Hacker News Reader

Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

giant squid have a biological premise; they're just bigger squid. Their origin can be strongly guessed. You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

we have yet to find a plethora of ocean-dwelling smaller mermaids and 'tic-tacs'. In fact, we've yet to discover solid evidence of the existence of either phenomena, regardless of size.

Chances start to diminish in the guessing game when you're trying to forecast the completely novel/unknown/under-witnessed.

'human effects' start to cloud things a lot more when we start talking about religion/ghouls/goblins/time-travelers/bainshees/sirens/etc.

View on HN

>You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

And there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Is it so unreasonable to guess that intelligent life arose more than once?

> Is it so unreasonable to guess that intelligent life arose more than once?

This is absolutely ludicrous. It doesn't matter how many stars are in the sky or how likely life bearing planets are in the galaxy. There's a vast gulf between "life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy" and "that life is flying around Earth in little metal spaceships that defy all known physical laws".

>There's a vast gulf between "life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy" and "that life is flying around Earth in little metal spaceships that defy all known physical laws".

The universe is 13 billion years old. The Milky Way is about 100K lightyears across. Suppose another species could travel at 90% of light speed. Then we're looking at maybe 110,000 years necessary to colonize the galaxy -- only a tiny fraction of 13 billion years.

I've been following this UAP stuff for a while, and as far as I can tell no one is claiming that the UAPs defy all known physical laws (i.e. I've seen no claims of violation of conservation of energy, 2nd law of thermodynamics, FTL travel, etc. -- though, someone should do the math on those transit times to check the FTL travel one). Just that the propulsion & cloaking work in ways we can't explain. Show Aristotle a jet fighter and he'll have a similar reaction.

Supposing that the UAPs arise from a civ that arose when the universe was about 12 billion years old, i.e. 1 billion years ago. That's about 1 billion years of technological development. Can we really put confident bounds on what could be achieved in terms of propulsion and cloaking with 1 billion years of research?

Not to mention, "that life is appearing to deliberately be almost completely elusive for no clear reason, in a way that's eerily similar to other superstitions like mermaids, fairies, Santa Claus, and Big foot."

Do active duty jet pilots report seeing mermaids, fairies, Santa Claus, or Big foot on a regular basis?

> mermaids

Professional sailors do.

> big foot

Professional park rangers do.

They're all full of shit by the way. Self-deluding or purposely tricking the public for laughs.

We've got defense bigwigs backing the jet pilots up. Are there corresponding bigwigs backing up the sailors/rangers?

Were the sailor/ranger claims treated as credible by a source at least as good as 60 Minutes?

Giant squid was dismissed as tall tales for hundreds of years.

Would a mermaid creature be something improbable to an ancient mariner, who hadn't even heard of anything like a monkey before he saw them with his own eyes?

> You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

Would you then say it is probable that species of giant shark exist to this day?

When mariners tell tails of giant squid so huge they can devour ships, they are rightly dismissed as tall tales. When they tell a story about a squid that was "about as big as a person but with really long tentacles", I don't think that ever got nearly as much ridicule.

They are much larger than a man, both in size and weight. And that's using those who have been caught. They are large enough to attack whales and small ships. I think there's more mythical creatures to be found in the ocean, specifically giant sharks.

mermaids are just women swimming in the ocean

Reply on news.ycombinator.com