A mass sighting with hundreds of photos, videos, eyewitness reports and maybe even physical evidence would be difficult to dismiss. Not necessarily evidence of aliens, but certainly evidence of something.
True story: My ex was a teen as one night she saw from the window of her room a huge (bigger than more cars) round glowing object in the middle of the street, standing on three thin feet, producing some strange beams to the neighbouring house. After she marvelled the sight for unknown time, she run to her father to tell him. The thing (conveniently for such stories) disappeared. It was winter, he didn't believe her, but he didn't tell her that, he wanted that she sees herself. He told her to get her coat, he took his and they went out to the street. "You know, if the thing was there, the snow would be missing there where the feet were," he told her, "so where was the first feet?" She showed him the point, and there it was, the round print in the snow. "Uh, um, where was the second?" Again, there it was, the second round print in the snow. "Well somebody could have made them intentionally," he said, his voice sounding less certain than before. The third print, I don't know if they haven't looked for it or haven't found it. Still she had never understood what that could have been. Hallucinations don't leave the marks on the expected places. She haven't had hallucinations before or after. She was mostly embarrassed to speak about it afterwards, a few times she attempted to, others didn't believe her. I also have no idea how to explain that event. And I'd be the first to doubt other people, however she was never hot on UFO's and is also very down-to-earth person. Technically it wasn't even an UFO -- she never saw the thing in the air. But it's quite unexplainable, I can claim, knowing her. And it has a lot of turns the typical UFO stories are made of. She calls the event "my UFO observation."
I had a similar experience when I saw something that appeared to hover over my neighbor's house. It almost looked like a V-22 osprey, but this was well before that aircraft existed and silent.
In my case, it was there when I went to get my dad, and we both looked at for a good 5m until it moved past the tree line.
No idea what it was -- could have been some weird atmospheric thing, but it was very freaky.
I like his work because he takes the scientific approach: the evidence is that we see lights in the sky. Start from there, assume nothing, and see where the evidence takes you. He's a breath of fresh air compared to the wacko UFO stuff you normally read.
One of may favourite nuggets from him is to look at the whole UFO thing as a cultural phenomenon. Don't doubt people, but listen - properly - to what they are saying, and look for patterns. He did this and looked at the standard taxonomy for UFO sightings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter), but focused on the exceptions. He found lots of stories that didn't fit the standard model e.g. a woman who had seen a humanoid figure just floating in the air for around an hour near sunset before disappearing. No good explanation for that in terms of aliens, so he looks further afield into various elements of human psychology and geophysics.
In the end, he seems to settle on the idea of a long term geo-physical phenomenon, which may be linked to the earthquake lights thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light). He posits that this might interact with human consciousness via the very strong magnetic fields that you would expect if such a phenomenon were to occur (perhaps with other mechanisms too). This would explain the varying effects from weak (lights in the sky) to strong (weird hallucination-like experiences), depending on how close you are to whatever is going on.
Sounds like a good way to tie all the stories together, especially given that as he points out, UFO stories are quite recent, but other cultural stories with almost identical characteristics e.g. faeries, angels, etc are pretty much universal, so may be the same phenomenon interpreted differently.
OTOH, evidence is hard to come by and this is definitely fringe theorising. Interesting reading though, and very thought-provoking.
One of the most common objections to UFOs-as-extraterrestrials that I see is that the distances between solar systems, and the amount of time required to travel between them is so large, even at light speed, that any such visitors are simply impossible. This objection is usually backed up with relativity, and the increasing amount of energy required as C is approached.
My objection to this is orangutans.
Orangutans are amazing creatures. Placid but intelligent, social and all in all an interesting specimen from nature. But you cannot teach them calculus. It's simply impossible. Their brains are not capable of dealing with concepts that are necessary.
What does this have to do with UFOs? There is a chance that there are concepts in the universe of which our brains are unable to conceive, just like orangutans and calculus. These concepts may be necessary to achieve travel over interstellar distances.
I understand that this is an unprovable statement. It is, nevertheless, a (admittedly fluffy) rebuttal to the "relativity forbids FTL travel" objection that is raised when the subject of UFOs is discussed. We have seen glimpses where savants are able to perform mental tasks that are amazing to "normals", giving hints that such things might at least be possible.
Then replace "orangutan" with "mockingbird" if you like. There are tasks that humans are capable of that other creatures are not. Extrapolate this the other direction. I do not believe that humanity's current evolutionary state is the pinnacle of what intelligence can be.
I wasnt objecting to your intelligence theory. Its perfectly ok to assume there may be intelligences in the universe far superior to ours. I was referring to your comment on the "common objections to UFOs".
This reminds me of something British enzymologist J.B.S. Haldane once said, "Reality is not only stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose." It's unprovable, but perhaps alien intelligence is already "here", existing at some level imperceptible to human faculties. Given the age of the universe, and humanity's relative youth, it's not impossible that an alien civilization could have developed transportation/communication technology far beyond anything we could possible imagine.
I understand your point and agree to an extent, but teaching an orangutan to do calculus would not require you to break the laws of physics, so that comparison wouldn't really work.
Things humans do regularly likely violate what a wild orangutan would consider the laws of physics, like putting a human inside a five-inch flat piece of glass.
Michio Kaku says: "Lets say we have an ant hill in the middle of the forest. And right next to the ant hill, they’re building a ten-lane super-highway. And the question is “Would the ants be able to understand what a ten-lane super-highway is? Would the ants be able to understand the technology and the intentions of the beings building the highway next to them?"
The chance of higher civilisations being all around us, but us being too primitive to perceive them is my favourite explanation.
My first though was spooks trying to discredit the reputation of the community as 'paranoid' and 'fanciful' given all the good and informative conversation regarding Snowden and other disclosures here lately.
Crossing my fingers a good UFO flick is on the way.
Does HN really believe in UFOs? Let's assume for the time being no.
Is the sudden influx of UFO articles then based on HN popularity or is there a campaign to introduce this content (these campaigns are common, although I do not know how popular on HN)? Let's assume for now that the articles are part of a campaign.
What group with what motivation would benefit from said articles. My first thought here was in fact TLAs/spooks. But only on entertaining the hypotheticals.
A 'viral campaign' for a UFO movie is also pretty reasonable, IMO.
If you were to entertain the two hypotheticals, what would you think?
>My first though was spooks trying to discredit the reputation of the community as 'paranoid' and 'fanciful' given all the good and informative conversation regarding Snowden and other disclosures here lately.
You do realize this is by definition both paranoid and fanciful?
Yeah I do. Although it is pretty tame on the spectrum. Certainly it is a more reasonable speculation than alien contact (low hurtle to jump).
For the record I don't believe this is the case. I do reserve the right to adknowledge it as a possibility with a small posterior probability in anticipation of additional priors.
1) Let's find the most obscure explanation for X UFO sighting that may or may not be true (aka. large spider webs that fly up to 14,000 feet in the air) while ignoring the other 100,000 + sightings per year around the world.
2) Let's post a story about a UFO and people who witnessed it, then let's close it off with witty remarks and laugh it off... because the potential for real aliens visiting our Earth is way the F* too scary to contemplate.
There are millions of scientifically minded geeks that have a nerdgasm just thinking about the possibilities of an extraterrestrial visitation.
If there was any available convincing evidence pointing toward an E.T. visit, we'd be all over it. Atlas, all the "evidence" out there currently is unconvincing, at best.
> Let's find the most obscure explanation for X UFO sighting that may or may not be true (aka. large spider webs that fly up to 14,000 feet in the air) while ignoring the other 100,000 + sightings per year around the world.
The media "ignores" the millions of religious miracles people "witness" each year for the same reasons.
"To lobby for "disclosure" implies that there is something to "disclose," which is highly dubious. And to hold a valid "hearing" implies that witnesses are queried under oath, which of course will not be the case, leaving them free to fabricate as much as they please without fear of repercussions. The five former members of Congress are being paid a reported $20,000 each by Paradigm to participate in this circus."
I stopped reading at .."To lobby for disclosure implies that there is something to disclose, which is highly dubious."... just like how it was highly dubious that the NSA wasn't spying on everyone, right? come on. This thing, if it's real is 100 times BIGGER than any previous government scandal - all the more reason to not disclose it (yes I know, circular argument). But the proper counter arguement is to watch the 2001 Disclosure video - in there you have dozens of Ex-military, NASA and US government employees (many of them high ranking) ready and willing to testify before congress on the matter.
Think about it, admitting aliens exist and are visiting us means:
1) They likely know how to travel across entire galaxies in their life-times (likely hours/days)
2) They have invisibility technology: UFOs are often reported to appear out of thin air and disappear back into thin air.
3) Their propulsion technologies completely baffle us. Tens of thousands of UFO witnesses (including many hundreds confirmed on radar) have reported to have travelled thousands of miles per second, to then stop on a dime or do 90 degree turns and carry on as if gravity could be ignored.
4) If even a single abduction story is real, they have the ability to paralyze any human being and teleport them through walls and ceilings. They also have the ability to find any single human anywhere on Earth as many self-confessed abductees have reported they tried to move across the country, yet the aliens always found them and just continued abducting them. It also begs to question their agenda and morality - WTF are they doing with humans they abduct?
5) If any of the military UFO stories are real, they can out maneuver every single fighter jet humanity has ever created - exactly zero UFOs have been shot down by military planes, despite hundreds of chases having been documented by pilots and radar operators. Roswell UFO crash is rumored to have been taken down by experimental military radar tests, not intentional military weapons.
6) Consider for a moment aliens are real and they are thousands of years more technologically advanced than us. What can we do about it? Nothing - we can do exactly nothing. Our "powerful" government leaders and best militaries would be exactly powerless to do anything. It would be full-on wide-spread global panic.
My personal theory is that given how vast the Universe is, it is entirely possible that some (millions?) planets were formed before Earth and at least many dozens/hundreds/thousands (?) evolved life to the point of human intelligence or greater, THOUSANDS of years before humans ever walked our Earth. This would translate to there being X number of alien civilizations out there far more advanced than humans technologically and more than likely biologically advanced (think brain power x 100+).
Consider how we've gone from horse and carriage to putting a man on the moon and creating space crafts that can travel 20,000 km/hour (in space) in a mere 300 years. Now imagine the capabilities (if you can) of what an alien species only 10,000 years more advanced than us might have. What about 100,000 years? 1 Million ? Their technology would be like magic to us - completely unimaginable ... you know like travelling across entire galaxies in mere hours, teleporting through walls, having invisible craft, shooting paralyzing beams, erasing memories of (some) human abductees etc.
Why is it so hard to imagine and believe that other intelligent civilizations on other planets exist and that they might be thousands if not millions of years ahead of us?
> Now imagine the capabilities (if you can) of what an alien species only 10,000 years more advanced than us might have. What about 100,000 years? 1 Million ? Their technology would be like magic to us - completely unimaginable ... you know like travelling across entire galaxies in mere hours, teleporting through walls, having invisible craft, shooting paralyzing beams, erasing memories of (some) human abductees etc.
And yet, they use technology that's similar to what the current era's science fiction talks about, use all that power to anally probe redneck farmers and abduct people from the woods, and they can't even get the memory wipes right all the time.
>Why is it so hard to imagine and believe that other intelligent civilizations on other planets exist and that they might be thousands if not millions of years ahead of us?
It isn't.
Why is it so hard to understand that the likely existence of life in the universe and the credibility of the UFO/abduction phenomenon are completely unrelated? Given the vastness of the universe, there could be empires spanning millions of worlds across a distant galaxy, and they could still be completely unaware of our existence, and we of theirs.
The "disclosure" movement is not the most credible source on this, even among those who take UFOs very seriously. The heads of this movement are complete crackpots. Unfortunately they've taken some otherwise very interesting testimony from credible people and harmed their credibility by linking it with nonsense.
I some what agree on that. I don't subscribe to Mr. Greer's overly optimistic perspectives on aliens, to say nothing of his meditation group meetings and incessant and obnoxious name dropping in nearly all his speeches. Still, the guy has managed to steer UFOlogy to some level of public credibility.
Gotta learn how to not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
By definition there are a lot of UFOs around, the trouble is just that none of them are commandeered by alien intelligences from beyond the Earth. There is no credible evidence for it (although I recognize that credibility standards vary a lot depending on who you talk to).
Personally, I find the absence of aliens surprising. This may one day even turn out to be problematic. Most HNers are probably aware of the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox).
One of the most likely answers seems to be that space is big and manipulating spacetime for FTL travel might be technologically intractable. Maybe we are living in a galactic dead patch, as a statistical fluke. Maybe technology-building civilizations are astonishingly rare. In any case, we would expect at least a few drones zooming by every once in a while.
But the absence of contact might also hint at a severe problem in our galactic region which we have not yet encountered. Another common scenario is that technology using species are so unstable as to exterminate themselves in most cases. It is unclear how such civilizations would all have a tendency collapse though, as it seems that different types of life forms should have vastly different behavioral characteristics.
However you turn it, most scenarios mean that more likely than not the galaxy should already have been colonized many times over, and by rights it should at the very least contain a lot of artifacts left behind. But apparently it doesn't. We should be very worried about this, something is not right.
>We should be very worried about this, something is not right.
Should we be worried?
We base our assumptions about what 'right' is, in this case what a universe containing the presence of life should look like (colonies and trash littered about,) on a single example of intelligent civilization (our own) with no knowledge at all of how normative that is, or what the actual technological capabilites of a truly interstellar civilization would look like.
We can extend our own dependence on fossil fuels exponentially and come up with the Kardashev Scale, then expect to find evidence of interstellar empires burning stars as fuel, or come up with clever math like the Drake Equation and feel confident that life should be abundant - but to quote Han Solo, it's all simple tricks and nonsense. We don't even know enough to know whether or not we should be worried.
Inevitably we are working with a lot of assumptions. But the Drake equation is one of the simplest expressions of our reasoning in this area imaginable. There is nothing contrived about the equation itself. You might choose to put in different variables, but the result would be the same.
At this point we do have a much better idea about the individual factors than we had when Frank Drake first wrote it down. We now know that planets are common. We know that tool-using intelligences arose independently several times on our planet, our civilization just happens to be the first on the local stage. We know that AI and nano technology have the potential to vastly increase the amount of time during which civilizations have a detectable output (hence the drone argument). We know there is nothing in principle preventing a civilization from colonizing the galaxy, even if speed-of-light restrictions always apply. So the argument goes that some species should already have done that. Given the age of the universe, it also seems unlikely that we're simply one of the first civilizations to arise.
While you can easily argue that it's all useless speculation as long as we don't know the exact value of every single factor, the sheer volume of scenarios pointing to the WTF-ness of the Fermi Paradox should absolutely bother us. We're not exactly a cautious or rational civilization (yet), so the odds of us ignoring something fundamental in this area might be quite high.
What always gets me is how these beings of superior technology manage to evade all of our detection systems, yet are spotted by regular eyesight.
They have amazing ships, able to do these seemingly physics-defying feats, yet they point beams of light at things we could easily detect without resorting to such wavelengths.
They have antigrav, yet they need to land and rest on tripods, leaving indentations in the ground (when they're not too busy making crop circles, that is).
If you're able to use fold travel to get around relativistic limitations, I should think that avoiding or camouflaging emissions in certain wavelengths would be child's play by comparison. We already have a primitive form of it ourselves.
Thus, working under the reasonable assumption that they are able to evade detection, sightings would indicate that they are not trying to remain hidden, but instead have travelled countless light years in order to spook rural families rather than opening up interstellar relations.
I wonder if their home planet knows how their tax dollars are being spent?
Before the technology of rocketry became commonplace, UFO sightings were of mysterious blimps and airships, and the inhabitants claimed to be from Mars or Venus. Before the grey alien became a common trope, many aliens were reported as obviously humanlike in appearance. They often seem to use recognizable things like computers with buttons and viewscreens, sometimes rockets.
It's strange how not alien these aliens and their technology always seem to be.
50 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadUnless, of course, they're the ET equivalent of 4chan trolling.
In my case, it was there when I went to get my dad, and we both looked at for a good 5m until it moved past the tree line.
No idea what it was -- could have been some weird atmospheric thing, but it was very freaky.
I like his work because he takes the scientific approach: the evidence is that we see lights in the sky. Start from there, assume nothing, and see where the evidence takes you. He's a breath of fresh air compared to the wacko UFO stuff you normally read.
One of may favourite nuggets from him is to look at the whole UFO thing as a cultural phenomenon. Don't doubt people, but listen - properly - to what they are saying, and look for patterns. He did this and looked at the standard taxonomy for UFO sightings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter), but focused on the exceptions. He found lots of stories that didn't fit the standard model e.g. a woman who had seen a humanoid figure just floating in the air for around an hour near sunset before disappearing. No good explanation for that in terms of aliens, so he looks further afield into various elements of human psychology and geophysics.
In the end, he seems to settle on the idea of a long term geo-physical phenomenon, which may be linked to the earthquake lights thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light). He posits that this might interact with human consciousness via the very strong magnetic fields that you would expect if such a phenomenon were to occur (perhaps with other mechanisms too). This would explain the varying effects from weak (lights in the sky) to strong (weird hallucination-like experiences), depending on how close you are to whatever is going on.
Sounds like a good way to tie all the stories together, especially given that as he points out, UFO stories are quite recent, but other cultural stories with almost identical characteristics e.g. faeries, angels, etc are pretty much universal, so may be the same phenomenon interpreted differently.
OTOH, evidence is hard to come by and this is definitely fringe theorising. Interesting reading though, and very thought-provoking.
My objection to this is orangutans.
Orangutans are amazing creatures. Placid but intelligent, social and all in all an interesting specimen from nature. But you cannot teach them calculus. It's simply impossible. Their brains are not capable of dealing with concepts that are necessary.
What does this have to do with UFOs? There is a chance that there are concepts in the universe of which our brains are unable to conceive, just like orangutans and calculus. These concepts may be necessary to achieve travel over interstellar distances.
I understand that this is an unprovable statement. It is, nevertheless, a (admittedly fluffy) rebuttal to the "relativity forbids FTL travel" objection that is raised when the subject of UFOs is discussed. We have seen glimpses where savants are able to perform mental tasks that are amazing to "normals", giving hints that such things might at least be possible.
With the one electron universe "theory" we could "theoretically" instantaneously materialize at a given point in space.
The chance of higher civilisations being all around us, but us being too primitive to perceive them is my favourite explanation.
There is a great article about The Fermi Paradox (why we might not have been contacted - to our knowledge&proof - by extraterrestrial life): http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
My first though was spooks trying to discredit the reputation of the community as 'paranoid' and 'fanciful' given all the good and informative conversation regarding Snowden and other disclosures here lately.
Crossing my fingers a good UFO flick is on the way.
It went more like this:
Does HN really believe in UFOs? Let's assume for the time being no.
Is the sudden influx of UFO articles then based on HN popularity or is there a campaign to introduce this content (these campaigns are common, although I do not know how popular on HN)? Let's assume for now that the articles are part of a campaign.
What group with what motivation would benefit from said articles. My first thought here was in fact TLAs/spooks. But only on entertaining the hypotheticals.
A 'viral campaign' for a UFO movie is also pretty reasonable, IMO.
If you were to entertain the two hypotheticals, what would you think?
You do realize this is by definition both paranoid and fanciful?
For the record I don't believe this is the case. I do reserve the right to adknowledge it as a possibility with a small posterior probability in anticipation of additional priors.
1) Let's find the most obscure explanation for X UFO sighting that may or may not be true (aka. large spider webs that fly up to 14,000 feet in the air) while ignoring the other 100,000 + sightings per year around the world.
2) Let's post a story about a UFO and people who witnessed it, then let's close it off with witty remarks and laugh it off... because the potential for real aliens visiting our Earth is way the F* too scary to contemplate.
If there was any available convincing evidence pointing toward an E.T. visit, we'd be all over it. Atlas, all the "evidence" out there currently is unconvincing, at best.
The media "ignores" the millions of religious miracles people "witness" each year for the same reasons.
1) 2001 Disclosure project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk
2) 2013 Ex-CIA deathbed confession: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CSeWkJvdbQ
3) Confessions of 4 USA Astronaults on UFOs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KyxLM2eqkk
4) After Disclosure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlhy3_akb_s
5) Citizen's Hearing on Disclosure - Testifying before former congress witnesses: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=citizens+hearing...
http://badufos.blogspot.co.at/2013/04/that-citizen-hearing-o...
"To lobby for "disclosure" implies that there is something to "disclose," which is highly dubious. And to hold a valid "hearing" implies that witnesses are queried under oath, which of course will not be the case, leaving them free to fabricate as much as they please without fear of repercussions. The five former members of Congress are being paid a reported $20,000 each by Paradigm to participate in this circus."
For some other views, see my other comments here.
Think about it, admitting aliens exist and are visiting us means:
1) They likely know how to travel across entire galaxies in their life-times (likely hours/days)
2) They have invisibility technology: UFOs are often reported to appear out of thin air and disappear back into thin air.
3) Their propulsion technologies completely baffle us. Tens of thousands of UFO witnesses (including many hundreds confirmed on radar) have reported to have travelled thousands of miles per second, to then stop on a dime or do 90 degree turns and carry on as if gravity could be ignored.
4) If even a single abduction story is real, they have the ability to paralyze any human being and teleport them through walls and ceilings. They also have the ability to find any single human anywhere on Earth as many self-confessed abductees have reported they tried to move across the country, yet the aliens always found them and just continued abducting them. It also begs to question their agenda and morality - WTF are they doing with humans they abduct?
5) If any of the military UFO stories are real, they can out maneuver every single fighter jet humanity has ever created - exactly zero UFOs have been shot down by military planes, despite hundreds of chases having been documented by pilots and radar operators. Roswell UFO crash is rumored to have been taken down by experimental military radar tests, not intentional military weapons.
6) Consider for a moment aliens are real and they are thousands of years more technologically advanced than us. What can we do about it? Nothing - we can do exactly nothing. Our "powerful" government leaders and best militaries would be exactly powerless to do anything. It would be full-on wide-spread global panic.
My personal theory is that given how vast the Universe is, it is entirely possible that some (millions?) planets were formed before Earth and at least many dozens/hundreds/thousands (?) evolved life to the point of human intelligence or greater, THOUSANDS of years before humans ever walked our Earth. This would translate to there being X number of alien civilizations out there far more advanced than humans technologically and more than likely biologically advanced (think brain power x 100+).
Consider how we've gone from horse and carriage to putting a man on the moon and creating space crafts that can travel 20,000 km/hour (in space) in a mere 300 years. Now imagine the capabilities (if you can) of what an alien species only 10,000 years more advanced than us might have. What about 100,000 years? 1 Million ? Their technology would be like magic to us - completely unimaginable ... you know like travelling across entire galaxies in mere hours, teleporting through walls, having invisible craft, shooting paralyzing beams, erasing memories of (some) human abductees etc.
Why is it so hard to imagine and believe that other intelligent civilizations on other planets exist and that they might be thousands if not millions of years ahead of us?
And yet, they use technology that's similar to what the current era's science fiction talks about, use all that power to anally probe redneck farmers and abduct people from the woods, and they can't even get the memory wipes right all the time.
http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/23/the-legacy-of-the-cias...
It turns out, it was funded by the taxpayers! The victims most probably preferred to tell they were abducted by "aliens."
It isn't.
Why is it so hard to understand that the likely existence of life in the universe and the credibility of the UFO/abduction phenomenon are completely unrelated? Given the vastness of the universe, there could be empires spanning millions of worlds across a distant galaxy, and they could still be completely unaware of our existence, and we of theirs.
Gotta learn how to not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Personally, I find the absence of aliens surprising. This may one day even turn out to be problematic. Most HNers are probably aware of the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox).
One of the most likely answers seems to be that space is big and manipulating spacetime for FTL travel might be technologically intractable. Maybe we are living in a galactic dead patch, as a statistical fluke. Maybe technology-building civilizations are astonishingly rare. In any case, we would expect at least a few drones zooming by every once in a while.
But the absence of contact might also hint at a severe problem in our galactic region which we have not yet encountered. Another common scenario is that technology using species are so unstable as to exterminate themselves in most cases. It is unclear how such civilizations would all have a tendency collapse though, as it seems that different types of life forms should have vastly different behavioral characteristics.
However you turn it, most scenarios mean that more likely than not the galaxy should already have been colonized many times over, and by rights it should at the very least contain a lot of artifacts left behind. But apparently it doesn't. We should be very worried about this, something is not right.
Should we be worried?
We base our assumptions about what 'right' is, in this case what a universe containing the presence of life should look like (colonies and trash littered about,) on a single example of intelligent civilization (our own) with no knowledge at all of how normative that is, or what the actual technological capabilites of a truly interstellar civilization would look like.
We can extend our own dependence on fossil fuels exponentially and come up with the Kardashev Scale, then expect to find evidence of interstellar empires burning stars as fuel, or come up with clever math like the Drake Equation and feel confident that life should be abundant - but to quote Han Solo, it's all simple tricks and nonsense. We don't even know enough to know whether or not we should be worried.
At this point we do have a much better idea about the individual factors than we had when Frank Drake first wrote it down. We now know that planets are common. We know that tool-using intelligences arose independently several times on our planet, our civilization just happens to be the first on the local stage. We know that AI and nano technology have the potential to vastly increase the amount of time during which civilizations have a detectable output (hence the drone argument). We know there is nothing in principle preventing a civilization from colonizing the galaxy, even if speed-of-light restrictions always apply. So the argument goes that some species should already have done that. Given the age of the universe, it also seems unlikely that we're simply one of the first civilizations to arise.
While you can easily argue that it's all useless speculation as long as we don't know the exact value of every single factor, the sheer volume of scenarios pointing to the WTF-ness of the Fermi Paradox should absolutely bother us. We're not exactly a cautious or rational civilization (yet), so the odds of us ignoring something fundamental in this area might be quite high.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSJElZwEI8o
They have amazing ships, able to do these seemingly physics-defying feats, yet they point beams of light at things we could easily detect without resorting to such wavelengths.
They have antigrav, yet they need to land and rest on tripods, leaving indentations in the ground (when they're not too busy making crop circles, that is).
If you're able to use fold travel to get around relativistic limitations, I should think that avoiding or camouflaging emissions in certain wavelengths would be child's play by comparison. We already have a primitive form of it ourselves.
Thus, working under the reasonable assumption that they are able to evade detection, sightings would indicate that they are not trying to remain hidden, but instead have travelled countless light years in order to spook rural families rather than opening up interstellar relations.
I wonder if their home planet knows how their tax dollars are being spent?
It's strange how not alien these aliens and their technology always seem to be.