About scientific theories
All scientific theories that we have must be based on some kind of knowledge. Or they should be based on the best available knowledge. We get our knowledge using instruments like telescopes. And that is one of the things that makes science living. Our view of the world is changing all the time, because we get new and more effective instruments to do research. That means things like JWST telescopes bring new and fundamental views into our knowledge. And still, we are looking at precisely the same things that ancient philosophers researched and thought. We know more particles than ancient philosophers. But we still look for the ultimate part of materia.
That part is the thing that we cannot decay. This is the thing in modern science. We find smaller and smaller structures, but we cannot find the ultimate part that cannot decay anymore. We can discuss things like God. And then we can see that those questions are too hard for people. Sometimes scientists don’t talk about religion because they are afraid of anger. But the other thing is this. Some people say that God is a member of a species that visited a long time ago. That means if a person believes in God, that person believes in other extraterrestrial civilizations.
And those things are somehow very sensitive things in science. When we talk about the SETI program, we must realize that things like species on other planets were science fiction or pseudoscience a couple of decades ago. In the 1980s, people claimed that there were no other solar systems. And today we know many other solar systems. But we don’t know any other civilization. There was one promising exoplanet where there could be phosphine and methane in its atmosphere. But then the checks deleted those observations.
The JWST telescope is the first instrument that can research exoplanets' atmospheres. The water planets can host lifeforms like primitive algae. But can there be intelligent and technically advanced lifeforms? The answer can be something that we don’t want to find out. Maybe primitive life is quite a common thing in the universe. But intelligent and technically advanced civilizations are less common. Nobody actually knows if there is some algae in the distant waterworld's oceans until we can fly to those exoplanets. Those algae don’t make any contact with other civilizations. But if we face another intelligent species from another solar system, there is always the possibility that the contact is hostile.
And then we must remember the dark forest hypothesis. The universe is like a dark forest. We think that we are alone. We can yell and ask if there is somebody. But we cannot know what kind of thing is in the darkness. There can be some kind of bandit waiting for the right moment to strike. And that’s why we should think carefully, if we want to make contact with other civilizations that we don’t know.
The thing is this. We don’t know anything about the aliens. We have many hypotheses. But those hypothesis bases are in our own culture. There are no officially confirmed alien contacts. That means all our “knowledge” of the other intelligent species is purely hypothetical, or its base is in imagination. And the imagination continues until we get in contact.
Maybe that contact comes tomorrow, maybe after 1000 years. Maybe it will ever come. The problem is that nobody can predict when the contact will come. Or maybe someday in the distant future, when the Sun turns into a white dwarf, the human civilization moves to another solar system. In that case, our species turns into many other species. When the Sun uses its fuel, humans or our descendants must leave the solar system or face extinction. But those things happen in the distant future.
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