I should also say that I'm invested in the idea that we could seed benthic microbes into the universe and that some day that would let us terraform Mars and Venus. That will not happen with magic thinking.
I knew someone who believed in the paranormal. She got hooked in with a group of ghost hunters in Seattle who were trying to apply science to ghost hunting (similar to the Portland group that got that reality show. Apparently they sat around making fun of those people as a sub-hobby.) They didn't want to be made fools of by declaring something was paranormal that ended up being loose wiring. So they had a very long checklist of things they would look at. Often the house owner was told to call an electrician (loose wires in a wiring panel make you feel weird when standing on the other side of the wall) or occasionally an HVAC specialist.
Practically speaking, they ended up being a ghost debunking group, hoping that one day they'd find something truly inexplicable. Discussions like this tend to remind me of that group.
Have you seen Room 1408? Cusack plays a cynical ghost hunter who finds a deeply complex haunting. I won’t spoil the ending, but at a moment where inexplicable things are piling up, he assumes instead that he’s been given a hallucinogen in a gift.
Decent movie, total waste of Samuel L Jackson though. I think he got paid to sit around the set snacking on the buffet.
I knew someone who believed in the paranormal. She got hooked in with a group of ghost hunters in Seattle who were trying to apply science to ghost hunting (similar to the Portland group that got that reality show. Apparently they sat around making fun of those people as a sub-hobby.) They didn't want to be made fools of by declaring something was paranormal that ended up being loose wiring. So they had a very long checklist of things they would look at. Often the house owner was told to call an electrician (loose wires in a wiring panel make you feel weird when standing on the other side of the wall) or occasionally an HVAC specialist.
Practically speaking, they ended up being a ghost debunking group, hoping that one day they'd find something truly inexplicable. Discussions like this tend to remind me of that group.