And once you paid attention to it, it might've been a Mylar balloon, but you could see

it's going in the, in the, in the air. And you're like, he's right. It's a balloon. It's a hundred percent of balloon. Once you see it, you're like, oh yeah, that's what it is. But before you saw it, you didn't, because you're not used to it in that context. So your brain doesn't know what to do with it. You're like, what is that? What could that possibly be? And then someone says that you're like, fucking A, that's exactly what it is. I love that guy because I feel like that's the guy

who's at the mall who walks over to those magic eyes that I've never seen anything in and is like, it's a kitten. And I'm just like, it's just fucking squiggles.

I can't tell what that is. I've crossed every eye and my fingers and I can't tell what that is. relax your brain or whatever you gotta look at. I can't tell what those things are. I've never seen one of those

in my life. Not a single one. Never. All right, so number three is the Quimbiaya treasure. And so this is, I love this because they're categorizing some of these.

And this category is ancient man couldn't have made this. Yeah. And so what they're talking about, and I'll pull it up on the big screen, is they're showing an image, and in the image, they're showing what looks like an airplane to us.

There it is. It looks like a flying dick to me. What it looks like to me is it definitely looks like a penis, but it also looks like it has wings, but it also looks like it looks like uh it has it looks like it has wings but it also looks like simplistic wings right like somebody couldn't really make a like a like a good wing so they're just like well just put two things on it that like resemble wings and then we'll try to draw it later you know we'll fill in the blanks later but but really what they always try to point

to is these ancient peoples there's no way these fuckers could have done this. And this is a very common trope. These, in fact, if you look at them closely, they have teeth or they have like horns or whatever. They look like insects or something else. They look like animals. They don't look like airplanes. And then they talk in the story about how

they use these people supposedly took the exact replica of this and turned it into an RC fly and it flew perfectly. And then once they show it, they're like, no, it absolutely is totally different from what is shown these actual things that were made versus what flew.

They had to basically go and do all the aerodynamic principles that we currently know in order to get it to fly. They had to imprint those on it because it didn't have any of that stuff. And so, we always either say they couldn't have made it or they're clearly pointing to some technology that they knew about that doesn't exist anymore.

Yeah, they shouldn't have known about this. But like, you know, this Kumbaya treasure is a great, it's a fish, right? Like, really what they were doing is modeling a fish and like, you know, this, this Kumbaya treasure is a great, it's a fish, right? Like really what they were doing is modeling a fish and like fish are aerodynamic. Water is a fluid. Yeah. So if you're modeling a fish, fish and airplanes are like a shark and an airplane have a lot of structural similarities because they have to start, they have to basically do the same thing, right? Because water is a fluid, air is a fluid. They have to cut through these things. So like, of course there's similarities

to them, but like, it's a chicken and egg problem. Like, which do you think we modeled first? Like, do we think we modeled the fish after the airplane or the airplane after fish? You know what I mean? Or the airplane after birds and fish. It's not like we didn't like look at other shit that flew and learned some lessons about other shit that cuts through fluid when we started building airplanes.

Look at the first wings that they were making. They look like bat wings. Right. You know, they look like bird wings. Right. They were going out of their way to be like,

well, this clearly flies. How do we do it? Exactly. Yeah. So it's like, it would be absurd if it weren't that way. Yeah. It would be insane. So like, yeah, man, they made goldfish.

Yeah. Goldfish are delicious. I don't blame them. Yeah. But seriously, also there's this, I'm trying to think of the word to use here. It's racism, but it's not like overt racism, right? It's subtle racism to be like, these people weren't able to do this. Yeah, these primitives, right? These people were primitive. They were not able to do this. And they do that when they talk about the pyramids,

when they talk about, you know, they talk about all these big structures, they talk about, you know, Machu Picchu, et cetera. They always talk about it in the sense that like, there's no way that these primitive people could have pulled this off. They never have to say any of that shit about the castles that got built in, you know, they never say any of that shit about any of the stuff that happened.

You think about it, like we didn't discover a lot of the stuff that was happening over here until, you know, the 1600s, right? So that's when we came over and sort of saw all the stuff that they had done. We had castles at the time, right? We had castles. They had Machu Picchu.

And we're just like, no, man, there's no way you primitives could have done this without help. Yeah, right. Yeah, uh-huh. I know. It's like, I get it. It is pretty impressive

that the Etruscans made pottery that we still can't make to this day. No matter what you do. No matter what. It's impossible. It's impossible. The next one is crystal skulls. Now this is the opposite, right? So instead of saying something back then couldn't

have existed, now we're saying something back then was made that couldn't have been made by natural causes, right? It existed back then and it couldn't have been made by natural causes, but instead what it is is a fraud. This is a crystal skull that was made with modern tools that people tried to pass off as a thing that was made in the ancient times. Yeah. And to put it another way, Crystal Skulls is a movie passed off as an Indiana Jones movie when in fact, it was a goddamn abomination. There's a guy swinging on a snake in that movie.

There is a guy who pulls himself out of fucking quicksand with a snake. With a snake. I don't think that works that way. There's a refrigerator that protects a man from a nuclear bomb. It's a genuine terrible movie. It's the worst movie.

It's worse than the actual fraud of the Crystal Skulls. But this was genuinely a thing that somebody tried to create. They tried to pass off as, say, look, this was made up back then. And don't get me wrong. The work on this is really good, right? It's really solid. It's really good work.

And you should have just been like, hey, guys, look what I made, instead of, hey, look what I found. And this was made by ancient peoples. And now I can sell two tickets for it at Barnum and Bailey's. Right. And it's not like we don't have the technology to be like, this was made with like a fucking grinder, bro. Yeah. This wasn't like hand carved thousands of years ago. Like they know how to look for this shit.

They know how to look for this shit. The last one is the best one. This, of course, is the Spirit Halloween E.T. that got accidentally popped in the microwave for a few minutes. And this is

the Congressional Alien. It is the funniest looking thing I've ever seen in my life. I cannot believe that serious people looked at this box and thought this was

a real something. It is so, and every, every turn there has been more and more and more press about this. And now they're talking about how they found DNA in it. That isn't, that isn't from our world or whatever. They're making up bullshit about DNA, et cetera, et cetera. No, yet they've never handed this thing off to like a real scientist. Let me put this thing on a fucking meat slicer. Right.

And slice through it like a fucking pastrami. Because I want to see what's inside of it. Because you know what's inside of it? Nothing's inside of it. Paper mache. Because he holds it like this. Uh-huh. Like he's pinching, he's pinching it up.

He's holding it up in the air. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life. I cannot believe there are people in the world that think this is real thing. I wish so much I was a billionaire because if I was a billionaire, I'd get billionaire money. I just buy it from everyone's got a price. Yeah. I'd buy it. I mean, you walk up to me like, what, 20 million? Can I buy a thing for 20 million? I'll buy your stupid fucking paper mache aliens. Here's a giant check and I'll bring it over to fucking MIT or wherever.

And I'll be like, what is it? And they'll be like, it's a papier-mâché trash alien in a weird gift box. And I'll be like, yeah, that's what I thought. That's what I thought it was. Throw it away. Yeah. Put it in the garbage. It's not worth keeping. And then as soon as he takes the money, he turns into the next one.

He's like a little- He gets all desiccated and shitty. It's like he's a little desiccated guy. And then- I just realized what these are for real. Do you know those little silica packs that say do not eat? This is what happens when you eat them. That's what happens.

This is a, this is what this is, is a little guy. Yeah. That ate one of those silica packs. They ate one of those silica packs. It says do not eat. And then it dries you out like Ben Shapiro's wife's vagina. Actually, this is a picture of Ben Shapiro's wife's vagina. That's what it is. Dusty and sees no action but but this is a great article because it showed you i think it showed you five really interesting

examples that that were big categories for all these different ancient artifacts that we're supposed to believe are actually aliens. Yeah, they're all of a type. Yeah. And that's why this was an important good article from Discover Magazine. Yeah. And it gave us the ability to really ask the hard questions like, what if we do translate whale songs?

When you get Star Trek IV, it's the voyage home. Okay. Yeah. So this main article is from the Washington Post. What we actually know about aliens according to science. This was weirdly a long form article to answer a question

called... Not much. Not much, yeah. It was mostly a SETI article. It's mostly a... It mostly seemed to me like a PR article for SETI. Yes.

SETI is the search for extraterrestrial... Intelligence. Intelligence. I was going to say something else, but it's a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. S. I was going to say something else, but it's a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI back in the day,

and I don't know if they still allow it or do it, but they used to have a system that you could sign up for and through your internet connection, they would use your computer when it was on its downtime to crunch some of the stuff, the data that they have.

Oh, that's cool. So they had like, they called it SETI at home. And so like you could log in. I don't know if it's still available. I didn't bother to look, but back in the day, you could log in,

download this program. And then when you, for five minutes, your computer was inactive and it was connected to the internet. Cool. We're just going to use it. It would download some shit,

run it through your processes, and then it would send it back to them. And so they could link a bunch of computers together to do this work so that they didn't have to or have the people or whatever to do. And so, because they would get, I mean, like, think about it. They scan the sky and they get these, you know, giant batches of data.

It's like the CERN, you know, the people at CERN who get these petabytes of data off of one collision. They have to be able to decode that data somehow. And it's just a lot of it's probably useless, but the nuggets are in there and they've just got to go through it. And so the same thing here for years, they were doing this and said, he just points the telescope, a radio telescope at the sky very often and just listens. They look out there for patterns. They look at, you know, they do these searches to see if they can find things that wouldn't occur in nature.

And there's been a couple of times in the past where they've almost been fooled, where there've been moments in the past where they've almost been fooled. But mostly this article is really just saying, you know, as much as people want to talk about UFOs, as much as people want to talk about aliens, the people who do this for

a living, we ain't found shit. Right. Yeah. They're basically saying like, look, there's a, there's, there's a few good, really solid mathematical reasons for us to think that, yes, probably. Yeah. But it's yes, probably was such an enormous series of caveats. Yeah. And like one of the things they say in this article is something like the Drake equation, which is kind of the famous equation that's used, is like, it's got so many variables to it

that it really just quantifies how much we don't know. And that is essentially everything. You think about the scope of the problem of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and it is massive in scope because it's not just a problem of scale in terms of physicality, but also in terms of time space. Yeah, that's the big problem.

And you have these multiplicative forces, which make this idea of finding other life out there so incredibly hard, but still there's like this human optimism to like, if we can look at all, even though our looking is so rudimentary and slow and tiny, and it's like, you know, a fucking, I think it's like, was it looking for a needle in a haystack that may not contain needles? It's still worth doing. Sure. Right. I do believe that it is still worth doing.

But I'm also like, yeah, we haven't mapped the oceans. We're not even close to having mapped our own oceans. The idea that we're looking meaningfully at like any percentage of all the billions upon billions of galaxies. These numbers defy reason to think about. But it's still worth doing. And with all of that, like we haven't found shit and nobody's found us. Yeah. And that's where it stands.

And there's no reason. You can have all the congressional hearings you want, but there's no evidence of anything at all. If there were, it would be life-alteringly important news. It would not be something you heard about fucking third-hand from your cousin's brother's uncle. Sure. Who once had and knew a guy with a security clearance. It wouldn't be a spirit Halloween fucking gift box

that's paraded around somewhere. There would be a lot more information about it. I think too, there's so many different variables like you were saying with the Drake equation and that time one is a big one because when we look out, we look back, right? When we look out, we look back. And you could be looking at the origins of the universe

really, really, really far away, and they haven't had an opportunity to mature yet at all, right? So we can't see the really far away stuff at this time. We have to see it in the past. And then we have to wait for it to catch up to this time. And so there's the farther you get out, the more chance you have of it being farther away from us and farther back in time, not the more chance it is farther back in time. And so then you're seeing things that were, and the universe is younger and the younger universe has less of a chance. Right.

And so the farther you look out, the, the worst chance I think you have of seeing stuff. And so we are, and we're also like, we are a social species. We want to find something. We really want there to be something. Like all good pseudoscience, wanting it to be true powers us, right? That's what makes us so gullible when it comes to, like, think about the fountain of youth, right? Who doesn't want that to be real? Who doesn't want the cure to cancer? Who doesn't want these things that we think of, like what homeopathy claims it can cure? Who doesn't want that to be true?

And this is the same thing. Who doesn't want aliens to be true? I can't imagine something I want more than this. But just because you want it to be true doesn't mean it is true. Yeah. And I was thinking like the scale of the problem of looking for this is like finding a single rubber ducky placed in the ocean at any point in the ocean at any time in the ocean's history yeah and you're like cool let's find the duck yeah and you're like also maybe there's no duck yeah and that's what the job is yeah and it's still worth doing it's totally it's totally worth doing and it's and

it's worth doing because because existentially we don't want to think we're alone. Right. And just the odds are we're not, right? The odds are that within the time span of the universe, there is going to be other life and other intelligent life somewhere. Within the time, if we did it, somebody else can do it, right? Within the time span of the universe. But the idea that it can travel here,

the idea that we can communicate with it, like these distances and these times are so far apart from each other. It's impossible to even think that it can be here and we can get to it. That's just not possible. And those times of intelligence have to overlap in time. That's what the Drake equation even says.

That's part of the Drake equation. So you're just like, yeah, fuck. Like it could be that like a thousand light years away, which is a small distance. Right. But it's also an impossible distance. Right.

It could be that a thousand light years away, there was intelligent life or that there will be intelligent life. Or that is now. And it's a thousand years ago and it still exists now. Cause that's how you would see it. Right. Because it's light, right? But they're not using the technology we're using.

Right. They're using a totally different technology. They don't use radio waves or whatever to communicate. Right. They never did. Yep. And so you're stuck without ever seeing that, even though it existed. Right.

Yeah. Like one of the things in there is like, what if that intelligent life is just in an ocean? Yeah. And you're just like, yeah, I don't fuck, you know? I don't know. Like you just can't. It's all so inconceivably difficult. It is. But like, we always imagine

it like signs or X-Files or you know, fucking close encounters where it's like, all right, like what if they built essentially a human structure and they were essentially human? And that's why, because we can't think of anything outside of ourselves. And in order to communicate in the ways that we communicate,

they would almost essentially have to be human. Right, yep. And I don't think that that, and that's a good point, right? Is that maybe we think that way because it's like we understand that if there's any hope of us ever meeting and communicating, there will have to be structural similarities. In order for us to even recognize, maybe they wouldn't recognize us as alive.

That's possible too, right? Or even as intelligent. I don't recognize an anthill is particularly worth my consideration. I don't recognize half of humanity is intelligent. All right. We hope you enjoyed this discussion about aliens and alien life. We are going to be back on Monday with a full show. And this upcoming Thursday

this following Thursday will be a live stream it'll be our Christmas live stream so come join us we'll maybe have hats on or something we'll see we'll figure something out but come join us for our live stream 9pm central time on Twitch and YouTube alright that's going to wrap it up for this week we'll catch you

on Monday with a new show but until then we're going to leave you up for this week. We'll catch you on Monday with a new show. But until then, we're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quasi-alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead, pan, sales pitch,

late night info-docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody. Evidential. Conclusive. expose your signs thrust your hands bloody evidential conclusive doubt even this

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