Source
r/UFOs•
_Nullius

Question for the Community: Why do so many UFO enthusiasts like the idea that extraterrestrial Intelligences want to ‘teach’ us?

What possible value to them (or it) -scientific, cultural, or exploratory- would teaching advanced physics and engineering to humans have? Is it some kind of modified religious impulse that convinces people alien intelligences have come to ‘save’ us?

There is a Woody Allen short story where Aliens arrive on earth, demand to see world leaders, and then the aliens proceed to drop off all of their dry cleaning -promising to return at a later date to pick it up (when they return they have sadly lost their ticket and their dry cleaning is lost) This seems about as likely as the idea that aliens are coming to teach us about clean fusion or something.

Posted Apr 11, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

156
switch182•

Better than Eat us

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_NulliusOP•

Haha I expect alien intelligences to be well past the notion of eating entirely.

3
No-Surround9784•

They need some energy to operate their huge brains (or whatever they use for thinking).

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_NulliusOP•

Or maybe human flesh is considered to be a cure for erectile dysfunction like white rhino horns are in China

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PRIMAWESOME•

They don't need to eat food for that though.

1
willbow-shmeshly•

Many ancient cultures' myths speak of our developments of agriculture and other sciences as a gift from higher beings. Much of the ufo community has patched together bits of old legends with ideas from science fiction and various spiritual beliefs. Also it may be a natural jump in logic since many believe we've been visited for a long time and they haven't destroyed us yet so maybe they have benevolent intentions. Also if people believe we were seeded here (as workers to find gold for instance) then the ETs would maybe take some interest in our development. Or perhaps nudge us in the right direction by giving us bits of technology etc. Its fun to speculate and there may be merit in many of the original ideas but people also need to learn to analyze information without outright believing it.

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_NulliusOP•

The most likely thesis to me is that we constitute a natural preserve worthy of scientific study. Alien intelligences are likely to be scientifically curious and when better way to study the evolution of intelligence than to simply watch it happen from orbit for a few thousand years.

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Inevitablegentlemann•

Because they probably are advanced enough to understand that all forms of life are apart of the same universe and made of the same stuff that stars are and maybe they just have reasonings we can’t understand?

6
_NulliusOP•

Or maybe life is so abundant in the universe that it’s more logical to simply consider life to be a state of matter like plasma or crystal or neutron star material or whatever. It would seem to be of little scientific value to interfere with the evolution of a living system like human society.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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_NulliusOP•

I would presume that most extraterrestrial intelligences are synthetic life forms. Organic matter is not well-suited for space travel. Even hard vacuum (which is pretty much the entire universe by volume) kills us quite quickly.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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_NulliusOP•

I’m not necessarily making a distinction between organic matter and advanced technology. Living tissue is a kind of advanced and highly organized matter. It’s just not built for space travel, rather it evolved to operate in extremely narrow and local conditions. Achieving similar complexity as a matter of intelligent design using materials more suitable for existence in the universe at large may ever result in beings that look ‘alive’ but are not necessarily organized as mega-colonies of carbon-based eukaryotic cells.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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pomegranatemagnate•

That is a great bit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdm0lm9_p7U

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_NulliusOP•

Haha I laughed my ads off at this. Thanks for finding it. I couldn’t remember if it was from standup or from one of his anthologies of short stories.

3
Clicker61•

Traditional, inconvenient religions have lost their appeal in the developed world cuz, rules and stuff. New religion envisions benevolent, nonjudgmental entities who'll solve all our problems with godlike technology but let us do whatever we want. Gee, I can't see a downside to that! /s.

3
willbow-shmeshly•

Ha indeed. Some issues will always arrive; for everyone believing that their problems will be solved by anyone other then themselves.

2
_NulliusOP•

I agree.

1
mightymoose13•

I think on a cosmic scale and from a physics stand point we are like clumsy children on the verge of tearing the fabric of space time with our nuclear devices. I think they would want to guide us past this point to protect everyone else.

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_NulliusOP•

Haha could be but thankfully the universe doesn’t seem to be especially fragile.

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Pristine_Exit2688•

To understand would require us to see from their perspective. Not sure it’s possible for us to comprehend only knowing what we know.

2
OneBagWinter•

I think it would be boiled down to empathy/altruism.

If they are at a Star Trek-level of technology and more, they would replicate anything they need, they would have effectively free energy, they would travel around the universe relatively easily, use robots/autonomous tools that do all labor, and live forever and without illness from advanced medical technology.

What else would be left to do in a universe like that, where all your needs are met and you have all the time in the world? There wouldn't be physical struggle anymore, and looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs from a practical standpoint, the vast majority of conflict at an individual and global level is from a physical resources/labor standpoint. Once you eliminate physical scarcity, it would be like the whole world and beyond opens up. Like getting to a post-scarcity society is the equivalent of going from a tutorial in a video game to the actual game itself. Now we would be free to do anything we want, and we would have no incentive to really hurt or steal from another besides from mental illness, which would be eliminated for the most part anyway because healthcare is also a scarce resource. And people who cause harm to others as a form of holding power over others would be eliminated too, because there's no incentive to control others when you won't get any time/resources/energy out of it.

So what happens when an individual to an entire civilization effectively have unlimited time, energy, and resources?

2
_NulliusOP•

Exactly. Their motives would be as alien from ours as human motives are alien to a dog or a sparrow.

What their ‘civilization’ would constitute would likely diverge wildly from our notion of a cooperative commonwealth of individual organisms. Aliens are likely to be extremely, well, ALIEN. Lol

2
No-Surround9784•

a dog

On the other hand we are all mammalians with similar emotions.

1
_NulliusOP•

Yeah but it’s for all practical purposes impossible for me to explain to my dog where I go every day or why I go there, even if I could speak dog.

1
Northern_Grouse•

We’re arrogant.

There’s a vast majority of people that believe were the top of the food chain, and that the world is ours to do with as we will.

That’s a suicidal mindset.

My guess, to your question, is that they may believe we have potential to be an interstellar friend/neighbor/colleague, so they don’t want to see us wipe ourselves out.

Or perhaps it’s the planet itself they’re trying to save, and they’d rather help us than wipe us out. For their own ethical reasons.

2
_NulliusOP•

I don’t foresee interstellar species seeing a lot of upside in providing advanced technology to barbaric species. If humanity were to bomb ourselves back into the Stone Age it has little impact on anyone else. Give us the power to traverse the galaxy and we become everyone else’s problem. Another problem for seen by Star Trek. I believe the Klingons were supposed to have been a species unadvisedly uplifted by the romulans, much to everyone’s eventual inconvenience

3
Northern_Grouse•

I’m not 100% of the mindset the UFO’s we know of on earth didn’t originate on earth. It circles back to the arrogance that we are the first and only advanced species that’s lived here. In that regard, there’s a nonzero chance that we’ve reached high technological levels before and our own civilization was met with war and destruction. Only to leave very few remnants.

That’s not the argument presented though.

Your question is basically asking the community why people believe the same intentions of aliens are benevolent. In which case, it’s just a matter of what you believe. There’s no physical evidence of aliens, let alone evidence of their intentions, or goals.

3
No-Surround9784•

We know of one place where intelligent life can evolve and that place is Earth. I never took the idea of a previous advanced species seriously but now I am turning in that direction.

Maybe we are seeing the rear guard of a previous civilization which left Earth before we evolved. It would be funny to know what kind of an animal they evolved from.

Seriously, life on Earth is old enough for this to have happened.

3
Northern_Grouse•

Best guess for me would be some type of amphibian, like frog

1
_NulliusOP•

I like that idea, but I’d suggest there is more evidence of UFO’s than we in the general public have access to. Recent disclosures by the former DNI and others attest to fairly complete and surprising radar and visual records.

2
Northern_Grouse•

I'm not contesting the evidence of UFO's. I'm contesting the idea that they're controlled by otherworldly visitors.

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RealApplebiter•

When you're a tiny child, and I mean a newborn, your eyes don't even focus properly, yet. If you could access an early memory of a parent, it might even look a bit like a classic gray alien. Otherwise, ET fulfills the same role as god, who is a proxy for one's parents. Again, Freud noticed that children become interested in the concept of god at precisely the age that they realize their parents are neither immortal nor infallible.

There seems to be a missing piece of culture around coming of age or stepping into one's own authority. I know that I was 29 when samadhi found me, and that seems to be consonant both with the "return of Saturn" and with the Greek conception of adulthood.

We can make the concepts exotic and florid, but at the bottom, there are only a handful of moving parts.

2
_NulliusOP•

Agreed. I think the notion of benevolent alien saviors has it’s roots in infantile psychology (and the dubious notion that interstellar species would consider us worthy of preservation)

2
tianepteen•

I know that I was 29 when samadhi found me

mind talking about what you experienced exactly?

2
RealApplebiter•

I don't mind under the right conditions, but not right now.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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[deleted]•

[removed]

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1
Barbafella•

Because if they can’t then we are fucked. If the knowledge that we are not alone in the universe, that our planet is precious and needs to be respected not trashed so a few can shit in gold toilets on 500 ft yachts, if we cannot grasp the basics from a higher intelligence then we don’t deserve this planet and should give dolphins a go instead.

2
_NulliusOP•

Humanity will escape the earth and evolve into countless new forms. We survived an ice age with nothing more than stone tools. We certainly have some growing up to do, but I expect that is precisely why we will not be ‘contacted,’ in the science-fiction sense. Why would anyone want to deal with us right now?

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No-Surround9784•

Why would anyone want to deal with us right now?

Maybe they are the original owners of this planet?

1
_NulliusOP•

Interesting thought, but what use would an interstellar intelligence have for a planet? Sentimental attachment? An appreciation for novel forms of life? There is a lot of real estate out there. I don’t picture extraterrestrial intelligences fighting for real estate as we know it. It’s possible that unique and rare interstellar phenomena could become points of contention if they provided some novel form of energy, transportation, or matter, but the earth doesn’t really have anything unique about it chemically.

1
PRIMAWESOME•

It could be due to past instances where aliens have helped out humans in the past, perhaps that has been wired into people. It also could just be a thing people think. For example, a lot of people always think aliens are here to study us or Earth. Some might be here for that, but there's a lot of other reasons they could be here and that reason is a rather stupid one in comparison.

1
_NulliusOP•

I disagree. I think study and research is by far the most likely. It stands to reason that an interstellar intelligence would be scientifically curious having developed advanced technology. The study and cataloguing of life and intelligence in all it’s myriad manifestations throughout the universe could occupy a being for aeons of time.

1
PRIMAWESOME•

That's because you're thinking like a human or comparing them to what humans are most likely going to do once they can space travel. You have to remember that not everybody is going to be like that. Just because a being is travelling in space, doesn't mean they are on a research mission and I'm not sure why it is hard for people to understand that.

Aliens being here for research is the dumb answer for people, that's all they can comprehend them doing here, I mean it is better than when people claim they are here to eat us or enslave us all or whatever other nutjob theory, but it's not the intelligent answer, it's just a base answer for people thinking slightly more intelligent than eating people.

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_NulliusOP•

So then I suppose you have an alternative, less “dumb,” hypothesis?

1
PRIMAWESOME•

Yeah, it's called not generalizing what aliens are here for.

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placebogod•

I’ve heard the narrative that the “game” is for us to spiritually evolve by ourselves

1
_NulliusOP•

Yeah there would seem to be very little value in interfering with a species evolution.

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Visual-Matter-837•

It might be a tiny possibility that they are aiding us through our evolution? And check up on us and disable our nukes so those stupid humans don’t destroy themselves. I’m not saying thats the case but it could be a possibility

1