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I’m a huge skeptic, but I’ve been following this very closely over the past few months. Fermi’s paradox has two good answers — we don’t see aliens because they

I’m a huge skeptic, but I’ve been following this very closely over the past few months. Fermi’s paradox has two good answers — we don’t see aliens because they don’t exist, or we don’t see them because they are here already. They should be here already. The paradox is about why we don’t see them. Being skeptical is different than doubt-by-default. A skeptic is curious and slow to judge. So with great curiosity, I’ve dug deep into the rabbit hole. It appears that the vast majority of those in “ufology” are in it for the money. Many claims about extraterrestrials also veer off into the supernatural. Conspiracy theories have a funny attraction to one another, creating clumps of exuberant irrationality. But the recent case of David Grusch and the rebranding of UFOs as UAPs and aliens as NHI (non human intelligence), are a sign that clear (but skeptical) thinking is growing on this topic. Grusch isnt (yet) making money off this. He appears entirely trustworthy in a way that is off-color for this topic. Assuming he isn’t a world class con playing the long-game, his credibility suggests three possibilities: 1. He has bad data, by accident or incompetence 2. He has bad data, by purposeful deceit 3. He has good data. The cool thing about Grusch is he doesn’t claim to have first-hand knowledge. He claims to have the names of people who do, and the locations associated with the “crash-retrieval” program. What’s more likely, that there is no other intelligent life in the galaxy, or that an advanced civilization that has been around for eons isn’t all that interested in engaging with the local wildlife? The most credible UAP reports don’t involve the fantastic stories of abduction, crop-circles, ancient pyramids, etc. The credible reports have what appear to be reconnaissance craft with a strong interest in the military and nuclear weapons. In short, it’s worth supporting Grusch and having his names and places checked out. The answer to Fermi’s paradox is an important one for humanity — as central as whether the sub revolves around the earth or the earth revolves around the sun. At the very least, we should be curious skeptics. As the head of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), Sean Kirkpatrick, said recently, “wouldn’t that be fun?” if we discovered evidence we were not alone.

balfirevic 3y ago
> or we don’t see them because they are here already. If we expected to see them far away, how would them being here prevent us from doing that (and also from seeing other presumably existing alien species that are not here)?
kcplate 3y ago
How about the option that aliens exist but are not here nor are detectable yet because we are the first and most technologically advanced form of life to arise…yet.
- alkibiades 3y ago
  if other life exists, the chances of us being first would be really low given the size and age of the universe
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    not sure I agree, the universe could go on to be hundreds of billions or trillions of years old, against which 13 (or maybe 26) billion years is really the same scale as the first humans venturing out of Africa just a few tens of millenia ago.
    - Timon3 3y ago
      The universe potentially getting really old doesn't make it more likely for us to be the first. It is incredibly unlikely.
      - simmerup 3y ago
        We don't need to be the first, we just need to be the first to survive and figure out some practical method of space travel. Space travel may even prove to be impossible for us.
        Timon3 3y ago
        "We don't need to be the first" to do what? We do need to be the first to be the first. If we're not the first, we're not the first, even if we figure out space travel.
      - ChainOfFools 3y ago
        I don't follow your reasoning at all. Unless intelligent life appeared everywhere in the universe spontaneously at the same instant, which seems rather unlikely, then someone has to be first. If the universe has, on the scale of potentially uncountable trillions of years, just barely reached a stage where the probability of life appearing has risen above "infinitely small" then there's nothing chauvinistic or anthropocentric about speculating that we're it.
deleted 3y ago
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vanrysss 3y ago
Or, they do exist but might as well not for practical purposes due to the universal speed limit.
kromem 3y ago
I don't get why no one ever throws out time travel as an explanation over extraterrestrial. Given the limit of the speed of information and the expansion of the universe, there's a VERY small area that would even be aware of the signals we've started sending out over the past century to come looking. But Earth would be an extremely interesting destination....for future Earth. Though personally the most likely answer is that it's our own tech that the people sighting it don't have clearance to even know about which is why USINT is so against more attention to reports of sightings. But if I had to put my money on outlandish claims, time traveling ships would get my best any day over extraterrestrial ones.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  yea, given the progress we've made in harnessing physics over the past few hundred years, extrapolating for the lifetime of our species, as long as we're around for long enough to figure out time travel... we should be able to come back, which means we would already be doing so? as long as the preconditions remain true... either way we would probably have some sort of "butterfly effect/grandfather paradox" laws in place that said, the value of future earth visiting past earth would likely be 'kitsch' at best :P
- DropInIn 3y ago
  If you travel "back in time" you don't enter your own timeline but another universe where you were Always going to appear. Time travel (backwards) is not possible, only inter-universe travel. What has happened has always happened and will always have happened.
  - MrYellowP 3y ago
    Finally I found an expert in time travel technology! Please tell us more about it!
    - DropInIn 3y ago
      Jfc... I see your hyperbole but I'll give you the "self evident" breakdown of why: If both events have occurred at the same time then that means they can't exist in the same timeliness. Pretty freaking simple ain't it?
throwbadubadu 3y ago
> we don’t see aliens because they don’t exist, or we don’t see them because they are here already imo most likely is they exist, but space is just so unimaginable huge, and also Aliens can at most go close to lightspeed. They didn't beat physics nor invented portals / wormholes? > They should be here already. Least likely for me out of the three options.. just our tinfoil hat love :)
- Xelbair 3y ago
  did you even read what Fermi Paradox is?
  - throwbadubadu 3y ago
    Yes, and I find multiple of its assumptions if not unreasonable at least with a huge flexibility that would void it, as have been discussed since it being stated and as one can even read on Wikipedia? There are dozens of similar feasible argumentations that can unparadox it..
- MrYellowP 3y ago
  > and also Aliens can at most go close to lightspeed. You're an expert in alien technology and civilizations far more technologically advanced than we are?
  - atoav 3y ago
    I mean there is one thing we can safely assume: their vehicles have to operate in the same universe as ours, at least when they are meant to be in ours at some point. Now they might know some tricks around the limitations of our universes physics, but even those tricks must do something measurably.
    - avaldez_ 3y ago
      They have to abide by the rules of the universe that WE know of. The universe is unbelievably big but also unfathomably OLD, so I'm sure there's been plenty of time for a number of civilizations to reach a technological level vastly larger than ours. Our latest technological revolution started just a hundred years ago. Imagine what just 10,000 more years can do. I mean, we thought (and our math said so) that the speed of sound was a physical barrier just a _few_ years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prandtl%E2%80%93Glauert_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prandtl%E2%80%93Glauert_singul...)
ilaksh 3y ago
It's convenient that he doesn't have first hand knowledge because that gives him an out when people ask for proof. Which there is none. He still works for intelligence, obviously. Aliens and UFOs are a well-known and obvious cover story for experimental aircraft. It's his job to spread this story. Note that I'm not suggesting most things people claim to be UFOs are actually experimental aircraft. A few may be. But often it's a hoax, a piece of dust, an ordinary aircraft, a weather balloon, an artifact of extreme zoom, etc.
- danenania 3y ago
  "He still works for intelligence, obviously. Aliens and UFOs are a well-known and obvious cover story for experimental aircraft. It's his job to spread this story." Without commenting on the likelihood of any hypothesis, I don't see how this makes sense. If we assume that it is a cover story for advanced tech programs, top secret programs in general are now going to have 10,000x more scrutiny by the media and Congress, and will be far more likely to have details leaked. Drawing attention like this is the exact opposite of what you'd do to keep something secret. If "cover story" really is the explanation, it seems unlikely that Grusch is in on it--more likely would be that he was also fed the cover story, and that his going public really is resented by the military since it brings so much unwanted outside attention.
kahnclusions 3y ago
> Fermi’s paradox has two good answers — we don’t see aliens because they don’t exist, or we don’t see them because they are here already. These are not "good" answers to the Fermi paradox, and definitely not the only answers. Much better answers (in my opinion) are things like: their signals haven't reached us yet; they haven't developed interstellar communications or travel yet; they haven't developed intelligent life yet. I would think an alien spacecraft carrying the energy and resources needed for interstellar travel (including the return trip) would be pretty obvious and detectable even by amateur astronomers. Instead what we're doing here is chasing at shadows and grasping at straws. Credible reports deserve to be looked into, yes. But what is Grusch alleging here? Existence of a UFO crash retrieval program. Presence of non-human biologics. OK, experimental Soviet or Chinese military technology with dog or cat DNA counts. Of course the US military guards those in secrecy. When we ask, "did you find aliens?" they aren't going to reply with "sorry no aliens, and to prove it, here are the details of all the experimental Soviet/Chinese/US military tech we recovered." PBS Space Time has a number of great episodes on the subject of aliens, including questions like how do we know whether humans are among the first spacefaring species: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTrFAY3LUNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTrFAY3LUNw
- kelipso 3y ago
  > I would think an alien spacecraft carrying the energy and resources needed for interstellar travel (including the return trip) would be pretty obvious and detectable even by amateur astronomers. I don't think this is true. If an alien ship landed on the moon, we won't know about it. No equipment or resources put in to monitor something like that. Much less all the other planets, moons, and asteroids in the solar system.
  - DougN7 3y ago
    Even if we couldn’t detect them, with tech as advanced as they would have to have, are they going to be crashing on our planet so often that we need a full on program for collecting them? If it happened once, maybe. Multiple times with that level of tech? No way.
guerrilla 3y ago
> Grusch isnt (yet) making money off this How could you possibly know that?
postmodest 3y ago
"Pascal's Wager has two outcomes: 1) there are no angels 2) angels dance upon EVERY pinhead, sight-unseen. There are no other options. And we may dismiss the first one because of the unspoken axiom of the wager." That's the argument I would like to make regarding the existence of angels and the coverup by the secularists to hide their involvement in humanity.
manjuc 3y ago
If these witnesses who have served and defended our country are lying under oath, Pentagon has all the means to prosecute them for misleading the congress, the senate and the public. Watch this 5 min clip for additional context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FrloSlst1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FrloSlst1A

balfirevic 3y ago

> or we don’t see them because they are here already. If we expected to see them far away, how would them being here prevent us from doing that (and also from seeing other presumably existing alien species that are not here)?

kcplate 3y ago

How about the option that aliens exist but are not here nor are detectable yet because we are the first and most technologically advanced form of life to arise…yet.

alkibiades 3y ago
if other life exists, the chances of us being first would be really low given the size and age of the universe
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  not sure I agree, the universe could go on to be hundreds of billions or trillions of years old, against which 13 (or maybe 26) billion years is really the same scale as the first humans venturing out of Africa just a few tens of millenia ago.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    The universe potentially getting really old doesn't make it more likely for us to be the first. It is incredibly unlikely.
    - simmerup 3y ago
      We don't need to be the first, we just need to be the first to survive and figure out some practical method of space travel. Space travel may even prove to be impossible for us.
      - Timon3 3y ago
        "We don't need to be the first" to do what? We do need to be the first to be the first. If we're not the first, we're not the first, even if we figure out space travel.
    - ChainOfFools 3y ago
      I don't follow your reasoning at all. Unless intelligent life appeared everywhere in the universe spontaneously at the same instant, which seems rather unlikely, then someone has to be first. If the universe has, on the scale of potentially uncountable trillions of years, just barely reached a stage where the probability of life appearing has risen above "infinitely small" then there's nothing chauvinistic or anthropocentric about speculating that we're it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

vanrysss 3y ago

Or, they do exist but might as well not for practical purposes due to the universal speed limit.

kromem 3y ago

I don't get why no one ever throws out time travel as an explanation over extraterrestrial. Given the limit of the speed of information and the expansion of the universe, there's a VERY small area that would even be aware of the signals we've started sending out over the past century to come looking. But Earth would be an extremely interesting destination....for future Earth. Though personally the most likely answer is that it's our own tech that the people sighting it don't have clearance to even know about which is why USINT is so against more attention to reports of sightings. But if I had to put my money on outlandish claims, time traveling ships would get my best any day over extraterrestrial ones.

jareklupinski 3y ago
yea, given the progress we've made in harnessing physics over the past few hundred years, extrapolating for the lifetime of our species, as long as we're around for long enough to figure out time travel... we should be able to come back, which means we would already be doing so? as long as the preconditions remain true... either way we would probably have some sort of "butterfly effect/grandfather paradox" laws in place that said, the value of future earth visiting past earth would likely be 'kitsch' at best :P
DropInIn 3y ago
If you travel "back in time" you don't enter your own timeline but another universe where you were Always going to appear. Time travel (backwards) is not possible, only inter-universe travel. What has happened has always happened and will always have happened.
- MrYellowP 3y ago
  Finally I found an expert in time travel technology! Please tell us more about it!
  - DropInIn 3y ago
    Jfc... I see your hyperbole but I'll give you the "self evident" breakdown of why: If both events have occurred at the same time then that means they can't exist in the same timeliness. Pretty freaking simple ain't it?

throwbadubadu 3y ago

> we don’t see aliens because they don’t exist, or we don’t see them because they are here already imo most likely is they exist, but space is just so unimaginable huge, and also Aliens can at most go close to lightspeed. They didn't beat physics nor invented portals / wormholes? > They should be here already. Least likely for me out of the three options.. just our tinfoil hat love :)

Xelbair 3y ago
did you even read what Fermi Paradox is?
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  Yes, and I find multiple of its assumptions if not unreasonable at least with a huge flexibility that would void it, as have been discussed since it being stated and as one can even read on Wikipedia? There are dozens of similar feasible argumentations that can unparadox it..
MrYellowP 3y ago
> and also Aliens can at most go close to lightspeed. You're an expert in alien technology and civilizations far more technologically advanced than we are?
- atoav 3y ago
  I mean there is one thing we can safely assume: their vehicles have to operate in the same universe as ours, at least when they are meant to be in ours at some point. Now they might know some tricks around the limitations of our universes physics, but even those tricks must do something measurably.
  - avaldez_ 3y ago
    They have to abide by the rules of the universe that WE know of. The universe is unbelievably big but also unfathomably OLD, so I'm sure there's been plenty of time for a number of civilizations to reach a technological level vastly larger than ours. Our latest technological revolution started just a hundred years ago. Imagine what just 10,000 more years can do. I mean, we thought (and our math said so) that the speed of sound was a physical barrier just a _few_ years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prandtl%E2%80%93Glauert_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prandtl%E2%80%93Glauert_singul...)

ilaksh 3y ago

It's convenient that he doesn't have first hand knowledge because that gives him an out when people ask for proof. Which there is none. He still works for intelligence, obviously. Aliens and UFOs are a well-known and obvious cover story for experimental aircraft. It's his job to spread this story. Note that I'm not suggesting most things people claim to be UFOs are actually experimental aircraft. A few may be. But often it's a hoax, a piece of dust, an ordinary aircraft, a weather balloon, an artifact of extreme zoom, etc.

danenania 3y ago
"He still works for intelligence, obviously. Aliens and UFOs are a well-known and obvious cover story for experimental aircraft. It's his job to spread this story." Without commenting on the likelihood of any hypothesis, I don't see how this makes sense. If we assume that it is a cover story for advanced tech programs, top secret programs in general are now going to have 10,000x more scrutiny by the media and Congress, and will be far more likely to have details leaked. Drawing attention like this is the exact opposite of what you'd do to keep something secret. If "cover story" really is the explanation, it seems unlikely that Grusch is in on it--more likely would be that he was also fed the cover story, and that his going public really is resented by the military since it brings so much unwanted outside attention.

kahnclusions 3y ago

> Fermi’s paradox has two good answers — we don’t see aliens because they don’t exist, or we don’t see them because they are here already. These are not "good" answers to the Fermi paradox, and definitely not the only answers. Much better answers (in my opinion) are things like: their signals haven't reached us yet; they haven't developed interstellar communications or travel yet; they haven't developed intelligent life yet. I would think an alien spacecraft carrying the energy and resources needed for interstellar travel (including the return trip) would be pretty obvious and detectable even by amateur astronomers. Instead what we're doing here is chasing at shadows and grasping at straws. Credible reports deserve to be looked into, yes. But what is Grusch alleging here? Existence of a UFO crash retrieval program. Presence of non-human biologics. OK, experimental Soviet or Chinese military technology with dog or cat DNA counts. Of course the US military guards those in secrecy. When we ask, "did you find aliens?" they aren't going to reply with "sorry no aliens, and to prove it, here are the details of all the experimental Soviet/Chinese/US military tech we recovered." PBS Space Time has a number of great episodes on the subject of aliens, including questions like how do we know whether humans are among the first spacefaring species: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTrFAY3LUNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTrFAY3LUNw

kelipso 3y ago
> I would think an alien spacecraft carrying the energy and resources needed for interstellar travel (including the return trip) would be pretty obvious and detectable even by amateur astronomers. I don't think this is true. If an alien ship landed on the moon, we won't know about it. No equipment or resources put in to monitor something like that. Much less all the other planets, moons, and asteroids in the solar system.
- DougN7 3y ago
  Even if we couldn’t detect them, with tech as advanced as they would have to have, are they going to be crashing on our planet so often that we need a full on program for collecting them? If it happened once, maybe. Multiple times with that level of tech? No way.

guerrilla 3y ago

> Grusch isnt (yet) making money off this How could you possibly know that?

postmodest 3y ago

"Pascal's Wager has two outcomes: 1) there are no angels 2) angels dance upon EVERY pinhead, sight-unseen. There are no other options. And we may dismiss the first one because of the unspoken axiom of the wager." That's the argument I would like to make regarding the existence of angels and the coverup by the secularists to hide their involvement in humanity.

manjuc 3y ago

If these witnesses who have served and defended our country are lying under oath, Pentagon has all the means to prosecute them for misleading the congress, the senate and the public. Watch this 5 min clip for additional context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FrloSlst1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FrloSlst1A