A new novel kind of religion is sprouting in the world, and might soon berth in Nigeria in a matter of time. It is already gaining ground in America, where it will spread to the rest of the world. It is a religion of UFO.
UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. Wikipedia says it is the popular term for any aerial phenomenon that cannot immediately be identified. Most UFOs, according to it, are identified on investigation as conventional objects or phenomena. The term is widely used for claimed observations of extraterrestrial spacecraft.
‘’A lot of people see disaster on the horizon, and there’s a deep fear that we won’t be able to save ourselves’’, she told Vox. ‘’So what will save us? Well, for some, it will be these advanced beings who come to us and tell us what we can do or how we can escape.’’
Kristin Houser, “Professor: belief in aliens could replace traditional religion ” at Futurism
It’s the topic of her new book, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, whose blurb reads, “More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God.”
According to Pasulka, some high-profile people believe:
She says we’re going to find life, we’re going to find habitable planets and things like that. So that gives this type of religiosity a far more powerful bite than the traditional religions, which are based on faith in things unseen and unprovable.
Sean Illing, “The new American religion of UFOs” at Vox
Pasulka provided Vox with an account of how she and a colleague were led blindfold by a space shuttle scientist to a place near Roswell, New Mexico—famed setting of space alien encounters of the commercial entertainment kind: “I never conclude whether it’s true or not… Do aliens actually exist? I don’t know. But my book is more about this new form of religiosity and how it’s becoming more influential among scientists and people in Silicon Valley and Americans more generally.”
There’s the idea that technology like artificial intelligence is going to kill us, but then there’s this idea that technology will be our savior, which is a very religious idea.
Sean Illing, “The new American religion of UFOs” at Vox
These discussions go on despite the fact that we have not found a single life form, simple or complex, let alone any intelligence, other than on Earth. And there are serious reasons to doubt that AI can ever rival human intelligence, let alone “kill us.”