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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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