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NSA UFO Documents Index

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Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#131

Post by jolincost »

motohagiography wrote: post #35

Went through the CIA one as well, and it's almost designed to be opaque and vague. UFO's create interesting ethical questions and can be useful thought experiments for contemporary issues. A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arr…

Oh, I love these ideas! I'm sure advanced civilizations have AIs, suoercomputers, lots of experience with this situation and some heuristics to help them decide, but i love doing the thought experiments with you :)

I agree the mere appearance of an advanced civilization could be a corrupting influence on the soon-to-be space faring savages, but then again the brutes might have other more pressing character flaws. At the same time maybe it would make sense for the advanced civilization to contact them in a covert manner so that there is sort of plausible deniability or non-verifiability to seed the ideas and create some sort of influence but limit the impact, which itself is a strategy which could create a sort of corrupt back channel between the terrestrial population and the advanced influencers.

But judging from the way that state departments handle these things it seems that early and persistent outreach, both covert and overt, and infiltration, and a mix of carrots (advanced tech, trade?) and sticks (erasure?) is the preferred method of maintaining some sort of control and relationship to manage the emerging threat or at least try to guide the development in a manner which the advance civilization sees as promoting whatever values are interests that it has.

Following the track your ideas lay out, seems if there were others out there that we're civic minded in a cosmic sense, they wouldn't adopt a hands off approach

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#132

Post by jolincost »

asdff wrote: post #120
motohagiography wrote: post #35

Went through the CIA one as well, and it's almost designed to be opaque and vague. UFO's create interesting ethical questions and can be useful thought experiments for contemporary issues. A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arr…

We don't stop the lion from eating the gazelle. Maybe exploiting our planet to the point of our extinction is the natural order of things. We could pollute all we want and while life as we know it will change, life on earth will continue as it has all these billions of years. This is a planet that gets shaken by asteroids and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions that make the entire industrial revolution look like a cigare…

You remind me of an absolutely wonderful George Carlin bit i love https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#133

Post by jolincost »

remir wrote: post #81
motohagiography wrote: post #35

Went through the CIA one as well, and it's almost designed to be opaque and vague. UFO's create interesting ethical questions and can be useful thought experiments for contemporary issues. A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arr…

It costs them nothing to wipe us out and spare the universe the trouble, so what must they believe about life, the universe, and everything to not do so. Economics may be universal, etc. Perhaps the world is highly valued in terms of its bio-diversity and life-supporting resources. There's a possibility that native civilization like us are being monitored and on some level "protected" from conquests if they show they…

Not to mock or denigrate your belief at all, it strikes me that there's a parallel between this belief and ancient human worship of nature gods.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#136

Post by jolincost »

INTPenis wrote: post #6
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #3

The redactions on some of these documents are absolutely ridiculous. What is the point for releasing documents in a state that leaves them completely useless.

Just a wild stab in the dark here but those redactions might have to do with SIGINT. Or in other words, how the UFO report came to be. Because when I saw this headline "NSA UFO Documents Index" hosted on nsa.gov, I realized why I don't care about UFO theories. Because even the NSA has given up. No sane person cares about this stuff. They will readily index it on their website to shut those lunatics up.

I liked your take on the redactions (and your crazy ass username, hehe). But, we're not lunatics, tho maybe your are for living in a fantasy of denial rather than facing the reality of the huge amounts of data on this. It seems crazier these days to deny the realities suggested by the Himalayas of reports and testimony. And this new index, well, it doesn't seem to be shutting anyone up now, tho, does it, hmm?

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#137

Post by jolincost »

anewaccount2021 wrote: post #18

If you say there are civilizations thriving somewhere in the galaxy, you're Carl Sagan. If you say our solar system may have had aliens pass by, you're an eccentric. If you say aliens landed on earth, you're a crank. Why is the sanity of the claimant inversely proportional to the distance of aliens from Earth?

This is a sage like observation. Thank you for this!

The answer is it probably is somewhat arbitrary but maybe related to human psychological proximity and the fear response. The most common response to fear is denial and so questioning the credibility of those people providing information that could provoke fear is a form of denial. The closer the object of fear the more fear therefore the more denial perhaps.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#138

Post by ryan-allen »

cookiengineer wrote: post #8

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this [1] and this [2] and especially this [3]. Area 51 was a radar testing site due to the unique properties of the salt on the ground. And they just tested a "silver shiny UFO" which was the prototype for the SR-71. And yes, this was exactly the same date when people first called radio stations and the police for UFO sightings. The Skunkworks A-12 OXCART research project led to the f…

Those spy planes are absolute marvels of engineering and creativity.

I couldn't even start to imagine what incredible stuff is currently classified and being worked on!

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#139

Post by guerrilla »

at_a_remove wrote: post #113
ikrenji wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure for the mechanisms we have come up with so far. doesn't say anything about things we come up in the future. we don't know what we don't know.

My stock response to that is that we don't know that I can't make a time machine out of some chewing gum wrappers, a rubber band, three transistors, six pipe cleaners, a AAA battery, and it only works while I wear a red hat. We also don't know that I can't use that device to go back in time to the start of the universe and change all of the physical laws so that the previous contraption cannot work. But what are the…

You could have used that argument to poo-poo someone proposing anything that was thought to be impossible before it was shown to be possible.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#140

Post by jolincost »

fpgaminer wrote: post #108
joombaga wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors". What's feeding your intuition here? I wouldnt have thought they'd likely be _that_ advanced. But I'm not sure where tens of thousands of orders of magnitude puts them on e.g. the Kardashev scale, and I'm sure being a huge Star Trek fan has affected my own intuitions :)

I love Star Trek, and that being a possible future is nice to entertain, but doesn't take into account an AI singularity. The latter, to some approximation, seems more likely to me. And that puts a Moore's law on intelligence. Not just for us, but for any potential space faring race. And it doesn't have to be just "AI"; as soon as a race has the capability to recursively improve their own intelligence they'll hit tha…

These are some nice timeframe predictions, seems more up to date than Kurzweil
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