> "Let me be clear: UAP are real," he writes. "Advanced technologies not made by our Government — or any other government — are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe
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.
I don’t believe in aliens (fermi paradox) but I doubt it’s a company.
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….
>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're assuming the tech is some kind of ex-machina, something incredible (btw I'm not). In your scenario, I could ask the same: Why does the company need the government for then? Would you sell your time machine to the US or use it?
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.
> If a private company could make these kinds of things, what benefit would they get by not selling it to a government?
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.
> If a private company could make these kinds of things, what benefit would they get by not selling it to a government?
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?
The weird phrasing "not made by any government" makes me think exactly the opposite. Whoever said it is probably being vague enough to tell the truth, we just don't know exactly what that truth means.
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.
Why not? Yes, we did send out probes...and where are we with them?
"If Von Neumann self-replicating probes are possible" That's a big if. Where is proof of these probes that you speak of?
If I could attach a software program to every replicating chunk of DNA, I'm pretty sure I could write a checksum and diagnostic and instructions to shut down if they failed. That's not a variable that does anything to feasibility.
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.
Self-replicating probes aren't closed systems. They exist within the universe, consume matter (which is how they replicate) and emit waste heat (as all physical systems must,) and are bound to the laws of physics which, yes, include the second law of thermodynamics. There may be short term local reductions in entropy, but eventually, inevitably, entropy must increase.
>Resilient, error-checking, self-healing systems are possible.
You cannot have such systems be perfectly efficient. That isn't physics, it's magic.
No one suggested perfect efficiency. I'm debating with you, a product of a similar reproductive process (evolution) where a system of throwing away the bad offspring has worked just fine. Magical indeed!
In fairness, that's a bad argument because this same process also gives us cancer.
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.
But the reason DNA is an apt analogy is because as we see in reality cancer does exist. So a self replicating probe would in theory be following same principles of DNA, it would develop a cancerous probe, that in theory could defeat the original design plan and maybe kill all previous probes. Or say by a bacteria on a planet laying latent that causes unexpected issues, etc.
DNA/cancer tells you mutation is possible, it does not say it is (in practice) mandatory.
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.
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?
It is a leap. Human beings are dependent on a specific, very delicate ecosystem and technological civilization to be able to replicate with the stability and scale that we do. We also can't replicate ourselves using arbitrary matter, we require the presence of a diverse breeding population.
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.
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?
It isn't absurd, it's the entire basis of the argument whenever it's brought up. If only one civilization has ever developed Von Neumann probes, then they should have consumed the galaxy by now. That they haven't is presented as a paradox, or evidence against the existence of life beyond Earth altogether. Some degree of grey goo scenario (enough for evidence of it to be obvious and observable) is always implied.
>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.
Why is grey goo implied? Send one probe per solar system. If two probes meet each other, have them pick a random number to decide who flies off to find another solar system or into the sun.
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?
> Send one probe per solar system. If two probes meet each other, have them pick a random number to decide who flies off to find another solar system or into the sun.
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.
>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.
> We also can't replicate ourselves using arbitrary matter, we require the presence of a diverse breeding population.
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.
Assuming they all can travel near light speed and considering time dilation, all interstellar civilizations will meet each other "from our perspective" somewhere a trillion years from now.
> 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?
We should've been seeing progressively more of them then, perhaps already been eaten by them.
The odds definitely tell us that by now, we should be seen a vast swarm of Von Neumann self-replicating little machines all around us. I stand by those odds, that idea makes a lot of sense.
However, "Von-Neumman probes must exist if possible" is a very different statement from "UAPs are alien probes".
So advanced civilizations routinely: FTL to earth, fly around San Diego buzzing the navy, then head to the southwest where they have engine trouble and crash?
This posits an extraordinarily American attitude to the cosmos. The universe eschewed public transportation several billion years ago, and instead of building the space subway system, they all got personal flying saucers. So yes they're out there on the weekends, cruising around and causing mischief. Even drunk-piloting their starships into sheep ranches in New Mexico (do the assholes even have insurance?).
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".
The probes can’t be both so incompetent that they can’t avoid detection and competent enough to successfully fly thousands of light years over god knows how much time.
You’re making some assumptions here and I suggest you broaden your mindset a bit. First of all, at least according to testimony under oath, they are not avoiding detection and there is a plethora of high resolution imagery and sensor data, they just keep it hidden and highly classified. I get that there isn’t a lot of quality stuff coming from civilians, but we don’t know the UAP intentions or quantity. They could be just trying to observe us without freaking us out or interfering with us en masse, much like we observe animals in nature ourselves. They may only be interested in subtly monitoring our military assets and nothing else. There could be any other unknowable reasons. They may not perceive existence the same way as us, they may not have the same 5 senses or see in the same spectrums, they may not have emotions or a completely different thought process.
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.
> they are not avoiding detection and there is a plethora of high resolution imagery and sensor data
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.
There's so many ways to postulate it such that it makes sense, here's just one:
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.
Yes there are a million fantastical scenarios one could imagine. But they are all incredibly implausible compared all of the mundane, boring non-alien alternatives:
* 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 get it, but now you’re moving the goalposts. You went from “there’s no way to explain it plausibly” to “there’s many ways to explain it but they are unlikely”.
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.
We know of only one planet with life. Of which there are estimates of forms of life number in the billions to possibly a trillion since the formation of our planet. One and only one form of life has evolved the intelligence to even as the question or conceptualize existence beyond this world and it took literally over a third of the age of the universe for us to get this far and short of sending machines beyond this planet, we (the living things) haven’t ventured much further than our own moon.
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.
If you make reasonable assumptions about grabby aliens (the kind that wants to do VN probes and get here anyway), and condition on us having not yet noticed, then the current modelling suggests about 40-50% of the universe has already been occupied by them — the only reason we wouldn't have noticed is that light from the expansion just hasn't reached us yet.
Or maybe Lue Elizondo doesn't actually know the top secret state of the art of technology made by every government in the world, and he's just talking out of his ass because he's a con man and a fraud, and currently trying to sell a book.
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.
There are people who do believe UFOs a really demons in disguise. Supposedly a lot of them are Evangelical Christians in high places in the US intelligence and military hierarchy, and one of the reasons for secrecy about UAPs/UFOs is that they don't want to risk calling up or empowering some existential demonic force by calling attention to it.
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.
bingo ... and distraction from Trump appointing so many wildly unqualified and corrupt folks to government positions of power. Matt Gaetz to DoJ (etc) ... wait, look ... a UFO!
Someone always says UFO stories are a distraction from whatever current thing is happening, but UFO stories are never actually that much of a distraction. No one is unaware of what Trump is doing because the UFO narrative exists.
I dunno, I still find the Russia-Ukraine war to be the biggest disappointment. Not just because it is a war, but also because it is a war between essentially identical cultures, both highly educated too.
Every time I walk into r/UFO subreddit I'm amazed at the number of believers there and the length they are going to justify them. They have their own private slang and a list of obscure figures they constantly discuss. The most epic episode was about a year ago, when they were discussing a short clip from a military gun camera, which had a bird shit splattered on a protective glass. There were like a dozen of topics with thousands of comments, and majority of people were imagining some aliens in that clip. Very entertaining to read sometimes, kinda gives of r/Bitcoin vibes :)
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.
Boebert came off clownish but if you heard that somewhere taken out of context she wasn't seriously claiming the earth was flat. It was a joke she was trying to make a point with albeit a poor one that it was neither the time or place for.
It's always been mainly a cover story for experimental aircraft. That's why there are so many "UFO sightings" near the military base where they test the most experimental aircraft. Obviously.
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.
I still yet to hear anything close to a plausible explanation of the situation. We have super advanced alien species who can travel across the galaxy, or even the universe, and they have found us. They watch over us and even though their technology is beyond our comprehension, 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.
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.
If we're ants/microbes to them, why wouldn't they just watch? Maybe UFOs are some interstellar view-master for alien kids. Maybe Earth/humanity is just boring, deepintoyoutube tier civilization without a lot of views, so objects pop in once in a while for a peek. All the cool alien kids are busy creeping on more viral civilizations.
Maybe it's a Sentinel Island sort of situation. The technology gap is vast, we've had ships wreck there or unauthorized visitors approach the island but though they attacked them both we've left them alone and haven't attempted to recover any of the "modern technology" that's abandoned there.
The Sentinelese are super close to us. They're hunter-gatherers, we were living like that practically yesterday (20k~30k years ago). Same genetics, same culture, just a little bit isolated.
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.
To be fair, it sounds like you have no knowledge about the history of UAPs. Sightings, crashes and encounters did not start 1947, it goes back hundreds of years and even thousands of years depending on how one interprets the data.
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.
It has to be aliens, because they're always blurry regardless of caveman drawings or flying through the most highly instrumented Naval _Test_ Range on the planet.
> ever adds up
They're even capable of changing our reasoning and math: 1+1=Aliens!
This is the 2nd stupidest shit ever. Only after blasting off to live on Mars 8-/
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.
Fake news: someone built a new thing and was testing it in a Navy training range or was using it to spy on the test range and some Navy aircraft entering or exiting the range managed to take video footage of it.
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.
Usurping the powers of Congress is the real issue here. If the military did things and hid them from Congress and the President, then they are in big trouble. Air safety is a secondary issue. National security is a concern, but given how long no one has been able to figure out definitive answers maybe it doesn't matter. On the other hand, drones are real and have also been buzzing military installations; that seems like a real national security threat that has been largely ignored.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadThat'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.
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….
Would that not be a government by definition?
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.
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?
Ze Peniz iz Bäd! Ze Gun iz Good!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Strong argument, no notes.
An argument that there exists any other civilization requires evidence. Show me yours.
However, "Von-Neumman probes must exist if possible" is a very different statement from "UAPs are alien probes".
The Great Filter is one possible explanation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrGpG0OrNws
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_9
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.
it's going to turn out that absence of evidence is evidence of absence
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.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.01522
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=...
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-/
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]?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files
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.
Military bases and equipment with presumably the most sophisticated camera systems.
Says it all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phones_with_8K...
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.
One word: teenagers.
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.
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.
> ever adds up
They're even capable of changing our reasoning and math: 1+1=Aliens!
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.
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.