Cognitive dissonance for lack of a better term.

 

    A few days ago I posted that to a site that I belong to that deals with philosophy and religion.  I'm not sure where it's from or who the artist was that originally did the piece.  I would give them credit if I knew.    

    What intereested me to this little meme was simple.  People are willing to accept the idea of Intelligent Alien Life, of which we have no proof of, without question.   Yet refuse to believe what is true and provable because they are biased in their opinions or it contracts some other deeply held value or belief. 

    Again, this is a non political blog but, sadly, this article is going to touch upon some religious and political viewpoints that can be controversial.   So you have been warned.

    However there is a really huge fallacy here first that needs to be addressed because everyone concentrates on the alien.   What this poster should be saying is "Alien Life."  All the evidence points to the fact that some sort of life exists "out there." 

    We can safely assume that somewhere "out there" their are little alien microbes living in the dirt of some warm water bearing planet.   We have discovered over 4000 exoplanets now, and more are added to the pile each day.  Many of those are far enough away from their suns to have liquid water on them (which we will come back to shortly) as well.  

    We also know that the same stuff needed for life on Earth (water, oxygen, carbon) is found throughout the universe.   So life of some sort is out there.   We also know that when you add a spark of electricity to what many believe the early atmosphere of Earth of like, you get lots of complex molecules.  The Miller Urey experiment produced over 20 amino acids, the building blocks of life.  The same results have been found in various similar experiments.  

    The problem with all this is that this is circumstantial evidence. It doesn't prove a thing.  It points to the fact that life should be out there, but until we find hard proof of it, it's still just a fun little guessing game.   If life is "out there" then the question becomes  if it is intelligent with some sort of civilization or still sunning itself on a rock.  That is an entirely different question that I'm not going to cover..   

Fossilized shells

 
    This is what makes Mars so interesting for anyone interested in the question of "life out there."   All the evidence points to Mars at one time being very similar to Earth in it's past.  Now if we turn over a rock and find fossilized shells, then that proves that life once existed on the red planet, and makes the argument that life "out there" even stronger.  If we don't find anything then that points to a darker conclusion.  That Earth is special and it takes special circumstances for life to have evolved.  That we may be "alone" after all.

    Alien Life, like the big guy in the meme above, captured the imagination of the general public a long time ago.  I've no doubt that other civilizations exist "out there" but I doubt if we will ever meet another race.  How many civilizations have risen and fallen on Earth in our mere 10,000 years of civilization?  

    Again though...this is not about the existence of an alien civilization. This ia about the fact that a majority of people believe that we are not alone in the Universe...despite having no solid evidence to back that belief up!

    Now what we do have is a good amount of evidence that the climate is being affected by global warming, that temperatures are going up and have been for decades - and this is directly related to human activity.  

    For example, it's possible to measure the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere going back to 1880.  In the 141 years since the amount of CO2 has gone up drastically, with major spikes occurring at certain times in history which directly correspond with human activity.   The wide spread use of auto's, World War 2, Industrialization.  The correlation is just to strong.

    When scientists started drilling in the ice of the polar regions they realized something.   In that ice were bubbles and in those bubbles were samples of the Earth's atmosphere going back thousands, if not millions of years.   Guess what they found?   That CO2 was pretty steady but started to spike with human industrialization and really jumped after 1950.   

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

 

 

    We have seen the average temperatures continue to raise, with the last seven (7!) years being some of the hottest on record.  Yet here in America, roughly one quarter of the population ignores this evidence and either sees no threat to global warming or flatly does not believe in it.

    I've not even touched upon evidence for melting ice caps, sea level rise, extreme weather events - as witnessed in Texas - or a thousand and one other things that indicate that humans are fucked.  

    Nor is this evidence circumstantial.   This is hard evidence, the proverbial smoking gun in the murder trial.   This is you and me on camera: being recorded pulling the trigger, writing a confession and then taking the body out to dinner type of stuff.

    Yes 1 in 4 Americans still would rather believe in Aliens than what is in front of their face.  

    Maybe it's to big of an idea?  Maybe it's to complex to understand.   Maybe we haven't had  54 years of a show like  Star Trek to make climate change part of our daily lives?  And let's be honest, a sexy green skinned woman is an easier sell than hard data and graphs. Maybe all those years ago we should have had listened to Captain Planet.   

    Honestly, in my humble opinion it's to late to make much of a difference now.   We should have started in the 1980's, and will simply have to be forced to make those changes needed to combat climate change.   It's not going to be easy or pretty, but we have no other choices.