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Notes -
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.
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.
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