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Comment by cowboysauce | Hacker News Reader

Commercial airlines apparently experience crashes at a rate of 6 per 100,000,000 flights. I wasn't able to find a figure from the testimony as to how many craft are claimed to have been recovered. The best I could find was an anonymous quote from a Vox article of 12+. Applying the commercial airline stat to 12 crashes over 80 years results in almost 7,000 alien flights per day (just over the US). There are 25,000 flights per day (again in the US). A ratio of alien:commercial flights of 1:4 is really hard to buy. The alternative is that these alien craft are incredibly more advanced and yet somehow worse at flying than human aircraft. To play devil's advocate, maybe the government is intentionally shooting them down. But how? With what? Human knock-offs of their own weapons?

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Or it could be you’ve made a ridiculous assumption by comparing commercial airlines to UFOs in the first place.

I'm asking if alien craft are a safer method of transport than air liners. Alternatively, if we replaced air liners with these craft, would fewer people die? If they are safer then the sky should be flooded with them to result in 12 crashes so far. This doesn't seem to be the case so there must instead be a smaller number of more dangerous craft to result in 12 crashes. So either the sky is flooded with invisible alien craft or their craft are a more dangerous method of travel than our air liners.

Or maybe it's better to compare to personal modes of traffic and not airliners?

I mean sure. Cars, for example, are significantly more dangerous than airliners and people crash all the time. But if alien craft are as safe as cars then that just leads back to my original point that airliners are better at traveling safely through our atmosphere than physics-defying alien craft.

Or there is a hell of a lot more than we think

...yes. and what else floats?

A duck!

who are you, so wise in the ways of science?

Your logic is based on the assumption that those alien crafts were intending to come to Earth. Perhaps they were intending to go somewhere else, and crashed into Earth mistakenly? Then the volume of total flights could be much larger, and the proportion of crashes could be much smaller.

So instead of thousands of craft flying daily over the US, there are potentially millions commuting past Earth? And those crashes still happen despite an abundance of help nearby?

I can't quite put my finger on why, but somehow these exchanges with fringe theorists strongly remind me of one-sided versions of those "who would win" arguments that people have between Star Trek technology versus Star Wars. The real objective seems to be to show off one's ability to creatively avoid being pinned down by argument from scientific knowledge while affecting that one's own claims are grounded in it.

I'm not sure if you're directing that at me, or the parent comment. But I'm not a fringe theorist, and I don't believe that aliens have been crashing into Earth either. I find the parent comment's argument very unconvincing.

It makes assumptions which don't seem reasonable in the context of the subject matter at hand. If aliens did exist, they could be much more numerous than humans. Their spacecraft could be more dangerous than airplanes to operate. Their method of travel could perhaps result in collisions with Earth even if it wasn't their intended destination.

My overall point is that we should minimize the assumptions we make here. There's no point in assuming various things and then proposing arguments based on those predicates.

Sure, what's preposterous about that?

We can't assume that getting "help" is trivial just due to the volume of travel. Commercial airplanes can't rescue each other, just as an example.

I don't believe that aliens are making contact with Earth. But I don't find your argument against that possibility convincing either.

In my mind, a much better argument would simply be that with 7 billion people on this planet, the likelihood of alien crashes staying secret seems miniscule. We would have solid conclusive evidence already if it had happened multiple times, like alledged.

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