Richard DawkinsのThe God Delusionを読んでいます。
The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods, just as missionaries were treated as gods (and exploited the undeserved honour to the hilt) when they turned up in Stone Age cultures bearing guns, telescopes, matches, and almanacs predicting eclipses to the second.
In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? In what sense would they be superhuman but not super- natural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance.
SETIはSearch for Extraterrestrial Intelligenceの略で地球外の知的生命体の探査のことです。
私が今日覚えたい単語は "provenance" です。
・Oxford English Dictionary: The beginning of something's existence; something's origin.: they try to understand the whole universe, its provenance and fate
・Collins Dictionary: The provenance of something is the place that it comes from or that it originally came from.[formal] Kato was fully aware of the provenance of these treasures.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: the place of origin of something: This raised doubts about the provenance of the painting.