Thanks to billbatard for instigating this debate- one of my favorite topics.
RESOLVED:Little Green Men Visited Long Ago
DEFINITONS:
LITTLE GREEN MEN is
"the stereotypical portrayal of extraterrestrials as little humanoid-like creatures with green skin and sometimes with antennae on their heads. The term is also sometimes used to describe gremlins, mythical creatures known for causing problems in airplanes and mechanical devices. Today, these creatures are more commonly associated with an alleged alien species called greys, whose skin color is described as not green, but grey.
During the reports of flying saucers in the 1950s, the term "little green men" came into popular usage in reference to aliens. In one classic case, the Kelly-Hopkinsville sighting in 1955, two rural Kentucky men described a supposed encounter with metallic-silver, somewhat humanoid-looking aliens no more than 4 feet (1 m) in height. Employing journalistic licence and deviating from the witnesses' accounts, many newspaper articles used the term "little green men" in writing up the story." [
1]
VISITED [verb] is the past participle of visit
VISIT [transitive verb] is
"to go to (a place) for pleasure, on an errand, etc" [
2]
LONG AGO [adverb] is
"At a time in the past, especially the distant past." [
3]
PRO does not explicitly define Earth as the Little Green Men's destination but this is clearly implied by context. Therefore,
EARTH is "the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life." [
4]
BURDEN of PROOF
"When two parties are in a discussion and one makes a claim that the other disputes, the one who makes the claim typically has a burden of proof to justify or substantiate that claim especially when it challenges a perceived status quo. This is also stated in Hitchens's razor. Carl Sagan proposed a related criterion, the Sagan standard, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". [
5]
In this case, PRO as instigator and claimant of extraordinary suppositions bears the entire responsibility of proof.
CON interprets this resolution to mean that PRO intends to prove that residents (stereotypical in appearance) of at least one exoplanet have at least entered Earth's atmosphere at sometime in the past.
PRO offers two pieces of evidence.
ITEM #1:
The study offers several plausible scenarios explaining why any hypothesized space-faring extraterrestrial intelligence has not yet visited Earth. Most importantly for our purposes, Carroll-Nellenback, et al. proceed from the assertion that no evidence for alien intelligence currently exists, Hart's "Fact A," etc, and attempt to account for that fact in a galaxy where some hypothetical settlement has nevertheless taken place.
"Our first conclusion shows that if diffusive stellar motions are accounted for it appears almost unavoidable
that if any interstellar-space-faring civilization arises, the
galaxy will become fully settled in a time less than, or
at very least comparable to its present age."
That is, if any human-like expansive civilization had arisen even only one or two billion years ago, they had so much time to explore the whole galaxy that the civilization has either failed or never existed. Any expansion modeled on human like progress encompasses the Milky Way in a few million years so even if only one human like civilization pops up every few million years, Earth should theoretically have been visited often enough to leave trace evidence and no such evidence has been found.
Unlike Carroll-Nellenback, PRO is not exploring possibilities here. PRO has affirmatively asserted that alien intelligence exists, even to the point of offering physical characteristics. Business Insider may have taken the paper's publication as an opportunity to re-visit a lot of sensational woo but Carroll-Nellenback absolutely refutes PRO's claim- no evidence of aliens exists.
PRO has self-refuted the resolution with the first evidence submitted.
ITEM #2:
In R1, PRO (barely) argues:
Anyone remember chariots of the gods by kurt voneget, yeah like that
Regarding "Chariots of the Gods," Wikipedia notes:
"Von Däniken's book, and much of his subsequent publications as Gods From Outer Space and The Gold Of The Gods, have drawn largely negative receptions from the academic mainstream despite being popular best-sellers. Many scientists and historians have rejected his ideas, claiming that the book's conclusions were based on faulty, pseudoscientific evidence, some of which was later demonstrated to be fraudulent or fabricated, and under illogical premises.
"A 2004 article in Skeptic magazine states that von Däniken plagiarized many of the book's concepts from The Morning of the Magicians, that this book in turn was heavily influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos, and that the core of the ancient astronaut theory originates in H. P. Lovecraft's stories "The Call of Cthulhu" and At the Mountains of Madness." [7]
Since his conclusions have been shown to be fabricated and plagiarized from works of fiction, Von Daniken's wild suppositions can be safely disregard as proof of any sort. Vonnegut's works make no factual claims supporting PRO's resolution.
ITEM #2 offers no evidence worthy of the name.
In R1, we have self-refutation followed by fictitious claims. PRO's resolution stands as entirely unproven.
I look forward to PRO's response in R2.