That would be a humongous world-changing announcement in a sane timeline. Half the people in our stupid culture wouldn’t even register it as a blip though.
In situations like this I like to think of the history students a thousand years from now, assuming the earth is still habitable, etc.
"So humanity’s first public recognition of extraterrestrial life only happened when it did to distract from the fact that the Big Country at the time had reelected the planet’s worst person AGAIN and they needed to delay justice until they died for… let me double check the text… they needed to delay getting in trouble for being at the top of a global human trafficking and rape operation?
And I am supposed to believe these people had running water, airplanes, internet, and space programs? They lied about every other damn thing!"
Why would they classify that information if its just microbial? The motivation for classification is clear if the aliens are flying around in UFOs (so they can reverse engineer their tech without adversaries of the US finding out) but there is no realistic motivation for why they might classify microbial life
Life of any kind on other worlds would upend lots of religious doctrine which insists that this place is special and that life was specifically put here for us.
But then again that assumes that these religions are logically consistent, so it probably wouldn’t matter.
Yeah. If they classify microbial life because it conflicts with religious dogma then you’d expect them to classify any scientific finding that conflicts with religious dogma, which doesn’t seem to be the case.
Information being classified doesn’t mean much, people classify all kinds of dumb shit to the point that training had to be implemented to prevent OVER-classification
Right. But in this particular case it doesn’t make sense. If microbial life were found on, say, Mars then that would be a discovery by NASA, which is a civilian agency. As far as I’m aware you don’t need a security clearance to work at a civilian agency.
On the other hand if the US found some unknown craft flying in their sky that would immediately become a military matter and so be classified by default
Oh i don’t doubt its aliens, just… microbial. Literally nothing major to speak of, single celled organisms.
That’s still infinitely more extraterrestrial life than we have proof of today
That would be a humongous world-changing announcement in a sane timeline. Half the people in our stupid culture wouldn’t even register it as a blip though.
In situations like this I like to think of the history students a thousand years from now, assuming the earth is still habitable, etc.
"So humanity’s first public recognition of extraterrestrial life only happened when it did to distract from the fact that the Big Country at the time had reelected the planet’s worst person AGAIN and they needed to delay justice until they died for… let me double check the text… they needed to delay getting in trouble for being at the top of a global human trafficking and rape operation?
And I am supposed to believe these people had running water, airplanes, internet, and space programs? They lied about every other damn thing!"
Why would they classify that information if its just microbial? The motivation for classification is clear if the aliens are flying around in UFOs (so they can reverse engineer their tech without adversaries of the US finding out) but there is no realistic motivation for why they might classify microbial life
Life of any kind on other worlds would upend lots of religious doctrine which insists that this place is special and that life was specifically put here for us.
But then again that assumes that these religions are logically consistent, so it probably wouldn’t matter.
Yeah. If they classify microbial life because it conflicts with religious dogma then you’d expect them to classify any scientific finding that conflicts with religious dogma, which doesn’t seem to be the case.
Information being classified doesn’t mean much, people classify all kinds of dumb shit to the point that training had to be implemented to prevent OVER-classification
Right. But in this particular case it doesn’t make sense. If microbial life were found on, say, Mars then that would be a discovery by NASA, which is a civilian agency. As far as I’m aware you don’t need a security clearance to work at a civilian agency.
On the other hand if the US found some unknown craft flying in their sky that would immediately become a military matter and so be classified by default
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