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| From #P4TC post: ET and Prayer Cloths |
Topics: Commentary, Philosophy, Politics, Research, Science, SETI, Space Exploration
As I've read, originally the "backfire effect" was applied to how professional women were treated in the workplace, negative to be sure. Lately, it's been applied to our political discourse - up is down; out is in; logic is illogical, and reason be damned.
Humans don't like being wrong, and facts only grind their heels into the cement foundation of their own biased certainty. No matter what, we retreat from reality to the comfortable; we reject data for the surety of our own preconceptions.
Becoming aliens
Neel V. Patel posited an interesting question in his post: "Will Humans Ever Build Starships?"
Think for a moment - if you're in the camp of aliens visiting our somehow special planet out of literally billions of others over several parsecs of options - what it would take?
1. First and foremost, as implied by the Drake Equation, such a civilization needs to survive its own hubris to travel, let alone communicate.
2. Crowd funding wouldn't do, this would be a global, expensive effort on any planet.
3. It would have to be a compelling reason: avoiding extinction, profit, water; to merely "seek out new life and new civilizations" alone wouldn't cut it.
4. Leaving whatever environment and life you've grown accustomed to as "home" for something likely utterly and completely different...alien. This would be a special breed of interstellar explorers indeed.
5. The unlikelihood of warp drive in the foreseeable future, such a 0.1-c trip would be one way in distance and time, else coming back to the home world, the astronauts would find via time dilation most of their former friends and family buried.
Lastly, the astronauts would have to have a means of evaluating new information, jettisoning old information once new data was known, in short steeped in the Scientific Method, something in our current climate of science denial/rejection we're not capable of just yet. A backfire effect even in low Earth orbit could prove suicidal to a crew, let alone a joint mission with a more senior intelligence.
If there are intelligent aliens out there, they are proving it...by ignoring us.
Related links:
Brain Pickings: The Backfire Effect
Columbia Journalism Review: The Backfire Effect
Rational Wiki: The Backfire Effect
Slate: Can we build a Starship Enterprise in the Next 10 Years?
Space.com: Could We Build 'Star Trek's' Starship Enterprise?
You Are Not So Smart: The Backfire Effect
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