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Why it's Never Aliens | Hank Green | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Why it's Never Aliens
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Summary
Core Theme
The persistent tendency to propose alien explanations for unexplained phenomena, despite a lack of evidence, stems from human biases like wishful thinking and discomfort with uncertainty, rather than the actual prevalence of alien life.
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Many times in my life, it has seemed
like it might be aliens. The wow signal,
the face on Mars, Taby's star, and the
rhythmic timing of pulsars. But in all
of these cases, it has turned out to not
be aliens. And I want to understand why.
Why is it so far never aliens? And I
think I have a pretty good explanation.
And if we understand that explanation,
it will be easier to know when it
actually is aliens, if that ever
happens. To start out, I do want there
to be aliens. I want them to come down
from space and tell us things that we
will never otherwise know in our
lifetimes. Their mere existence would
tell us that we are not alone. That
there is other intelligent life in the
universe and even more importantly that
it can overcome the tremendous distance
between the stars and even more than
that intelligent [music] species can
survive their own fragility. I would
like to know that and I want to be here
for a big spectacular moment. Something
that could either be good or bad but is
definitely big. I know that about
myself. Even if it's not something that
I feel great about, I want there to be
more. I want it to be big and I want to
make that YouTube video. [music] So, I
pay attention when it might be aliens.
And there have been a lot of times since
I started watching the X Files in the
mid '9s when it seemed like something
big might be coming. I could make a
video called 20 times we thought we
found aliens and not run low on case
studies. Recently, Avibe, an
astrophysicist at Harvard, has been
talking about how Threeey Atlas, the
third interplanetary object ever
detected by humans, has a roughly 40%
chance of being alien technology. He
also said before this that there was a
good chance that Umuam Mua, the first
interstellar object ever detected by
humans, was alien tech. Call me crazy,
but since something like 99.99999%
of all of the objects in our solar
system are rocks, it would be weird if
the moment our tools became
sophisticated enough to detect
interstellar [music]
objects, one or even two of the first
three we detected were something other
than rocks. So yeah, I do think that we
will find that threeey atlas is a rock.
And this will be another case where
maybe its aliens turned out to not be
aliens. So I think there's a reason why
it's never aliens. And it's different
from the fact that they're not around.
That's separate. We're not talking about
that. What we're talking about is that
people will propose that it might be
aliens a lot and then it turns out to
never be aliens. So why is that
happening? I think that there are
reasons. I think that there is something
special about the alien hypothesis as an
explanation for something. And that
special thing or those special things is
resulting in it being proposed a lot
more frequently than it probably should
be. I have a few thoughts. I'm sure
other people will have more, but I'm
[music] going to start with one that I
personally suffer from the most. I know
that I want aliens to visit us, and I
know that must be true of other people.
And if we want something to happen, we
will look for reasons it might be
happening. Basically, there's a reason
why the most iconic image from the
X-Files is Fox Moulder's poster that
says, "I want to believe. Believe, not
know." I think you could see this in
this shot. I I I made a whole t-shirt
about this. This is so important. The
tools and structures of science do not
exist to eliminate bias from humans
because that is impossible. They exist
to get better information despite those
biases. We accept that the biases are
real and we create systems to work
around them. So there's this Carl Sean
quote that gets trotted out during
conversations about aliens or life on
other planets. Extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence. that I
love this, but it has become a bit
cliche and that risks having people
think that it's dogma rather than just
like good policy. And I actually think
that it's good policy for several
distinct reasons. One is the way that I
think Carl actually meant it. If
something aligns with a bunch of stuff
that we have known before and seen
before, in other words, it's ordinary,
not extraordinary. The level of scrutiny
that must be applied before accepting it
is simply not that high. both because we
know what to look for and because we
know that it's possible. For example, if
scientists were to discover a new small
moon of Jupiter, the barrier to
accepting that evidence would be
relatively low. We know what moons of
Jupiter look like. We know how they act.
And we know that there are lots of other
small moons of Jupiter. But if the claim
is extraordinary, then that means that
we have fewer tools and less experience
identifying a phenomenon. And also, we
have no idea how likely or even possible
that claimed phenomenon is. So, if
someone says there's a spaceship
orbiting Jupiter, that's going to
deserve more scrutiny. Both because it
would be much weirder and because we
don't know how to confirm the existence
of spaceships because we've never done
it before. We know how to detect moons.
We've seen them lots. We don't know how
to detect spaceships. We've never seen
them. But there's a second way I think
Sean's quote is good. The claim isn't
only out of the ordinary, but if we want
it to be true, we have to be even more
careful. And scientists want to discover
extraordinary things, they want to turn
everything on its head. That's how you
win a Nobel Prize. And that can happen.
It does happen. But when it comes to
extraordinary claims, both the bias of
wanting to discover something amazing
and the lack of skill and experience we
have with that discovery means that more
scrutiny must be applied to the claims
and the evidence. And if the evidence
wins out, amazing. Extraordinary claims
don't require us to turn around and
ignore them, but they do require more
scrutiny. The case of Professor Loe is a
remarkable one here. He obviously knows
more than I do, but he also says that
ThreeI Atlas's trajectory is extremely
specific. It's quite in line with the
plane of the solar system and it's
heading into the interior of the solar
system. And that he says is just very
unlikely. There are so many other
directions this thing could be moving
in. And that for him is a piece of
evidence in favor of the idea that this
is something possibly sent specifically
to explore [music] our solar system. He
thinks this is something we need to pay
attention to because it could be a
threat to our civilization. And to that
I say it would be weird if the
civilizational threat showed up the
moment we had the technology to detect
it rather than I think a better
explanation of now that we have the
technology to detect these things,
[music] we are able to detect them and
they probably come around fairly
regularly. But even more to the point of
this very specific trajectory, I assume
that Professor Loe knows that Atlas, the
telescope that discovered ThreeI Atlas,
was designed by astronomers to detect
rocks that could potentially hit Earth.
Those rocks are, of course, almost
entirely inside of the plane of the
solar system. And thus, that's where the
Atlas telescope looks. Atlas is looking
for objects inside [music] the plane of
the solar system. So, it is extremely
unsurprising that the object it spotted
is inside of the plane of the solar
system. And so here is our first reason
stated more clearly. If you want
something to be true, you will
unconsciously accept weaker evidence and
[music] interpret weird data as being in
favor of your hypothesis. And that is
one reason why it's never aliens.
Because people are biased to believe
they might be seeing something
historically important because that
would be very cool. But because they
have that bias, the number of times they
have thought it might be aliens is just
higher than it should be. And this goes
beyond Harvard astronomers to, you know,
congressmen and air force pilots and all
the rest of us. UFO influencers do this
constantly. The best evidence for UFOs
is always the thing that hasn't yet been
disproved. Then when that piece of
evidence gets disproved, they move on to
another video or credible sounding
eyewitness report. But whenever there
are videos, the ones that are the best
evidence are always, for whatever
reason, the blurriiest. As an example, I
recently did a video about this balloon
that was hit by a missile off the coast
of Yemen. And I said in that video that
it was the only piece of video evidence
presented during this congressional
hearing. And that was kind of true, but
some folks yelled at me about it because
they said there was another video and it
was actually the better piece of
evidence. But that video is just a video
of a blurry heat signature probably
coming out of the back of a distant jet.
And yeah, I was ignoring that video
because it's terrible evidence. The
video shows nothing that couldn't be
explained in a bunch of other ways,
which is why it wasn't the thing that
the media was talking about. The media
was talking about the weather balloon
video because it looked weirder. The
point is, if you want to start to prove
something, you need evidence that would
persuade not just you, but the skeptical
version of you who does not want to
believe, but wants instead to know. I
thought this might be a good time to
break in and tell you about the fact
that I designed this. You could watch I
put it on the screen right now. You can
watch me design it. There's a part where
I thought I might put a bunch of colors
in. I worked hard on that, but then I I
decided not to do that. I can't get far
enough away from my camera there. It's
the I want to believe from the XF with a
weather balloon, but instead of I want
to believe, it says I want to know. And
you could pre-order that shirt for the
next week and then never again because
it's busy time at the warehouse. So, we
can't keep it open for too long. So,
this is your first and last warning if
you want that. We take all the
pre-orders and then we end the pre-order
and then we make the exact number that
were ordered. And that's a great vibe
because we don't make too much, we don't
make too few. We got to do this one
really quick because the warehouse is
about to get very busy with Christmas
stuff. So, it's just a weekl long
pre-order this time. All right, back to
the video.
>> Professor Loe clearly wants there to be
aliens, and that's a real problem that
has led to him thinking it's aliens a
lot of times. But this is not the only
problem. There are others. And this next
one is [music] the most common one I see
in like normal everyday people. Not
knowing what's going on is super common
and normal. Sometimes people will show
me a video and say, "How do you explain
this?" And my answer will be like I mean
I don't know what's going on there. I
don't have an explanation. And that will
be seen by many as an admission that it
is aliens or something supernatural. But
unexplained stuff is normal. For 99.999%
of human history, we had no idea what
lightning was. The sky would just
explode during storms. We still don't
precisely know how lightning works. When
America was founded, everyone knew that
if you held your breath long enough, you
would die. And no one, no one on earth
had any idea why. And because this was
so obviously important and so
mysterious, it was seen as a link with
the supernatural. Accepting an
explanation for a mystery without any
evidence is totally understandable, but
it does not usually lead you anywhere
close to the truth. What really leads to
truth is accepting the mystery.
Unexplained is the default state.
Everything we know is something we
figured out. No one told us any of this
stuff. When I see a video that I can't
explain, that feels to me normal. Very
normal because I know that there are
unexplained phenomena hiding under every
rock in science. When you see a science
news story, like just open up any
science news and what you will see is
people providing explanations for things
that were unknown and unexplained
yesterday. So, it's just not surprising
when people start showing around things
that no one has a good explanation for.
And many times I have watched as
something that seemed unexplainable
gets explained. You have more
unexplained phenomena in your colon than
there are contained in 10,000 UFO
videos. The reason we focus on the UFO
videos is because they tap into our
desire for big important mysterious
things. But the absence of an
understanding does not require an
explanation. It begs it. It makes us
want it. It makes us drive to look for
it. But it is so common for there to be
mysteries that don't have explanations.
Sometimes there are just things that we
don't know for now. And then hopefully
sometimes we figure them out. These
interstellar objects are another great
example of this. AmuA Mua and threei
Atlas both have behaved quite
differently than objects we have
cataloged from our solar system. And you
can look at that and you can say that is
really weird. We don't have any reason
why this rock would look like that or
act like that. So, aliens, and I
honestly get that if you're not a
trained scientist, but I'm baffled when
it comes from trained scientists. Like,
they're weird compared to what? Compared
to other interstellar objects? No, we
don't have anything to compare them to.
We've seen three. This is the third
interstellar rock we've seen, and it's
the one that we have by far the best
data on. The fact that it's not acting
like rocks from our solar system is very
cool, but it's not like surprising. It
might have been traveling through space
for 10 billion years. Like, I don't know
what kind of star system it comes from.
I don't know how it was formed. We don't
know anything about this. This is
entirely new stuff. This is very
exciting. The fact that it seems
different from objects in our solar
system indicates that we're likely about
to have a huge boom in our understanding
of the universe by studying rocks from
distant star systems. Now, it could have
been that they'd all be like rocks from
around here, so there'd be nothing to
learn. It's exciting that it's
different, but thinking that the third
interstellar rock is so weird that it
might be aliens is textbook, I don't
understand, thus maybe aliens. There's
no reason to go from some amount of
confusion to I've got an explanation I
want to talk to people about when data
is still pouring in and all that data is
brand new. When we leap very easily from
I don't know what's going on here to
maybe it's aliens, we overindex on that
explanation and that results in it very
frequently being maybe aliens, but so
far never being actually aliens. And
look, I honestly think that these first
two reasons why we hit aliens as an
explanation so often are totally
understandable and normal instincts of
humans, which is why they are both
instincts that the processes of science
put some brakes on. But there's also, I
think, an understandable instinct that
says, "Look, it's never been aliens. It
never will be aliens. And oh my god,
will you shut up about the aliens?" And
we also need to be careful about that.
Aliens are not a supernatural idea.
Obviously, technology can exist. It
exists on our planet. So, there may be
alien technology, and it may someday be
the right answer. As long as the aliens
hypothesis isn't shutting down an
interest in more data collection and
discussion, I think it might be a little
distracting, but mostly fine. But yeah,
because we want it to be aliens and
because we are uncomfortable with not
knowing things and aliens are good at
explaining anything confusing. It is so
often brought up to much media fanfare
before being quickly disproven. But the
last thing on my list is a related
phenomenon that I actually really
dislike and I think is often used to
actively manipulate people and can
sometimes cause us to become stuck on
the explanation even when it must be
discarded. This is very common among UFO
influencers. We just discussed how we
often move from I don't know what this
is to maybe this is aliens and that is
because aliens can basically do
anything. So any evidence can be
explained by aliens. Any confusion in
the skies, anything that looks a little
bit weird, whether that's above our
heads or in the pyramids of Giza, maybe
aliens did that can explain it. But one
thing that can also be explained by
aliens and often is is a lack of
evidence for aliens. Why do we have no
good pictures of aliens? Well, because
the aliens are hiding from us and they
have extremely advanced technology. This
trick can be used to prevent any
evidence in opposition to the hypothesis
from being accepted. And hopefully you
could see the problem there. Once
something does not have to explain the
known laws of physics, it can explain
anything. And we need to be very
cautious with explanations that can
explain anything. If an alien can appear
or vanish instantly, redirect a hellfire
missile, erase people's memories, and
violate conservation of energy, then
there is no thing that aliens can't
explain, including the fact that as the
number of cameras on Earth has increased
by five orders of magnitude, the number
of credible photographs of aliens or
UFOs has not increased. We don't know
why Uranus spins on its side. That is a
mystery phenomenon, but aliens can
explain that. They have infinite
abilities and powers. They can travel
between the stars. Maybe that is the
reason why Uranus spins on its side. And
this is the biggest problem. If you
settle on an explanation that can
explain anything, we stop looking for
other explanations. You stop being able
to hear people who disagree with you.
And every time we have done that, every
time we stop learning. I don't want to
believe. I want to know. And the unlock
of science is not accepting things as
true until they have stood up to intense
scrutiny. When UFO videos are subjected
to scrutiny, the subreddits and the
Congress people, they get up in arms and
they say they're being silenced. No,
that's how this works. The mainstream
media wants to cover this. Congress
wants to talk about it. YouTube viewers
want to watch the videos. The reason
your views aren't mainstream is that
your ideas don't stand up to the level
of scrutiny applied to a senior
biochemistry thesis. The alien
hypothesis has been raised many many
times and it has never stood up to
scrutiny. That indicates that some
combination of our biases is resulting
in this hypothesis being raised too
quickly and too frequently. And that
doesn't surprise me at all because I
want there to be aliens. And yet in the
minds of many people for whom
unexplained phenomena can be explained
by aliens, the lack of direct evidence
of aliens is also explained by aliens.
You see the problem with this? It's an
idea that is impervious to critique.
Aliens as an explanation for something
is appealing because it is exciting and
unknown and on the edge of discovering a
literal god. So there's a strong
incentive to want to believe. The alien
hypothesis also solves the problem of
things we don't know, the mysteries we
can't solve. And look, I haven't really
talked about this yet, but the alien
hypothesis can also deliver attention,
ad revenue, video views, and book sales.
And it can explain any evidence very
quickly with very little thought,
including a lack of other evidence you
would expect if the hypothesis were
true. And once you get that deep, the
alien hypothesis isn't just
unfalsifiable, it is actively corrosive
to inquiry. It turns a failed prediction
into a confirmation, and it shuts down
the search for other answers. You could
see how I would dislike this. It seems
to me that people often believe that
accepting aliens as an explanation for
something unexplained is somehow
countercultural or brave. And I kind of
get that. Like I feel the pull of that
because it has so often not been aliens.
People like me do default to hearing
maybe it's aliens and immediately
thinking it's never aliens. And so often
times the more time people have spent
with us, the more likely they are to
immediately discount a perspective. And
that means that like the elites are
disagreeing. The elites are saying no,
no, no. And that can feel bad. And
there's all kinds of mechanisms at work
here that are, you know, in addition to
the biases I've already discussed, but
we don't need to get into everything
[music] today. But the point is like
someday I might hear people say maybe
this is aliens and I'm going to think to
myself, it's never aliens. But someday,
someday that might happen and I might be
wrong. But by understanding why so far
it's never been aliens, despite the fact
that often times people have said maybe
it's aliens, hopefully we can avoid
defaulting to that explanation every
time something seems weird while keeping
the door to that hypothesis open if we
encounter a situation where it looks
like it's probably aliens. I don't like
it when things are unexplained. My mind
wants to see that puzzle completed. It
is unsatisfying. It is makes me
offkilter. But more than that, I want
the fireworks, the big moment that
rewrites our place in the cosmos. But
the actual brave thing here is wanting
the truth more than we want any of that
stuff. And the first step, the necessary
first step to uncovering truth is to not
know. It is to be uncertain. We have
never uncovered any truth without
[music] that first step of uncertainty.
The more you want to believe, the more
you lose the opportunity to someday
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