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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.
I'm genuinely sorry to hear that, and I'm not being sarcastic. For what it's worth I believe I try to be extra polite when talking to you in particular, even if I'm willing to acknowledge that I can be slightly tetchy when ticked off. Can I really change that? I don't know. I have tried, I hope you believe me when I say 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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