#SoCIA18 is back for the afternoon. I've decided to sit in on the block of Astrobio+Religion. First up: "SETI & Christianity" by Greg Anderson, read by Kelly Smith.
Hmm. This appears to be literally a reading of a paper. Will do my best, but may be hard to tweet while paying audio-only attention.
This paper is not taking the biblical story literally, but is taking the "something exceptional must have happened, based on peoples' adherence to it immediately afterward."
Which has always felt psychologically absurd to me. But that may be the point here: what people do to maintain their sense of self in the face of something that should be concept-breaking.
Going on about detection of alien signals, interpretation of signals. Social-media-distributed attempts at interpretation. New religions & philosophies emerging around the message...
...cults who say they got additional, private messages. Future people who claim that the original message never happened at all. Fun historical parallels here.
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