Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

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I recognize this sounds completely insane -

What if aliens are more of a psychiatric phenomena? Aliens have the ability to cross galaxies and stay undetectable to most of our instruments. They manipulate our senses to stay hidden to us, and have the ability to wipe our memory, which only gets better over time as they interact and experiment on us more. The amount of technology that an alien civilization amongst us has would be incomprehensible to us, using aspects of physics that we have no idea exist. Probably they are observing us now in detail, waiting to reveal at the correct moment - or more likely, they are revealed when we discover far more advanced technology and we learn how to see them.

OK, thanks for reading.

Have you heard of the concept of falsifiability? Replace "aliens" with "leprechauns" and attempt to dispute this alternative hypothesis.

I would think aliens are far more likely to occur in the universe than leprechauns. I would say its a certainty there is other life, whereas leprechauns are certainly non-existent.

The claim to be falsified isn't that aliens exist anywhere in the universe, which is likely, but specifically that they are on Earth, and by extension, that stories of UFO phenomena (sightings, abductions, etc.) are accurate and correct.

Conflating the two is a common misdirection tactic of UFO believers, meant to imply that it's as reasonable to believe in the former as the latter, or that the general scientific consensus that alien life probably exists somewhere in the universe lends credence to UFO mythology.

The truth is, without some evidence that everything we know about physics is wrong, the universe could be teeming with life and it would still be about as reasonable to believe in the presence of extraterrestrial life on Earth as to believe in leprechauns.

How was that a hypothesis? It was merely a thought experiment.

This is straight out of Doctor Who https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_(Doctor_Who)

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