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Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

The "gimbal video" has been plausibly explained several times already. It seems journalists cannot be bothered to actually do a bit of research before writing these articles. First hit on google: https://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=29089

Occam's razor.

Develop the technology to travel light years through space, and craft to fly through an alien planet's atmosphere (more dense/less dense/hotter/cooler), and then... flash a few lights, disappear, bend over a bit of corn, and bother a farmer in the middle of nowhere?

Or... mistaken natural phenomena, hoaxes, faulty video equipment, and so on.

Sorry, but alien UFOs do not exist.

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I tend to agree...

Why would you go all the way to Earth with your god-like-technology only to get caught by our (to them) dumb-dumb radar systems and airplanes; and not at least say "hello".

I'd think that if you can travel intergalactic distances, you would either

- a) evade our detection

- b) say hello

Unless they have a sick sense of humor, I can't reconcile it and lean towards ETIs aren't currently visiting us.

(edit to change UFO to ETI)

Let me preface this with, I don't think it is likely, just playing devil's^W ETIs advocate.

It makes sense to me if the ETIs have a prime-directive-like reason not to engage but have reason to monitor or study humans. Then the behavior seems similar to teen-agers bashing mailboxes from cars or when the Air Force of one country gets a little too close to planes from another country. Your basic low-level alien tweaking the superiors/humans and seeing what it can get away with.

I feel like a challenge so I'm going to play the devil's advocate. It is possible to craft explanations for why UFOs behave this way, if they are in fact aliens. There's a very common fallacy in a lot of alien debunking discussions. It goes like this: if you can travel faster than light then your technological powers are entirely unlimited and you can do whatever you want. There's an implied assumption that FTL travel is a sort of über-technology and the speed of light is a kind of ur-limit. Once you know how to break it, every other physical law becomes breakable too.

There's no logical reason to believe this is the case. It's a social assumption caused by the fame of Einstein and the way pop culture has constantly told us FTL travel is "impossible", putting anything that can do FTL immediately into the realm of "if you can do one impossible thing, why not N impossible things". But C being the universal speed limit is a theory only 115 years old. That's not very long in the grand scheme of things. And now we're seeing respectable and serious physics research that explores the concept of a warp drive. Whilst still in the realm of impossible, it appears there are gradients of impossible and FTL travel may slowly be moving between them.

What if FTL travel is easier than we think? Then a civilisation that mastered it would not be some unimaginably advanced god-like race about whom we can assume nothing. It would be a civilisation kinda like ours, just with FTL drives. And we could then start to apply everyday reasoning to their behaviour. For example, why would UFOs fly around and yet be detected by radar/cameras/sensors etc? Well, maybe:

• Complete invisibility is not a tech they have. Our stealth tech is not entirely stealthy, just stealthy enough to get close against currently existing radars.

• Their FTL drives are incompatible with the type of ship geometry required for radar invisibility.

• Their knowledge of our own sensor capabilities is old/not entirely accurate, so they can hide from sensors but don't always do so at the right times. E.g. it may have impose some energy or tactical costs to hide so they don't want to do it all the time.

• They don't actually care whether they are detected or not.

• They do in fact have invisibility technology and there are shit-tons of UFOs flying around that we don't detect, but because they're not an uber-race they make mistakes just like we do and occasionally this results in sightings that shouldn't have happened.

Why would they not make contact? Maybe:

• They don't wish to because we have nothing to offer them.

• They don't know / can't agree on which political bloc to make contact with, and are waiting for humanity to unite under one world government (hopefully not).

• They have some rules against making contact unless some galactic federation votes that it should happen and the votes hasn't yet been won, but information is being collected by survey craft to inform the decision making progress.

Why would they apparently rejoice in doing ludicrous or pointless changes in speed or direction?

• Why not? If your FTL drive lets you change direction without needing to worry about gravity, why would you ever turn in a curve?

• Maybe they are frequently retasked and need to go somewhere different to their original goal, especially when they believe they were detected?

And so on. The thing is, if you're willing to make just a slight leap and assume that FTL tech is not as hard as we think, then it's suddenly easy to come up with lots of explanations for UFO behaviours. It's only the social assumption of (FTL->any imaginable tech) that makes us ignore these possibilities.

There's a fun short story called 'The Road Not Taken' from the perspective of an alien civilization that stumbled upon agrav tech but is otherwise at a Napoleonic technology level attempting to evade earth. From their perspective a civilization not stumbling upon agrav early on is preposterous.

Personally assuming the objects are actually some kind of non earth craft autonomous drones make the most sense to explain their behavior, particular their seeming interest in nuclear facilities.

> There's no logical reason to believe this is the case. It's a social assumption caused by the fame of Einstein and the way pop culture has constantly told us FTL travel is "impossible", putting anything that can do FTL immediately into the realm of "if you can do one impossible thing, why not N impossible things". But C being the universal speed limit is a theory only 115 years old. That's not very long in the grand scheme of things. And now we're seeing respectable and serious physics research that explores the concept of a warp drive. Whilst still in the realm of impossible, it appears there are gradients of impossible and FTL travel may slowly be moving between them.

This is, in my layman opinion, a very generous interpretation of in favor of the possibility of FTL. C as a fundamental limit is core to one of the most well tested and accurate models in the history of science. The Alcubierre drive variations are essentially just fun math puzzles for physicists to play with in their spare time. Until very recently they required exotic matter and/or ludicrous quantities of negative energy, and the best we've managed to do since then is replace those impossibilities with a ludicrous conventional energy requirement. Even if that was fixed there are still other problems to deal with, like the interior of the bubble being causally separated from the rest of the universe, meaning you couldn't actually control the bubble.

I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I understand how the universe works, so I can't say it is definitely impossible, but it is foolish to believe something is possible that the best evidence in the history of mankind says isn't, until we have evidence that it might be. UFOs can be explained by a lot of things significantly more likely to be real than alien visitation with FTL drives. I mean, if you're willing to believe that, then why not believe they're from Earth's future, or an alternate-timeline Earth, or any other sci-fi explanation that we have roughly equal expectation might be real as FTL.

FTL and time travel are the same thing if Einstein is even close to right.

Are you putting a negative connotation on this or using it as an explanation?

If you time travel outside of your light cone with FTL then can you have any paradoxes?

Whether there is directly a paradox doesn't change the moving through time bit of it.

I mostly don't think that future FTL capable humans would be disciplined, so we'd be talking to them if they existed (in a four dimensional sense).

I think if you're technically time travelling out of your lite cone at 1 second per second it'd be totally fine.

I think you wooshed their point and instead told them what they already know.

Imagine the GP starts off with "So assume FTL travel is easier than we think..." Then the rest of their post follows.

Just like "Assume A Teleporter And a Warp Drive and A Post Money Society" -> All of Star Trek canon follows.

There is literally no reason to assume that though. You may as well assume that time travel is possible, ghost are real, and Jesus was a reptilian.

Star Trek has the virtue of being unabashed fiction, it doesn't need to have its science make sense, which is good because it doesn't make sense even if you do assume all those things.

The assumption that FTL is impossible is predicated on our understanding of physical laws being complete. But current physical theories are not complete, and in particular have large holes in them related to gravity. We don't actually know what's possible and what's not, only what we believe is possible given our current understanding of the universe. There are known unknowns, in other words, and we don't know what's hiding behind those doors.

Anyway, whether FTL is or isn't possible isn't the point of my post. The point is that if you assume aliens are basically like us except with warp drives then it's easy to come up with reasonable explanations for their behaviour. It's actually the "FTL = flawless beings so far ahead of us we can't reason about them at all" viewpoint that leads to people being baffled, not that the behaviour is itself inherently impossible to explain.

> The assumption that FTL is impossible is predicated on our understanding of physical laws being complete.

No, the assumption that FTL is impossible is based on it being impossible according to the very best evidence we have. It does not require a complete understanding of physical law to confidently state that the sun will rise in the east and a dropped ball will fall to the ground.

> We don't actually know what's possible and what's not, only what we believe is possible given our current understanding of the universe.

This will always be true. And we cannot say for certain that I am not a Boltzmann brain imagining a conversation with you. It means nothing. We have to work with what we are given because the alternative is to pretend that fantasy is reality.

> Anyway, whether FTL is or isn't possible isn't the point of my post. The point is that if you assume aliens are basically like us except with warp drives then it's easy to come up with reasonable explanations for their behaviour.

Fair, but what I'm saying is that that's an assumption on the order of "assume world leaders are actually disguised reptiles".

A British ship floats up to an uninhabited Pacific atoll in 1750, people get off, grab some coconuts, beach the ship, wait for the tide to go out, make some repairs and are gone the next day and no other ships stop by for the next 100yr because the first ship noted in their logs that the atoll was devoid of anything more useful than the beach.

From the seagull's point of view that may as well be a UFO sighting but with big white men instead of little green men.

If there's a lot of life out there in the universe odds of any one planet (ours) being interesting or low. If aliens show up it's likely for some short lived menial purpose. Like stopping to grab some nitrogen or measure our moon for their survey or whatever.

I agree we probably aren't being visited by aliens. But if we I suspect they wouldn't be all that interested in us.

> Why would you go all the way to Earth

Perhaps we just happen to be on the route to somewhere more interesting? It's a pretty big assumption that we are the final destination for visiting alien craft.

This line of counterargument is built on the very flimsy assumption that an alien intelligence is just like us with similar thoughts and motivations. There is zero reason to believe that would be the case.

Playing devil's advocate... maybe they are prepping the battlefield and don't want to start the confrontation yet. If you plan on exterminating termites, would you care at all that they noticed your presence beforehand?

hmm so the entire thing is just an conspiracy to fund some cushy research positions. based on the fact that some random person on youtube is better at image analysis then the US Navy?

This is the problem with the cargo-cult skeptics whether it's directed against UFO's or JFK assassination theories, where the complete lack of any genuine skepticism by the skeptics, tend to reinforce people's belief in non-canonical explanations for data that falls outside of the normal and cannot be easily identified.

The real story might not be aliens but it's likely also not an conspiracy between the us navy and the press to create hype around some low level pentagon positions, and the real story might include genuinely unstudied atmospheric phenomena.

Yes and GoFast looks like a cruise missile. The remaining question for me would be why are multiple pilots seemingly confused by what they are seeing? Is it acting/conspiracy?

None of this means is of extraterrestrial origin of course.

Why not? You have thousands of pilots, not each and every one is an expert in interpreting the data they see. For example the "gimbal" video is probably out there because they wanted to teach pilots how this effect looks in real life.

Also it's possible some of the videos are showing unknown military aircraft or systems that the pilots are not aware of.

They probably do:

- we are fascinating

- theyre likely just probes and not bio aliens

- the last time you looked at an ant hill did you say hi? Did you think they understood you?

"Develop the technology to travel light years through space, and craft to fly through an alien planet's atmosphere (more dense/less dense/hotter/cooler), and then... flash a few lights, disappear, bend over a bit of corn, and bother a farmer in the middle of nowhere?"

On the flip side, if you want to interact with a baby animal you've never experienced before and has never experienced you, I don't image one would go in firing on all cinders banging pots and showing off.

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