Hacker News Reader

Comment by TehCorwiz | Hacker News Reader

So, I had a thought about the wording they've been using to describe some of the more incredulous parts of this story.

Specifically this one: “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

That feels like a crafted, or intentionally obtuse statement. Now there is something to be said for the clinical and dry phrasing of scientists or the military. But this doesn't read to me as "extraterrestrial" and certainly not aliens.

Combined with the assertion this week that Russia was testing a space-based weapon[1], this reads as "A foreign adversary has built a vehicle in space. And we might have captured one."

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/russia-space-weapon-twitter-hack...

View on HN

I agree. Even releasing the original videos showing the UFOs being tracked was likely sending a signal to an adversary. The fact that the objects were being tracked by commodity Navy fighter jets and not something more advanced might send the message “Look, our basic radar can easily track this thing, not to mention our more exotic classified equipment. If we can track it we can shoot it down.” I think this is an attempt to de-escalate a space-based weaponry race that may be getting out of hand.

>Specifically this one: “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

> That feels like a crafted, or intentionally obtuse statement. Now there is something to be said for the clinical and dry phrasing of scientists or the military. But this doesn't read to me as "extraterrestrial"

“extraterrrestrial” is just a single polysyllabic latinate word for “not made on this earth”. The statements are literally equivalent.

The more significant part of that is that the quote is in reference to someone given a briefing on retrieval techniques, for which precautionary procedures would be developed if your mission included dealing with the potentiality, even if there were no concrete past or current examples.

Yes, I know "extraterrestrial" literally means "not of this earth" but colloquially in the US it's used to mean the equivalent of "not of human origins" or "alien".

The point I was trying to make is that it's unlikely that any revelations will be about encountering, either intentionally or unintentionally, another culture or technology from outside our own gravity well.

Another interview with the same guy, Eric Davis:

"These things don't look like anything that we can manufacture on earth so we don't have the manufacturing or industrial technology for it"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2gjPRv4E7s

I don't know what's more unbelievable, Russia building vehicles in space or extraterrestrials.

I know [Russia|China|SpaceX] exists and could prove it if pressed.

I have no evidence that extraterrestrial aliens exist and do not know of anyone else who does either. I could not prove that they did if my life depended on it.

That kinda places it in the build-by-humans camp for me. Heck it might not be a country, SpaceX builds its own rockets and that's a private corporation. Musk isn't the only sickeningly-rich person with space on their mind.

Sure. But isn't it more likely that it would be an attribution error? I.e. the craft was actually made on earth. My point is that space borne manufacturing seems incredible. And incredibly hard to hide.

I don't know. We haven't probed what zero-G manufacturing might be capable of. One of the amazing properties of a near-perfect vacuum is that there are near zero contaminants. Being able to more accurately control reactions might yield breakthroughs in room-temp superconductors or metallurgy. I could imagine there's some low-hanging fruit too since we're just starting to probe the possibilities.

That all said, it's therefor possible that the things that make these supposed craft unique might be defined by their requirement to have been manufactured in a zero-G vacuum.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com