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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3003 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 11, 2025

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[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]

The mood in the UFO community has been rather dour lately due to a string of disappointments and setbacks, but Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri dropped some promising indications this week that Congress has not forgotten about the topic and full disclosure may very well still be in the works:

"We're pursuing a hearing date. We've got a list of people that we're looking at. We're actually looking at potentially doing two. One with some people that are direct whistleblowers, who have had direct, and when I say direct, they had eyes directly on or have personally encountered UAP. In their formal operations."

"Not somebody out and about like Joe Blow out there that saw something. There's thousands and thousands of people like that. We're talking about people that worked for the Pentagon, worked in a government program, where they worked in and around this technology. Whether it was through crash retrieval, or through reverse engineering, that's what we're pursuing right now."

"The next hearing after that, once we're able to get information, we're looking at doing some interrogatories, which is where you take some of the things that have been said in these briefings, in these open hearings under oath. And then we send a formal letter as a committee, asking for answers from, whether it's Tulsi Gabbard, or whomever it is that we need to be asking these questions of. And then which would send up the potential second hearing, which would hopefully be able to clear people like Tulsi Gabbard to come forward."

"And I've been told she's very... friendly when it comes to this topic. That she wants disclosure. She wants to help bring about disclosure on this topic."

I want to believe, but also there are no aliens in the classical “beings from outer space” sense.

I rate this news 5 Nothings out of 5 Ever Happens.

You are correct that Comic Sans is the appropriate font for this.

Do you think there's no alien life anywhere, or do you just believe that it's implausible that it's a) intelligent and b) has the means and desire to get here?

It's more like if the alien life exists, and is intelligent, and had the means to get here it would operate on technology and energy scales that is completely beyond what we can even imagine how to operate. And if such beings are around we'd either all notice them very well and far beyond the occasional case of butt-probing a rural weirdo, or wouldn't notice them at all because they wouldn't want to destroy our fragile backwards culture by inadvertently stepping on us in so many ways. In other words, if it happened, it would happen in completely different way - thus, what is happening, if anything is happening at all, is not it.

Some species has to be the very first sapient life in the galaxy. Maybe we're just the Progenitors.

There are probably alien mechanisms in the solar system but we won't find them for centuries.

I’m on record here, but given the fact that the laws of physics would have to be nearly completely wrong to allow anything to move faster than light, the chances that we’d actually communicate with an alien let alone be visited by one are pretty small. Even if you have something like a generation ship, any such aliens would either conquer immediately, kill us, or move on. Pranks don’t make sense at all.

The galaxy is only 100,000 light-years in diameter. Starships moving at a mere 0.1 c could get from one side to the other in only a million years.

That's peanuts in astronomical time. If you can make a 0.1 c starship you need not worry about biological lifespans. 'Aliens exist but are too far away' doesn't make any sense. They could've shown up 100 million years ago and still be here. There are centuries old engravings of weird shapes in the sky, recordings from egypt, footage from modern jets and sensors.

Furthermore, our understanding of the universe is extremely limited, bordering on pathetic. 95% of the universe is 'dark' to us, we have no clue about it. Logically, that's the most likely place for the bulk of the aliens to be. Not only is it the vast majority of the universe's mass and energy, it provides a simple explanation for the apparent absence of aliens in the tiny portion we understand.

It makes no sense to play around with Dyson Spheres or largescale structures we might be capable of observing, it's not cost-efficient compared to 'dark' enterprises.

We prank the North Sentinel Islanders with drones and occasional plane/helicopter overflights, some missionaries showing up and getting killed. The real estate they control is so small it's worthless. Nobody wants to live on a crap jungle island. It's probably the same with aliens but instead of crap jungle island it's 'entire visible universe'. There's no real serious intent, more like casual observation. The only thing interesting on Earth is us.

I mean we have no information about the stars in the universe too far away to see. We actually know quite a bit about mundane physics, and it’s mundane physics that rule out most travel between stars at least at human lifespan scales. This would drastically change the equation for why beings would come here. The sentinalese are fairly trivial to get to. If you got on an airplane in New York, you would be able to get to them in less than a day and without the need to carry your own life support systems. Going from one solar system to another takes 4 years at the speed of light. It would take a generation at 0.1 of light speed. Would anyone spend 40 years at huge expense to prank drunken rednecks and steal the naughty bits off of dead cows? Especially since you’d need life support systems, food, water, and waste disposal. This isn’t just a small trivial jaunt on a jet plane followed by a boat ride.

The trouble is that we keep conflating the age of sail to space travel. They are nothing alike. Traveling from England to North America took a month under sail. You had to bring food and water, but you were never in a hostile environment. In fact the age of sail was possible because the ocean would provide the propulsion for you in the form of wind and ocean currents. You thus don’t need to provide fuel. You could breathe the sea air, and in fact as someone who enjoys an ocean beach, it smells pretty good. If worst came to worst, you could easily catch fish along the way. Space is nothing like that. In a month, you wouldn’t even reach Mars, let alone deep space (which at current technology would take decades), and you’d have to pack everything you’d need including atmosphere and a way to recycle it, food (and if it’s a long trip, a way to grow food), water and a way to recycle urine into water.

Second, due to studying earth biology, we have a fair understanding of what kinds of chemistry to look for to find life on exoplanets. So far, I think there are maybe one or two that are possible candidates for exobiology. We know what to look for as far as technology, and to my understanding we haven’t found anything that’s even plausible as alien technology. No Dyson spheres, no repeated mathematical signals, no lights on the ground nothing that is large and regularly shaped and made of metal.

Based on this, im just not buying it. If aliens exist they’re as trapped by biology and physics as we are.

My point is that life isn't to be found on exoplanets (certainly not for long), that 40 years or 40,000 years is nothing to an immortal being, that Dyson Spheres make about as much sense as burning dung for fuel.

Huge expenses from our perspective are trivial for a powerful civilization working on astronomical timescales, not biological timescales. Maybe it takes 150 years to build their gigantic planetary scale accelerator complex for highspeed travel (it probably wouldn't if they just spin up more workers or use advanced construction methods). Maybe it takes 1000 years to build a dark matter refinery. Why would they care? They have billions of years to work with.

Our knowledge of physics is overrated. Still no fusion power! What could we achieve if we had a particle accelerator that ran all the way around the world? What could AI discover if given hundreds of years, billions of terawatts, giant computer complexes the size of countries? This is mindboggling sci-fi stuff for us, it's boring and primitive for a powerful civilization.

We know what to look for as far as technology

No, all we know is what we can see. And we can't see 95% of what's out there!

Strongly B.

I have no stance one way or the other on whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Sure, it’s a bit implausible that we’re the first, but also someone has to be so why not us? It’s just unknowable at the moment.

If there is intelligent life and it developed further away than Mars, I think it is impossible for it to have the means and desire to reach Earth, and then spend the last 80 to 8000 years apparently mostly focused on pranking us. They would have conquered us to work in the unobtanium mines, or coldly and amorally reshaped the planet to their liking, or just moved on, or something.

There's no reason there can't be life elsewhere, it's a big universe. Even intelligent life. Even intelligent life at, or above, our present level of technological advancement.

Where the big, improbable jump lies is from "aliens exist" to "aliens exist and visited/visit our planet".

I could imagine alien scientists examining specimens of humans; we do it with animals (see monitoringbirds) and with anthropologists turning up to bother the last 'undiscovered' tribes that won't immediately kill them. But that has to first get over the hurdle of "space is very big and there's no evidence they ever got here". I went through my Ancient Astronauts/von Daniken phase in my late teens/early twenties. All the 'look here is an Egyptian tomb painting of what can only be a circuit board with transistors!' is convincing - when transistors are cutting edge tech. Twenty years later, that's not convincing any more because now we've moved on and we'd expect aliens with spaceships to be even more advanced than we are, not using tech that's outdated within twenty to fifty years.

I don't believe in the advanced tech all the wishful thinking here engages in:

"We're talking about people that worked for the Pentagon, worked in a government program, where they worked in and around this technology. Whether it was through crash retrieval, or through reverse engineering, that's what we're pursuing right now."

What I'm starting to think is that UFO rumours were great propaganda during the Cold War. The USA is a global superpower but it's not the only one. Russia (and to a much lesser extent China) are there breathing down their necks. The USA had the atom bomb first, but they weren't able to remain sole possessors of the technology. Everyone is working to have the best, newest, most kaboomy big-kaboom! first.

What better way to muddy the waters than to let hints slip out about amazing new tech? Even better - Russia and China can console themselves "okay their scientists got there first but our guys are smart, too, and it's just a matter of some light spying and a lot of hard work to catch up or even pass them out", but how can they do that if the rumours about the tech are that it's not human, it comes from advanced alien civilisation that crash landed in the desert? How will you catch up then, unless you get an alien UFO of your own?

Yeah, they're not going to believe random "Joe Blow says he saw something in the sky" but if you have all the dedicated True Believers talking about secret bases? my cousin knows someone who knows someone who swears he saw bodies being carried away? here's a leaked report of a military pilot talking about the mysterious craft that shadowed them on this flight?

Now you've got them chasing shadows trying to catch something that doesn't exist in the first place. And again, if they do catch wind of anything advanced you really built using your own human scientists working hard, then that is just more bait for "and what about the stuff we're not seeing? what if they really have something even better under wraps?"

Add "c) would reveal its existence solely through slightly weird bogeys" to that list.

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