Wingnuts everywhere.

[elfs]

In one of my other lives, namely the political one, I come in regular contact with a host of ordinary Americans. Most of them are Democrats, but that's because the Republicans in Washington's 33rd District are so damned dysfunctional that, despite the presence of the regional airport in our district, not one of our Republican candidates could find his ass with both hands, ground radar, and the guidance of two concurrent towers.

I've documented before about local political activism is rife with crazy folks, and sometimes it just gets worse. One woman I run into regularly has suddenly gone all Area 51, convinced completely about the whole "little green man" story in its entirety. She also started evangelizing the story to everyone at a recent meeting.

I finally sat down with her and tried to lay out all of the problems with the story from a completely scientific standpoint: about just how far it is from one star to another, how much energy it takes to move a ship capable of carrying and provisioning beings even the size of Kouryou-chan across interstellar distances. I described the state of the art in building a station within Mercury's orbit to harvest solar power and convert it into antimatter, then shooting that antimatter at near-relativistic speends along a line of flight to provide fueling stations, so the ship wouldn't be weighed down with it's own fuel, and even then how it would take twenty years to get to the nearest star and back, and the nearest inhabitable star was centuries away. And finally I got into the whole bit about how our bodies couldn't stand the strain of such travel, no organic being could. The physics of interstellar travel made little green men impossible.

She held onto every last little straw, arguing in favor of cryonics, warp drive, cyborgs. I said, "If they're cyborgs, they've gone all the way. They're completely machines, even their minds are made of silicon and glass. Meat is a terrible way to get from one star system to another." I talked about the different time scales one has to embrace to be an interstellar traveler, conceptual language problems, the whole gamut from Clarke to Egan to Watts.

A week later she was still talking about little green men and flying saucers.

I don't know why I bother.

[Edit: *Giggle.* I just noticed that audacious is twistedly psychic today.]

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Scary thought: she has the vote, and she's not afraid to use it.

[oldhans117.livejournal.com]

Do you wounder why James Randi is such a grouch.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the intractable problem of local political activism: by and large the people who do it are the ones who (a) have the most time for it, and (b) are by nature a little obsessive to begin with. Primarily, IOW, college students, and the retired/unemployed.

On the "right", this translates into the black helicopters / "NAFTA superhighway" / "Amero currency" crowd. On the "left", you get the Area 51-ers, the chemtrail-ers and the "dude, Exxon developed a pill that turns gasoline into water in the 50s" burnouts.

(And, of course, the "9/11 Truthers", who seem to draw heavily from the sludge on the bottom of both pools.)

Sadly, it's not legal to smack any of them.

[davidlevine]

Not to say your interlocutor isn't a nut, but when I see these carefully-reasoned explications of why interstellar travel is absolutely impossible, always has been, and always will be, no ifs ands or buts (Charlie Stross is big on these as well) I'm reminded of Clarke's First Law. So many times in human history the best and soundest physical theories have been shattered by new, game-changing, disruptive theories that come out of left field and leave the previous theories' proponents gawping. So I hold out some hope that our current view of the impossibility of interstellar travel will some day seem as ludicrous as the Men's Health view of nutrition from 1995.

(Of course, ninety-nine out of a hundred disruptive theories are just crackpottery...)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Hmm, there's interstellar travel in both the Freyaverse and the Ainekoverse, so I don't see how Stross is completely opposed to interstellar travel; he just points out that it's really freakin' hard. The same is true of Egan, Watts, Clarke, and even Vinge, and Vinge allowed for a human-capable interstellar transport system. It was all just STL. And really freakin' hard.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I should add that Vinge's STL universe necessitated a natural "technology suppression field" that prevented the emergence of AI within the ellipsoid of the Milky Way. Otherwise, the Vinge universe would look a lot like the Egan universe.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

I think the primary problem here, which Stross does a good job of painting by example but doesn't really name as such, is that interplanetary colonization by meatbags (even if you just re-bootstrap them from DNA on the far side) doesn't just require one or two paradigm shifts in the Kuhnian sense: it likely requires dozens. And not just in engineering and physics, but also in biology and medicine. And you need them all: the minimal set of requirements is difficult to distinguish from the maximal one.

Will it happen? I remain optimistic. In my lifetime? In my grandchildren's lifetime? Any time before the year 3000? If only I could find a way to collect on betting no...

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

Collect on the bet? No problem. You just need to invent a time machine....

[tagryn]

Armchair psychologist corner: you need to use a different approach. Rational argument isn't going to work. To truly change her mind, you'd need to figure out the emotional reasons why she needs to believe in "secret knowledge" and address those. Otherwise, the reassurance she gets/needs fulfilled from the belief will always trump any argument.

It sounds annoying but harmless, though.

Seems like the right answer to me

[anthony albert (from livejournal.com)]

I've run into this, as well. No matter how scientifically impossible something is, the rational argument doesn't work to shake this sort of person. Their belief is so powerfully ingrained for other reasons, that mere logic just can't shake them - or it would happen naturally, from daily encounters.

There's some other reason, a non-logic one, why she (and others like her) believe.