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The Dept of War has released a new batch of UAP documents at https://war.gov/ufo/
This is supposedly the first in a series of releases that will come out in the coming months. Trump has made repeated comments that he intends to declassify what the government has in UAP and that the public can make up its own mind.
There are many pages of documentation being sifted through this morning. The initial reaction seems to be that this is largely more of the same grainy video that we’ve previously had - with a few key exceptions. The big on being reporting by Peter Doocey is NASA records (picture and communications logs) from the Apollo missions. NASA astronauts reporting and confirming observations of very bright luminescent angular objects tumbling in the moons atmosphere. Also appearing formation in some videos. The NASA comms logs seem significant. Trained military and science professionals of the highest order. Reporting that they see a bogey out the window. Ground control asks “is that the booster?”. Astronaut says “it’s a bogey”.
From a culture war perspective, it’s going to be interesting to see how politics impacts this. Already the /ufo/ subreddit is completely fixated on the fact that Trump is behind this and that it’s a bit distraction from the Epstein files. While there is no smoking gun here, it’s obviously an escalation of the disclosure trend that started nearly 10 years ago. There are reports that subsequent release will include the infamous 46 HD videos that congress has seen. Also reports of potential anomalous (ET?) bodies.
We’re also in a very unfortunate position where conspiracy, uap, and other paranormal phenomena have been politicized. It’s impossible for me to believe that ScienceTM will take any real interest in this. I wonder when that dam will break. They are so invested in the pre-disclosure narrative that they will not update without something truly shocking being released.
It’s understandable that people remain skeptical. That being said, there is now an overwhelming amount of evidence out there that something is going on outside of what mainstream science will recognize. There are countless government insiders that have told their stories.
I personally don’t claim to know what to make of all of this. But I continue to update my priors on the following:
There are NHI entities or technology regularly interacting with earth.
There are one or more ET civilizations that are currently on earth and have formal relationships with various states.
There are public and private organizations that have advanced technologies beyond conventional energy and aerospace tech.
There are terrestrial breakaway civilizations from the deep past or present with otherwise unknown technology.
There are paranormal phenomena and metaphysical entities that are the source of all of these events.
How about you all? Anyone else adjusting lately?
Edit. Link to nasa logs.
https://x.com/the_astral_/status/2052729234435481632?s=46
Life imitates art, first as farce, second as tragedy.
This feels like when I was watching Entourage and realized that all the awful absurd fake movies that they fake as a satire of bad Hollywood projects, have actually been made now, unironically. Narcos, Aquaman, Fire Country, these were all failed Vince and Ari projects before they were real movies and shows.
I have this theory that the government shakes the "ALIENS" coins in a coffee can every time that conspiracy theorists start to get popular, knowing that conspiracy theorists can't resist talking about aliens and will start going off about it and scare the hos. Right now, conspiracy theorists are getting increasing headway on right and left as a result of some of Trump's apparent policy reversals in office, so it's time to shake the coins at them and distract them.
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You're getting some replies saying "why wouldn't we see them in space" so I'm dropping this note to remind everyone that SETI efforts have indeed found stellar signatures broadly consistent with stellar engineering.
Do I think that's what we've spotted, personally? No, not really. Do I think "we haven't spotted any candidates for technosignatures, so there aren't any" is a good argument when we have spotted candidates for technosignatures? No, not really.
Ahem :
And even before the SETI article:
Need I remind you that we shouldn't be looking for "just" a single Dyson swarm candidate? A civilization with the technology to build even one should be in the process of a Grabby Alien takeover of the lightcone. You'd want to see a roughly spherical wave of expansion, perhaps including swarms-in-progress.
When the technosignatures, scrutinized closely, overwhelmingly tend to turn out to be well explained by natural phenomena? Yeah. We ought to check, because it's cheap and possibly quite important if we detect something real, but expectations should be very, very low if you're modeling things sensibly.
I think the natural phenomena explanation is more likely. (Like I said, I don't think we've actually spotted Dyson swarms.) But the truth is more complicated than "oh well we would know if they were out there." The fact that we might know if someone built a Dyson sphere tells you something about how much we don't know.
Maybe - I don't actually think Dyson sphere are very likely to be built, even by an advanced spacefaring civilization. Swarms are slightly more likely, but even then I don't think the fact we haven't spotted them. And I don't actually think the scenario where Grabby Aliens start making Dyson Swarms in the entire galactic neighborhood is a given, either.
You've found one paper arguing that one candidate is explained by natural phenomena. I think it is most likely all of them are explained by natural phenomena but, again, what sort of argument is this?
"We can say confidently there's no aliens because we looked for one extremely difficult to build megastructure of questionable plausibility, found multiple potential matches and we're pretty sure one of them is explained by a natural occurrence" is just a bad argument. I would bet every single one of these SETI findings is due to some natural occurrence, but that doesn't make the argument good!
The real argument, at least the one I have implicitly and explicitly made, is that we need a good explanation for why there's such an abundance of untapped negentropy in the wider universe, which would be extremely unlikely if there was a civilization out there with even a minor (in geological terms) headstart on us.
As any good Bayesian will tell you, an absence of evidence constitutes evidence of absence. It's not "proof" of absence (that nonsense is for Popperians), but the more you should reasonably expect to see something and then not see it, the more questions that raises.
You should know very well that even STL interstellar colonization is well within the reach of civilizations not that much more energetically or technologically advanced than us. We don't see it. Every single candidate we look at closer turns out to be a bust. I've shared a few examples, but that's not an exhaustive overview, there are other discussions I didn't link to. The point is that "almost certainly not aliens" is clearly true for technosignature claims. If there are any examples where we haven't conclusively proven otherwise so far, it's exceedingly likely that there's a boring explanation. Not aliens.
Maybe we're just the last outpost in the Slow Zone before the Unthinking Depths.
If you're talking about the Motte vs 4chan and Reddit? Yes. Vinge's work is great scifi, but not a good model for cosmology or technological forecasting. He says so himself, it's just an interesting plot conceit.
It's too bad he's gone. He's my favorite hard SF author. I'd kind of like to know the story of Nyjora, how it lost its technology, and what remnants of said tech still existed during the dark ages.
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Can you expand?
Do you read Sutter Cane?You should read Vernor Vinge, all his stuff is good, but specifically you should try A Fire Upon the Deep if you have not already.More options
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I would love it if we actually got to be the first ones on the map and the universe is ours to grasp so long as we manage to survive. But what if the star wars came and went even longer ago than they were far away and we missed the show? What if now there is only a quiet intelligence which has no reason to shout at itself and likes things just the way they are?
Maybe it's already done things to the universe. Massive things. We can't fully account for a large proportion of the matter that our understanding of gravity predicts should exist. Maybe it's found a way to obscure itself among this. Maybe we're living in a post-war nature preserve without knowing it, one that it frequently interrogates and paws through because observing intelligent beings that are not itself is the only potentially interesting thing left in its existence.
Now are you going to hit this bong or not? We all agree that we've gone as far as grainy gun camera videos of blobs are going to take us, so let's just wait until this whole release cycle blows over without anything better coming out, and agree to e-beat anyone who acts like this wasn't a big waste of time.
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There's no shortage of such good explanations, such as the Dark Forest Theory, the Aestivation Hypothesis, and of course Greg Fodor's Intraterrestrial Hypothesis (which of course if expanded universe-wide would explain very neatly the lack of mega-engineering.) "Grabby aliens" is just one model of how advanced alien species might behave based, essentially, on pre-modern human behavior.
The Dark Forest is a terrible explanation. Others have written on the matter before, and I'd advise you look that up first.
If not, I will address that in detail.In fact, I've written it upThe Dark Forest theory just doesn't make sense on its own terms.
A civilization with access to exponential self-replicating probes is very hard to eradicate. The offense and defense equations change drastically when the latter have massive advantages in mass as well as the ability to disperse.
Further, it doesn't take imaging technology much better than ours to spot biosignatures from the other side of the galaxy. An inferometric telescope maybe an AU across in terms of effective lens size would work just fine. With better modeling, you could simply predict which planets are likely to be habitable, and then RKV the fuck out of them a few hundred million years before they develop multicellular life.
You can launch from distant outposts, outside the galactic plane even, a delay of decades or centuries means nothing on those time scales. No need to make your own system the obvious target. But in return, any civilization close to a Type 2 in terms of energy budget has the ability to sterilize the galaxy and barely notice the expense. They're also likely so dispersed and decentralized with off world outposts and robotic manufacturing and infrastructure that simply blowing up their home planet or razing it with a Nicoll-Dyson beam would only be a mild inconvenience. And there's no way to hide when you have one of those, that we know of.
If there were highly advanced and malevolent civilizations lurking out there, barring truly out there technologies and an implausible ability to cover their tracks in terms of emissions and signatures from before they knew how to start hiding or even the ability to do so, then there is simply no sense in trying to hide.
You should aim to get as big as possible, as fast as possible, if your Von Neumanns arrive at a system that's actually home to a hiding super-civilization, well they'd have found you first, but that's a problem tens of thousands of light years away. If they RKV you, so fucking what, you've got outposts past the Oort and can amass teratons of fuck-you in return. Your best bet is signaling that you're too big to fuck with, and the only way to get there is to grow.
Thankfully it seems that we're alone in the galaxy or even the cluster, unless there's very good reason why civs would have access to energy sources even more abundant than nuclear fusion and also coincidentally ignore all the lovely stars left free to waste theirs.
You can't hide. You can run. You can make them regret it. If you spot techno signatures across the galaxy, better be sure they won't be capable of sending RKVs back, but that's an acceptable cost, and in the meantime you need to rush for all the empty real estate.
Aestivation makes sense if you've already collected all the resources you can, tidied them up for longterm storage, and can sit tight till the universe cools down and you can exploit the Landauer limit in peace. If you see the stars still burning, that ain't working. You'd expect widespread star-lifting or intentional gravitational engineering. Aestivation without collecting resources? That's like putting $5 in the bank when you're a child and then hoping that works as your retirement fund. You need a job, or you should have a job.
Fodor's take is braindead. Yeah, sure, we can digitize and live in VR. Doesn't stop space probes and VNRs from being sent out. That is the default expectation.
Grabby Aliens is enormously parsimonious and makes minimal claims about motivations. All you need to accept is that STL interstellar colonization is possible, and that most species would want more resources, especially if they're easy to acquire. The beautiful thing is that you can turn the knobs and make things way more expensive or slow, and that doesn't change the bigger picture. There's been plenty of time to start the grab, and there's no evidence that even one civilization in the entire visible cosmos has started the process. All it takes is one.
You just made a big long argument that RKVs are so cheap that you could sterilize the entire universe but also that RKVs aren't cheap enough to destroy every possible outpost made by a civilization that made something as obvious as a Dyson sphere.
Now, setting aside the fact that this does actually explain the Fermi paradox (a prior civilization targeted every planet that was then capable of supporting life) you completely failed to address the downsides of spamming RKVs in universe where there may be civilizations that can produce RKVs: they are 1. likely noticeable because of the heat signature produced by relativistic speeds, even against interstellar particles, and 2. very easy to intercept with other RKVs or lightspeed weapons, and 3. not likely to be reliable against targets at long ranges because any minute error (including errors introduced by unexpected gravitational forces during the intervening travel time) will cause it to miss.
There are ways to mitigate these problems but RKVs are not good weapons against any civilization that might be able to shoot back in the next [distance away in light years] years. Since it is more energy-efficient to defend against them than to attack with them, we would not expect them to be utilized en masse among peer civilizations.
Why would you collect resources when the universe will do it for you? Stars won't be very energy rich near the heat death of the universe, but Sagittarius A* isn't going anywhere, and will likely continue to grow until after the stars burn out (remember, black holes can grow from cosmic background radiation), until the expansion of the universe places all objects and radiation beyond its gravitational reach forever. You could park yourself in orbit and run calculations off of a black hole (which emits tremendous amounts of radiation as it consumes matter, and tiny amounts as Hawking radiation) for an
infinitely long amount of time. This would likely be more efficient than building Dyson spheres throughout the universe; Sagittarius A* has the mass of about 4 million stars and is growing. Right now it would take vastly longer than the age of the universe for Sagittarius A* to evaporate due to Hawking radiation. And because Hawking radiation grows as the size of the black hole gets smaller, it seems arguably perfect for such a plan, since you will be maximizing energy collected at a point when the universe is the coldest. As time goes on and the universe grows colder and your calculations grow more efficient, you also gain more energy to calculate with.The main objection to this plan is that the Hawking radiation output on a supermassive black hole is too negligible to power anything, but I am not sure this holds true if we are orbiting near the event horizon with our Dyson swarm, due to time dilation. (Also you get fried with gamma radiation when the black hole collapses, but whatever, surely you've finished your big math problem or whatever by then.)
However, this is only the second-best plan involving black holes. By creating a small black hole and feeding it mass, you now have an extremely efficient method of both energy production and propulsion. You could (in theory, if you can do the math right) travel around the entire universe at relativistic speeds and feed 100% of the mass into your black hole, directly converting about 25% of it into energy to run your calculations with.
Since our entire point is hibernating until the universe is colder to do the math, the best time to crunch the numbers and figure out how to do this is after the universe is already dying. You'd only need a small "bootstrap" energy source (which might even be something as trivial as a fusion reactor) to run your calculations at that point. Of course, you wouldn't want to gamble on this unless you were pretty sure a black hole starship was possible.
Fodor explicitly discusses this, which tells me you've dismissed his take as "braindead" without bothering to read it (which you can do here). Even if he was wrong about the space probes, it's pretty clear that a society that virtualized at, say, 2200 levels of human technology wouldn't really need to expand to have all the energy they could ever need, and any probes they sent would be much less conspicuous than a DYSON SPHERE.
I would argue that you actually have to accept that most species will pursue ~limitless resources that they don't need, which is a harder pill to swallow. If we assume as a default that most species have no access to contraceptives, this makes sense. But if something like the human experience is the default, we can expect most species to grow slowly if at all by the time they need to colonize other worlds because they will be able to control their own reproduction, and they will not maximize the pursuit of energy resources simply for its own sake (we certainly do not do this on Earth). They will have zero reason to construct anything like Dyson sphere, as they will have no need for the energy. Furthermore, colonizing other star systems without cracking the lightspeed barrier is a very dangerous idea, for obvious reasons: your first concern shouldn't be aliens, but members of your own species developing their own culture in a technologically advanced parallel socio-political environment. No sane species would permit this by default without some sort of constraints. We should expect most species to, at least while their star is still burning, to centralize their civilization around their star system, which will have enough resources for practically limitless numbers of their society without anything besides modest engineering (such as space habitats), and actively inhibit attempts to leave by would-be splinter societies.
Sterilizing planets is cheap. Particularly if you focus on potentially habitable planets, preferably before they show signs of intelligent life.
A K1+ civilization is a little more resistant to bleach. They can pack their bags and move to lower-rent neighborhoods like the local Oort, and which makes total eradication a real pain.
You are no longer aiming for a single planet in a system, assuming your terminal guidance allows for that. Now you've got to kill every asteroid, every orbital, every stealthed facility running cold, probably every rogue planet in the vicinity. Good fucking luck if they're multi-system. And if they've got VNRs, AGI/ASI? Sorry. You'll need to really up the budget or send your own berserkers.
To illustrate. Let's assume a civilization 200 ly away picks up Hitler's broadcast and decides they don't like the mustache. They fire an RKV at 99.9% of c. It'll get to Earth, at the earliest, somewhere past 2340. The solar system will look very different by them, assuming we haven't exterminated ourselves.
I am extremely confused by accusations that I haven't addressed the downsides of indiscriminate RKV spam, particularly if you're targeting systems with budding civilizations or near-peers. Given the speed of light is a rather hard limit, there's every chance they've grown up in the span of time between detection and terminal effect. That gap could be anywhere from decades to millennia, depending on fast the RKVs are.
Hang on a moment. You are quite possibly the first person who has told me that it's "very easy" to intercept RKVs. Citations please. As I've mentioned elsewhere, a sufficiently fast RKV will appear barely any time after the light that came off it. There's scope for (minor) evasive maneuvers, better versions of MIRVs, just going fuck it and exploding early to turn into a macron gun.
In particular, point 3 assumes zero terminal guidance, which is... a bold demand to make. It's hard to steer relativistic projectiles, of course, but not impossible.
And then there are Nicoll-Dyson beams. If you can build one, GG to whoever tries to block them. You can reach across a whole galaxy with ease.
Also, if someone was sterilizing every potential life bearing planet in the Milky Way, I think we wouldn't be having this conversation. At the bare minimum, we haven't been hit.
Uh... What about all the photons that stars are busy wasting right now? At the bare minimum, you should harvest that. Maybe make kugelblitzes with a Nicoll-Dyson beam, if you're more inclined towards civilian applications. Dyson swarms can be dual use.
You forget that you can extract rotational energy from existing black holes with remarkable efficiency (compared to most power sources). It's easy. You just have to drop mass in the right way. Plenty of papers on black hole farming out there. You don't even need to make one yourself, you can happily appropriate the closest one if you can get to it.
You don't have to wait till they shrink and emit significant Hawking radiation. If you do, you're waiting a very, very long time. The Aestivation hypothesis fails because you don't see any of the infrastructure work you need before that wait makes sense.
I have read it. I found a Medium post. I still think it has severe hypoxic brain damage.
Oh god. I'm genuinely disappointed, and I don't say this for the sake of insulting you. You really, really underestimate how important selection pressure or exponential growth is. Consider humanity. All it takes is a single person with a dream, like Elon Musk, to move forward timelines by decades. VNRs are trivial to the kinds of civilizations we're discussing. Nominal population doesn't matter, especially when we consider robotics or AGI.
Your argument must be true for every civilization.For its entire history till the present. One defector, in one galaxy a million ly away? They'd have eaten the whole thing and sent probes and VNRs our way.
Even a very, very low rate of growth can take over galaxies in what is the barest fraction of the time that has passed since the universe formed, even counting since the earliest plausible eras for life to form - when metallicity was sufficient. We have billions of years to work with.
You demand that every civilization convergently decides to become a hermit. They is really not a good argument.
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Conspiracy theorists argue in favor of the dark forest hypothesis. Unfortunately no one else is willing to engage with the evidence without dismissal so we don't know if that's because it's genuinely what the evidence favors or if it's because psychics tell them so.
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I do not doubt it. The problem is, I did not trust the USG's scientific rigor even before it loudly announced that paracetamol causes autism.
The fact that there are credible reports (I think) of the spooks investigating extrasensory perception in the cold war does not imply that ESP exists, the better explanation is that the USG wasted a few millions investigating a dead end (possibly well aware of the odds, just covering their base in case the Soviets got their first, but possibly also because they had true believers advocating for it, it would not have been the first time the USG wasted money).
For anything observed during the Apollo missions, if I believed unexplained a bunch of people saw, I would have a lot of believing to do. Space in mind-boggling big. The surface area of the Moon is larger than the area of the USSR was. If Apollo astronauts just saw an alien spacecraft by looking out of the window, then either the spacecraft was attracted by them or the Moon is abuzz with alien spacecrafts.
(Also, the Moon's atmosphere is famously even thinner than the evidence for aliens.)
I am skeptical on priors. The aliens would have to have some basic competence at staying hidden (otherwise we would have seen CNN reports of them landing their UFO in Paris and going on a sightseeing tour. But also not too much competence, because the USG caught wind of them. Unless the aliens are big fans of God's own country, this implies that other countries also have evidence. And yet they all formed conspiracies to keep the knowledge secret, but were not successful enough to destroy the belief in aliens.
Aliens who have interstellar travel probably also have to teach one or two other things to mankind -- think Keltham in Cheliax. You might argue that it is impossible to know which technologies are actually alien origin -- perhaps they literally gifted control of fire to mankind, or taught them to build pyramids -- but none of the recent stuff feels likely. LLMs are mostly a consequence of the advances in semiconductors which have been going on for 50 years. If the USG (or any other government) has controlled fusion, or room temperature superconductors, or material with the tensile strength required for space elevators, they surely spend a lot of time keeping their mouth shut. But if there is no technological advantage to be had, then why not tell the world? Actually, with the current US president, I doubt he could keep his mouth shut even if there was an advantage to keep the aliens secret. He would bask in the attention of showing off an alien origin room temperature superconductor as a lizard basks in the midday sun.
The real question is if this is supposed to distract the voters from the Epstein files, or from how the Iran war is going.
Or, more likely, this is a campaign promise or coalition agreement and not part of some kind of plan.
Remember the group of random black people larping as Amerinds in North Carolina, who Trump recognized as an Indian tribe shortly after he got elected because they voted for him? Yeah, this is the exact same thing. Some podcaster wanted Trump to release UFO files in exchange for an endorsement most likely.
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Yeah, I tend to agree with this. If extra-terrestrials were sophisticated enough to get to the Earth without leaving any solid evidence, it seems like they should be sophisticated enough to completely evade detection. But the situation is similar to that with the evidence for ghosts; psychic phenomena; bigfoot etc. Lots and lots of low-grade evidence, none of which really stands up to scrutiny.
I am speculating a bit, but I suspect part of the problem with UFOs is that over the years, the US government has been deliberately spreading disinformation for strategic reasons.
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This phenomenon isn't unique to either the USG or even the supernatural.
In China, a lot of the insurance system covers Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is pretty much just bullshit. Here in the US, I know people who have gotten chiropractic coverage under their own insurance. Acupuncture is also something apparently covered by many private insurance companies, despite also being highly suspect. Some apparently are even covering Reiki now.
Point here being that interest groups who believe they're effective push hard for their inclusion and treatment as "real medicine" and there's not really a strong lobby against it. It's not like you'll gonna be able to convince the TCM/Chiropractic/Acupuncture/Reiki/etc believers otherwise that easily after all, they're passionate and committed in a way that opposition isn't. If you have a bunch of people who really think that crystals or halo therapy or whatever are better than normal mainstream medicine, then you have a lobby pushing for their inclusion.
Because there's a bunch of very very passionate people in support, I don't expect spending and focus on ESP, or "super foods" or ghost hunting or whatever other nonsense to end anytime soon in the same way that coverage of (what I consider to be bullshit) "traditional medicine" and other beliefs is being actively expanded by insurances. It's just part of living in society, sometimes you have to accommodate what you personally think is bullshit because large numbers of people believe it.
You might think "well just ban things that are stupid and bad" but the monkey paw curls and all of a sudden the vaccines are banned. Whoops, turns out other people have different views on what is stupid and bad.
I’ve sometimes wondered why a lot of domestic insurance programs in the US refuse to cover medical tourism operations abroad, when the expense is often much cheaper. It’s not all cosmetic that’s done elsewhere (although a lot of it is). Probably regulatory related if I had to guess. Not to speak of the logistics.
In the event of a complication can exponentially blow up if you're stuck in another country
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None of this is bullshit, these techniques obviously work and I have benefited from them as well as millions of other people. If they didn't work, people wouldn't use them or pay for them, obviously.
Even if it's just 'placebo', whatever that actually means, the techniques work.
This is not obvious. You can sell something that does not work at all, not even as a placebo, as long as your buyers are uninformed enough.
Suppose I know that a certail illness passes on its own in about a week in most cases, but my target audience doesn't. I could sell them a treatment that doesn't hasten or lighten the course of the illness in any way, then claim credit when after a week, the illness does indeed pass.
Being a valid placebo requires that there is a measurable benefit from the sugar pill compared to no treatment.
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That is only true if the only thing they're selling is the efficacy. But it's not. What draws people to these sorts of bunk medicines is the vibes. The naturalistic fallacy, the appeal to "tradition" and "ancient wisdoms", feeling like they have some sort of secret knowledge (the same sort of thing that draws flat earthers or 9/11 conspiracies and the like), anti corporate beliefs, or blind hope for solutions that we don't currently have in the same way that people will pay psychics to find their lost child, and other reasons like that.
I'm sure there are some things somewhere that modern medicine is overlooking, but in general the saying "you know what we call alternative medicine that works? Medicine" is the general truth. It's not like they're opposed to the idea of herbs or mushrooms or other stuff having healing properties, most modern meds are literally based off that stuff! Even the newest discoveries like Wegovy are based off real world natural substances, like the gila monster venom.
If it's just placebo then it pretty much by definition doesn't work. It's entirely just your mind and outlook doing everything there.
The vibes are strong and time-tested. AIUI, acupuncture is a very powerful placebo.
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If you set the threshold for success as low as a placebo then your answer is built directly into the assumptions of the argument. The standards for medical efficacy are generally much higher than that, which is why a lot of it is bunk. At the very least none of it has proved worthy of repeated scientific scrutiny and came out with flying colors on the other side.
A decent chunk of 'modern medicine' is likely gonna hit a similar wall when looked at with a couple decades worth of hindsight, though. I do agree that a lot of TCM etcetera is placebo and correlations =/= causation but the amount of modern medicine that's been pushed and shaped for ideological reasons like 'gender confirmation' is indicative that the field isn't really as serious as it ought to be.
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I’ll always go back to the first important question of whether or not there’s the possibility of aliens or alien technology: if they are really aliens, why can’t we point to a signal from deep space? Why can’t we hear chatter or detect engines or Dyson spheres or other forms of building in either deep space or on a planet? In short, how are these things getting here without bases, ships or cities on another planet. We needed a global civilization to launch glorified missiles at the moon. That’s almost nothing compared to the amount of infrastructure needed to launch something like the fictitious Enterprise. Even if we grant the rather dubious idea of FTL travel, you still need advanced civilization based on at least one planet to build the ship (likely several planets linked by trade). Yet, we have no evidence of even life on other planets. Certainly no cities have been discovered, let alone solar system spanning infrastructure necessary to build our starship. Absent that, I don’t see any reason to invent concepts of aliens to explain this stuff. 1,2 and 4 require that there be a solar system spanning civilization out there. 5 and 3 don’t. And 3 would be something that the government would want to protect. You don’t want Chinese spies to know exactly which companies are producing technology decades ahead of conventional technology.
Sounds like you’re just talking about Fermi’s paradox.
First of all if they were out there, how would we see them? The problem isn’t that we don’t see them but we shouldn’t even expect to. Our television and radio broadcasts don’t even reach beyond the heliosphere. It’s the sphere of charged particles at the edge of the solar system. A lot of those radio waves are just going to get annihilated, or scattered or absorbed.
Even if they did though, the inverse square law entails that the signals going to degrade substantially and so quickly that eventually it’s going to be below the standard background radiation (and therein invisible, it’ll be static; like looking at a TV). I’ve seen calculations done before that about one hundred light years is roughly the maximum distance (and this is even if you don’t take into account the cosmic dust that absorbs radio signals) it could travel theoretically. And even if you multiplied the strength of the broadcast by say two, that doesn’t increase the distance by two.
But let’s say life occurs once every thousand light years. Even in our galaxy alone, they’d be too far away for us to ever see them. Even if they’re millions of years older than us, because those signals are simply gone. Even if you had nuclear powered spaceships roving around the galaxy, they still aren’t generating anywhere near the amount of energy that starlight does. So Fermi’s paradox isn’t really a paradox for me. The best takeaway from this is to assume that intelligent life is roughly less than one per hundred light year radius. SETI researchers fully acknowledge all of this.
A highly intelligent and old civilization wouldn’t be very expansive necessarily, even with Dyson spheres in the mix. It doesn’t follow that we would expand to every spiral arm throughout the Milky Way and then move to other galaxies either. This becomes evident when you calculate the expansion rate. Is it one light year every billion years? One every thousand years?
Old civilization or not, they’d still run into the same problems as us. You have relativistic speed limits. But even apart from that, you can’t really send a massive spaceship at the speed of light, because the first particle it hits will just disintegrate. Just the random protons floating around alone will be like nuclear bombs, practicality dictates you would go slower. The propagation rate wouldn’t be near the speed of light. Even if you went 10% of that, every particle that hits that ship is going to do massive damage to it, plus you’re talking about light years of distance, and that’s not even factoring in gamma radiation… there’s way to many problems with this whole project; it just wouldn’t work.
I’ve never done the full calculations, only the quick and dirty mental math. Even if there was an advanced alien civilization say every thousand light years, the probability of seeing nothing would be close to 100%. The silence and non-observation that we see should be fully expected even if they are out there; that’s why the argument from silence fails, because it’s fully expected by the evidence.
Except that the entire argument is simply trying to explain away finding absolutely no evidence that there are aliens out there. And while accept that radio waves don’t propagate infinitely, you still have to explain why we don’t see Dyson swarms or spheres, why we’ve never detected life, let alone civilization anywhere in the universe. At some point, the thing becomes silly. They’re definitely out there, but they’re invisible, you see, and no you can’t possibly detect them no matter what methods you use, or what you’re looking for. I find it much simpler to say that until there is concrete, public evidence to the contrary, there’s no good reason to insert aliens into the picture, or if the picture includes anything people believe is out there, no reason to include aliens and exclude angels, demons, ghosts, or Asgardians. Until there’s evidence of aliens in deep space, it’s just speculation. They should be there, perhaps, but we don’t know if they actually are there.
I literally just told you why. It’s the physical limitations that prevent us from being able to detect them. But even suppose none of that was true, is the best thing to do if you’re an intergalactic civilization announce your existence to the rest of the galaxy? Why think that at all? It doesn’t seem to me to be the case that that would be the best approach in the first place.
I mean im not disputing that at all. My point is that absent any evidence of extraterrestrial life, there’s no good reason to insert them into our understanding of the universe. Theres no reason to posit a class of things that we have no evidence exists. They might be out there, they might not. But until we find something unequivocally pointing to extraterrestrial life existing, it’s impossible to say they exist. It’s unknown and unknowable and thus not not useful to assume.
I suspect your actual question is more about convincing me as a skeptic. To me, the proof would have to be public— a landing in a public place and filmed by legitimate news media, NASA showing images of a city on another planet. A signal of clearly intelligent origin announced by NASA or SETI. A deep space object that is clearly of technological origin and not built by humans. In short a public demonstration of evidence for life in deep space affirmed either by the event itself being public or vetted by subject matter experts and given to the public as news.
My opinion is simple, im defaulting to “not extraterrestrial life” until Theres good evidence to think they not only exist, but are capable of coming here. There are lots of potential explanations for what the reported are showing: radar malfunctions, secret craft of human origin, intelligence gathering lies to find out what kinds of technology our rivals have, poorly trained observers, a cover story for classified craft being filmed or to hide a weakness of radar. All of these would be plausible with the information we have available and what is known about intelligence agencies and individual actors in that technology and military sphere. If I can explain the data dump without positing aliens, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have my default explanation be “it could be aliens” any more than it would be a good idea to have my default interpretation be “it could be demons.”
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We do see things that could be stellar megastructures. They're too far away/our tech isn't good enough to know for sure, lots of them have perfectly decent natural explanations and some of them are probably equipment errors yahta yahta yahta but the absence of evidence problem is not a real problem for this specific thing.
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Can someone provide some context for this phrasing?
Military slang for an unidentified/unknown object, coming from its original meaning of a supernatural creature.
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The Apollo missions have provided us with weird shit for ages. Consider the opening sample in this song.
If the government had bombshell evidence of extraterrestrials, it managed to keep quiet through decades of competing administrations, including Trump I. Why would that change now?
On the other hand, if there’s nothing new to report…why not now?
Trump is, as usual, signaling his cool outsider status. He wants you to know he’s not afraid of the swamp creatures who have totally been keeping this from you. It’s the same old playbook; I’m not expecting much.
That specific instance (from Apollo 17) was later determined to be the spent 3rd stage of their own Saturn Rocket
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What is the argument for this? There's been more than 70 years of persistent rumors from government officials regarding bombshell evidence of UFOs. As just a random example, I have sitting on my hard drive a 1950 letter from a USAF Colonel to an MIT professor mentioning rumors of a UFO crash in Mexico.
I mean if you had met a Klingon, I would think it would be hard to not mention it to someone, especially given the absolute mania in the West for stories of aliens going back to HG Wells, and through Buck Roger’s in the 1940s and so on. Add in that any scientist with proof of alien life (and it would not even need to be intelligent, just alive and on another planet) would be the winner of the highest honors science has to offer, as well as book offers, sell out speaking engagements, and be the most famous scientist since Einstein, and the fact that no one has claimed those prizes, the money, the fame, or the career security that such proof would bring is pretty strong negative evidence.
But people make these claims all the time! There's not a lack of mentioning stories of aliens!
Rationalists/reddit intellectuals love to talk about how it's impossible to have large conspiracies because large groups of people can never keep a secret. Yet if you look at even recent history, we are chock full of examples where this is outright false.
It's quite funny to me at this point.
Indeed. Actual government conspiracies such as COINTELPRO, MKUltra, Operation Choke Point, etc were not leaked by conspirators. They were discovered by unrelated means despite perfect lack of leaking. You can indeed get a bunch of people in the FBI or CIA to coordinate and keep their mouths shut afterwards. Even (or especially?) when their actions are illegal and immoral.
MKUltra failed and COINTELPRO targeted people who CIA types would naturally oppose for underlying social / political reasons, since at that time the agency was largely right leaning WASPs and some conservative Ellis Islanders who wouldn’t sympathize with targeted organizations. Likewise an organization consisting of, say, committed Zionist Jews could probably quite easily keep a secret mission against some infamous antisemitic group quite secret.
The reason why “someone would have said something” is compelling for 9/11 stuff isn’t that it would be impossible for that kind of conspiracy to be kept secret in a technical sense, it’s that a large number of people in the security establishment would have ideologically disagreed with killing thousands of American civilians including in some cases people they knew and loved personally.
For secret aliens at Area 51, the compelling ideological scenario to maintain secrecy isn’t really there. Announcing aliens exist doesn’t give their technology, if any exists, to the Soviet Union. And of course there are questions about why no other country is announcing that presence, too. Lastly, the incentive to reveal is much stronger than with MKUltra or COINTELPRO - the CIA doing underhanded or shady stuff isn’t a surprise. Aliens, especially intelligent, technologically advanced ones, would be a world historical unveiling of unfathomable proportions that would change our culture and trajectory forever.
What is the compelling ideological scenario for the Chinese Communist Party to ban the existence of ghosts, and spend very real terrestrial government money and resources censoring media to make sure ghosts aren’t mentioned?
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Keep in mind that the allegations out of the former US government personnel pushing for "'disclosure'" are that the parties responsible for maintaining some of this information may have committed crimes or at a minimum failed to be entirely transparent with Congress.
If you are the executive branch (just setting the NatSec question to the side for a moment) your incentives for unraveling the secrecy about a historical program like this are very complicated. You might want to disclose stuff to make yourself look good, or your political foes look dastardly. You would think very carefully before disclosing something that ran the risk of Congress passing the Ending Insane Executive Power Overreach Act of 2026.
Which is consistent with what we're seeing out of the executive now (a drip of documents, blurry pictures and video, nothing particularly politically interesting). But of course that's also consistent with the government not really having anything politically interesting to begin with.
If anything spicy does start to come out, pay close attention to how much of it is oh-so extremely historical.
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Obviously I definitely think it's possible for a group of people to keep a secret (...most corporations do this!) but I also don't understand the entire line of argumentation that holds "these whistleblowers must be wrong because if they were right somebody would blow the whistle" (!??!?!!?)
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Or, more likely, somebody appointed to the administration for some other reason simply wants this stuff declassified, and Trump, being an outsider who doesn't really care about the issue, is willing to do it. There's also an outside possibility that this is some second order effect of DOGE, where the people pushing to keep this stuff classified got fired.
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The scenarios as I see them in order of likelihood.
A: Someone testing the latest generation of classified tech fucked up and got caught, (think opening scene of Top Gun: Maverick)
B: A Stargate type situation where the US government or possibly multiple governments have either developed or discovered something truly Sci-Fi and are trying to keep the metaphorical genie in the bottle.
C: Angels, daemons, and egregores, are real.
D: Predator and Predator 2, are real.
To be clear, I am reasonably certain that the A: is the true explanation and D: is unlikely in the extreme, but I threw it in there because I rewatched those movies recently, and I feel like the idea of the solution to the Fermi paradox being that Earth is essentially a national park/game preserve for Rastafarian Super-Klingons has potential for some really meaty sci-fi from both the human "prey" perspective, and from the perspective of the hunters who discover that the Antelope have invented crossbows and IEDs, since the last time they went on safari.
I feel like people overdistinguish between B(/D) and C. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all. "Demons try to trick humanity into thinking they're aliens to shake our belief in God" is an opinion that's all the rage among fundies these days, and every time I see it, all I can think is, can you really not draw the connection that "angels and demons" and "aliens" could quite sensibly just be two different sets of vocabulary for the same thing? Is "angels and demons might be beings much like humans but from different stars/planets" an inherently heretical view? Did ancient people have any need to be informed of the logistical specifics of how angels and demons came about? If we have faith, why would we presume that aliens don't have their own histories with and views on God, for good or for ill, which would make them, to us, angels or demons? In the event that our elites are secretly in contact with aliens, it seems entirely plausible to me that this is a very evil thing, on both ends of the contact, and that this is functionally occult activity, powerful people with demonic patrons.
This is the Islamic view on Jinn. That they are alternate sentient beings with their own rules/relationship with God. And can do good or evil just as humans.
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Yes. Angels are not "beings much like humans", they are held to be completely different creations. For "angels and aliens are just two words for the same kind of thing", you would have to change the nature either of angels or of aliens. If you want "angels are corporeal creatures with high tech" then that's not consonant with traditional Christian belief. If you want aliens to be the same sort of being as angels, then you have to drop the "much like humans" part. (As an aside, this is probably the origin of the "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" joke about Scholasticism).
Coincidentally, though I'm not watching the latest season of "The Boys", I see that Homelander's arc is him wanting to become a god, or thinks he's God, or has been chosen to be God, and my reaction is "Huh. Well, inventing your own twist on Christianity is very American" and while I imagine (though I don't know what the scriptwriters intend) that this is all meant to be more criticism of megachurch American Protestantism that is seen to be right-wing and in cahoots with Trump, what it could also be jabbing at is Mormonism, because "we can become gods of our own worlds" is the King Follett Discourse. and while they've given Homelander raging mommy issues, this is Heavenly Mother if you want to look at it that way.
So they're arguing whether angels are fermions or bosons?
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Yes, it is heresy for mainstream Christians. Angels are held to be made as, specifically, servants of God and demons are simply those who rebelled. They are not beings with their own civilization.
I guess here we also bump into another free variable in the "Christianity is right (and it's actually aliens)" scenario: do we only want to assume that Christianity's initial version was a true revelation of cosmic realities packaged up as memes digestible for the Mediterranean of 2000 years ago (and every elaboration humans added on since might be a corruption, even if done by overwhelming consensus), or do we have to assume that one or even multiple branches remained under "divine" guidance or inspiration until now, so the space opera would also have to fit at least some innovations that don't strictly follow from what was in the 1.0 release?
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Did God not make us to be servants, and did we not rebel? All the works of detailed information on the nature of angels and demons that I know of are either extremely speculative, not considered religiously significant by many serious authorities, or both.
Tell me you're from a 19th century American Protestant mainstream tradition without telling me you're from a 19th century American Protestant mainstream tradition 🤣
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No, God made made us in his own image.
Yes. "We were made to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next". Not mere servants, but sons:
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Harry Turtledove has an entire series based on exactly this premise.
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I think you're excessively negative on mainstream science in this case. The VASCO survey people put out a study of pre-Sputnik glints around geostationary orbit. These are respected scientists and it's a finding that is, uh, hard to explain without invoking aliens.
John Michael Godier did a video on this(and a good collection of study links). He not only offers a potential solution(nuclear testing), but also points out independant comfirmation of the VASCO study. Amoung other interesting tidbits.
That said, imo, it's never aliens.
It's remarkable that he somehow didn't mention that the transients were almost entirely in patches of the sky corresponding to areas outside of earth's shadow at geostationary orbit at a crazy level of significance. That is sufficient to completely dismiss any discussion of plate contamination as far as I can see.
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I think my negativity is warranted.
The VASCO stuff is fascinating and those people deserve our utmost respect for doing this work in public.
The VASCO findings, along with everything else released by DoW will be ignored. It seems to me that certain people will not update their priors on this topic. They’ve not considered VASCO and will not consider other evidence that’s been released over the past few years. The rebuttals have not changed in 30 years.
There is a certain institutional arrogance at work here. Opinions have been cemented and mockery has been the protocol. /u/self_made_human made the case against ETs quite clearly. In some people’s mind, we have learned all there is to know about the material world. If we don’t, well the. Surely someone would have published a peer reviewed study on it somewhere and we therefore have incorporated it into the corpus of scientific knowledge.
It’s certainly possible that all of the testimony from government and military personnel is a mass hysteria or a scam. It’s possible the hundreds or thousands of pictures and sensor readings are just mistakes, visual artifacts, or frauds.
I’m rooting for more to be released though. If for no other reason than to see the increasingly absurd contortions that certain people will go through rather than admit they were wrong.
I'm in general agreement with @self_made_human's points and I'd add that it's fascinating how the revelations about recovered alien technology or the kinds of space ships witnesses viewed are always in line with current human technology. If we take the likes of the Ancient Astronauts promoters like von Daniken, when publishing their books at the time it was pictures of "and this Inca altar slab clearly shows an astronaut in a space capsule" or "this is a jet plane" or a helicopter and of course all this proves that aliens have been visiting Earth for centuries!
Except that other, debunking, books publish the same photos and show the entire slab and that the "space capsule" bit was carefully cropped out and edited, and the likes.
It's like effects in Star Trek - writing the show in the 60s it was all transistors and switches, in the 80s with TNG and later it was touch screens. We're always envisioning the future (or aliens) in line with our most recent tech and just a little bit more advanced.
Genuine aliens in Egypt are not going to be flying anything looking like helicopters (if they don't have matter transporters they can GTFO, I say!).
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I'm unimpressed. The "they're here" hypothesis is a stack of conjuncts you have to price separately. I say this every single time this topic comes up, because someone has to.
Physics first. For aliens to be in our atmosphere, getting here without us noticing, physics has to break. Hard. Either FTL or energy budgets that make Kardashev-I civilizations look like loose change. Getting even a 1,000 kg probe to 20% of c needs something like 10^18 joules of kinetic energy, and that's a one-way trip. Sub-luminal crewed travel runs into interstellar hydrogen turning into ionizing radiation past ~0.5c, with deceleration costs equal to acceleration.
The energy costs are far from impossible, but the bigger issue is that deceleration would be a dead give-away. There are plausible approaches to stealth in interplanetary space, such as the Hydrogen Steamer, but when we're talking interstellar travel that doesn't take a gazillion years (especially from outside the immediate stellar neighborhood?). Fuck no. You'd be brighter than most stars from our perspective.
The easiest way to get around detection (for a non-standard definition of "easy") would be to get as close to the speed of light as you can, without bothering to slow down. That minimizes the temporal delta between your emissions giving you away and your arrival in system.
There is, however, a serious problem with that. I hope the keen-eyed reader can parse it. If not? Well: what I've just described is a Relativistic Kill Vehicle. Very different from something carrying a cargo you want to survive a journey, to a planet that you also would prefer mostly intact.
I can hear the response: "our physics is incomplete!" Yeah buddy, I know. It came free with the dark matter and dark energy. But if we grant FTL, reactionless drives, warp bubbles, exotic matter etc etc, then all bets are off. But once you've blown off the cost of the trip, you've blown up the priors on what these beings can do.
A civilization that solved interstellar travel has, with overwhelming probability, also solved stealth, signal control, and not-getting-photographed. Conditioning on "crossed several light-years" and "doesn't want to be caught by humans" should not leave you predicting "keeps getting caught on jet FLIR looking like fuzzy tic-tacs." The more advanced you demand the hypothetical aliens to be, the more evidence you need that the cryosleep has given them brain damage bad enough to explain the terrible OPSEC.
I'm not picking one explanation for what's in the released material. Far more likely, ridiculously more likely that it's several things compounding. Sensor artifacts (Sean Kirkpatrick, who ran AARO until 2023, has consistently argued the famous clips are jet engines doing weird things at long focal lengths). Tired pilots, going off a culture that treats every blip as anomalous. Black programs where one arm of USGov tests toys it didn't tell the other arm about. Adversary hardware misclassified, because, at least in theory, China might have some fun toys. Foreign and domestic psy-ops. Plain grift and running cover. A classified drone test, witnessed by a fatigued pilot, captured on a wonky sensor. This can all give you roughly the corpus we have, for far cheaper evidentiary cost.
Aliens? C'mon. I don't rule them out categorically. I just notice that "we're in a simulation and the admins are messing with us" buys roughly the same explanatory power at roughly the same cost in violated assumptions, and nobody treats it as the modal explanation. Pick your absurdity.*
What would move me is something an advanced interstellar civilization should find trivial. Hijack global comms and broadcast a coherent signal in every language at once. Live-stream a constructive proof of the Riemann hypothesis. Set an undeniable craft on the White House lawn at noon, on every camera. Drop asteroids in the Sahara to spell "ssup?" in characters and craters legible from orbit. None of that is demanding for someone who cracked star travel. The action-to-evidence ratio of "do something unambiguous, once" massively dominates "occasionally appear as a fuzzy shape humans argue about for decades." Our tech has gotten better since the 60s. It would be very awkward if theirs has improved at just the right pace to keep getting caught at the same rate.
So you've got a dichotomy. Either they want us to know they're here, in which case the demonstration is trivial and we'd already have it. Or they don't, in which case routinely showing up on cockpit thermal cameras is a level of opsec failure inconsistent with the engineering required to be here at all.
I don't think the evidence forces me to pick either. I advise that everyone chill the fuck out. If you're going to update, then update at the rate of installing Windows 11 from floppy disks.
*I'll dwell further on the fact that the simulation hypothesis and the alien hypothesis are explanatorily isomorphic in the relevant sense. Both posit an agent with effectively unbounded capability who is, for unstated reasons, choosing to interact with us via low-bandwidth ambiguous signals rather than the high-bandwidth unambiguous ones available to them. If you state your reasons, that really doesn't help, since the usual explanations I've heard are really bad. Embarrassingly so. I'm a hard-SF nerd, so if I can't salvage your argument, who can?
Or they want some of us to suspect that they're here, but not be able to prove it, because it amuses them.
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This is still why I remain ambivalent about divinity. Please speak up, God, I can't hear you.
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I can. It’s not aliens. It’s the remnants of technologically advanced civilizations that rose and fell in earths antediluvian past. That would solve the two hardest problems, the interstellar travel physics issue and the ontological question of why they would travel a billion miles just to kind of fart around earth and the moon a bit.
As to why we’ve never found them, the deep ocean and deep underground are still pretty much uncharted and unobserved.
I like it. I always thought that the badlands in southern Utah (like the Bentonite Hills for one of many examples there) always looked like slag heaps of long-departed civilizations.
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Heck, even the "demons are messing with us" explanation covers it just as well. Oh, you prefer to believe in aliens rather than demons, because aliens are Science and demons are Religion? That's just your preference, and if demons turn out to be real, it doesn't matter what you prefer, the truth is it's demons not aliens.
I mean, it could also be fairies if we're going supernatural. There are all sorts of fairy abduction tales like Tam Lin or Sir Orpheo, which have some interesting parallels to alien abductions. And European fairy myths are continuous with things like the Norse Wild Hunt, which involved bands of supernatural beings flying through the air.
Once you reach to invoke one of the more out there options, a lot of things are on the table.
Or it could be aliens messing with us.
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Uh, what? Proxima Centauri is the closest star, and it's not visible to the naked eye. I don't think it would be hard to launch a probe via electron beam or a laser in a non-visible spectrum without being noticed by pre-Sputnik astronomy.
ETA particularly since you probably would not be pointing the laser directly at the planet, you'd be "leading" it. This objection doesn't really make any sense imho.
Logically speaking, there's several billion years of history when we could have been visited by any number of interstellar space probes, without anybody in a real position to notice or file a complaint about violated speed limits.
I will note that acceleration is fine. You can probably make the beam tight enough despite unavoidable dispersion to get away with it, especially if you choose an oblique final angle of approach. Deceleration without getting caught is the hard part, especially if you aren't going to dramatically lengthen the journey in the process. I don't think that even the ~hardest torchship engines can avoid ridiculously large thermal emissions.
At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter all that much for the sake of my general argument. There is very little justification for aliens that advanced to go to all the bother and do... whatever they're presently accused of doing. Which doesn't seem to be much. It wouldn't explain why they don't seem to be doing anything at all back home, wherever that is.
No it's not, you can e.g. decelerate from nearly .5C over the course of about 20 years with a magnetic sail.
This is an odd objection to me given that the "aliens" in the conventional narrative supposedly act exactly as humans do towards, say, apes (trying to observe them discreetly but slipping up in embarrassing ways, occasionally knocking them out with mysterious weapons and taking biopsy samples or tagging them, doing hybridization experiments, etc.) and if anything that seems suspiciously anthropomorphic. It seems to me we should expect aliens to behave weirdly, if they were truly from a distant world in some way.
That is a better argument than most. I will concede that even JWST probably couldn't detect the thermal signatures, assuming the craft coasted in after doing the bulk of the braking by 10 AU away.
You should posit motivations that constrain expectations better than just "they might behave weirdly". We're still requiring a model of alien psychology that has to reconcile some very questionable behavior, conditioning on the observations actually being of something alien.
Why are they here? If they are here, why do they act in a manner that's just at or below the threshold for robust detection by our ever-improving detection capabilities?
And this is exactly the sort of arrival by aliens we should expect if they don't have exotic space propulsion. Some sort of solar or magnetic sail, from what I can tell, is just a more efficient way of traveling long distances than a nuclear rocket. Fewer moving parts and chance of malfunction, too.
To be clear, I do not think that it needs to follow AT ALL that because some of the stories from e.g. fighter pilots and intelligence personnel are true, that all the stories of alien abductions are true. Similarly, even if every single story of alien abduction is true (as understood by the people telling them) I don't think it follows necessarily that any of the strange UFOs/UAPs spotted in the sky and undersea are alien in origin.
According to who? The narrative from former intelligence/DoD/CIA types is that they very much can be tracked (but that they exhibit evasive behavior/attempts at "signature management"). Are you unaware of the "range foulers" that appeared when the Super Hornets got their AESA upgrade, of the declassified US documents discussing a potential UAP spotting via a satellite, of Ratcliffe talking on national television about corroborating UAP tracks from multiple sensors, of the "UAP detection mode" on the S-400 discussed by a former CIA analyst...?
If your argument is "why aren't they detected by civilians," where's the clear photo of NGAD? Of the SR-72? We know (or at least can assess, in the latter case) they were built and flown. The RQ-180 flew operationally for probably a decade before really clear footage was taken of it by civilians. It's not hard to prevent civilians from taking slam-dunk evidence that something exists. Even large organizations with significant amounts of institutional incompetence can do it routinely.
If we detected atmospheric signatures that strongly indicated life in any star within, say, 40 light-years, I think we would attempt to launch a probe to investigate sometime within the next 100 years. Nothing that we put on that probe would be authorized to speak for us in any binding sense (although of course we might opt to put some golden records or something on it).
Which, if you think about it, would explain fairly neatly the behavior we've witnessed:
I don't think there's a monocausal explanation for UFOs, and due to the numerous reports from many angles of what seems to be what might be termed a "spiritual" dimension to them, I tend to suspect part of the true explanation is even less prosaic than modestly advanced aliens from a nearby world. But I try to think through the possibilities with an open mind, and I don't think the broad outline of the reported behavior is very odd for an unmanned scientific mission. And yes, I don't see any tension between an unmanned scientific mission and the reported acquisition of "bodies." Even granting that an advanced civilization saw a bright line between biological and mechanical entities the way that we do, biological entities could be helpful at accomplishing various aspects of the mission, and there's no law of physics that would prevent them from being put together at the destination, or prevent them from utilizing the biological makeup of the native life, adopted as it conveniently is to its native environment.
Also the stealth Blackhawk. If one hadn’t gone down in Pakistan during the Osama Bin Ladin raid, it would still be unknown to the public. I think that one is especially significant since it’s a vehicle that routinely flies low, and and yet it’s hardly ever been seen.
Another good example. People forget how completely low light environments absolutely neuter cameras!
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The obvious answer to this is that they got here before we invented telescopes and have been hanging out in the Hollow Earth ever since.
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It’s quite possible for operators of technology to be much less competent / impressive than the people who built that technology. In fact, that seems to be the typical pattern. Perhaps our aliens are the equivalent of a bunch of yahoos driving around Toyota technicals in the Sahel. The fact that their trucks have advanced microchips in them does not mean they are capable of building such microchips. When you consider the possibility of deep time where civilizations exist on the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of years this seems even more possible.
I do agree with you that aliens seem pretty unlikely, I’m just pushing back on the idea that advanced technology implies advanced other things.
Yeah, but trucks don't represent an advanced vehicle for us, back when it did they were probably rare in the hands of yahoos in the Sahel.
Now though this has me wondering about a tangeant. I think humanity has been pretty good at not giving giving idiots access to advanced vehicles. I wonder how many people with sub-100 IQs have ever piloted an airplane (on their own, not like "pilot let me hold the yoke of personal airplane"). Can't be too many, I imagine.
*EDIT: AI guesses seem to be in the million range, though likely strongly concentrated into general aviation (recreational aviation)
During the Cold War, you did have a lot of ridiculously incompetent third world armies being given pretty advanced soviet Migs. This is part of why NATO had such an unrealistically high opinion of its own vehicles and equipment: most of the time then they were fighting an enemy with Soviet gear, that gear was being operated by literal retards. It’s also why fighting Iran has been such a shock for America.
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Well maybe the spaceships don’t represent an advanced vehicle for them. There is no objective point on the tech continuum at which a vehicle becomes advanced.
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Possible? Yes. Very many things are possible, more than this textbox has the room to catalog or contain.
Plausible? No. More importantly, the more epicycles you tag on, the worse the theory gets. UFOs = alien visitation is rickety enough as is, tacking on "monkeys that found a spaceship" doesn't help.
You're conflating implies with requires. I'm keeping those things separated. It would be very curious if the operators of this sufficiently-advanced technology were just incompetent enough to get caught so infrequently, with such plausible deniability.
Not monkeys who found spaceships, just members of a larger society who are less advanced than the ones who supplied their tools, like we see with different human communities all the time.
I was using implies in the sense of logical implication, which does mean the same thing as requires.
This is the premise of the Predators franchise. The predators did not invent their technology. They were a slave race who slaughtered their masters and took their advanced tech. Now a bunch of savages have plasma casters, stealth tech and convenient interstellar travel.
Any time you see something dumb in a Predator movie: that's because they're dumb.
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You’ve set up a nice strawman there batting down an ET explanation.
It seems to me that more people than ever are exploring non ET explanations.
The point of all of this is that there is a very long list of observations that do not comport to known phenomenon.
We also have a long list of government insiders who have talking about seeing, hearing, and being involved programs that are related to unexplained or unacknowledged phenomenon.
It sounds like you are bit hostile to the idea that there is something going on here that doesn’t fit neatly into our current understanding of how nature works. Why is that?
Someone above suggested I was being a hard on Science. I think this is exactly it right here.
If the claims are just "there is something beyond our current understanding of science", nobody would be getting hot under the collar. "Oh, the government has released some old documents about ball lightning, yay, now tell me am I going to be able to afford a fill of gas for my car, what with what is going on with Iran?"
But the claims are, and have been for decades, much more extravagant than that. I hate to say it, but you're doing some motte-and-bailey footwork here, @Rex.
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Most of the insiders are unnamed, and given that they’re working various forms of espionage and intelligence, they’d be more likely than the average American to concoct a cover story, especially if the truth is something they don’t want other countries to know about.
My best be it that this is about explaining away things that are being tested by the government in ways that would make sense to other countries.
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There is a difference between being skeptical and being hostile. I am immensely skeptical, but I am perfectly willing to accept the proposition that "advanced alien civilizations exist in the observable universe". Unfortunately, the balance of evidence is against it. Our telescopes would have spotted Kardashev 3s. The universe has had plenty of time for even a slightly temporally privileged civilization to make a dent in their astrographical vicinity, to a degree we can see from here.
Why rely on the Kardashev scale? Because energy-consumption, while imperfect as a scale for gauging technological progress, is far better than alternatives in the sense that it would be something we could observe, and what we would expect to observe barring a dramatic upsets. Moar energy = Moar good. Why leave all those stars alone, wasting perfectly good negentropy shining into empty rooms?
Then thermodynamics itself imposes constraints in the form of waste heat. It would be extremely implausible that an advanced, older civilization wouldn't make use of available resources, or that it could completely disguise their heat signature.
K2 and below? They still be very likely to leave obvious signatures on interstellar travel. They don't have the same resources, though interstellar travel is hardly out of the question if you own even a thousandth of a Dyson swarm. The question is why you aren't something useful with that capability, instead of engaging in glorified voyeurism on primitive neighbors. For a more mundane example, the CIA could gang-stalk a random farmer in sub-Saharan Africa. But they don't, because they have better uses for their time and energy.
If there are aliens out there, then they're most likely to be pond scum if they're in our galaxy. If they're more advanced, then they're almost certainly further away, and we have pretty decent limits on what is plausible. If you want more, read up on Grabby Aliens (and lack thereof) as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
Length and verbosity is a very poor metric for quality of evidence. You can collect a million people willing to swear on the benefits of homeopathy, still doesn't best placebo.
There's nothing against "there are aliens out there, and they are at or slightly below our own level, which is why we're not seeing Dyson spheres and the reset of it". But that would also mean "no trips to Earth by alien teens on their version of spring break, getting rowdy with the locals" and the UFO people don't want that to be true.
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That's because there are way too many of them now.
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Am I forgetting how light works? Some schmucks somewhere could have invented a superintelligence and started doing whatever ten-thousand years ago and there'd only be a little 20kly diameter bubble around us where we'd notice even if they were blowing up the universe. I've seen these kinds of dismissals before and they always seem to hinge on the notion that aliens existed it would obviously have been for trillions of years and obviously they would have reformatted the universe in some 1970's sci-fi novel way that everyone around could see.
I mean I'm not going in for aliens being real until somebody plunks down some real evidence or Gleep Glorp comes down and shakes my hand, but this stuff isn't satisfying. You're way too sure no canoe could ever cross the great sea.
If there's a "little" 20kly diameter bubble out there, I promise you we'd see that pretty well. We'd know by now.
Notice what even a mere 20,000 years of existence as rapidly hegemonizing interstellar civilization can achieve. Of course, by the time we see them, it's probably been much longer. And there might be massive civilizations taking over whole clusters we wouldn't know about for another million years. They're far away, if they exist. Their visual absence even with potential billion year headstarts suggests they don't exist.
The hell? I never disputed that interstellar travel is possible. It's perfectly plausible, the problem is that the civilizations that could launch them are nowhere to be seen. I'm also just saying that it's expensive, it's not very easy to hide, and if you do go to all that bother, then you wouldn't be as incompetent as your friendly neighborhood UFOs of alleged alien origin. If you have a K2 in the Milky Way, we might see it now. That would be a very unusual star, though a distant or occluded one might escape our scopes. If they came from even further away, what have they been up to, signing up with galactic HOA and agreeing to leave all the stars unmolested?
I'm pointing out that if someone started blowing up the universe 10k years ago then it would have to be within that little 20k diameter bubble (with Earth in the middle) for us to even notice.
This sentence reeks of pulp novels. You have a handful of speculative stellar engineering projects that might come across as impractical or unwise to alien superintelligence for any number of reasons, not least of which would be the (correct) suspicion that someone else might be watching. You've only been looking at the slice of spacetime visible to you in an organized fashion for a short time, and your species invents concepts like dark matter because it isn't quite sure where the majority of the universe is.
Everything you believe could well be correct, but your tone of certainty is unwarranted.
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I like that explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Yeah, turns out they did achieve ASI and now they're all bogged down as consumers of AI slop and their economies are devoted to taking in one another's washing to pay for that slop 😂
Sorry I deleted this, I thought better of it and ended up deleting it in favor of the other reply. I hadn't realized that anyone had seen it yet.
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I certainly could be wrong, but I read “You're way too sure no canoe could ever cross the great sea.” as a a more general comment on how definitive your dismissals are in general. It’s likely there are many unknown unknowns here. Unless it’s your claim that we have all the answers when it comes astrophysics, xenobiology, and the history of the galaxy.
Between the “look dude” in your reply to me and the emotional response here, perhaps we should all move on from this thread. You seem to have a bone to pick on the topic. No one’s asking you to believe in aliens. It’s just a fun topic that seems to be taking a CW turn.
Look dude. I'll say it again, that's just the way I talk. There is no malice behind it, at worst it's a textual tic or an expression of mild exasperation. If you find it that unbearable, well, that's a shame. Take care.
I personally find your riffing and attempts at humor at the expense of your interlocutor (and/or his/her views) off-putting, and generally I avoid interacting with you for this reason. This is just a data point for you, of course you're free to act however you like. (Even here I expect some sort of snarky "Thanks for the permission" retort, when that is not the tack I'm intending. If I generally posted in a way that caused others to react badly I'd want to know.) Even here, you seem to apologize, then think better of it and your last two sentences are basically a fuck off. It's very un-Motte, though rests in the plausible deniability "Whatever do you mean?" territory.
But I'm a fucking Quokka, to use a Motte-term, so there's that.
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I think you may have missed my point. You’re confidently suggesting that because ETs are unlikely, the evidence of unexplained phenomena are uninteresting, unimpressive, and not worth further investment.
I want to ask you specifically, have you considered the following:
[https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/many-big-pre-sputnik-earth-orbit](Pre Sputnik Sky Survey) showing anomalous things in our sky
[https://a.co/d/068TpBaG](UFOs and Nukes by Robert Hastings), a clinical examination of UFO observations around US and Soviet nuclear weapons. Includes the record interviews with some of our most well trained service members in control of nuclear weapons. People that are under constant monitoring for substance abuse and mental issues.
Official USA releases of the GoFast, Gimbal, and other AARO videos/pictures showing objects that defy conventional explanation or at the very least, would require other tenuous explanations.
Hundreds of interviews with people who worked in some official capacity at the government that say, on the record, I saw something that is not explained by conventional science.
Historical accounts of similar experiences, e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg](Nuremberg 1951) or [https://unidentifiedphenomena.com/people/diana-pasulka/](Diana Pasulka)’s academic research comparing historical religious accounts of encounters that map closely to modern UAP)
Any one story or observation can be explained away. When taken together, in my opinion, there is something happening that that explains all of this that is unknown or concealed from the general public. There’s too much smoke here for it to be nothing. ETs are just one possibility.
I suspect you have not thought too deeply about the specifics here. Especially what’s new to public since 2015. And that’s okay. It’s a niche interest. But to confidently express “I’m not impressed”, and then go on to emphatically explain why one narrow explanation is clearly false… is closed minded.
With all of that said I ask your opinion on this: do you think there is some unexplained here worth further time money and interest to investigate? Or is it a big jerk off waste?
Look dude. You're not telling me anything really new, I've already explained that the kind of big, impossible to miss, incontrovertible and dramatic evidence that would make me sit up straight and take this more seriously. If Oumuamua deployed radiators and then settled into a parking orbit, I wouldn't be making this argument.
Anything less than that moves the needle by negligible amounts. It's one more floppy disk at best, against the mountain that is the other evidence suggesting the wider evidence is empty, or that if the aliens do exist, they have to remarkably stupid/incompetent.
In short, I think this is a massive waste of time. Not the search for aliens, in general. They might be out there. We might spot a K2 in Andromeda or something. Maybe someone is laying the foundation on a new Dyson swarm, which will affect property prices and escalate the race for the light cone. I'll believe it when I see it. We should keep spending some money on observing the cosmos in detail. But if you're looking on Earth, with evidence this scanty, with a claim this enormous? I'm not moved, the lever isn't long enough.
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More people than ever can be wrong. Popularity does not measure truth.
Observations are often flawed in a variety of ways.
I can't speak for him, but I've observed that UFOology is a Shepherd Tone, always approaching, never arriving. At this point, I am confident that it never will arrive, and am confident enough to want to stake my position clearly. None of this is going to cash out in significant changes to consensus reality. There will be no new tech, no new avenues of research, nothing productive, just an endless series of what-ifs.
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I don't buy the idea that aliens, who have presumably mastered FTL travel, are so incompetent at hiding themselves that we're constantly finding evidence of their ships and whatever else, and they're doing things like anal probing random citizens and crashing in New Mexico but also still competent enough that they've been able to hide themselves for decades and no one can provide any actual evidence better than what exists for Bigfoot. And their competency at hiding, just like Bigfoot, happens to scale to whatever the current human technological level so despite everyone having a camera 24/7 now and tons of privately owned satellites in the sky, we can't find them.
Like that is an extremely specific level of competency needed where they constantly fuck up with little hints and exposures but never end up being revealed. They're always just out of sight in the corner of your eye while your phone is out of battery.
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One thing that I keep considering is that "bogey" just means that we don't know what the hell it is.
It doesn't have to be flying saucers.
I prefer to think that it could be space whales.
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The NASA/Borman audio is also old. I checked the Metabunk thread (my usual source of analysis on UFO stuff) and someone pointed out an 8 year old Youtube video with the same audio. The thread is only a few hours old so they don't have analysis of most of it yet, but the linked explanation of the Chandelier video as a diffraction pattern is typical of how I expect the rest of it to turn out.
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I note the use of a abreviations like NHI and ET. It's to avoid saying extraterrestrial out loud, because that sounds dumb.
I always go back to the guy who said some wreckage contained "Unknown Elements" with no further explanation as to what that actually meant. Elements in the colloquial sense, like how an alternator is an element of an engine? Element Zero or Infra-lead? I'm always disappointed that no one who interacted with anything Unknown Flying Object-related has a paid-attention-in-high-school education.
Also, slightly unrelated, but I always laugh whenever UFOologists talk about "hybrids" interbreeding, and genetic experimentation. Or the anal probing thing. It's so obviously primate sexual anxiety being projected onto the unknown/imaginary.
I want a scene in something where a visiting alien gets asked one too many times about hybrids or breeding and gets annoyed.
What I'm hearing is "miracle health food": all the taste, none of the calories!
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And then we tell him about furries 😁
Furries still have human sexual characteristics, and notably there's few primate furries; it's mostly dogs with boobs.
My friend, I have seen art of snakes with boobs, dragons with boobs and vaginas (so. many. dragons.) and other horrors too traumatising to relate, and I've only barely even dipped my toe into that world by accident.
If it's there, we humans will have a fetish about it. I hope our alien friend has a good therapist on standby once the kinky set find out about pedipalps. Which, uh, might already be happening? What the hell is this, no I do not want to know and if our visiting friend feels a strange stirring in their extremities well let's leave them in privacy.
Second, does that misaligned protein chirality mean we could eat them and the resultant dish would come out the other end undigested? Forget maltitol and carb blockers and fat binders and burners, now the new guilt-free food you can indulge in without packing on the pounds! First "To Serve Vegans" cookbook out when?
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Not exclusively. Ferals exist.
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Yeah, furries almost point in the other direction with this: it's human beings being "attracted to other species" but in reality they're just taking attractive human characteristics and putting them on those species.
Though I guess this does open up an opportunity for arbitrage: imagine an alien species that has some extremely unattractive-to-them feature that maps well to attractive human characteristics, and vice-versa: now the unattractive members of our species and the unattractive members of their species can get together, both finding the other extremely attractive.
How is this not a romance series already?
There's a SF short story about this, damned if my sieve memory can remember the name or the author, but it's that humans are weird in that we are capable of altruism outside our species, and this can turn into an extreme.
We made contact with other species and find ourselves enamoured with them, but they don't reciprocate. Humans will even take care of the disabled members of alien species out of devotion. Those other species don't understand this and regard humans with a range of reactions from contempt to disgust. 'Human fuckers' are the deviants of their native species, and needn't even have sex with humans, just be (what are now called) sugar babies being funded and pampered by besotted humans.
The story was narrated by a human reporter covering the humans in space, one of whom had applied for and got a very low level job on a space station (even though he's hugely over-qualified), just so he could be around aliens. The requirement is that only married couples will be accepted for such jobs, but there's no problem entering into a marriage of convenience with another human with the same fetish as you in order to get around that rule.
That guy tries warning the reporter to be careful, but the reporter is too dazzled by "wow, my first time seeing X and Y species up close!" to heed it and we end there.
I have the feeling it could be by Samuel Delany? But that might not be right.
Based on the first paragraph I though it might be "Kindness to Kin" by Eliezer Yudkowsky, but when I read the rest I realized that could not be it. So I tried AI and GPT cracked it; it's "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" by James Tiptree Jr. Very New Wave.
Ah, Tiptree! Yeah, that would be it. Thank you for searching for this!
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The academic industrial complex exists to acquire and spend tax revenue on political hobby horses. Environmentalism has been a big one. Critical race and gender theory has been another. I do not foresee ScienceTM caring about extraterrestrial discovery and exploration until those interests align with the blue tribe’s interests. Especially when so much of space exploration is now red coded thanks to Elon Musk and Space Force.
My unsubstantiated theory is that extraterrestrial life exists, and is probably just as inept as we are. I imagine a civilization of E.T.’s shitposting on Alien 4chan and levying random racial slurs over which aliens have more impressive frills or more purple appendages.
This is an almost charmingly reductive model of any job.
My industry also exists to chase tax dollars via hobby-horses. At some level, those hobby-horses are informed by serious professionals asking “is this a reliable product,” “does it align with our doctrine,” or “you’re asking us to pay how much?” Their concerns creep uphill until they meet the goals and political postures rolling downhill. Eventually the two forces reconcile in the form of a budget.
Apply this same model to “ScienceTM.” Some academics have spent decades caring an awful lot about extraterrestrial discovery and exploration. Does that all go away when the top layer of paint changes colors? Not at all. You have to purge a lot more thoroughly to see institutions of this size abandon their missions.
Perhaps another tack. What do you think NASA has been doing since the shuttle was discontinued? I promise you, it wasn’t feminist glaciology.
This account is not encouraging, and coincides with other highly-plausible critiques of NASA culture and procedures. "Feminist glaciology" isn't a perfect description, but "paying people to spin their wheels and produce nothing useful ever while actively abusing those who try to do better" seems like an analogue too close for comfort.
Entirely possible, and also not at all what I was replying to.
The parent suggested that “SpaceTM”, which I read as everyone involved in space that isn’t actively supportive of Trump, does not care about exploration. Why? Because academics have been known to spend money on environmentalism and critical race theory. Charitably, this suggests some confusion over how many academics are out there, and their level of specialization.
NASA might well be the poster child for government inefficiency, but that’s not the same thing as sandbagging. It’s not going to suddenly start “caring” about its projects once mecha-Biden is back in office.
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"Science" definitely cares about space, but basic math suggests that we are very, very far away from any possible alien life and contact will have to be initiated by them. Space exploration is a giant money sink; the real money is in building satellites, not rockets.
Any civilization that manages to accomplish interstellar travel would surely have to be significantly competent. If they really have reached Earth, it seems unlikely that they would manifest in sketchy flashes of light, often offshore. Maybe they live in water and assume Earthlings do too, though the pattern of lights would clearly suggest complex land based life.
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