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Comment by boringuser2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm willing to put aside literally every mechanical interpretation of probability here, ignoring really poignant questions, in favor of one overarching question:

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.

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> Do you really, really think a species capable of interstellar travel would have vehicles or crafts that we could recognize as such?

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.

Quick question for you.

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.

Yes, but Isaac Newton would be able to see an F-35 and iPhone and would be able to understand how these things work once explained.

But, you are giving Newton an affordance that makes this an unfair comparison: "once explained".

How do you think he would do with rare visual glimpses and hearsay only?

You asked, analogously, if he would be able to recognize the F-35 as a vehicle. All it would take is watching one land and seeing the pilot climb out to make it absolutely clear to him.

The fundamental issue is that people really have no intuition as to how unfathomably gigantic space is.

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.

Now, imagine their dinky little arts and crafts UFOs are "crashing" due to something trivial like gravity.

Just playing devils advocate though: okay, but couldn't they also just have really high-tech ships in a primitive shape (like a sphere, for aesthetic reasons) with really fast engines and really strong hulls, too? Maybe we're simply too limited in our naive essence to understand the technology behind such a simple premise.

"Ships" feels really really anthropomorphic.

I mean, sure, the odds are not zero. But they seem very, very, very, very close to zero (to me).

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.

Can you imagine recovering alien technology, and the best we have to show for it is an iphone, with East Asia starting to lap us in things like semiconductor manufacturing?

You'd sure thing ALIUM technology would be useful for Intel to leapfrog Asia's foundaries.

Weird, where is that stuff?

Oh I never said anything about them visiting us. Or finding us. Or wanting to.

Just the super fast super durable aesthetic spheres.

Its not crazy to me to think that there is something here.

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.

I think a modern jet is similar enough to a bird that animals created millions of years ago (prehistoric birds) can have some basic understanding on how it behaves.

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)

Apologies: This comment is a terrible analogy.

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.

I'd be happy to explain any of this to Aristotle. "It's a picture that draws its itself. Here, touch it." We do this every day with children. Ten thousand years o development and you're caught up in five. It's fine!

My point is that our relative distance in time and technology is basically zero, yet we're already seeing massive gaps in capability.

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.

You can give an infant an ipad and they will figure out how to use it pretty quickly. They will have an understanding of its purpose. You merely extrapolate from our advances of 5000 years that there must be technology that is inconceivably advanced.

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.

This is why I dont understand why people expect UFOs to have lights on them. Or when they see lights they go to UFO.

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.

> That feels more like a technology 100-200 years ahead of us, akin to science fiction

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.

While I completely agree with you on interstellar travel, I'd like to add the nuance that you seem to assume that there is no life in the Solar system other than on Earth.

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, that can't be it.

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.

Not only that, but when they're here on Earth they get from point A to point B by actually traveling the distance through the air. Slow enough for us to see. You'd think these aliens with FTL technology would just appear to us as popping in and out of existence when they change position.

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?

And after they fly across the universe for millions of light years, they immediately crash for Uncle Sam to retrieve them. Or no, actually Uncle Sam immediately shoots them down with his pew pew rockets that travel at infinitesimally low speeds.

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