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To be clear, I don't think these are alien, BUT... You might not be able to "prove a negative" in the purely scientific sense, but you can rule out most option
by tombert 5y ago
To be clear, I don't think these are alien, BUT...
You might not be able to "prove a negative" in the purely scientific sense, but you can rule out most options to effectively "prove a negative".
If, for example, Russia came out and took credit for these things, and showed working prototypes of these crafts, would that "prove" (in the truest, mathematical sense of the word) that they aren't aliens? No, I suppose Russia could have intercepted alien technology and pass it off as their own, but for any kind of practical purpose that would "prove" they aren't aliens to most rational people, and thus "prove" a negative.
- WalterBright 5y agoCan you "rule out" I'm an alien?
- tombert 5y agoAgain, not in the truest mathematical sense of the word, no, but I can reasonably rule it out in most practical senses: a) You look like a human b) You write human language c) We have not seen any direct evidence for any kind of humanoid alien life, but we have seen lots of evidence for humans existing. d) If you were an alien spying on human culture, you wouldn't waste your time on Hacker News :). Does this fully "rule out" the possibility of you being an alien? No, I suppose you could be an alien in a human skin suit who learned English, and maybe aliens are really interested in software engineering forums, but I can practically rule it out just playing the odds.
- WalterBright 5y agoYou can just as safely "rule out" the possibility that these UFOs are aliens.
- tombert 5y agoI don't disagree with that, hence why I made it clear from the get-go that I don't think they're aliens (I think it's probably most likely camera artifacts or experimental aircrafts or bad reporting, since we know all these things exists already). I just feel like it's extremely reductive to say "can't prove a negative," for which I provided a counter example.