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Sunday, June 3, 2012

Which Is More Likely / Which Will Happen First?

C G-K - DSC 0442 (by)
  1. Life is discovered on Mars, or definitive proof is found that Bigfoot is real?
  2. SETI detects a signal unambiguously from an alien civilization, or it is definitively proved that ghosts are real?
  3. A third-party candidate wins the presidential election, or the whole electoral system is cast aside by a dictator / coup / foreign invasion?

6 comments:

  1. 1) bigfoot 2) ghosts are real 3) and third party candidate wins. Those are my picks.

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    1. Question 2 is not about whether ghosts are real; it is about definitive proof. Mostly on philosophical grounds, I suspect that (some, perhaps very few) ghosts are real, but I would not be able to prove that to someone who thinks otherwise.

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  2. 1) and 2), I don't know.
    3) Third party candidate. But the third party will have the name of one of the current two major parties. And the number of major parties involved in the election will still be two.

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    1. I don't follow you. Do you mean something like, the election will be between the "Democrats" and Republicans, but the party calling itself "the Democrats" will really be Communists? (Or, to put the shoe on the other foot, the party calling itself "the Republicans" will really be Fascists?)

      I'll concede that neither party looks today the way it looked in 1960, 1930, 1900, or 1860. The basic beliefs, let alone tactics, of the parties have changed radically over the years, but the change has tended to be not only continuous but also gradual enough that most people don't notice it. To me, a 3rd party victory would mean a discontinuous change, perhaps do to one of the parties collapsing the way the Whig Party collapsed.

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  3. When I read this post I misunderstood it and decided that 3 would happen without 1 or 2 having occurred.

    PS: Thank you for (inadvertently) alerting me that a certain one of my blog comments elsewhere had made it out of moderation and even received public approval from the blogger in question.

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    Replies
    1. All of the options for 1 and 2 are of course real long-shots, which is what makes the question interesting. Often someone will have a strong opinion about one of those options being merely unlikely, but the other one being impossible.

      Question 3 is a bit different. One of those things is practically guaranteed to happen with the passage of enough time, but either one would be a shock should it happen soon.

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