[dreadgeek]

perhaps i read this wrong,but my take on it was that Day wanted to hear peoples thoughts,speculations,and views on recent events....even if there arent facts to back them up,and without being told that my ideas,thoughts,views,and/or beliefs are wrong. [/QUOTE]

I haven't said anyone can't post anything here. But if someone posts something suggesting that birds dying MUST be the result of aliens, I'm going to point out that birds use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate and that this navigational sense can be thrown off by, for instance, power lines. I'm also going to point out that interstellar travel is non-trivial. That's not saying you can't put every significant event ever to happen on this planet on the plate of E.T., but it is going to give a counter to non-evidentiary explanations. If, in fact, the alien explanation is the best one then, eventually, it will have the most evidence for it.

In science there is this heuristic that is used called Occam's Razor. The basic thrust of the idea is this: given two or more possible explanations, the one that is the simplest (not the easiest to understand but the one that requires the *Fewest* number of conjectures) is most likely the one that is true. So ask yourself, which is more likely to be true?

A) An alien species has worked out ALL of the basic science problems to be able to build a ship capable of interstellar travel, actually built it and then voyaged here to a little ordinary nickel-iron planet orbiting a star of no consequence, in order to kill some birds so that the dominant chimpanzee-like species would become more environmentally minded

or

B) Birds magnetic navigational sense is being thrown off by a sudden (too rapid to evolve a defense) increase in *strong* electromagnetic fields causing them to either fly into buildings, fly into power lines or towers, or fly so high that they freeze to death.

Why should we treat A and B as being equally likely when one is far MORE likely to be true.

Cheers
Aj