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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

This assumes they are not coming from some giant station on the other side of our sun, parked there for the last several hundred years. They could also be anywhere in our solar system, that our technology is not advanced enough to detect. We cant really keep track of all the space rocks floating near us and they aren't trying not to be seen.

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That would be really weird for them to be hiding from us behind the sun. What's in it for them? They arrive in Sol to set up a base but the carbon-based predators on the wet planet must not be disturbed. Why should they care about us in that specific way? That tale sounds a lot like typical human hubris to me.

We hide to observe animals all the time.

Most of the time we don't.

We also install remote/un-manned viewing platforms all the time. They sometimes require us to revisit them periodically to collect the data and load fresh media/power/etc. Then we upgraded them to use solar to replenish power, and installed wireless communications to make it so we don't have to visit. Maybe we just need to start listening for rogue broadcasts from our planet for these ET-phone-home devices?

Why do we have rules about disturbing the tribes in the amazon or the Sentinelese. Maybe there are established rules about contacting primitive cultures? Maybe they are just watching for the Fermi Paradox to take care of us.

We tend to try to predict alien behavior basing it more or less on our own, 10000 year-long history. If intelligent life that travels the billion-old stars actually exists, I doubt we would be able to put their intentions and modus operandi into words with our constrained ideas and limited, lonely planet vocabulary.

Of course, for most of that history, the default result of a more technologically advanced culture meeting a more primitive one was the former immediately enslaving or committing genocide against the latter.

And let's be honest, if the Sentinelese were sitting on anything worth killing for, they would be long dead or "civilized" onto a reservation by now.

Here we're talking about meeting a culture not made of human subjects. We know nothing. When they're able to cross interstellar space we're unlikely to have anything they'd want. They'd be so advanced technically we might not even detect them given our limited understanding of physics.

The thing I do see an alien species could want from us is our capability to understand a blueprint and to reassemble them physically from transmitted information. Because that is how they might travel between galaxies. Their assembly, I hasten to add, would be a rather stupid thing to do on our part. If we want to live. But we might do it anyway because we're curious.

How are the scenarios of brute predators, noble protectors, or imperial fleets any more worthwhile to consider than those of the incessant replicators? My answer: Because our culture likes that kind of tale. Because we project our predatory and social features onto an unknown.

So whenever somebody explains phenomena like blips on a radar with an alien species that happens to be eerily similar to us I think of how people made god in their image and either rail against the blatant human-centrism or just disengage.

A cosmic conspiracy. I like it. As a sci-fi story.

If they're using any technology that we know to be feasible (and they haven't already been here for a century or more), their approach would involve a star-hot plume of nuclear flame that burns in the sky for weeks or months at least.

Now, as Baybal said, if they've uncovered fundamental physics that we don't know about, all bets are off. Or they could have showed up centuries ago and been hanging around ever since, for all we know, recorded by history as a supernova or something. But if they arrived recently and use known physics, we most likely would have seen them.

I suspect that space probes like STEREO would have been able to see a giant space station on the other side of the Sun, but they might not have been looking.

But why would they have come here hundreds of years ago? They'd have had to leave their planet hundreds (if not thousands) of years before that. Meanwhile, Seinfeld hasn't even reached them yet. What did they find so interesting about our system so many years ago that they would expend the time and energy for such a project? Who is paying for this?

Maybe they are simply observing the experiment they started 4 billion years ago.

If they're hiding from us on the other side of the sun, then that means they're probably on the same orbit as the Earth, but a full half orbit ahead. But then you'd think spacecraft like the Parker Solar Probe which has a perihelion of only 0.04 AU and a very eccentric orbit would be able to spot it.

Hiding on the other side of the sun only hides them from direct observation from exactly Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe

Wouldn't the same gravitational lensing that proved relativity also possibly reveal something hidden behind the sun, if it were massive enough?

How about they’re from a birth of life somewhere nearby but hard for us to detect - like oceans below the surface of Enceladus?

I think that makes sense too, we are still finding out basic things about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Space wise we are really just getting started.

Is that even necessary? If they sit far enough out, are sufficiently small, and are not broadcasting radio, I doubt we'd notice them.

Hmm, it seems like we could see behind our sun with our space probes

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