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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

#111

Post by simion314 »

sumedh wrote: post #67
simion314 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is paradoxical is that decades ago we had many pcitures in newspapers with UFOs or Jesus/Mary apparitions (and here in Romania there were newspaper focused only on paranormal stories vampires,ghosts, witches etc) but today when is easy to create proofs with your phone the number of this encounters decreased instead of increasing. Btw my father has a similar story to tell (but with a small ball of light that move…

There are so many phones with cameras, there are dash cams in cars, there are home security cams and yet no credible ball lightning video. What does that tell you?

Good question, what does it tell you? let me add some extra info, the incident happened 50+ years ago in a village without electricity. So we have no light pollution or devices to distract people. There were 3 witnesses so it was no hallucination, so what could it be ? maybe insects, someone prank , or a rare phenomena.

But for sure I expect to see more videos with such phenomena ,I do not think that light pollution and less people outside in nature can explain the missing of the videos.

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

#112

Post by lm28469 »

mrfusion wrote: post #103
mjburgess wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't ignore them. It may be clearer to write all probabilities above as being conditioned on "our best knowledge of the universe". P(All intelligent life is organic | Our best knowldge) =~ 1 Who knows the actual P(All intelligent life is organic). My point is that OP seems profoundly ignorant of "the facts of the matter" as our best theories describe them. Such facts make D-AnythingOtherThanAliens vastly more lik…

I like your thinking but this still bothers me: > P(All intelligent life is organic | Our best knowldge) =~ 1 Even looking at ourselves, we are somewhat close to AI and it’s a reasonable belief that we’ll have something smarter than us within a few decades. Why are non organic aliens so unlikely to you?

> we are somewhat close to AI and it’s a reasonable belief that we’ll have something smarter than us within a few decades.

We've been saying that for the past 50 years or so now... We're always two years from self driving cars too.

I wouldn't be so certain about AI, don't forget the 80/20 law, we got very good at pattern matching but we're faaaaar from general AI

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

#113

Post by ErikVandeWater »

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.

My intuition is that every intelligent species is interested in space travel. That ability will be developed if possible regardless of whether it is an imperative.

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

#114

Post by badRNG »

graderjs wrote: post #68
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…

It's possible that your bias against believing this means your interpretation is a lot of bizarre takes dressed up as the only possible conclusions. What I don't get is the arrogance of every side about this subject. We have no answers. We have no understanding. The government seems to be about to admit as much. But the true believers are sure, and the true debunkers, yourself included, are sure. To me, you're both j…

> What I don't get is the arrogance of every side about this subject. We have no answers. We have no understanding. The government seems to be about to admit as much. But the true believers are sure, and the true debunkers, yourself included, are sure. To me, you're both just tin foil hat flunkies clinging to your own special precious version of the coming apocalypse. Your own special cult.

Generally speaking, it seems like good epistemology to withhold belief in propositions until evidence exists to support them. There aren't "two equally unreasonable cults" on the issue; it's unreasonable to believe in aliens absent evidence and it is reasonable to be skeptical of the former group's claims.

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

#115

Post by T-A »

admissionsguy wrote: post #19
dogma1138 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (The difference between the intelligence of Albert Einstein and an ant is far less than Albert Einstein and some living thing which is able to make it to earth and live here undetected for 60/? years ) Eh? That’s a really weird way of looking at intelligence. 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. Now one can argue that aliens…

The aliens might also be less intelligent than humans, but more advanced technologically due to the lead time or just higher cooperativity. "Dumb aliens" could be a refreshing premise for a sci-fi story.. although it lies on the same continuum as any ant-like intelligent collective, so it's nothing new after all.

Here's a classic one:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3302567-pandora-s-planet

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

#116

Post by mrob »

smcl wrote: post #78
epilys wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. I wish there was a way to share basic medicine etc to improve their life quality without further damage to their existence. It's a shame to have means of reducing suffering and not share them with your fellow beings.

Yeah it's gotta be hard to figure out where the line is between helping and interfering. A few accounts of the Sentinelese suggest they don't want any help but I think some of the peaceful exchanges in the past show that they don't mind contact and are happy to receive packages of food and bits of iron for tools. All I know is that I'm not gonna be the one to reach out, an American preacher repeatedly tried to do so…

>on one of his attempts a Sentinelese kid fired an arrow at him that struck his bible which if I was religious I would have taken as a sign to GTFO ...

If I was religious I'd have interpreted it as God protecting me, like in the tales of bibles stopping bullets.

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

#117

Post by williamstein »

Mizza wrote: post #79
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…

That sounds nice, but is it true? Weren't the Vikings, later Normen, far less advanced than the places they raided? They absorbed the technology, the land and culture and used it to conquer and form what is present-day England. Maybe we'll beat the aliens with our savagery.

Or diseases.

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

#118

Post by lioeters »

cnity wrote: post #49
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…

Maybe not the silver flying saucers claimed to have been seen hovering over barns in the mid-west, but I recommend reading Extraterrestrial for a fascinating argument for Oumuamua's likelihood in being an extraterrestrial object.

Reference:

Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth - by Avi Loeb

> Harvard’s top astronomer lays out his controversial theory that our solar system was recently visited by advanced alien technology from a distant star.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48930288-extraterrestria...

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

#119

Post by sumedh »

simion314 wrote: post #111
sumedh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many phones with cameras, there are dash cams in cars, there are home security cams and yet no credible ball lightning video. What does that tell you?

Good question, what does it tell you? let me add some extra info, the incident happened 50+ years ago in a village without electricity. So we have no light pollution or devices to distract people. There were 3 witnesses so it was no hallucination, so what could it be ? maybe insects, someone prank , or a rare phenomena. But for sure I expect to see more videos with such phenomena ,I do not think that light pollution…

> There were 3 witnesses so it was no hallucination

A mass hallucination is a phenomenon in which a large group of people, usually in physical proximity to each other, all experience the same hallucination simultaneously.

https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Mass_hallucination

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

#120

Post by mrspeaker »

oxymoran wrote: post #65
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…

Having seen a flying orb along with a complete stranger who also saw it, there is no time to just pull out my phone and snap a picture. Additionally, seeing something that is seemingly unreal is spell binding. And let’s be real, if there was a high quality photo, you would just claim it was photoshopped. You need to see it to believe it, and that’s fair.

Not to deny your orbs (though, orbs are pretty "common" - like ball lightning)... but I saw 3 flying orbs in the 90s that I thought were ufos (or, one ufo) - like they were kind of linked, but moving independently. Weird looking. I woke my parents to come and verify I wasn't crazy. I called the telephone operator (lol, trust me, they were a thing once) to get the number for the observatory and the operator said "You saw them too? Let me know if you find out what it is!". The observatory was closed and I never chased it up.

I started thinking about that again recently and went to see if others had the same experience. Ended up finding video footage of exactly what I saw, and... US spy equipment. I have the program name written down somewhere - it wasn't Black Triangle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_triangle_(UFO)) - but it was something similar. I was so disappointed.

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