From: Tommy the Terrorist Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.science Subject: Re: Tipler's Version of Fermi Paradox and Von Neumann Probes Date: 25 Apr 1996 09:08:42 GMT Organization: Dis Distribution: world NNTP-Posting-Host: e046.gene.uic.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: Nuntius 2.0.4_68K X-XXMessage-ID: X-XXDate: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 09:55:42 GMT Once you get into the fraudulent-universe theory (i.e. that aliens are concealing their transmissions, altering the star patterns, and so on), well, why stop there? Working with mice is a psychologically *bad* thing to do. I recommend that if you have the option to avoid it that you seriously consider doing so. When you look at a pregnant mouse with her pups, somehow it gets confused with how a pregnant human looks with her child, and sometimes it's not certain which looks more like the other. You see them in their little cages, wandering around, and if you open one up, it usually seems like they can't even *conceive* of Life Outside The Cage. You transfer them from cage to cage and how do they explain it? And in the end, you judge them, and you slay them, and how can they but be certain that there is one God and that he is evil beyond their imagination. That there are terrors that they were not meant to know. So how do you work? How do you live? How many people are in your little "cage" with you? You imagine yourself wandering through three-dimensional reality... but how do you know that this is not a fraud? How do you know that you aren't just a mouse in a cage, with perhaps a few tubes set up like in a pet owner's gerbil mansion so that you can wander from cage to cage, meeting with each little set of animals consigned to those quarters? How do you know that there is really something three streets over? How do you know that the strangers you see on the street are anything but crude simulacra? How do you know that you are anything but the subject of an experiment for purposes beyond your comprehension, and surely less important than its effect upon you? How do you know how that experiment will end? Have you ever felt like there was an audience just behind you? Have you ever felt like "the props men screwed up" and left something in your house that wasn't supposed to be there? Have you ever had a dream that something so horrible had happened that you couldn't remembered it? Or had a day pass and not know what had happened, and wondered whether some one or some thing spent it interrogating you and changing some of the facts? Have you ever SEEN the inexplicable --- and found yourself forgetting it, over and over again, because it just didn't fit in with anything you thought was possible? Have you ever wondered how it is that (for instance, here in cage "Chicago") the seasons keep starting at May 1 for summer and November 1 for winter and lasting exactly six months each, year after year after year? Have you ever found yourself looking at something odd and muttering "More cutbacks at the animal care facility..." I don't claim to believe all this yet. When I do, I'll be crazy.