Hi Everyone,
I surprised myself and created this video today for public consumption. This follows on some thinking I have been doing on this general subject — essentially human civilization and any alien civilization as essentially exercises in creating structures for ever more complex information management.
This is not really a UFO lecture — well, it is, in a way. But it’s somewhat anthropological, or rather exopological (not sure if that’s a real word). But you get the idea. The longer I study this subject of ours, the more it brings me into thinking – what is it that characterizes the NHI civilization? Which in turn gets me to thinking about human civilization, which in turn has led me down a path that brings me to a fresh understanding of civilizations in general. Whether they exist here on Earth or anywhere else.
I don’t think this is anthropomorphizing. I prefer to think of this exercise as seeing human civilization as part of a much larger and perhaps more widespread process. One that has its own necessary logic.
Anyway, it’s a speculative piece. Your thoughts, please!
Richard
What an amazing mind you have Richard. I am humbled by your expression of civilisations’ development of and dependence of information. Ever more complex technology may be causing our brains to atrophy in some way. I think our ancestors may have had many faculties in which we are impoverished. One wonders whether or not the individuals and their well being or the complexity of the society in which they live is the better judge of that society. It seems as if year by year we as a species become weaker and increasingly more vulnerable, Pete.
Thank you very much, Peter. The idea about atrophy is really important. What you see with evermore complex forms of information management is that important functions increasingly get exported. Memory, for instance. Mathematics. So much more, and now increasingly with AI, reasoning. It seems to me that our brains evolved to perform those necessary functions individually. But over time we discovered more efficient ways of doing this. The real danger, it seems to me, is what happens if/when we lose part or all of this supporting infrastructure? We’d better not, that’s all I can say.
Hello Richard
This hit my view exactly. So many people both the normal guy and the educated PHD¨s have said that ET intelligent life may not look as us at all. Maybe even very different.
I do not think so, they may be a little different and maybe scary to look at but the main build is more likely very similar to us then very different.
We live on a planet that is a sphere orbiting a star that also is a sphere and on our planet we have animals with two rear legs and two foreward facing legs or arms if they can stand on their rear legs. Even the reptile family have that. This is the evolution¨s way of designing the best possible species to survive. Why should not that be the same on every other similar planet.
Thinking that an ET technological species is very different is in the same class as thinking they live on a square planet orbiting a square sun. You will need hands to invent and build technology, not tentacles. You need legs to move around on dry land , not fins…
Very very similar, most likely nearly identical in many cases is my point of view. If you spot very different ET s they are most likely drones made from very high technology design and not natural life.
regards.
I’ve noticed an evolution in my thinking. It all started with ufology, really. All those years ago, thinking about aliens in general got me into thinking about civilizations. Eventually, I landed on ideas like breakaway civilization and even later, humanity’s fourth stage. But even that turned out to be a gateway toward a broader notion of civilization as something like a sophisticated data management system. To some that sounds really bare bones. But functionally, I do think there’s a lot of truth to this. And it seems to me that there may well be certain rules, or at least predispositions regarding it. Anyway, thanks for the comment.
We think in words. Every word, every kind of word allowed more complex thought, cogitation. Abstract thought is the ability of people to just think of something in their mind, something they weren’t directly perceiving, something that wasn’t right in front of them. This includes thinking about the future. Words and thought became more and more powerful as more and more words and kinds of words could describe thought experiments. All before writing.
If we think in words, telepathy must be words or we would not understand it.
Is there observation or intervention? Here is where again we must avoid the trap of thinking there is only one sort of NHI. If there are multiple NHI, I would expect there to be both kinds.
A good talk I listened to while setting up a power saw.
Glad you enjoyed that, AG.
True disclosure I only just saw this right now and haven’t heard any of it. But and I am being intentionally sarcastic about disclosure here… But also serious. I only just found out the other day by chance the Doctor Phil is somehow now very involved in disclosure and get some kind of classified information? Well there you have it Richard just ask that genius Doctor Phil everything you want to know about aliens psychology. I’m sorry but when I saw that all I could say to myself is that this is such a joke. And I can’t even deal with all the nonsense online that all the podcasters have with every guy that’s ever been in the military having telepathic downloads from ET. It’s the circus. Thanks Richard Rita
Got to agree there, Rita. We have ourselves a true circus! 🙂
Agree, complete circus… better look 180 degrees the opposite direction.
Dr.Phil…. UFO expert ?? Is he chosen to be the new Philip.J.Klass ? The new Sherlock Holmes of Ufology as Philip seem to be ragarded as ?
As any other circus, we must have fun and laugh. While they show dots of light captured on film and unknown objects that can be anything, people are still being abducted and see massive crafts close up…
Certainly, the circus is leading the populations perseption in a wanted direction, not towards facts. It is as serious as the 911 commission.
regards.
Yeah, just jumping in. You have to wonder just how capable our society really is at handling serious questions in a mature and responsible manner.
Richard I have to make a statement that’s really serious actually. I didn’t know it would happen this way but then that’s the nature of creativity isn’t it? We never know. I always thought UFO disclosure meaning not through the government but in more direct ways would happen before world war 3 happens. It just goes to show…..
I heard the news today oh boy…….
First time commenter here. These are important observations. You raised a few different premises and I think there’s an unspoken question “Why?” I can’t imagine that it’s fundamentally impossible for a long-lived spacefaring civilization to be entirely human in mindset, or even more passionate and less precise than we are. Something like the Klingons. However I think the most obvious answer why that’s unlikely is something you perhaps implied and the listener is expected to assume, and it’s one of the Great Filters: the types of capabilities we see in UFO reports (especially if they are interstellar) would require massive amounts of power, and some kind of post-relativistic understanding of quantum mechanics and gravity to unlock. Any civilization that hasn’t sufficiently eliminated any chance of “error” or misuse of the technology (possibly via a shared collective mind or interest) will wipe themselves out not long after they discover the secret. Nuclear energy is child’s play compared to the “UFO power source”, although it’s perhaps a stepping stone in the tech tree to the same physics – and why they seem so interested in our nuclear activities. Therefore survivor’s bias tells us that any advanced spacefaring civilization is most likely going to have the qualities you suggest and be much more organized and error-correcting than we are.
Another obvious possibility comes from the collective organization of information required to unlock the secrets of the universe in the first place. We pride ourselves on “the scientific method” but there will probably come better forms of reality observation/induction/deduction/abduction, information collation and storage, and just overall epistemological frameworks that we are barely on the cusp of understanding. The UFO phenomenon at large tests this. It always seems just beyond our grasp and it might not be until we’ve “leveled up”, for example with AI, that we can start to make headway.
If you’re ever interviewed by Joe Rogan this would be something to bring up. He often likes to talk about how humans are almost hardwired to build more and more complex things over time. This information complexity management theory is one explanation.
I agree completely with everything you just said here. And I think I will have some follow-up to that in my fireside chat tomorrow, July 19th. Thanks for your post.
Thanks Richard, I do love these thoughtful speculations.
As you’re talking, I wonder if the points you raise could bolster the ‘them’ as future us, hypothesis. Not sure I subscribe personally, but from the points raised, the observe and influence subtly, approach could well be one of beings trying nudge and guide us in a certain direction. Influence, but not overtly, as that could derail, in order to guide the desirable / required (predetermined?) outcome. As I type though, that could also be the actions of others whose perception of time is less linear than ours so they see everything that has been and will be, and understand their place in that story?
Over many years, my thoughts have gone all over the place on this matter. Currently, I’m drawn to the idea of a kind of convergent evolution thesis, but not necessarily in terms of biology so much as the information architecture necessary for civilizations. Too much for me to get into detail here, I addressed it to a limited extent in that video, but there’s a lot more to unpack. In my mind, this tends to minimize the “future us” hypothesis. Additionally, I think I have a bias against the time travel hypothesis to begin with. However, this is yet another talk that I should try to explore. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating possibility.
Richard I have to make a statement that’s really serious actually. I didn’t know it would happen this way but then that’s the nature of creativity isn’t it? We never know. I always thought UFO disclosure meaning not through the government but in more direct ways would happen before world war 3 happens. It just goes to show…..
I heard the news today oh boy…….
Sigh. Yeah, good point, Rita. Not sure I ever thought world war 3 would come first either. Well, I’m still hoping for some crazy reason that it won’t really explode into a catastrophe. Fingers crossed.