It’s such a tired and useless phrase – ‘Conspiracy theory.’ Throughout history conspiracies existed, provably so, and continue into this day.
So, following the concept of ‘Who benefits?’ Those who are involved in conspiracies and wish to deflect attention by deriding conspiracies as ‘crazy’ and the very idea as a ‘theory.’
An alternative is to be believe that no-one has secrets, everybody is ‘nice’ and most have the best interests of the world at heart.
As a human being I can’t avoid having a world view. It may be cartoonish or luminous but it’s there as a background. I was brought up when Darwin’s ideas regarding evolution were dovetailed with the idea that millennia or aeons passed with very little change to our planet – apart from cometary impacts, volcanoes, earthquakes and tidal waves. The extinction of the dinosaurs being an exception to this gradual change to conditions on Earth.
That idea is the basis of a world view whose almost unpronounceable name is – “Uniformitarianism, also known as the Doctrine of Uniformity or the Uniformitarian Principle and is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present-day scientific observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It refers to invariance in the metaphysical principles underpinning science, such as the constancy of cause and effect throughout space-time, but has also been used to describe spatiotemporal invariance of physical laws” - thanks there to Wikipedia, not always reliable but useful.
I don’t understand what ‘… spatiotemporal invariance of physical laws’ means but I can live with that.
This Uniformitarian world view does not align with the geographical evidence but the evidence does align with an alternative world view named Catastrophism which, as its name suggests, points to a past containing countless catastrophes not just here on Earth but within the solar system and within the collective memory of mankind.
Added to the Doctrine of Uniformity is the idea that gravity is the prevailing force in the Universe. Electricity plays no part yet the cosmological evidence shows otherwise.
It matters that I have some understanding of these world views, probably not held consciously by most but there nonetheless in the background, because there are also those who believe literally that the world was created in six days and that it wasn’t that far in the past.
It is these people who hold inordinate amounts of power and act on their beliefs – there would be no slaughter in Gaza if it were otherwise.
At least fifty thousand years gives us countless generations of Aboriginal people here in Australia who, with such an ancient timeline, perhaps see the history of the Abrahamic religions as a very recent event.
Are we alone in the Universe is an obvious and sensible question to ask. It’s been an abiding interest of mine throughout my life. Again, the evidence is there, whether it be in medieval art or within my lifetime, that alien intelligences exist and visit. The recent puerile attempt by the U.S. to rename UFO’s as UAP’s and to set up Congressional hearings in which nothing transpires is testament to the secrecy involved in these matters.
I’m not a materialist, not everything in life can be measured or contained. Do aliens sing, have a sense of humour, have the capacity to be moved to tears?
