Yeah, I didn’t say any of that. I try and speak very literally. I understand that me arguing pro aliens often leads to people saying I must be convinced aliens are here, but if you want to understand me, just take the words I say at face value.
You’re almost there. Any good photo must have no other explanation, because literally any other explanation is vastly more likely. Again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The % likelihood being the variable that we all assign without any specific knowledge regarding life outside our universe. It’s mostly assumptions and guessing.
MikeJ
1633
If you set the parameters of the Drake equation such that there is only a 50% chance of a co-existing civilisation, that would be true. What I am saying is that is that given all the unknowns in the equation, I’ll saying something like 50/50 average over many possible settings of the parameters. IIRC, some study that came out a few years ago put it around 30%. So a good chance we are completely alone in the galaxy, but in the other 50% there is also some significant chance that there are many coexisting civilisations, some of them quite old.
…just when I thought I’d heard it all. :)
-Tom
woops! I meant solar system. That on the heels of me scolding somebody for not taking my words literally, ha ha.
So do you believe they could potentially be observer/sensor errors, natural meteorological effects or earth-sourced vehicles? How do any of those, if you accept them as plausible, leave any room for discussions of aliens?
Generally speaking yes, but each case needs to be taken on it’s own merit. So if I were to look at the Nimitz case for example, I find observer/sensor errors and weather effects to be highly unlikely, but human technology likely. This will vary on a case by case basis.
Where my opinion differs from most folks here I think is I give the % aliens chance a higher number than most.
So let’s put aside all the ways you can fake a photo like that and try this:
I walk outside tomorrow and see what looks like a metal disc flying through the air. Show me the chain of logic that gets me from that observation to the belief that the object in question must originate from another planet. Because I sincerely don’t see it.
You know, the more charitably I read this, the more boring it becomes. So there’s a recording, or a witness testimony, of something we don’t recognize and it could be anything. Could it, theoretically, be aliens? Well aliens are included in “anything” so I guess so?
Congratulations, your claim is both technically correct and completely trivial.
ShivaX
1640
I’d argue that interstellar travel also isn’t simple.
Between those two things, odds get real small, real fast.
Warp is theoretically possible. If you can convert the entire mass of Jupiter into energy you can get a small ship in a warp bubble.
Which is something that most sci-fi would balk at.
JMR
1641
They’re at the party with Richter of course.
Menzo
1642
I think assuming that our knowledge of the laws of physics and the universe are complete is naive and refuted by human history.
We all know that our current knowledge makes it very difficult or impossible to imagine interstellar travel. But there was also a time when people thought your lungs might collapse if you travel faster than around 20mph and that the sun revolves around the Earth.
We also think about time in context of a human lifetime. What if there are beings that live for millennia? Or beings that exist in machines that could “live” for eternity?
Multiverses rubbing up against ours is real scientific theory. There was something in the news last year about it.
Anyway you all are wondering why they’re here, I found some documentary evidence on the subject.
Extraterrestrial life, perhaps even life we could someday interact with, seems quite possible. I just don’t think that popularly imagined or speculated UFOs have any connection to it.
His next tweet is just as good
It’s remarkable how little people care
Here’s an example (there are many) of the guy who studied UAP for the government for a decade implying that its aliens. You only need to watch a few minutes to get the point, but the whole interview is intriguing.
Like I listen to doctors about getting a vaccine, I listen to people that have the information I do not have to help form my opinions. Worth noting it’s not just him, and yes I acknowledge they could be lying or doing some sort of government psyop or something, but even that explanation is interesting.
What a mystery indeed…
I cannot add anything to the discussion about our soon-to-be alien overlords (who, for the record, I for one welcome, in case they are watching this), but I do have some admittedly old but perhaps relevant experience with government secrets.
People hinting at vast arrays of occult knowledge that, if only they could talk about it, would blow your mind, has been a thing probably since the first security clearance was issued. There are, no doubt, a lot of things that governments keep hidden that would be interesting, maybe shocking even. I’ve seen some of them, though at this point in history very little of it would be interesting, or relevant, except for some of the context perhaps. But back then, in the Cold War, you also got people making veiled statements and implying all sorts of mysteries, and of course never following through with any revelations worthy of the name. The stuff that actually was significant, Glomar Explorer, Pentagon Papers, whatever, came out largely due to non-government actions and ultimately was backed up by actual evidence. Of course, none of that stuff was particularly earth-shattering to anyone with a brain, either, much like how Snowden’s revelations that the NSA–gasp!–spied on people.
tl;dr, there may or may not be lots of valuable info locked behind the veil of secrecy, but knowing winks and nods and hints of things to come have been part of the culture of conspiracy that lives on the fringes of government secrets for decades. I’m not sure how valuable any of that stuff is. The reality is that people with high clearances by and large do not talk about the stuff they are cleared for, unless there is something epochal they feel is absolutely essential to be made public. If anything, though, might get someone to risk jail or worse, you would think it would be clear evidence of ETI or alien technology. Given that people like Manning and Snowden risked all sorts of retribution for what turns out to be IMO rather mundane dirty laundry, you would think that if some reasonably large group of people had knowledge of alien-related stuff, they would have come forward by now. And not just in veiled hints. The only way to do it and get out alive really is to gather up as much as you can, dump it all at once, and run like hell.
Years ago (long before Uber) I had a summer job driving people home from airports (back then, a surprising number of people actually commuted by airplane and would come home for weekends after working a week at some other place in the country.) One guy said he was a physicist who worked at Lawrence Livermore, and he shared that they had developed an energy source so efficient a tiny amount was enough to power all the lights in San Francisco for a year - but it was quashed by the government because it would ruin the oil and gas industry.
I didn’t believe him, but I couldn’t say that of course.
[I’d be remiss if I didn’t add I too anxiously await the arrival of our alien overlords.]
Spoiler: Slightly political, read at your own risk.
(Climate change was at the time only a nascent issue and not yet partisan but we had started studying it in my environmental studies classes at UVM. At the time acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer were much larger issues in the public eye.) Nevertheless, I shared that story with my conservative evangelical Christian roommate and he was like “well yeah, the government had to do that, we need the oil and gas industry.” :/
I’m also of the opinion that the human race is the only intelligent species in the galaxy at this point in time. So that’s why I consider it more likely. :)
Of course, ‘more likely’ in this context is still infinitesimally small odds. And with regards to what I believe these ufos are… I always have to think about ball lightning.
Ball lightning sightings have been around for as long as the written word exists and for the longest time everybody believed it to be fiction. Yet at some point in the 60’s it became clear that all these sightings were too consistent with one another to be dismissed as pure fiction. Fast forward to 2014 when a Chinese science team happened to capture a ball lightning on camera, which tentatively proved one of the proposed hypothesis that ball lightning is a silicon gas cloud, super-heated by lightning.
Point being: for fifty years, ball lightning was a phenomena that was real, yet unexplained.
So to loop that back to a ufo and what I think they are; we still don’t know exactly how the universe is constructed and what rules apply. A ufo might very well be a ‘natural’ effect of existing rules of physics that we simply cannot recognize because of that incomplete understanding. This also would explain some of the seemingly impossible things ufos can do.
