> U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either
Sub header:
> A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge.
Those descriptions are a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government.
Can't prove a negative.
It would be trivially rejectable if we had any intel it was another country, for example.
If we could disprove Joe Biden was a human, and couldn't disprove he was a pod person, alien, ghost, or leprechaun, that indeed would be an interesting set of conditions.
I feel like you're purposefully conflating terms here.
Not at all. But go ahead and believe those fuzzy blobs (pictures of UFOs are somehow always fuzzy blobs) are aliens if you like.
Do you know why the UFO pictures are always fuzzy blobs? Because if they were clear pictures, we'd recognize they are birds/balloons/drones/Venus/whatever.
I think you might have gotten your usernames mixed up. I said I don't think they're aliens.
I don't disagree with you, I think every case of "alien" sightings are probably either camera artifacts or experimental aircrafts or people not knowing about how plane lights work.
It can (and has) actually. Whenever astrology has been tested, it has failed to hold any predictive properties. As such, it can be ruled out. You know this, because if you didn't then you wouldn't have used astrology as an example.
> Do you think this merits credulous attention from "serious" news media?
"Merits" is a loaded term and I don't think either of us are qualified to know what that means, but I'll take a shot at it.
This was an officially requested report by government officials that was requested by congress and a sizable chunk of the public. The report was released. People are interested in what the report has to say. If the news is there to report on what people find interesting, it certainly has met that criteria.
Now, what differentiates this from something like "The Weekly World News"? I think mostly who requested and released the report. This wasn't just some quack on Joe Rogan or Twitter or something, this was the United States Military: the most powerful and most-funded military on the planet.
I really do not think this is hard to parse, but just to be clear, here's an example: If I broke my leg tomorrow, and CNN reported on it, I would think "jeez, must be a slow news day". If Joe Biden broke his leg tomorrow, it would not be weird at all for CNN to report on it.
And so has the UFOs are aliens theory.
CNN isn't just reporting it, they're reporting it as credible. In fact, a "sizable chunk of the public" being interested in this is precisely because CNN (and some others) are reporting it as credible.
Welcome to CNN creating news, not just reporting it.
Is CNN irresponsible for presenting it as credible? I mean, I don't know, maybe, but the source isn't a quack from Twitter, it's congress and the military. What is CNN supposed to do, title their headline as "A bunch of bozos in the military think aliens are real LOLOLOL!!!!"?
Yes. Does CNN brag about following the science? Yes. Is CNN following the science here? Nope.
> What is CNN supposed to do, title their headline as "A bunch of bozos in the military think aliens are real LOLOLOL!!!!"?
For news that's not credible, yes. That is, if CNN itself wants to have any credibility.
For some perspective, CNN pretty much labeled everything the President of the United States said in the last 5 years as a lie. They're hardly afraid of doing that.
> I don't mean to be patronizing
You shouldn't believe everything authority figures tell you. UFOs are aliens should be pegging your bullshit detector.
I'm sorry but I really do not know how many times I need to repeat this, but as I have already said twice to you now: I do not think they are aliens. It does trigger my "bullshit detector." I never once claimed I believed in in extraterrestrials visiting earth, I never claimed that the videos congress is talking about are aliens. I feel like you're trying to group me in with morons like Alex Jones or Art Bell or something, and that's extremely dishonest, and since this is the second time you've done this in this thread, I have to think you're doing it on purpose.
Again, and I really want to make this clear, unambiguous, and easy to parse: I DO NOT THINK THE UFOS ARE ALIENS. It's probably a compression artifact or a drone or something. Please, please, please stop trying to put words into my mouth.
> Yes. Does CNN brag about following the science? Yes. Is CNN following the science here? Nope.
I'm hardly a fan of CNN but after about two decades of watching them on/off, I cannot recall a single instance of them "bragging" about "following the science". Admittedly I haven't watched it every day so it's possible I missed something.
The statement "Joe Biden is a pod person" is logically equivalent to the statement "All things that are not pod persons are not Joe Biden".
I've examined tens of thousands of things that were not pod persons and none of them were Joe Biden, thus providing evidence for the second statement, and hence for the first statement.
(For those curious about this kind of evidence, it is called the Raven paradox [1]).
You might not be able to "prove a negative" in the purely scientific sense, but you can rule out most options to effectively "prove a negative".
If, for example, Russia came out and took credit for these things, and showed working prototypes of these crafts, would that "prove" (in the truest, mathematical sense of the word) that they aren't aliens? No, I suppose Russia could have intercepted alien technology and pass it off as their own, but for any kind of practical purpose that would "prove" they aren't aliens to most rational people, and thus "prove" a negative.
a) You look like a human b) You write human language c) We have not seen any direct evidence for any kind of humanoid alien life, but we have seen lots of evidence for humans existing. d) If you were an alien spying on human culture, you wouldn't waste your time on Hacker News :).
Does this fully "rule out" the possibility of you being an alien? No, I suppose you could be an alien in a human skin suit who learned English, and maybe aliens are really interested in software engineering forums, but I can practically rule it out just playing the odds.
I just feel like it's extremely reductive to say "can't prove a negative," for which I provided a counter example.
Um, why?
Just the "Motivation and Planning" category will reveal several reasons. My favorite is that there is almost no reason to go through the trouble of colonizing our planet, if you need any of our resources you can mine asteroids and no one will fight back. Unless of course the aliens are Evil.
If the aliens are millions of years ahead of us, it's pretty optimistic to think they'll take us into account at all, unless maybe as a mildly interesting subject of nature documentaries.
(1) The number of filters they've passed through without destroying themselves suggests that they've overcome tribalism. The late-stage species most prone to violence are also the ones most prone to self destruction before they developed the tech to traverse space and get to Earth.
We don't have good predictions on the destructive potential of future tech, but suppose that tech advances in 1000 years means that every individual can easily make a weapon as destructive as a nuke. If such advances are possible, only the species predisposed to peace will survive.
(2) Resource abundance from technology removes the selective pressure towards tribal conflict, in the same way that it achieved that for the evolution of bonobos. They are genetic bonobos, not chimps, and violence is anathema to their genetic predisposition (assuming they're biological). Aliens may not have been that way in their ancestral past, but they would evolve in that direction post abundance.
We can't know that - once you can spread to multiple planets, even planet-killer tech isn't an extinction-level event.
> selective pressure towards tribal conflict
Over thousands, or millions of years; not only that, but you have to have selective pressure against tribalism to actually remove the instinct. Otherwise there's no pressure, and it can remain, just like any other vestigial organ.
"even planet-killer tech isn't an extinction-level event."
You're right that a civilization that has violent tendencies may not self-destruct since it may turn out that the destructive potential of future technology is confined to the capacity of city-scale destruction instead of solar-system-scale destruction. Or they may escape their host planet quickly and diversify before nukes or whatever comes after nukes wipes them out.
But it seems to me that the probability of extinction is non-trivially positively correlated with violent and tribal tendencies once that civilization reaches our stage of development. And so that nudges the odds towards an advanced alien civilization being peaceful.
"Over thousands, or millions of years"
I believe it won't end up as a vestigial organ and will be actively selected against. Tribal conflict has a positive reward to the victor in a resource constrained environment but is negative sum over both parties. Without the payoff to the victor then all we are left with is a negative sum outcome which should be selected against. The only thing I'm not sure of is tribal conflict over reproductive capital, although I can imagine that technology could make that abundant as well.
From the genetic perspective of a male, a female's ability to reproduce is a scarce, excludable resource that they need for their genetic fitness and other men stand as roadblocks to obtaining that resource. That makes violence and conflict a valid way to improve the competitive odds of male A over male B.
In a future where gestation occurs outside of the womb in some bioengineered setup, that genetic pressure to compete between men will be lessened, which will be a force for peace.
I don't mean to talk about groups of people as resources, but for this topic in particular, since we're talking from the perspective of unconscious genes, I think it offers the most clarity.
It's all in the realm of speculation of course, with any proposal having quite a risk of anthropocentric (terracentric?) biases.
An organism (biological or otherwise) could have competing internal parts/models, and not be constrained by the mechanism by which natural selection operates now, i.e. biological reproduction.
So multiple subagents could compete within it, without posing an existential threat to the physical manifestation of the organism itself; somewhat analogous to redundant computers making decisions by consensus in e.g. spacecraft.
How so? Humans are capable of basic space travel already.
If they still wanted the biosphere intact afterwards, then they could alternatively deploy a targeted anti-human bioweapon.
https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/flying-saucers-th...
Heh. Are you really suggesting that after decades of disinterest, the US government is releasing this in order to...make people afraid of aliens? In order to increase taxse?
Or do I misunderstand what you mean?
I'm disputing that lying about aliens would be an effective or preferred strategy for doing so.
Like, a war against...whom? Is the voting public going to buy it? Cut me a break!
I had a Political Science professor in college who came from that school of IR thought who evangelized it, and then a couple of others who explicitly called it out and attacked it, which was shocking to me as a student. It feels like par for the course as a more jaded adult.
I've seen this sentiment expressed before, but it's never seemed persuasive. Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.
Not only that, but the moment that peaceful species encounters a non-peaceful species it would be wiped out, as evidenced by numerous extinct, or in the verge of being extinct, species on planet Earth. So peaceful species are going to be short lived and may not last much, in Universe times, to have too much contact with other species.
If you've mastered enough energy to arrive at another solar system in force, you already had to figure out how to live peacefully with many billions of individuals.
There's no reason to assume they would feel empathy towards other intelligent species. We coexist with intelligent animal species on Earth, and at best we consider their intelligence a novelty. If other apes began to speak and reason as we do, do you think we'd grant them property rights and a vote? No, we'd probably just slaughter them.
It seems more likely to me that an advanced alien species would see us the way we see animals, rather than as like themselves.
Not even advanced aliens can get around the laws of thermodynamics - that would take far more energy than any resource it creates could possibly be worth.
But, they wouldn't even need to, because they can find abundant supplies of whatever resources they wanted anywhere. Even in our own solar system, they would be far better off mining our asteroid belt and Jovian planets and not even acknowledging our existence.
Actually aliens being peaceful fails the logic test as evidenced by our experience with the only intelligent species we have encountered so far, humans.
- The US government has been studying this phenomenon for years and has recently managed to reverse engineer the technology to the degree it has real-world applications. To actually explain how we achieved those feats, it will be necessary for the public to understand where it originated from, since a lie would be obvious.
- There's some really (REALLY) bad news to share, and this is part of a rollout plan needed to be able to deliver that news in the way that would minimize it's net effect on our society. (For example, we're in a zoo. And we've hit some tripwires and are now no longer allowed to develop technology X, Y, or Z.)
This may be more of a reaction to Qanon and troll farms.
(Or I guess conversely they might be trying to distract people)
1. Up until sometime in the last decade or so, the UFO sightings that were not successfully explained as natural phenomenon or optical effects that made something ordinary like an airliner appear as something else were all accidental sightings of government projects.
2. Then sightings started that the government recognized as the same technology, except not from the government. Whatever it is the government was experimenting with that occasionally led to an accidental sighting is now being experimented with by someone else, and the government does not know who that is.
When it was just the government projects getting accidentally sighted, they wanted to discourage reports and discussion to try maintain secrecy. Now that someone else is doing similar work, they want to know who and how they got the technology. They need people to report and discuss sightings so they can try to get past the secrecy of whoever is doing these new experiments.
That or it really IS aliens, and we're just used to not believing the Pentagon, or U.S. govt... cause they haven't always looked out for our best interests (NSA / Snowden ring's a bell).
I haven't been following this closely. Why?
> In an unprecedented move, the US government is preparing to issue an unclassified report detailing what it knows about a series mysterious encounters with unidentified flying objects.