A Discussion of Aliens as a Modern Superstition

Recently, some netizens have been leaving comments on the blog discussing the issue of aliens (there were some earlier discussions under Jiang Xiaoyuan’s lecture commentary). Since his comment was placed under the introduction page Who Is Gu Bo?, it felt a bit out of place (in general, casual comments and questions may as well be posted under the message board), so I decided to open a new post and transplant the comments over directly~

Although I have already discussed this here and there in bits and pieces, I have always wanted to write a dedicated essay on the issue of aliens; it could be an essay on “science and religion” (in fact, I still owe Teacher Su an essay). But on the one hand I have never managed to find the time, and on the other hand reference materials on this topic are not easy to find—not because there are too few of them, but because they are too mixed and scattered. I feel that someone could probably do a master’s thesis on this topic, but since it spans several major fields—science fiction, science communication, science and religion, and science and technology policy—it is still rather difficult to handle. Before I have any free time to pay close attention to this topic, I can only be satisfied with chatting about it offhand like this, I suppose~

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.