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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38184 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I have to say that I really, really want all this UFO stuff to be true, mostly because this implies that there's an "adult in the neighborhood" who won't let a super-intelligence be created, it would imply that we'd have to share the cosmic endowment with aliens, but I'll take the certainty of getting a thousand bucks over the impossibility a billion.

However, If the US has had alien technology for decades and kept it a secret, this implies that the US has essentially sacrificed unbelievable amounts of economic and technological growth for the sake of... what, exactly? Preventing itself from having asymmetric warfare capabilities?! Isn't asymmetric warfare the entire goal of the US military? The rationale for maintaining this unbelievable level of secrecy for 8 decades, through democrat and republican presidents, through wars and economic crises, just doesn't seem that strong to me.

So therefore, barring actual physical evidence, it seems that the US intelligence apparatus is trying to make us believe that alien tech exists, and I have no clue why. This is obviously a fairly complicated operation given all the high-level people who keep coming forward, but I can't see what is to be gained here. So overall, my impression at the whole UFO phenomenon is massive confusion, I can't come up with a single coherent model of the world which makes sense of everything I'm seeing.

This honestly makes more sense than anything else- might it be an attempt to safeguard US hegemony by convincing eg Saudi Arabia that massive American technological advances are just around the corner? After all, Saudi Arabia believes lots of crazy things and the US intelligence apparatus does not seem very good at modeling their behavior.

Yeah, the only way I can make sense of this (apart from the guy being a UFO nut and there have been plenty of them) is if it's all some big disinformation campaign aimed at China/Russia/take your pick from Turkey to Europe to whomever: "Oh yes, we have secret UFO tech, don't you?"

Then get Xi Jinping or Kim Jong Un turning the house upside-down demanding "Where's our secret UFO tech, then? If the dumb round-eyes have it, why don't we???"

Seems more likely that it’s aimed at Turkey/Saudi/India or another strategically important but somewhat backwards country trying to convince it to align with USA than a strategic enemy- China and Russia can’t really be expected to change their behavior on the basis of just how superior to them the US is.

However, If the US has had alien technology for decades and kept it a secret, this implies that the US has essentially sacrificed unbelievable amounts of economic and technological growth for the sake of... what, exactly? Preventing itself from having asymmetric warfare capabilities?!

that is of course if reverse engineering the technology is at all possible. It could be the case as described by Bob Lazar of Scientists of past centuries in possession of an atomic reactor.

Bob Lazar is a lying hack, but that particular point of his is true, it's just that in that case, there's no downside to revealing the secret. Other countries won't do much better at deciphering the hidden tech, so we might as well use the US's dominance in science to make as much progress as possible with this.

that would be incredible risky, as from the get go you don't know how feasible to reverse engineer the technology is. Maybe after revealing it to the world a stroke of luck in a Chinese lab allows them to do what the US couldn't do in 80 years. That would put the west in a very bad situation.

Yeah, I certainly agree about the confusion. I'd add that it doesn't seem totally unbelievable to me that the US military would want to keep potentially powerful military tech secret given that a good chunk of those 80 years occurred during the Cold War.

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