It's not harmless. If enough people believe there are aliens the government can use that to do basically whatever they want because now were in danger from the ultimate boogieman. Re covid hysteria.
I agree with you. It's not harmless. When I was a kid, I'd tuck a small FM radio under my pillow and secretly listen to Coast-to-Coast with Art Bell when I was supposed to be sleeping. The stories about aliens, immortals, bigfoot, the Philadelphia Experiment, and holes to hell were mysterious, intriguing, exciting. I grew out of that and looked back on it as "harmless fun", like telling ghost stories around a campfire.
I've changed my tune in recent years, seeing how destructive these conspiracies can be to society as a whole. Any single one conspiracy or ghost story isn't so bad, but they compound and result in a dysfunctional society less capable of digesting fact and thinking critically about nuanced topics.
(In retrospect, I now recognize Art Bell himself never took it seriously and considered it Entertainment, almost satire, like the World Weekly News. But many people didn't pick up on that and did take it seriously...)
I forget which episode it was, but there was an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation where a primitive people fired on the Enterprise. It barely registered on their instruments and certainly did nothing to the shields.
I suspect we would be playing the role of the primitive people. Our civilization(s) have had many set-backs.
You have to assume they already know we are, at best, inherently dangerous, and at worst, a threat.
Anyone observing has detected the nearly 2,000 nuclear weapons tests we've conducted in the past. Those tests produce gamma rays that can be detected at cosmic distances, and the frequency of events would have been a curiosity.
So imagine yourself an alien observer. Over the course of decades, you watch flashes of gamma rays originate from one location in the galaxy. Naturally curious, you send a probe or scout to get a closer look.
From observable techno-signatures, you deduce there is an advanced civilization in a great war or a species crazy enough to explode powerful weapons on their home-world for shits & giggles.
If I am an advanced civilization I might not see nukes as a threat to my own people. I might see it as a strange behavior, that a planet would destroy itself in attempt to harm me. In such a case I might just stealth visit the planet and nobody would be any wiser.
Given cosmic distances (and assuming FTL travel isn't in the equation), it seems more likely that any aliens arriving are coming because they detected molecular oxygen in the atmosphere and it took them a while to arrive. They detected a planet that probably had life, and sent out an exploratory mission many millions of years ago. I can only imagine the disappointment of waking up from cryo-sleep or whatever and finding a planet whose occupants are seemingly deliberately reverting the atmospheric composition back to CO2.
I don't know. Oxygen isn't exactly rare. It is the third most common element.
A CO2 level of 0.04% is hardly reverting the atmosphere to the Ordovician, which of course, will never occur, and we'd need to reach levels of 3000 to 9000 ppm to do so. Even if we burn every drop of oil and every lump of coal we could find, reverting the atmosphere is impossible. The earth sequesters CO2 and plants consume it via photosynthesis, and produces the oxygen we rely on.
Any life is likely to be significantly different from us, so they might just want to take some CO2 home with them.
it's not rare in combination with other elements. it is rare on its own, as it is so reactive. there would be very little free molecular oxygen in earth's atmosphere if it was not being actively produced via photosynthesis
and any life we encounter is unlikely to be based on anything but carbon, because it is the only element capable of forming likely complex structures because of thermodynamics, among other things
Yes bound oxygen isn't rare, which is why I specified molecular oxygen. An alien race that could detect our atmosphere's composition (not outlandish, we've detected exoplanet atmospheres) would see the molecular oxygen and find it very intriguing (assuming they were susceptible to intrigue). If we detected an exoplanet with a 20% molecular oxygen atmosphere, it would be revolutionary.
The bit about us reverting the atmosphere to the CO2 composition a couple billion years ago was a bit tongue in cheek, but not a very good job at humor on my part.
Any alien race with technology to reach Sol will also have superior technology to defend themselves. Only start worrying when the “balloon” shot down the F-18s and F35s that were scrambled to shoot it down.
I've never really thought about it before, but I'm not sure if "The Sun" actually has an officially sanctioned name! I'll accept "Sol", and "The Sol System". I'll also accept "Helios/The Helios System", or the "Terran System" to refer to our entire Solar System. And I'm sure many different cultures have their own term. But in terms of science/academia, I'm not sure that it has an official name. Looks like the IAU (International Astronomical Union) hasn't given it a sanctioned designation. [0] [1] [2]
>Any alien race with technology to reach Sol will also have superior technology to defend themselves.
Actually I was surprised to find this isn't _strictly_ true, but it is likely.
One possibility is other solar systems (far away) with a different blend of materials that make certain advancements "easier". One hypothetical example is a far away solar system having high quantities of "exotic" stable super-heavy elements that make things like FTL possible.
In such a scenario we wouldn't discover it because it's not naturally occurring in our solar system, and we wouldn't stumble on it until we built a large enough particle accelerator. So another race could be _way_ ahead of us with respect to FTL, but way behind us in things like material science or computers. Imagine if their solar system was completely missing say... silicon.
Our first interstellar probes are unlikely to be able to destroy a fighter jet. They'll likely be similar to and just as fragile as the probes we use in our own solar system: https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/3
Aliens doesn’t mean tip of the spear of an alien invasion force.
Could just be some alien scientists who managed to scrape together a bit of grant money sending out cheap disposable probes to various systems to collect data.
If Star Trek taught me anything, it's that Aliens don't want to interfere with lesser lifeforms! Unless it's for our own good, then they will but try to hide it [1].
If it's aliens, it's either going to be very very obvious for years before they arrive or never going to be noticed until they want to be noticed. Positing a sweet spot between our competence and their incompetence is not reasonable. It does make for better stories.
“I want to believe” is the saying! You hit the nail on the head. Is it aliens? No. But I enjoy entertaining the theory that it might be. It’s harmless and adds mystery and excitement to my world. If you were young in the 90s, I’m sure you can remember the wonder that everyone seemed to have. I’m only sad that Art Bell isn’t here to speculate with us.
My current theory (other than nefarious state actors) is that it’s somehow just industrial inflatable gas storage devices that got filled with lighter than air gas and took off.
Eh. It’s extremely probably not aliens this time, though there is a very small chance it is. Given the trajectory of humanity, the alien scenario explaining an unexplained phenomena is not unreasonable, though almost always very unlikely. I find that a major portion of people fear the possibility so much that they’re unable to entertain the probability.
Physics never does an about face. Whatever new physics is out there must be compatible with the physics that we know and use today. And we know enough about physics at planetary and solar system scale phenomena to know that UFO-type intelligent aliens visiting us is a physical impossibility.
How isn’t it compatible? Einstein didn’t overthrow Newton, he just clarified what happened at high speed and high energies.
There are a few cases where physicists found new capabilities which weren’t known before, like Faraday discovering induction, or Einstein discovering mass-energy conversion. But even then the basic principle of energy being conserved is respected, and physical limits obeyed.
> I find that a major portion of people fear the possibility so much that they’re unable to entertain the probability.
you may feel this, but in reality these people might have heard "its aliens" for 50+ years and are fed up with people jumping to conclusions without actual evidence.
and no, shooting down unknown objects is not evidence.
Nobody but actual tinfoil hats are saying ”it’s definitely aliens”. Nobody is jumping to conclusions. It’s all probabilities, and disregarding a possibility without evidence to contrary despite its improbability is, to my eye, as naive as their counter opposites.
But why entertain this particular vanishingly unlikely explanation, when there are myriad other vanishingly unlikely possible explanations as well?
That's the problem with considering the unlikely (especially when there is a lack of evidence for the phenomena prior to this). When you're that far down in the weeds, it's all noise. There are too many technically possible but extremely unlikely explanations to spend time on them all, and in the absence of evidence, there's no reason to single any one of them out.
I understand your point, but I don’t believe the probability to be vanishingly small, just extremely small (in this particular case, based on what we currently know). I believe you and I differ in our prior estimation of the probability of extraterrestial observers.
I find that the two prior base scenarios, one with galactically widespread advanced civilizations and one with only us alone in the vastness of space, would very probably look practically identical to us. There’s no reason advanced civilizations would use radiowaves for communication, and little reason for them to interfere in the development of a primitive civilization. I find that we would see an empty galaxy in both priors with a high likelihood.
Given this, the core problem in assigning an actual probability for either scenario is that we don’t know how easy or difficult it is for intelligent life to emerge. At this point it is quite impossible to assign the probability, since our sample size is 1. It is no more true to assign a probability close to 0 than it is close to 1. This must then either be set to 0.5 or eyeballed by circumstantial info, which is never real proof to one direction or another.
I believe it to be sufficiently high that the scenario where the apparently-empty galaxy is full of life is far from vanishingly small - and far from certain.
> I don’t believe the probability to be vanishingly small
I consider it vanishingly small because of the screaming lack of even moderately firm evidence that it's ever actually happened.
> I believe it to be sufficiently high that the scenario where the apparently-empty galaxy is full of life is far from vanishingly small - and far from certain
I believe it is likely to the point of virtual certainty that there are other intelligent forms of life in the universe. We don't disagree there.
But the universe is unimaginably enormous, and the chances of any two such life forms being within reach of each other is miniscule. In order for it not to be, the universe would have to be absolutely packed with such life, and if it were, we'd very likely have some sort of evidence of it.
But my point still stands. Of all of the very unlikely things that might be true, why fixate so hard on this one? My suspicion is because people want it to be true, and starting with that stance makes error and misunderstanding very likely.
> But the universe is unimaginably enormous, and the chances of any two such life forms being within reach of each other is miniscule. In order for it not to be, the universe would have to be absolutely packed with such life, and if it were, we'd very likely have some sort of evidence of it.
Yes, this is where we differ. Even at sub-light speeds, an advanced civilization would take only a few million years to colonize the entire galaxy. Thus, distances within a galaxy are trivial for intelligent life. Observable-universe-tier distances, however, are not - if we stay within sub-light speeds. If we assume that intelligent life could have emerged only within the last billion years, the observable universe would need to have quite many intelligent lifeforms indeed for some to have reached us.
But then again, that's only a question of numbers. We have no idea of the probability of intelligence emerging and reaching space age. It could be very low or very high. We cannot make inferences about distances due to this. We can only consider evidence. If the universe and our galaxy was packed with life, and we assume they would not want to interfere with our development, what evidence would we have?
Personally I can come up with no other possible evidence than radio signals. We can't image other solar systems yet with our equipment. Detecting Dyson spheres under construction is a reach for a number of reasons. And radio signals may easily be phased out very quickly as means of communication - we have only been using them for 100 years or so. This is why I don't find it convincing to use lack of evidence as evidence - what evidence would there be which we could detect short of direct contact?
> Of all of the very unlikely things that might be true, why fixate so hard on this one? My suspicion is because people want it to be true, and starting with that stance makes error and misunderstanding very likely.
You may be right on this point. However, I also believe that the historical stigma on discussing the extraterrestial scenario as a realistic possibility clouds the judgement of many towards overt caution, using strawmen where steelmen should be used. Evidence we have on the general subject points to no direction. Thus it's a question of probability for a very simple event - an intelligence reaching space age in any given planet, which we (almost) know to be non-zero. Therefore things like pooling extraterrestials together with wizards further strenghtens the stigma which greatly inhibits assessment of probabilities for explaining unexplained phenomena.
Remember Oumuamua?
That was something that had a very small probability of being aliens.
This has zero (or to split hairs some nonzero probability that is so infinitesimally small as to be practically zero).
People, including respectable scientists, were perfectly willing to entertain the possibility of aliens there, with all the appropriate and huge caveats.
It’s not that people don’t want it to be aliens, it’s just that it never is.
The very small chance of it being aliens is the same as the very small chance of it being wizards, or angels, or the rogue appendages of extradimensional horrors, or glitches in the matrix. It's irrational to fixate on the technically non-zero odds of aliens when there are an infinite number of explanations with technically non-zero odds.
There is a non-zero chance that angels and magic are not real, and the chance of aliens being real, while perhaps greater, still relies mostly on conjecture, and is ultimately pretty close to those two things.
Show me a demonstrably provable example of either.
In an "infinite worlds, infinite possibilities" sense it's possible that something, somewhere in the universe is alive and/or magical. But there is no telling that 1) that's actually happening, and 2) that we'd ever encounter it before the heat death of the universe.
Obviously it isn't aliens and the rest of this is just fun, but:
Our Galaxy formed 13,000 million years ago. We estimate any single technological civilization that developed the technology to build Bracewell/von Neumann probes during this time (perhaps minus a few billion years) could have colonized every star system in the galaxy with self-replicating tech in at most a few million years. Presumably if the probes were self-replicating they could also be self-maintaining and therefore a single colonization could effectively produce a permanent technological presence within a given star system. We can't know what a civilization would do with such a network, but we can guess that human beings would program it to investigate life and technological civilizations.
So the "could there be alien technology in our solar system" question breaks down to a series of technical questions around the feasibility and probabilities of the above events. I personally still think those probabilities are low enough that we can round them to zero, but the spec-fi fan in me very much hopes that they're not.
Also: for god's sake, these are Chinese balloons and not aliens. :)
Why would the von Neumann probes not engage in stellar engineering to stop the wasteful emission of sunlight doing nothing more than heating the cosmos by a few micro kelvin? Where are all the Dyson spheres?
I'm guessing, but is it because we'd see a big empty space with a large gravitional pull? Would light bend around it similar to a black hole, or is the behaviour different enough to be obvious?
Disclaimer, my knowledge extends to high school physics (which I've largely forgotten).
There have been efforts to find them in the Milky Way and in other galaxies. All we really know is that Kardashev Type III civilizations aren't all around us. But that doesn't mean very much. https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/01/20/the-dyson-sphere-...
Human tribes branched before recorded history and pursued different rates of technological advancement. Thus, invasions from more technologically advanced "alien" branches of life have been happening for all of recorded history.
The last one I can think of was a mere 225 years ago (Hawai'i).
I get fatigued when people at bars or parties try to preach at me about how alien life is obviously behind the UFOs and if I don't believe them I'm a "sheep". Same goes for the wave of girls who think they're witches because they bought Tarot cards off Amazon.
It's depressing how uneducated, gullible people think they're clever for having "super secret" info no one else has.
Sometimes I think that's the case, and sometimes I think the wrong crowd is rapidly becoming the only crowd.
It's legitimately everywhere. The spread of baseless conspiracy theories, belief in magic and the occult, flat earthers, etc. has measurably gotten worse, I want to recall a few HN articles about the topic.
Genuine question, because I just realized I don't know.
Is the obsession with aliens/UFO's a human thing, or just an American thing?
Like is the average person from France, Nigeria, or China just as excited about "ooh what if they're aliens?" Are human beings in general so captivated by extraterrestrial contact that shooting down balloons immediately tantalizes them? Or does the rest of the world go, "oh those loony Americans who've been watching too many movies."
If you said "Area 51" to people outside of North America, does it mean anything at all? And if so, is it just a joke?
America is the one superpower that both has the security apparatus that playsibly could hide major things, as well as a cultural environment to feed grand narratives as plausible alternatives, whether it would be religious or more secular in nature.
It defies belief. Secrets can be kept for a long time, but how long is inversely proportional to how many people know the secret and how earthshaking the secret is. Look at it this way -- the US couldn't even keep the development of the atomic bomb a secret.
The Earth might be getting visited by aliens -- I mean, it's technically possible -- but it's even less likely that it could be kept a secret by the government if the government were aware.
Has it been kept a secret? I think its more of a question of whether you believe whats out there or think there isn't sufficient explanation for what 'definitive' evidence there is (tic tac video for example).
As someone who's not American, I'm always confused by the Americans' obsession with aliens. A single data point, but I don't think I've seen it in such a way in any other culture.
Probably because the idea of intelligent life forms outside our planet is fascinating? And the stories and culture through the radio and movies brought it to life.
But anyway, the Sasquatch and Yeti is pervasive across numerous countries and cultures. That's a similar path to becoming part of the culture (some random reportings, some weak evidence, then movies and tv shows and now it's part of the culture regardless of whether it exists or not and interesting to most people whether they believe in it or not). Like mermaids.
Aliens are not only an American thing. And American's are not obsessed. It just might seem that way with the media.
Of all countries, India believes the most that aliens will visit Earth in 2023. 43%. The US is 17% which is actually under the global average of 18%.
Many/most people here (Germany) know Area 51, because it appears in so much media. My impression: Except a small minority, most people here consider this a big joke (same for UFOs in general) and for us, the current UFO craze in the US it chuckleworthy at best. However, I guess the minority that actually believes this stuff has the same deep distrust of the government and "mainstream media" as people in the US that are actively believing it. Luckily, here it's just a small percentage for now.
It originated from the Cold War, and is a consequence of American Propaganda that both covers up intelligence and military action inside our own borders (the original area 51 conspiracy was started and propagated by the US military) as well as our inate belief that we are the worlds biggest and most powerful superpower, therefore the only things that could invade our airpsace must be extra-terrestrial.
Edit: They didn't conspire to invent the conspiracy, but didn't outright deny it either, since it provided them with a convenient distraction
> the original area 51 conspiracy was started and propagated by the US military
Do you have a source for that? From a quick Google search it seems the US wasn't necessarily opposed to the rumors, but I can't find anything that shows it was started by the military, or actively propagated.
Zimbabwe has a famous siting back in the 90s where a bunch of school children saw some aliens. Were they were taken a piss or influenced by American UFO culture? Who knows
I wager its a western thing as western civilizations were full of explorers who made big names for themselves by "contacting" alien civilizations and bringing back artifacts and stories. Then technology began shrinking the world, first eliminating the unknown here on the surface then further shrank in the emerging field of astronomy. With nothing left to explore and the realization that we're a small spec in a vast, cold universe, what's left? Alien invasion stories are just the other side of the great tales of discovery and conquest by the Magellan's and Columbus's of the universe.
And aliens are no different than other superstitions and monsters such the chupacabra or yeti. It's all cultural influence.
I think to start imagining what the rest of the universe might contain one has to have moved past the god delusion, which rules out a lot of people in developing countries.
In France, we obviously joke about aliens when we see a flying object we can't identify, and a few loonies believe it, but it's not the same level as in the US.
I remember randomly watching TV some day and they interviewed a French guy saying he saw lights slowly floating horizontally in the sky at a certain date, and he was convinced it was a fleet of UFO. It caught my attention because at this specific date I attended a wedding in a village near where this guy saw the "fleet", and in the night we launched paper sky lanterns. This dude saw our sky lanterns, thought it was UFOs and went on TV because of it.
People tend to see what they expect to see, and when people see things they can't identify, they tend to identify them in terms of their cultural background.
"Flying saucers" are mostly a US/UK thing (in no small part because the US military encouraged "flying saucer" speculation to cover for when people saw secret aircraft testing).
In the past, and in other cultures, such things were perceived differently. "Angels", monsters, faeries, etc. It all depends on the cultural background of the viewer.
> Is the obsession with aliens/UFO's a human thing, or just an American thing?
Mostly an American thing, pushed on by continued interest -- eyeballs drive all.
At this point I'm convinced it's a US Gov ploy to distract crazy right-wingers and domestic saboteurs, since UFO crazes in the press tend to follow right-wing agitation. Runs all the way back to the 90s and Oklahoma City. Keep the conspiracy nuts busy for a few weeks until things calm down, etc. etc.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadSo - every once in a while, try to care more about other humans than you do about being Right On The Internet.
And - my impression is that folks who believe in aliens tend to believe that the aliens are less dangerous (to ordinary people) than the government.
BTW, what if people started believing in near-earth asteroids? Imagine what governments could justify then...
I've changed my tune in recent years, seeing how destructive these conspiracies can be to society as a whole. Any single one conspiracy or ghost story isn't so bad, but they compound and result in a dysfunctional society less capable of digesting fact and thinking critically about nuanced topics.
(In retrospect, I now recognize Art Bell himself never took it seriously and considered it Entertainment, almost satire, like the World Weekly News. But many people didn't pick up on that and did take it seriously...)
I suspect we would be playing the role of the primitive people. Our civilization(s) have had many set-backs.
Anyone observing has detected the nearly 2,000 nuclear weapons tests we've conducted in the past. Those tests produce gamma rays that can be detected at cosmic distances, and the frequency of events would have been a curiosity.
So imagine yourself an alien observer. Over the course of decades, you watch flashes of gamma rays originate from one location in the galaxy. Naturally curious, you send a probe or scout to get a closer look.
From observable techno-signatures, you deduce there is an advanced civilization in a great war or a species crazy enough to explode powerful weapons on their home-world for shits & giggles.
Would you want to visit?
much longer than that, if you are using balloons
A CO2 level of 0.04% is hardly reverting the atmosphere to the Ordovician, which of course, will never occur, and we'd need to reach levels of 3000 to 9000 ppm to do so. Even if we burn every drop of oil and every lump of coal we could find, reverting the atmosphere is impossible. The earth sequesters CO2 and plants consume it via photosynthesis, and produces the oxygen we rely on.
Any life is likely to be significantly different from us, so they might just want to take some CO2 home with them.
and any life we encounter is unlikely to be based on anything but carbon, because it is the only element capable of forming likely complex structures because of thermodynamics, among other things
The bit about us reverting the atmosphere to the CO2 composition a couple billion years ago was a bit tongue in cheek, but not a very good job at humor on my part.
"the universe is big -> it's unlikely aliens can visit -> so it's not aliens".
Thanks for that, that's ground-breaking.
It's called the solar system. "Sol" is not an official name.
[0] https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-suns-name/
[1] https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming/
[2] List of IAU Solar System Objects, Exoplanets, Starts, and Stellar Streams https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CEXGyancLRtHyPW7u0L_...
Also el sol (es), o sol (pr), il sole (it), le soleil (fr), etc.
Technically the IAU hasn't sanctioned an official name, but Sol is fairly well understood.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-suns-name/
Actually I was surprised to find this isn't _strictly_ true, but it is likely.
One possibility is other solar systems (far away) with a different blend of materials that make certain advancements "easier". One hypothetical example is a far away solar system having high quantities of "exotic" stable super-heavy elements that make things like FTL possible.
In such a scenario we wouldn't discover it because it's not naturally occurring in our solar system, and we wouldn't stumble on it until we built a large enough particle accelerator. So another race could be _way_ ahead of us with respect to FTL, but way behind us in things like material science or computers. Imagine if their solar system was completely missing say... silicon.
ALIENS
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Watches_the_Watchers
Yes, but what if it's really aliens?
(cue Not Saying It's Alien But It's Alien meme)
not really sure about that.
it opens up a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories to get lost in, while we really need a grounded and educated electorate.
https://m.indiamart.com/proddetail/portable-biogas-balloon-1...
According to who? How is that compatible with the history of physics?
There are a few cases where physicists found new capabilities which weren’t known before, like Faraday discovering induction, or Einstein discovering mass-energy conversion. But even then the basic principle of energy being conserved is respected, and physical limits obeyed.
you may feel this, but in reality these people might have heard "its aliens" for 50+ years and are fed up with people jumping to conclusions without actual evidence.
and no, shooting down unknown objects is not evidence.
That's the problem with considering the unlikely (especially when there is a lack of evidence for the phenomena prior to this). When you're that far down in the weeds, it's all noise. There are too many technically possible but extremely unlikely explanations to spend time on them all, and in the absence of evidence, there's no reason to single any one of them out.
I find that the two prior base scenarios, one with galactically widespread advanced civilizations and one with only us alone in the vastness of space, would very probably look practically identical to us. There’s no reason advanced civilizations would use radiowaves for communication, and little reason for them to interfere in the development of a primitive civilization. I find that we would see an empty galaxy in both priors with a high likelihood.
Given this, the core problem in assigning an actual probability for either scenario is that we don’t know how easy or difficult it is for intelligent life to emerge. At this point it is quite impossible to assign the probability, since our sample size is 1. It is no more true to assign a probability close to 0 than it is close to 1. This must then either be set to 0.5 or eyeballed by circumstantial info, which is never real proof to one direction or another.
I believe it to be sufficiently high that the scenario where the apparently-empty galaxy is full of life is far from vanishingly small - and far from certain.
I consider it vanishingly small because of the screaming lack of even moderately firm evidence that it's ever actually happened.
> I believe it to be sufficiently high that the scenario where the apparently-empty galaxy is full of life is far from vanishingly small - and far from certain
I believe it is likely to the point of virtual certainty that there are other intelligent forms of life in the universe. We don't disagree there.
But the universe is unimaginably enormous, and the chances of any two such life forms being within reach of each other is miniscule. In order for it not to be, the universe would have to be absolutely packed with such life, and if it were, we'd very likely have some sort of evidence of it.
But my point still stands. Of all of the very unlikely things that might be true, why fixate so hard on this one? My suspicion is because people want it to be true, and starting with that stance makes error and misunderstanding very likely.
Yes, this is where we differ. Even at sub-light speeds, an advanced civilization would take only a few million years to colonize the entire galaxy. Thus, distances within a galaxy are trivial for intelligent life. Observable-universe-tier distances, however, are not - if we stay within sub-light speeds. If we assume that intelligent life could have emerged only within the last billion years, the observable universe would need to have quite many intelligent lifeforms indeed for some to have reached us.
But then again, that's only a question of numbers. We have no idea of the probability of intelligence emerging and reaching space age. It could be very low or very high. We cannot make inferences about distances due to this. We can only consider evidence. If the universe and our galaxy was packed with life, and we assume they would not want to interfere with our development, what evidence would we have?
Personally I can come up with no other possible evidence than radio signals. We can't image other solar systems yet with our equipment. Detecting Dyson spheres under construction is a reach for a number of reasons. And radio signals may easily be phased out very quickly as means of communication - we have only been using them for 100 years or so. This is why I don't find it convincing to use lack of evidence as evidence - what evidence would there be which we could detect short of direct contact?
> Of all of the very unlikely things that might be true, why fixate so hard on this one? My suspicion is because people want it to be true, and starting with that stance makes error and misunderstanding very likely.
You may be right on this point. However, I also believe that the historical stigma on discussing the extraterrestial scenario as a realistic possibility clouds the judgement of many towards overt caution, using strawmen where steelmen should be used. Evidence we have on the general subject points to no direction. Thus it's a question of probability for a very simple event - an intelligence reaching space age in any given planet, which we (almost) know to be non-zero. Therefore things like pooling extraterrestials together with wizards further strenghtens the stigma which greatly inhibits assessment of probabilities for explaining unexplained phenomena.
This has zero (or to split hairs some nonzero probability that is so infinitesimally small as to be practically zero).
People, including respectable scientists, were perfectly willing to entertain the possibility of aliens there, with all the appropriate and huge caveats.
It’s not that people don’t want it to be aliens, it’s just that it never is.
The very small chance of it being aliens is the same as the very small chance of it being wizards, or angels, or the rogue appendages of extradimensional horrors, or glitches in the matrix. It's irrational to fixate on the technically non-zero odds of aliens when there are an infinite number of explanations with technically non-zero odds.
In an "infinite worlds, infinite possibilities" sense it's possible that something, somewhere in the universe is alive and/or magical. But there is no telling that 1) that's actually happening, and 2) that we'd ever encounter it before the heat death of the universe.
Our Galaxy formed 13,000 million years ago. We estimate any single technological civilization that developed the technology to build Bracewell/von Neumann probes during this time (perhaps minus a few billion years) could have colonized every star system in the galaxy with self-replicating tech in at most a few million years. Presumably if the probes were self-replicating they could also be self-maintaining and therefore a single colonization could effectively produce a permanent technological presence within a given star system. We can't know what a civilization would do with such a network, but we can guess that human beings would program it to investigate life and technological civilizations.
So the "could there be alien technology in our solar system" question breaks down to a series of technical questions around the feasibility and probabilities of the above events. I personally still think those probabilities are low enough that we can round them to zero, but the spec-fi fan in me very much hopes that they're not.
Also: for god's sake, these are Chinese balloons and not aliens. :)
I'm guessing, but is it because we'd see a big empty space with a large gravitional pull? Would light bend around it similar to a black hole, or is the behaviour different enough to be obvious?
Disclaimer, my knowledge extends to high school physics (which I've largely forgotten).
What bearing does the trajectory of humanity have on the reasonableness of explaining things by alien? I fail to see any connection.
On the other hand, it being extremely unlikely (because in every instance so far the answer has been "no" or "we don't know") seems pretty relevant.
The probability is so vanishingly tiny that there's little point to entertaining it beyond "sure, it's possible".
Keep your mind open, but not so open that your brains fall out.
The last one I can think of was a mere 225 years ago (Hawai'i).
It's foolish to expect history to not repeat.
It's depressing how uneducated, gullible people think they're clever for having "super secret" info no one else has.
It's legitimately everywhere. The spread of baseless conspiracy theories, belief in magic and the occult, flat earthers, etc. has measurably gotten worse, I want to recall a few HN articles about the topic.
We'll send him to the bottom of Hudson Bay.
Is the obsession with aliens/UFO's a human thing, or just an American thing?
Like is the average person from France, Nigeria, or China just as excited about "ooh what if they're aliens?" Are human beings in general so captivated by extraterrestrial contact that shooting down balloons immediately tantalizes them? Or does the rest of the world go, "oh those loony Americans who've been watching too many movies."
If you said "Area 51" to people outside of North America, does it mean anything at all? And if so, is it just a joke?
If they were hiding the existence of aliens that would be pretty extraordinary.
Secrets sure but a secret of that magnitude for how long? I’m skeptical.
The Earth might be getting visited by aliens -- I mean, it's technically possible -- but it's even less likely that it could be kept a secret by the government if the government were aware.
But anyway, the Sasquatch and Yeti is pervasive across numerous countries and cultures. That's a similar path to becoming part of the culture (some random reportings, some weak evidence, then movies and tv shows and now it's part of the culture regardless of whether it exists or not and interesting to most people whether they believe in it or not). Like mermaids.
Aliens are not only an American thing. And American's are not obsessed. It just might seem that way with the media.
Of all countries, India believes the most that aliens will visit Earth in 2023. 43%. The US is 17% which is actually under the global average of 18%.
https://www.statista.com/chart/29296/public-opinion-on-alien...
Edit: They didn't conspire to invent the conspiracy, but didn't outright deny it either, since it provided them with a convenient distraction
Do you have a source for that? From a quick Google search it seems the US wasn't necessarily opposed to the rumors, but I can't find anything that shows it was started by the military, or actively propagated.
- Official UFO night: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672842;
- Varginha UFO incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident;
- List of UFO sightings in Brazil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_sightings_in_Brazil.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-57749238
And aliens are no different than other superstitions and monsters such the chupacabra or yeti. It's all cultural influence.
Mainly a US/UK thing apparently.
In France, we obviously joke about aliens when we see a flying object we can't identify, and a few loonies believe it, but it's not the same level as in the US.
I remember randomly watching TV some day and they interviewed a French guy saying he saw lights slowly floating horizontally in the sky at a certain date, and he was convinced it was a fleet of UFO. It caught my attention because at this specific date I attended a wedding in a village near where this guy saw the "fleet", and in the night we launched paper sky lanterns. This dude saw our sky lanterns, thought it was UFOs and went on TV because of it.
"Flying saucers" are mostly a US/UK thing (in no small part because the US military encouraged "flying saucer" speculation to cover for when people saw secret aircraft testing).
In the past, and in other cultures, such things were perceived differently. "Angels", monsters, faeries, etc. It all depends on the cultural background of the viewer.
Mostly an American thing, pushed on by continued interest -- eyeballs drive all.
At this point I'm convinced it's a US Gov ploy to distract crazy right-wingers and domestic saboteurs, since UFO crazes in the press tend to follow right-wing agitation. Runs all the way back to the 90s and Oklahoma City. Keep the conspiracy nuts busy for a few weeks until things calm down, etc. etc.