Neil DeGrasse Tyson- Space Chronicles, Facing the Ultimate Frontier. Chapter Twenty-Six
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Space Chronicles Facing the Ultimate Frontier By Neil DeGrasse Tyson Chapter 26 How to prove you've Been Abducted by Aliens? Do I believe in UFOs or extraterrestrial visitors? Where shall I begin? There's a fascinating frailty of the human mind that psychologists know all about called argument from ignorance. This is how it goes. Remember what that you stands for in UFO. You see lights washing This guy. You've never seen anything like this before and don't understand what it is you say. It's a UFO. The U stands were unidentified, but then you say I don't know what it is. It must be aliens from outer space visiting from another planet. The issue here is that if you don't know what something is, your interpretation of it should stop immediately. You don't bend, say, must be X or Y or Z. That's argument from ignorance. It's common. I'm not blaming anybody. It may relate to our burning need to manufacture answers because we feel uncomfortable evolving, steeped in ignorance. But you can't be a scientist if you're uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. This is very different from the way journalists portray us. So many articles begin. Scientists may now have to go back to the drawing board. It's as though we're sitting in our offices, feed upon our desks, masters of the universe and suddenly say, Oops, Somebody discovered something? No, we're always at the drawing board. If you're not at the drawing board, you're not making discoveries. You're not a scientist, you're something else. The public, on the other hand, seems to demand conclusive expansions as they leap without hesitation, from statements of abject ignorance to statements of absolute certainty. Here's something else to consider. We know not only from research experiments in psychology, but also from the history of science.