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Part of the problem is all the crazy mythology around the subject. But strip that off and it has always seemed to me that there is an interesting residue of facts. It's not enough to prove anything but it's enough to be intriguing.

One possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that they are here but are just not making overt obvious contact. If this were true we'd probably be talking about a "post-singularity" super intelligence. It would be nearly immortal and thus very patient. Contact protocols might take thousands of years.

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After reading "The Dark Forest" I've leaned towards the idea that we are under pervasive observation (likely by hard-to-detect autonomous AI agents of some form, the origin of which is relatively inconsequential) and once the probability tilts towards a non-zero value that we are a threat beyond a certain blast radius we'll be wiped out.

If that were true, and the message of that being the case were delivered somehow to our governments, the general status quo around these phenomena and the propaganda steering people away from caring about them would be explainable. People have barely gotten used to the idea of mortality, but to know your race was doomed to extinction with certainty would almost certainly cause massive civil unrest and a major disruption to almost all human institutions and culture that assume our collective future is unbounded.

Perhaps this is too tinfoil but it's an internally consistent story, perhaps with the exception of how or why these agents would be detectable at all, when they surely could conceal themselves completely -- perhaps it's just probabilities though since there would not be much downside of detection by a primitive civilization such as ours.

I think this is the least tinfoil of theories in this thread. After I read Three Body Problem it's become impossible for me to see the Fermi paradox in any other way. In fact , every other theory about how aliens might be on earth all seem so charming now. As if they haven't read the 'news' about what really happened.

Obviously this isn't the case but I just feel the Cixin Liu layed out this theory so convincingly that, at least for me, it might as well be.

> the message of that being the case were delivered somehow to our governments,

That would make a fun plot for a movie. But having worked with the government and then also having observed leaks of top secret information and tools coming out the supposedly most secretive government institutions, I cannot believe they would be competent enough to keep that information under a tight lid for long.

Someone, somehow would have ex-filtrated some proof by now.

What I can see happening the government not necessarily encouraging but perhaps not discouraging either these rumors from spreading in order to divert attention from say testing of experimental aircraft.

>But having worked with the government and then also having observed leaks of top secret information and tools coming out the supposedly most secretive government institutions, I cannot believe they would be competent enough to keep that information under a tight lid for long.

What I find interesting is that certain government programs are very leaky and others we have not seen any leaks. For instance we know the NSA has cryptanalysis programs, yet no leaks of US cryptanalysis have occurred. The Snowden documents have very little information on these programs.

Large numbers of people knew about ULTRA across many nations on both sides of the iron curtain. ULTRA was kept secret for 42 years, well past the point that the main utility of keeping it secret has passed.

Why? What makes one program more leaky than another.

>What I can see happening the government not necessarily encouraging but perhaps not discouraging either these rumors from spreading in order to divert attention from say testing of experimental aircraft.

There so many motivations for a disinformation campaign here.

We're also assuming Snowden was not an intentional leak. Spy games get weird and complicated. They don't call it the "puzzle palace" for nothing.

That sounds similar to the plot for The Day the Earth Stood Still (in particular the original 1951 version), except that it wasn't a secret message.

I seem to remember reading a story that was more similar to what you were describing, but can't remember the name or much about it.

Why not wipe us out now though? Observing you risk missing the "danger" point in our evolution, wiping us out now eliminates that risk. I suspect there's more to it than that.

They are betting on us like greyhounds in a cosmic TV show back at ther ship

Why not just annihilate us now then? That would minimize risk, since there is always a non-zero probability that we might suddenly make some powerful discovery or other circumstances might change.

I loved the books but Dark Forest theory makes little sense to me because it more-or-less assumes aliens have no concept of morality (the Trisolarans in the book literally have no morality).

If we became super-advanced, it's hard to imagine given our past (including sci-fi like the series) that we'd just go head and decide to wipe out anyone we encounter, even if we did consider them lowly. Largely for the same reasons there exist animal rights groups, etc.

Morality is a human construct, tied to self-awareness which isn't necessary for (super)intelligence. There are theories that posit self-awareness as an evolutionary dead-end.

If the stars are teeming with "machinic" intelligence, something far more probable than any sort of biological intelligence, then anthropomorphizing is not going to lead you outside the maze.

Ever heard of antibiotics, pesticides, rat poison, cockroach sprays and mosquito mats?

Humanity is done playing the morality game a few thousands of years back. There were a few socio religious movements in India, which focussed on these things and they more or less concluded these things were beyond impractical.

And yes, even today rats and other animals are used for experiments in manufacturing drugs for humans.

What is to say they don't see as rats?

What's to say they necessarily do see us as rats, is my point.

I never understand why we always assume that it's extra-terrestrial.

For example, let's say time travel will be possible at any given point in the future. Well, if it were possible in the future, we might expect to see it happening across time, including the past and present.

It would of course represent technology thousands of years more advanced than the observers of the phenomenon, but not millions of years away, as might well be the case for civilizations from planets evolving quite differently from our own. It would also represent technology that evolved from our own developmental progress.

It would also address the issue of spatial proximity - of course we don't detect life outside Earth, because the "extra-terrestrials" come from Earth.

I'm not suggesting it is absolutely time travelers, but I'm quite surprised I never see that suggested on a similar frequency with the whole aliens angle when discussing UFOs.

Another theory is that we're being visited be entities from a parallel dimension.

The ET speculation is the most popular because we know for a fact that other stars and other planets around those stars exist and we know for a fact that it's (theoretically) possible to travel between at least nearby stars with sufficient technology.

We do not know for a fact that time travel is possible and there are good physics-based reasons to think it isn't. We definitely don't know that there are parallel dimensions or universes that are actually inhabitable. Dimensions and parallel universes may be mathematical artifacts. In math a dimension is just a degree of freedom. A penny is five-dimensional if you count temperature and electrical charge as dimensions.

Another speculation you run into is the "ultra-terrestrial" idea-- that they might be from Earth itself. Maybe they live deep underground or under the ocean, etc. This one is pretty implausible too. I could believe that there are unknown species, sure, but not an unknown species with an industrial infrastructure capable of producing flying machines. No way. Even deep underground we'd detect its vibration and EM emissions.

So yeah, space aliens are the most reasonable hypothesis if these things were to actually be artificial and not made by humans. That's the big "if" of course. Like I said elsewhere there's some intriguing evidence out there but nowhere near enough to draw such a conclusion.

> One possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that they are here but are just not making overt obvious contact

Exactly.

There's simply no reason to, except maybe sheer curiosity or some legal issues. What would we want from an uncontacted Amazonian tribe?

But even if they wanted, from the political point of view, who would you even talk to? People of the planet Earth, bypassing their governments? Every government of every country?

Plus, what about the possible social upheaval? They would be guilty.

No matter how you spin it, it's more trouble than it's worth. It is, however, essential to keep a potential competitor under surveillance, especially when they are rapidly developing.

Being spotted though, that I find improbable. There are numerous ways we could eliminate signs of contact with a society at the level of, say, X century, and that's just one thousand years gap. With a greater gap, it would probably be like competing with wild baboons over a Nobel prize.

I'd imagine it just would try to maximize utility -- remaining undetected in all scenarios may come with its own costs and risks.

Alternatively, maximizing utility may require a certain minimal level of detection. It's hard to predict what cost function is being optimized.

Given what is now common knowledge about AI game theory, it's super hard or impossible to actually ascribe any form of motives, ethics, intent, etc to the underlying system or intelligence that is controlling these objects if they are not natural and have no association with human culture or intelligence.

> I'd imagine it just would try to maximize utility -- remaining undetected in all scenarios may come with its own costs and risks.

That's true, and there could be "rogue actors" who care less about the detection. But - again, borrowing the X century analogy - there's a lot of tools that can be employed to eliminate the witnesses and such.

There's a great article called something like 'a biologist's take on the Fermi paradox'. Worth reading because it challenges some core assumptions.

This one?

https://praxtime.com/2013/11/25/sagan-syndrome-pay-heed-to-b...

Yes I think so

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