Experts testify at UFO hearing in Congress
text.npr.org
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People are seeing things that they can't explain. That warrants investigation. Definitive statements about how these are not human seem motivated by ideology instead of evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If that evidence is presented I'm happy to change my mind here, but none of this ever adds up.
By the way, we have no idea what the Sentinelese think of us or our technology. We don't know if they see it as more advanced or not, or how they perceive our presence. The only thing we know is that they're hostile towards visitors.
> ever adds up
They're even capable of changing our reasoning and math: 1+1=Aliens!
We have extraordinary evidence, this is what is being presented right now, among other things.
> [...] they're lazy enough to get caught a few times here and there. Why would they just watch? Are they really that lazy that they get caught? Surely they know and understand our capabilities. It just doesn't make sense.
Yes, this line of thinking has been presented countless times. I believe everyone's first argument against UAPs or non human intelligence (NHI) is exactly this. There are numerous possible answers to this question, for example:
* The crashed ships are "gifts" for us to examine and learn from
* Sightings and encounters represent the tip of an iceberg, drawing us in to explore to and learn.
* We can create amazing things, sometimes our amazing things break for whatever reason, perhaps that is universal.
* Perhaps what we are witnessing is not NHI specifically visiting us, instead it is a consequence of how the ship moves through space. Perhaps the ships move in and out from what we perceive is our existence, while moving through space.
Point is; the history of UAP is ancient, the documentation and data is statistically significant, the disinformation campaign is insidious and the encounters are world wide.
My suggestion is just to keep an open mind.
I don't want to keep an open mind when interpreting data. What I want is the exact opposite.
So, yeah. "I want to believe", but I don't want to have to bend my critical thinking in order to do so.
One word: teenagers.
That's very specific: not made by any government.
We know it's not aliens. It's never aliens. So, it's some sort of private party, probably a company.
The man tried to pass off a picture of a chandelier as a UFO. He claims he fought terrorists using astral projection. He's connected to the bullshit circus that is Skinwalker Ranch. He's not credible.
This is always the game with these people. Everyone's talking about Corbell's "jellyfish UAP" video - which is obviously just bird shit on the lens - and how there's a second video showing it leaping in and out of the water that definitely exists but of course that the public can never see. It's always allegations, claims, speculations, and rare circumstantial evidence that nine times out of ten turns out to be bunk. What has David Grusch actually revealed, other than a rehash of existing UFO folklore, and things he's been told by other people? It's all smoke and mirrors and people keep falling for it because of media hype, their inherent mistrust in government, and because they want to believe.
If there is something at the center of this - I promise you, I guarantee you the people talking about aliens and "NHIs" and interdimensional beings don't know anything about it.
(Whenever you tell something is smoke and mirrors, it is very likely people will imagine something even more fantastical).
I don't know how true the latter part of that is (the former is definitely true) but people like that aren't going to be disabused from their beliefs regardless of the criticism, it's religion at that point.
All I'm saying is if people want this to be taken seriously, and approached credibly, they need to stop taking the word of people like Lue Elizondo uncritically. We don't know that any of these people actually know anything about anything. We do know they can't or won't prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. We also know the proof they do provide, when they choose to provide it, is often unreliable, circumstantial or outright fraud. That should be more of a red flag for people than it seems to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World?wprov=...
If a private company could make these kinds of things, what benefit would they get by not selling it to a government? They could set their price and immediately become world renowned.
Unless you are saying that there is a shadowy secret organization that controls the world with space lasers and UAPs….
As you return home, henchman grab you, blindfold you and take you to my secret lair, then bind you to a table with a laser mounted on the ceiling pointed at the table. I walk up to the table and power on the laser and its beam slowly moves toward you between your legs.
Me: "You figured it out. SPECTRE rules the world with UAPs and space lasers!! And that's unfortunate for you."
I start to walk away...
You struggle with the bonds confining you to the table, to no avail. And with just a hint of panic in your voice:
You: "Do you expect me to talk?"
I laugh and say:
Me: "No Atotalnoob. I expect you to die."
With apologies to Ian Fleming[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(film)
Edit: Fixed typo and formatting.
You should. It's fun. And Sean Connery (IMNSHO) was the best Bond.
Ze Peniz iz Bäd! Ze Gun iz Good!
That'd be a neat trick, given that he's been dead for four years.
Does he jump out of his grave to do that?
I think it's something trivial, probably boring, yet locked in some sort of confidential arrangement. I think we're on a scenario that the public should know something, but we can't know what UAPs are, and these two conditions are deadlocked.
Would that not be a government by definition?
Hedge fund stock market bullshit. You know, the kind that has people track movements of various CEOs, or buy aerial/satellite images of parking lots, and stuff.
That would be my main guess. As for "monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe" specifically, I'd look at PMCs and data brokers, but there's probably many more scenarios I'm failing to imagine right now.
EDIT: Also, to channel my inner Matt Levine: securities fraud?
They could play countries off each other to gain soft power over policy that affects other investments, ones easier to leverage that selling weapons. “That’s a nice military you got there, it’d be a shame if China/Taiwan/Israel/Iran/NK/Russia/USA had this one weird trick to obsolete it.”
It’d be even more impactful if it changed the nuclear MAD game, because the company could hide behind the risk of escalation. Don’t sell to any one nuclear power so that the others don’t immediately start nuclear war to preempt the new technology.
This is all ridiculously speculative but if humans managed to make a flying craft as fast and maneuverable as UFO witnesses say they are, missile defense and the end of MAD is my first thought.
Why? Shouldn't probes be here by now?
There are 200 sextillion stars in the observable universe. We know of one civilization--ours, and it immediately began sending probes once capable. If Von Neumann self-replicating probes are possible, doesn't that solve both distance/speed of light/time scale objection and imply probes should be here by now? The sending civilization may not even still exist, but their probes would.
However, "Von-Neumman probes must exist if possible" is a very different statement from "UAPs are alien probes".
So…yes, until we see some tentacled slug monster land in Central Park…or their probe, I am going to assume that intelligent life is super rare. Lots and lots of time must pass to become intelligent and advanced enough to venture beyond the place where they live out there. Also, distances are so vast between these intelligent civilizations that there just hasn’t been enough time that has passed for them or their probes to reach us since the creation of the universe.
Seems likely.
Had space politics gone differently, there would be high-speed galaxy trains connecting all the important star systems, and we would've gone unnoticed in our little backwater forever. You need proof? r/fuckpersonalflyingsaucers is marked "invite only".
They also may not be light years away, but rather ultra terrestrial or interdimensional or time travelers or they use wormholes to “teleport”. We just don’t know, but the possibilities are not constrained to just your “incompetent but competent” paradox.
Edit: you may find this article thought provoking: https://jdmadden.substack.com/p/naturalizing-without-demytho...
That's my point. They seem to want to be hidden yet aren't very good at it? They can travel across the galaxy but somehow can't avoid being seen by our shitty cameras? Those two things don't square.
> They also may not be light years away, but rather ultra terrestrial or interdimensional or time travelers or they use wormholes to “teleport”.
They might also be magical pixies that travel via quantum flatulence. But it seems unlikely.
Beings lived on earth 50-60M years ago, they left without a trace but left probes to watch what happens, once civ reaches a certain point they reveal themselves in stages.
I was going to write a few more variations, but as I do I realize even more permutations. There must be at least 50 I can think of within an hour or so that seem remote but plausible enough.
I think with any postulate you sort of get to "ok so what now?" and I agree that there's not much you can really do. If they are super-squid or inter-dimensional beings or future humans or some sort of god, there's not really much to do with it unless you think they are weaving some sort of message for us to parse.
* People getting bored and imagining things (“seeing faces in the clouds” so to speak)
* People being primed to see something (they read about other “UFO” sightings) and then, of course, they “see it” too
* People wanting to believe something for tangential ideological or social reasons — the government is corrupt and is hiding things -> UFOs must exist!
* People literally just making things up (they want attention, money, want to one-up someone, want to be special, have unregulated emotions, etc)
* Faulty / mis-calibrated sensors
* Data corruption / misinterpretation
* It was just a bird / cloud / water vapor / reflection of sunlight / electrical short / optical illusion
* And so on
These are the types of “boring” things that are always the real explanation when someone starts talking about crazy shit like ghosts or aliens. Aliens and ghosts are cool and exciting so people don’t want to believe the boring reasons. We often want distractions in our lives, and what a fun distraction that would be, eh?
Wild and outlandish claims require overwhelming evidence.
I’ll take it that you’ve conceded that point.
If I wanted to engage with your new point I’d say - actually none of the points you’ve listed explain the current situation. There’s simply too many credible people, from too many separate instances, that are claiming largely similar things across many different incidents. And we now have hard (though not ideal) video evidence that has yet to be explained within our current popular understanding of physics (and I’m aware of the popular debunks, which I find far from compelling).
But that would be opening a whole new discussion, and I’m not here to fight that battle.
The Great Filter is one possible explanation:
We should've been seeing progressively more of them then, perhaps already been eaten by them.
Though if you mean "physically disassemble the Earth", conditional on us having not noticed them yet, there's this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.01522
That's a tiny "if". Were you to ask me to write a science fiction story where the premise was that they were indeed impossible, I'd struggle to come up with ideas why that might be the case. In principle it must remain true, even if the "self-replicating probe" were gigantic human colony ships, and humans were some kind of component of the scheme. And if humans are sufficient components to make that work, why not something simpler than a big drooling man-monkey?
It's not that they're impossible. I don't think we'd need even another 200 years to do it. I just don't think we have the time. We're on a fast course to extinction, and by the time most people realize that this is so, the last chance to avert it will be 30 or 40 years in the rear-view.
Is it? Since humans can send probes, and reproduce ourselves, technology and civilization, it proves that a slower self-replicating bio-mechanical system has this capability and now we're left debating if a faster more compact system is possible, which doesn't seem like a leap?
You can't just take human beings, push them out into space and expect them - somehow - to multiply exponentially and without error using any arbitrary matter they encounter over millions of generations, but that's the baseline expectation of Von Neumann probes.
Add to that all of the assumptions required to use Von Neumann probes as an explanation for modern UFO folklore. One might assume that a simplistic organism could survive and thrive more easily in interstellar space (something like a virus or tardigrade, for example.) Complex organisms tend to be more delicate and more prone to replication errors over time, as well as more sensitive to things like the radiation of interstellar space. But that isn't what people are reporting - they're reporting large, complex, technological, apparently even piloted vehicles. And that's not even getting into the interdimensional stuff, links between UFOs and the supernatural, or abductions.
Obviously Von Neumann probes haven't consumed the galaxy. Therefore, either no technological civilization has ever existed in the universe other than ourselves, in which case UFOs/UAPs cannot be Von Neumann probes because they obviously haven't consumed the galaxy, and don't behave in the ways that such probes would be expected to, or else technological civilizations can and likely do exist, and Von Neumann probes aren't as simple or inevitable as people seem to think. And it still doesn't explain UFOs/UAPs as reported.
The former is true, but mainly limited by phosphorus as all the other elements are relatively easy to get hold of in random rocks or gas giants.
The latter is no longer true as we have adequate diversity of collectable sperm and egg samples and also (albeit crude) DNA modification tech if we really needed it.
That's absurd. If you can make a self-replicating probe, you can code a heuristic that prevents a grey goo scenario. Cells reproduce, but they haven't consumed the galaxy.
> doesn't explain UFOs/UAPs as reported.
So, the existence of spurious reports magically invalidates actual probes?
>So, the existence of spurious reports magically invalidates actual probes?
Given that the entire premise of bringing them up was to validate the probable reality of those reports, yes. If one is going to argue that the UFO/UAP phenomena which are the subject of TFA are likely true because self-replicating probes should exist, a valid counterargument is pointing out that the craft described by said phenomena do not resemble self-replicating probes either in their construction or behavior. For instance by having pilots, or by appearing to travel across dimensions or faster than light, which would render obsolete the entire rationale behind self-replicating probes to begin with.
If there were probes here, are you sure you'd see it? Why do silly reports being mixed in change the liklihood? If they don't, couldn't a single report that was real be in the mix? Ok, maybe a few?
So, saying "*some* don't resemble self-replicating probes" doesn't really invalidate anything?
> a valid counterargument is pointing out that the craft do not resemble self-replicating probes either in their construction or behavior
It seems like this is difficult to know what it would present as?
I don't think there would be enough probes for it to be unusual that none have landed here, given the size of interstellar space. I may be wrong, but if I am, we're back to the Fermi Paradox and it's essentially the same problem. If they should be here, they should be everywhere.
>So, saying "some don't resemble self-replicating probes" doesn't really invalidate anything?
I'm saying none of them do.
>It seems like this is difficult to know what it would present as?
To reiterate, being a probe, it wouldn't likely have pilots or crews, and the current UAP narrative mentions "NHI" (non-human intelligences) and "NHB" (non-human biologics), and the broader UFO narrative of course has plenty of aliens.
One could, I suppose, suggest that the probes for whatever reason also replicate crews within themselves, but that seems to be stretching the premise beyond absurdity to me. At some point one has to assume there are limits to the capabilities of this model, otherwise it's essentially magic.
Also to reiterate, the model of self-replicating probes assumes slower than light travel. If you have faster than light travel (assuming that's possible) you don't need self-replicating probes. Both the current UAP narrative and the broader UFO narrative involve craft traveling faster than light, across dimensions, through wormholes, etc. And as far as I'm aware there isn't any report of a UAP or UFO replicating itself as one would expect.
So it isn't necessary to know what, specifically, self-replicating probes would present as when none of the details reported support the presence of self-replicating probes over any other possibility.
Millions of years of evolution have already granted DNA the capacity for diagnostics, error correction and self-repair. Despite that, genetic replication is still error prone, and everything still fails, sometimes catastrophically. DNA is made of molecular bonds, and that "software" is necessarily also made of molecular bonds, there is no distinction between "software" and "hardware" at that level of physical granularity.
You're not going to get perfect replication of anything over millions of generations. That violates the laws of thermodynamics. The system has to change, randomly and unexpectedly, and it has to fail over time. Entropy must accumulate. And that's not even taking into account the radioactive hellscape of interstellar space.
This is the difference between mathematics and physics. Mathematicians can handwave away or ignore inconvenient or uninteresting complexities, and thus something like the infinite exponential progress of self-replicating probes across the galaxy seems obvious because the math is obvious, but reality doesn't allow that.
Yes to the first two, but "has to fail over time" is something you are making up--not a law of physics.
Local decreases of entropy happen continually. Resilient, error-checking, self-healing systems are possible.
>Resilient, error-checking, self-healing systems are possible.
You cannot have such systems be perfectly efficient. That isn't physics, it's magic.
I'd instead point out that while "perfect" isn't possible, we can relatively simply design the system to have an error rate such that there's less than a 1e-12 chance of an error occurring anywhere in the universe even if you did turn the entire mass of the universe into probes.
I'd counter that with the point that people are very bad at accounting for all the possible ways that systems can fail, and that while it's easy to create an error correction code that good, the actual failure rate of the system as a whole is likely to be much, much worse.
Organisms' mutation rate is not constant: there's a need to mutate more due to the need to be able to adapt over generations to novel threats, and a need to mutate less due to the risk of premature (before reproduction) death. This adaptability also explains why whales, which are much bigger than us, don't all get cancer almost immediately and die young; and also why dogs, which are much smaller, still often manage to get it despite only living to 12 or so.
In computers… well, there's multiple layers of error correction. There's error correction in the link layer, in the transport layer with TCP, at the OSI application layer implicitly in TLS because errors would break the signing, and important files also get separate checksums (and these days security signatures) to be tested when the transfer is complete. These were all designed with arbitrary standards of "acceptable" error rates, there's nothing to prevent a new design with a different idea of what's "acceptable" and setting that threshold as low as I suggested, or even lower.
But!
Every time I see someone make a pronouncement that they're more than 99% confident of something they've never actually tested, I think they've likely not thought of all the ways their thing can go wrong. That means that while I can be confident that we can design a system that appears, according to every scenario we can imagine, to have less than a one-in-a-trillion chance of a mutation surviving even if every atom of the universe is converted into more von Neumann probes implementing that system, even then I still expect that if it were built it would rapidly encounter an outside context problem.
it's going to turn out that absence of evidence is evidence of absence
Strong argument, no notes.
An argument that there exists any other civilization requires evidence. Show me yours.
People have lied to congress a good bit in the past. It's safe to do if it's even a little difficult to prove.
That doesn't even count the times people lied to whoever is doing the testifying, such that they aren't knowingly lying to congress.
“Not made by any government” is not a lie when you’re a lawyer.
The truth: an advanced intelligence capable of interstellar flight traveled dozens if not millions of light years to visit Earth and chose to fly perpendicular to a bunch of F/A-18s in a Navy training range and then disappear, never to be seen again by man or machine. They ignored all of the locations of industrial activity, all of the people, the land, the animals, the unique geologic features, the vast expanses of earth covered by multiple overlapping forms of radar and cameras pointed at the sky, and flew over an empty-ass stretch of ocean COINCIDENTALLY when some F/A-18s were there.
What's next, a hearing on whether ghosts are real?
This really is at the root of so many of modern societies problems.
And really the biggest disappointment of the 21st century. How can we possibly still be this primitive 8-/
In some cases it's just dirt on a lens or similar. Extremely occasionally there are aircraft they can't identify but in no cases is it ever clear that these are extraterrestrial.
No wonder the US political situation is such a disaster (and I don't just mean the election of the cheato).
With this much of the population, and this much of the representative legislature so far off the rails of reality, it's almost a miracle that anything gets done at all.
Military bases and equipment with presumably the most sophisticated camera systems.
Says it all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phones_with_8K...
Is a hoax. There are no "other world" aliens or spacecrafts. Everything is earth-based.
https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/unidentified-anomalous-p...
When Ms. Boebert open her mouth, she immediately claims the earth was flat. Additionally, this wasn't just "UAP" but really a way to drum up various conspiracy theories. She keeps goes on about non-human genetic materials and creating of hybrids, and alien hideouts in the oceans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT2iWKZr0qA
This is a waste of my tax payer money. Republicans voted down Biden's Cancer Moonshot, but find this trash to be completely legit?
I guess she's been binging The X Files[0]?
Immaculate Constellation
A luminous nation's celestial tic