In this walk and talk I discuss some perspectives on Gary Nolan’s comments and analogies in the Through Conversations podcast I was listening to this morning. In it, he was (appropriately and righteously ) ripping into Neil deGrasse Tyson’s absurd dismissals of research into UFO’s and the existence of Non Human Intelligence.

( link to my talk in the comments )

Here are some of the comments I found particularly generative…

On the Sol Foundation (and other foundations):

“We are setting up a perimeter [ around the topics of UFOs and Non Human Intelligences ] allowing us to talk and explore professionally and academically about this subject matter so that we can invite people in who might be willing to talk about it but are concerned about the bullies like Neil degrass Tyson and that guy Dr Nye, ‘the science guy’. People are are afraid of the bullies and what the bullies do. These bullies are more like priests than they are scientists. In today’s world it is becoming increasingly difficult to access truthful nuanced and wide ranging perspectives in terms of the truth we consume and the information we consume.”

On Whether or Not We Can Understand Nonhuman Technologies:

“I mean let’s just keep it at the science level. There are common Frameworks for math. Does ( alien ) math work the same from their point of view as it does for ours? Here’s an example ( we could take insight from ) A friend of mine works in or worked until very recently in the CIA, and his day job was reverse engineering Soviet technology. He planned and created the programs that would go in and obtain our adversaries’ technology. He would plan the missions that would go and obtain stuff out of the Soviet Union and bring it back, or spy it out. And even he said that sometimes we would get technology that we didn’t understand from the Soviets… things that were built on novel principles that the Russians had developed. And so we had to start with the function and work backwards towards the math that explained it. So it isn’t obvious what you have in your hands just because you have it in your hands— it could be based on mathematical principles that you haven’t formulated in your culture. But having understood them eventually… by the way he said that they probably only were able to reverse engineer—of the Soviet materials at the time—about 60 or 70% the rest were they just couldn’t figure them out with our best scientists.”

On “Getting an Idea of What’s Possible”, by Exposure to Advanced Technologies:

“So you know there’ve been arguments made— in books and conspiracy theories —that fiber optics came from the Roswell craft. I don’t know if that’s true. But somebody said that they found these wiring things and they figured out that if they put coherent light in one end—light came out the other—and that was how fiber optics were invented. I don’t know that that’s true, but let’s say that that was true. [ In that case, we should remember that ] the purpose of the fiber optic might have been something completely different than what we use it for. It’s a side interest, right? So you know I can send a cell phone back to the Neanderthals or Cro Magnon man and they figure out how to make glass —because they can see this screen and they figure out that the glass might be made of silicon or sand, right? So they they understand that there’s »something hard that you can look through» that’s not a cell phone but is »a principle that you learned from the cell phone».”

On Having to Live Out the Consequences of Selecting for Psychosis in Human Leaders:

“I feel though that we are in a moment in time where we have so much opportunity and yet we’re so busy fighting with each other over pennies—or a you know a few square miles of land—how we let our emotions and our historical baggage keep us primitive is beyond me, but you have to look again evolutionarily at how we got here… When you had two tribes competing for limited resources the aggressive tribe won. The aggressive tribe likely had a psychotic leader and so what did you do? You selected for psychosis in leaders.

Now we look around at society and everywhere we look I see a psychotic leader. And it doesn’t matter which side of the political Spectrum you’re on… you know they are megalomaniacs and not interested in the common good. They’re interested in their own aggrandizement.

So what do I look forward to? Our own form of non-human intelligence. I hope artificial intelligence comes along and cleans it all up for us.

I will vote for the first artificial intelligent president the moment they’re on the ballot.”