Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

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So let's assume this is real for a moment. It's either the "breakaway civilization"[1], otherwise known as the secret space program or it must be the Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic"[2] scenario.

In support of "Roadside Picnic", if they've been hanging around all these years and just making the ocassional look-around and flybys without landing on the white house lawn and asking us to join the Interstellar Federation, we must be extremely unimpressive. Basically, life is common in the universe. We are a somewhat interesting tourist attraction and pit stop on the way to alpha centauri or whatever, but not really that special. They get here, pick up water and air maybe, take some pictures, some dna samples and fly off to wherever they were on their way to. Everything we have here they have in a million other places all around the galaxy.

The breakaway civilization seems more plausible if one assumes that travelling interstellar distances is flat out impossible though. However, there could be a mix of the two...

Now if this is all just a bug on the windshield "swamp gas", I understand the downvotes, but otherwise please tell me how it's not one or the other given the evidence.

1.http://www.theeventchronicle.com/study/breakaway-civilizatio...

2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

There are other options, if you're talking about the latest UFO video:

3) equipment failure

4) mass delusion

5) error in judgement

6) the creator of the matrix messing / debugging

7) government or private company testing a new type of propulsion

Now look at all these options rationally, which ones are more likely?

The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.

> The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time.

Of course it is. The greater the clarity of the footage, the lower the probability that the filmed object will remain unidentified (as in Unidentified Flying Object).

If you’re on the look for unidentified things, how could anything but unclear evidence be useful?

Even when people do get clear video, people just accuse it of being a drone or CGI. Video evidence means shit in 2017.

That's not entirely true. Cameras are starting to introduce video signing. At least there's a chance to prove the source was filmed with camera X, if its public key is known. It would be cool if camera manufacturers had a public API for that too.

Example:

http://www.urbanalarm.com/knowledge-base/2016/digital-chain-...

> At least there's a chance to prove the source was filmed with camera X, if its public key is known.

To be fair, the only thing that can be proven is that it was either filmed with that camera, or someone has extracted the private key from the device (or just tricked the signing chip to sign a custom data packet).

What a great idea.

> The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.

Ding ding ding.

In fairness military FLIR pods are better/more credible than cheap smartphone cameras.

> The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.

Try taking a picture of a plane at a height > 3000ft with equipment available at hand (during the night) see how it looks like

So UFOs only fly at night? Cause during the day people with consumer cameras have zero problems recording planes at much higher than 3000ft:

https://youtube.com/results?search_query=zoom+airplane&q=zoo...

I zoomed in on a commercial airliner flying above my house once with a 40x camera, it was really cool.

Most sightings are at night

I think there’s an 8th possibility that is plausible - the government testing stealth technology that can spoof sensing equipment.

FYI the Nimitz FLIR1 video was taken at a distance of around 30 miles. pretty good video for that distance.

Also this is the only declassified video, I would assume better video exist but this will help ease us into acceptance.

Acceptance of what?

> The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time.

Maybe, like Bigfoot, UFOs are actually intrinsically fuzzy.

Option 3, intelligent life that builds a civilization is not common in the universe, so they want to study us. Much the same way we study great apes or dolphins.

In that case, they might want to observe us without interfering to see how we behave naturally. Or maybe they have a sort of prime directive. Or maybe they realize that if they interact with us and expose us to their level of technology, we might destroy ourselves given the level of conflict and violence we're still prone to.

> Much the same way we study great apes or dolphins.

Unfortunately, humans are known to study other species by locking them in cages and cutting them open. :(

It's a good thing Aliens prefer anal probing

Maybe that's why they remain shy and stay at a distance we can only capture them in low resolution and/or grainy videos?

>In that case, they might want to observe us without interfering to see how we behave naturally. Or maybe they have a sort of prime directive

The thing is, assuming this scenario to be true, "they" seem to be interfering with us all the time. Humans have developed an entire subculture, complete with religious overtones, around the belief in interference by UFOs. One would assume the quarantine was breached a long, long time ago.

Maybe they are waiting for/helping us to evolve enough for us to be able to have a conversation with them. Even 50 years ago almost everyone would have found this idea very difficult, as time goes on it gets better.

We also have no idea of being able to relate to their culture which may be radically different than our own. It might be far far more right wing for example and they might see us as a slave race or supremely inferior, which we will probably be.

Waiting till we achieve warp.

Our universe could exist in a higher dimensional space, and these events could be cases where higher dimensional objects are intersecting with our 3 spatial dimensions.

This would explain the strange changes of shape, high speed, hovering without apparent means of support, and disappearances so often reported for these objects.

It does require that the higher dimensional space we occupy be relatively empty in our vicinity, otherwise we would expect far more of these events. Perhaps we're in a 5-D alien lab, being studied in a tank.

But it's far more likely to be a consequence of more mundane human perceptual limitations - tricks of the light, etc.

Yeah, Flatland came to mind when I first saw the videos...but as you said, that is considerably less likely than some other more mundane phenomena at work.

This. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If I had to guess, I'd subscribe to the "Random Voyager" theory. That is, there are tons of somewhat sophisticated civilizations in the galaxy. For the ones that don't self-destruct or entertain themselves into extinction, it's quite common to create long-lived interstellar probes. These probes would be as intelligent or more intelligent than people, be able to move much better than anything we have, and not interested in being detected or having any interaction at all with the flora and fauna of a planet aside from refueling and making recordings.

Contact like that would be intermittant, difficult to document, and perplexing to a species that wants to talk to everybody it runs into. Which kinda describes where we are with some of this odd aerial phenomenae we've been documenting for decades now.

>entertain themselves into extinction

Do you think this is an actual possibility? For ours or any other sort of civilization?

Imagine a world where everyone's consciousness has been uploaded to computers. People play sports, knit sweaters, whatever- all in virtual reality. It's much safer and cheaper than maintaining a physical body, after all. Now each person might have some real human friends, but they're more likely to have AI friends who are smarter, more charming, more interesting. Or maybe there's just a lot more of them. You may not even know which of your friends are "real." It might be considered insulting to ask. You spend more and more time playing alone or tittering with a circle of sycophantic AIs.

Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide, or overdose on data-drugs, or get squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources, or whatever. And so the species gradually dies out until you just have some AI routines running in a hot server room on a dead planet. The last human might not even realize that she's the last.

The same situation could occur without mind uploads if you could build very realistic androids, but I like the mind upload scenario.

And of course this is all very chauvinistically assuming that those AI routines slash robots don't qualify as human even though they're indistinguishable. The AIs could be conscious, or not, I suppose, depending on how they're implemented.

Damn, that's well thought out. Are you working on a near-future sf book? ;-)

No, I just cobbled that together from other SF I've read. If you want more of that, try:

- Permutation City by Greg Egan (Imagine a world where everyone's consciousness has been uploaded to computers.)

- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (People play sports, knit sweaters, whatever- all in virtual reality.) Note: this book is corny as hell and borderline YA but still fun

- Blindsight by Peter Watts (You spend more and more time playing alone or tittering with a circle of sycophantic AIs. ... squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources)

- https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football (Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide) Just for the impact of functional immortality on common people

Thanks for the recs! Will check them out.

> we must be extremely unimpressive

i'm reminded of a short story by Stephen Baxter, "The Invasion of Venus".

I think it's entirely reasonable they don't want to come down and chat since they don't want to end up having to give us their tech. After all, how will they know they've given it to the 'right' side, especially with all the hostility they must have observed between us.

I think any moral species would wait until we've made sufficient progress on our own then meet us at our level instead of rocking the boat by coming down demoing all their advanced tech.

Get a new set of polio/communicable diseases

Or, they are super shy and loneliness is something they protect like a diamond :)

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