361–370 of 1001 posts
It sort of reminds me of the "God of the Gaps" fallacy.
I saw an interview with this guy just yesterday. He didn't see anything himself. His claim is that some people, and he believes them to be trustworthy, confided in him and showed him some documents. So, at best his testimony is hearsay. All of this stuff reeks of some kind of psyop. My belief is that for some reason, the US government used psychology tests to identify a select few people who naturally "want to believ…
I'd also assume this is just a psyop, though more in the more general propaganda sense. You want other countries to both overestimate and underestimate you. If other countries think there's a serious possibility that the US has alien technology then they'll be extra cautious. I doubt anyone buys it, personally. But propaganda operations definitely have unintended consequences, I'd personally guess that experiments on…
It’s not even the biggest country by land area. And it’s only a small percentage of the total land area of earth.
And while we’re at it, why do aliens always crash land where the number of witnesses is close to one?
It almost makes you think that all these phenomena are observer dependent.
If true, I'm curious to know how the government even came into possession of such non-human aircraft. E.g. - did they shoot it down? (this seems to contradict the claims that the aircraft can perform unrealistic maneuvers like massive acceleration / extreme changes in vector) - did some random farmer stumble upon the craft? (then why didn't the farmer post photos of it online and/or speaking out about it) - where was…
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Given the enormity of the universe and the seeming[0] impossibility of FTL travel, plus the complete absence of astronomical observation of extraterrestrial civilization, and the incredibly tiny (on astronomical scales) window of time in which we have data, any other explanation for pretty much any phenomena we care to observe will be more likely than "aliens did it". [0] extremely well supported
Even if we pretended aliens wouldn't be able to surpass FTL, Von Neumann probes only take half a million years to spread across an entire galaxy, which is a grain of sand of time in cosmological timescales. "Let's take a look at one of John von Neumann's most fascinating contributions to science: the Von Neumann probe. Simply put, a Von Neumann probe is a self-replicating device that could, one day, be used to explor…
And then there's the general time scale. I agree that half a million years (or even 10 million years) isn't much in the grand scheme of things. But it matters to us: what if this alien civilization sent them out 50 thousand years ago? They may not have gotten to us yet. Or what if they were sent out 100 million years ago? It's unclear if they'd still exist today, or if they would have broken down, their repair and replication systems failing after all those years; even if they are still around, maybe the civilization that sent them out doesn't exist anymore.
Also consider that building these probes is pretty much at or beyond the limit of our technological capabilities right now. We might be able to build enough of them as a seed fleet if we devoted tens of trillions of dollars to the project. And accelerating something to 0.1c is nothing to sneeze at either. Remember that they also have to decelerate from that speed in order to find targets for mining in order to fuel themselves and their replication systems, or even just to enter orbit around a planet or star. They'd require some pretty advanced software to run them, too.
I've seen quite a few articles and videos on Von Neumann probes, created by people I respect, but even many of them acknowledge that building these and sending these out would not be a small undertaking. A civilization that did so would have to be at a point where they've solved most of their problems at home (or be in dire need of finding a new home, but at the same time able to wait thousands or millions of years to find one) before they could justify taking this on.
(Remember, the person upthread isn't talking about the mere existence of aliens. They were talking about the improbability of us having some evidence or experience of their existence.)
HN is in for quite the gut punch. All of this is happening because of the 2023 NDAA provisions where congress invalidated all NDAs blocking disclosure (to congress, not the public).
Not saying this guy is 100% legit, but hang on…
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Or it crashed of its own accord, but instead of a farmer finding it, they'd been tracking it carefully and got there first.
Like an enemy weather balloon
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Why does it have to be a conspiracy? Some small but significant portion of the population is mentally ill, and it seems likely a few would hear a joke ("we keep the alien space ships through that door, I'd show you but I'd have to kill you"), take it way too literally, and it becomes the focus of their mental illness. That seems not only possible but probable given the size the military industrial complex.
Also people who don't understand what is or is not possible easily get confused about what is impossible / difficult versus possible / easy. My guess is that a substantial fraction of otherwise competent American adults don't realise VTOL jet aircraft are a thing we can and have built for example, and that if one of them saw a prototype like the Flying Bedstead (Rolls Royce experimental platform, which doesn't look a…
The paradox about this is that even though our sensor technology keeps getting vastly better we still only have evidence at the extreme edge of it. Never any really conclusive proof -- spaceship lands and aliens get out and get caught on video. And then there's this guy who just knows about a secret government program, but hasn't seen any of it. It sort of reminds me of the "God of the Gaps" fallacy.
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That reminds me of an amusing story I read in Analog several years ago. I don't remember the name or author. It was about the first time travel trip. The team that developed the first time machine decided to send the first traveler to visit Shakespeare, figuring that Shakespeare had a flexible enough mind to not be freaked out by the visit. When the traveler got to Shakespeare they were right that he did not freak ou…
I suspect time-travelling and Shakespeare is a whole sub-genre, the one I know is one where Shakespeare travelled forward in time and enrolled in a university Shakespeare course - which he then failed... There must be at least one where all his works were actually sent back in time for him to copy from, leading to all sorts of questions as to who originally wrote them.