Have you ever watched one of those UFO shows on TV, the ones supposedly giving historical reports? Well, I did while I was on the treadmill today. Those reports make nice stories, but I am unconvinced, especially when the UFOs reveal themselves with lights on their underside. I’m guessing that since UFOs don’t appear to land after flying over Phoenix, for example, then there’s no reason for lights other than taunting: “Hey, we’re up here; you don’t know who or what we are; and there isn’t anything you can do about us.” Come on! Lights on the spacecraft? We didn’t even have such bright lights on the Space Shuttle or any of the capsules we’ve sent into space and back.
But it makes an interesting story. Surely, we have enough mysteries to solve, what with Big Foot running around appearing only as a blurry object partially off camera on videos taken at twilight. Hey, how many pixels did that camera have? I think I’ve captured a baseball coming off the bat of hitters more clearly with my cell phone than Big Foot hunters capture with theirs a lumbering hairy giant. And then there’s always the ancient monument. How did those Egyptians get those pyramids to square with an error of only an inch or so long before Euclid gave us geometry? And we’re still looking for the Grail, even if Dan Brown fans say it’s not a cup, but rather a bloodline. Yes, we are steeped in mysteries, all giving us a hint at solution, but no hint as brilliant as lights hovering in the night sky above Phoenix.
And that makes me wonder why, when the SARS Covid-19 virus came out of Wuhan, China, so many want to make its origin a mystery, why so many want to pursue conspiracy theories. Is it because they weren’t there to see a virus naturally mutate? Were government biologists involved? Did aliens drop the virus from their well-lighted ships?
Is it natural for people to seek the unnatural for explanations? To seek the exotic?
Nanometer-size viruses don’t take selfies and don’t make films of their transitions from animal to human infectious agents. They just change as opportunity affords, and their change is as good an argument for the effects of favorable (for the organism itself) mutations as any. This pandemic isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. Each will occur unexpectedly like hovering lights over Phoenix, but unlike those lights that have never made an irrefutably documented human contact, each will, instead, invade as some agent alien to the human body.
Two kinds of humans seem to push conspiracies with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, those who have a political agenda and those who refuse to accept evolutionary changes as natural processes. In the course of human events, there’s nothing new in this. Some people want to scapegoat; others want to deny certain realities because accepting a current reality can be difficult in the context of preconceived notions and expectations.
Fortunately, you don’t fall into either category. Right?
But it makes an interesting story. Surely, we have enough mysteries to solve, what with Big Foot running around appearing only as a blurry object partially off camera on videos taken at twilight. Hey, how many pixels did that camera have? I think I’ve captured a baseball coming off the bat of hitters more clearly with my cell phone than Big Foot hunters capture with theirs a lumbering hairy giant. And then there’s always the ancient monument. How did those Egyptians get those pyramids to square with an error of only an inch or so long before Euclid gave us geometry? And we’re still looking for the Grail, even if Dan Brown fans say it’s not a cup, but rather a bloodline. Yes, we are steeped in mysteries, all giving us a hint at solution, but no hint as brilliant as lights hovering in the night sky above Phoenix.
And that makes me wonder why, when the SARS Covid-19 virus came out of Wuhan, China, so many want to make its origin a mystery, why so many want to pursue conspiracy theories. Is it because they weren’t there to see a virus naturally mutate? Were government biologists involved? Did aliens drop the virus from their well-lighted ships?
Is it natural for people to seek the unnatural for explanations? To seek the exotic?
Nanometer-size viruses don’t take selfies and don’t make films of their transitions from animal to human infectious agents. They just change as opportunity affords, and their change is as good an argument for the effects of favorable (for the organism itself) mutations as any. This pandemic isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. Each will occur unexpectedly like hovering lights over Phoenix, but unlike those lights that have never made an irrefutably documented human contact, each will, instead, invade as some agent alien to the human body.
Two kinds of humans seem to push conspiracies with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, those who have a political agenda and those who refuse to accept evolutionary changes as natural processes. In the course of human events, there’s nothing new in this. Some people want to scapegoat; others want to deny certain realities because accepting a current reality can be difficult in the context of preconceived notions and expectations.
Fortunately, you don’t fall into either category. Right?
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