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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

It’s a good call out - the ability of the government to keep secrets across decades.

But - tinfoil hat time - have they not demonstrated their ability to do this wrt the knowledge around nuclear weapons?

Edit: and considering the claimed abilities of UAP, might those technologies be on par (in terms of military might) with the technology behind nuclear weapons?

Also, that bit about a spaceship needing a biological pilot was kind of dumb. I don’t know how you can see the advances in AI these days and not be able to extrapolate an advanced space faring species not needing a biological pilot on their spaceship.

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You mean our nuclear weapons where the secrets were leaked[0] to other governments repeatedly? Those secrets? The secrets that we executed both of the Rosenbergs over?

No our government has not demonstrated their ability to keep secrets over the span of a few years, let alone decades.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies

I don't disagree with you, but you have to remind yourself of a potential bias: you only hear of the secrets they didn't successfully keep. The ones they kept successfully you obviously wouldn't have heard about, by definition. Who's to say this hearing isn't an example of them losing control over a secret?

A lot of what is known about the T-U design is because of some clever social engineering.

I think I've only ever seen one quantitative book that deals with the minutiae of a nuclear bomb (in a book about explosives, will link it)

Those designs aren’t even modern though are they? Plus there’s a whole host of logistics and operations knowledge at scale around nuclear weapons that are highly classified and not known.

They said nothing about a pilot. He said they found "biologics". Doesn't mean it was a pilot.

Probably just means that a drone hit a cow.

> “I don’t want to oversimplify it, but how are you going to fly one [spaceship]? You got to have somebody in it. That seems to be pretty simple,” Burchett said.

“Simple” is not the word I’d use to describe this conclusion.

One meaning of the word simple is naive and/or unintelligent, so depending on your attitude, simple might be a perfectly good word to use here.

It was a machine pilot keeping a pet plant in its ship.

Only half kidding, if we meet aliens they will be machines at least to some extent. Biological life has a lot of annoying limitations and continuously circumventing them is more expensive than just becoming machines.

It’s way more likely to encounter von Neumann probes than some beer drinking alien traveling across the galaxy in compression socks and with a neck pillow.

I wouldn't be so sure. They could have a much more advanced idea of what life is, and life could have deep meaning to them, they might seek to keep their biological selves in tact and use machines only as tools. I know that's how I would roll, and I'd raise my kids that way, a group of beings like that could spawn a nation down the road with a rule like that. Or with their understanding of life and computation and intelligence and the universe, it could just be self evident to them: your form follows your function, if you change your form you change your function and you're no longer you. Sending robots, sure, becoming robots, I think you're bound to meet at least as many that don't as that do.

AI is more Apparent Intelligence these days

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