Comment by MrJohz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrJohz | Hacker News Reader

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I think the biggest argument against UFOs (or at least, against UFOs being aliens) is the set of claims that need to be true for it to hold up.

* Aliens (which in fairness, is the easy thing to accept here)

* Aliens that have the technology and means to travel vast distances to our solar system, and then on to earth

* (Alternatively) Aliens that have the technology and means to hide their presence in nearby solar systems and also still pretty good technology for traveling long distances

* A desire in these aliens to regularly and specifically visit earth (otherwise we wouldn't have sightings over such a long period of time)

* A desire to avoid being spotted by humans (otherwise we should surely expect far more of these sightings)

* A consistent inability in these aliens to avoid being spotted despite the aforementioned desire and technological capability (otherwise we would have no sightings at all)

* A very heterogenous set of equipment, vehicles, creatures, and patterns to account for the wide range of different reported sightings

* A desire by the government to keep this information hushed up (in fairness, this might not be required, but it seems insisted upon by every UFO believer I've ever heard)

* An inability by the government to keep this information hushed up

* A conscious choice by experts and the media to be sceptical of this story even when evidence is leaked or released

In fairness, all of this stuff could be true. If the evidence points to it, we should be willing to accept crazy claims like "this particle is actually also a wave" and "black holes exist". But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and repeated, consistent evidence. And that's what the whole "UFOs are aliens" lacks. There is a handful of circumstantial, fuzzy evidence from photos and videos that show wild things but aren't consistent with each other, and at best support one or two of the claims made above.

For me, that's the biggest issue here. It's not just accepting that some shiny ball of light might be an extraterrestrial vessel, it's also building a full theory out of that assumption that actually makes sense. Every interpretation I've seen requires so many crazy assumptions that it's very difficult to take the whole thing seriously at the end.

On the other hand, it might seem most likely that aliens should be here, given:

- the vastness of space

- the abundance of habitable worlds

- the age of the universe

- the speed with which tools like von Neumann probes could proliferate the galaxy

- the likelihood that somebody somewhere over millions of years would create a von Neumann probe (computer viruses didn't take long to make)

- the observation that we are here so why is no one else?

If we look around and see that we are alone, are we to assume no one else is there, or is it more likely they are and are hiding? There are good reasons to assume the group that comes to survive longest in the galaxy is also the one that is good at hiding. I think all these considerations more or less answer your first 5 points.

For some of the remaining points, maybe there are very few real alien sightings in the UFO reports but they are very few. The vast majority are hoaxes / confused. Government is not involved but maybe covering up the fact that they have detected some things they can't explain.

> - the speed with which tools like von Neumann probes could proliferate the galaxy

> - the likelihood that somebody somewhere over millions of years would create a von Neumann probe (computer viruses didn't take long to make)

The problem with this is no one has demonstrated any technology that can be used to make a von Neumann probe, and if you look at it from an engineering perspective, it's not clear that it's feasible at all. We are nowhere close to building machines that can build machines, much less ones that can do so when the inputs are "mine this rock", much less ones that can identify the rocks to be so mined, much less ones that are capable of being launched onto another planet, much less ones that can land on exoplanets, much less ones that can identify said exoplanets, much less ones that can remain in good working order for the entire journey.

That's... a lot of steps that need to be met for a von Neumann probe to be possible in the first place, almost none of which are demonstrable anytime soon. Should any one of those things be impossible, or merely impracticable, then that means von Neumann probes themselves are so. Until it's demonstrated that there's a good reason to think that von Neumann probes should be possible to construct, I don't think it's reasonable to argue that we should assume they already exist.

Humans, animals, plants, microbes, etc are that technology. Life is self-replicating nanotechnology machines. If synthetic biology works - and we know it does, we have already created a synthetic cell - it's perfectly possible. Not to mention it could evolve on its own. Humans are Von Neumann probes in our environment.

If you calculate and come up with the answer that it's really likely we should be seeing life, is it more likely that life is hiding or that one of your assumptions is wrong? Maybe try adding confidence levels to your estimates or changing them to ranges? It might be that von Neumann probes are harder to make or slower than you're expecting. If you're really confident in all the values then your conclusion still makes sense.

There's other factors that contribute to not seeing life in the universe. We have extremely limited ability to obverse exoplanets, my understanding is an exoplanet we're looking at could have life and we wouldn't know it. I think we're best suited to detecting life that outputs recognizable radio signals in our direction, which should be rare among all life.

It's probably extremely likely that if there are other intelligent life out there it is hiding. Risks of things like contamination and extermination are massive, and one need only to look at our own history. Transoceanic trade was havoc enough on our own species when it emerged a few centuries ago, both in terms of loss of human life from violence and disease as well as native flora and fauna that was either exploited, cut out in favor of a cash crop, or outcompeted by an invasive species that came aboard those ships. Even today you can't do things like transport firewood due to the risk of spreading disease to different populations. I think we are in an especially dangerous position since we are just blaring out "Look at me!!!" with our radio emissions into the universe. Hopefully another species doesn't consider this as some brutish chesthumping of our confidence against conquest.

Like I say, I'm all in board with accepting that aliens are likely to exist, that's the easy part of my list. And accepting that aliens can travel vast distances is also plausible, we just need to make them very technologically advanced in order to do so in reasonable time scales. And then possibly these very advanced aliens want to come to earth specifically out of curiosity or something?

But the problem is with each premise you're making more assumptions, and as you get further those assumptions start contradicting each other. The aliens aren't making their presence known so clearly they want to hide in some way. But these super advanced aliens keep on getting spotted, so maybe they don't want to hide, or they're not that good at hiding? So maybe they don't have all that good technology? But now how do we get them to fly between solar systems to make the start of the theory work?

And the further down the list you go, the more assumptions start to contradict each other, or become a step to far. But all of the assumptions are necessary because otherwise there's a gaping flaw in the whole idea.

> But these super advanced aliens keep on getting spotted, so maybe they don't want to hide, or they're not that good at hiding? So maybe they don't have all that good technology?

But I addressed this by saying they're not getting spotted. This is an orthogonal discussion to the UFO discussion which started this thread. I think the vast majority of UFO sightings have a terrestrial explanation.

Not to mention that there has to be something they would get from visiting earth and flying around for decades that they couldn't get by passively observing or landing a few times centuries ago.

* Decade after decade of the aliens at-most flirting with small numbers of isolated observers, generally in situations (like flying) where humans senses are far from their best. And never, ever doing something really slow, close, and obvious - say, 20 feet above an Xmas Parade, at 20 miles an hour, lower hatch on their saucer open, and mooning the crowd. Maybe catching Santa in the face with a couple Saturnberry cream pies, too.

> UFOs (or at least, against UFOs being aliens)

This right here is a huge issue. You get UFO believers who can't talk about UFOs without mentioning aliens.

But then you get disbelievers with the same problem! It's ridiculous and automatically calls into question individuals' claims of rationality or scientific intentions.

I don't think anyone doubts that some non-alien flying objects built by humans happen to be both flying, and unidentified by someone taking video of them.

It's not an interesting thing to discuss. In fact, it's the most obvious, mundane, simple, and unsurprising explanation for UFO videos. It's so banal, it's not even worth mentioning.

That's why skeptics talk about how the alien-ufo conspiracies are bunk, and why conspiracists talk about little green men at Roswell. It's way more interesting then 'The Air Force is testing weird air-frames at Area 51' or 'Some pilot somewhere saw some Russian aircraft but couldn't identify it.' Everyone already knows they are testing weird air-frames at Area 51, and that Russians occasionally fly around in airplanes.

> non-alien flying objects built by humans

I get the feeling you think "ET/alien" or "human-made" are the only two possible choices?

There's also bubbles of swamp gas, birds, weird atmospheric optical phenomena, miscalibrated radars, and hoaxes.

I'm not hugely interested in figuring out which one of a million different, mundane explanations is responsible for any particular UFO sighting. There's a never-ending stream of those sightings, all of them very low-quality, and they never amount to anything interesting. Maybe some spy wonk somewhere three stories underneath the Pentagon has looking at them as his OKR, but I don't get paid for it!

> There's also bubbles of swamp gas, birds, weird atmospheric optical phenomena, miscalibrated radars, and hoaxes.

Damn, some of my favorites aren't even here!

I think the never-amount-to perspective is interesting. It's very outcome-focused. IMO this psychology is not normally a great fit for UFO research, which is rather income-focused and outcome-distracted. So you get a diffusing effect and the most promising work is to be found in pockets and almost never in the big-picture view.

What third category could there be? God?

I don't want to share my list after reading that category. Please keep going! Maybe my list is more boring than I give it credit.

Animals Weather Airborne rubbish (in the form of plant or land material if you consider 'human made' already covered)

Etc.

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