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On Aliens and the Post-Truth Era in Mexico [1]

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Date: 2023-11-13

A month ago, Mexico’s senate began a series of hearings on aliens, with presentations including alleged bodies of aliens. While the idea that there is alien life is not scientifically absurd, discussions on alien life have often been characterized by all the markers of the post-truth era. In many ways, Mexico’s hearings on alien life are a theater of the absurd that shows the erosion of truth in civic discourse.

Do Aliens Exist?

Human beings have speculated over whether we are alone since the dawn of time. For instance, the Greek philosopher, Epicurus, believed that the natural processes that led to the creation of life on Earth, should be able to do so on other planets. Scientifically, there have been attempts to quantify the likelihood of there being alien, or extraterrestrial life. The Drake equation is the most popular attempt to do so. NASA, and other groups of researchers have attempted to calculate how many planets support extraterrestrial civilizations. When Frank Drake developed the equation in 1961, he estimated that there were 20 such civilizations across the Milky Way Galaxy. NASA, which supports a “rare Earth hypothesis” , believes that we are likely alone in this galaxy, and maybe in the observable universe. There are estimates as high as 15.6 million civilizations. In short, nobody really knows. It is a question that we will only have the answer for when our galaxy and the observable universe has been fully investigated. Science is about navigating through uncertainty in search of truth.

A Post-Truth Age

Donald Trump’s election occurred around the time when humanity seemed to enter into a post-truth era. Indeed, Trump was one of the most followed “power users” on Twitter (now X), spreading conspiracy theories from birtherism to how Mexican cartels were sending criminals over the border. With the earlier arrival of the internet, it became possible for people to be siloed into different information networks. Truth became less important than finding news that aligned with your identity. Everyone plunged into echo chambers. With that, all the guardrails for determining if something was true, seemed to come off. Today, look at the top podcasts on Spotify, and the number one podcaster in the world, Joe Rogan, has often entertained conspiracy theories, many of them on…alien life. Compare the uncertainty among scientists with Joe Rogan saying that he is “100% confident” that there have been aliens among us. He believes the government is hiding alien life from us, that there have been alien abductions , and he has even opined on the hearings in Mexico . In his essay on “The Meaning of Wikileaks” , the Italian thinker, Umberto Eco, pointed out that conspiracy theorists are not interested in seeking new evidence to test their ideas, rather, they look for information that confirms their deeply held views. Believers in alien life are taking an unscientific position: science demands evidence before belief, conspiracy theorists express belief before any evidence, and they assume conspiracies to hide what they believe to be true.

Fake News in Mexico

As soon as you look into the story it becomes apparent that Mexico’s hearings in its lower chamber have been dominated, not by scientists skeptically looking at evidence, but by conspiracy theorists. When there is little evidence for something, it becomes easy to imagine all sorts of things about, this fertile field for the imagination leads to conspiracy theories. Before astronomy, there was astrology, before chemistry, there was alchemy. The human need to know, and to be certain, generates imaginings about what could be. UFOs, or what the government calls, “unidentified anomalous phenomena” fall into that bucket: there is no evidence for their existence. Yes, there have been things that scientists and pilots have not been able to explain , but the lack of an explanation does not imply that the answer is, “aliens”.

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