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UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

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Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#31

Post by throw1742 »

bloak wrote: post #25
atweiden wrote: post #12

As Stephen Hawkings and Neil deGrasse Tyson have quipped, in Earth’s history, any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe. It’s a lot like dis…

I don't think it makes sense to compare interactions between, on the one hand, different groups of primitive humans on Earth and, on the other hand, interactions between interstellar intelligences, which might be (and in my opinion probably would be) some kind of distributed AI which does not think or behave like a living organism, the product of biological evolution. My guess is that an extraterrestrial intelligence…

Maybe Nikola Tesla was on to something when he fell in love with a pigeon...

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#32

Post by mbnull »

DrBazza wrote: post #7

UFOs exist. Alien spaceships do not. Occam's Razor. Also, having the technology to fly light years through interstellar space, means that you should surely be able to construct a craft that doesn't crash on Earth (Roswell), or waste your time flying for years to dip into the atmosphere, do a little light show and fly off, or harassing a farmer in the middle of nowhere vs landing in Central Park. The gimbal video and…

Occam's Razor postulates that the simple solution is often the right one. That does not mean it's always so. For the longest time Occam's Razor would have favored a flat earth, before we knew better.

Alien intelligence would also be alien enough if it wasn't interstellar. Interplanetary, inter-dimensional or subterranean would be alien by my standard, too.

The Videos might have been plausibly explained, but i would argue that the pentagon has certainly more footage and sensor data to base their statement on.

And please do try to take photos of planes in the night sky with your smartphone camera. The image quality is not great.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#33

Post by pacman2 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #30
pacman2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today. There are people who would disagree with this.

Why ? I've heard that things might have changed 80k years ago when thanks to cultural progress autism went from negative to positive (for the community), but otherwise AFAIK there haven't been any significant changes since the apparition of homo sapiens 350k-400k years ago ?

There is an argument that the mind of people changed a few thousand years ago, part as a cultural phenomenon, part as a genetic selection process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...

(the genetic selection process is mentioned in the book, the wiki abstract puts more focus on a cultural development)

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#34

Post by beowulfey »

gambiting wrote: post #21
noodles_nomore wrote: post #14

UFOs shouldn't be synonymous with alien intelligence. If anything evolved to travel through the universe, wouldn't it be logical to assume that it originated from a place where this ability was necessary for survival, e.g. the edge of a black hole? Such a life form could be quite different from our rock-bound existence. They might be closer to fish than to us.

Stanisław Lem has explored this sort of idea in his works very often. Like in Solaris, where the entire planet is very clearly an organism - it exhibits reactions to events, it maybe even has conscious thought, but it's on such a gigantic scale and on such long timeline that any idea of "communicating" with it is just fantasy. Or in Fiasco where there is a whole planet covered in microorganisms which have evolved a "…

Lem is a treasure of science fiction and I can’t recommend him enough.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#35

Post by atweiden »

zhdc1 wrote: post #15
atweiden wrote: post #12

As Stephen Hawkings and Neil deGrasse Tyson have quipped, in Earth’s history, any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe. It’s a lot like dis…

> ...any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites. It's very likely that we don't h…

> This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites.

What about enslavement? Here Hawkings / Neil deGrasse Tyson make another interesting point: any civilization which could peacefully colonize a galaxy is not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all. The very act of wanting to colonize self-selects for violence/exploitation.

> It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops.

Surely any civilization advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be better than we are at gathering intelligence and predicting humanity’s next move, which for all we know might threaten their interests.

If extraterrestrials are silently monitoring humans, isn’t it more likely to be for intelligence gathering purposes than for altruistic reasons? If the monitoring were intended to be altruistic, where’s the proof of the altruism?

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#36

Post by Hikikomori »

pacman2 wrote: post #33
BlueTemplar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why ? I've heard that things might have changed 80k years ago when thanks to cultural progress autism went from negative to positive (for the community), but otherwise AFAIK there haven't been any significant changes since the apparition of homo sapiens 350k-400k years ago ?

There is an argument that the mind of people changed a few thousand years ago, part as a cultural phenomenon, part as a genetic selection process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in... (the genetic selection process is mentioned in the book, the wiki abstract puts more focus on a cultural development)

One of my favourite cyberpunk novels was inspired by this, Snow Crash.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#37

Post by BlueTemplar »

pacman2 wrote: post #33
BlueTemplar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why ? I've heard that things might have changed 80k years ago when thanks to cultural progress autism went from negative to positive (for the community), but otherwise AFAIK there haven't been any significant changes since the apparition of homo sapiens 350k-400k years ago ?

There is an argument that the mind of people changed a few thousand years ago, part as a cultural phenomenon, part as a genetic selection process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in... (the genetic selection process is mentioned in the book, the wiki abstract puts more focus on a cultural development)

That's a fascinating theory, but also quite a wild claim which seems to be hard to falsify ? (And the link with the matter at hand is even more tenuous, since it's only partially genetic.)

It's a bit like if you were saying that you couldn't teach a prehistoric child to read (but even more exaggerated) ?

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#38

Post by ydbrurgsu »

notahacker wrote: post #27

The whole thing is a masterpiece of bizarre statements dressed up as reasoning Take: Second, between (Ca) spontaneous decentralized hoaxes and lies, and (Cb) hoaxes and lies coordinated by a big central organization, (Cb) seems much more likely. Apply this to reports of something other than UFOs, like, say fairies, ghosts or angels. You don't need to be an Oxford research associate writing about overcoming bias to re…

I fully agree. Side note: this post is by Robin Hanson, not Nick Bostrom.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#39

Post by antibuddy »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #30
pacman2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today. There are people who would disagree with this.

Why ? I've heard that things might have changed 80k years ago when thanks to cultural progress autism went from negative to positive (for the community), but otherwise AFAIK there haven't been any significant changes since the apparition of homo sapiens 350k-400k years ago ?

Autism is by (original) definition a disorder. If everyone has that disorder, then it is no longer a disorder.

I think many people confuse specializaiton, focus and/or intellect with autism.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#40

Post by JulianMorrison »

I think it's undercounting or failing to consider the likelihood of natural causes. That is to say, physics, biology, higher-dimensional weirdness, etc, that we don't know of and can't anticipate, but is as natural as red sprite lightning. Planes chasing tic-tac aliens could be doing the high-tech equivalent of kittens chasing a laser pointer.
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