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Eh. It’s extremely probably not aliens this time, though there is a very small chance it is. Given the trajectory of humanity, the alien scenario explaining an

Eh. It’s extremely probably not aliens this time, though there is a very small chance it is. Given the trajectory of humanity, the alien scenario explaining an unexplained phenomena is not unreasonable, though almost always very unlikely. I find that a major portion of people fear the possibility so much that they’re unable to entertain the probability.

adastra22 4y ago
It is unreasonable. It defies physics and all common sense.
- nucleogenesis 4y ago
  It defies known and well understood physics.
  - skc 4y ago
    Except when shooting them down apparently.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Physics never does an about face. Whatever new physics is out there must be compatible with the physics that we know and use today. And we know enough about physics at planetary and solar system scale phenomena to know that UFO-type intelligent aliens visiting us is a physical impossibility.
    - exclusiv 4y ago
      > Physics never does an about face. Whatever new physics is out there must be compatible with the physics that we know and use today. According to who? How is that compatible with the history of physics?
      - adastra22 4y ago
        How isn’t it compatible? Einstein didn’t overthrow Newton, he just clarified what happened at high speed and high energies. There are a few cases where physicists found new capabilities which weren’t known before, like Faraday discovering induction, or Einstein discovering mass-energy conversion. But even then the basic principle of energy being conserved is respected, and physical limits obeyed.
penjelly 4y ago
> I find that a major portion of people fear the possibility so much that they’re unable to entertain the probability. you may feel this, but in reality these people might have heard "its aliens" for 50+ years and are fed up with people jumping to conclusions without actual evidence. and no, shooting down unknown objects is not evidence.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  Nobody but actual tinfoil hats are saying ”it’s definitely aliens”. Nobody is jumping to conclusions. It’s all probabilities, and disregarding a possibility without evidence to contrary despite its improbability is, to my eye, as naive as their counter opposites.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    But why entertain this particular vanishingly unlikely explanation, when there are myriad other vanishingly unlikely possible explanations as well? That's the problem with considering the unlikely (especially when there is a lack of evidence for the phenomena prior to this). When you're that far down in the weeds, it's all noise. There are too many technically possible but extremely unlikely explanations to spend time on them all, and in the absence of evidence, there's no reason to single any one of them out.
    - mach1ne 4y ago
      I understand your point, but I don’t believe the probability to be vanishingly small, just extremely small (in this particular case, based on what we currently know). I believe you and I differ in our prior estimation of the probability of extraterrestial observers. I find that the two prior base scenarios, one with galactically widespread advanced civilizations and one with only us alone in the vastness of space, would very probably look practically identical to us. There’s no reason advanced civilizations would use radiowaves for communication, and little reason for them to interfere in the development of a primitive civilization. I find that we would see an empty galaxy in both priors with a high likelihood. Given this, the core problem in assigning an actual probability for either scenario is that we don’t know how easy or difficult it is for intelligent life to emerge. At this point it is quite impossible to assign the probability, since our sample size is 1. It is no more true to assign a probability close to 0 than it is close to 1. This must then either be set to 0.5 or eyeballed by circumstantial info, which is never real proof to one direction or another. I believe it to be sufficiently high that the scenario where the apparently-empty galaxy is full of life is far from vanishingly small - and far from certain.
Swenrekcah 4y ago
Remember Oumuamua? That was something that had a very small probability of being aliens. This has zero (or to split hairs some nonzero probability that is so infinitesimally small as to be practically zero). People, including respectable scientists, were perfectly willing to entertain the possibility of aliens there, with all the appropriate and huge caveats. It’s not that people don’t want it to be aliens, it’s just that it never is.
kibwen 4y ago
> there is a very small chance it is The very small chance of it being aliens is the same as the very small chance of it being wizards, or angels, or the rogue appendages of extradimensional horrors, or glitches in the matrix. It's irrational to fixate on the technically non-zero odds of aliens when there are an infinite number of explanations with technically non-zero odds.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Well no because magic isn't real but extraterrestrial life very well may be.
  - misnome 4y ago
    Can you prove that magic isn't real?
  - adastra22 4y ago
    UFO-type extraterrestrial life is as unreal as wizard magic. It is effectively the same thing.
  - ss108 4y ago
    There is a non-zero chance that angels and magic are not real, and the chance of aliens being real, while perhaps greater, still relies mostly on conjecture, and is ultimately pretty close to those two things.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Show me a demonstrably provable example of either. In an "infinite worlds, infinite possibilities" sense it's possible that something, somewhere in the universe is alive and/or magical. But there is no telling that 1) that's actually happening, and 2) that we'd ever encounter it before the heat death of the universe.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Obviously it isn't aliens and the rest of this is just fun, but: Our Galaxy formed 13,000 million years ago. We estimate any single technological civilization that developed the technology to build Bracewell/von Neumann probes during this time (perhaps minus a few billion years) could have colonized every star system in the galaxy with self-replicating tech in at most a few million years. Presumably if the probes were self-replicating they could also be self-maintaining and therefore a single colonization could effectively produce a permanent technological presence within a given star system. We can't know what a civilization would do with such a network, but we can guess that human beings would program it to investigate life and technological civilizations. So the "could there be alien technology in our solar system" question breaks down to a series of technical questions around the feasibility and probabilities of the above events. I personally still think those probabilities are low enough that we can round them to zero, but the spec-fi fan in me very much hopes that they're not. Also: for god's sake, these are Chinese balloons and not aliens. :)
jstummbillig 4y ago
> Given the trajectory of humanity, the alien scenario explaining an unexplained phenomena is not unreasonable, though almost always very unlikely What bearing does the trajectory of humanity have on the reasonableness of explaining things by alien? I fail to see any connection. On the other hand, it being extremely unlikely (because in every instance so far the answer has been "no" or "we don't know") seems pretty relevant.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JohnFen 4y ago
> unable to entertain the probability The probability is so vanishingly tiny that there's little point to entertaining it beyond "sure, it's possible". Keep your mind open, but not so open that your brains fall out.

adastra22 4y ago

It is unreasonable. It defies physics and all common sense.

nucleogenesis 4y ago
It defies known and well understood physics.
- skc 4y ago
  Except when shooting them down apparently.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Physics never does an about face. Whatever new physics is out there must be compatible with the physics that we know and use today. And we know enough about physics at planetary and solar system scale phenomena to know that UFO-type intelligent aliens visiting us is a physical impossibility.
  - exclusiv 4y ago
    > Physics never does an about face. Whatever new physics is out there must be compatible with the physics that we know and use today. According to who? How is that compatible with the history of physics?
    - adastra22 4y ago
      How isn’t it compatible? Einstein didn’t overthrow Newton, he just clarified what happened at high speed and high energies. There are a few cases where physicists found new capabilities which weren’t known before, like Faraday discovering induction, or Einstein discovering mass-energy conversion. But even then the basic principle of energy being conserved is respected, and physical limits obeyed.

penjelly 4y ago

> I find that a major portion of people fear the possibility so much that they’re unable to entertain the probability. you may feel this, but in reality these people might have heard "its aliens" for 50+ years and are fed up with people jumping to conclusions without actual evidence. and no, shooting down unknown objects is not evidence.

mach1ne 4y ago
Nobody but actual tinfoil hats are saying ”it’s definitely aliens”. Nobody is jumping to conclusions. It’s all probabilities, and disregarding a possibility without evidence to contrary despite its improbability is, to my eye, as naive as their counter opposites.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  But why entertain this particular vanishingly unlikely explanation, when there are myriad other vanishingly unlikely possible explanations as well? That's the problem with considering the unlikely (especially when there is a lack of evidence for the phenomena prior to this). When you're that far down in the weeds, it's all noise. There are too many technically possible but extremely unlikely explanations to spend time on them all, and in the absence of evidence, there's no reason to single any one of them out.
  - mach1ne 4y ago
    I understand your point, but I don’t believe the probability to be vanishingly small, just extremely small (in this particular case, based on what we currently know). I believe you and I differ in our prior estimation of the probability of extraterrestial observers. I find that the two prior base scenarios, one with galactically widespread advanced civilizations and one with only us alone in the vastness of space, would very probably look practically identical to us. There’s no reason advanced civilizations would use radiowaves for communication, and little reason for them to interfere in the development of a primitive civilization. I find that we would see an empty galaxy in both priors with a high likelihood. Given this, the core problem in assigning an actual probability for either scenario is that we don’t know how easy or difficult it is for intelligent life to emerge. At this point it is quite impossible to assign the probability, since our sample size is 1. It is no more true to assign a probability close to 0 than it is close to 1. This must then either be set to 0.5 or eyeballed by circumstantial info, which is never real proof to one direction or another. I believe it to be sufficiently high that the scenario where the apparently-empty galaxy is full of life is far from vanishingly small - and far from certain.

Swenrekcah 4y ago

Remember Oumuamua? That was something that had a very small probability of being aliens. This has zero (or to split hairs some nonzero probability that is so infinitesimally small as to be practically zero). People, including respectable scientists, were perfectly willing to entertain the possibility of aliens there, with all the appropriate and huge caveats. It’s not that people don’t want it to be aliens, it’s just that it never is.

kibwen 4y ago

> there is a very small chance it is The very small chance of it being aliens is the same as the very small chance of it being wizards, or angels, or the rogue appendages of extradimensional horrors, or glitches in the matrix. It's irrational to fixate on the technically non-zero odds of aliens when there are an infinite number of explanations with technically non-zero odds.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
Well no because magic isn't real but extraterrestrial life very well may be.
- misnome 4y ago
  Can you prove that magic isn't real?
- adastra22 4y ago
  UFO-type extraterrestrial life is as unreal as wizard magic. It is effectively the same thing.
- ss108 4y ago
  There is a non-zero chance that angels and magic are not real, and the chance of aliens being real, while perhaps greater, still relies mostly on conjecture, and is ultimately pretty close to those two things.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Show me a demonstrably provable example of either. In an "infinite worlds, infinite possibilities" sense it's possible that something, somewhere in the universe is alive and/or magical. But there is no telling that 1) that's actually happening, and 2) that we'd ever encounter it before the heat death of the universe.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Obviously it isn't aliens and the rest of this is just fun, but: Our Galaxy formed 13,000 million years ago. We estimate any single technological civilization that developed the technology to build Bracewell/von Neumann probes during this time (perhaps minus a few billion years) could have colonized every star system in the galaxy with self-replicating tech in at most a few million years. Presumably if the probes were self-replicating they could also be self-maintaining and therefore a single colonization could effectively produce a permanent technological presence within a given star system. We can't know what a civilization would do with such a network, but we can guess that human beings would program it to investigate life and technological civilizations. So the "could there be alien technology in our solar system" question breaks down to a series of technical questions around the feasibility and probabilities of the above events. I personally still think those probabilities are low enough that we can round them to zero, but the spec-fi fan in me very much hopes that they're not. Also: for god's sake, these are Chinese balloons and not aliens. :)

jstummbillig 4y ago

> Given the trajectory of humanity, the alien scenario explaining an unexplained phenomena is not unreasonable, though almost always very unlikely What bearing does the trajectory of humanity have on the reasonableness of explaining things by alien? I fail to see any connection. On the other hand, it being extremely unlikely (because in every instance so far the answer has been "no" or "we don't know") seems pretty relevant.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

JohnFen 4y ago

> unable to entertain the probability The probability is so vanishingly tiny that there's little point to entertaining it beyond "sure, it's possible". Keep your mind open, but not so open that your brains fall out.