Carl Sagan explains why aliens are not visiting us all the time

there's not a single verified or checked out report which is it all connectible with with the possibility of extraterrestrial life it doesn't say that I I think I suggest your life is impossible quite the contrary I think that many of the stars in the sky have planetary systems we know enough now about the origin of life to make it appear likely that life arises naturally on the vast bulk of these planets it's possible but by no means certain that life though on many of these planets evolves into beings which are as advanced as we or more advanced and I don't see any reason why we can't imagine that there are civilizations thousands or millions of years in advance of ourselves capable of technical feats that we hear we can hardly imagine if you would believe as the Flying Saucer cultists would have us believe that the the majority of the saucer reports are due to their visitations they have a very strange situation that means several spaceships are coming to the earth over interstellar distances every day as if all the anthropologists in the world would converge on one of the the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean because they just invented the fishnet there or something I think it's a much more reasonable fewer if you want to speculate on the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence that there are very rare visits from extraterrestrials to the earth there's no evidence for this I just say that's not implausible but have several visits a day I think is straining credulity I think a key to what's behind the real belief in flying saucers is most easily obtained if you look at the contact myths there are several hundred people in the United States who claim to have had personal contact with the inhabitants of flying saucers have landed and if you examine these myths you find that there's some peculiar regularities the inhabitants of saucers are benevolent I mean they're really concerned for our well-being there are on nipa Tintin stream Li powerful omniscient extremely knowledgeable and they often wear long white robes now this combination is something I've heard in another context this isn't a science this is religion and what I suspect is happening is this we live in a in very unsettled times it used to be possible to believe in a personal benevolent powerful all-knowing God who cared about individuals who you could pray to but now there's very few people who really believe that I think science for good or for ill has destroyed a lot of the traditional theologies and yet people have the same needs to believe that they always did perhaps more so because the times we live in well the Flying Saucer myths are a really clever compromise it's a way of having beings that come from the sky worried about us powerful that are gonna step in and prevent us from destroying ourselves as we might very well might ah and yet have it in the cloak of science so that no one can say nonsense that doesn't matter science it's all very pseudo scientific I would think that that at least for the contact myths and probably for a lot of the events of people who just see things that understand flying overhead that what's involved psychology and theology and not so much the physical sciences soul as we have seen scientists think the evidence is mounting that life in some form exists elsewhere in the universe but almost unanimously they find no evidence that anything out there has come here one thing is clear you could not keep a spaceship a secret too many professionals with too many powerful instruments are probing the skies these days too many journalists could not be restrained from trumpeting one of the greatest news stories of all time it also seems clear that since the security of our world is involved in converting all UFOs immediately into IFOS perhaps these phenomena are properly the responsibility of scientists and the military with periodic reports to the public on what they have found if anything the rest of us can emulate the scientists by keeping an open mind since yesterday's fantasy sometimes turns into tomorrow's reality we might remember too that while fantasy improves science fiction science is more often served by facts as a water drown guide for CBS reports good night

Channel: vson8

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Length: 4min 46sec (286 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 22 2014