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Do you believe in aliens? What are the complexities of your belief? It's time for CYS to get its bearings on this matter. We need to know what the orthodoxy is.Answer THIS, OFFICIAL, COMPREHENSIVE questionnaire, and we all will get to the bottom of this once and for all. Reply here letting me know you're done so that I can verify that you're the one sending the response.

Done.

This is clearly an extremely important task I had to do. So I did.

They call me ET (Extra Testicle)

Complete.  

Completed! Thank you for providing something for me to do on my bus ride home

Reveal yourself, SMELVBERT

Is it?

I did it! 

Done

Done.

All done!

Done.

Done!

Done 18 hours ago but forgot to reply.

23 responses so far.

Two of them are smelvbert and shelvebert. I'll start posting pie charts tomorrow.

There.

But if you really wanted the important answer quicker, you should have just asked on the forums "Would you fuck an alien?"

I've filled it out.

Done. Hopefully I'm not too late.

Did it yesterday.

I did my part.

Well, that was a wild ride. Done

I was gonna post something like this yesterday, as promised, but I seemed to keep recieving responses, so it never felt like there was a convenient time. Also, I couldn't have been arsed.

I gotta say, there was a diverse array of very interesting answers, and I had fun trying to guess who people were by the time I scrolled all the way to the  bottom during the individual evaluations. We truly got a response from almost everybody- E

ven Shelvebert and Smelvbert!... And Guest, who I'm assuming is there to speak for all 73-108 of his kind that exist here at any moment, watching us from the shadows.

Some of you were very nice about your answers, like Tim, who signed off with this:


Others (and you know who you are) were more like Corgi.

This was not appreciated.

That all aside, now that I have a lot of data, let's get into what was said. We must establish the Cystian Orthodoxy on Extraterrestrials.

QUESTION 1:

Of those surveyed so far, the vast majority (20) believe there are probably aliens, 7 believe that there are absolutely aliens, only one believes that there are no aliens, and 5 people are yellow.

QUESTION 2:

Of those surveyed, the vast majority of surveyed Cystians, 18 of them, state that their religion has no official stance on the existence of aliens. But, critically, 3 Cystians state that the existence of aliens, if such a thing came to pass, would violate their religious beliefs. They are narrowly outnumbered by the 4 Cystians who hold something about aliens as integral to their own religious leanings. 0 Cystians have ever felt alienated from a group for not believing in aliens, but one person for whom the existance of aliens is critical seems to have doubts about the traditional notions of extraterrestrials. This seems to indicate that, thankfully, there are no UFO cultists among us yet. Either that, or this particular Cystian has not come out about their heresy, but this seems statistically improbable. I neglected to ask which religious beliefs exactly were violated or upheld by the existence of aliens, but that's just the kind of loose information you can glean from a checkbox quiz like this.

8 Cystians consider this to be a weird topic of conversation, despite answering the entire questionaire like a bunch of clowns.

QUESTION 3:

Multicellular microbes (28) seem to narrowly beat out primitive single-cell life (27) as the most commonly believed-in form of alien. This would seem to indicate the strange notion that some people believed in one without the other. As someone who has read through all the responses individually, it's actually far weirder than that- Some people believe in animal-sized organisms and civilizations without any microscopic life, though most of the time they would also cover this with notions of non-cellular and non-carbon-based life. Not always, if I remember correctly.

Some people picked other contradictory answers in ways that tantalizingly imply some far more complicated and elaborate alien cosmogony than this quiz could convey. And, infuriatingly, I neglected to include any questions that could possibly follow up on this because I was too busy trying to cover the broader bases like an idiot. Multiple times I noticed that people who picked Panspermia also picked the option that stated humans had a separate extraterrestrial origin from other earthly life. I can only hope people clarify what they think was going on back then because clearly I overlooked a relatively large demographic of alien believers. In my experience, people normally only subscribe to one school of thought or the other. People who hold both views are a group I need to know more about.

People were far more readily accepting of the idea that some part of the universe we don't know much about was alive in strange ways, most people, however, rejected the idea that it had anything to do with atoms and energy itself being living. A few of the 14 answerers who picked that existence implied consciousness did have some overlap with the 19 who picked exotic not-understood forms of life, however.

Of the specifically named alien options, Reptilians were by far the most popular, with about 11 subscribers to the idea. Cryptids as aliens came in 2nd place, with 9 respondents. The Grays came in third, with 8. The relatives of the classic gray alien, being the green guys and the tall white guys, don't seem to have been as well-loved. They share 4th place jointly with The Nephilim and Shadow People, with 7 subscribers each.

QUESTION 4:

There seemed to be not very much overlap between people who thought some cryptids were aliens and the people who thought any of the presented cryptids were real. So that would be yet another useful point for thread discussion and further clarification between our participants. Many of the people who did claim to believe in the cryptids also mentioned that they didn't think any of these particular cryptids were aliens.

QUESTION 5:

16 Cystians attribute UFO sightings to alien activity- This is by far and away the phenomena most blamed on aliens by anyone in this sample size ever. The bermuda triangle and crop circles are tied for second and they don't even begin to compete, at 7 respondents each. Soma from Indo-Iranian mythology got a surprising amount of responses (well more than double the amount of statistical noise from the other choices) and I'm honestly interested in why people picked that one too. The majority of Cystians, however, in their custom responses, do blame none of these things on aliens- I would say the number there is about 19.

QUESTION 6:

Of the 33 respondents at time of writing, only 4 claim to have seen an alien. One of them saw an extraordinarily sick burn, though.



QUESTION 7:



Let me tell you, it was really interesting seeing this pie chart start out really paranoid and then slowly watching 'No' barely edge out 'Yes', while the rest became suspiciously flooded with amnesty and indecision.

QUESTION 8:

It's really hard to summarize this question because the answers were all over the map here. The closest thing to a consensus seems to suggest apocalyptic war, genocide, and/or colonization upon contact with a suitably advanced alien race. However, there really were all kinds of answers, with some people suggesting deadly plagues and invasive species, and one guy even suggesting that aliens could just be way too ugly to even look at.

QUESTION 9:

Similar here. People are a lot more reticent to assume anything about the specifics of the aliens' agenda, if they believe the aliens would have one at all. There's more of a split between conquerors, curious observers, and non-sentience here.

QUESTIONS 10-18:

I find this government one particularly interesting because it's been so evenly split and has some of the most strong opinions on both sides of it.



This might be the most agreed-with of the pie chart questions. I wonder what the reasoning is of people who disagree?

This is the second most agreed-with of the pie chart questions if I'm reckoning right. No strong disagreements either.

QUESTION 20: THE NIGHTMARE



I'll save you a lot of reading. Only about 3 of the specialised "Other" answers amount to "No". Almost everything else is a "Yes, IF..."

I think Nightwatch summed it up best with this meme he made:

Lmao I actually spit out on my phone at the mention of my love life. Who's the genius that posted that 😂

:). Me, it's me. 

You didn't give the stats on the results of people who thought sending our genetic coding into deep space was a good idea or not.

Yes, I am also interested in who might think that was a good idea.

Thanks for catching that, I could've sworn snipped it the first time but I probably interrupted myself.


I'm particularly interested in the 4 people who strongly disagreed, implying that we should have sent our DNA sequence out there. Please note that the numbers are slightly adjusted because another person responded, so this is a pie chart of 34 respondents.

(Used to be 35 but one of them was "NotENdmaster" so I deleted it.)

The thing that concerns me about our DNA is how weaponizable it is. Publishing our genome is the surest way to give a more advanced species a hundreds-of-years headstart prior to meeting us to create some kind of incurable virus or other earthling-invalidating bioweapon. Or, if they wanted, to cover their planets and ours in otherwise undetectable prions of some sort that just cause death and leave a freshly wiped and colonizable planet behind. There's at least the vague threat of losing valuable resources if they ever choose to nuke us, but there's no such concern if they ever get ahold of the golden disks. Hell, they could even use the clones to build statistics and AI that map human behavior like people are doing to themselves right now, and use that for all manner of fucked up angles if we ever eventually run into each other. In the event that intelligent life exists, we didn't just send a self-portrait into space as much as we sent a loaded gun that happened to have our face painted on it.

Pretty much why I thought it was a bad idea.

Granted a sufficiently advanced alien race could probably just glass us from space anyway even without the extra info, but I figure they can at least do their own dirty work without us making it easier for them.

Yep, and considering what seems like might be possible using current Crispr tech now, it makes me very uneasy what would be possible for a tech advanced alien society to do.  They could not only clone, but modify humans to the point that we are no longer human like at all.

That depends quite a bit on what falling is. From an early interpretational perspective, it's necessary for the fall to have happened for civilization, let alone spacefaring civilization, to come about. Animals aren't aware of good and evil, but it's sapience and reason that makes us able to differentiate between them. In turn, that makes us build civilizations and create laws, technology, and social mores that can gradually liberate us from the brutal and restrictive roles of our tribal forefathers, and elevates men from being chimps with nothing to live for but food and sex who have to constantly fight, kill, or migrate to get some share of the patriarch's wife hoard. Because that's animal life. That is the alternative to civilization, and the alternative to the human species- We have other, naturally-created species on this planet, and they are devious and violent against each other as we are, utterly without knowing. They are without sin only because they are without agency, and it is the original sin that gave us shame and made us capable of telling the difference.

That's just the nature of the beast that is evolution and nature, but the reason we see it as cold and heartless is precisely because we were made aware. Being able to make those judgments is being "like God" in the way the serpent promised, and that's partially why we hopped aboard the civilization grind when we could've been hunter-gatherers as we have been for most of our existence, including premodern history. (Though of course the middle east abruptly turning into a desert save for the river systems might've had a bit to do with that too.) That's the dead wasp at the core of the fig. You can't be separated from the cold darwinism of nature unless you have the power of reason and innovation, because that is the default. Hunting and gathering, at the whim of the climate, and in competition with animals, is the default state of man. Everything further, good and evil, is a philosophical advancement as much as it is technological.

This is why I posit that, even from a strictly Christian-biblical perspective, if an alien were capable of finding those records and understanding them for what they literally are, they should be feared, because the same principles of self-benefit and potential imperialism would govern them as they do us, and you can only cross your fingers and hope that they happen to be philosophically and theologically sophisticated enough that they can see past their own needs and meet us peacefully. Which, if they went through the time and expense to find and catch a tiny golden artifact hurtling through deep space, is far from a guarantee.

The only aliens in space without civlization, who therefore wouldn't have committed some form of the original sin, barring some kind of wild freak accident that sends highly durable and non-respirating entities spaceward, would be living nebulas and other vacuum-borne, impossible-to-communicate-with things. The alternative for an un-fallen species is that the voyager records land on a living planet with creatures that are either animal and can't understand it, or hunter-gatherers who only understand these things insofar as they now have proof that some other entity exists out there, but if they're sentient in a similar way that we're sentient even if they haven't committed original sin, they probably have enough religious and phantasmagorical instincts to have imagined that there were such things out there anyway without our help. Just like talking to the police about a crime you weren't involved in, the voyager records would be useless to both parties in a best-case scenario, and unfathomably dire for the one who volunteered information at worst.

Chimps also sort of have a sense of right and wrong, a lot of social animals do. But I think the wisdom of the forbidden fruit has a few factors to it, tbh. It's fairly clear from all evidence that we have that people have always been dying, every life form has died of natural and unnatural causes for as long as there has been life. Only a few very simple organisms lay claim to any kind of (very conditional) immortality. But with this first revelation came not death in the literal sense, but rather the pervasive awareness that man must die. This would be the same thing anyway to anyone writing it all down. And so, suddenly, there became tremendous impetus to somehow spend that life righteously in order to mean something- To achieve, to invent, to be remembered, to pass down knowledge, to keep the fire going, and to make conscious effort to do good and avoid wrong. I also sincerely doubt any of Adam's children were pre-fall, but I'm not an expert and I'd have to refresh my memory of Genesis and its aftermath.

It is interesting to think about what kind of technology an alien race would have if there was no death or true and immanent awareness of death, though. Hell, even with knowledge of mortality, it was a philosophically Christian invention that time was forward-moving and that life could be improved and progressed for future generations. Most ancient civilizations were utterly stubborn in their refusal to change except by violent upheaval- They viewed themselves as the apex of thousands of years of mostly the same-old same-old. (and in the cases of places like Greece and Persia, they were mostly right.) To most of humanity for a long time, time itself was an ongoing cyclical thing, with finely tuned senses of disgust and superstition leaving them utterly un-open to change and with very little notion of technological, political, or moral progress. There's hints of it even in a certain, very ancient national identity, that's trying hard to prevent its constituents from imagining that life could be any different in order to justify its power- China has flatly banned alternate history and time travel from all fictional works.

Without the urgency implied in memento mori, sentient aliens would have a very different notion of convenience. They might not create things for the sake of saving time or effort at all. Sure, they might make ergonomic objects in order for some tasks to be less annoying, but "annoying" is a very subjective term (Some people like spear-fishing manually, and wouldn't appreciate all the work it takes to build a weir or the unintuitive process of building a fish trap in order to take that activity out of their lives) and a lot of them would probably be so used to doing things a certain way that individual innovations might not survive (or spread beyond, if we're going with creatures that literally do not die) their inventors. A creature that has all the time in the world to do as it pleases might not even invent cups to drink out of, since they can drink water the inefficient way with their hands and mouth as long as it takes, and it would likely view the mountain of little toils as necessary and one of the daily tasks of existing. Take manual rice farmers for example. Their existence is hellacious and unenviable drudgery to most people outside that part of the world, and many of them do jump at the chance for an alternative- But only when there's an alternative, usually created by a political or economic entity with the food surplus that they create, almost always a city. Outside of trying to jump entire social classes, this simply is (and for thousands of years, has been) life for hundreds of thousands of people, and millions historically, and nobody exactly questioned it, because the alternative was just not living. And historically rice farmers who make up the backbone of a lot of eastern cultures have been some of the most conservative in the world. It was civilization and industry that made their lives gradually easier, which they might invent at some point if food scarcity drives them to invent agriculture, but in a deathless society they might not even do that. In a society that doesn't conceptualize the universal nature of mortality, they might do it only with the knowledge that starvation kills people so toiling for consistent food is fundamentally better than not toiling but not always getting any food.

The most popular inventions would be things that directly prevent harm to someone during something everyone has to do. Clothes to prevent wear and tear on the body, (definitely shoes, or anything with a similar function if they don't have feet, and temperature-regulating clothing) and simple tools that prevent wear and tear on the hands or teeth during everyday tasks, like tools for cracking open food with shells. Possession means very little when you're able to wait a potentially infinite time for your turn to use or borrow something. I don't think they would have very much impetus to create containers to store belongings. They might use pottery to carry food or water to places where food or water isn't as readily available, and maybe to keep it from going bad in some limited capacity. They also probably wouldn't feel very much need to trade when they have as much time as they need to find materials of their own and learn how to make the kind of thing they want for themselves- No need to build up value for trade or keep track of possessions means a severely diminished need for arithmetic, which in turn means severely diminished odds that this people would have invented math or writing. Especially not when people basically live forever (or think they will live forever) and so they don't feel the need to create anything that will survive them, or write down any ideas to pass on to people unfiltered generations down the line. They might come up with some forms of geometry if their architecture ever gets very elaborate, but that's banking pretty hard on them having any survival pressure at all to invent sedentary agriculture.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and in a world where nobody dies, there's not a lot of necessity for anything but the very basics. With infinite time, you might get some very interesting large-scale art projects across vast stretches of time, but pretty limited and primitive technology. Technology in an agricultural society might gradually eak forward at a glacial pace without the threat of death, but frankly I think parts are just as easily liable to be lost or forgotten along the way by infinite entities. (or entities that mistakenly think they could be infinite as the case may be)

Where are these Biblical scholars who hold a view of pre-Adamic civilization?  The scholarly consensus is that Genesis is a collection of initially distinct documents that became unified later. No one serious is reading the canon, as we have it, in the order we have it, and trying to make sense of it that way. 

Additionally, even with a biblical perspective, humans do not have a monopoly on evil.  Lucifer was an angel and chose and fell within scriptural context.  If we define alien as "not human", then there is a biblical example of an alien species "falling" into evil. 

Perhaps, though according to some readings of Genesis, some did procreate with human women.

Though I understand the term, I don't really follow "angelology" or whatever either.  Just speaking in the context of "alien life" if we define alien as non-human.  

But it would seem, Biblically, that angels are a race or species of beings created by God that can interact with matter and also have the capacity for evil.  Perhaps a definition of "biology" needs to be reformed to not exclusively include carbon based life, but also as Mizal has mentioned, other dimensions as well

"if it hits"

Don't try to say your own thing like you didn't type it in there so it doesn't look weird, you alien-fucker gremlin.

I was just making sure that your analysis was thorough. Carry on.

Thanks for all the data Sent! Fun survey!

Probably worth pointing out that if you're concerned that we've given the aliens too much info, 

1. we haven't given them anything they couldn't trivially acquire by abducting one single human 

2. they could exterminate all life on our planet by pushing an asteroid into our gravity well, kicking up a shit ton of sun-blocking debris and killing basically any sophisticated life on Earth. Any civilization that has the ability to travel the stars also has the ability to move an asteroid 

Which is why I said they can do their own dirty work without us making it easier for them. (Or even easier as the case may be)

While it is true that they could most likely acquire it easily if they so desired ( especially since everyone willing to have sex with an alien would be giving it to them anyway), it doesn't mean we should just send it out to them.

For someone with the right skill and equipment, it would probably be fairly easy for them to break into and steal my truck, but I'm not going to leave the doors open with the engine running to make it easier on them.

Unfortunately this happened before my time. But in a situation like this, it would be the responsibility of future generations to take up the mantle of guarding the permanently unlocked car with a vigilant eye, and nunchuks.

We have decided there is not enough of our genetic code in space yet apparently.

Ah, the tabs. Yummy, hasn't your mother ever told you that not everything you read on the internet is true?

What is a mother? I was created from ingredients thrown hodgepodge into a pot and tossed into an oven. 

Same oven I'm from? Maybe we're twins

I doubt it.