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Went through the CIA one as well, and it's almost designed to be opaque and vague. UFO's create interesting ethical questions and can be useful thought experime

Went through the CIA one as well, and it's almost designed to be opaque and vague. UFO's create interesting ethical questions and can be useful thought experiments for contemporary issues. A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arrivers might find. The question is whether they're going to pose a threat to the regional galactic order, and if they haven't got their cultural act together, do you let them? Second, if you do intervene, does their new knowledge of the intervention of an intermediate power harm their social and ethical development, given their entire political economy and ethics will switch from discovered principles, to merely competing to appeal to the most powerful force they can? (I think this would make them impossible to trust.) Could it recover and develop on its own if you arrived and chose some of them for benefits but not others? Do you pick the most dominant, or the species with the most suitability to become part of the space faring community. It costs them nothing to wipe us out and spare the universe the trouble, so what must they believe about life, the universe, and everything to not do so. Economics may be universal, etc. I don't think these are dumb questions at all, and they resemble ones that state dept's make very day, so I don't dismiss people interested in UFOs as they are interested in some pretty useful questions.

justinclift 6y ago
> Second, if you do intervene ... Bear in mind that intervention doesn't have to be obvious. In our current networked world, there's a lot which a more-advanced-than-us group or civilisation could do without needing to reveal themselves as such. ;)
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  how many of us have met a congressmen, senator, media personality in person? How hard would it be for a super advanced society to insert a media network that's all basically ai-generated people? We already have deep fakes, imagine the tech they might have that's deep fakes after 50 generations... They could control us from a small satellite without needing to come anywhere near us,just by controlling what we see, think, or hear on the television.
  - mmcconnell1618 6y ago
    If you live in the greater Washington DC area it is very easy to bump into political figures in real life. It has happened to me several times on flights too. I like the idea of some super advanced society trying to manipulate our political process but all they need is the ability to wire transfer some cash to actual humans.
  - jolincost 6y ago
    Holy shit, that's mind-blowing. as a humorous aside I'm sure that sort of total information control program (but run by a terrestrial government siding another territory) has been specked up in some elaborate document in a think tank or intelligence agency somewhere, as an alternative to "world of atoms" occupation.
  - justinclift 6y ago
    > ... just by controlling what we see, think, or hear on the television. Even that's pretty overt. It should be entirely possible to change the course of political events by leaking damaging info at appropriate times. ... and good luck with the various governments who'd want to extradite and throw them in jail. ;)
rebuilder 6y ago
I don't mean to be a pedant, but you mean when you say 'UFOs' you mean extra-terrestrial visitors, don't you? It's an important distinction because even if you assume any given UFO sighting was not just a hallucination or misinterpretation but something real and unprecedented, assuming it's aliens from space is still a wild leap. A leap people tend to make because we're so primed to think "aliens" when we hear "UFO".
fpgaminer 6y ago
I think this is a bit like us diving into the ocean to observe algae. We don't do it because we're concerned about its imminent sentience and potential to "cause trouble". We just do it because we're curious; we want a better understanding of our world and universe. We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors". Us being a threat is unlikely to be even a single virtual particle of thought in their intragalactic quantum brains.
- joombaga 6y ago
  > We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors". What's feeding your intuition here? I wouldnt have thought they'd likely be _that_ advanced. But I'm not sure where tens of thousands of orders of magnitude puts them on e.g. the Kardashev scale, and I'm sure being a huge Star Trek fan has affected my own intuitions :)
  - fpgaminer 6y ago
    I love Star Trek, and that being a possible future is nice to entertain, but doesn't take into account an AI singularity. The latter, to some approximation, seems more likely to me. And that puts a Moore's law on intelligence. Not just for us, but for any potential space faring race. And it doesn't have to be just "AI"; as soon as a race has the capability to recursively improve their own intelligence they'll hit that exponential curve too. So by the time a race gets space faring and solves FTL travel, it's likely they're at least a good step onto that exponential intelligence curve. Hence a vague estimate of "tens of thousands of orders of magnitude". For example, as is we should be capable of building a GPT-human within 20 years (1). About the same time frame that, if we put all our effort into it, it would take for us to barely colonize another planet in our solar system. Given another 20 years and we've got an AI that's 1000x more intelligent than us. I see our trajectory as hitting that exponential curve before we even get out of this solar system. So I just imagine any potential "visitors" to our planet are much further along. (1) This is calculated using Moore's law: how many doubles of compute will it take before GPT-3 can be naively scaled to the estimated number of parameters of a human brain. That doesn't necessarily imply human level intelligence, but our studies so far indicate that there's strong reason to believe that GPT-human will be something approximating 1000x smarter than GPT-3. Human or not, that's terrifyingly intelligent. Remember that Transformer like architectures are the ones that "solved" protein folding last year. And none of this calculation takes into account the potential for continued improvements to architectures and efficiency over that time span. So while I don't think GPT-human will start an AI apocalypse in 20 years, I do think GPT-human will be better than every other human on this planet at doing ... AI research. And that's where the spark of singularity begins.
remir 6y ago
It costs them nothing to wipe us out and spare the universe the trouble, so what must they believe about life, the universe, and everything to not do so. Economics may be universal, etc. Perhaps the world is highly valued in terms of its bio-diversity and life-supporting resources. There's a possibility that native civilization like us are being monitored and on some level "protected" from conquests if they show they're responsible and take care of their own world. But if the native civilization continue to destroy their own world, then all bets are off. More responsible and structured civilizations could be granted the right to intervene and potentially take over. In other words, the more self-sufficient, ecologically responsible and wise we are, the more a civilization like us would be able to avoid this intervention.
- mr-wendel 6y ago
  My pet theory is they're already here and don't care at all about environmental issues. Planets like this are a dime-a-dozen to them. However, nowhere else in the universe have they come across music like ours. They are madly obsessed with it and dare not intervene in our affairs, lest they taint the source. I have absolutely no evidence for this. I just like the idea that Freddie Mercury just might have been an intergalactic superstar.
  - infradig 6y ago
    Then Narabedla Ltd is the book for you then.
- jolincost 6y ago
  Not to mock or denigrate your belief at all, it strikes me that there's a parallel between this belief and ancient human worship of nature gods.
deeeeplearning 6y ago
>A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arrivers might find. The question is whether they're going to pose a threat to the regional galactic order, and if they haven't got their cultural act together, do you let them? Seems a strange position to take. Look at our own case. Do we evaluate "un-contacted/lost" tribes in the Amazon to see if they may pose a risk to the current Global Order? No, because that would be absurd. They are so far behind technologically that they pose about as much of a threat as a troop of chimps do. For galactic scale civilizations the difference in capabilities is probably at least as extreme as that.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  You'd think, but we subvert and bomb Iran every time they get close to enriching uranium, so there are precedents, if perhaps not on the same relative scale. The other question is why not just domesticate us and what kind of evolutionary impact does domestication have on a species? As someone who "educates," horses and dogs to live in an inescapable human dominion, in doing so, I shape them into something other than what they are. They have good lives and find joy, but there is a responsibility I have they will almost never see. The best I can personally do is evolve my own understanding and various virtues and to relieve their suffering where I comprehend it. I would hope an alien species would be a little further along than most of us on that front, but I'd say the analogies are useful.
  - nervousvarun 6y ago
    The "Uplift" books by David Brin basically use this idea. They were popular I think in the 80s-90s. In his books, an enlightened species "uplifts" an inferior one that has potential and after being helped...they sortof serve a period of time as pets/servants until they demonstrate that they can be part of galactic civilization. Humans blunder into all of this by accident when they begin exploring space. Normally the knowledge of physics required for space travel is a side-effect of being uplifted. It's not discovered, it's taught. But we didn't do it the normal way. If I remember correctly humans after learning this is sortof how it's done begin "uplifting" dolphins. The uplift process involves genetic engineering and education, etc. One of the core mysteries in the books for the other enlightened species out there is did someone uplift humans? It's been a while so I probably butchered that.
jrowen 6y ago
I don't think these are dumb questions at all They're not, but they're also somewhat orthogonal to "UFO culture." You're describing a philosophical/sociopolitical discussion that isn't really informed by a blip on a grainy video frame. The question that's more relevant to UFOs, in my opinion, is "Why would these aliens, with their unimaginably superior technology, travel all the way here and reveal themselves in such asinine ways?" Did they intend to come all this way to do some cryptic and spooky display for a small number of people? Did they simply slip up and briefly drop their cover? I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area).
- vageli 6y ago
  > I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area). After having read Roadside Picnic, I'm inclined to disagree. If sufficiently advanced aliens ever happened upon us they might treat us as we treat ants in our backyards—that is, they don't really notice or care for us at all.
  - resu_nimda 6y ago
    I’m not familiar with the book, but 1) I don’t think the analogy of ambling around our backyards holds for space travel. Space is vast and largely empty, it would be astronomically unlikely for anyone to casually wander over to earth from another star or galaxy. 2) We only treat ants that way because we already know about them. People have noticed them and studied them at great length. A person who doesn’t know that other animals exist on earth would probably be incredibly fascinated by them and likely try to communicate with them.
    - jolincost 6y ago
      We think space is empty, but we don't really have evidence that it is... It could be teeming with life or ships that our current sensor tech simply doesn't pick up from here. Maybe if we inhabited space significantly we would find there's a lot going on between the stars
asdff 6y ago
We don't stop the lion from eating the gazelle. Maybe exploiting our planet to the point of our extinction is the natural order of things. We could pollute all we want and while life as we know it will change, life on earth will continue as it has all these billions of years. This is a planet that gets shaken by asteroids and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions that make the entire industrial revolution look like a cigarette idling in an ash tray in comparison. If anything, we live in a galactic nature preserve.
- jolincost 6y ago
  You remind me of an absolutely wonderful George Carlin bit i love https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4 https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4
jolincost 6y ago
Oh, I love these ideas! I'm sure advanced civilizations have AIs, suoercomputers, lots of experience with this situation and some heuristics to help them decide, but i love doing the thought experiments with you :) I agree the mere appearance of an advanced civilization could be a corrupting influence on the soon-to-be space faring savages, but then again the brutes might have other more pressing character flaws. At the same time maybe it would make sense for the advanced civilization to contact them in a covert manner so that there is sort of plausible deniability or non-verifiability to seed the ideas and create some sort of influence but limit the impact, which itself is a strategy which could create a sort of corrupt back channel between the terrestrial population and the advanced influencers. But judging from the way that state departments handle these things it seems that early and persistent outreach, both covert and overt, and infiltration, and a mix of carrots (advanced tech, trade?) and sticks (erasure?) is the preferred method of maintaining some sort of control and relationship to manage the emerging threat or at least try to guide the development in a manner which the advance civilization sees as promoting whatever values are interests that it has. Following the track your ideas lay out, seems if there were others out there that we're civic minded in a cosmic sense, they wouldn't adopt a hands off approach

justinclift 6y ago

> Second, if you do intervene ... Bear in mind that intervention doesn't have to be obvious. In our current networked world, there's a lot which a more-advanced-than-us group or civilisation could do without needing to reveal themselves as such. ;)

gremlinsinc 6y ago
how many of us have met a congressmen, senator, media personality in person? How hard would it be for a super advanced society to insert a media network that's all basically ai-generated people? We already have deep fakes, imagine the tech they might have that's deep fakes after 50 generations... They could control us from a small satellite without needing to come anywhere near us,just by controlling what we see, think, or hear on the television.
- mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  If you live in the greater Washington DC area it is very easy to bump into political figures in real life. It has happened to me several times on flights too. I like the idea of some super advanced society trying to manipulate our political process but all they need is the ability to wire transfer some cash to actual humans.
- jolincost 6y ago
  Holy shit, that's mind-blowing. as a humorous aside I'm sure that sort of total information control program (but run by a terrestrial government siding another territory) has been specked up in some elaborate document in a think tank or intelligence agency somewhere, as an alternative to "world of atoms" occupation.
- justinclift 6y ago
  > ... just by controlling what we see, think, or hear on the television. Even that's pretty overt. It should be entirely possible to change the course of political events by leaking damaging info at appropriate times. ... and good luck with the various governments who'd want to extradite and throw them in jail. ;)

rebuilder 6y ago

I don't mean to be a pedant, but you mean when you say 'UFOs' you mean extra-terrestrial visitors, don't you? It's an important distinction because even if you assume any given UFO sighting was not just a hallucination or misinterpretation but something real and unprecedented, assuming it's aliens from space is still a wild leap. A leap people tend to make because we're so primed to think "aliens" when we hear "UFO".

fpgaminer 6y ago

I think this is a bit like us diving into the ocean to observe algae. We don't do it because we're concerned about its imminent sentience and potential to "cause trouble". We just do it because we're curious; we want a better understanding of our world and universe. We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors". Us being a threat is unlikely to be even a single virtual particle of thought in their intragalactic quantum brains.

joombaga 6y ago
> We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors". What's feeding your intuition here? I wouldnt have thought they'd likely be _that_ advanced. But I'm not sure where tens of thousands of orders of magnitude puts them on e.g. the Kardashev scale, and I'm sure being a huge Star Trek fan has affected my own intuitions :)
- fpgaminer 6y ago
  I love Star Trek, and that being a possible future is nice to entertain, but doesn't take into account an AI singularity. The latter, to some approximation, seems more likely to me. And that puts a Moore's law on intelligence. Not just for us, but for any potential space faring race. And it doesn't have to be just "AI"; as soon as a race has the capability to recursively improve their own intelligence they'll hit that exponential curve too. So by the time a race gets space faring and solves FTL travel, it's likely they're at least a good step onto that exponential intelligence curve. Hence a vague estimate of "tens of thousands of orders of magnitude". For example, as is we should be capable of building a GPT-human within 20 years (1). About the same time frame that, if we put all our effort into it, it would take for us to barely colonize another planet in our solar system. Given another 20 years and we've got an AI that's 1000x more intelligent than us. I see our trajectory as hitting that exponential curve before we even get out of this solar system. So I just imagine any potential "visitors" to our planet are much further along. (1) This is calculated using Moore's law: how many doubles of compute will it take before GPT-3 can be naively scaled to the estimated number of parameters of a human brain. That doesn't necessarily imply human level intelligence, but our studies so far indicate that there's strong reason to believe that GPT-human will be something approximating 1000x smarter than GPT-3. Human or not, that's terrifyingly intelligent. Remember that Transformer like architectures are the ones that "solved" protein folding last year. And none of this calculation takes into account the potential for continued improvements to architectures and efficiency over that time span. So while I don't think GPT-human will start an AI apocalypse in 20 years, I do think GPT-human will be better than every other human on this planet at doing ... AI research. And that's where the spark of singularity begins.

remir 6y ago

It costs them nothing to wipe us out and spare the universe the trouble, so what must they believe about life, the universe, and everything to not do so. Economics may be universal, etc. Perhaps the world is highly valued in terms of its bio-diversity and life-supporting resources. There's a possibility that native civilization like us are being monitored and on some level "protected" from conquests if they show they're responsible and take care of their own world. But if the native civilization continue to destroy their own world, then all bets are off. More responsible and structured civilizations could be granted the right to intervene and potentially take over. In other words, the more self-sufficient, ecologically responsible and wise we are, the more a civilization like us would be able to avoid this intervention.

mr-wendel 6y ago
My pet theory is they're already here and don't care at all about environmental issues. Planets like this are a dime-a-dozen to them. However, nowhere else in the universe have they come across music like ours. They are madly obsessed with it and dare not intervene in our affairs, lest they taint the source. I have absolutely no evidence for this. I just like the idea that Freddie Mercury just might have been an intergalactic superstar.
- infradig 6y ago
  Then Narabedla Ltd is the book for you then.
jolincost 6y ago
Not to mock or denigrate your belief at all, it strikes me that there's a parallel between this belief and ancient human worship of nature gods.

deeeeplearning 6y ago

>A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arrivers might find. The question is whether they're going to pose a threat to the regional galactic order, and if they haven't got their cultural act together, do you let them? Seems a strange position to take. Look at our own case. Do we evaluate "un-contacted/lost" tribes in the Amazon to see if they may pose a risk to the current Global Order? No, because that would be absurd. They are so far behind technologically that they pose about as much of a threat as a troop of chimps do. For galactic scale civilizations the difference in capabilities is probably at least as extreme as that.

motohagiography 6y ago
You'd think, but we subvert and bomb Iran every time they get close to enriching uranium, so there are precedents, if perhaps not on the same relative scale. The other question is why not just domesticate us and what kind of evolutionary impact does domestication have on a species? As someone who "educates," horses and dogs to live in an inescapable human dominion, in doing so, I shape them into something other than what they are. They have good lives and find joy, but there is a responsibility I have they will almost never see. The best I can personally do is evolve my own understanding and various virtues and to relieve their suffering where I comprehend it. I would hope an alien species would be a little further along than most of us on that front, but I'd say the analogies are useful.
- nervousvarun 6y ago
  The "Uplift" books by David Brin basically use this idea. They were popular I think in the 80s-90s. In his books, an enlightened species "uplifts" an inferior one that has potential and after being helped...they sortof serve a period of time as pets/servants until they demonstrate that they can be part of galactic civilization. Humans blunder into all of this by accident when they begin exploring space. Normally the knowledge of physics required for space travel is a side-effect of being uplifted. It's not discovered, it's taught. But we didn't do it the normal way. If I remember correctly humans after learning this is sortof how it's done begin "uplifting" dolphins. The uplift process involves genetic engineering and education, etc. One of the core mysteries in the books for the other enlightened species out there is did someone uplift humans? It's been a while so I probably butchered that.

jrowen 6y ago

I don't think these are dumb questions at all They're not, but they're also somewhat orthogonal to "UFO culture." You're describing a philosophical/sociopolitical discussion that isn't really informed by a blip on a grainy video frame. The question that's more relevant to UFOs, in my opinion, is "Why would these aliens, with their unimaginably superior technology, travel all the way here and reveal themselves in such asinine ways?" Did they intend to come all this way to do some cryptic and spooky display for a small number of people? Did they simply slip up and briefly drop their cover? I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area).

vageli 6y ago
> I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area). After having read Roadside Picnic, I'm inclined to disagree. If sufficiently advanced aliens ever happened upon us they might treat us as we treat ants in our backyards—that is, they don't really notice or care for us at all.
- resu_nimda 6y ago
  I’m not familiar with the book, but 1) I don’t think the analogy of ambling around our backyards holds for space travel. Space is vast and largely empty, it would be astronomically unlikely for anyone to casually wander over to earth from another star or galaxy. 2) We only treat ants that way because we already know about them. People have noticed them and studied them at great length. A person who doesn’t know that other animals exist on earth would probably be incredibly fascinated by them and likely try to communicate with them.
  - jolincost 6y ago
    We think space is empty, but we don't really have evidence that it is... It could be teeming with life or ships that our current sensor tech simply doesn't pick up from here. Maybe if we inhabited space significantly we would find there's a lot going on between the stars

asdff 6y ago

We don't stop the lion from eating the gazelle. Maybe exploiting our planet to the point of our extinction is the natural order of things. We could pollute all we want and while life as we know it will change, life on earth will continue as it has all these billions of years. This is a planet that gets shaken by asteroids and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions that make the entire industrial revolution look like a cigarette idling in an ash tray in comparison. If anything, we live in a galactic nature preserve.

jolincost 6y ago
You remind me of an absolutely wonderful George Carlin bit i love https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4 https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4

jolincost 6y ago

Oh, I love these ideas! I'm sure advanced civilizations have AIs, suoercomputers, lots of experience with this situation and some heuristics to help them decide, but i love doing the thought experiments with you :) I agree the mere appearance of an advanced civilization could be a corrupting influence on the soon-to-be space faring savages, but then again the brutes might have other more pressing character flaws. At the same time maybe it would make sense for the advanced civilization to contact them in a covert manner so that there is sort of plausible deniability or non-verifiability to seed the ideas and create some sort of influence but limit the impact, which itself is a strategy which could create a sort of corrupt back channel between the terrestrial population and the advanced influencers. But judging from the way that state departments handle these things it seems that early and persistent outreach, both covert and overt, and infiltration, and a mix of carrots (advanced tech, trade?) and sticks (erasure?) is the preferred method of maintaining some sort of control and relationship to manage the emerging threat or at least try to guide the development in a manner which the advance civilization sees as promoting whatever values are interests that it has. Following the track your ideas lay out, seems if there were others out there that we're civic minded in a cosmic sense, they wouldn't adopt a hands off approach