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I feel like a challenge so I'm going to play the devil's advocate. It is possible to craft explanations for why UFOs behave this way, if they are in fact aliens

I feel like a challenge so I'm going to play the devil's advocate. It is possible to craft explanations for why UFOs behave this way, if they are in fact aliens. There's a very common fallacy in a lot of alien debunking discussions. It goes like this: if you can travel faster than light then your technological powers are entirely unlimited and you can do whatever you want. There's an implied assumption that FTL travel is a sort of über-technology and the speed of light is a kind of ur-limit. Once you know how to break it, every other physical law becomes breakable too. There's no logical reason to believe this is the case. It's a social assumption caused by the fame of Einstein and the way pop culture has constantly told us FTL travel is "impossible", putting anything that can do FTL immediately into the realm of "if you can do one impossible thing, why not N impossible things". But C being the universal speed limit is a theory only 115 years old. That's not very long in the grand scheme of things. And now we're seeing respectable and serious physics research that explores the concept of a warp drive. Whilst still in the realm of impossible, it appears there are gradients of impossible and FTL travel may slowly be moving between them. What if FTL travel is easier than we think? Then a civilisation that mastered it would not be some unimaginably advanced god-like race about whom we can assume nothing. It would be a civilisation kinda like ours, just with FTL drives. And we could then start to apply everyday reasoning to their behaviour. For example, why would UFOs fly around and yet be detected by radar/cameras/sensors etc? Well, maybe: • Complete invisibility is not a tech they have. Our stealth tech is not entirely stealthy, just stealthy enough to get close against currently existing radars. • Their FTL drives are incompatible with the type of ship geometry required for radar invisibility. • Their knowledge of our own sensor capabilities is old/not entirely accurate, so they can hide from sensors but don't always do so at the right times. E.g. it may have impose some energy or tactical costs to hide so they don't want to do it all the time. • They don't actually care whether they are detected or not. • They do in fact have invisibility technology and there are shit-tons of UFOs flying around that we don't detect, but because they're not an uber-race they make mistakes just like we do and occasionally this results in sightings that shouldn't have happened. Why would they not make contact? Maybe: • They don't wish to because we have nothing to offer them. • They don't know / can't agree on which political bloc to make contact with, and are waiting for humanity to unite under one world government (hopefully not). • They have some rules against making contact unless some galactic federation votes that it should happen and the votes hasn't yet been won, but information is being collected by survey craft to inform the decision making progress. Why would they apparently rejoice in doing ludicrous or pointless changes in speed or direction? • Why not? If your FTL drive lets you change direction without needing to worry about gravity, why would you ever turn in a curve? • Maybe they are frequently retasked and need to go somewhere different to their original goal, especially when they believe they were detected? And so on. The thing is, if you're willing to make just a slight leap and assume that FTL tech is not as hard as we think, then it's suddenly easy to come up with lots of explanations for UFO behaviours. It's only the social assumption of (FTL->any imaginable tech) that makes us ignore these possibilities.

kipchak 6y ago
There's a fun short story called 'The Road Not Taken' from the perspective of an alien civilization that stumbled upon agrav tech but is otherwise at a Napoleonic technology level attempting to evade earth. From their perspective a civilization not stumbling upon agrav early on is preposterous. Personally assuming the objects are actually some kind of non earth craft autonomous drones make the most sense to explain their behavior, particular their seeming interest in nuclear facilities.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> There's no logical reason to believe this is the case. It's a social assumption caused by the fame of Einstein and the way pop culture has constantly told us FTL travel is "impossible", putting anything that can do FTL immediately into the realm of "if you can do one impossible thing, why not N impossible things". But C being the universal speed limit is a theory only 115 years old. That's not very long in the grand scheme of things. And now we're seeing respectable and serious physics research that explores the concept of a warp drive. Whilst still in the realm of impossible, it appears there are gradients of impossible and FTL travel may slowly be moving between them. This is, in my layman opinion, a very generous interpretation of in favor of the possibility of FTL. C as a fundamental limit is core to one of the most well tested and accurate models in the history of science. The Alcubierre drive variations are essentially just fun math puzzles for physicists to play with in their spare time. Until very recently they required exotic matter and/or ludicrous quantities of negative energy, and the best we've managed to do since then is replace those impossibilities with a ludicrous conventional energy requirement. Even if that was fixed there are still other problems to deal with, like the interior of the bubble being causally separated from the rest of the universe, meaning you couldn't actually control the bubble. I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I understand how the universe works, so I can't say it is definitely impossible, but it is foolish to believe something is possible that the best evidence in the history of mankind says isn't, until we have evidence that it might be. UFOs can be explained by a lot of things significantly more likely to be real than alien visitation with FTL drives. I mean, if you're willing to believe that, then why not believe they're from Earth's future, or an alternate-timeline Earth, or any other sci-fi explanation that we have roughly equal expectation might be real as FTL.

kipchak 6y ago

There's a fun short story called 'The Road Not Taken' from the perspective of an alien civilization that stumbled upon agrav tech but is otherwise at a Napoleonic technology level attempting to evade earth. From their perspective a civilization not stumbling upon agrav early on is preposterous. Personally assuming the objects are actually some kind of non earth craft autonomous drones make the most sense to explain their behavior, particular their seeming interest in nuclear facilities.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> There's no logical reason to believe this is the case. It's a social assumption caused by the fame of Einstein and the way pop culture has constantly told us FTL travel is "impossible", putting anything that can do FTL immediately into the realm of "if you can do one impossible thing, why not N impossible things". But C being the universal speed limit is a theory only 115 years old. That's not very long in the grand scheme of things. And now we're seeing respectable and serious physics research that explores the concept of a warp drive. Whilst still in the realm of impossible, it appears there are gradients of impossible and FTL travel may slowly be moving between them. This is, in my layman opinion, a very generous interpretation of in favor of the possibility of FTL. C as a fundamental limit is core to one of the most well tested and accurate models in the history of science. The Alcubierre drive variations are essentially just fun math puzzles for physicists to play with in their spare time. Until very recently they required exotic matter and/or ludicrous quantities of negative energy, and the best we've managed to do since then is replace those impossibilities with a ludicrous conventional energy requirement. Even if that was fixed there are still other problems to deal with, like the interior of the bubble being causally separated from the rest of the universe, meaning you couldn't actually control the bubble. I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I understand how the universe works, so I can't say it is definitely impossible, but it is foolish to believe something is possible that the best evidence in the history of mankind says isn't, until we have evidence that it might be. UFOs can be explained by a lot of things significantly more likely to be real than alien visitation with FTL drives. I mean, if you're willing to believe that, then why not believe they're from Earth's future, or an alternate-timeline Earth, or any other sci-fi explanation that we have roughly equal expectation might be real as FTL.