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I’m not saying that I buy into these narratives, but in the interest of curiosity and for sake of argument… Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s s

I’m not saying that I buy into these narratives, but in the interest of curiosity and for sake of argument… Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s say that the US government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for decades. If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean. If any of this is real, the kind of legislation described in the article seems like one of the few ways they can start to introduce this information to the public. This makes it sound like they know what this is and they need to establish the channels and narratives to discuss it publicly (even if “this” is all a cover for misuse of funds that has nothing to do with ET craft). Everyone is focused on “what is this distracting us from?”, and maybe that’s all that this is, but even if this is misdirection, there’s something going on that’s making elected officials and reputable military types speak publicly about UAPs. That by itself is a pretty interesting signal if nothing else. It could also all be bullshit, and either way, I’m pretty curious to see where this goes.

justinclift 3y ago
> no legal pathway to introduce to the public So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.
- haswell 3y ago
  I think that would all depend on how advanced this hypothetical tech is, and the timeframe in which someone wants it known to the public. DARPA may not provide enough cover for sufficiently advanced discoveries that cannot be explained without raising bigger questions. It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield more. Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary goal. And again, I’m not saying these are likely explanations. But in the unlikely event that we’re really talking about alien tech, they seem plausible.
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    There is also that fermi paradox resolution that basically says the same tech that unlocks infinite energy also unlocks the ability to destroy ourselves. So in theory there could be good reasons for avoiding commercialization of highly advanced technology, if it means that within a century some guy on the street could build an apparatus that destroys the planet in an industrial accident.
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      AI could unlock the ability to destroy ourselves and we've commercialized that highly advanced technology but it sure didn't stop the majority of people from wondering "should". :P
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  You're assuming they've been able to figure anything out and are just sitting on it. If tech from an interstellar craft is here on Earth it's so far beyond anything we can make that we probably don't have a chance of figuring it out. It'd be like the first Europeans to reach America giving the natives guns and asking them to duplicate them, they don't even have the ability to smelt iron so it's just not going to happen and just having a gun isn't going to advance any of their other tech in the least.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    Whoa, that's far from true. They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm. The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discovery of fireworks.
    - throwaway4aday 3y ago
      Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify is the charcoal. The other components are going to be unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled into the powder that they are inseparable without techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to evaporate the water to get the salt out of it. Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals like copper first to develop smelting techniques and nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find, mine and smelt copper or iron.
      - jstarfish 3y ago
        I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create a single component of a functional firearm, but they're going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying. Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would still have given us Velcro.
- asdff 3y ago
  If they had this technology I'd assume there would be no point of revealing it, since you'd lose the advantage of secrecy over it for no good reason. The US military is capable enough against other nations with conventional technology. I'd expect if this tech were employed in war it would be in defense of the planet itself.
LatteLazy 3y ago
Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech was created in any of 1000 labs? I am sure there is a scientist somewhere willing to take credit can get a nobel prize. Or just say it was discovered by Darpa, don't ask questions but here is how it works?
- haswell 3y ago
  This was my first thought as well, and I think there are a number of possible reasons: - The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes - They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding - They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project
  - delecti 3y ago
    That's an interesting thought experiment. Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc. The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly advanced technology would necessarily lead to an incremental advancement before we got to the end result, and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on current technology. There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big that I'm very inclined towards the first one.
    - Sunspark 3y ago
      > If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc. A bicycle is an even better example. It is 100% understandable to a Roman just via looking and touching, but replicating a bicycle in Rome isn't as easy as it looks. The chain alone is a problem.
CommieBobDole 3y ago
It's possible as well that the technology used in such a device would be entirely indecipherable to us due to not just being more advanced, but due to being on the other side of a technological 'leap' that we're nowhere near making ourselves. If you gave a broken iPad to the greatest minds of the mid-19th century and they expended all the resources at the world's disposal to study it, it's likely that they wouldn't learn anything about it at all, and it wouldn't advance technology a bit, at least not for a hundred years or so. If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".
- fn-mote 3y ago
  > if the government is forced to reveal it The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?
  - CommieBobDole 3y ago
    Congress could pass a law requiring it to be revealed, the president could order it, leaking of additional information could cause public outcry leading to one of the above. I'm using 'forced' in the sense of 'circumstances cause it to become necessary to do', not 'some more powerful entity will make them do it'.
    - TechBro8615 3y ago
      I don't think the people allegedly involved in this alleged coverup have shown any respect for laws or norms. They can just keep lying and obfuscating. The only way they would ever disclose anything is if they wanted to. We can't even hold some NIH administrators accountable for funding research that led to a pandemic. It's laughably naive to think that we could hold accountable, nevermind investigate, whatever faceless perpetrators are responsible for a government program cloaked in so much secrecy that not even presidents have been aware of it.
asdff 3y ago
I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god? Especially if its a truth that has been kept secret for so long, that would be particularly damning for the legitimacy of current governments of the world in the eyes of most people, I would assume. On the other hand, if we have our hands on ET craft, you'd have to imagine there are some capitalists who would like to profit hand over fist over whatever this technology might offer, people who aren't well leveraged for this revolution be damned and left to fight amongst themselves while your cabal maintains the largest technological advantage relative to other groups in human history. We have plenty of examples of capitalists profiteering at the expense of humans and the earth today. This is all speculation of course, who knows what is happening.
- apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
  > I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god? Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way. You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war. The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.
  - asdff 3y ago
    I'm sorry, but this would be an entire paradigm shift of how we see ourselves as a species. To think people would show up to work on monday I think is uncertain. We would be going from a millenia of human primacy on this planet to having these unknown apex predators lurking with unknown intentions. It's so completely unprecedented that it would be hard to imagine there wouldn't be social unrest, and major dissatisfaction with governments that have chosen to lie to the people they allegedly serve and represent. You might start to question who really runs the world, if some secret cabal had been able to keep the greatest secret of all time a secret for decades, and make decisions for the entire planet independent of our supposed democratic process.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
If it is real, then there's probably a billion self-replicating alien robots in the oceans already converting the earth to paperclips without our realizing it. There will be a trillion before we notice, and then we'll just get wiped out. No actual aliens will ever visit earth, just autonomous drone swarms trying to keep us from becoming properly space faring. After all, if we ever get to be properly space faring, we might interfere with it's paperclip goal
snowwrestler 3y ago
> If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean. They would just release it and come clean. No one would be mad that we suddenly have near-magical solutions to energy problems. What you're describing is essentially what happened with the Manhattan Project, which was a tightly guarded military secret. But once it became clear there were civilian applications, they stood up the Atomic Energy Commission and helped the rest of the country get to work on nuclear energy.

justinclift 3y ago

> no legal pathway to introduce to the public So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.

haswell 3y ago
I think that would all depend on how advanced this hypothetical tech is, and the timeframe in which someone wants it known to the public. DARPA may not provide enough cover for sufficiently advanced discoveries that cannot be explained without raising bigger questions. It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield more. Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary goal. And again, I’m not saying these are likely explanations. But in the unlikely event that we’re really talking about alien tech, they seem plausible.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  There is also that fermi paradox resolution that basically says the same tech that unlocks infinite energy also unlocks the ability to destroy ourselves. So in theory there could be good reasons for avoiding commercialization of highly advanced technology, if it means that within a century some guy on the street could build an apparatus that destroys the planet in an industrial accident.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    AI could unlock the ability to destroy ourselves and we've commercialized that highly advanced technology but it sure didn't stop the majority of people from wondering "should". :P
throwaway4aday 3y ago
You're assuming they've been able to figure anything out and are just sitting on it. If tech from an interstellar craft is here on Earth it's so far beyond anything we can make that we probably don't have a chance of figuring it out. It'd be like the first Europeans to reach America giving the natives guns and asking them to duplicate them, they don't even have the ability to smelt iron so it's just not going to happen and just having a gun isn't going to advance any of their other tech in the least.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  Whoa, that's far from true. They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm. The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discovery of fireworks.
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify is the charcoal. The other components are going to be unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled into the powder that they are inseparable without techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to evaporate the water to get the salt out of it. Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals like copper first to develop smelting techniques and nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find, mine and smelt copper or iron.
    - jstarfish 3y ago
      I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create a single component of a functional firearm, but they're going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying. Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would still have given us Velcro.
asdff 3y ago
If they had this technology I'd assume there would be no point of revealing it, since you'd lose the advantage of secrecy over it for no good reason. The US military is capable enough against other nations with conventional technology. I'd expect if this tech were employed in war it would be in defense of the planet itself.

LatteLazy 3y ago

Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech was created in any of 1000 labs? I am sure there is a scientist somewhere willing to take credit can get a nobel prize. Or just say it was discovered by Darpa, don't ask questions but here is how it works?

haswell 3y ago
This was my first thought as well, and I think there are a number of possible reasons: - The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes - They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding - They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project
- delecti 3y ago
  That's an interesting thought experiment. Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc. The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly advanced technology would necessarily lead to an incremental advancement before we got to the end result, and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on current technology. There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big that I'm very inclined towards the first one.
  - Sunspark 3y ago
    > If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc. A bicycle is an even better example. It is 100% understandable to a Roman just via looking and touching, but replicating a bicycle in Rome isn't as easy as it looks. The chain alone is a problem.

CommieBobDole 3y ago

It's possible as well that the technology used in such a device would be entirely indecipherable to us due to not just being more advanced, but due to being on the other side of a technological 'leap' that we're nowhere near making ourselves. If you gave a broken iPad to the greatest minds of the mid-19th century and they expended all the resources at the world's disposal to study it, it's likely that they wouldn't learn anything about it at all, and it wouldn't advance technology a bit, at least not for a hundred years or so. If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".

fn-mote 3y ago
> if the government is forced to reveal it The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?
- CommieBobDole 3y ago
  Congress could pass a law requiring it to be revealed, the president could order it, leaking of additional information could cause public outcry leading to one of the above. I'm using 'forced' in the sense of 'circumstances cause it to become necessary to do', not 'some more powerful entity will make them do it'.
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    I don't think the people allegedly involved in this alleged coverup have shown any respect for laws or norms. They can just keep lying and obfuscating. The only way they would ever disclose anything is if they wanted to. We can't even hold some NIH administrators accountable for funding research that led to a pandemic. It's laughably naive to think that we could hold accountable, nevermind investigate, whatever faceless perpetrators are responsible for a government program cloaked in so much secrecy that not even presidents have been aware of it.

asdff 3y ago

I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god? Especially if its a truth that has been kept secret for so long, that would be particularly damning for the legitimacy of current governments of the world in the eyes of most people, I would assume. On the other hand, if we have our hands on ET craft, you'd have to imagine there are some capitalists who would like to profit hand over fist over whatever this technology might offer, people who aren't well leveraged for this revolution be damned and left to fight amongst themselves while your cabal maintains the largest technological advantage relative to other groups in human history. We have plenty of examples of capitalists profiteering at the expense of humans and the earth today. This is all speculation of course, who knows what is happening.

apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
> I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god? Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way. You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war. The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.
- asdff 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but this would be an entire paradigm shift of how we see ourselves as a species. To think people would show up to work on monday I think is uncertain. We would be going from a millenia of human primacy on this planet to having these unknown apex predators lurking with unknown intentions. It's so completely unprecedented that it would be hard to imagine there wouldn't be social unrest, and major dissatisfaction with governments that have chosen to lie to the people they allegedly serve and represent. You might start to question who really runs the world, if some secret cabal had been able to keep the greatest secret of all time a secret for decades, and make decisions for the entire planet independent of our supposed democratic process.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

If it is real, then there's probably a billion self-replicating alien robots in the oceans already converting the earth to paperclips without our realizing it. There will be a trillion before we notice, and then we'll just get wiped out. No actual aliens will ever visit earth, just autonomous drone swarms trying to keep us from becoming properly space faring. After all, if we ever get to be properly space faring, we might interfere with it's paperclip goal

snowwrestler 3y ago

> If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean. They would just release it and come clean. No one would be mad that we suddenly have near-magical solutions to energy problems. What you're describing is essentially what happened with the Manhattan Project, which was a tightly guarded military secret. But once it became clear there were civilian applications, they stood up the Atomic Energy Commission and helped the rest of the country get to work on nuclear energy.