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Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

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Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#81

Post by prox »

sammalloy wrote: post #60
prox wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly? Not to be such savages. With which I mean is that we are hilariously incompetent when it comes to basic rights, freedoms and most of all structuring society. If we worked together in true unison, we have enough riches/resources to feed, clothe and give a home to anyone who needs it. Just for a moment imagine if the military budgets didn’t need to be spend. Note I am not advocating any ideology or political…

> we are indeed underdeveloped savages We really are. I’ve been trying to improve myself, and I’ve been practicing a form of cultivating metta. If anyone reading this wants to experiment with their mind, this is a truly difficult practice. The next time someone wrongs you or hurts you, intentionally or unwittingly, try to show some compassion and understanding for them. That act goes against our very nature, and unde…

Metta is very good, and I hope we all find this way of seeing! I honestly feel that if we all practiced it, wars would cease to exist. It’s not important to be right or wrong, it’s important to feel reciprocated and seen as a human being. It’s an attitude we could all benefit from and integrate in our culture.

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#82

Post by euroderf »

Apocryphon wrote: post #11

I was listening to a fun podcast episode about a couple of folks who founded a UFO-related political third party: https://www.buzzsprout.com/760511/11204787-gabriel-green-the... And it mentioned there was a flying saucer craze in 1947- Roswell wasn't even the most interesting story then. It made me think, these myths and legends are highly historically and culturally contextual. Alien UFOs replaced phantom airships r…

The most interesting story was the flying saucer invasion of Washington DC in the early 60s.

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#83

Post by euroderf »

prox wrote: post #43
motohagiography wrote: post #7

Fun topic because the question of under what conditions would we as humans would contact another less advanced civilization in space opens up some pretty interesting but simple criteria. We would need for that civilization to not be a danger to us, not only from a technology angle, but from an ontological perspective. When you look at how insane other creatures in nature are and the biological economics of their surv…

Honestly? Not to be such savages. With which I mean is that we are hilariously incompetent when it comes to basic rights, freedoms and most of all structuring society. If we worked together in true unison, we have enough riches/resources to feed, clothe and give a home to anyone who needs it. Just for a moment imagine if the military budgets didn’t need to be spend. Note I am not advocating any ideology or political…

A third rate civilization on a backwater spiral arm. It is what it is.

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#84

Post by grishka »

adrianN wrote: post #80
grishka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a clear line between "the cat says meow and you figure out what it wants based on the context" and "someone thinks something and says it out loud such that you now have the same thought". It's this process of transfer of abstract thoughts between people, and later the ability to preserve those thoughts on paper, that made our civilization possible.

So were is the line? Is an Ape using sign language on our side of the line, or on the cat's side? At what age does a child cross the line?

On the cat's side. They don't use it to represent abstract ideas.

I can describe to you something you've never seen and have no idea about, yet you'll be able to imagine it and reason about it from my description alone. Apes or dolphins or crows or dogs or other animals we consider smart can't do that. If they could do it, they'd have their own civilization by now. It's a uniquely human trait among all life forms we're aware of.

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#85

Post by motohagiography »

sammalloy wrote: post #59
motohagiography wrote: post #7

Fun topic because the question of under what conditions would we as humans would contact another less advanced civilization in space opens up some pretty interesting but simple criteria. We would need for that civilization to not be a danger to us, not only from a technology angle, but from an ontological perspective. When you look at how insane other creatures in nature are and the biological economics of their surv…

> The question I have would be, what would we as a species need to demonstrate to be allowed "off leash," in a community of other spacefaring civilizations? What consistent understanding would each person as a random human need to have to be able to be relied upon to interact safely with a spacefaring being? I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. answered this question in 1967: > Modern man suffers from a kind of pover…

It's almost as though every person already has the tools and a manual, and we each have the individual choice whether to become it or not. :)

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#86

Post by grishka »

alrlroipsp wrote: post #67
galaxyLogic wrote: post #45

Reason to be skeptical: For the last 10 years (?) or so most everybody has a mobile phone with high-quality camera in it and most people carry their phone with them all the time. Shouldn't that mean that the quality and quantity of UFO evidence should have exploded since about 10-15 years ago? But I haven't seen any articles about how much more and how much better quality UFO evidence we have now that anybody whose s…

Do this as an execerise: Take your phone outside, find an airplane. Try to take a photo.

I did once. It turned out nice.

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#87

Post by nprateem »

ben_w wrote: post #78
nprateem wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but in aggregate, I trust them to be able to collectively say "something weird is going on". 100+ ex-service personnel testified in front of Congress about UFOs interfering with and disabling nukes in siloes over several decades. Can't find a link ATM but it's on Youtube somewhere I think.

"Weird" describes far more options than just ETs. My dad worked in the defence sector, on IFF transponders; Plessy when I was young, Marconi bought them out, I think his division was bought by BA around the time he retired. Not sure who before Plessy. But I digress: one of his stories was about a light in the workshop that would not switch off . Eventually they got a technician in, who saw the switch did nothing to t…

Exactly. If something's weird, it should be investigated. Not curtail the careers of people who do report it to discourage others reporting weird things. However, when those weird things are backed up by multiple sensors, and relate to multiple objects flying in formation maneuvering in ways far beyond technology we know about, there are only a few possibilities, and they should all be seriously considered.

The US government/military (and probably still large parts of the secret side) has been actively FUDding over the years (e.g. curtailing careers of people who report UFOs, project Blue Book), so you have to weigh things up on the balance of what evidence you can find. Short of little green men landing in front of a news crew, some people won't accept anything, even now the US is admitting to investigating them.

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#88

Post by colordrops »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #77
colordrops wrote: post #2

Funny enough I was just reading the book "In Plain Sight" [1] before I flipped over to hacker news. It's a book about the serious investigation into UAPs by various governments, and is heavily sourced, with often times a half dozen references per page, many official and declassified sources. It's hard to come out of reading it without being strongly convinced that these UAP are not of human or natural origin. [1] htt…

I think there is one very powerful argument against the idea that any alien life form has visited Earth since the humanity existed: the humanity still exists.

That makes a lot of unfounded assumptions about the nature of advanced alien life.

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#89

Post by ben_w »

nprateem wrote: post #87
ben_w wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Weird" describes far more options than just ETs. My dad worked in the defence sector, on IFF transponders; Plessy when I was young, Marconi bought them out, I think his division was bought by BA around the time he retired. Not sure who before Plessy. But I digress: one of his stories was about a light in the workshop that would not switch off . Eventually they got a technician in, who saw the switch did nothing to t…

Exactly. If something's weird, it should be investigated. Not curtail the careers of people who do report it to discourage others reporting weird things. However, when those weird things are backed up by multiple sensors, and relate to multiple objects flying in formation maneuvering in ways far beyond technology we know about, there are only a few possibilities, and they should all be seriously considered. The US go…

> and they should all be seriously considered.

They are. And the various airforces have always investigated unidentified flying objects simply because that's literally the point of having an airforce.

This generally comes in one of three conclusions:

1. We had a secret research project all along, and thanks to codeword-level classification the people who spotted our secret planes/drones/method for interfering with our own sensor data had no idea it was us all along.

2. Same but it was a foreign project.

3. Systematic flaw with our sensors or lack of general knowledge because the tech is new. (My dad had a few examples of that, one of which had the punchline "turns out the moon doesn't have an IFF transponder", another time it was "until they sent up the interceptors to check on them, we didn't realise geese ever flew that high").

Care to guess about the light? Another hint: no battery.

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#90

Post by api »

sterlind wrote: post #20
krono wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be covered by the zoo hypotheses[1] I think. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis

not necessarily. UFOs might not hide intentionally; maybe they don't care but happen to rarely hang out in populated areas. for instance, maybe they just care about the sea floor, and only surface to beam data back. or they're preferentially attracted to fast-moving objects like fighter jets, or sources of unusual EM signatures. if UFOs are alien drones trying to hide, why do they suck at it?

Maybe they’re very good at it. We see them rarely and see them clearly or get good photos almost never but they’re actually all over the place. The ones we see are malfunctioning in some way or flukes caused by chance conditions of light, angle, etc.
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