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No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#161

Post by meowster »

gfodor wrote: post #32

They exist. They are real. They aren't ours. They aren't an adversary's, because a) the military would never admit it if that were possible and b) if it were the case the adversary would have already taken over the world. There's no evidence they were made by aliens, leprechauns, or ghosts. But there's evidence they were made. Not that they are swamp gas or funny clouds. So lets get past that, and realize there's som…

> the adversary would have already taken over the world.

Maybe they're happy with the status quo. Or maybe it's a benevolant group (not anyone's adversary).

Or maybe it's ours (the U.S.) and it's being released this way as to pretend it's not ours.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#162

Post by gfodor »

WalterBright wrote: post #159
gfodor wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly possible to disprove they are alien. By not ruling it out, it's saying there is no present evidence to reject that hypothesis, which is a meaningful thing to say. It would be trivially rejectable if we had any intel it was another country, for example.

You have no evidence that Joe Biden is not a pod person. Is that a meaningful thing to say?

No, but if you assume the closure of explanations which includes "aliens" or "pod people" are interesting enough, failing to rule those out is meaningful, despite the fact it doesn't imply a specific conclusion is true (like aliens or pod people)

If we could disprove Joe Biden was a human, and couldn't disprove he was a pod person, alien, ghost, or leprechaun, that indeed would be an interesting set of conditions.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#163

Post by WalterBright »

gfodor wrote: post #162
WalterBright wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no evidence that Joe Biden is not a pod person. Is that a meaningful thing to say?

No, but if you assume the closure of explanations which includes "aliens" or "pod people" are interesting enough, failing to rule those out is meaningful, despite the fact it doesn't imply a specific conclusion is true (like aliens or pod people) If we could disprove Joe Biden was a human, and couldn't disprove he was a pod person, alien, ghost, or leprechaun, that indeed would be an interesting set of conditions.

Maybe you should alert CNN to the fact that science hasn't yet ruled out the possibility that Joe Biden is a pod person.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#164

Post by tombert »

WalterBright wrote: post #158
tombert wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I don't think these are alien, BUT... You might not be able to "prove a negative" in the purely scientific sense, but you can rule out most options to effectively "prove a negative". If, for example, Russia came out and took credit for these things, and showed working prototypes of these crafts, would that "prove" (in the truest, mathematical sense of the word) that they aren't aliens? No, I suppose Russ…

Can you "rule out" I'm an alien?

Again, not in the truest mathematical sense of the word, no, but I can reasonably rule it out in most practical senses:

a) You look like a human b) You write human language c) We have not seen any direct evidence for any kind of humanoid alien life, but we have seen lots of evidence for humans existing. d) If you were an alien spying on human culture, you wouldn't waste your time on Hacker News :).

Does this fully "rule out" the possibility of you being an alien? No, I suppose you could be an alien in a human skin suit who learned English, and maybe aliens are really interested in software engineering forums, but I can practically rule it out just playing the odds.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#165

Post by meowster »

gfodor wrote: post #154
walexander wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Self-replicating probes could exhaustively explore a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as a million years" - Wikipedia [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox ] The possibility of these things being extraterrestrial in origin does not seem that farfetched, honestly. If you assume something like a Von Neumann probe [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo... ] to be possible (a…

If you assume a civilization (or AI singularity) eventually stops worrying about destroying itself, and the bulk of the risk to it stems from external civilizations unleashing galaxy destroying technologies (perhaps unintentionally), it seems logical that if a) such probes are technologically feasible and b) life can originate in places beyond Earth with some meaningful probability that you should expect to find a ga…

Perhaps are afraid that making themselves known would increase the chances of others developing galaxy-destroying technologies.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#166

Post by tombert »

WalterBright wrote: post #159
gfodor wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly possible to disprove they are alien. By not ruling it out, it's saying there is no present evidence to reject that hypothesis, which is a meaningful thing to say. It would be trivially rejectable if we had any intel it was another country, for example.

You have no evidence that Joe Biden is not a pod person. Is that a meaningful thing to say?

We absolutely have evidence that Joe Biden is not a pod person (just not absolutely "proof"). No one has ever demonstrated the existence of pod people (assuming that by "pod person" you mean 1950's-esque scifi comics pod people), and we've seen lots of evidence that Joe Biden is a human. Since we know humans exist, but we don't have any reason to believe that pod people exists, that does serve as evidence that Joe Biden is not a pod person.

I feel like you're purposefully conflating terms here.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#167

Post by WalterBright »

tombert wrote: post #164
WalterBright wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you "rule out" I'm an alien?

Again, not in the truest mathematical sense of the word, no, but I can reasonably rule it out in most practical senses: a) You look like a human b) You write human language c) We have not seen any direct evidence for any kind of humanoid alien life, but we have seen lots of evidence for humans existing. d) If you were an alien spying on human culture, you wouldn't waste your time on Hacker News :). Does this fully "r…

You can just as safely "rule out" the possibility that these UFOs are aliens.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#168

Post by fighterpilot »

generalizations wrote: post #115
fighterpilot wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that and this is my thinking behind it. (1) The number of filters they've passed through without destroying themselves suggests that they've overcome tribalism. The late-stage species most prone to violence are also the ones most prone to self destruction before they developed the tech to traverse space and get to Earth. We don't have good predictions on the destructive potential of future tech, but supp…

> The number of filters they've passed through without destroying themselves suggests that they've overcome tribalism. We can't know that - once you can spread to multiple planets, even planet-killer tech isn't an extinction-level event. > selective pressure towards tribal conflict Over thousands, or millions of years; not only that, but you have to have selective pressure against tribalism to actually remove the ins…

  "even planet-killer tech isn't an extinction-level event."
We're talking about probabilities.

You're right that a civilization that has violent tendencies may not self-destruct since it may turn out that the destructive potential of future technology is confined to the capacity of city-scale destruction instead of solar-system-scale destruction. Or they may escape their host planet quickly and diversify before nukes or whatever comes after nukes wipes them out.

But it seems to me that the probability of extinction is non-trivially positively correlated with violent and tribal tendencies once that civilization reaches our stage of development. And so that nudges the odds towards an advanced alien civilization being peaceful.

  "Over thousands, or millions of years"
Yeah, over a million years, which is not much on cosmic timescales. If FTL travel isn't possible, it'll take many millions of years to go anywhere.

I believe it won't end up as a vestigial organ and will be actively selected against. Tribal conflict has a positive reward to the victor in a resource constrained environment but is negative sum over both parties. Without the payoff to the victor then all we are left with is a negative sum outcome which should be selected against. The only thing I'm not sure of is tribal conflict over reproductive capital, although I can imagine that technology could make that abundant as well.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#169

Post by gfodor »

WalterBright wrote: post #163
gfodor wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if you assume the closure of explanations which includes "aliens" or "pod people" are interesting enough, failing to rule those out is meaningful, despite the fact it doesn't imply a specific conclusion is true (like aliens or pod people) If we could disprove Joe Biden was a human, and couldn't disprove he was a pod person, alien, ghost, or leprechaun, that indeed would be an interesting set of conditions.

Maybe you should alert CNN to the fact that science hasn't yet ruled out the possibility that Joe Biden is a pod person.

Your snark is duly noted, thank you for your contributions.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#170

Post by WalterBright »

tombert wrote: post #166
WalterBright wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no evidence that Joe Biden is not a pod person. Is that a meaningful thing to say?

We absolutely have evidence that Joe Biden is not a pod person (just not absolutely "proof"). No one has ever demonstrated the existence of pod people (assuming that by "pod person" you mean 1950's-esque scifi comics pod people), and we've seen lots of evidence that Joe Biden is a human. Since we know humans exist, but we don't have any reason to believe that pod people exists, that does serve as evidence that Joe Bi…

> I feel like you're purposefully conflating terms here.

Not at all. But go ahead and believe those fuzzy blobs (pictures of UFOs are somehow always fuzzy blobs) are aliens if you like.

Do you know why the UFO pictures are always fuzzy blobs? Because if they were clear pictures, we'd recognize they are birds/balloons/drones/Venus/whatever.

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