2011-06-23
Hailing Frequency
When searching for extraterrestrial life, searchers need to ask themselves "what would an obvious frequency be?", ie what would the galactic "hailing frequency" be?
Throughout my life I have generally born in mind what the obvious thing a prophet would do is. I was disillusioned with Jesus's alleged philosophy of "turn the other cheek" which led to gross unchecked human rights abuses. A decent prophet would be preaching a different message - one that said that human rights needed to be defended.
Ideally the defense of human rights would be done by someone other than the victim. So e.g. the ideal response after 9/11 would have been for the rest of the world to say "America, sit tight - thanks for your help in past scrapes - we will take care of this problem for you - you don't need to exercise your right to self-defence". And then the neutral observer could have starting winding up the worldwide anti-Americanism that led to this attack. The world is obviously far from this ideal.
Anyway, when the Iraq war was on, there was a major change happening in the world, and there was a dispute as to whether that was right or wrong. 99.9% of the non-Iraqi world doesn't have access to Iraqis to ask for their opinion on whether it was right or wrong, and why. So if there was a prophet in the world, the most likely case was that he was in that 99.9% - outside the political/military/media circle, and would have been dependent on asking the Iraqi bloggers for their opinion. So there was an obvious "hailing frequency" - a place for prophets to congregate and exchange analysis. Also a place for hardcore atheists to go to prove that they were better than any damned prophet to have ever walked the face of the earth.
Another assumption - any prophet worth his salt would be doing his analysis according to scientific principles and would have accepted the data provided by the western governments - which are organizations in themselves, subject to leaks - and which come with vetting by the free media. ie accept a simple truth from those sources, rather than assuming that everything was a conspiracy and believing that Bush ordered 9/11 etc. Because the best data is required in order to come to the best conclusions. A human computer.
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Throughout my life I have generally born in mind what the obvious thing a prophet would do is. I was disillusioned with Jesus's alleged philosophy of "turn the other cheek" which led to gross unchecked human rights abuses. A decent prophet would be preaching a different message - one that said that human rights needed to be defended.
Ideally the defense of human rights would be done by someone other than the victim. So e.g. the ideal response after 9/11 would have been for the rest of the world to say "America, sit tight - thanks for your help in past scrapes - we will take care of this problem for you - you don't need to exercise your right to self-defence". And then the neutral observer could have starting winding up the worldwide anti-Americanism that led to this attack. The world is obviously far from this ideal.
Anyway, when the Iraq war was on, there was a major change happening in the world, and there was a dispute as to whether that was right or wrong. 99.9% of the non-Iraqi world doesn't have access to Iraqis to ask for their opinion on whether it was right or wrong, and why. So if there was a prophet in the world, the most likely case was that he was in that 99.9% - outside the political/military/media circle, and would have been dependent on asking the Iraqi bloggers for their opinion. So there was an obvious "hailing frequency" - a place for prophets to congregate and exchange analysis. Also a place for hardcore atheists to go to prove that they were better than any damned prophet to have ever walked the face of the earth.
Another assumption - any prophet worth his salt would be doing his analysis according to scientific principles and would have accepted the data provided by the western governments - which are organizations in themselves, subject to leaks - and which come with vetting by the free media. ie accept a simple truth from those sources, rather than assuming that everything was a conspiracy and believing that Bush ordered 9/11 etc. Because the best data is required in order to come to the best conclusions. A human computer.
# posted by Paul Edwards @ 19:47 
