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Comment by addaon | Hacker News Reader

This feels like one of those cases where it’s safe to say “history” instead of “recorded history.”

History, as recorded by Flightradar24: "a whopping grand total of 153,359 commercial flights were tracked between 00:00 UTC and 23:59 UTC on July 23, 2026" So I would say it's justified to qualify it. Not sure how Flightradar24's coverage has evolved over time, but it could theoretically be that there were more flights at some point before 2020, but some of them weren't tracked?

Minor commercial flights at minor airports? The kind of 20 people flight between two cities in Indonesia not even Indonesians know much?

One would generally think that even those had ADS-B running.

Sure, most commercial aircraft were probably broadcasting their position etc. via ADS-B, the question was just if they were picked up by a Flightradar24 receiver. Also, I'm not sure what the threshold is for Flightradar24 to consider a flight "tracked" - probably at least the takeoff and landing? So (to use the same example) if there was a receiver near the larger city in Indonesia where the flight originated, but not near the remote airstrip where it landed, it probably isn't considered tracked?

I think the parents point was that before recorded history we can be pretty sure there weren't airplanes for anyone to take flights on

safer to hedge ones bets. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. We could dig up a dinosaur equivalent of a 747 tomorrow.

also, recorded history pulls double duty here limiting the record to earth. You never know what those shady schmucks in the delta quadrant are up to...

> The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence

We have plenty of evidence to suggest that no other known thing that we have ever encountered on Earth either living or as fossils would have been capable of building an airplane

You're right that we have no direct evidence that there never were airplanes before humans existed, but with the evidence we do have it would be downright absurd to suggest we can't make a statement about that with some authority

> no other known thing that we have ever encountered on Earth

Fantastic tautology. A+ in Logical Fallacies today.

I personally know 3 guys who say they work for Boeing, but I have no evidence that they aren’t lizard people.

I'm not sure what you're objecting to

I'm trying to say there might be stuff out there we don't know about, but we have no knowledge of it or reason to believe it exists so -who cares-. If we encounter that stuff later on we can adjust our priors at that time. What exactly is the fallacy there?

Even history is not safe if you consider the entire universe.

Technically history only refers to the parts of the past for which we have written records.

Paleontologists would like to have a word…

No the study of history started at written records. It's call pre-historical for a reason

Paleontology != History

What if the aliens wrote stuff down?

I dont think they are refering to that. I think it is a reference to all the non-recorded flights happening every day. Maybe there was a day last week with more flying, but it wasnt all recorded.

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