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What does the Motte think about UFOs/UAPs? I ask because there was a relatively big instance of "disclosure" today within the UFO community. A former senior US intelligence figure (who allegedly had enough high level classifications to report directly to the president) has apparently stated to Congress and journalists that the US has recovered "non-human technology."
From the article:
I figure that most people in this community are good rationalists and dismiss UFOs/UAPs/"non-human intelligences" out of hand. Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all? What would?
For those who, like me, think this (in conjunction with the massive amount of other evidence for UFOs/UAPs/etc.) is fairly good evidence that this phenomenon is real, what might be the social and political implications of this? It's kind of hard for me to imagine anything changing our current political stalemate and trajectory, and I can definitely imagine a situation where the US completely admits to the existence of "non-human intelligences" only for the story to be overtaken the next day when Trump says something allegedly racist, or whatever. And unless reverse-engineered non-human technology starts seeping into consumer electronics or something, it's hard to see it affecting people that much on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine news that could be more important.
I've raised this issue before and gotten a bombardment of scepticism. The issue is that people set base rates too low and then use that to explain why they won't accept evidence that would raise their base rate. Cameras? We have decades of recordings from radar and military jets! We have 'Foo Fighters' from WW2, we have the Wow signal.
And why should the base rate for alien civilizations be so low? We really don't know what we're dealing with - we are not an ancient civilization. We haven't reached the highest levels of technological attainment. Our understanding of the universe is very limited. What is 'dark' matter and energy (95% of the universe's matter/energy)? How does gravity work with the rest of physics? We don't have stellar-scale particle accelerators or superintelligences, we don't even have controlled fusion.
We don't have the knowledge necessary to model advanced civilizations. Would they be building Dyson Spheres en masse or are Dyson Spheres pleb-tier megastructures? Are there far better ways to acquire resources that we just don't know about? Would this have some relation to dark matter and dark energy, which make stars look rather small and ineffectual?
Even based upon what we do know, interstellar travel is trivial for a powerful civilization. According to wikipedia it would only take half a million years for Von Neumann probes to proliferate throughout the galaxy at 0.1c. Even if there are 10x more unexpected difficulties, 5 million years is peanuts. If we remove the 'UFO's definitely aren't aliens' firewall, then we get to solve the Great Silence mystery as well.
Sure, the 1561 sighting could be some combination of 'a very unusual sundog' and excessive religiosity. Radar does have glitches. People get drunk and make mistakes. Fakes are not unknown. But what couldn't be explained away in such a fashion? Everything short of a gigantic Independence Day style battleship! If there are any extraterrestrials that use even a modicum of subtlety, this approach would miss them. We need a more targeted, precise epistemology (without all the people who airily pronounce that interstellar travel is extremely unlikely, they've disqualified themselves).
Furthermore, I dislike the attitude of the skeptics. CuriousCA goes on about how highly credentialed experts in the field are fabulists (or some proportion of them). Wouldn't this wipe out Newton or Galileo? Our understanding of the universe improves when a small number of experts disagree with the crowd. Most critically, we advance by assessing evidence, not smearing people as quacks if they dare swim against the current. The people best equipped to assess evidence are those at the National Reconnaisance Office like Grusch or 'I founded eight biotech companies' tier biologists as in the last time this came up. I reckon we'd have a lot more such whistleblowers without the universal derision field for the whole topic, as with HBD or other matters.
We have radar, pilot testimony, aircraft cameras, testimony from high-ranking officials (from many different nations). What more is needed apart from little green men waddling around on the White House Lawn? If that is what you need to update, going from 0.0001 to 1 in a moment, then you're not a good rationalist.
If the US couldn't cover up its torture chambers in Iraq, fake Russiagate stories or spying on the public for more than a few years, how can they cover up a massive psy-op lasting since the Nimitz sightings in 2004, if not longer?
What makes me highly skeptical of the "totally aliens" take is, according to all currently known physics, it's impossible to travel between stars in a remotely reasonable timeframe without an engine with such massively powerful output that it'll be obvious to everyone, especially considering it would pretty much have to be pointed directly at the Earth.
This means that either 1. There are no aliens because it would be blindingly obvious, or 2. Any existing aliens that have made it here have technology capable of bypassing this apparent requirement, which would be so far beyond anything we can conceive of that we would probably be effectively primitive apes to them. And if they're that advanced, why are they spending their time zipping around the Earth in weirdo semi-invisible craft that can only occasionally be seen but never really interact with us. They'd be perfectly capable of taking whatever they want.
If aliens want minerals or lebensraum, there's no shortage out there. They would only be here for observation or fun. There's nothing to take, only sights to see or cheap laughs from messing with the locals.
You could definitely make a Von Neumann probe with only our known physics, that's enough to get a presence in every star system in the galaxy.
One could also conceive of stealthy engines with obscenely high exhaust velocities, directed in a tight beam so they're hard to see. Or perhaps some gigantic coilgun that accelerates a package to relativistic speeds. What do we know about high-speed space travel, we've got no experience at all!
What you're missing is that they have to slow down. They can't just go fast and stay that way, then they crash fast.
And slowing down requires exhaust pointed back vaguely in earth's direction, I would think.
Two beams of cold exhaust (more efficient that way, even), each angled epsilon radians off center in opposite ways, would be basically invisible but would still be 100% minus epsilon squared as efficient.
The bigger reason there's said to be No Stealth In Space is heat - your power plant will have to radiate a ton of waste heat, your life support will be warm, etc. But the catch is that your radiators don't have to be omnidirectional. A peer doesn't care; they can have a network of sensors in every direction ... but hiding from 21st century Earth would be easier.
I still don't believe in alien visitors. You can't hide the Dyson cloud they came from. If their tech can't get a Dyson cloud (enough orbital colonies to occlude their star noticably) operational they probably can't get here either; if their science is so advanced they don't need a Dyson cloud then they probably won't screw up and be seen while they're here. If their tech is still in flux ... why? the Universe is billions of years old; it would require a huge coincidence for the most advanced alien intelligence in our galaxy to be mere millenia ahead of us rather than eons ahead or behind.
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The UFOs we observe seem to have no problems with inertia or producing enormous plumes of exhaust. Maybe there's a physics breakthrough they've made that we aren't aware of.
Alternately, one could pulse the engine in other directions than directly towards Earth. Move the angle up 1 arcsecond and you're still decelerating but the particles will go past the Moon. Or use some planet as cover for your burn. Or use any technology or tactic that a peak-superintelligence could come up with, given stellar-scale resources. I can't stress enough how much we don't know about post-singularitarian civilizations, we are not in a position to define their capabilities and limits.
Maybe the probes arrived a million years ago - it seems overly convenient that we should reach technological civilization within 100 years of aliens first arriving. If they're out there, they ought to meet us in the distant past or distant future.
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