There's literally no level of evidence I would accept because the premise is contrary to numerous, basic logical inferences.
The only fact I know for certain is that the federal government and military industrial complex has a history of lying and waging information warfare on American citizens. If they tell me aliens are here, there's no way I will believe them. As much as I want to believe, I simply can't, unless I personally have some experience with an alien.
And remember... no matter what happens, no matter what the government or the "aliens" tell you... do not get on the ships!
"Plausible deniability"
The CIA is (supposed to) serve at the pleasure of the president.
Although, "specific physical / recorded evidence made publicly available for study" would be even better if the evidence is strong. Once you're at "if it's a hoax/fraud, the perpetrator has advanced science we don't" it's a world-changing thing; maybe it's not an alien, but whatever it is it's amazing.
If you haven't, I recommend watching the YT minidoc "In Search of a Flat Earth" by Folding Ideas. It's not about the aliens, it's not about the earth being flat, it's about the conspiracy and who is behind it. If you dig deep enough, it's always rooted in some racist or antisemitic world view.
Basically Federal agents became "convinced" that paranormal stuff is happening at Skinwalker ranch, but that is/was because of significant conflict of interest where they earn income from entertainment enterprises (like History Channel) by leaking information to them -- even information which is completely falsified.
How so?
The argument for no aliens is lack of evidence, not evidence of their lack.
Is there were a large animal in my garage, I would see droppings.
If there were aliens, we would......what exactly?
Every day we see new stuff in the universe that we didn't see before.
The difference between my garage and the universe is immense.
You walk through your garage with a camera and when you play back the video, there’s a strange orb on the video!
Must be dragons!
It’s stupid. When you look very hard for something and you dont find it, sure, it’s not evidence it doesn’t exist.
…but it does increase the probability that it doesn’t exist. It eliminates a category of possible “it existing” cases.
Everyone on the planet has a high resolution camera in their pocket, and can share photos and videos instantly online.
Yet, miraculously, paranormal phenomena is somehow covered up by the government…
50 years ago, the possibility of an alien crash coverup seems plausible.
Today, it beggars belief it could happen and not be noticed and commented on.
That is not proof nothing “weird” exists; but if you think it doesn’t eliminate a broad category of things from existing, you’re delusional.
Humans are good at believing in things that don’t exist.
What we see isn’t “reality”, its just our interpretation of the input from our senses. We see things that don’t exist.
That doesn’t make them exist.
Things like:
* There have to be enough star systems and planets that could support life. Research here is exploding as we discover more and more exoplanets and are able to gather more detailed information about them. But it's still not clear that it's at all common, and might be breathtakingly uncommon.
* Those star systems and planets that could support life have to actually spawn life. And then they have to spawn intelligent life capable of creating and using tools, and capable of intellectual thought and developing theories and application across physics and engineering. This life needs to be somehow "compatible" with humans, in the sense that it can't be so wildly different that they might not recognize us as intelligent life and vice versa.
* The aliens have to exist "right now". A civilization that existed in the past and fell even a few thousand years ago is not one that we would see. Similarly, a civilization that is, say, 10 thousand years behind us, is not one that we would see.
* These aliens need to actually be interested in the possibility of life outside their own world (or at least interested in generally exploring outside their solar system), and mount a campaign to search the skies and look for us.
* Then the aliens have to have found us. That means that they have been looking in the right spot, at the right time (aliens who live 3000 light years away won't see "us", absent some sci-fi faster-than-light viewing device). Also consider that the amount of effort we've spent to search for alien life could easily be insufficient to find any, even if life turns out to be somewhat common in our galaxy.
* The aliens have to have figured out interstellar travel. Our current understanding of physics suggests that this is Very Hard. Assuming our current understanding of physics is correct, it will be expensive and difficult for these aliens to come visit us. Even assuming we don't have the whole picture when it comes to physics (almost certainly true), that would seem to increase the barrier, not reduce it.
* Even if aliens do manage to find and reach us, they have to either a) want to be seen, or b) screw up and be seen by accident. If they want to be seen, then presumably they'd have done a better job of it (despite various Earth governments trying to hide it) and detailed knowledge of alien life would be common. If they don't want to be seen, then a -- perhaps unlikely -- accident must occur that reveals themselves to at least some of us (whom the rest of humanity don't really believe).
That's just a taste; there's a lot more you can find if you go down the rabbit hole. All of this has to work out for it to be the case that aliens have visited our world. If we assume that each of these events is fairly improbable on their own, than the probability of all of it happening is pretty tiny. Even if we assign decent odds to many of these things, the probability of all of them being true is still fairly low. Doesn't mean it definitively hasn't happened, but probability it usually pretty suggestive.
If you can flash a light bright enough to be seen by other civilization you can communicate with them at light speed. Then once you convince your communication partners to build machines and run programs you send them, your AI's can "travel" at light speed.
Once the AI has arrived it can start communicating without the light speed lag and things really start moving. The AI could build UFO's locally using the science and tech of its own culture.
If your aliens are just data, light speed travel doesn't sound that far fetched.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
If we assume GPT4 is a trillion parameters, each 16 bits, then this would require 5000 years to transmit (quite aside from any error correction or the description of how the parameters should be arranged).
I would hope that our AI would be able to bootstrap to FTL in that time.
Sit back and enjoy the ride.
Do you really, really think a species capable of interstellar travel would have vehicles or crafts that we could recognize as such? That feels more like a technology 100-200 years ahead of us, akin to science fiction, than the reality of a species hundreds of thousands or MILLIONS of years ahead of us technologically, whose existences would simply be fucking incomprehensible to the human eye or mind.
The conception that such entities are travelling the galaxy in dinky little craft is completely absurd.
They could probably scan our fucking souls and create replicas of our qualia with technology from the interstellar equivalent of a Walgreens.
Or, more likely, they simply have technologies that we can in no capacity conceive of or understand at all.
So my theory is in about 150 years, DJI will release a drone with a time-travel capability, and the UFOs we see now are people in 2170 trolling us.
Traveling Mars to Earth would require some decent tech. Traveling from the next star over requires some mind-bending tech. An entity traveling from the next galaxy over would necessarily be in possession of just some truly incomprehensible technology and would probably exist on spatial and temporal scales that just cannot be loaded into our ape brains via our sensory organs.
And then the odds go down further that they have tech that can move them 10,000+ light years in a palatable amount of time/energy for them to visit Earth.
Then the odds go down further by the fact that, if they exist with that broad a view of the universe, Earth is almost certainly not worth visiting.
Then the odds go down further by the fact that we have allegedly detected and recovered them?
Not zero but it really is astronomically low, even if you have high conviction the universe is actually teeming with life.
You'd sure thing ALIUM technology would be useful for Intel to leapfrog Asia's foundaries.
Weird, where is that stuff?
Just the super fast super durable aesthetic spheres.
But that it doesn't care if we see it or not. There is not much of it so we just don't see it often.
Who know what we recovered? Perhaps just some discarded waste, perhaps the result of internal conflict. Neither seems crazy.
I like to think the Earth _is_ very special given "life", and that we are just about to start our own exploration of the galaxy (on galactic timescales)
It's really only a few hundred years before we mount an artificial general inelegance in the front of some rocket and shoot it at the nearest sun.
What makes you think just because it’s millions of years more evolved we wouldn’t be able to get the general gist of what it does ? (not how it does it, of course)
Try explaining quantum physics to Aristotle.
That's a mere 2-3000 years of technology with large periods of stagnation.
Give Churhill/Stalin/Hitler an iPhone.
They now have access to a device of unparalleled ability compared to anything they could have conceived of, and they will simply be completely incapable of understanding or utilizing it outside of performing basic tasks.
That's 60 years of the accelerated age of technology we live in.
Yes, Aristotle would likely be able to pick up on the new monke uptake given that he was a unparallelled mind. That was a pretty weak analogy given it didn't impart the information that I intended.
Though he did not believe in it, Aristotle was aware of the concept of atoms (that he had no hope of observing). I am sure he would have gotten the gist of quantum physics too.
Yes. That is, they almost certainly use objects made out of actual atoms to travel it or whatever the hell. There are almost no hints, with the possible exception of dark matter, in even the most speculative of well -grounded physics, of anything else they could be using. So that's the the null hypothesis. And the mere presence of that object in an interaction is enough to recognize it with high confidence as a vehicle.
People get too obsessed with the idea of technology indistinguishable from magic. Physics is still real, still imposes hard constraints on technology, and our tech is already sufficiently shaped by those constraints that other things within those constraints will at least be recognizable with some effort. We may not know how it works right away, but that's a very different question.
Have you heard of a really smart guy named "Isaac Newton"?
Well, his ideas are only ~300 solar years established and observations in quantum mechanics have opened a realm of complete impossibility to a Newtonian worldview.
How do you think he would do with rare visual glimpses and hearsay only?
That could very well be true... but we're not even confident ruling out life on Mars completely, and we landed there and took soil samples and explored.
Honestly, if there are extraterrestrials on Earth, I'd wager my hat that they're from somewhere in the Solar system. Just because the alternative is even more unlikely -- as you rightly argue.
No local drones or Dyson spheres, but we're cohabitating with a species capable of intra-solar travel?
Seems highly suspect. They'd need to be at roughly our level of technological development, which, if true, would be more likely to believe in a concept of "God" engineering that outcome than any kind of organic alien life.
They seem a little too domestic. It reminds me of how ancient people thought the Sun rode across the sky in a chariot. Because how else would the Sun get around but the same way we do?
Why ? Why would external lights be helpful when travelling interstellar distances. Then if you have the technology to travel these vast distances so quickly, why would you need lights when darting about at "slow" terrestrial speeds, the technology you must have to navigate and avoid things must be so beyond just lights... You almost certainly aren't navigating in anything that remotely resembles looking out your craft ?
It just makes no sense to me. IT's why I assume if anyone mentions a UFO when talking about lights in the sky I'm totally convinced it's terrestrial in nature.
[0] extremely well supported
You can get halfway across the galaxy in less than 50,000 years.
-Deep sea exploration
-DNA sequencing and cloning
-Flight
-Long-range electric power
-Microbes
-Organ transplants
-Solar panels
I understand the enormity of the proposition of things such as FTL travel. But just saying "it doesn't have a fit within our current framework of understanding, so it's impossible and a moot point" seems a little...conceited, given all the historical precedents of exactly the opposite becoming true, eventually, given enough public interest.
"Let's take a look at one of John von Neumann's most fascinating contributions to science: the Von Neumann probe. Simply put, a Von Neumann probe is a self-replicating device that could, one day, be used to explore every facet of the Milky Way in a relatively small window of time.
The general idea is to build a device out of materials that are readily available and easily accessible out in space, like on rocky planets or small moons. Once it finds a suitable destination, it lands and mines the material it needs to build even more devices, which, in turn, land on other planets and moons and build even more.
The system is very effective, and by some estimates, it would take around half a million years to dispatch millions of probes across our galaxy, assuming each one travels at approximately 1/10th the speed of light, or 18,640 miles (30,000 km) per second (though the real number could be closer to ten million years, which is still no time at all in the grand scheme of things)."
And then there's the general time scale. I agree that half a million years (or even 10 million years) isn't much in the grand scheme of things. But it matters to us: what if this alien civilization sent them out 50 thousand years ago? They may not have gotten to us yet. Or what if they were sent out 100 million years ago? It's unclear if they'd still exist today, or if they would have broken down, their repair and replication systems failing after all those years; even if they are still around, maybe the civilization that sent them out doesn't exist anymore.
Also consider that building these probes is pretty much at or beyond the limit of our technological capabilities right now. We might be able to build enough of them as a seed fleet if we devoted tens of trillions of dollars to the project. And accelerating something to 0.1c is nothing to sneeze at either. Remember that they also have to decelerate from that speed in order to find targets for mining in order to fuel themselves and their replication systems, or even just to enter orbit around a planet or star. They'd require some pretty advanced software to run them, too.
I've seen quite a few articles and videos on Von Neumann probes, created by people I respect, but even many of them acknowledge that building these and sending these out would not be a small undertaking. A civilization that did so would have to be at a point where they've solved most of their problems at home (or be in dire need of finding a new home, but at the same time able to wait thousands or millions of years to find one) before they could justify taking this on.
(Remember, the person upthread isn't talking about the mere existence of aliens. They were talking about the improbability of us having some evidence or experience of their existence.)
Sounds like you'd accept something that breaks the basic known science then. If they could demonstrate any tech which does not exist, or is wildly outside of the current limits, would that convince you? For example energy use allowing interplanetary travel in a vehicle of unreasonably small size.
And now I'm trying to imagine aliens that look like members of the onion family.