9 ms·

I honestly don’t know what to make of these observations other than I’m utterly convinced they’re not alien, super high tech or break the laws of physics (eg in

by jmyeet 5y ago

I honestly don’t know what to make of these observations other than I’m utterly convinced they’re not alien, super high tech or break the laws of physics (eg inertia). There was no alien crash in Roswell. I also file believe any government is competent enough for the claimed cover up and associated psyops. What I do find interesting is the overlap between people who buy into various conspiracy theories and people who are religious, were religious or would otherwise be likely to be religious. There’s some fascinating psychology here and I think it boils down to a combination of wishful thinking and the comfort derived from there being a Grand Plan rather than just a collection of random stuff that just happens. “Can’t be explained” is typically “hasn’t been explained yet”. Lack of an explanation is nothing more than that. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I approach this from the other direction. Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way and even if we aren’t it requires an awful lot of hubris to suggest a species would spend the considerable effort and tens of thousands of years to come here and hide. Like this is Main Character Syndrome at its finest.

user3939382 5y ago
> wishful thinking and the comfort derived from there being a Grand Plan You may not have meant this by your comment, but in general I find a related analysis common among atheists, that religious people believe what they do because it feels good. I find that's often wrong, and when generally applied condescending, as if atheists are simply more emotionally mature. On the contrary many religious people will tell you they believe what they do because it seems to them to be true. > Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. One might consider the existence of the universe extraordinary evidence (for the existence of God). That said I think we can mostly agree that based on what we know so far, "aliens" is a fairly implausible explanation for any given unexplained phenomenon. Where ever you fall on that debate, I don't think it has anything to do with religious beliefs except as far as the biases of the people who conduct these psychology studies goes.
- water8 5y ago
  - quesera 5y ago
    There's a high correlation between arrogance and anyone who wants you to believe as they do. This applies to all of the most visible proselytizers of religion, politics, economics, operating systems, and text editors, among others.
  - bratwurst3000 5y ago
    Same said about arrogance and theist. Most religions are based on beeing something special and not a shitload of atoms nobody will remember as time pase by
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      I disagree. Religion usually involves deifying a entity that you consider to be superior, because it is not human. As an example, the word Islam literally means "submission" in reference to submitting to God. I'm not sure how that's arrogant. If anything being just a creature of god inherently means that we're nothing special in the grand scheme of things.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rblion 5y ago
  Agree with you 100%. Albert Einstein was once asked to clarify his faith, here is his reply: “Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.” I read this often and maintain the attitude that scripture, science, art are all branches of the same Tree.
ssklash 5y ago
I think you hit on the key part of conspiracy thinking. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that many of the most conspiracy minded are also extremely religious, in the US anyway. I don't know anything about conspiracy thinking in the context of Islam or Hinduism, for example. It seems like the tendency to accept a higher power in control of your life and the world leads to believing in other earthly powers being able to exert vast control over the world.
- vmception 5y ago
  In France, it was also deeply religion people of Christian or Muslim faith who felt is was their duty to tell me about the shadow groups controlling the world. The best part was that these shadow groups were all French, based in Paris.
  - ssklash 5y ago
    I think they must be wrong, since I have it on good evidence from my deeply-religious and conspiracy-minded family that the shadow groups are _US based_. But seriously, I assume all these types of people have this sort of localized, my-version-is-the-right-version theories, since they do the exact same thing with their religion.
oldstrangers 5y ago
You can't really extrapolate being alone in the universe from "aliens aren't visiting us." The fact that we exist at all, especially as a random occurrence of events, would suggest it's not that bizarre of an event. If we were single celled organisms having this conversation, then yeah, life outside of earth would seem more unlikely. But we have 4.543 billion years worth of evidence showing that life REALLY likes to live. To get from a single celled organism to me typing to you over the internet tells me there's probably something universal to this process. To me it's a lot more "Main Character Syndrome" to suggest we are wholly unique and alone in the universe. We are the special chosen species that made it out of an infinite number of probabilities. Sounds insane.
- tunap 5y ago
  AC Clarke posited perhaps extra-terrestrial life came, they observed & they quarantined our corner of the galaxy to inhibit the escape of slavery, murder & environmental destruction.
- DennisP 5y ago
  For all we know, it takes a whole universe banging molecules together before metabolizing self-replicating life randomly arises. If it has only emerged one time in the entire universe, nothing would look different to us than it does right now. Or maybe it happens all the time. But with only one sample, we have no data either way.
  - oldstrangers 5y ago
    > But with only one sample, we have no data either way. Sure we do, that one instance of life pushes the needle in favor of life. A fun exercise is to imagine or visualize the concept of nothingness, as far as you can take it. Eventually you realize even the "idea of nothingness" negates the meaning of "nothingness." You reach a paradox in awareness that you're incapable of resolving because to do so would mean the idea didn't exist in the first place. Applying it to life, the existence of life negates the existence of no-life, and increases the probability in our favor. Functionally I think life is more commonplace than anyone realizes, and we're probably just incapable of understanding life outside of our perception of reality.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nabla9 5y ago
To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (media & entertainment company) makes this stuff up and sells it. https://tothestars.media/ https://tothestars.media/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(company)
TremendousJudge 5y ago
I mostly agree with your take, but I'll pick on this sentence: > Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way The fact that we can come up with the idea of a Dyson Swarm doesn't mean that not finding any in our observations results in we "being alone in the galaxy". It's also Main Character Syndrome, in a way. Even discarding the idea of alien life being so different from ours that we wouldn't recognize it even if we were looking right at it, and assuming a "human like civilization", it's perfectly possible for there being unknown physics to us that make the idea of a Dyson Swarm unnecessary. Using our own civilization as an example, in the 1950s and 60s we did all of our data broadcasting over radio waves, and built huge powerful antennas that screamed about our presence to the wider universe. People then thought "well, if we're broadcasting all this stuff, where are the alien broadcasts? why can't we hear them? we must be alone in the galaxy". Fast-forward to now. Our current tech allows pretty much all communications to be over cables, and we're being much less wasteful with our emmiting; our radio emissions are diminishing over time. So, not a century has passed, and already newer technology has proven our assumptions of alien life wrong. Why would it be any different with Dyson Swarms? You can't know how more advanced technology looks like, you can only extrapolate with what we have now.
bostonsre 5y ago
How are you utterly convinced when it can't be proven true or false and don't have any other explanation for it? Why close all those doors without sufficient evidence to close them? We don't have extraordinary evidence therefore it's not possible that it's anything weird doesn't seem very scientific.
- stonemetal12 5y ago
  >Why close all those doors without sufficient evidence to close them? Because there isn't sufficient evidence to open them in the first place. Might as well claim it is unicorns and dragons, you don't have any evidence it isn't.
  - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
    We have unexplained phenomena. We have eyewitness accounts from the Navy's top pilots as well as instrument data and IR footage. If we cannot explain this phenomena with what we know, then we must consider the possibility its something that we don't know. Simply putting your head in the sand or attempting to debunk this documented phenomena with patently absurd explanations like "a lens flare" or "it was only Venus" isn't good enough for thoughtful people.
    - kingofpandora 5y ago
      > Navy's top pilots Relative to what? Other pilots who fly the same aircraft? All fighter jet pilots in the Navy? All pilots of all types of navy aircraft?
      - bostonsre 5y ago
        A squadron commander doesn't get into that position by being incompetent. Fighter jets are incredibly complex and demanding and there are lots of different aircraft to pilot in the navy.
        5y ago
playcache 5y ago
The problem with your comment is you just lumped together a string of un-credible events and then summarise you're not convinced. To be frank Roswell and psyops (whatever that is) would not be enough to utterly convince me too. What I do find very interesting though is credible recent eye witness testimonies coming from US Navy pilots and the work at Harvard University for the Galileo Project, along with the other many recent activities around the study of UAPs (whatever they might be). The problem as I see it with this area is it's been far too stigmatised, so no researchers would ever dare touch it for fear of being labelled conspiracy theory believing nutcases. That sentiment is now dying off thankfully and we can start to find out what on earth is going on.
- xdennis 5y ago
  I'm surprised you're more convinced by eye witness testimonies. People are notoriously unreliable. If anything, this glare is better proof of green men than just talk.
  - playcache 5y ago
    where did I say I was convinced? I said I was not unconvinced. I am curious and not out-ruling anything, especially now that we have credible academic research starting on the matter. Why are you convinced by a hobbyist with no academic background? He is a retired video game programmer.
honkdaddy 5y ago
The Dyson Swarm is more or less a science fiction concept. Is its lack of existence really your reason for believing we’re alone in the universe? You seem keen to make fun of dogmatic people but attaching a hypothetical concept which is so trivial and fringe to your mental model seems like pretty dogmatic behavior. If you’d never heard of a Dyson Swarm, like the vast, vast majority of people haven’t, would your view of extraterrestrial life have significantly changed?
staticman2 5y ago
"Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics" Since we haven't been able to build such a thing I think it's fair to say it requires something or other that's exotic to us.
bratwurst3000 5y ago
Totaly true . Look at alex jones. He is a full blown crazy person that believes in the supremacy of the christian race… oh yes racism goes also realy well with religion
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  What? Christianity is not a race.
jonnylynchy 5y ago
Someone forgot to take their anti-cynicism medication this morning.
jl6 5y ago
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way There’s still a huge engineering gap between our current tech and the theoretical possibility of a Dyson Swarm. I don’t find it at all implausible that such a thing would need too much energy, effort, collective will, or some other resource, to make it practical. There could still be plenty of stealthy sub-Dyson civilizations, or even supra-Dyson civilizations that have found it in their interest not to be detectable.
jklinger410 5y ago
The thing about conspiracy theories is that when people who hold power over large groups of people actively mislead them and deny them of a source of authority, those people grasp at what pieces of information they do have in order to build a narrative that isn't tainted by lies. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, entirely unhelpful for you to ascribe it to main character syndrome or compare it to the belief in an omnipotent God. If sources of truth in human societies like governments and scientific institutions would stop lying or misleading people nearly constantly then you could call conspiracy people lunatics, or fringe. But you simply cannot. Not only are people being lied to, but they are being actively disinformed for "their own good." There are massive socializing forces that have taken an active role in manipulating society based around the idea that they know better. And the ironic part is that, to a degree, they do know better. People act stupid in groups and have important information WITHHELD for various reasons that make it impossible to discern the truth. If you want to start minimizing the amount of bullshit beliefs that people hold, supernatural or otherwise, you can start by tearing down the systems that are used to create false narratives which push people into those beliefs.
president 5y ago
I think a lot of people just find the topic of conspiracy theories interesting and entertaining. You don't need to hate on them for what is essentially a hobby.
Banana699 5y ago
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics This doesn't account for the fact that you don't know what - if any - benefits do exotic materials and funky physics might bring if they exist and are feasible to exploit. The benefits might be so much larger than Dyson Swarms, that it would be wastful\unnecessary to use Dyson Swarms, except maybe as a hobby or as a low tech fallback for civilizations like camping enthusiasts and survivalists. Why bother with stars when you have tech to live in the 21 dimensions that those born-yesterday biologicals can't even sense yet ? The Dyson 'Paradox' doesn't strike me as much of a paradox, imagine if a group of ants looked at the sky and wondered why aren't extraterrestials building tunnels inside the moon's regolith like ants do on Earth. It's just assuming too much. It's of course a valid scenario, it just isn't the only one.
mr_toad 5y ago
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm Dyson Swarms are only plausible if your society is still stuck in an exponential growth mode. It assumes technological advancement, but stagnant sociological development, or perhaps even worse; pathological development, like a hegemonising swarm. I think that many UFO theories make the same mistakes. They assume high tech aliens with low tech motives.
dcolkitt 5y ago
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way and even if we aren’t it requires an awful lot of hubris to suggest a species would spend the considerable effort and tens of thousands of years to come here and hide. Robin Hanson has the most plausible ET hypothesis to explain these UFO observations. Basically it goes: 1) Life only evolved once in the galaxy. 2) However it spread to one or more stars its system of origin through the process of panspermia. 3) This sister planet that shares a common life origin with us evolved an advanced civilization that predates ours by 10-100 million years. 4) However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres, this sister civilization developed a highly anti-growth world government. 5) They've sent local probes or outposts to study us because we're interesting as a sister branch in the tree of life, and also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms. This explains why we have spacefaring ETs poking around but no resource gobbling Dyson spheres expanding through the light clone. If civilizations were widespread, then almost certainly one would be gobbling resources. But if there are only two civilizations, ours and theirs, it's quite believable that the earlier of the two fell into an anti-growth world government.
- jmyeet 5y ago
  The idea of panspermia isn't a new one. There are several variations. The very early universe was relatively warm. Simple or even complex life could've evolved and spread through parts of the Universe with relative ease given the much shorter distances. It seems highly unlikely though given the rarity of metals (in the astronomical sense; meaning anything other than hydrogen and helium) and the likely needed timescales. This probably means at best it was organic molecules of some level of complexity. There are later versions of this where panspermia occurred much more recently, either intentionally or not. Whatever the case it's all unprovable speculation. If we ultimately the same unlikely patterns repeating on different wrolds then I guess we can revisit. So how recent in this hypothesis did this occur? There are fossil records for people going back millions of years. Are we talking all life? Or just people? If it's all life then we need to go back billions of years, at which point we're just talking about spreading amino acids. Such a connection will be similar to our fraternal bond with bananas. > However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres This seems unlikely. Why? Because the tech for a Dyson Swarm is basically stainless steel, solar panels and the ability to build things in space in large quantities. The last one is significant of course but is largely gated on the high cost of getting things into orbit, which is something likely to plummet in the coming centuries. Saying we could build a self-sustaining orbital within 1,000 years I don't think is a stretch. Only industrial scale separates building 1 and building a million. But there's another problem: people often neglect the energy cost of interstellar travel. It's... massive. And this is even assuming you solve the reaction mass problem. Interstellar travel almost seems predicated on a Dyson Swarm simpsly to have sufficient energy. > ... also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms. This is a well-trodden avenue of thought on the Fermi Paradox. What if alien civilizations just stop growing? If there's 1, sure that might be possible. But what if there were 1,000? Would they all follow this path? It gets increasingly unlikely that not one would grow significantly. Non-growth civilizations would be at an extreme disadvantage with another who has vastly more energy and matter at their disposal. Like you almost have to grow just in case someone else does. But all of this just seems like highly selective curve overfitting to reach the desired conclusion that UFOs are alien in origin.
mlindner 5y ago
Atheists have religious beliefs too, they just believe in different things. Atheists are no better than any other humans. There is nothing special about an atheist. They are just as susceptible as any other human. I agree with your post other than this portion.

by jmyeet 5y ago

user3939382 5y ago

> wishful thinking and the comfort derived from there being a Grand Plan You may not have meant this by your comment, but in general I find a related analysis common among atheists, that religious people believe what they do because it feels good. I find that's often wrong, and when generally applied condescending, as if atheists are simply more emotionally mature. On the contrary many religious people will tell you they believe what they do because it seems to them to be true. > Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. One might consider the existence of the universe extraordinary evidence (for the existence of God). That said I think we can mostly agree that based on what we know so far, "aliens" is a fairly implausible explanation for any given unexplained phenomenon. Where ever you fall on that debate, I don't think it has anything to do with religious beliefs except as far as the biases of the people who conduct these psychology studies goes.

water8 5y ago
- quesera 5y ago
  There's a high correlation between arrogance and anyone who wants you to believe as they do. This applies to all of the most visible proselytizers of religion, politics, economics, operating systems, and text editors, among others.
- bratwurst3000 5y ago
  Same said about arrogance and theist. Most religions are based on beeing something special and not a shitload of atoms nobody will remember as time pase by
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    I disagree. Religion usually involves deifying a entity that you consider to be superior, because it is not human. As an example, the word Islam literally means "submission" in reference to submitting to God. I'm not sure how that's arrogant. If anything being just a creature of god inherently means that we're nothing special in the grand scheme of things.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rblion 5y ago
Agree with you 100%. Albert Einstein was once asked to clarify his faith, here is his reply: “Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.” I read this often and maintain the attitude that scripture, science, art are all branches of the same Tree.

ssklash 5y ago

I think you hit on the key part of conspiracy thinking. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that many of the most conspiracy minded are also extremely religious, in the US anyway. I don't know anything about conspiracy thinking in the context of Islam or Hinduism, for example. It seems like the tendency to accept a higher power in control of your life and the world leads to believing in other earthly powers being able to exert vast control over the world.

vmception 5y ago
In France, it was also deeply religion people of Christian or Muslim faith who felt is was their duty to tell me about the shadow groups controlling the world. The best part was that these shadow groups were all French, based in Paris.
- ssklash 5y ago
  I think they must be wrong, since I have it on good evidence from my deeply-religious and conspiracy-minded family that the shadow groups are _US based_. But seriously, I assume all these types of people have this sort of localized, my-version-is-the-right-version theories, since they do the exact same thing with their religion.

oldstrangers 5y ago

You can't really extrapolate being alone in the universe from "aliens aren't visiting us." The fact that we exist at all, especially as a random occurrence of events, would suggest it's not that bizarre of an event. If we were single celled organisms having this conversation, then yeah, life outside of earth would seem more unlikely. But we have 4.543 billion years worth of evidence showing that life REALLY likes to live. To get from a single celled organism to me typing to you over the internet tells me there's probably something universal to this process. To me it's a lot more "Main Character Syndrome" to suggest we are wholly unique and alone in the universe. We are the special chosen species that made it out of an infinite number of probabilities. Sounds insane.

tunap 5y ago
AC Clarke posited perhaps extra-terrestrial life came, they observed & they quarantined our corner of the galaxy to inhibit the escape of slavery, murder & environmental destruction.
DennisP 5y ago
For all we know, it takes a whole universe banging molecules together before metabolizing self-replicating life randomly arises. If it has only emerged one time in the entire universe, nothing would look different to us than it does right now. Or maybe it happens all the time. But with only one sample, we have no data either way.
- oldstrangers 5y ago
  > But with only one sample, we have no data either way. Sure we do, that one instance of life pushes the needle in favor of life. A fun exercise is to imagine or visualize the concept of nothingness, as far as you can take it. Eventually you realize even the "idea of nothingness" negates the meaning of "nothingness." You reach a paradox in awareness that you're incapable of resolving because to do so would mean the idea didn't exist in the first place. Applying it to life, the existence of life negates the existence of no-life, and increases the probability in our favor. Functionally I think life is more commonplace than anyone realizes, and we're probably just incapable of understanding life outside of our perception of reality.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nabla9 5y ago

To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (media & entertainment company) makes this stuff up and sells it. https://tothestars.media/ https://tothestars.media/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(company)

TremendousJudge 5y ago

I mostly agree with your take, but I'll pick on this sentence: > Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way The fact that we can come up with the idea of a Dyson Swarm doesn't mean that not finding any in our observations results in we "being alone in the galaxy". It's also Main Character Syndrome, in a way. Even discarding the idea of alien life being so different from ours that we wouldn't recognize it even if we were looking right at it, and assuming a "human like civilization", it's perfectly possible for there being unknown physics to us that make the idea of a Dyson Swarm unnecessary. Using our own civilization as an example, in the 1950s and 60s we did all of our data broadcasting over radio waves, and built huge powerful antennas that screamed about our presence to the wider universe. People then thought "well, if we're broadcasting all this stuff, where are the alien broadcasts? why can't we hear them? we must be alone in the galaxy". Fast-forward to now. Our current tech allows pretty much all communications to be over cables, and we're being much less wasteful with our emmiting; our radio emissions are diminishing over time. So, not a century has passed, and already newer technology has proven our assumptions of alien life wrong. Why would it be any different with Dyson Swarms? You can't know how more advanced technology looks like, you can only extrapolate with what we have now.

bostonsre 5y ago

How are you utterly convinced when it can't be proven true or false and don't have any other explanation for it? Why close all those doors without sufficient evidence to close them? We don't have extraordinary evidence therefore it's not possible that it's anything weird doesn't seem very scientific.

stonemetal12 5y ago
>Why close all those doors without sufficient evidence to close them? Because there isn't sufficient evidence to open them in the first place. Might as well claim it is unicorns and dragons, you don't have any evidence it isn't.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  We have unexplained phenomena. We have eyewitness accounts from the Navy's top pilots as well as instrument data and IR footage. If we cannot explain this phenomena with what we know, then we must consider the possibility its something that we don't know. Simply putting your head in the sand or attempting to debunk this documented phenomena with patently absurd explanations like "a lens flare" or "it was only Venus" isn't good enough for thoughtful people.
  - kingofpandora 5y ago
    > Navy's top pilots Relative to what? Other pilots who fly the same aircraft? All fighter jet pilots in the Navy? All pilots of all types of navy aircraft?
    - bostonsre 5y ago
      A squadron commander doesn't get into that position by being incompetent. Fighter jets are incredibly complex and demanding and there are lots of different aircraft to pilot in the navy.
      - 5y ago

playcache 5y ago

The problem with your comment is you just lumped together a string of un-credible events and then summarise you're not convinced. To be frank Roswell and psyops (whatever that is) would not be enough to utterly convince me too. What I do find very interesting though is credible recent eye witness testimonies coming from US Navy pilots and the work at Harvard University for the Galileo Project, along with the other many recent activities around the study of UAPs (whatever they might be). The problem as I see it with this area is it's been far too stigmatised, so no researchers would ever dare touch it for fear of being labelled conspiracy theory believing nutcases. That sentiment is now dying off thankfully and we can start to find out what on earth is going on.

xdennis 5y ago
I'm surprised you're more convinced by eye witness testimonies. People are notoriously unreliable. If anything, this glare is better proof of green men than just talk.
- playcache 5y ago
  where did I say I was convinced? I said I was not unconvinced. I am curious and not out-ruling anything, especially now that we have credible academic research starting on the matter. Why are you convinced by a hobbyist with no academic background? He is a retired video game programmer.

honkdaddy 5y ago

The Dyson Swarm is more or less a science fiction concept. Is its lack of existence really your reason for believing we’re alone in the universe? You seem keen to make fun of dogmatic people but attaching a hypothetical concept which is so trivial and fringe to your mental model seems like pretty dogmatic behavior. If you’d never heard of a Dyson Swarm, like the vast, vast majority of people haven’t, would your view of extraterrestrial life have significantly changed?

staticman2 5y ago

"Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics" Since we haven't been able to build such a thing I think it's fair to say it requires something or other that's exotic to us.

bratwurst3000 5y ago

Totaly true . Look at alex jones. He is a full blown crazy person that believes in the supremacy of the christian race… oh yes racism goes also realy well with religion

ARandomerDude 5y ago
What? Christianity is not a race.

jonnylynchy 5y ago

Someone forgot to take their anti-cynicism medication this morning.

jl6 5y ago

> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way There’s still a huge engineering gap between our current tech and the theoretical possibility of a Dyson Swarm. I don’t find it at all implausible that such a thing would need too much energy, effort, collective will, or some other resource, to make it practical. There could still be plenty of stealthy sub-Dyson civilizations, or even supra-Dyson civilizations that have found it in their interest not to be detectable.

jklinger410 5y ago

The thing about conspiracy theories is that when people who hold power over large groups of people actively mislead them and deny them of a source of authority, those people grasp at what pieces of information they do have in order to build a narrative that isn't tainted by lies. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, entirely unhelpful for you to ascribe it to main character syndrome or compare it to the belief in an omnipotent God. If sources of truth in human societies like governments and scientific institutions would stop lying or misleading people nearly constantly then you could call conspiracy people lunatics, or fringe. But you simply cannot. Not only are people being lied to, but they are being actively disinformed for "their own good." There are massive socializing forces that have taken an active role in manipulating society based around the idea that they know better. And the ironic part is that, to a degree, they do know better. People act stupid in groups and have important information WITHHELD for various reasons that make it impossible to discern the truth. If you want to start minimizing the amount of bullshit beliefs that people hold, supernatural or otherwise, you can start by tearing down the systems that are used to create false narratives which push people into those beliefs.

president 5y ago

I think a lot of people just find the topic of conspiracy theories interesting and entertaining. You don't need to hate on them for what is essentially a hobby.

Banana699 5y ago

> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics This doesn't account for the fact that you don't know what - if any - benefits do exotic materials and funky physics might bring if they exist and are feasible to exploit. The benefits might be so much larger than Dyson Swarms, that it would be wastful\unnecessary to use Dyson Swarms, except maybe as a hobby or as a low tech fallback for civilizations like camping enthusiasts and survivalists. Why bother with stars when you have tech to live in the 21 dimensions that those born-yesterday biologicals can't even sense yet ? The Dyson 'Paradox' doesn't strike me as much of a paradox, imagine if a group of ants looked at the sky and wondered why aren't extraterrestials building tunnels inside the moon's regolith like ants do on Earth. It's just assuming too much. It's of course a valid scenario, it just isn't the only one.

mr_toad 5y ago

> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm Dyson Swarms are only plausible if your society is still stuck in an exponential growth mode. It assumes technological advancement, but stagnant sociological development, or perhaps even worse; pathological development, like a hegemonising swarm. I think that many UFO theories make the same mistakes. They assume high tech aliens with low tech motives.

dcolkitt 5y ago

> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way and even if we aren’t it requires an awful lot of hubris to suggest a species would spend the considerable effort and tens of thousands of years to come here and hide. Robin Hanson has the most plausible ET hypothesis to explain these UFO observations. Basically it goes: 1) Life only evolved once in the galaxy. 2) However it spread to one or more stars its system of origin through the process of panspermia. 3) This sister planet that shares a common life origin with us evolved an advanced civilization that predates ours by 10-100 million years. 4) However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres, this sister civilization developed a highly anti-growth world government. 5) They've sent local probes or outposts to study us because we're interesting as a sister branch in the tree of life, and also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms. This explains why we have spacefaring ETs poking around but no resource gobbling Dyson spheres expanding through the light clone. If civilizations were widespread, then almost certainly one would be gobbling resources. But if there are only two civilizations, ours and theirs, it's quite believable that the earlier of the two fell into an anti-growth world government.

jmyeet 5y ago
The idea of panspermia isn't a new one. There are several variations. The very early universe was relatively warm. Simple or even complex life could've evolved and spread through parts of the Universe with relative ease given the much shorter distances. It seems highly unlikely though given the rarity of metals (in the astronomical sense; meaning anything other than hydrogen and helium) and the likely needed timescales. This probably means at best it was organic molecules of some level of complexity. There are later versions of this where panspermia occurred much more recently, either intentionally or not. Whatever the case it's all unprovable speculation. If we ultimately the same unlikely patterns repeating on different wrolds then I guess we can revisit. So how recent in this hypothesis did this occur? There are fossil records for people going back millions of years. Are we talking all life? Or just people? If it's all life then we need to go back billions of years, at which point we're just talking about spreading amino acids. Such a connection will be similar to our fraternal bond with bananas. > However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres This seems unlikely. Why? Because the tech for a Dyson Swarm is basically stainless steel, solar panels and the ability to build things in space in large quantities. The last one is significant of course but is largely gated on the high cost of getting things into orbit, which is something likely to plummet in the coming centuries. Saying we could build a self-sustaining orbital within 1,000 years I don't think is a stretch. Only industrial scale separates building 1 and building a million. But there's another problem: people often neglect the energy cost of interstellar travel. It's... massive. And this is even assuming you solve the reaction mass problem. Interstellar travel almost seems predicated on a Dyson Swarm simpsly to have sufficient energy. > ... also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms. This is a well-trodden avenue of thought on the Fermi Paradox. What if alien civilizations just stop growing? If there's 1, sure that might be possible. But what if there were 1,000? Would they all follow this path? It gets increasingly unlikely that not one would grow significantly. Non-growth civilizations would be at an extreme disadvantage with another who has vastly more energy and matter at their disposal. Like you almost have to grow just in case someone else does. But all of this just seems like highly selective curve overfitting to reach the desired conclusion that UFOs are alien in origin.

mlindner 5y ago

Atheists have religious beliefs too, they just believe in different things. Atheists are no better than any other humans. There is nothing special about an atheist. They are just as susceptible as any other human. I agree with your post other than this portion.