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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?
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.
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.
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 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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