A Conversation About NASA, The Moon, And Alien Visitations

What follows is half of an online conversation I had with a friend about "aliens".  Out of respect to him and his anonymity, I will leave interpolation of his responses as an exercise for the reader.  I expect the general gist and flavor of his responses should be clear.

I responded to his original post promoting the book “Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA” by Richard C. Hoagland, with, "...is this something you take seriously? ...or is this a bit?"  

[He responded]

I don't take seriously claims about ancient aliens, modern alien abductions, moon hoax, evil NASA, flat earth, Roswell was a crashed alien spacecraft, et cetera. It's not that I'm specifically prejudiced against these particular claims, it's that they are extraordinary claims which, in many cases, contradict the available evidence, require "unconventional interpretations" of some facts, and acceptance of other unsupported claims to be believed, and bear the hallmarks of supercharged suspicion on the brink of paranoia, and a desire to be seen as having "secret knowledge". Sure, people are corrupt and power-seeking and greedy. I'll happily grant that. I think that the way that the overwhelming majority of people are actually corrupt, power-seeking, and greedy is far more mundane and tedious than all these overly-elaborate red-yarn-and-pushpins conspiracy conjectures. I am concerned that otherwise level-headed folks embrace these elaborate schemes, because 1) they vote, and the same mind they use to think up reasons why Neil Armstrong was a shill for Monsanto because ancient alien pyramid architects is the same mind they use to elect Senators, Representatives, Presidents, school board members, and dog catchers; and 2) they get distracted from the real corruption that actually affects people's real lives when they worry about Hunter Biden's laptop and the nonexistent basement in a DC pizza restaurant; and 3) they don't seem to have their Baloney Detection Kit properly calibrated (or functioning at all), and leave themselves open to "learning" fake "facts" which they use as context for receiving and interpreting new information. In short, I don't like it, and cannot in good conscience support it.

[He responded]

I suspect that if we shared a back yard and anything bigger than a softball landed in it, especially if it was a functioning spacecraft of some sort, we wouldn't have time to consider whether to keep it a secret, because the swarm of blackhawks, apaches, and windowless vans that would show up immediately... or possibly before the "visitor" would ensure that all "threats to national security" would be isolated and rendered non-threatening in short order.

...and as far as "truths" go... I don't know, man... When I hear people say things like "I have my truth and you have yours"... I lose a little more hope for humanity. ...and lemme tell ya... I don't have a lot left to lose.

[He responded]

We apparently employ different definitions for the words "truth",'fact", "belief", and "know", and that makes serious conversations difficult. Colloquially, I may say I "know" something, when, in fact, I believe it, or maybe I just suspect it to be true -- I try to be conscious of my usages, but sometimes I screw it up. People tend to get really tired of having every term defined and every remark qualified. It takes a lot of time, and people often feel like they're being talked down to. I try to have evidentiary warrant for the things I claim to know, or suspect to be, true. Claims are not facts and they're not evidence. This is something that comes up All. The. Time. when atheists ask theists to present the evidence they have to support their claim that a god exists, and they point to Bible verses... the Bible verses are claims. They may be different claims, that, were they demonstrated to be true, might support the original claim, but until such time they are unsupported claims, apparently offered as a diversion. I don't know of enough evidence... actual objectively verifiable evidence... to support claims that extraterrestrial life exists (intelligent or not). It seems that, statistically, it is almost a certainty that life started somewhere else, too. Whether that life got a foothold, and whether selection pressures and mutations produced beings with anxiety about an imagined superbeing watching them masturbate... I don't know. That seems less likely to me. That such beings evolved further, and developed such fantastic technology as vehicles that can traverse space at superluminal velocities without the relativistic side effects and arrive at Earth with a penchant to mutilate cattle and anally probe humans seems, I must admit, unlikely. Is there advanced, space-exploring life out there among the billion-billion stars? Maybe. Are they visiting Earth? That seems very improbable. It's hard for us mere humans to really comprehend the enormous distances at play in the universe. Do you realize that the moon, our nearest neighbor is about a quarter of a million miles away. It takes light (and radio signals) about a second and a half to travel that distance. The sun is over 370 times as far from Earth as the moon, and the nearest star other than the sun is over 28,000 time[sic] farther still. Recent studies suggest that planets are much more likely than previously thought, but whether planets are common which can support life that depends on liquid water as a solvent and gas exchange to fuel the business of life and take away its wastes... that has yet to be demonstrated beyond Earth. Other biological systems which depend on liquid methane or ammonia as a solvent may be possible, which would open up the range of environmental conditions which might support life. but we don't know. We haven't seen life that uses anything but water as its principal solvent. One thing that seems pretty certain is that the behavior of materials seems to be consistent across the observable universe. Carbon has the same number of valence electrons in the Anrdomeda galaxy, two and a half million light years away, as it does here. Carbon behaves chemically in the Andromeda galaxy as it does here. We are confident of this because electromagnetic emissions from stars in the Andromeda galaxy, some of which pass through gas clouds, allow us to identify the same patterns of emission and absorption of energy we observe in our labs here on Earth (adjusting for frequency shifts due to the relative velocities of the two galaxies), As far as anyone has been able to tell with any level of reliability, the "laws of nature", that is, the observed patterns of behavior of matter and energy, are the same everywhere we can see what's going on. The four fundamental forces we know about are doing the same business in the same way every place we look. All of this is to say, not that aliens are impossible, but that the chances that /we/ are being visited by extraterrestrials with vastly superior intellects and technology is very, very improbable, and it would require significant direct, empirical, objectively verifiable evidence to persuade me that we were being visited.

I don't know if I made a difference, but, sometimes, I just can't let things stand, and I have to say something.  Did I make myself out to be a crank?  Did I disrespect him?  Did I disrespect you?  I don't know. If I did, I'm sorry.  I'm not sorry I spoke up.