Crop Circles: Preliminary Remarks

Talking about Crop Circles is like wandering around a minefield with clown’s shoes. (My colleague Alain invented it :-) so funny.)There is the risk of blowing up in no time. Each step is a potentially fatal mistake. Religion, Philosophy, Science, Sociology, History are few of the matters that in a way or another seem to bob up every time we try to analyze the crop circles topic.

Nevertheless, I find the topic extreeeeeeeeeeeeeeemly interesting so I’ll try to develop it trying to be brief, reasonable, stimulating and, at the while, open-minded. Won't be possible, however, to comprehensively develop the topic in this occasion, being myself out of tools, knowledge, and time, to do so. I find necessary however, before entering into the Crop Circles debate, to briefly analyze two concepts: “Belief” and “Communication”.

Should you find them “boring stuff” you can always switch to the out and out crop circles post: Tags >> Nature>> “Crop circles, Maya, Universe and much more…”

Belief

According to the Oxford English Dictionary belief is an “acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof”.
As already mentioned, the Crop Circles topic inevitably attracts several different matters, among which (The most “dangerous” one) Religion.
Are, for instance, Crop Circles messages from aliens?

What I find completely insane is the sarcastic attitude, the above mentioned query, and people who believe the answer being “Yes”, constantly receive.
Is actually extremely surprising how “alien’s believers” are usually considered crazy or idiots or psychopaths while billions of religious people are not. I mean…what’s the difference? I wonder how. I really do. I wonder how the hell is possible that a pious man (Who believes in a God who has less probabilities of existing than aliens by the way) back from the church, turns the TV on, learns about someone believing in aliens, and breaks out: (and he’s really surprised too ) “huahuahuahu poor idiot!!!”
Who’s the crazy here? What’s actually the difference between him and the so called “poor idiot”? Well, there is actually a difference, which is that, if truth has to be told, the probabilities (note I’m talking about probabilities not proofs) of alien’s existence are higher, way over higher, of the pious man’s God existence ones.

There are 100 billion galaxies out there and 100 billion stars in each galaxy. Is really so crazy the guy who believes in the existence of an alien life?
I’m not usually benevolent towards Religion, but by “equal conditions” spirit I wanna conclude with a Padre Pio quote (a pious man certainly, not a fool; a pious man who believed in a socially accepted alien): “Do you really think that God has revealed his almighty only through the planet earth?”

Communication

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, communication is “the imparting or exchanging of information…”
Communication anyway is another huge topic. There are hundreds of communication approaches, each one of them for several different proposes or for the same ones. Formal methods, interpersonal methods, Philosophic communication, integrated communication, and so on.

Why? Because there are infinite ways, for imparting or exchanging information.
Now, let’s just allow the proposition, in order to stay sticky to the above quoted case, that someone is actually wondering if aliens are in fact trying to communicate with us.
Too often I hear objections and /or critics which don’t take into consideration the idea of communication itself! What do we know about the way “they” might have to communicate? The idea “they” might have of communication itself? Do they conceive ideas? Do “they” have the same concept of ideas we do?
The problem here, on balance, is always the same one: We tend to read or to interpret possible non human scenarios (referring to aliens or to God) using as parameters, the human ones. Time, beginning, ending, communication, idea, bad, good, space etc… We tend to think about those ideas as universally interpretable trough human parameters. That’s the first mistake.

I heard while ago, a guy saying: “If they are really trying to send to us a message, why don’t they do a crop circle in front of the White House?”

Right. This guy is a priori assuming that:

“They” know and understand the idea we have about the “White house” meaning.
“They” know and understand the idea we have about political / social power, social classes or the idea of proximity. (The fact the circles physically “near” the White House should be more significant than circles not so “near”). What does it mean from “their” point of view “near” in the first place?

I repeat and conclude:

We tend to read or interpret possible non human scenarios (referring to aliens or to God) using as parameters, the human ones. Time, beginning, ending, communication, idea, bad, good, space etc… We tend to think about those ideas as universally interpretable trough human parameters. That’s the first mistake.