751–760 of 1001 posts
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Why would faster than light travel be presupposed in any way?
Where do we think the aliens came from, specifically, without it?
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> but as I attempt to learn more and more about physics, travel approaching the speed of light, the mechanics that transformed us from a basic life form to a life form with a consciousness, it just seem incredibly unlikely sadly As if humanity's knowledge circa 2023 is the end-all of things!
This arrogance underpins so many comments on here. We don't know whether some breakthrough is possible that makes interstellar travel viable using hitherto unknown physics.
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It's hilarious watching how HN upvotes insane theory instead of crazy theory. Wild times! There is a very very simple explanation, which is that everything he says is true. There is a secret program, they did reverse engineer, they did withhold it from congress, and people did tell him that there is alien stuff. Why make up silly make believe? The guy isn't claiming 'oh i saw aliens'. He could simply be telling the a…
> There is a very very simple explanation I’m not sure an explanation that presupposes FTL travel is very very simple
I mean.. just accept it at face value. Stop reading into it.
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>All of this stuff reeks of some kind of psyop. Ugh, I was 100% with you until this point. This is speculative, fantastical, and I think serves to discredit the sober and calm pushback of the type exhibited in the first half of your comment. And that is desperately needed in a moment like this.
A psyop doesn’t have to be a super advanced operation. It could be some low effort opportunistic thing that helps objectives. The “declassified” UAP videos so far are rote footage containing easily debunked garbage. Why would the military release lens flare videos and claim they’re UAP? They could be blithering idiots not knowing they’re looking at lens flare, which is probably less likely than knowing it’s BS and cl…
A more mundane possibility: Someone thought, "Hey, you know, if there are aliens doing thing secretly, we'd want to know about it, right? And also, there are always going to be these stories, and if our answer is always, 'No that's probably lens flare', people are going to think we're trying to cover something up. So how about we just make a policy, that any time someone has unexplained phenomena, we log it properly? Either we'll get a long track record of nothing-burgers, or we'll actually find something. Or, maybe we'll have 50 years of nothing-burgers, followed by something actually different, and we'll have a solid 'baseline' from which to look into the new phenomenon."
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>but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not? This is the tragic sentence which is letting the parade of carnival animals in through the back door. In some sense it's true that intellectual humility is necessary as we allow ourselves to be challenged by ideas we thought not possible. But it's true the way hallmark card quotes are true, as vague generalities. It does no work as a specific response to…
A thought experiment. The universe is extremely large and billions of years old. Let's imagine life has developed within a few of those billions of galaxies out there, then imagine this started 1 billion years before us . How advanced to you think we could get in another billion years (assuming we don't annihilate ourselves)? What's really impossible?
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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…
I am usually one to treat EVERYTHING with a very healthy dose of skepticism, but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not? I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach. The US Military released rather intriguing, yet unexplained videos of objects outmaneuvering our top jets. You should go check those out. I've yet to see an explanation that covers all the data those jets…
It's usually not a 50/50 percent probability on whether something is possible or exists.
ECREE is a good rule to follow when trying to come up with probabilities lacking direct evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
For example imagine I told you I own a pencil. Would you ask me to prove it or doubt me? Even you don't know or trust me, probably not. Why? Because pencils exist, it's easy to get one, and I have no reason to lie (in this scenario).
Now what if I told you I have an invisibility cloak. You'd call me a liar and want proof, hell probably an in person demonstration. Think about why.
-------------- "I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach."
Whether or not aliens exist is not the same as not reaching space. Say it's the year 1876- 1. Aliens may or may not exist, it's unknown 2. it's a true fact that humans haven't gone to space.
I get that you mean the amount of technological advancment in the last 300 years has been crazy.
The reason the burden of proof is on whether something occurred or exists is because the number of events that haven't occured and what doesn't exist is infinite.
Finally you also ask about who is to say and I assume you also mean "why not". There's always a downside to believing false things, maybe it's small for some people or maybe a crazy person adds aliens to the pile of "government lies" then decides to shoot up some government agency.
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This arrogance underpins so many comments on here. We don't know whether some breakthrough is possible that makes interstellar travel viable using hitherto unknown physics.
For real there should be a name for this sort of categorical error in thinking.
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…
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.
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If you look at all the crazy coincidences that were required for life to develop on Earth, it starts to make sense that we're alone. Single star in the system, need a big Jupiter to block space rocks, our target is a rocky planet close to star, but needs to be hit by an abnormally large moon right as the lithosphere is cooling, ripping out 1/3rd of it so that the planet can have giant continents barely covered with w…
We don't know that any of those conditions are necessary. Right now what it looks like is certain chemistry, which happens to be pretty common, an energy gradient of sufficient magnitude, and relative stability. If we look at it as crazy coincidences, we can say that the earth is in a very unique state due to the crazy coincidences such that theres nowhere else just like it, but then, theres nowhere like anywhere els…
So our original evolutionary advantages were persistance hunting & rock throwing (ranged weapons). This gave us such a huge advantage that we had enough excess energy we could start to develop bigger brains, language and culture (tools). For it to be possible we needed:
* Huge evolutionary advantages (rock throwing? fire to cook? walking upright? sweating?)
* Vocal chords that would let us develop language
* Hands that would let us make tools
And once we have that we can start to evolve intelligence and shared culture. But for a very very long time this was evolving a trait that is an actual hinderance. So we also need for that to be our 'peacocks tail'. A costly trait that is selected _for high cost and total uselessness_. And that trait could've been practically anything else!
Imaigne all the worlds where ranged weapons are developed by a species which just can't do language. Or where they can't make tools only throw rocks they find with their evolved longbow like limbs. They'd conquer the world but that would be it. And that world is now too well optimised for another animal to develop intelligence, they can't afford it.
If this is the case life could be wildly abundant but 'intelligence' more or less unheard of. This is infact what we see in the historical record on earth, there were many epocs of dinosaurs, as far as we know none of them shaped rocks for throwing, had language or developed cultures. In the time we've been around no indepdent intelligent species have evolved (we only see evidence of ones with a common ancestor.)
I think the drake equation suffers from the same fallacy that seems to beset everyone talking about AI. Intelligence is over-rated, it is not a linear thing or a super power where more of it is always better and can solve any problem. It's incredibly costly and often quite useless. Our actual problem solving is more down to trial and error at the level of culture than we like to admit to ourselves.