Good morning, John. Aliens. I love aliens. And there's lots of reasons to, especially in fiction. Adventure, and danger, and the unknown, and self-reflection, and mystery, and revelation. But the thing I'm talking about here is real aliens, which is a very different thing.
And I should start out by saying that I think that life elsewhere in the universe is a physical inevitability. Even if the galaxy were not inconceivably huge, which it is, the chemical system that is life, obeys the laws of kinetic thermodynamics, and while it is possibly the coolest, most interesting thing, it's not magical. Intelligent life does not seem inevitable in the same way, it just seems extraordinarily likely.
In statistics, there's something called the mediocrity principle. Basically, if you have a sample size of 1, chances are that that is from the most common data set. And to some extent, we have pulled one solar system out of the hat and it has intelligent life on it. It has several species of intelligent life. Now there are some reasons to think that our version of intelligent life as it exists right now on this planet is not super common. But zero reasons to think it's unique. 
But that's all preface. The thing I want to talk about is why do people like me who have an understanding of how discovery works, how science works, seem to never think that extremely unusual things are caused by aliens.
And that's relevant right now because there are these unclassified videos and there's a Congressional report coming out about them, and we do not know what they are. But there are going to be, and have been many times, things that we really do not understand. This has happened a lot in the history of our species, and it's often the first step on the path to discovery. We don't know exactly what's going on, we make guesses, we test them. That's how we end up knowing more things, and being able to do more things. That's how we ended up with Covid vaccines, and smartphones, and in-depth knowledge of the Big Bang. 
But also, when you are inside this world, you know that there are a lot of big mysteries right now that are totally unexplained. We don't know what dark matter is, but it is most of the stuff. But also, we don't know why anything exists at all, like why there's matter in the universe, that's a mystery. We don't know how life started on Earth. Also we don't know why we sleep. We don't know we yawn.
But here's the thing: almost every mystery could be answered with the word "aliens." And that makes it a certain kind of bad explanation. Now we want to understand the thing we don't understand, that's totally normal. And one way to do that is to find an explanation that will explain everything. 
There's a fairly new version of this, which is that our universe is a simulation and whenever you see something that doesn't make sense, that's a glitch in the simulation. 
Now to me there are two big problems with explanations that can explain anything. First, every time we've ever had something go from mystery to not a mystery anymore, it has not been explained by something that could explain everything. We've had some biggies that explain a lot, like natural selection or quantum mechanics, but they haven't explained everything, like for example those two things don't do a great job of explaining each other. And the second thing -this is really important- I don't think it's not aliens. I think we don't know what it is. It's really important to be able to say that we don't know what something is without trying to immediately explain it. Whenever we do that, whenever we encounter something that's completely unexplained and we immediately try to explain it with some idea from our head that's not based on data and observation and critical thinking, it's based on our biases and on our confusion and on defaulting to something that could explain anything.
Things to know about these unidentified aerial phenomena: they are moving against the wind, they are detected by multiple sensors including human eyes, they are moving in ways that known aircraft do not move. Are they aircraft? They might be. They might not be. The wrong thing to do is to dismiss these things as a joke just because everybody's saying aliens. In science, and in life, you have to follow the interesting and this stuff's really interesting. It's weird. And honestly I'm a little worried that the legitimate interestingness of this gets overwhelmed by the conspiracy theories and the just wild, flagrant guessing about sexy things that could explain lots of other things. But most importantly, preferring a conclusion is the exact thing that scientists are taught to avoid. Investigating potential explanations? Aboslutely. Figuring out new ways to collect more data? 100%. But focusing on explanations that could kind of explain anything have so far not helped us explain anything.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.