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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
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.
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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