A clip of The Tonight Show, a collaboration with Johnny Carson in 1978, was circulated on social media in mid-July. The guest of this episode-astronomer and science educator Carl Sagan-made a keen criticism of the recently released Star Wars movie at the time because of its shortsightedness of the appearance of organisms from other galaxies (and Whitewash) Imagine. In this collection, journalist Leonard David reviewed the government report released in June that investigated our evidence of extraterrestrial life so far (see “Experts weighing the Pentagon UFO report”), we The authors of the two opinions considered some specific situations of alien contact.
But Sagan’s foresight reminded me that our search for other life in the universe will always be a strictly human endeavour: how do we imagine the appearance, thinking, or operation of aliens, and how we look for or discover their existence- All these factors are based on the human perception framework. These limitations are only problematic when we ignore them and cannot in some way jump outside the boundaries of our thinking.
This article was originally published in SA Space & Physics 4, 4, (August 2021), with the title “Human Framework for Extraterrestrial Life”