Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Wipeout FINAL
2NC Aliens.................................................................................................................................... 16
AT Aliens Immortal ................................................................................................................... 20
AT No Multicellularity .............................................................................................................. 21
AT - Moon K2 Life ....................................................................................................................... 22
AT - Sun Unique ........................................................................................................................... 23
AT - Aliens Will Save Us ............................................................................................................. 24
AT Alien Death Inevitable ......................................................................................................... 25
AT Jupiter Key........................................................................................................................... 26
AT Our Moon Key ..................................................................................................................... 27
AT Only Humans Intelligent Proves.......................................................................................... 28
AT Fermi Paradox...................................................................................................................... 29
AT Multi-Verse Theory ............................................................................................................. 30
AT Infinitely Expanding ............................................................................................................ 31
AT - Tectonics .............................................................................................................................. 32
AT Where are They, Yo? ........................................................................................................... 33
AT Rock Formations.................................................................................................................. 34
AT Idiosyncrasy Key ................................................................................................................. 35
AT No Other Solar System ........................................................................................................ 36
AT Aliens Destroy the Universe ................................................................................................ 37
AT Impact Turns Omega Points ............................................................................................. 40
AT Impact Turns Need our DNA ........................................................................................... 42
AT Impact Turns Grey Draconian Stuff ................................................................................. 43
AT Impact Turns Greys Can Time Travel .............................................................................. 44
AT Impact Turns Saunders X inev ...................................................................................... 45
AT Impact Turns - Mack ........................................................................................................... 47
1NC PaRtY
Aliens are real and there are at least 10,000 independent civilizations
Drake 02, Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor University of California at Santa Cruz ,
<July, Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net/news/article236.html> The Earth's fossil record is quite clear in showing that the
complexity of the central nervous system - particularly the capabilities of the brain - has steadily increased in the course of evolution. Even the
mass extinctions did not set back this steady increase in brain size. It can be argued that extinction events expedite the development of cognitive
abilities, since those creatures with superior brains are better able to save themselves from the sudden change in their environment. Thus smarter
creatures are selected, and the growth of intelligence accelerates. We see this effect in all varieties of animals -- it is not a fluke that has occurred
in some small sub-set of animal life. This picture suggests strongly that, given enough time, a biota can evolve not just one
intelligent species, but many. So complex life should occur abundantly. There is a claim that "among the millions
of species which have developed on Earth, only one became intelligent, so intelligence must be a very, very rare event." This is a textbook
example of a wrong logical conclusion. All
planets in time may produce one or more intelligent species, but they
will not appear simultaneously. One will be first. It will look around and find it is the only
intelligent species. Should it be surprised? No! Of course the first one will be alone. Its uniqueness - in principal temporary - says nothing
about the ability of the biota to produce one or more intelligent species.If we assume that Earths are common, and that usually there is enough
the optimistic view is that new systems of
time to evolve an intelligent species before nature tramples on the biota, then
intelligent, technology-using creatures appear about once per year. Based on an extrapolation of
our own experience, let's make a guess that a civilization's technology is detectable after 10,000
years. In that case, there are at least 10,000 detectable civilizations out there. This is a heady result, and very
encouraging to SETI people. On the other hand, taking into account the number and distribution of stars in space, it implies that the nearest
detectable civilizations are about 1,000 light years away, and only one in ten million stars may have
a detectable civilization. These last numbers create a daunting challenge to those who construct instruments and projects to search for
extraterrestrial intelligence. No actual observing program carried out so far has come anywhere close to meeting the requirement of detecting
reasonable signals from a distance of 1,000 light years, or of studying 10 million stars with high sensitivity.Donald Brownlee: But how often are
animal-habitable planets located in the habitable zones of solar mass stars? Of the all the stars that have now been shown to have planets, all
either have Jupiter-mass planets interior to 5.5 AU or they have Jupiters on elliptical orbits. It is unlikely that any of these stars could retain
habitable zone planets on long-term stable orbits. On the other hand, many of the stars that do not have currently
detectable giant planets could have habitable zone planets. But even when rocky planets are located in the right place,
will they have the "right stuff" for the evolution and long term survival of animal-like life? There are many "Rare Earth"
factors (such as planet mass, abundance of water and carbon, plate tectonics, etc.) that may play important and even
critical roles in allowing the apparently difficult transition from slime to civilization. As is the case in the
solar system, animal-like life is probably uncommon in the cosmos. This might even be the case for microbes: how can scientists agree that
microbial life is common in our celestial neighborhood when there is no data? Even the simplest life is extraordinarily complicated and until we
find solid evidence for life elsewhere, the frequency of life will unfortunately be guesswork. We can predict that some planetary bodies will
provide life-supporting conditions, but no one can predict that life will form. Frank Drake: Only about 5% of the stars that have been studied
sufficiently have hot Jupiters or Jupiters in elliptical orbits. The other 95% of the stars studied do not have hot Jupiters, and just what they have is
still an open question. The latest discoveries, which depend on observations over a decade or more, are finding solar system analogs. This
suggests that 95% of the stars - for which the answers are not yet in - could be similar to our own system. This is
reason for optimism among those who expect solar system analogs to be abundant.
The organic materials necessary for life are plentiful- proves we arent alone
McKay, 02NASA Planetary Scientist, (Christopher, Complex Life in the Universe?, http://www.astrobio.net/news/article236.html)
Chris McKay: There is no solid evidence of life elsewhere, but several factors suggest it is common. Organic material is
widespread in the interstellar medium and in our own solar system. We have found planetary
systems around other sun-like stars. On Earth, microbial life appeared very quickly - probably before
3.8 billion years ago. Also, we know that microbial ecosystems can survive in a variety of
environments with liquid water and a suitable chemical energy source or sunlight. These factors suggest that microbial life - the
sort of life the dominated Earth for the first two billion years - is widespread in the stellar
neighborhood.
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1NC PaRtY
Humans will inevitably destroy the universe- we will isolate multiple scenarios
1st is Timetravel
Even if the tech doesnt exist, its possible- which means we will do it
Pickover 1998 Clifford A.PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, associate editor for numerous scientific journals, research
staff IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Member of SETI League (Time: A Travelers Guide; pg 248-249) Various researchers have
proposed ways in which backward and forward time machines can be built that do not seem to
violate any known laws of physics. Remember that the laws of physics tell us what is possible, not
what is practical for humans at this point in time. The physics of time travel is still in its infancy. While all physicists
today admit that time travel to the future is possible, many still believe time travel to the past will never easily be attainable. Dont believe
anyone who tells you that humans will never have efficient technology for backward and forward
time travel. Accurately predicting future technology is nearly impossible, and history is filled with underestimates of technology:
Time travel creates loops in time that makes infinite folds in the universe- causes it to end
Randall No Date physics student @ CalTech-- (Time Travel - the Possibilities and Consequences;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A398955)
This theory involves two types of temporal loops. One type is the loop mentioned in the last paragraph, the 'grandfather paradox'. For the rest of
this paragraph, let's call it the 'infinite repeat' loop, because it results in two different possibilities, infinitely repeating after one another. Another
type of loop exists. It is the 'infinite possibilities' loop. In this loop, the loop changes every single time that the loop repeats. Think of this:
Imagine that you ask your best friend to go back in time to before you were born and kill your
granddad. Also, you had enough forethought to tell him to, while he's back there, write a note to his
future self to go back in time and kill the man who would be your granddad. Everything's Okay, right? Maybe
not. When your friend is given the instruction to go and kill your granddad from you, he might do
one thing. When he receives a note from his future self, he might do another. And if he does another
thing during the second repeat, he must do a different thing the third. And the forth. And the fifth. A change
in one iteration of the loop would result in a change in the note, which would result in a change in
the next iteration. Eventually, he'll do something that ends up breaking down the loop (ie, forgetting to
write himself a note). This will result in a infinite repeat loop starting. And as was already mentioned, infinite
repeat loops may cause the universe to end.
Wichita State 4
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1NC PaRtY
2nd is particle accelerators
Humans will have particle accelerators capable of destroying the universe by 2100
Leslie 1996 Johnemeriti professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph and a fellow @ the Royal Society of Canada (End of the
World; pg 86)
However, energies above 1011 GeV would be had well before the year 2100. Already people have
proposed plasma particle accelerators in which the fields accelerating the particlesperhaps fields
produced by two laser beams which create a rapidly moving interference pattern called a beat wavewould be many thousand
times stronger than those of present-day accelerators. In his Dreams of a Final Theory S. Weinberg speculates that
with plasmas to transfer energy from powerful laser beams to individual charged particles even Plank-scale energies might
be attained. Plank-scale energies are of roughly 1019 GeV, which is ten million to a hundred million times above
the 1011 to 1012 GeV which Hut and Rees gave as energy released by some cosmic ray collisions.
Destruction of our vacuum creates a new one that destroys the universe
Leslie 1996 Johnemeriti professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph and a fellow @ the Royal Society of Canada (End of the
World; pg 86-87)As Hut and Rees commented, it may be that the vacuum state we live in is not the absolute
lowest one because on many physical theories a local minimum of the effective potential, which can be quite stable, can exist for certain
parameter values. The universe, starting at high temperatures, might have supercooled in such a local minimum. In this case we
should find ourselves in a false vacuum. Fields wouldnt be at their lowest energies, the ones to
which they would like to fall. It would follow that our vacuum statespace of the sort we live in
might suddenly disappear if a bubble of a real vacuum formed. The bubble would expand at close
to the speed of light, with enormous energy release, right through the galaxy and then onwards
indefinitely. Might such an unfortunate event be triggered by a new generation of particle accelerators? As has been pointed out by
Coleman and De Luccia, this would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe. Inside the ever expanding
bubble, the new vacuum. There would be new constraints of nature. Not only is life as we know
it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it, since all protons would decay as soon as they were hit
by the advancing bubble wall. Worse still, there would be no hope that the new vacuum would in
due course come to sustain if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. For the space through
which the bubble had expanded would suffer gravitational collapse in microseconds or less.
Wichita State 5
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1NC PaRtY
3rd is artificial intelligence
1NC PaRtY
4th is Nanotechnology
1NC PaRtY
5th is Isomer Bombs
The military is building isomer bombs that destroy the quantum vacuum- even testing
destroys it
Bekkum in 4 (Gary S., Founder Spacetime Threat Assessment Report Research, American Military is Pursuing New
Types of Exotic Weapons, Pravda, 8-30, http://www.starstreamresearch.com/dark_matters.htm)
Recently the British science news journal "New Scientist" revealed that the American military is pursuing new types of
exotic bombs - including a new class of isomeric gamma ray weapons. Unlike conventional atomic
and hydrogen bombs, the new weapons would trigger the release of energy by absorbing radiation,
and respond by re-emitting a far more powerful radiation. In this new category of gamma-ray
weapons, a nuclear isomer absorbs x-rays and re-emits higher frequency gamma rays. The emitted
gamma radiation has been reported to release 60 times the energy of the x-rays that trigger the
effect. The discovery of this isomer triggering is fairly recent, and was first reported in a 1999 paper by an international group of scientists.
Although this controversial development has remained fairly obscure, it has not been hidden from the public. Beyond the visible part
of defense research is an immense underground of secret projects considered so sensitive that their
very existence is denied. These so-called "black budget programs" are deliberately kept from the public eye and from most political
leaders. CNN recently reported that in the United States the black budget projects for 2004 are being funded at a level of more than 20 billion
dollars per year. In the summer of 2000 I contacted Nick Cook, the former aviation editor and aerospace consultant to Jane's Defence Weekly, the
international military affairs journal. Cook had been investigating black budget super-secret research into exotic physics for advanced propulsion
technologies. I had been monitoring electronic discussions between various American and Russian scientists theorizing about rectifying the
quantum vacuum for advanced space drive. Several groups of scientists, partitioned into various research organizations, were exploring what
NASA calls "Breakthrough Propulsion Physics" - exotic technologies for advanced space travel to traverse the vast distances between stars.
Partly inspired by the pulp science fiction stories of their youth, and partly by recent reports of multiple radar tracking tapes of unidentified
objects performing impossible maneuvers in the sky, these scientists were on a quest to uncover the most likely new physics for star travel. The
NASA program was run by Marc Millis, financed under the Advanced Space Transportation Program Office (ASTP). Joe Firmage, then the 28-
year-old Silicon Valley CEO of the three billion dollar Internet firm US Web, began to fund research in parallel with NASA. Firmage hired a
NASA Ames nano-technology scientist, Creon Levit, to run theInternational Space Sciences Organization, a move which apparently alarmed the
management at NASA. The San Francisco based Hearst Examiner reported that NASA's Office of Inspector General assigned Special Agent
Keith Tate to investigate whether any proprietary NASA technology might have been leaking into the private sector. Cook was intrigued when I
pointed out the apparent connections between various private investors, defense contractors, NASA, INSCOM (American military intelligence),
and the CIA. While
researching exotic propulsion technologies Cook had heard rumors of a new kind of
weapon, a "sub-quantum atomic bomb", being whispered about in what he called the "dark halls"
of defense research. Sub-quantum physics is a controversial re-interpretation of quantum theory,
based on so-called pilot wave theories, where an information field controls quantum particles. The late
Professor David Bohm showed that the predictions of ordinary quantum mechanics could be recast into a pilot wave information theory. Recently
Anthony Valentini of the Perimeter Institute has suggested that ordinary quantum theory may be a special case of pilot wave theories, leaving
open the possibility of new and exotic non-quantum technologies. Some French, Serbian and Ukrainian physicists have been working on new
theories of extended electrons and solitons, so perhaps a sub-quantum bomb is not entirely out of the question. Even if the rumors of a sub-
quantum bomb are pure fantasy,
there is no question that mainstream physicists seriously contemplate a
phase transition in the quantum vacuum as a real possibility. The quantum vacuum defies common sense, because
empty space in quantum field theory is actually filled with virtual particles. These virtual particles appear and disappear far too quickly to be
detected directly, but their existence has been confirmed by experiments that demonstrate their influence
on ordinary matter. "Such research should be forbidden!" In the early 1970's Soviet physicists were concerned
that the vacuum of our universe was only one possible state of empty space. The fundamental state of empty space is called the "true vacuum".
Our universe was thought to reside in a "false vacuum", protected from the true vacuum by "the wall of our world". A change from one vacuum
state to another is known as a phase transition. This is analogous to the transition between frozen and liquid water. Lev Okun, a Russian physicist
and historian recalls Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, expressing his concern about research into the phase transitions of
the vacuum. If the wall between vacuum states was to be breached, calculations showed that an
unstoppable expanding bubble would continue to grow until it destroyed our entire universe! Sakharov
declared that "Such research should be forbidden!" According to Okun, Sakharov feared that an experiment might
accidentally trigger a vacuum phase transition.
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6th is Atomtech
Humans are creating a type of biotech that reduces the earth to green goo
ETC in 3 ((<Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration Atomtech: Technologies Converging at the Nano-scale January
2003, The Big Down)
Atomtech will create both living and non-living hybrids previously unknown on earth. The environmental
implications of such new creationssome that could have the half-life of the universeare incomprehensible.
Human-made nanomachines that are powered by materials taken from living cells are a reality today. It wont be long before more
and more of the cells working parts are drafted into the service of human-made nanomachines. As
the merging of living-nano and non-living nano becomes more common, the idea of self-replicating
nanomachines seems less and less like a futurists daydream. In his dismissal of the possibility of molecular
manufacture (see Step 3), George Whitesides stated that it would be a staggering accomplishment to mimic the simplest living cell. But we may
not have to reinvent the wheel before human-made, self-replicating creations are possible; we can just borrow it. Whitesides believes the most
dangerous threat to the environment is not Gray Goo, but selfcatalyzing reactions, that is, chemical reactions that speed up and take place on
their own, without the input of a chemist in a lab.77 It is herewhere natural nanomachines merge with mechanical nanomachinesthat
Whitesidess warning resonates strongest. Can societies that have not yet come to grips with the nature of being human soldier on to construct
partially-human, semi-human or super-human cyborgs? As the merging of living cells and human-made
nanomachines develops, so will the sophistication of biological and chemical weaponry. These bio-
mechanical hybrids will be more invasive, harder to detect and virtually impossible to combat.
For those who do not accept the risk of Drexlers Gray Goo, there is still the looming issue of a Gray New
World posed by super-smart machines, unlimited surveillance capacity and a governing elite that
becomes Big Cyborg Brother to us all. The power of nano+info+cogno is exponential and poses a major threat to democracy
and dissent. But there is an additional concern. Perhaps it is not the Gray Goo we need to fear but the Green Goo.
Rather than try to manufacture self-replicating machinery that mimics the self-replication of living
materials, it is more likely that we will take control of living materials and use them to mimic
machinery. This is already happening at the level of microorganisms, but it might also include higher life forms. For example,
the military is finding that the modification of insects for military or industrial objectives could be a much simpler task than creating mechanical
flying machines of similar size. In the end, will the Green Goo Revolutionthe takeover of life for industrial functionspose the greater risk?
the progress of artificial life research know that effects of messing with the engines of evolution
might lead to forces even more regrettable than the demons unleashed at Alamogordo. Biocidal
technologies threaten life throughout the rest of the universe.
Wichita State 10
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1NC PaRtY
We will have vacuum mining tech by 2020- and guess whatit destroys the universe
Mundi in 7 (Exit, Physicist, http://www.exitmundi.nl/quantum.htm)
It will be over before anyone can say `sorry'. In a laboratory somewhere, someone tries to get hold of a weird and completely
new, exotic type of energy. But boy, the experiment goes out of hand. Suddenly, there's a BIG explosion. And
then there's nothing -- our planet, the sun, all planets in our solar system and even some stars surrounding our
solar system have been blown to smithereens. And explaining what went wrong isn't even simple. We're talking quantum
physics here: the physics of the vanishingly small building blocks that make up all matter in the
Universe. In quantum physics, everything is totally different from daily life. Quantum particles can be in two places at the same time, and can
behave both like waves and particles. In fact, when you hear a quantum physicist say `particles', don't think of little, round balls. Quantum `particles' are
better compared with tones of music: they're definitely there, but you can't see them or catch them. One of the most mind-boggling properties of
quantum particles is that they come into existence out of nowhere. Suck every molecule of air out of a bottle, making it completely vacuum -- and
quantum particles will still be there. They pop up in pairs out of nowhere. And within a tiny fraction of a second, they merge together and -- zzzip! --
they're gone. It
is precisely this odd `quantum vacuum' that may one day open the door to a very new source of
energy. Suppose you're able to snatch some of those out-of-nowhere particles away. Admittedly, you'll have to be REALLY fast. But if you do
succeed, you'll have harvested particles out of nowhere. And since matter and energy are basically the same stuff (according to Einstein's E=mc2), you'll
have energy out of nowhere! The advantages would be unimaginable. Here's an energy source that never runs out, is everywhere around, is extremely
cheap, and causes no pollution whatsoever. But then again, there is a small, but alarming risk. There may be
simply energy too much.
Mining the quantum vacuum might bring about an unstoppable chain reaction, releasing an ever
increasing amount of energy. In fact, no-one knows how much energy will be released: calculations done by physicists give answers
anywhere between zero and infinity. Obviously, too much energy would mean trouble. The explosion could be huge enough to blow
apart our entire solar system and everything around it. And of course, infinite energy would bring about infinite destruction,
bombing not just a handful of stars, but everything in the entire Universe. Gladly, no present-day scientist is capable
of mining the quantum vacuum. On the other hand: one day, there will be. And that day may arrive sooner than you think: some
estimate around 2020 science will be ready. Let's hope physicists finally have their calculations straightened out by then. So it's `wait and
see'. And talking about `seeing': as the famous science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out, whenever you see an unexplained burst of
energy coming from the cosmos (and there are a lot of them), it may be some alien civilization, blowing itself to kingdom come while experimenting
with the quantum vacuum...
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8th is Ice Nine
We will create Ice-Nine accelerators that will consume the universe- tests prove
Close 2
COULD WE DESTROY THE UNIVERSE? Professor Frank Close OBE 19 March 2002
Gresham College http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/could-we-destroy-the-universe
Frank Close is a particle physicist, author and speaker. He was theGresham Professor of Astronomy between 2000 and 2003. He is
Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He was formerly vice president of the British
Association for Advancement of Science, Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Head
of Communications and Public Education at CERN. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling Antimatter, and the
winner of the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his "outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics."
All the rivers, lakes and oceans froze with a "great vvarroomph" as Kurt Vonnegut's mad scientist
dropped some molecules of "ice-nine" into a stream. Ice-nine was a (hypothetical) form of water, more stable than the
ordinary form, which froze at room temperature. In the story, ordinary water is metastable and changes into the stable form - ice-nine - when it
encounters the minutest traces of it. Put ice-nine in a whisky and soda and you would have instant scotch on the rocks; but don't drink it or the
Thankfully that's science fiction, but it is getting harder to be sure
water in your body will instantly freeze.
when one reads reports that scientists are concerned that they might inadvertently create "Killer
plasma ready to devour the Earth". The story centres on experiments that are planned at two high energy
accelerators of heavy ions, nuclei of atoms like lead. One of these, known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or "RHIC",
has just started in the USA, while a much more powerful version is currently being built in Geneva -
the Large Hadron Collider, LHC. Can drop by colliding these pieces of atoms at huge energies scientists will
investigate conditions such as have not existed since the first moments of the universe. At that epoch,
quarks and gluons, the seeds of atomic nuclei today, were in effect melted, swilling around in a hot soup known as "quark gluon plasma".]
According to some reports, scientists have warned that if these experiments "go wrong" they could produce
a new form of particle, which media named the "killer strangelet". Some theories predict that strangelets (forget the
"killer") exist. These are atomic nuclei similar to those that make matter as we know it, but contaminated by "strange particles" such as are found
naturally in cosmic rays. Whereas strange particles normally live less than the blink of an eye, it is possible that in nuclei they might stabilize.
Indeed, the intriguing possibility is that under certain conditions, the resulting strangelets might even turn out to be more stable than the stuff that
Were strangelets to come into contact with ordinary matter, they might then act like
we're made of.
"ice-nine", gobbling up the nuclei of ordinary matter, until so heavy that the strangelet sank to the center of the Earth.
Then it would eat up the Earth from the inside "converting it into one giant strangelet and killing us
all in the process". Could this really happen? On both continents committees of scientists were convened to look into this and the more
general question: what risks are there when entering "unknown territory" with high energy particle accelerators? All our experience to date has
given us a picture of how the universe works, and based on the best available evidence we proceed to plan the next steps. Although
RHIC and the LHC will be entering new territory in our current experience, it is not a first in the history
of the universe.
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1NC PaRtY
And finally, you should evaluate this round based on a utilitarian framework
There is no alt to util even if you think human extinction is bad, killing all aliens is net
worse
Pettit 1991 Philipprofessor of Philosophy @ Australia National University (A Companion to Ethics, ed. By Peter Singer; pg 234)
It is usually said against consequentialism that it would lead an agent to do horrendous deeds, so
long as they promised the best consequences. It would forbid nothing absolutely: not rape, not torture, not even murder.
This charge is on target but it is relevant of course in horrendous circumstances. Thus if someone of
ordinary values condoned torture, that would only be in circumstances where there was a great potential
gainthe saving of innocent lives, the prevention of catastropheand where there were not the bad consequences involved, say,
in state authorities claiming the right to torture. Once it is clear the charge is only relevant only in horrendous
circumstances, it ceases to be clearly damaging. After all, the non-consequentialist will often have to
defend an equally unattractive response in such circumstances. It may be awful to think of
torturing someone but it must be equally awful to think of not doing so and consequently allowing,
say, a massive bomb to go off in some public place.
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Humanity must acknowledge the equality of alien life anything less justifies genocide
Packer, Master in communication Wake Forest, 2007
<Joe, Alien Life in Search of Acknowledgment, pg 62-63>
Once we hold alien interests as equal to our own we can begin to revaluate areas previously
believed to hold no relevance to life beyond this planet. A diverse group of scholars including Richard
Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, Nick Bostrom, philosophy professor at Oxford University, John Leslie
philosophy professor at Guelph University and Martin Rees, Britains Astronomer Royal, have written on the emerging
technologies that threaten life beyond the planet Earth. Particle accelerators labs are colliding matter together,
reaching energies that have not been seen since the Big Bang. These experiments threaten a phase transition that would create a bubble of
altered space that would expand at the speed of light killing all life in its path. Nanotechnology and other machines may soon reach the
ability to self replicate. A mistake in design or programming could unleash an endless quantity of
machines converting all matter in the universe into copies of themselves. Despite detailing the
potential of these technologies to destroy the entire universe, Posner, Bostrom, Leslie, and Rees
only mention of alien life in their works is in reference to the threat aliens post to humanity. The
rhetorical construction of otherness only in terms of the threats it poses, but never in terms of the
threat one poses to it, has been at the center of humanitys history of genocide, colonization, and
environmental destruction. Although humanity certainly has its own interests in reducing the threat of
these technologies evaluating them without taking into account the danger they pose to alien life
is neither appropriate nor just. It is not appropriate because framing the issue only in terms of
human interests will result in priorities designed to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits
to humanity, not all life. Even if humanity dealt with the threats effectively without referencing
their obligation to aliens, Posner, Bostrom, Leslie, and Rees rhetoric would not be just, because it arbitrarily
declares other life forms unworthy of consideration. A framework of acknowledgement would allow humanity to
address the risks of these new technologies, while being cognizant of humanitys obligations to other life within the universe. Applying
the lens of acknowledgment to the issue of existential threats moves the problem from one of self
destruction to universal genocide. This may be the most dramatic example of how refusing to
extend acknowledgment to potential alien life can mask humanitys obligations to life beyond
this planet.
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2NC Aliens
Extend our Drake evidence - recent examinations of the fossil record and astronomical
discoveries put the number of alien civilization at our level of complexity at 10,000, and
there are 100s of billions of galaxies. Drake is an astrophysicist default to our quals
Extend Mackay 2- the abundance of microbial organisms in the universe mathematically
guarantees that aliens exist- Earth is not the only planet that has the conditions necessary
for life- only a few key elements are necessary and they are wide spread.
Even using the most pessimistic standards there is a 100% chance of alien life in the
Universe
Aczel, 01professor of Mathmatics Bentley College,
<Amir, Probability 1: The book that proves there is life in outer space, pg 212-214>
The union rule for independent events allows us to compute the probability that there is at least one
other planet outside Earth with life on it. Lets start by making some reasonable and minimal (that is, least
favorable to our conclusion) assumptions about the basic probabilities of the existence of life on a planet
orbiting any one star other than the Sun. Lets take the estimate of the number of stars with planets, f from Drakes
equation, as = 0.5. Then, from the fact that out of nine extrasolar planets thus discovered, one is in the
habitable zone, and the fact that this is confirmed in our own solar system (Earth being in the habitable zone, the other eight planets
possibly not), we will use Y9 for that parameter. Now we come to the hard part, getting a lower bound for the actual probability of life: What is
the probability that DNA develops and is sustained in life-forms on a planet that is within its stars habitable zone? Lets
entertain the
notion that DNA is an extremely complex molecule with a very small chance of occurring on its own
and that life is precarious because the universe is a dangerous place. Let us therefore assume that
the probability of life occurring on any single planet that is already within its stars habitable zone
is extremely, extremely remote: one in a trillion. By multiplication of this extremely small number
by the previous factors of 0.5 and /9, we get the assumption that the probability of life around any one
given star is 0.00000000000005. Our galaxy has about 300 billion stars (although some estimates are lower), and
lets assume there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe. We will now use all these estimates and plug them into the
rule for the union of independent events: P (life in orbit around at least one other star in the known universe) = 1
The answer is a number that is indistinguishable from 1.00 at
(0.99999999999995)30000000000000000000000000
Even if we
any level of decimal accuracy reported by the computer. The answer is, for all practical purposes, equal to 1.00or 100 percent.
assume that there are only 10 billion stars in our own galaxy and that there are only a billion
galaxies, the answer still comes out to be a number indistinguishable from 1.00 for the probability of life
elsewhere in the universe. This shows that the result is overwhelmingthe probability that life exists outside Earth does not depend very strongly
on the actual number of stars in the universe, as long as that number is very largeas we well know it to be from everything astronomy has
taught us. New results from the Hubble Space Telescope about the existence of so many billions of galaxies in the universe serve the point that
there are so many possible places for life to develop. There is also no dependence in the model on the assumptions about the percentage of stars
with planets and the percentage of these planets within the habitable zone. While we used the best scientific estimates, even lower values still lead
to the same answer, a number close to 1.00. The probability is a virtual certainty. What is happening here, mathematically, is that even though our
probability of life on any one planet may be extremely small, the compound probability that life exists on at least one other planet increases
steadily because there are so man places to look so many stars. This type of convergence as the number of trials becomes large always takes
place when one uses the rule for the union of independent events. If you give something enough of a chance to happen, it eventually will. Finally,
we dont really know for certain the size of the entire universe. Some
believe that our universe is infinite. If there are
infinitely many stars, the answer to our question is that the probability of extraterrestrial life is
identically equal to 1.00 (not just a number indistinguishable from 1.00 to any level of accuracy), and that this holds true no matter
how small the probability of life on any planet may be, as long as that number is not identically zero (and we know that it is not zero since we
exist).
Wichita State 17
Tournament 2009 Wipeout
2NC Aliens
Even if humanity goes extinct life will reemerge if we do not destroy the Universe
Grinspoon, Southwest Research Institute Principle Scientist Department of Space Studies and adjunct professor of Astrophysical and
Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado, 03
<David, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, pg 415>
Everything
My belief in aliens is inseparable from a certain unavoidable, foolish, naturalistic optimism about our own ultimate prospects.
that Ive learned about the nature of our universe and our biosphere tells me that life will find a
way to thrive. Gaia, as Lynn Margulis has said, is a tough bitch. If her noosphere chops off its head,
shell keep grooving along. In time, she may grow another noosphere, giving a different proto-
intelligent species a chance at reaching the big time. I see our proud little spurt of technical
invention as a little eddy in a whirling universe that is evolving, self-organizing, and moving
inexorably toward more life and more intelligence. Our little whorl could wink out in an instant, or it could grow into a
deeper more stable mind-storm. Is psychogenesis limited to Earth? I doubt it. Will there be a psychozoic age of the universe? Has it already
begun? If we believe even in the possibility of the transformation to wisdom and immortality, then we must live in a universe increasingly
permeated with intelligence, and suffused with love. I proved it mathematically in the last chapter, and equations dont lie.
Margulis = Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts
Panspermia means comets will spread life all over the Universe
Shostak. SETI Senior Astronomer, 03
<Seth, Panspermia: Spreading Life Through the Universe, Jul. 24,
http://www.seti.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=191981&ct=220926>
About 25 years ago, two British astronomers, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe, proposed that comets might be the Johnny Appleseeds of
life, carrying vital spores from star system to star system, an idea that is known today as panspermia. If
the tail of such a life-loaded
comet were to brush the Earth, it might pass some of its frozen microorganisms into the
atmosphere where they could descend to our planets surface. The two astronomers ventured that this might account
for the start of life on Earth. They also made the disturbing suggestion that panspermia could spread disease. Now you might wonder whether life
from space, as intriguing as the idea might be, solves the mystery of how biology got started in the first place. Or does this theory merely push the
problem of lifes origin into someone elses lap? Well, of course, to some extent it only accomplishes the latter. But there is an appealing aspect to
panspermia: itallows life to be widespread, even if the genesis of life is a difficult and rare event. After
all, humans cover the planet, even though Homo sapiens got his start in only one locale (Africa,
presumably.) Life might blanket the Galaxy even if it only sprung up on a small number of worlds. Great.
But is there any evidence for panspermia, or is it just a seductive idea with a sexy moniker? Jayant Narlikar, of the Inner-University Centre for
Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India, claims to have data in support of panspermia. Narlikar recently flew an experiment in a high-altitude
balloon. On board was a cryogenic sampler consisting of 16 cylinders that were pumped out and decontaminated before launch. As the balloon
climbed into the Indian sky, puffs of air were sucked in. One by one, the cylinders were automatically filled with samples from various altitudes,
ranging from 25 to 41 km. Once the payload returned to Earth, it was examined in biology labs in Cardiff and Sheffield, England. To their
amazement, the researchers found evidence for live cells in the samples from 41 km. Even more interesting, these "bacteria" recovered at high
altitude were non-culturable. This doesnt mean that they didnt appreciate opera, but rather that they couldnt be grown in laboratory Petri dishes.
According to Narlikar, this was important in ruling out laboratory contamination of the samples the cells found were clearly not a common lab
bacterium.
Wichita State 18
Tournament 2009 Wipeout
2NC Aliens
2NC Aliens
Life can survive under any circumstance- its unlimited in the universe
Grinspoon, Southwest Research Institute Principle Scientist Department of Space Studies and adjunct professor of Astrophysical and
Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado, 03
<David, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, pg 129-131>
Life has expanded on its bag of chemical tricks to facilitate survival in a bewildering array
of environments. In recent years, weve discovered life in the strangest of places: in unlikely corners of our
planet where no one had thought to search because they seemed so obviously uninhabitable. Weve found bacteria thriving in
acid so strong that it would dissolve your skin instantly, and creatures soaking contentedly in
superheated thermal springs above two hundred degrees. Some of these hyperthermophiles, or extreme-heat-
loving organisms, require temperatures above the normal boiling point of water to survive. At the opposite extreme are those that survive in
intense cold. In frigid arctic tundras that appear lifeless, weve
found colonies of bacteria hiding out inside
frozen rocks. Weve even found organisms that can survive after being frozen for weeks in
liquid nitrogen! The green plant Welwitschia mirabilis can survive for thousands of years in places with only one centimeter of rainfall
per year. The Dead sea, it turns out, is alive with salt-loving bacteria and algae. In 1997, Japanese scientists
discovered a species of marine worm living in an ocean trench twenty-one thousand feet beneath the sea at a crushing pressure 650
times that of sea level. Bacteria have survived for 3 million years in Siberian permafrost at fifteen
degrees below zero with no sunlight, air, or food. They dont do very much down there but survive simply by
waiting, for eons if necessary, until the ground thaws and they can resume living at a healthier clip. Large, diverse communities of previously
unknown organisms crowd the hot, nutrient-rich waters surrounding black smokers, volcanic vents on the bottom of the sea. The denizens of
these recently discovered ecosystems include sulfur-eating shrimp and giant tube worms up to ten feet long. As weird and unearthly as these
There
deep-ocean communities seem to us, many scientists are starting to think that our most distant ancestors came from just such a place.
are even bacteria living a mile underground and eating nothing but basaltic rock and
water. * In fact, it now seems possible that most life on our planet is in the deep Earth
biosphere, a realm extending miles underground whose existence we never before suspected. This would be the
biological equivalent of dark matter in that the majority of life even on our own planet could as yet be unknown to us. Weve been sharing a
planet with these unlikely creatures for billions of years, but who knew? Our own planet is crawling with aliens. We continue to find
extremophiles (lovers of extremes) that break our conceptual barriers of lifes range in temperature, pH, diet, and pressure. They
show us
that life is even more robust, adaptable, and resourceful than we imagined, and this
encourages us to think that it will find ways to persist in diverse and extreme environments
on other planets. In fact, life may not even need a planet. When the Apollo 12 astronauts
retrieved pieces of the old Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which had been sitting idle in a lunar crater fully exposed to the harsh
radiation and vacuum of space, investigators back on Earth were shocked to find viable Streptococcus
bacteria that had survived a three-year stay on the Moon. Who is to say that living creatures cannot survive
longer spells in outer space? This possibility was amplified by another recent discovery: bacteria such as Deinococcus radiodurans that
live happily inside nuclear reactors, flawlessly reassembling their damaged genomes from hundreds of fragments, despite
radiation doses a thousand times stronger than those that would kill a human.
AT Aliens Immortal
The only Aliens that are immortal are in higher dimensional universes, not our own.
India Daily Technology Team, 2005 Aug. 17, (http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/4204.asp)
The life forms in higher dimensional universes and the Hyperspace, such as aliens, may be just
electromagnetic energy that stays as a cohesive energy and is indestructible. These life forms are immortal who from time to time use natural means of getting
into Physical beings and visit the Physical Universe. Like any other civilization, they have a specified hierarchy and divided roles in civilizations.
What is fascinating is that these life forms are really immortal and can take shape of
Physical existence in the Physical Universe.
Wichita State 21
Tournament 2009 Wipeout
AT No Multicellularity
Multicellularity will emerge
Darling, PHD in astronomy from University of Manchester, lecturer and renowned author, 01
<David, Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology, Pg 136-138>
. But in 1999, Jochen Brocks of the University of Sydney and his colleagues reported evidence of
eukarotes much older than Grypania. The evidence is in the firm of organic molecules called steranes, detected in rocks
2.75 billion years old. Steranes can only come from the breakdown of complex sterols (a group of alcohols that includes cholesterol), and sterols
are only made by eukarotes using chemical pathways that demand molecular oxygen. A straightforward interpretation of these results is that
eukarvotes were living 2.75 billion years ago with access to oxygen. Yet
the Oxygen Revolution still lay 500 million
years in the future. This presents paleobiologists with an interesting puzzle. It also comes as bad news for a
theory about eukarvotic origins put forward by Joseph Kirschink, chief of Caltechs Paleomagnetics
Laboratory, and which has been used as a Rare Earth argument. Kirschink suggested a number of criteria that the prototype eukaryotic host cell had
to meet. It had to he capable of phagocytosis (literally cell eating, or ingesting food particles by surrounding them); be big enough to engulf other bacteria; and offer a controlled environment so that natural selection would favor it
as a partner for symbiosis. Only one organism, he felt, met all the requirements: Magnetobacter a goliath among bacteria that uses onboard crystals of magnetite to orient itself along Earths magnetic field lines. As well see in the
next chapter, no such organism is likely to appear on an anaerobic world or on a world without a magnetic field. Kirschinks proposal was used by Ward and Brownlee as one of their Rare Earth arguments because it implies special
requirements for the rise of higher life. If Magnetobacter were the ancestor of all eukaryotes, there ought to be no signs of eukaryotic activity before the Oxygen Revolution. Yet now we have evidence of eukaryotes living at a time
when Earths free oxygen levels must have been very low. It seems not only that complex life (at the level of eukaryotes) got started much earlier than was thought, hut much earlier than it was thought possible. A way out this enigma
has been suggested by Harvard biologist Andrew Knoll. He takes as his central clue the fact that, together with the sterane biomarkers, Brocks and his colleagues found traces of what are called alphamethylhopanes. These are only
made by cyanobacteriaphotosynthetic bacteria of the type found in microbial mats. It seems that oxygen-requiring eukaryotes were living in the same locale as oxygenproducing cyanobacteria. This is surely no coincidence. The
stromatolites, Knoll suggests, probably provided an early oxygen-rich oasis in which eukaryotes could get a head start. He counters possible criticism that oxygen released by stromatolites would be quickly diffused into the general
ocean in three ways. First, many eukaryotic cells today can survive in oxygen-poor conditions, needing higher levels only in order to grow and reproduce. Second, the slime that microbial mats produce traps bubbles of oxygen,
delaying the gass escape. Third, the dependence of early eukaryotes on cvanobacteria would have encouraged close contact and made it easier for an endosymbiotic relationship to develop. Who knows how much deeper in time
Just as scientists are continually pushing back the origin of life, were
well find evidence of eukaryotes?
AT - Moon K2 Life
Moon is not key to life
Darling, PHD in astronomy from University of Manchester, lecturer and renowned author, 01
<David, Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology, Pg 96-97>
But its now clear that Laskars findings rule out neither simple nor complex biology. Contrary to Ward and Brownlees assertion, big moons
may not be rare, necessary or even desirable to the emergence of higher firms of life. Recent computer simulations by Eugenio
Rivera of NASA Ames and his colleagues suggest that small planets with big moons are likely to be
quite common. As many as one in three Earth-like planets in their infancy may he struck
hard enough by other large objects to make big moons, and one in twelve struck at a time
when its tilt is sufficiently mild for it to be stabilized at a terrestrial angle (currently 23 1/2 degrees) or
less. On the question of whether a big moon is crucial to the emergence of complex life, there are two points. First, if the Earth had
been deprived of a big moon then, as Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute points out: Our planet would spin faster
fast enough, in fact, to stabilize it against major tipping.* In addition, even if an Earth-like planet
occasionally does spin flip, it will spend 10 million years or more doing so. Life can probably
adapt to such slow changes. Indeed, it already has, during episodes of polar wander on Earth. Second, new biological
possibilities are opened up for planets that do periodically roll on their sides for want of a stabilizing
satellite. In 1997, James Kasting and Darren Williams at Penn State calculated that our climate would be like if
the Earth were tipped on its side (as Uranus is) and located 1.4 times further from the Sun, at a
distance of 210 million kilometers. They found that, given the extra greenhouse heating due to increased levels
of carbon dioxide, conditions should be positively balmy. The equator would be at a steady 11C, whereas the
poles would never rise above 46C or fall below 3C. Thered be no ice anywhere, except on the top of tall mountains
AT - Sun Unique
Localized nature of science means they will not understand in time to stop it
Basalla, History Professor University of Delaware, 05
<George, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Extraterrestrials, pg 177>
When philosopher Nicholas Rescher was asked to comment on Drakes notion of alien science,
he dismissed it as infinitely parochial. It was like saying that extraterrestrials share our
legal or political system. Rescher was well qualified to examine Drakes claims. He had recently studied the
anthropomorphic character of human science and how it related to alien science. Rescher struck at the
heart of the popular conception of alien science when he challenged the widely held view
that there is only one natural world and a single science to explain it. He called this the one world, one
science argument. The physical universe is singular, Rescher agreed, but its interpreters are many and
diverse. What we know about physical reality stems from our special biological and
cognitive make-up and our unique cultural and social heritage and experiences. We have no reason to
suppose that extraterrestrials share our peculiar biological attributes, social outlook, or cultural traditions. Human science,
therefore, is incommensurable with extraterrestrial science. If extraterrestrials cultivate science, it will be their
kind of science, not our kind. Alien science is a wholly different form of knowledge. It is not human science raised to a higher degree. Rescher
Astronomy as practiced by
offered a compelling illustration of how human biology and our situation on Earth shaped our science.
humans has been molded by the fact that we live on the surface of the Earth (not underwater), that
we have eyes, and that the development of agriculture is linked to the seasonal positions of
celestial objects. Intelligent alien creatures living in an oceanic abyss might develop sophisticated hydrodynamics but fail to study the motion of
heavenly bodies, investigate electromagnetic radiation, or build radio telescopes. Even
if extraterrestrials are surface
dwellers, their biological endowment will determine what they are able to sense, their
ecological niche, what aspects of nature they exploit to satisfy their needs, their cultural
heritage, which questions about nature they find interesting to ask. Rescher acknowledges the existence
of intelligent extraterrestrials who possess the ability to develop science and technology. He does not dispute the scientists repeated claims (1)
that there is a single scientifically knowable physical reality and (2) that aliens are not simply other humans inhabiting a different planet. After
adopting these claims, he demolishes the idea of a universal science that serves as a common language in the universe. Rescher
maintains that wherever science exists in the universe, it will be localized.
Wichita State 25
Tournament 2009 Wipeout
AT Jupiter Key
Jupiter like planets are not key to life
Kasting, Geoscience Professor, Penn State, 01
<James, Essay Review: Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's "Rare Earth" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.1 (2001) 117-131 Project
Muse>
Ward and Brownlee hedge their bets as to whether Jupiter-like planets exist in other
planetary systems. On p. 239, they say: "It is likely that many planetary systems do not have Jovian planets." This statement is
presumably based on Wetherill's original analysis. At the time Wetherill wrote his paper, astrophysicists were having a difficult time figuring out
how to form Jupiter fast enough. Jupiter's core had to form fast in order to capture hydrogen and helium from the solar nebula before it dissipated,
and then-current accretion models were not able to simulate this under realistic conditions. Since that time, however, the situation has changed.
Astronomers have now found over 30 Jupiter-sized planets orbiting other stars. Many of
these orbit very close to their stars--some closer than Mercury is to our own Sun. Paradoxically, these "hot Jupiters" probably
had to form very fast in order to interact gravitationally with their respective stellar nebulae and spiral in to their present positions. While
explaining this process theoretically remains a difficult problem, the empirical evidence tells us that giant planets can and do form rapidly.
Ward and Brownlee are well aware of the existence of these extrasolar planets. On p. 242,
they mention that the other 95 percent of stars that do not have "hot Jupiters" may have
planetary systems similar to our own. One can only suppose that they wrote this section
before most of the known extrasolar planets had been found and then went back and
revised it without pointing out that the scientific landscape has changed. In reality, we still don't know
whether Jupiter-sized planets at Jupiter-like distances from their stars (~5 AU) are common. (The current Earth-Sun distance is 1 AU, or 1
astronomical unit.) The good news is that existing extrasolar planet searches are expected to tell us the answer within the next five to 10 years.
Jupiter's own orbital period is about 12 years, so current detection methods, which rely on the perturbation to the star's position or velocity caused
The existence of
by the planet's gravity, would need about this same amount of time to find a similar planet around another star.
Jupiter is a double-edged sword (or maybe even a triple-edged one, if such a thing exists). In addition to comets, Earth is
also thought to have been hit occasionally by asteroids that have been perturbed from the
asteroid belt by Jupiter's gravity. It was most likely an asteroid, not a comet, that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years
ago, as evidenced by the high concentrations of iridium in the boundary layer clay. Indeed, the very existence of the asteroid belt is most likely a
result of Jupiter's large gravity, which prevented a planet from forming in that region. So, to the extent that asteroid impacts are a danger to life on
The flip side of this latter argument is that many authors
Earth, Jupiter is a villain as well as a protector. [End Page 119]
would agree that the Cretaceous/Tertiary mass extinction facilitated the rise of mammals, and later, of humans. At the
time when the asteroid struck, the dinosaurs had ruled the Earth for almost 200 million years. Biological evolution may get stuck in ruts (if one
considers the dinosaurs to be a "rut"), from which it can escape only by way of some catastrophic event. Whatever
one's opinion
may be on such matters, it is clear that Jupiter has influenced the course of biological evolution on Earth.
But this does not necessarily imply that complex life is rare elsewhere in the galaxy.
Jupiters will be common around Earth like planets
Darling, PHD in astronomy from University of Manchester, lecturer and renowned author, 01
<David, Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology, Pg 107>
Another claim of Rare Earth advocates is that, in order to nurture advanced life, a planetary system must contain a large gas giant moving in a wide, circular orbit. Such a planet, the argument goes, serves as a body guard, deflecting
asteroids and comets away from the inner regions and so preventing large numbers of these stray objects from crashing into an worlds on which complex life is destined to evolve. The Earth was extraordinarily lucky, its said, to have
Jupiter as a protector. This idea was originally put forward by George Wetherill, of the Carnegie Institution, in 1995. First, its worth mentioning that we already know of a few
classical extrasolar Jupitersgas giants occupying fairly large, not-tooelliptical orbits. For example, a planet going around the star 47 Ursae Majoris has a mass just over twice that
of Jupiter, and another going around the star RD 10695 has a mass about six times that of Jupiter. Both orbit at distances similar to that of the asteroid belt from the Sun, in paths only slightly more elliptical than the orbit of Mars. In
conventional gas giants at this early stage in the search suggests there may be a very large
reservoir of them waiting to be found over the next couple of decades. Second, this matter of Jupiter-like planets in Jupiter-like
orbits is not divorced from the issue of Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits. Yet Rare
Earth advocates treat the two as statistically unrelated events, different rolls of the dice. This is a little like the movie character who,
when told that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrigs disease, asked, Gee, what are the odds of that? In fact, the odds are pretty good. If a planetary system hasnt been rearranged, early on, by big planets hurtling all over the place,
youd expect the original design still to be in place: small, terrestrialtype worlds close in and large, Jovian-type worlds further out. One implies the other. As weve seen, its too early to say how common these relatively undisturbed
planetary set-ups really are.
Wichita State 27
Tournament 2009 Wipeout
Even if this would true, our evidence indicates that other Earth-like planets also have
moons similar to ours. Their argument is not mutually exclusive. Plus, the moon is not key-
Spin fills in for moonless planets and life could always adapt
Shostak 00 (Seth setiwriter www.seti-inst.edu)
Does sophisticated life require a large moon? Some have argued that it does, for the moon helps stabilize Earths rotation axis and keeps it from possibly dangerous tilts. Other Earth-like planets might not be blessed with such a hefty
computations have
moon, as it seems that our own natural satellite was produced in an accidental collision between Earth and Mars-sized or larger asteroid more than 4 billion years ago. But
shown that if the moon had not been formed, our planet would spin faster fast enough, in
fact, to stabilize it against major tipping. In addition, even if an Earth-like planet occasionally
does a spin flip, it will spend 10 million years or more doing so. Life can probably adapt to such
slow changes. Indeed, it already has, during episodes of polar wander on Earth
Wichita State 28
Tournament 2009 Wipeout
AT Fermi Paradox
Extend Subpoint B truly advanced civilizations will realize there is no future in endless
expansion which is the reason we have yet to find them.
No time to find us
New Scientist, 07 <Aliens need a lot more time to find us, 20 January,
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19325875.100-aliens-need-a-lot-more-time-to-find-us.html>
"SO, WHERE is everybody?" Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi reportedly quipped to fellow physicists in 1950, when
discussing why we haven't seen any signs of alien civilisations if, as many believe, our galaxy is teeming with life. Now, a maths model
may have an answer to Fermi's paradox. Rasmus Bjrk of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, has
calculated that eight probes - travelling at a tenth of the speed of light and each capable of
launching up to eight sub-probes - would take about 100,000 years to explore a region of
space containing 40,000 stars. When Bjrk scaled up the search to include 260,000 such systems in our galaxy's habitable zone, the probes took almost 10 billion years - three-quarters the
age of the universe - to explore just 0.4 per cent of the stars (www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0701238v1). So, Bjrk's answer to the Fermi paradox: aliens haven't contacted us because
Consumerism
Miller 06. Evolutionary Psychologist, University of New Mexico, GEOFFREY Runaway consumerism explains
the Fermi Paradox http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html
I suggest adifferent, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox. Basically, I
think the aliens don't blow themselves up;
they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize
space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need
Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind
must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. We don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek
tasty foods that tended to promote survival and luscious mates who tended to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and
pornography. Technologyis fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our real
biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness subjective cues of survival and
reproduction, without the real-world effects. Fresh organic fruit juice costs so much more than nutrition-free soda. Having real friends is so much
more effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming
Star Wars or Serenity.
It would take intensive colonization to conquer the galaxy aliens arent interested
Shostak 01, Senior Astronomer SETI, is an American astronomer. He grew up inArlington, VA[1] and earned
his physics degree from Princeton University and aPh.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.[2] He is the Senior
Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the 2004 winner of the Klumpke-Roberts Award awarded by
theAstronomical Society of the Pacific in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of
astronomy.[3]
< Seth. Nov. 08, SETI Institute Fermi's Paradox Part 2 What's Blocking Galactic Civilization?
http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179285>
Of course, if energy costs can be brought way down, for example with fusion or matter-antimatter technology, or by capturing more of the
radiation spewed into space by the home star, this explanation might not hold water. But even if the aliens can afford colonization, maybe they
havent got the stamina to see it through. Subduingthe Galaxy takes more than sending a ship full of
restless nomads to the next star. The nomads have to settle that star, and then spawn pilgrims of their own. And those migrs have to
produce yet more settlers. And so on. If each and every colony eventually founds two daughter settlements (a
pretty decent accomplishment), then 38 generations of colonists are required to bring the entire Galaxy
under control. Even the Polynesians, who swept across the western Pacific domesticating one island after another, didnt
manage this. Maybe the aliens cant do it either.
Wichita State 30
Tournament 2009 Wipeout
AT Multi-Verse Theory
1. This is irrelevant: Humanity will still destroy the entirety of this Universe which
massively outweighs the impact to human extinction.
AT Infinitely Expanding
1. This is irrelevant - there is no evidence to indicate that the acceleration would be fast
enough to escape our impact scenarios. Additionally thousands of alien life forms will still
be destroyed if we fail to eliminate humanity.
Thus, anarbitrarily tiny negative cosmological constant can make the universe to decelerate in the
future, even though it is accelerating now! This gives us an scenario in which the matter contents of the universe include the
quintessence and a negative cosmological constant (which can be nearly zero and undetectable at present), or, equivalently, only one quintessence
field which rolls towards a negative minimum of its potential, such that the universe is accelerating now caused by the quintessence evolving
beyond zero of the quintessence potential, but will decelerate and collapse eventually due to the negative cosmological constant or the negative
height of the minimum of the quintessence potential, thereby avoiding the cumbersome event horizon. In conclusion, firstly, the fate of the
universe is much more sensitive to the presence of the cosmological constant (or the nonzero height of the minimum of the quintessence
potential) than other matter content, even though the cosmological constant may be extremely tiny and undetectable at all at the present time.
Thus, before we pin down the magnitude and the sign of the cosmological constant from observations, it is hard to tell what the ultimate fate of
the presently accelerating universe will be. Secondly, as suggested by the above discussions, the
potential incompatibility of
superstring theory with an event horizon in an eternally accelerating universe can be avoided in a
self-consistent way if superstring theory can provide a negative cosmological constant in itself.
constant, and is not growing in strength with time, which would cause the Universe to eventually
rip itself apart.
Wichita State 32
Tournament 2009 Wipeout
AT - Tectonics
There is nothing miraculous about tectonic activity
Shostak 00 (Seth, SETI author, seti-inst.edu) is an American astronomer. He grew up inArlington, VA[1] and earned
his physics degree from Princeton University and aPh.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.[2] He is the Senior
Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the 2004 winner of the Klumpke-Roberts Award awarded by
theAstronomical Society of the Pacific in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of
astronomy.[3]
Plate tectonics are useful for cycling carbon
But what about such possible terrestrial peculiarities as plate tectonic or the companionship of a large moon?
between the atmosphere, the ocean, carbonate rocks, and living things. This happens because the slip-slide of the oceans pushes
carbonate rocks on the sea bottom (such as limestone) under the continental margins. The carbonates melt and are blown back into the atmosphere by volcanoes. But tectonic activity neednt
AT Rock Formations
models of planet formation dont rule out the formation of new worlds even in these
explosions). But
depleted systems. And theres still plenty of raw material. Note that the mass of the Earth is only
about 0.0003% that of the Sun, so even in the metal deprived neighborhoods of globular clusters
there is more than enough suitable material for constructing Earth-like planets. In addition, the
overwhelming majority of luminous stars are in the galaxys disk, not in the roughly one-half of all
stars have metallicities comparable to, or even greater than, that of the Sun. The composition of
our solar system will be similar to that of billions of other sun-centered solar systems. Roughly half
of theses will be old enough to have incubated intelligent beings.
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AT Idiosyncrasy Key
the fact. A mutt off the street could have a spot on one ear, two eyes of different color, and a limp. In
other words, it would be a mutt unlike most other dogs (and if examined carefully enough, a mutt unlike all other dogs). But this hound could
also have fleas. Would we be correct in concluding that dog, so obviously special, is the only one
likely to have fleas? The question is not how idiosyncratic is Earth, but whether our world enjoys
circumstances that are simultaneously rare and essential to complex life. As far as we know, this
isnt the case.
Wichita State 36
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This argument is not responsive: Our evidence indicates that high energy physics
experiments and other upcoming technologies will lead to destruction of the universe. That
aliens havent destroyed the universe does not deny that this is possible, aliens may have
not developed these technologies or may simply have been more intelligent than humans in
employing them.
Science is localized believing aliens will develop the same technology is parochial
Basalla 05, History Professor University of Delaware,
<George, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Extraterrestrials, pg 177>
When philosopher Nicholas Rescher was asked to comment on Drakes notion of alien science, he
dismissed it as infinitely parochial. It was like saying that extraterrestrials share our legal or
political system. Rescher was well qualified to examine Drakes claims. He had recently studied the
anthropomorphic character of human science and how it related to alien science. Rescher struck at the heart
of the popular conception of alien science when he challenged the widely held view that there is only
one natural world and a single science to explain it. He called this the one world, one science argument. The physical
universe is singular, Rescher agreed, but its interpreters are many and diverse. What we know about
physical reality stems from our special biological and cognitive make-up and our unique cultural
and social heritage and experiences. We have no reason to suppose that extraterrestrials share our peculiar biological attributes, social
outlook, or cultural traditions. Human science, therefore, is incommensurable with extraterrestrial science. If
extraterrestrials cultivate science, it will be their kind of science, not our kind. Alien science is a wholly different form of knowledge. It is not
human science raised to a higher degree. Rescher offered a compelling illustration of how human biology and our situation on Earth shaped our
science. Astronomy as practiced by humans has been molded by the fact that we live on the surface of
the Earth (not underwater), that we have eyes, and that the development of agriculture is linked to the
seasonal positions of celestial objects. Intelligent alien creatures living in an oceanic abyss might develop sophisticated hydrodynamics
but fail to study the motion of heavenly bodies, investigate electromagnetic radiation, or build radio telescopes. Even if
extraterrestrials are surface dwellers, their biological endowment will determine what they are able
to sense, their ecological niche, what aspects of nature they exploit to satisfy their needs, their
cultural heritage, which questions about nature they find interesting to ask. Rescher acknowledges the
existence of intelligent extraterrestrials who possess the ability to develop science and technology. He does not dispute the scientists repeated
claims (1) that there is a single scientifically knowable physical reality and (2) that aliens are not simply other humans inhabiting a different
Rescher
planet. After adopting these claims, he demolishes the idea of a universal science that serves as a common language in the universe.
maintains that wherever science exists in the universe, it will be localized. It will be the science of the creatures
who have fashioned it. They will act according to their special physical constitution, environment, history, and needs. Hence, science diverges in
the universe. It does not converge on the theories, concepts, and topics that happen to interest terrestrial researchers at this point in the history of
the human intellect.
Wichita State 38
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the maximum degree of encephalization which (Crudely speaking) measures the ratio of brain to body
that
mass has increased considerably in complex animals for the last 100 million years or so. The
dinosaurs were bulky but not bright. Even the most cerebral of these lumbering lizards had less
brain power, as judged by encephalization, than an ostrich. The mutual stimulus to increased mental capability
inherent in predator-prey activity has led to increased encephalization for some segments of the
animal kingdom. Consequently, many of todays animals would handily outscore their Mesozoic
predecessors on any IQ test. Human-level sophistication could be a common outcome of this
ratcheting up of neural capability, although it is the uncertainty of this conclusion that drives us to
look for intelligence elsewhere.
Wichita State 39
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Wichita State 40
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Human extinction is inevitable which means the Omega Point will never be reached.
Nanotech, Particle accelerators or any other countless technologies will have destroyed us
long before then.
Tipler fails to account for aliens. His theory rests on the premise that humanity is the only
life in the universe. We will win that aliens exist which mean that they can achieve the
Omega point independent of humanity and resurrect all life.
Our Gartner evidence is a better prediction of the future of the universe. It examines the
same premises as Tipler but concludes that instead of leading to an Omega point the
universes biofriendly nature will lead to the creation of infinite new universe.
Even Tipler admits there is no solid evidence for the Omega Point
Schermer, teaches history of science, technology, and evolutionary thought, Occidental College, 02
<Michael, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition & Other Confusions of Our Time pg 268>
On the first page of the Physics of Immortality, Tipler claims that his Omega Point
The Hope Springs Eternal Problem.
Theory is a testable physical theory for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who will one day in the far future
resurrect every single one of us to live in an abode which is in all essentials the Judeo-Christian Heaven and that if any reader has lost a loved
one, or is afraid of death, modern physics says: Be comforted, you and they shall live again. So, everything we always believed to be true
based on faith turns out to be true based on physics. What are the chances? Not good, I am afraid. And, after
305 pages of concise
and cogent argumentation, Tipler finally admits, The Omega Point Theory is a viable scientific theory of the future of the
physical universe, but the only evidence in its favor at the moment is theoretical beauty. Beauty by itself
does not make a theory right or wrong, but when a theory fulfills our deepest wishes we should be
especially cautious about rushing to embrace it. When a theory seems to match our eternal hopes,
chances are that it is wrong.
1. Their authors have zero qualifications or credible evidence for the claim that UFOs are
visiting earth much less that Aliens need out DNA (insert whatever bad argument is made).
Each part of our argument is backed by experts in the respective field.
2. Non-unique: Humanity will inevitably be destroyed means even if their right it means
that Aliens wont be able to use our DNA fast enough Also, there are over 10,000 alien
civilizations no way they can prove that they are all dependant on our DNA
If you buy these terrible arguments, our Gardner evidence indicates that we have an
obligation to support life in the universe - even if the Draconians are bad they are better
than no life.
Their own crazy authors disagree with them, they think the greys are evil.
The evidence indicates that Greys are evil your authors have been brainwashed while
abducted
Burlington News in 03 UFO Burlington UFO and Paranormal Research and Educational Center
The Greys, 03/27, http://www.burlingtonnews.net/greys.html
These theories both have their various sources, and both have evidence that supports one theory, while detracting
from the other. The author's personal views lean towards the first theory, due to several key points of evidence.
Most of the evidence for the Grey-government conspiracy comes from sources within the
government, and from careful observation and analysis of government activities over the
past 50 years. The benevolent Grey belief comes directly from the Greys, who have
implanted into their abductees' minds certain instructions and ideas to give to society at various times,
as they determine. Using the abductees as 'virtual recorders,' the Greys claim that they are here to 'help humanity realize its potential,' and to
'watch over humanity.' The
government files, on the other hand, claim the Greys are adept liars, and they
are not to be trusted. This data comes from the few applicable documents gleamed from the military using the
Freedom of Information Act, as well as former and current government workers who claim to have broken their
oaths of silence and come forward to tell the truth.
Even if they are enemies the Greys will just give up when the Draconians arrive.
Collier in 77 Alex, The Leading Edge, February, http://www.burlingtonnews.net/greysagenda.html
Here's our scenario. The benevolent races have told the world governments that they would help us but world governments have to dismantle
their nuclear weapons. The earth governments did not want to do this because they don't know who to trust. They created this situation and they
do not know who to trust now. However, the world government is so desperate to get rid of the Greys, that they apparently have put a call out for
help, using satellites. The Andromedans say there is a group that has offered to help our earth governments with the problem of the Greys, even
by giving us weapons to fight the Greys. Re-enter,
the Reptilians from Alpha Draconis, the only real enemies the
Greys have, and that humankind has. The Reptilians from Alpha Draconis have answered the call. But
the Greys actually work for the Draconians. It's all part of the set-up. When we invite them
in here there will be no battle. And once they're here we'll never get rid of the Draconians.
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This means you vote neg on presumption their evidence indicates that Greys would be
benevolent and would solve our anthropogenic problems - which means they would just
travel back in time and solve the aff.
The Greys dont understand the tech they cant save us.
Burlington News in 03 UFO Burlington UFO and Paranormal Research and Educational Center
The Greys, 03/27, http://www.burlingtonnews.net/greys.html
Another of the theories possible begins with a cetacean life form evolved on another planet. Unlike Terran cetaceans, they did not return to the
oceans, but were discovered and later altered and cloned by another species. This species (called the Masters for argument's sakes), needed a
source of slave labor, and thus searched for an intelligent lesser species that they could genetically manipulate in order to be used effectively.
Arbitrarily assuming that this period of time was about one million years ago, the most evolved species at that time on Terra would have been
dolphins and whales. This might also have been possible on another planet, where a similar species evolved instead of a primate-like organism.
Under this theory, the cetacean ancestors of the Greys were taken and genetically altered into an upright, bipedal species capable of doing labor
for the Masters. After a time, however, the
Greys apparently rebelled, and are now on their own, using the
technology of the Masters, but since they were created to simply operate them, and not to design
them, their knowledge of the technology's operation is lacking.
Wichita State 45
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Wow you found a PHD, he is still crazy and his doctorate is in political science not anything
relevant to what he is discussing
Coast to Coast AM
<Richard Sauders Biohttp://www.coasttocoastam.com/guests/643.html>
He has a B.A. in sociology, an M.A. in Latin American studies, an M.S. in forestry and a Ph.D.
in political science. He is the author of three books, Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is
the Government Trying to Hide?, Kundalini Tales, and Underwater and Underground
Bases.
Wars arent inevitable: the Saunders evidence has zero warrants other then there have
been bad leaders in the past - this isnt a reason that all humanity will die. Even if this is
the case it just proves their case impacts are nonunique and you should vote negative on
presumption.
Warming theory is false- its not anthropogenic and there are too many alternative causes
Pipes and Zycher 2003
Sally C., president and chief executive officer of the Pacific Research Institute, National Advisory Board of the Capital Research
Center, Benjamin, senior fellow in economics at the Pacific Research Institute, Cato adjunct scholar, Claremont Institute adjunct
fellow, PhD in Economics from UCLA, December, Pacific Research Institute Study, Attorneys General Versus The EPA,
http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/sab/enviro/CO2-Study-12-03.pdf
In 2001, more than 17,000 scientistsphysicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, environmental scientists,
chemists, biochemists, biologists, and so forthendorsed the proposition that:The proposed [Kyoto Treaty] limits on greenhouse gases would
harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There
is no
convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other
greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of
the earths atmosphere and disruption of the earths climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in
atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth.6 That this dissent from
the casually-asserted mainstream consensus on global warming is so massive suggests the presence of a serious body of evidence refuting the
conventional view. An overview of the data can be summarized as follows: Atmospheric
concentrations of carbon
dioxide have increased from about 290 parts per million (ppm) in 1900 to about 360 ppm today.
Over 80 percent of this increase occurred after the surface temperature peak around 1940, a
sequence of events inconsistent with the conventional (IPCC) hypothesis.7 Evidence derived from marine
organisms and other natural phenomena shows that surface temperatures 3,000 years ago were about 2C higher than today, abnormally low
1,500 years ago, and over 1C warmer 1,000 years ago, after which the earth entered the Little Ice Age until about the year 1700, from which
Temperatures now appear to be a bit below or at the
surface and atmospheric temperatures now are emerging.
3,000-year average, and the evidence does not support the claim that temperatures in the 20th century were unusual compared with
the previous 900 years.8 Satellite and weather balloon (radiosonde) measurements since 1979, corrected for orbital drift, instrument calibration
shifts, and other such measurement error, show an increase in lower tropospheric temperature of 0.06C per decade during January 1979 through
April 2002, or 0.6C if extrapolated for 100 years.9 Other recent work correcting various biases in the IPCCs model projects similarly modest
warming over the next century, of about 1.5C.10 Surface temperature measurements over the last century show an increase of about 0.27C;
urbanization may distort the long-
since 1940, the figure is about 0.09C if extrapolated for 100 years. Increasing world
term surface data due to a heat island effect, for which adjustments in the data may be incomplete.11 Since 1979, surface
temperatures have increased at about 0.18C per decade. As noted above, the figure for the lower troposphere is 0.06C per decade; but the
conventional models predict that the troposphere should warm more than the surface. That this prediction is not consistent
with the data suggests that the models predicting substantial anthropogenic warming are afflicted
with significant modeling errors.12 The IPCC models predict larger effects from increased concentrations of carbon dioxide than actually
observed in the satellite and weather balloon data, an outcome consistent with the hypothesis that the interactions among water
vapor, carbon dioxide, and other atmospheric components tend to dampen the effects of
increased concentrations of carbon dioxide.13 Data on solar activity and surface temperatures show a high correlation.14 Despite
assertions that global warming will yield coastal flooding over large areas, satellite measurements of global sea levels show a downward trend for
most of the earth, with the exception of the eastern equatorial Pacific, with far greater variability in terms of annual increases and decreases in
various regions and no acceleration in the 20th century.15 Despite assertions that hurricane frequencies and intensities (wind speeds) will
increase with global warming, the data since 1940 show trend declines in both.16 Both theory and evidence suggest that prospective
anthropogenic warming will be modest and will occur for the most part in the coldest and
driest air masses, particularly Siberia and western North America in the winter.17 Accordingly, it is far from
clear that the earth is warming significantly, particularly in the context of increases above the very long-term average. To the extent that warming is
occurring, it is not clear that the dominant source is anthropogenic, and the attendant magnitude is
obscure as well.
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Mack is a Hack
New Republic, 94
<James Gleick The Drs Plotpublished in The New Republic 24 May 1994
http://www.around.com/abduct.html> What really makes Mack different from the standard flying-saucer nut is that he's got authority.
"Ordinarily," Oprah declared, "we would not even put people on television, on our show certainly, who make such bizarre claims. . . . But we
were intrigued by this man. . . . Dr. Mack is a respected professor who teaches at Harvard University. He is an eminent psychiatrist . . ." The
promotion surrounding his new book, Abduction, leans heavily on his professional trappings. There
is his status as a medical doctor
and psychiatrist. There is his Pulitzer Prize (won not for anything to do with UFO's, of course, but for a
biography of T. E. Lawrence published 17 years ago). There is Harvard University, where Mack enjoys the comfort of academic tenure. Mack's
publicists--besides Scribner's, he uses a New Jersey firm, PR with a Purpose Inc--are combining and recombining these elements in sleazy ways.
A press release begins: "Abduction by aliens was not a topic taken seriously at Harvard University, until John E. Mack, a medical doctor and
professor of psychiatry . . ." (Of course, it is still not a topic "taken seriously" at Harvard, except to the extent that Mack and fellow gulls happen
to be on campus.) For readers, Abduction will seem a cross between the Whitley Strieber genre and the Nancy Friday sort of one-sexual-fantasy-
after-another-as-told-to-me genre. Ed has sex in a "pod" with a silvery-blond alien and finds it "fulfilling" and "great." Catherine is forced to lie
on a table naked and spread her legs while an alien with cold hands inserts an instrument into her vagina. Eva is fondled by three "midgets." And
so on. It's all excruciatingly unpleasant and incoherent. Just about everyone gets painful needles in the brain or the leg, and just about everyone
The core of Mack's belief is the following
gets a lecture about pollution or global consciousness on the way out.
cocktail-party syllogism: People think they were abducted. They don't seem crazy. (And we
ought to know--we're experts on mental illness.) Therefore people were abducted. It sounds more respectable in
psychiatrist talk, naturally: "Efforts to establish a pattern of psychopathology other than disturbances associated with a traumatic event have been
unsuccessful. Psychological testing of abductees has not revealed evidence of mental or emotional disturbance that could account for their
No one remembers their abductions right away. These aliens, clumsy
reported experiences." Ergo . . .
as they are about anaesthesia and scars, have a way of making the experience vanish from
the conscious minds of all 4 million of their American victims. (Why is abduction such a
peculiarly American phenomenon, by the way? Our national borders aren't visible through
the portholes of those spaceships. Mack has an answer: abductions are global, but it's only in the United States that we are
lucky enough to have large numbers of UFO-obsessed therapists to help people uncover their suppressed experiences.) Abduction
psychiatrists like Mack need a method of helping people remember, and that method is
hypnosis. You are getting sleepy . . . when you awake you will remember . . . Hypnosis is all about suggestion. It has
always been a fringe practice, as useful to carnival magicians and movie-makers as to clinical psychiatrists, and for every
genuine buried memory unearthed by a hypnotists, many more false memories have been
implanted. At its best, the process is a conspiracy between hypnotist and willing subject.
Time magazine has quoted one of Mack's subjects as saying that she was given UFO
literature to read in preparation for her sessions and was asked obvious leading questions.
Garry Trudeau has shined his own form of common sense on the process in a Doonesbury sequence that has a hypnotized subject saying "Now I
see a . . . a blinding light." "It's a vehicle, isn't it? Some sort of space vehicle?" the hypnotist prompts. "I . . . I can't tell. It has Nevada plates."
From a scientific point of new, Mack's anecdotes are grossly lacking in respectable
methodology. He doesn't provide information about his hypnotic techniques, though he does give
the impression that there's a lot of breathing involved. He provides no data from psychological tests. These are "time-consuming and expensive,"
he notes--gosh, right, in that case, why bother? There is nothing remotely resembling a control or a negative
case.
Wichita State 48
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2NC Nanotech
Extend Gaudin- It will be here by 2040 Tests have proved that the tech is feasible and
researchers are investing in it for medical use.
Our Webb evidence indicates that this type of biotech would inevitably break out of the lab
like a virus it says that the tech will develop to a point where we wouldnt be able to
control it and it would wreak havoc on the environment, feeding on all of the carbon on
Earth- this would lead to green goo which would force the nanotech to consume the
universe, all the while self replicating.
Nanotech weapons could be used to create superior bots, which would kill all life
Drexler in 86 ( Eric K.Ph.D. in Molecular Nanotechnology and Chairman of the Foresight Institute, Engines of Creation,
www.foresight.org/EOC/EOC_Chapter_11.html)
Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the gray goo problem. Though masses of uncontrolled
replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term gray goo emphasizes those replicators able to obliterate life might be less
inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make
them valuable. We have evolved to love a world rich in living things, ideas, and diversity, so there is no reason to value gray goo merely
because it could spread. Indeed, if we prevent it we will thereby prove our evolutionary superiority. The gray goo threat
makes one thing perfectly clear: we cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
Nanotech Inevitable
Drexler in 86 ( Eric K.Ph.D. in Molecular Nanotechnology and Chairman of the Foresight Institute, Engines of Creation,
www.foresight.org/EOC/EOC_Chapter_11.html)
Assemblers will take years to emerge, but their emergence seems almost inevitable: Though the path to assemblers has
many steps, each step will bring the next in reach, and each will bring immediate rewards. The first steps have already been
taken, under the names of "genetic engineering" and "biotechnology." Other paths to assemblers seem
possible. Barring worldwide destruction or worldwide controls, the technology race will
continue whether we wish it or not. And as advances in computer-aided design speed the development of molecular tools, the
advance toward assemblers will quicken.
Wichita State 49
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Particle Accelerators inevitable we are already creating insanely rare particles at huge
energies
Dorigo 2011Eilam Gross: Higgs - The Best There Is, For Now
By Tommaso Dorigo | December 14th 2011 10:05 AM Science 2.0
http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/eilam_gross_higgs_best_there_now-85535
In 2011 the LHC particle accelerator in Geneva collided over 300 trillion (a million million) protons in
two opposing beams. All of that enormous energy (7 trillion electron volts) went into the effort to produce
the Higgs boson. In each collision, other similar particles are created and there is no way to foresee what will be found. Quantum field
theory enables us to predict the chances of a certain particle being created. The calculations show that the likelihood of getting a Higgs out of a
particular collision is so small that over the course of a year we cant see the signs of more than a hundred or so (with a mass of 126 GeV). In the
figure above we see the result of a collision that looks like a Higgs. But is this a Higgs particle? The problem is that we dont know enough to
conclusively identify it. It could look like hundreds or thousands of other particles produced in the collisions. How can we tell? We dont know
for sure! What we can do is count how many of the collisions outcome look similar to a Higgs, and we can calculate how many of these we
expect to see in the Standard Model without the Higgs. On the basis of observation, we can compute the probability that the number of collisions
that result in particles similar to a Higgs boson will fit the Standard Model (without the Higgs). The numerical value of that probability is called
p0. If there is no Higgs, we would expect that value to bearound 0.5 (50%), i.e., the same as the chance that the flip of a coin will come up heads.
But if the Higgs exists, weshould get extra collision results with a mass in the range that the Higgs might have. Of course, even
if there is no Higgs, there could be statistical fluctuations affecting the experimental results. But the chances of
such fluctuations are low (that is, they have a small p0).
Extend Leslie 96 particle accelerators will be able to rival the energy levels of cosmic
cycles this high intensity energy makes our vacuum instable by distorting the equilibrium
and threatening to push it to complete entropy
The last Leslie card indicates that energy destabilization and entropy would create a
bubble in our vacuum that would expand at the speed of light. Protons would immediately
decay upon contact and the entire chemical structure of life would collapse- this bubble
would expand indefinitely and consume the entire universe
Particle accelerators will create compressed quarks that create Ice Nine- independently
destroying the universe
Wired, 03 <Gregg Easterbrook, July, We're All Gonna Die!But it won't be from germ warfare, runaway nanobots, or shifting magnetic
poles. A skeptical guide to Doomsday.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday.html?pg=2> "Martin Rees, who... return to
nothing."
Martin Rees, who has taken part in panels evaluating the safety of particle accelerators, has revived the idea that high-energy
physics
could accidentally destroy the world. In his new book, Our Final Hour, Rees worries that power improvements in atom smashers
like Brookhaven's new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider might make these machines capable of creating a black hole that would scarf up the globe.
Ever more powerful accelerators, he fears, might create a "strangelet" of ultracompressed
quarks - the smallest known units of matter - that would serve as an ice-nine for the entire
universe, causing all matter to bind to the strangelet and disappear. Since, fundamentally, matter seems
to be made of very rapidly spinning nothingness, there may be no reason why it couldn't spontaneously return to nothing.
Wichita State 50
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We saved the best card for now the military will have AI for armed forces by 2015
NYTFeb. 16, 2005
(A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield;
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050216101209990001)
Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American
The robot soldier is coming. The
military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's
effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in
American history. The military plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in automated armed forces. The
costs of that transformation will help drive the Defense Department's budget up almost 20 percent, from a requested $419.3 billion for next year
to $502.3 billion in 2010, excluding the costs of war. The annual costs of buying new weapons is scheduled to rise 52 percent, from $78 billion to
$118.6 billion. Military planners say robot soldiers will think, see and react increasingly like humans.
In the beginning, they will be remote-controlled, looking and acting like lethal toy trucks. As the
technology develops, they may take many shapes. And as their intelligence grows, so will their
autonomy. Even the strongest advocates of automatons say war will always be a human endeavor, with death and disaster. And supporters
like Robert Finkelstein, president of Robotic Technology in Potomac, Md., are telling the Pentagon it could take until 2035 to develop a robot
that looks, thinks and fights like a soldier. The Pentagon's "goal is there," he said, "but the path is not totally clear." Robots in battle, as
envisioned by their builders, may look and move like humans or hummingbirds, tractors or tanks, cockroaches or crickets. With the development
of nanotechnology - the science of very small structures - they may become swarms of "smart dust." The Pentagon intends for robots to haul
munitions, gather intelligence, search buildings or blow them up. All these are in the works, but not yet in battle. Already, however, several
hundred robots are digging up roadside bombs in Iraq, scouring caves in Afghanistan and serving as armed sentries at weapons depots. By April,
an armed version of the bomb-disposal robot will be in Baghdad, capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute. Though controlled by a soldier with a
laptop, the robot will be the first thinking machine of its kind to take up a front-line infantry position, ready to kill enemies. "The real world is
not Hollywood," said Rodney A. Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T. and a co-founder of
the iRobot Corporation. "Right now we have the first few robots that are actually useful to the military." Despite the obstacles, Congress ordered
in 2000 that a third of the ground vehicles and a third of deep-strike aircraft in the military must become robotic within a decade. If that mandate
is to be met, the United States will spend many billions of dollars on military robots by 2010. As the first lethal robots head for Iraq, the role of
the robot soldier as a killing machine has barely been debated. The history of warfare suggests that every new technological leap - the longbow,
the tank, the atomic bomb - outraces the strategy and doctrine to control it. "The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making
life-or-death decisions," said Mr. Johnson, who leads robotics efforts at the Joint Forces Command research center in Suffolk, Va. "I have been
asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are
confident they can make it." Trusting robots with potentially lethal decision-making may require a leap of faith in technology not everyone is
21st-century robotics and nanotechnology
ready to make. Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has worried aloud that
may become "so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses." "As
machines become more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them,"
Mr. Joy wrote recently in Wired magazine. "Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary
to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them
intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control." Pentagon officials and military contractors
say the ultimate ideal of unmanned warfare is combat without casualties. Failing that, their goal is to give as many difficult, dull or dangerous
missions as possible to the robots, conserving American minds and protecting American bodies in battle.
The impact is terminator salvation our Bostrom evidence indicates that these robots will
be given obscure goals that will be misinterpreted. They will turn the entire universe into a
computational device and kill everyone and everything in a cold, robotic calculation.
the progress of artificial life research know that effects of messing with the engines of evolution
might lead to forces even more regrettable than the demons unleashed at Alamogordo. Biocidal
technologies threaten life throughout the rest of the universe.
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Time travel is possible and humans will find a way to do it thats Kaku 94 because of
the matter- energy content of the universe, it is theoretically possible to bend time. We will
use high concentration levels of energy to make it possible, much like we do with
accelerators.
Prof Amos Ori has set out a theoretical model of a time machine which would allow people to travel
back in time to explore the past. The way the machine would work rests on Einsteins theory of
general relativity, a theory of gravity that shows how time can be warped by the gravitational pull
of objects. Bend time enough and you can create a loop and the possibility of temporal travel. Prof
Oris theory, set out in the prestigious science journal Physical Review, rests on a set of mathematical equations
describing hypothetical conditions that, if established, could lead to the formation of a time
machine, technically known as closed time-like curves. In the blends of space and time, or spacetime, in his
equations, time would be able to curve back on itself, so that a person travelling around the loop might be able to go
further back in time with each lap. In the past, one of the major challenges has been the alleged
need for an exotic material with strange properties - what physicists call negative density - to create these time
loops. This is no longer an issue, he told The Daily Telegraph. You can construct a time machine without exotic matter, he
said. It is now possible to use any material, even dust, so long as there is enough of it to bend spacetime into a loop.
Extend Pickover 98 Time travel does not violate any known laws of physics, and because
of profit motivation, humans will find a way to do it it is extremely reductionist to believe
we will never have the tech models already prove its feasibility
Extend the Randall evidence- traveling in time will create an infinite number of loops as we
go back and change random events it causes a cyclical rotation of strings that break down
time as a dimension. Since our universe is based on time it would cease to exist as we know
it- killing all life.
Extend Bekkum in 4 The defense department is investing in new types of chemical bombs
that are based on Hafnium and release high energy gamma rays. In the dark halls of
defense research, scientists have found a way to create high frequency weapons that can
disrupt the energy levels of our vacuum.
New military technology will use lasers that exceed cosmic energy
Leslie 96, Philosophy Professor, Guelph Univerity
<John, The End of The World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction pg 113-114>
Among the sources of electromagnetic waves which physicists have so far developed, the most
powerful are the hard-X-ray lasers of President Reagans SDI or Star Wars project. While the energy
outputs of the lasers are secret, they are at any rate much greater than that of the hangar-sized Nova Laser of the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory. This
can deliver one hundred thousand joules, energy enough to raise a kilogram weight by
about ten thousand meters, in a burst lasting a billionth of a second. The National Ignition Facility
laser proposed to replace it would be about twenty times more powerful. In 1988 the US Department of Energy
relaxed secrecy sufficiently to reveal that Livermores nuclear fusion programme needing powerful lasers to compress pellets and heat them to
100,000,000 C, it was pursued in parallel with SDI laser research was progressing so well that a new laser with pulses of ten million joules was
contemplated. Each pulse would rival the explosion of two kilograms of TNT. This laser, though, would be designed to operate many times.
The SDI lasers, in contrast, would be vaporized after generating single pulses because they would
be powered by small nuclear bombs. An X-ray laser pumped by a one-hundred-kiloton bomb might
generate not just ten million joules, but ten trillion. This would be what was needed to destroy an intercontinental ballistic
missile during its far-distant acceleration phase, given that the laser beam would be distributed over a spot perhaps two hundred meters in
diameter. Could
such lasers be used to exceed cosmic ray collision energies? Laser pulses which might
seem very brief could still have their energies spread over periods much greater than those of
collisions between particles (cosmic rays are protons, helium nuclei and occasional heavier nuclei)
which were moving at nearly the speed of light. Several techniques of pulse compression are available, however. They delay
a pulses successive elements to different degrees, so that the entire pulse reaches the target at virtually the same moment. Compression by about
a thousand times can be achieved by simple acousto-optic delay lines or, when a pulse has a mixture of frequencies varying with time, by using
grating to direct components with different frequencies along paths of different lengths. With light of a single frequency, one can use a crystal
whose refractive index varies in response to a rapidly oscillating electric field. We
remain faced with the impossibility of
bringing any mere wave to a focus narrower than its wavelength. Now, there is quite a gap between an SDI X-ray
lasers 10 -9 meter (millionth of a millimeter) wavelength and the circa 10 -15 meter which is characteristic of cosmic rays. Still, use of
tremendously energetic pulses could help compensate for this. So could techniques for generating higher harmonics: that is to say, of processing
original discovery in this area was that
beams so as to increase their frequencies and hence reduce their wavelengths. The
passing laser light through a quartz crystal could lead to frequency doubling. Greater frequency
increases were next obtained with other crystals acting singly or in combination. Later still,
increases by over a hundred times could be had: intense laser beams tore electrons from atoms but
then allowed them to spring back, which made them radiate at the higher frequencies.
And their aff proves that tech development for defense is inevitable we will find a way to
exceed current energy levels and use it as a weapon- only a risk that it will backfire and
destabilize the vacuum
And that would destroy the universe our Mundi evidence on the Quantum Vacuum
Mining scenario indicates that breaching the energy equilibrium would destroy the balance
of our vacuum which would destroy all life.
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2NC Ice 9
Extend Close 2 Scientists will be able to use accelerators to create strangelets that cause
the freezing point of water to re-configured to room temperature. This technology is not
limited to Kurt Vonnegut imagination- the feasibility of it has been proven and the
conditions have been recreated in labs-
And Ice 9 would destroy the entire universe the evidence indicates that this particle
would be unleashed in the ocean, and it would freeze the entire ecosystem if humans came
into contact with it, we would be turned into blocks of ice this type of tech would expand
and self replicate to the point where it consumed all life in the universe
Ice 9 would create an unstable vacuum that would release cosmic level energy destroying
the universe
Powell2000 [Corey S., Senior Editor of Discover Magazine, 20 Ways the World Could, with additional research by Diane
Martindale, http://www.extinct.net/]
Collapse of the vacuum In the book Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of "ice-nine,"
a form of water that is far
more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature. Unleash a bit of it, and
suddenly all water on Earth transforms to ice-nine and freezes solid. Ice-nine was a satirical invention, but an abrupt,
disastrous phase transition is a possibility. Very early in the history of the universe, according to a leading cosmological model, empty space was
state of affairs, called a false vacuum, was highly precarious. A new, more stable
full of energy. This
kind of vacuum appeared and, like ice-nine, it quickly took over. This transition unleashed a
tremendous amount of energy and caused a brief runaway expansion of the cosmos. It is possible that another, even more stable
kind of vacuum exists, however. As the universe expands and cools, tiny bubbles of this new kind of vacuum might appear and spread at nearly
the speed of light. The laws of physics would change in their wake, and a blast of energy would dash everything to bits.
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And timeframe is not an answer to this scenario this is an instance where you evaluate
inevitability claims before timeframe arguments- if there is a risk that high-energy physics
would destroy the vacuum, then you evaluate universal destruction first.
Future mining tech will release high levels of energy that destroy the vacuum
Leslie in 96 (John, Philosopher, Cosmologist, End of the world Science and Ethics of Human Extinction)
Is vacuum metastability a ridiculous fantasy? As was noted by J. Ellis, A. Linde and M. Sher, many physicists would
not like to even consider the possibility that we live in an unstable vacuum state. Yet, they pointed out, the
particle physicists standard mode the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam model indicates that we indeed live in such a state if the top-
quark mass exceeds 95 GeV plus six-tenths the Higgs-boson mass. It might well do so, for tests had suggested that the top quark weighed
between 100 and 160 GeV, while the Higgs boson was perhaps as light-weight as 41 GeV98. More recent tests give a top-quark mass of near to
200 GeV. This figure might seem alarmingly high, but some currently popular theories view it as a sign of a Higgs boson massive enough to
exclude the danger entirely, as J. Demaret and D. Lambert say. The main characteristic of this area, in fact, is that nobody is in the least sure
about it. It isnt even clear that Higgs bosons exist, or whether they would come in several masses; and if one goes beyond the simple standard
model to a super symmetric one, then, R.A. Flores and Sher point out, the proliferation of parameters makes any attempts to find limits
we simply couldnt know whether our vacuum would be stable against an energetic
meaningless, so
push. Plainly, our sole security lies in keeping below the cosmic ray collision energies which Hut
and Rees estimated.
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2NC Atom-tech
Nano-biotech is inevitable there will be no regulations the green goo problem will
overwhelm our tech
ETC in 4 (Nanotech News in Living Colour: An Update on White Papers, Red Flags, Green Goo, Grey Goo (and Red Herrings)
Green goo refers to potential dangers associated with nanobiotechnology the merging of the living
and non-living realms at the nano-scale to make hybrid materials and organisms. Nanobiotechnology
involves the integration of biological materials with synthetic materials to build new molecular structures or products. Researchers are coaxing
living organisms to perform mechanical functions precisely because living organisms are capable of self-assembly and self-replication. With
nanobiotech, researchers have the power to create completely new organisms that have never existed
on Earth. Nanobiotech raises many potential concerns: will new life forms, especially those that are designed to
function autonomously in the environment, open a Pandoras box of unforeseen and uncontrollable
consequences? Thats the specter of green goo. It is important to acknowledge that nanobiotechnology does not always
involve self-replication, and biological materials can be harnessed for more mundane applications. It is wrong to assume that all nanobiotech
research will spawn uncontrollable green goo. Some applications will be more risky than others. For example, nanobio products that
incorporate living organisms and are intended for environmental applications are higher green
goo risks than those that simply incorporate biological proteins in synthetic materials. However, propelled by venture capital and taxpayer
dollars, the field of nanobiotech is advancing rapidly, in the absence of public debate or regulatory
oversight. For most government policymakers, the implications of nanobiotech arent even on the
radar.
Extend Adams in 4 Green goo is irreversible this carbonless sludge can exist under any
condition all the while self replicating no technology will be able to prevent it from
extending into space
Extend Earth Review 2k This type of biotechnology would feed on other forms of life
throughout the universe it would be self replicating and unable to control and it would
export the green goo problem to other planets.
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2NC Util
All of this means that you should default to a utilitarian framework the aff may save all of
humanity, but humanity will destroy the rest of the universe this means that wipeout is a
prior question and precedes the truth claims of the 1AC
Extend Bentham 48 Util is inevitable the aff itself is a reason why util is probably a
good idea- but we access it better, our evidence indicates that util is a prerequisite to policy
action which means the possibility that there is life outside our own means that we have to
govern our space policy based on utility
Extend Sikora and Berry in 78- our util calculations must remain impartial to aliens if
we fail to extend our ethics to aliens then we justify all of the mass atrocities of the 20th
century- there can be no exception. This evidence literally says Equal consideration is
extended to all sentient creatures.
Extend Pettit in 91- All alternatives to util fail- in the most extreme instances, util
calculations are essential to avoiding genocide - If there are fifty people in a room, and one
of them is a little girl, and you can kill the little girl to save fifty people, you have to do it. It
is the only ethic that avoids decisions that save the little girl and kill fifty people.
Because of the advent of nuclear omnicide, ethics should not be held absolute
Nye 1986 Joseph, Director of the Center for Science and International Affairs @ Harvard University, Nuclear Ethics,
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case. Imagine that you are
visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where an army captain is about to order his men to shoot
peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village shot at the captains men last night. Why
you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that
we all have dirty hands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle and tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the
other. Otherwise both die. He warns you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will you shoot one person
with the consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play his dirty game?
The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both traditions, Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would
refuse to shoot. But at what point does the principle of not taking an innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it
matter if there were 20 or 1,000 peasants to be saved? What
if killing or torturing one innocent person could
save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists nuclear device? At some point does not integrity become
the ultimate egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the lives of countless others? Is
it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit remorse or regret over the immoral means, but justify the actions by
consequences? Do absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons Dowhat is right
though the world should perish was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and
there is some evidence that he did not mean it to be taken literally even then. Now that it may be literally possible in the
Nuclear age, it seems more than ever to be self-contradictory. Absolutist ethics bear a heaver
burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.
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2NC Util
Aliens are not exempt they must be involved in our consequentialist framework
Ryder 2005 Richard -- Professor at Tulane University and chairman of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals-- August 6, (All beings that feel pain deserve human rights/ Equality of the species is the logical conclusion of post-
Darwin morality; http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,11917,1543799,00.html) The word speciesism came to me while I
was lying in a bath in Oxford some 35 years ago. It was like racism or sexism - a prejudice based upon morally irrelevant physical differences.
we are human animals related to all the other animals through evolution; how,
Since Darwin we have known
then, can we justify our almost total oppression of all the other species? All animal species can suffer pain and
distress. Animals scream and writhe like us; their nervous systems are similar and contain the same biochemicals that we know are associated
concern for the pain and distress of others should be extended to
with the experience of pain in ourselves.Our
any "painient" - pain-feeling - being regardless of his or her sex, class, race, religion, nationality
or species. Indeed, if aliens from outer space turn out to be painient, or if we ever manufacture machines who are
painient, then we must widen the moral circle to include them. Painience is the only convincing basis for
attributing rights or, indeed, interests to others.
Their impact claims are overgeneralized, non-causal assertions that are the opposite of
truthmodern biopolitics includes economic pluralization and democracy that inhibits the
rise to totalitarianism, even if it involves centralized state coercion
OKane 1997 Modernity, the Holocaust, and politics, Economy and Society, February, ebsco
Modern
Chosen policies cannot be relegated to the position of immediate condition (Nazis in power) in the explanation of the Holocaust.
bureaucracy is not intrinsically capable of genocidal action (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state
coercion has no natural move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which
play the greatest part, whether in effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing
science and technology or introducing extermination policies, as means and as ends. As Nazi Germany and Stalins USSR have
shown, furthermore, those chosen policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards modernity.
The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of circumstances. An analysis of the history of each case
plays an important part in explaining where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political institutions and structures
also helps towards an understanding of the factors which act as obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not just political factors which stand in
Modern societies have not only pluralist democratic political
the way of another Holocaust in modern society.
systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to change jobs and bargain wages and
where independent firms, each with their own independent bureaucracies, exist in competition with state-controlled
enterprises. In modern societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served by the open scientific method. By ignoring
competition and the capacity for people to move between organizations whether economic, political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks
It is these very ordinary and common
crucial but also very ordinary and common attributes of truly modern societies.
attributes of modernity which stand in the way of modern genocides.
Biopolitics is not the problem in and of itself its biopolitics deployed in totalitarians
societies which is bad our strengthening of democratic structures prevents, not causes,
their impact
Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism,
Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History,
vol. 37, no. 1, March
In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucaults ideas have fundamentally directed attention
away from institutionally centered conceptions of government and the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and its
microphysics.48 The broader, deeper, and less visible ideological consensus on technocratic reason and the ethical unboundedness of
science was the focus of his interest.49 But the power-producing effects in Foucaults microphysical sense (Eley) of the
construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of an entire institutional apparatus and system of practice ( Jean Quataert),
simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive dynamic of Nazism was a product not so much of a
particular modern set of ideas as of a particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous
potential of those ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which
occurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments and disciplines were
organized and used, and the external constraints on them. In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian
conception of social management focused on the power and ubiquity of the vlkisch state. In democratic societies,
biopolitics has historically been constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management. This is a point to which I
will return shortly. For now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state. A comparative framework can
help us to clarify this point. Other states passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s indeed, individual states in the
United States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did not proceed to the next steps adopted by National Socialism
mass sterilization, mass eugenic abortion and murder of the defective. Individual figures in, for example, the U.S.
did make such suggestions. But neither the political structures of democratic states nor their legal and political principles
permitted such policies actually being enacted. Nor did the scale of forcible sterilization in other countries match that of the Nazi
program. I do not mean to suggest that such programs were not horrible; but in a democratic political context they
did not develop the dynamic of constant radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi policies.
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Biopolitics is good only seeing it as bad a) ignores the massive decrease in structural
violence it has caused and b) views power unidirectionally in contradiction within their
own critique
Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our
Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March
This understanding of the democratic and totalitarian potentials of biopolitics at the level of the state needs to be
underpinned by a reassessment of how biopolitical discourse operates in society at large, at the prepolitical level. I
would like to try to offer here the beginnings of a reconceptualization of biopolitical modernity, one that focuses less on
the machinations of technocrats and experts, and more on the different ways that biopolitical thinking circulated
within German society more broadly. It is striking, then, that the new model of German modernity is even more relentlessly
negative than the old Sonderweg model. In that older model, premodern elites were constantly triumphing over the democratic opposition. But at least there was an opposition; and
in the long run, time was on the side of that opposition, which in fact embodied the historical movement of
modern- ization. In the new model, there is virtually a biopolitical consensus. 92 And that consensus is almost
always fundamentally a nasty, oppressive thing, one that partakes in crucial ways of the essential quality of
National Socialism. Everywhere biopolitics is intrusive, technocratic, top-down, constraining, limiting. Biopolitics is almost never conceived of or at least discussed in any detail as creating possibilities for
people, as expanding the range of their choices, as empowering them, or indeed as doing anything positive for them at all. Of course, at the most simple-minded level, it seems to me that an assessment of the
potentials of modernity that ignores the ways in which biopolitics has made life tangibly better is somehow deeply
flawed. To give just one example, infant mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20 percent; or, in other words, one in five
children died before reaching the age of one year. By 1913, it was 15 percent; and by 1929 (when average real purchasing power was not significantly higher than in 1913) it was
only 9.7 percent.93 The expansion of infant health programs an enormously ambitious, bureaucratic, medicalizing, and sometimes intrusive, social engineering project had a great deal to do with that change.
It would be bizarre to write a history of biopolitical modernity that ruled out an appreciation for how absolutely
wonderful and astonishing this achievement and any number of others like it really was. There was a reason for the
Machbarkeitswahn of the early twentieth century: many marvelous things were in fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is not really accurate to call it a Wahn (delusion,
craziness) at all; nor is it accurate to focus only on the inevitable frustration of delusions of power. Even in the late
1920s, many social engineers could and did look with great satisfaction on the changes they genuinely had the
power to accomplish. Concretely, moreover, I am not convinced that power operated in only one direction from the
top down in social work. Might we not ask whether people actually demanded welfare services, and whether
and how social workers and the state struggled to respond to those demands? David Crew and Greg Eghigian, for example,
have given us detailed studies of the micropolitics of welfare in the Weimar period in which it becomes clear that
conflicts between welfare administrators and their clients were sparked not only by heavyhanded intervention,
but also by refusal to help.94 What is more, the specific nature of social programs matters a great deal, and we
must distinguish between the different dynamics (and histories) of different programs. The removal of children
from their families for placement in foster families or reformatories was bitterly hated and stubbornly resisted by
working-class families; but mothers brought their children to infant health clinics voluntarily and in numbers , and after 1945 they
brought their older children to counseling clinics, as well. In this instance, historians of the German welfare state might profit from the demand side models of welfare development that are sometimes more explicitly explored in
some of the international literature.95 In fact,even where social workers really were attempting to limit or subvert the autonomy and
power of parents, I am not sure that their actions can be characterized only and exclusively as part of a
microphysics of oppression. Progressive child welfare advocates in Germany, particularly in the National Center for Child Welfare, waged a
campaign in the 1920s to persuade German parents and educators to stop beating children with such ferocity,
regularity, and nonchalance. They did so because they feared the unintended physical and psychological effects of beatings, and implicitly because they believed physical violence could compromise
the development of the kind of autonomous, selfreliant subjectivity on which a modern state had to rely in its citizenry.96 Or, to give another common example from the period,
children removed from their families after being subjected by parents or other relatives to repeated episodes of
violence or rape were being manipulated by biopolitical technocrats, and were often abused in new ways in institutions or
foster families; but they were also being liberated. Sometimes some forms of the exercise of power in society are in
some ways emancipatory; and that is historically significant. Further, of course we must ask whether it is really true that social workers and social
agencies attempts to manipulate people worked. My own impression is that social policy makers grew increasingly aware, between the 1870s and the 1960s, that their own ends could not be achieved unless they won the
cooperation of the targets of policy. And to do that, they had to offer people things that they wanted and needed. Policies that incited resistance
were sometimes with glacial slowness, after stubborn and embittered strugglesde-emphasized or even abandoned. Should we really see the history of
social welfare policy as a more or less static (because the same thing is always happening) history of the imposition of manipulative policies on
populations?
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many of
championed by the Nazis. The totalitarian and biological conception of national unity was in part a response to the apparent failure of a democratic and pluralist model of social and political integration. And yet ,
those very same experiments were revived, with enormous success, after 1949. Examples from my own field of
research might include the development of a profession of social work that claimed to be a value-neutral
foundation for cooperation between social workers of radically differing ideological orientation; the development
of a psychoanalytic, rather than psychiatric, interpretation of deviance (neurosis replaces inherited brain defects); and the
use of corporatist structures of governance within the welfare bureaucracy. These mechanisms did not work
perfectly. But they were a continuation of experiments undertaken in the Weimar period and shut down in 1933;
and they did contribute to the stabilization of a pluralist democracy. That was not a historically trivial or
selfevident achievement, either in Germany or elsewhere. It required time, ingenuity, and a large-scale convergence of long-term
historical forces. We should be alive to its importance as a feature of modernity. As Fritzsches review makes clear, then,
much of the recent literature seems to imply that National Socialism was a product of the success of a modernity
that ends in 1945; but it could just as easily be seen as a temporary failure of modernity, the success of which
would only come in the 1950s and 1960s. As Paul Betts recently remarked, we should not present the postwar period as a
redemptive tale of modernism triumphant and cast Nazism as merely a regressive interlude. But neither should
we dismiss the fact that such a narrative would be, so to speak, half true that the democratic welfare state is no
less a product of modernity than is totalitarianism.
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Their critique only focuses on the dark side of modernity, masking the achievements of
biopolitical modernity which is the large scale absence of mass murder not its cause
Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our
Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March
A second example is Geoff Eleys masterful synthetic introduction to a collection of essays published in 1996 under the title Society, Culture,
and the State in Germany, 18701930. Eley set forth two research agendas derived from his review of recent hypotheses regarding the origins
and nature of Nazism. One was to discover what allowed so many people to identify with the Nazis. The second was that we explore the ways
in which welfare policy contributed to Nazism, by examining the production of new values, new mores, new social practices, new ideas about
the good and efficient society. Eley suggested that we examine strategies of policing and constructions of criminality, notions of the normal
and the deviant, the production and regulation of sexuality, the . . . understanding of the socially valued individual . . . the coalescence of
racialized thinking . . .62 So far so good; but why stop there? Why not examine the expanding hold of the language of rights
on the political imagination, or the disintegration of traditional authority under the impact of the explosive
expansion of the public sphere? Why not pursue a clearer understanding of ideas about the nature of citizenship in
the modern state; about the potentials of a participatory social and political order; about human needs and human
rights to have those needs met; about the liberation of the individual (including her sexual liberation, her liberation
from ignorance and sickness, her liberation from social and economic powerlessness); about the physical and
psychological dangers created by the existing social order and how to reduce them, the traumas it inflicted and
how to heal them? In short, why not examine how the construction of the social the ideas and practices of the
modern biopolitical interventionist complex contributed to the development of a democratic politics and
humane social policies between 1918 and 1930, and again after 1945 ? Like Fritzsches essay, Eleys accurately reflected the
tone of most of those it introduced. In the body of the volume, Elizabeth Domansky, for example, pointed out that biopolitics did not
automatically or naturally lead to the rise of National Socialism, but rather provided . . . the political Right in Weimar with the
opportunity to capitalize on a discursive strategy that could successfully compete with liberal and socialist strategies.63 This is correct; but
the language of biopolitics was demonstrably one on which liberals, socialists, and advocates of a democratic
welfare state could also capitalize, and did. Or again, Jean Quataert remarkedquite rightly, I believe that the most
progressive achievements of the Weimar welfare state were completely embedded in biopolitical discourse . She
also commented that Nazi policy was continuous with what passed as the ruling knowledge of the time and was a product of an extreme
form of technocratic reason and early twentieth-century modernitys dark side. The implication seems to be that progressive
welfare policy was fundamentally dark; but it seems more accurate to conclude that biopolitics had a variety of
potentials.64 Again, the point here is not that any of the interpretations offered in these pieces are wrong; instead, it is that we are,
collectively, so focused on unmasking the negative potentials and realities of modernity that we have constructed a
true, but very one-sided picture. The pathos of this picture is undeniable, particularly for a generation of historians raised on
the Manichean myth forged in the crucible of World War II and the Cold War of the democratic welfare state. And as a rhetorical gesture,
this analysis works magnificently we explode the narcissistic self-admiration of democratic modernity by revealing the
dark, manipulative, murderous potential that lurks within, thus arriving at a healthy, mature sort of melancholy.
But this gesture too often precludes asking what else biopolitics was doing, besides manipulating people, reducing
them to pawns in the plans of technocrats, and paving the way for massacre. In 1989 Detlev Peukert argued that any
adequate picture of modernity must include both its achievements and its pathologies social reform as well as
Machbarkeitswahn, the growth of rational relations between people as well as the swelling instrumental goal-
rationality, the liberation of artistic and scientific creativity as well as the loss of substance and absence of limits
[Haltlosigkeit].65 Yet he himself wrote nothing like such a balanced history, focusing exclusively on Nazism and on the negative half of
each of these binaries; and that focus has remained characteristic of the literature as a whole. What I want to suggest here is that the
function of the rhetorical or explanatory framework surrounding our conception of modernity seems to be in
danger of being inverted. The investigation of the history of modern biopolitics has enabled new understandings of
National Socialism; now we need to take care that our understanding of National Socialism does not thwart a
realistic assessment of modern biopolitics. Much of the literature leaves one with the sense that a modern world in
which mass murder is not happening is just that: a place where something is not yet happening. Normalization is
not yet giving way to exclusion, scientific study and classification of populations is not yet giving way to concentration camps and
extermination campaigns. Mass murder, in short, is the historical problem; the absence of mass murder is not a
problem, it does not need to be investigated or explained.
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Biopolitics is not totalitarian, in fact its good it has empirically lead to the strengthening
of liberal democracy which has on-balance prevented the violence they describe and been
used against oppressive structures
Dickinson 2004 Edward Ross (Professor at University of Cincinnati) Biopolitics, Fascism,
Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History,
vol. 37, no. 1, March
the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state
In short,
in our own time are unmistakasble. Both are instances of the disciplinary society and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering
modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for
example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial
and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two
kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different
from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that
characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic
population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to
generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and
historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and
constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany.
Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is
functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through
a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on
coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed
by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very
impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet
clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by
sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think
it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might
fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At
the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end
point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian)
theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian
states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are
two very different ways of organizing it. The concept power should not be read as a universal stifling night of
oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or
effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of
autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive
elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite
different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a
structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create multiple
modernities, modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.
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This evidence doesnt apply: Debate is different from normal prediction because it allows
competing worldviews to be tested against one another based upon evidenceTetlocks book is
about people having a close-minded view of predictions and refusing to consider evidence to the
contrary. His point is that he indicts people like Bill OReilly because they make predictions but
are so blinded by partisan filters that they dont consider competing claims
This also takes out their aff: all of their solvency claims are based upon predictions what the aff
will doeven their ethics claims rely upon the assumption that the consequences wont be direif
their argument is true, vote negative on presumption because you cant really determine ethics
without looking to consequences
A.) Empiricism, reason, evidence and warrants can increase the possibility of accurate forecasting,
even if its not perfect, its enough to establish probabilities. For example, people predicted that
invading Iraq would cause an insurgency and a civil war, and the warrants for those predictions
were based upon a study of empirics, their expertise in the Middle East, and rational arguments.
Listening to those predictions and having an informed debate over their legitmacy instead of
framing the issue in terms of a moral duty to protect human rights and stop WMD would have led
to more rational policymaking.
B.) Their argument would make all policymaking impossibleits like saying we shouldnt have
intervened in World War 2 to stop the Holocaust because we cant predict if it will be useful since
we cant know consequences
C.) State policymakers are obligated to make predictions, a nuclear world changes the calculus and
means you have to assess probability. Their argument is thorough nonsenseit would justify
invading China because of the moral obligation to free Tibet outweighs the uncertainty as to
whether China would respond with nuclear weaponsthis is silly and reckless
Simply because our predictions cannot be guaranteed does not mean we should quit trying
to prevent catastrophes they should use evidence to disprove our scenarios instead of
rejecting foresight, itself***
Kurasawa 2004 Fuyuki Constellations Volume 11, No 4, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention
and the Work of Foresight
When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one is likely to encounter from some intellectual circles is a deep-seated skepticism about the very value of the exercise. A radically postmodern line of
thinking, for instance, would lead us to believe that it is pointless, perhaps even harmful, to strive for farsightedness in light of the aforementioned crisis of conventional paradigms of historical analysis. If, contra teleological
models, history has no intrinsic meaning, direction, or endpoint to be discovered through human reason, and if, contra scientistic futurism, prospective trends cannot be predicted without error, then the abyss of chronological
inscrutability supposedly opens up at our feet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of chance. Therefore, rather than embarking upon grandiose speculation about what may occur, we should adopt a pragmatism that
abandons itself to the twists and turns of history; let us be content to formulate ad hoc responses to emergencies as they arise. While this argument has the merit of underscoring the fallibilistic nature of all predictive schemes, it
future cannot be known with absolute certainty does not imply abandoning the task of trying to
understand what is brewing on the horizon and to prepare for crises already coming into their own. In
fact, the incorporation of the principle of fallibility into the work of prevention means that we
must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for responses that provoke
unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in the final section of this paper). In addition, from a normative point of view, the
acceptance of historical contingency and of the self-limiting character of farsightedness places the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present generations. The future
no longer appears to be a metaphysical creature of destiny or of the cunning of reason, nor can it be sloughed off to pure randomness. It becomes, instead, a result of human action shaped by
decisions in the present including, of course, trying to anticipate and prepare for possible and avoidable sources of harm to our successors.
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The ethical practice of prediction and prevention builds communal ties and energizes a
citizen base capable of pressuring for real solutions to extinction
Kurasawa 2004 Fuyuki Constellations Volume 11, No 4, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture
of Prevention and the Work of Foresight
dystopian imaginary, I am claiming that it can enable a novel form of
Rather than bemoaning the contemporary preeminence of a
transnational socio-political action, a manifestation of globalization from below that can be termed preventive
foresight. We should not reduce the latter to a formal principle regulating international relations or an ensemble of
policy prescriptions for official players on the world stage, since it is, just as significantly, a mode of ethico-
political practice enacted by participants in the emerging realm of global civil society. In other words, what I want to
underscore is the work of farsightedness, the social processes through which civic associations are simultaneously constituting and putting into
practice a sense of responsibility for the future by attempting to prevent global catastrophes. Although the labor of preventive foresight takes
place in varying political and socio-cultural settings and with different degrees of institutional support and access to symbolic and material
resources it is underpinned by three distinctive features: dialogism, publicity, and transnationalism. In the first instance, preventive foresight
is an intersubjective or dialogical process of address, recognition, and response between two parties in global civil society: the warners, who
anticipate and send out word of possible perils, and the audiences being warned, those who heed their interlocutors messages by demanding
that governments and/or international organizations take measures to steer away from disaster. Secondly, the work of farsightedness derives its
effectiveness and legitimacy from public debate and deliberation. This is not to say that a fully fledged global public sphere is already in
existence, since transnational strong publics with decisional power in the formal-institutional realm are currently embryonic at best. Rather,
in this context, publicity signifies that weak publics with distinct yet occasionally overlapping constituencies are coalescing around struggles
to avoid specific global catastrophes.4 Hence, despite having little direct decision-making capacity, the environmental and peace movements,
humanitarian NGOs, and other similar globally-oriented civic associations are becoming significant actors involved in public opinion
formation. Groups like these are active in disseminating information and alerting citizens about looming catastrophes, lobbying states and
multilateral organizations from the inside and pressuring them from the outside, as well as fostering public participation in debates about the
future. This brings us to the transnational character of preventive foresight, which is most explicit in the now commonplace observation that we
live in an interdependent world because of the globalization of the perils that humankind faces (nuclear annihilation, global
warming, terrorism, genocide, AIDS and SARS epidemics, and so on); individuals and groups from far-flung parts
of the planet are being brought together into risk communities that transcend geographical borders.5 Moreover, due
to dense media and information flows, knowledge of impeding catastrophes can instantaneously reach the four corners of the earth sometimes
well before individuals in one place experience the actual consequences of a crisis originating in another. My contention is that civic
associations are engaging in dialogical, public, and transnational forms of ethico-political action that contribute to the creation of a fledgling
global civil society existing below the official and institutionalized architecture of international relations.6 The work of preventive
foresight consists of forging ties between citizens; participating in the circulation of flows of claims, images, and
information across borders; promoting an ethos of farsighted cosmopolitanism; and forming and mobilizing weak
publics that debate and struggle against possible catastrophes. Over the past few decades, states and international organizations
have frequently been content to follow the lead of globally-minded civil society actors, who have been instrumental in placing on the public
agenda a host of pivotal issues (such as nuclear war, ecological pollution, species extinction, genetic engineering, and mass human rights
violations). To my mind, this strongly indicates that if prevention of global crises is to eventually rival the assertion of short-term and narrowly
defined rationales (national interest, profit, bureaucratic self-preservation, etc.), weak publics must begin by convincing or compelling official
representatives and multilateral organizations to act differently; only then will farsightedness be in a position to move up and become
institutionalized via strong publics.7 Since the global culture of prevention remains a work in progress, the argument presented in this paper is
poised between empirical and normative dimensions of analysis. It proposes a theory of the practice of preventive foresight based upon already
existing struggles and discourses, at the same time as it advocates the adoption of certain principles that would substantively thicken and assist
in the realization of a sense of responsibility for the future of humankind. I will thereby proceed in four steps, beginning with a consideration of
the shifting socio-political and cultural climate that is giving rise to farsightedness today (I). I will then contend that the development of a
public aptitude for early warning about global cataclysms can overcome flawed conceptions of the futures
essential inscrutability (II). From this will follow the claim that an ethos of farsighted cosmopolitanism of solidarity that
extends to future generations can supplant the preeminence of short-termism with the help of appeals to the
publics moral imagination and use of reason (III). In the final section of the paper, I will argue that the commitment of global
civil society actors to norms of precaution and transnational justice can hone citizens faculty of critical judgment
against abuses of the dystopian imaginary, thereby opening the way to public deliberation about the construction
of an alternative world order (IV).
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Its morally irresponsibleit justifies risking the lives of thousands to protect a single
person, it would create reckless policy actions, and it means that you could never kill
someone who is going to kill your family because all life is infinite
Our being in the world makes some degree of calculation inevitableattempts to avoid all
calculation simply reproduce calculability in its worst forms
Derrida 1992 Jacques The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed: Cornell, Rosenfeld, and Carlson, p. 28-29
That justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as an
alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or state or between institutions or states and others. Left
to itself, the incalculable and giving idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst for it can
always be reapportioned by the most perverse calculation. Its always possible. And so incalculable justice requires
us to calculate. And first, closest to what we associate with justice, namely law, the juridicial field that one cannot isolate within sure
frontiers, but also in all the fields from which we cannot separate it, which intervene in it and are no longer simply fields: ethics, politics,
economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, literature, etc. Not only must we calculate, negotiate the relation between the calculable and
incalculable, and negotiate without the sort of tule that wouldnt have to reinvented there where we are cast, there where we find ourselves;
but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the place where we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality
or politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and international, public and private, and so on. This requirement doesnt properly
belong to either justice or law. It only belongs to either of those two domains by exceeding each one in the direction of the other.
Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism or a triviality, we
must recognize in it the following consequence: each advancement in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so
reinterpret, the very foundations of law such as they had been previously calculated or delimited. This was true for
example in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all emanicipatory battles that remain and will
have to remain in progress, everywhere in the world , for men and for women.