It’s not aliens. It’ll probably never be aliens. So stop. Please just stop
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
1) is there other life in the universe?
2) is other life visiting Earth?
Considering the number of stars in the universe and the potential number of planets around those stars, IMO it is extremely unlikely that our particular star & planet are so special that we are the only life that exists and has ever existed.
If you believe that yes, we are that unique, then of course you cannot believe in anyone visiting Earth. If you do believe there is other life in the universe, it's reasonable to believe they travel around, just like we have traveled around.
But also, because of the vastness of the universe, if there is other life, IMO it's likely to be so far away that we will never cross paths. It's like 2 grains of sand on a beach getting next to each other.
Unless the grains of sand are "Grabby". An aggressively expansionist species (as in, one new colony per colony every 10,000 years) fills up a galaxy really remarkably quickly.
~5% matter. Most of this is H and He though, bit of Li in there too. And it's all mostly burning in a star's gravity well. Like, 99.99999% of it. The stuff you and I are made of (C, N, P, Fe, etc), that we would wish aliens would be made of too, is really rare.
~25% dark matter. We know a little about it. We know that it falls down and doesn't like to touch just about anything. But that's really kinda it.
~70% dark energy. It falls ... up (?!). We know pretty much nothing about it. And it's the large majority of 'stuff' in the universe.
If there are buddies out there, then we may want to look at stuff that is a bit more common.
If I said "this dessert is 30% milk, 40% sugar, and 30% good timing" you would be similarly confused.
Volume would be an odd measure to use given it changes with speed (due to special relativity) and gravity (general relativity).
The visible sky is over 99% empty, so it can't be that.
Which leaves us having to choose between mass and energy. But as e=mc2, they are effectively the same thing, which means we don't have to choose.
Is the obsession with aliens/UFO's a human thing, or just an American thing?
Like is the average person from France, Nigeria, or China just as excited about "ooh what if they're aliens?" Are human beings in general so captivated by extraterrestrial contact that shooting down balloons immediately tantalizes them? Or does the rest of the world go, "oh those loony Americans who've been watching too many movies."
If you said "Area 51" to people outside of North America, does it mean anything at all? And if so, is it just a joke?
If they were hiding the existence of aliens that would be pretty extraordinary.
Secrets sure but a secret of that magnitude for how long? I’m skeptical.
The Earth might be getting visited by aliens -- I mean, it's technically possible -- but it's even less likely that it could be kept a secret by the government if the government were aware.
But anyway, the Sasquatch and Yeti is pervasive across numerous countries and cultures. That's a similar path to becoming part of the culture (some random reportings, some weak evidence, then movies and tv shows and now it's part of the culture regardless of whether it exists or not and interesting to most people whether they believe in it or not). Like mermaids.
Aliens are not only an American thing. And American's are not obsessed. It just might seem that way with the media.
Of all countries, India believes the most that aliens will visit Earth in 2023. 43%. The US is 17% which is actually under the global average of 18%.
https://www.statista.com/chart/29296/public-opinion-on-alien...
Edit: They didn't conspire to invent the conspiracy, but didn't outright deny it either, since it provided them with a convenient distraction
Do you have a source for that? From a quick Google search it seems the US wasn't necessarily opposed to the rumors, but I can't find anything that shows it was started by the military, or actively propagated.
- Official UFO night: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672842;
- Varginha UFO incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident;
- List of UFO sightings in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_sightings_in_Brazil.
And aliens are no different than other superstitions and monsters such the chupacabra or yeti. It's all cultural influence.
Mainly a US/UK thing apparently.
In France, we obviously joke about aliens when we see a flying object we can't identify, and a few loonies believe it, but it's not the same level as in the US.
I remember randomly watching TV some day and they interviewed a French guy saying he saw lights slowly floating horizontally in the sky at a certain date, and he was convinced it was a fleet of UFO. It caught my attention because at this specific date I attended a wedding in a village near where this guy saw the "fleet", and in the night we launched paper sky lanterns. This dude saw our sky lanterns, thought it was UFOs and went on TV because of it.
"Flying saucers" are mostly a US/UK thing (in no small part because the US military encouraged "flying saucer" speculation to cover for when people saw secret aircraft testing).
In the past, and in other cultures, such things were perceived differently. "Angels", monsters, faeries, etc. It all depends on the cultural background of the viewer.
Mostly an American thing, pushed on by continued interest -- eyeballs drive all.
At this point I'm convinced it's a US Gov ploy to distract crazy right-wingers and domestic saboteurs, since UFO crazes in the press tend to follow right-wing agitation. Runs all the way back to the 90s and Oklahoma City. Keep the conspiracy nuts busy for a few weeks until things calm down, etc. etc.
Stuff is flying in our airspace and we need to focus on identifying those objects. Of course the likelihood of alien technology is rather low. That’s not the point. The point is we need to stop labeling and jumping to conclusions so we can open up to actual discussions that may lead to proper scientific examination of evidence.
The flaws and failure modes in our perceptive and recall facilities are so extensive it's amazing we survived as a species at all. I suppose it comes down to the fact that as long as perceiving a potential danger that isn't there doesn't directly get you killed, it's better to err on the side of caution rather than risk ignoring something that could be an actual threat.
So before we start considering the infinitesimally low but possibly non zero chance that an unexplained observation is actual extra-terrestrials that travelled many lightyears to stick a probe up someone's butt, lets first consider the chance that the detection was simply mistaken.
After all, we have huge numbers of very well documented cases of people, including pilots, navigators, radar operators, etc including even whole teams of specialists definitively and provably getting something wrong. It happens alarmingly often. Aircraft and nautical navigation errors, collisions, target misidentifications, blue on blue incidents. Tragedies such as the highly trained command crew of the USS Vincennes getting target identification and tracking systematically wrong at multiple levels of review despite multiple contra-indicators and shooting down an airliner.
So wouldn't we expect there to be quite a large number of such cases where we never discover the source of the error, or ever positively identify the actual reason for the inaccurate observation. Given the number of provable known cases, it seems plausible that we should expect there to be a rather large number of unproven ones, whether aliens exist and are occasionally flying around over our heads or not. So really, large numbers of unexplained but false detections are to be expected, right?
All we can do is speculate right now, and speculating wildly unlikely phenomena for which there is almost no evidence of having happened before seems illogical.
According to who? How is that compatible with the history of physics?
There are a few cases where physicists found new capabilities which weren’t known before, like Faraday discovering induction, or Einstein discovering mass-energy conversion. But even then the basic principle of energy being conserved is respected, and physical limits obeyed.
you may feel this, but in reality these people might have heard "its aliens" for 50+ years and are fed up with people jumping to conclusions without actual evidence.
and no, shooting down unknown objects is not evidence.
That's the problem with considering the unlikely (especially when there is a lack of evidence for the phenomena prior to this). When you're that far down in the weeds, it's all noise. There are too many technically possible but extremely unlikely explanations to spend time on them all, and in the absence of evidence, there's no reason to single any one of them out.
I find that the two prior base scenarios, one with galactically widespread advanced civilizations and one with only us alone in the vastness of space, would very probably look practically identical to us. There’s no reason advanced civilizations would use radiowaves for communication, and little reason for them to interfere in the development of a primitive civilization. I find that we would see an empty galaxy in both priors with a high likelihood.
Given this, the core problem in assigning an actual probability for either scenario is that we don’t know how easy or difficult it is for intelligent life to emerge. At this point it is quite impossible to assign the probability, since our sample size is 1. It is no more true to assign a probability close to 0 than it is close to 1. This must then either be set to 0.5 or eyeballed by circumstantial info, which is never real proof to one direction or another.
I believe it to be sufficiently high that the scenario where the apparently-empty galaxy is full of life is far from vanishingly small - and far from certain.
I consider it vanishingly small because of the screaming lack of even moderately firm evidence that it's ever actually happened.
> I believe it to be sufficiently high that the scenario where the apparently-empty galaxy is full of life is far from vanishingly small - and far from certain
I believe it is likely to the point of virtual certainty that there are other intelligent forms of life in the universe. We don't disagree there.
But the universe is unimaginably enormous, and the chances of any two such life forms being within reach of each other is miniscule. In order for it not to be, the universe would have to be absolutely packed with such life, and if it were, we'd very likely have some sort of evidence of it.
But my point still stands. Of all of the very unlikely things that might be true, why fixate so hard on this one? My suspicion is because people want it to be true, and starting with that stance makes error and misunderstanding very likely.
Yes, this is where we differ. Even at sub-light speeds, an advanced civilization would take only a few million years to colonize the entire galaxy. Thus, distances within a galaxy are trivial for intelligent life. Observable-universe-tier distances, however, are not - if we stay within sub-light speeds. If we assume that intelligent life could have emerged only within the last billion years, the observable universe would need to have quite many intelligent lifeforms indeed for some to have reached us.
But then again, that's only a question of numbers. We have no idea of the probability of intelligence emerging and reaching space age. It could be very low or very high. We cannot make inferences about distances due to this. We can only consider evidence. If the universe and our galaxy was packed with life, and we assume they would not want to interfere with our development, what evidence would we have?
Personally I can come up with no other possible evidence than radio signals. We can't image other solar systems yet with our equipment. Detecting Dyson spheres under construction is a reach for a number of reasons. And radio signals may easily be phased out very quickly as means of communication - we have only been using them for 100 years or so. This is why I don't find it convincing to use lack of evidence as evidence - what evidence would there be which we could detect short of direct contact?
> Of all of the very unlikely things that might be true, why fixate so hard on this one? My suspicion is because people want it to be true, and starting with that stance makes error and misunderstanding very likely.
You may be right on this point. However, I also believe that the historical stigma on discussing the extraterrestial scenario as a realistic possibility clouds the judgement of many towards overt caution, using strawmen where steelmen should be used. Evidence we have on the general subject points to no direction. Thus it's a question of probability for a very simple event - an intelligence reaching space age in any given planet, which we (almost) know to be non-zero. Therefore things like pooling extraterrestials together with wizards further strenghtens the stigma which greatly inhibits assessment of probabilities for explaining unexplained phenomena.
This has zero (or to split hairs some nonzero probability that is so infinitesimally small as to be practically zero).
People, including respectable scientists, were perfectly willing to entertain the possibility of aliens there, with all the appropriate and huge caveats.
It’s not that people don’t want it to be aliens, it’s just that it never is.
The very small chance of it being aliens is the same as the very small chance of it being wizards, or angels, or the rogue appendages of extradimensional horrors, or glitches in the matrix. It's irrational to fixate on the technically non-zero odds of aliens when there are an infinite number of explanations with technically non-zero odds.
In an "infinite worlds, infinite possibilities" sense it's possible that something, somewhere in the universe is alive and/or magical. But there is no telling that 1) that's actually happening, and 2) that we'd ever encounter it before the heat death of the universe.
Our Galaxy formed 13,000 million years ago. We estimate any single technological civilization that developed the technology to build Bracewell/von Neumann probes during this time (perhaps minus a few billion years) could have colonized every star system in the galaxy with self-replicating tech in at most a few million years. Presumably if the probes were self-replicating they could also be self-maintaining and therefore a single colonization could effectively produce a permanent technological presence within a given star system. We can't know what a civilization would do with such a network, but we can guess that human beings would program it to investigate life and technological civilizations.
So the "could there be alien technology in our solar system" question breaks down to a series of technical questions around the feasibility and probabilities of the above events. I personally still think those probabilities are low enough that we can round them to zero, but the spec-fi fan in me very much hopes that they're not.
Also: for god's sake, these are Chinese balloons and not aliens. :)
I'm guessing, but is it because we'd see a big empty space with a large gravitional pull? Would light bend around it similar to a black hole, or is the behaviour different enough to be obvious?
Disclaimer, my knowledge extends to high school physics (which I've largely forgotten).
What bearing does the trajectory of humanity have on the reasonableness of explaining things by alien? I fail to see any connection.
On the other hand, it being extremely unlikely (because in every instance so far the answer has been "no" or "we don't know") seems pretty relevant.
The probability is so vanishingly tiny that there's little point to entertaining it beyond "sure, it's possible".
Keep your mind open, but not so open that your brains fall out.
As for explaining UFO's/UAP's as aliens, that seems to be the least likely explanation, but shutting down all talk of UFO's/UAP's because of the association of the terms with aliens/"I want to believe" people is silly. There's plenty of room for conversation both valuable (what terrestrial technology and motives could be behind these?) and just fun and enjoyable (wild speculation about technology and motives).
I love scifi, this strikes me as a community filled with people who love scifi, I am excited about secrets and technology and a future filled with continued technological advancement. I'll never stop enjoying this type of speculation.
Personally, I love sci-fi and aliens, but I dont think that aliens are real, visiting beings among us and anyone who does seems likely to also think that vaccines are ineffective, global warming is fake, the earth is flat, and the moon landing was fake.
Many (most?) major religions teach that we are not the only intelligent life in the universe. The Abrahamic faiths teach the existence of angels, for example.
And even if we restrict it to intelligent biological life, most religions don’t really say anything about that at all.
That would at least exclude sentient extra terrestrial life.
So God can only exist if we are the only intelligent life in the universe?
That's some outdated geocentric reasoning.
And the article seems to be less targeting people having fun with the concept and more that fringe minority who take such things seriously, and perhaps indirectly journalists/bloggers who prey on such people for ad revenue.
Also if there's one thing I learned over the past few years, never underestimate the ignorance of the masses. I remember reading about a lawsuit against Walmart, and the Walmart legal team released a pretty boring PR statement saying "we are looking into the complaint...blah blah blah", and the most up-voted comment was along the lines of "well you can tell how much Walmart cares about this lawsuit when they just dismiss it as a "complaint"". Never mind that "complaint" is just the correct technical legal term, you file a "complaint" with the relevant court to start a lawsuit. Not defending Walmart, but clearly a lot of people were getting spun up over nothing and reveling in it, and it isn't healthy. I imagine the Alien stuff falls into the same category, albeit less on HN than elsewhere.
Only with a few specific religious beliefs. Most have no theological problem with the idea of life elsewhere in the universe.
So - every once in a while, try to care more about other humans than you do about being Right On The Internet.
And - my impression is that folks who believe in aliens tend to believe that the aliens are less dangerous (to ordinary people) than the government.
BTW, what if people started believing in near-earth asteroids? Imagine what governments could justify then...
I've changed my tune in recent years, seeing how destructive these conspiracies can be to society as a whole. Any single one conspiracy or ghost story isn't so bad, but they compound and result in a dysfunctional society less capable of digesting fact and thinking critically about nuanced topics.
(In retrospect, I now recognize Art Bell himself never took it seriously and considered it Entertainment, almost satire, like the World Weekly News. But many people didn't pick up on that and did take it seriously...)
If we don't know what an object is, then we don't know what it isn't either. This much is obvious. The people jumping to the conclusion that it _must_ be mundane are making the same mistake as the people who claim the opposite. We simply need better evidence.
Do I believe aliens are visiting Earth? Frankly, I do not. But I can't dismiss it outright either, because we don't know what we don't know.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - in other words, this speculation can be dismissed without additional proof
What Loeb is pointing at is that in the real world you can't expect extraordinary scientific evidence while refusing to fund the research that could produce such evidence.
I am not claiming that these observations are caused by aliens. I am merely pointing out the inherent contradiction behind statements like "we don't know what this is, but [we sure know] it is not aliens".
Could it be aliens? Technically, I guess. Just like it could technically be craft sent by advanced beings living in the center of a hollow Earth.
It makes sense to start with hypotheses that are actually likely, or at least not terribly unlikely, before going on flights of fancy.
In this case it doesn't. the expensive part was tracking the objects and taking one down, after that it's just recovering and studying the debris. If it's alien, it should be easy to tell.
Logic doesn't work that way.
We don't know all of the things it isn't. We can know many individual things it's not. I know that none of the UFOs in the news are my left shoe.
It's depressing how uneducated, gullible people think they're clever for having "super secret" info no one else has.
It's legitimately everywhere. The spread of baseless conspiracy theories, belief in magic and the occult, flat earthers, etc. has measurably gotten worse, I want to recall a few HN articles about the topic.
Edit. Keep being censored by ycombinator. In response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34791803
Yeah... but have you noticed that Youtube is towing the Govt line and preventing anyone from seeing the scene where the military create a spoof train wreck to evacuate people from the area? Was Steven Spielberg trolling the govt all those years ago?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=close+encounter...
If they transit space rapidly (on a human scale) they will be able to discharge energy in amounts so vast as to be incomprehensible.
If they transit space slowly (on a human scale) they will be able to store energy in amounts so vast as to be incomprehensible.
They'll be able to pluck individual hydrogen atoms out of the vast emptiness of interstellar space and reconstitute them into any element whose existence is possible. They'll be able to generate and arbitrarily manipulate gravity. They'll be able to approach, disassemble, store, and reassemble entire stars.
They won't be lazily floating in a car-sized object above the Canadian wilderness, bouncing around in the jet stream.
not really sure about that.
it opens up a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories to get lost in, while we really need a grounded and educated electorate.
What concerns me is that the countermeasures (missiles) we are using to destroy these things likely cost an order of magnitude more than the balloons cost to create. Certainly less than spy satellites that can do the same job. If we are going to defend our airspace from these surveillance platforms, we have to find more cost-effective means of taking them down than $1M missiles.
It's called the solar system. "Sol" is not an official name.
[0] https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-suns-name/
[1] https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming/
[2] List of IAU Solar System Objects, Exoplanets, Starts, and Stellar Streams https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CEXGyancLRtHyPW7u0L_...
Also el sol (es), o sol (pr), il sole (it), le soleil (fr), etc.
Technically the IAU hasn't sanctioned an official name, but Sol is fairly well understood.
Actually I was surprised to find this isn't _strictly_ true, but it is likely.
One possibility is other solar systems (far away) with a different blend of materials that make certain advancements "easier". One hypothetical example is a far away solar system having high quantities of "exotic" stable super-heavy elements that make things like FTL possible.
In such a scenario we wouldn't discover it because it's not naturally occurring in our solar system, and we wouldn't stumble on it until we built a large enough particle accelerator. So another race could be _way_ ahead of us with respect to FTL, but way behind us in things like material science or computers. Imagine if their solar system was completely missing say... silicon.
So now we are talking UFO and aliens invasions rather than the CCP. Amazing how misdirection works. The old mythologies still work well to avert our eyes and hearts.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3857321-white-ho...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-mystery-objects-get-shot-dow...
https://m.indiamart.com/proddetail/portable-biogas-balloon-1...
The last one I can think of was a mere 225 years ago (Hawai'i).
It's foolish to expect history to not repeat.
It.Will.Never.Be.Aliens.
ALIENS
I suspect we would be playing the role of the primitive people. Our civilization(s) have had many set-backs.
Anyone observing has detected the nearly 2,000 nuclear weapons tests we've conducted in the past. Those tests produce gamma rays that can be detected at cosmic distances, and the frequency of events would have been a curiosity.
So imagine yourself an alien observer. Over the course of decades, you watch flashes of gamma rays originate from one location in the galaxy. Naturally curious, you send a probe or scout to get a closer look.
From observable techno-signatures, you deduce there is an advanced civilization in a great war or a species crazy enough to explode powerful weapons on their home-world for shits & giggles.
Would you want to visit?
much longer than that, if you are using balloons
A CO2 level of 0.04% is hardly reverting the atmosphere to the Ordovician, which of course, will never occur, and we'd need to reach levels of 3000 to 9000 ppm to do so. Even if we burn every drop of oil and every lump of coal we could find, reverting the atmosphere is impossible. The earth sequesters CO2 and plants consume it via photosynthesis, and produces the oxygen we rely on.
Any life is likely to be significantly different from us, so they might just want to take some CO2 home with them.
and any life we encounter is unlikely to be based on anything but carbon, because it is the only element capable of forming likely complex structures because of thermodynamics, among other things
The bit about us reverting the atmosphere to the CO2 composition a couple billion years ago was a bit tongue in cheek, but not a very good job at humor on my part.
"the universe is big -> it's unlikely aliens can visit -> so it's not aliens".
Thanks for that, that's ground-breaking.
Yes, but what if it's really aliens?
(cue Not Saying It's Alien But It's Alien meme)
Borrowing from the world of Finance: past performance is not a guarantee of future results :-)
On the other, it’s exactly what a collaborator working with the aliens would say.
The public hears "It's magic, aliens or Jesus"
Last June, the Navy divers...... according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning."
"Hersch was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, "It's a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what's going on."
https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/02/10/hersh-nord-stream-sab...
We'll send him to the bottom of Hudson Bay.
>inb4 the drake equation