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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28267 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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At this point, anyone who has anything to say re: UAP is presumed to be a hostile bullshitter. I'd not believe in UAPs even if videos of them were shown all around mainstream media.

I'm willing to give a pass to people who say "come and see this crazy plane on saturday, it can pull 50 gees" or "here is 50 gigabytes of top secret data showing anomalous craft, here are military personnel who collected it".

I'd love for the idea of (peaceful) interstellar contact to be a reality, but the problem is that it just really isn't feasible unless several major widely accepted parts of physics are actually false. The time and energy requirements needed for interstellar travel so high that any non-supernatural (i.e. angels or demons etc. instead of aliens) explanation for UFOs is prima facia false.

IMO that's an interesting but rather strange objection. Doesn't the presence of angels and demons require more flaws in the scientific understanding of physics than fast interstellar travel, not fewer?

Supernatural entities would presumably operates by rules separate from those of the physical universe. Aliens have to follow the same rules as us.

What is the difference between "rules separate from those of a physical universe" and "following the same rules as us yet exploiting the parts of them that we haven't discovered yet"?

following the same rules as us yet exploiting the parts of them that we haven't discovered yet

Relativity and the speed of light put a pretty hard limit on things

The time and energy requirements needed for interstellar travel so high that any non-supernatural (i.e. angels or demons etc. instead of spirits) explanation for UFOs is prima facia false.

I mean, I get where you are coming from, but the main objection to interstellar travel isn't energy (you could do it with Voyager 1 amounts of energy) it's just time. Which humans have very anthropocentric ideas about that may not generalize to any other entities out there.

Most of the barriers on interstellar travel are barriers on human interstellar travel, that vanish if you have a relatively long time horizon and are fine sending GPT as your ambassador instead of a human. We could almost certainly send a (very small) spacecraft to another star in my lifetime via a starwisp if we really wanted to (and maybe we will!) Relatively fast nuclear-powered travel is also theoretically possible (it should be within the laws of physics, but obviously that's a huge engineering challenge!)

With slightly more advanced technology than we have now, it should be possible to send some sort of a small constructor (not grey goo, or anything crazy like that) that could construct larger devices. Iterate to even more advanced technology, and it could even construct lifeforms ("biologics") in artificial wombs, or, even if not from scratch, from frozen embryos.

Thus you could have a situation where there are little green/grey men crashing spaceships in New Mexico like all the most far-out theories claim without breaking any physical laws, or really any novel technology that humans haven't already considered and mathematically sketched out since the early Cold War.

Frankly, I think the weird reported behavior of some of the objects (e.g. instantaneous acceleration) is much more of a problem from a physics/materialist view in my mind than the problem of interstellar travel. And of course ironically is that we have much better reasons to believe there is something out there engaging in eye-wateringly fast acceleration within Earth's atmosphere than we do that it came here from Over There. So while I'm sympathetic to the "it makes more sense for it to be supernatural" approach, I really don't think interstellar travel is the barrier that some seem to think it is. It's just that interstellar travel might not look like Star Wars.

I’d be willing to entertain the notion if anyone “convinced that Gorsch is legit” had any background in the hard sciences. Or if we had any sort of evidence of life in space. You find me a JWST image of a spaceship, we have something to talk about. If the head of the astrophysics department at MIT hears what Congress just heard, then okay there’s at least some reason to begin considering the idea. What we actually have at best are weird photos taken by the general public, statements by a few airmen, and a bunch of Congress members who haven’t taken physics since high school.

None of that in my view constitutes either someone qualified to make a judgement about what is or is not alien, or whether or not the data collected is meaningful. And none of the evidence we see is considered even interesting by anyone who is an expert on space.

I’ll say what I said when this little sideshow started. I don’t believe because there’s nothing that makes it plausible. We don’t have any evidence that interstellar travel is remotely possible, we might, maybe, have a highly speculative theory if negative mass and negative energy can exist. We don’t have evidence of life in deep space. We don’t have signals that are unambiguously artificial in origin. We don’t have images of anything artificial in space that we didn’t put up there ourselves. Until we have even one of those things there’s no reason to consider aliens a reasonable hypothesis.

I’d be willing to entertain the notion if anyone “convinced that Gorsch is legit” had any background in the hard sciences.

There are people like that (e.g. Jacques Vallee, Eric W. Davis, Hal Puthoff, Jack Sarfatti, to a certain extent Eric Weinstein) but unfortunately they’re all pretty much ‘unhinged’ to the point where it doesn’t really matter. They all believe (besides Weinstein) in things like remote viewing and parapsychological phenomena which would disqualify any materialist from taking what they say seriously prima facie, and coincidentally, all of them besides Weinstein have worked for intelligence services (ONI, CIA, NSA, etc.) before. Weinstein is a bit of a wildcard since he doesn’t believe in things beyond the materialistic paradigm he was taught in, but he also is totally divorced from academia and many people think he’s a crank since he indicates that people like Ed Witten are intelligence operatives and String Theory is a psyop, etc.

I’d be willing to entertain the notion if anyone “convinced that Gorsch is legit” had any background in the hard sciences.

Would you support declassifying the information that was shared in the January briefing that convinced the two lawmakers I cited that Grusch was legit? Then people with a background in the hard sciences could take a look at it (whatever "it" is).

Depends on what gets declassified and why. I’d at minimum want the information looked at by an outsider with a background in the relevant sciences so that we aren’t left with “Marjary Taylor Green sat in a closed session, came out and said Gorsch is telling the truth.” She has no background to let her determine what she’s seeing.

With classified stuff, even if it’s UFO stuff, it might well reveal things of use to other military and spy agencies. In order to study the airman pictures properly, you need a pretty deep understanding of the systems in the aircraft. Which would also be very interesting to China. Giving an astrophysicist clearance is probably safer.

Depends on why it is kept secret.

If it is coverup of secret weapon/sensor tests by USA military? Then probably better to keep it classified.

Is it an attempt to get Chinese to waste enormous pile of money chasing aliens? Keep it classified if it helps.

I think it's just a lot more mundane than that - the US just over classifies everything as a habit.

Also if a UAP turns out to be some PLA wunderwaffen or technical gremlin, then that's something you really shouldn't publicise. The thing about unexplained phenomena is that you don't know what they are, so better not take the risk.

and even then...

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