Belief in aliens could be America’s next religion - I don't think that the idea propsed here is all that far fetched but for different reasons - the chances of actual aliens arriving are very very slim, the nearest star systems are just too far away and light speed travel is likely not possible, but as is clear from the recent EU copyright laws coming into place, certain groups want to ensure that they remain in control of things, and by creating copyright laws you move the power from the corporations into much longer lasting structures, the next logical and even more stable structure is to bake something similar into religion type structures, these tend to last for hundreds and up to thousands of years, so a technology based religion makes a lot of sense, whether it's a good idea for humanity as a whole is something else, is there more freedom in tech (and future tech) than religion? The other thing that's actually quite likely is illusions created for psychological manipulation, certainly much more likely than aliens, but I could of course be wrong, might be kind of neat if there was an alien space ship orbiting earth - Another thought on this, thinking optimistically about humanities intensions, it might be worth spending some time encoding the shapes of the useful design patterns we have discovered in these recent years into stories that last like folklore and mythology, I wouldn't be all that suprised if we found a lot of these already in some of the stories, if the aliens were here in ancient times, that's probably what they would have done :)theoutline.com #