8 ms·

Commercial airlines apparently experience crashes at a rate of 6 per 100,000,000 flights. I wasn't able to find a figure from the testimony as to how many craft

Commercial airlines apparently experience crashes at a rate of 6 per 100,000,000 flights. I wasn't able to find a figure from the testimony as to how many craft are claimed to have been recovered. The best I could find was an anonymous quote from a Vox article of 12+. Applying the commercial airline stat to 12 crashes over 80 years results in almost 7,000 alien flights per day (just over the US). There are 25,000 flights per day (again in the US). A ratio of alien:commercial flights of 1:4 is really hard to buy. The alternative is that these alien craft are incredibly more advanced and yet somehow worse at flying than human aircraft. To play devil's advocate, maybe the government is intentionally shooting them down. But how? With what? Human knock-offs of their own weapons?

edgyquant 3y ago
Or it could be you’ve made a ridiculous assumption by comparing commercial airlines to UFOs in the first place.
- potsandpans 3y ago
  ...yes. and what else floats? A duck! who are you, so wise in the ways of science?
- cowboysauce 3y ago
  I'm asking if alien craft are a safer method of transport than air liners. Alternatively, if we replaced air liners with these craft, would fewer people die? If they are safer then the sky should be flooded with them to result in 12 crashes so far. This doesn't seem to be the case so there must instead be a smaller number of more dangerous craft to result in 12 crashes. So either the sky is flooded with invisible alien craft or their craft are a more dangerous method of travel than our air liners.
  - pleb_nz 3y ago
    Or maybe it's better to compare to personal modes of traffic and not airliners?
    - cowboysauce 3y ago
      I mean sure. Cars, for example, are significantly more dangerous than airliners and people crash all the time. But if alien craft are as safe as cars then that just leads back to my original point that airliners are better at traveling safely through our atmosphere than physics-defying alien craft.
      - pleb_nz 3y ago
        Or there is a hell of a lot more than we think
- isitmadeofglass 3y ago
  [dead]
Reubend 3y ago
Your logic is based on the assumption that those alien crafts were intending to come to Earth. Perhaps they were intending to go somewhere else, and crashed into Earth mistakenly? Then the volume of total flights could be much larger, and the proportion of crashes could be much smaller.
- cowboysauce 3y ago
  So instead of thousands of craft flying daily over the US, there are potentially millions commuting past Earth? And those crashes still happen despite an abundance of help nearby?
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    I can't quite put my finger on why, but somehow these exchanges with fringe theorists strongly remind me of one-sided versions of those "who would win" arguments that people have between Star Trek technology versus Star Wars. The real objective seems to be to show off one's ability to creatively avoid being pinned down by argument from scientific knowledge while affecting that one's own claims are grounded in it.
    - Reubend 3y ago
      I'm not sure if you're directing that at me, or the parent comment. But I'm not a fringe theorist, and I don't believe that aliens have been crashing into Earth either. I find the parent comment's argument very unconvincing. It makes assumptions which don't seem reasonable in the context of the subject matter at hand. If aliens did exist, they could be much more numerous than humans. Their spacecraft could be more dangerous than airplanes to operate. Their method of travel could perhaps result in collisions with Earth even if it wasn't their intended destination. My overall point is that we should minimize the assumptions we make here. There's no point in assuming various things and then proposing arguments based on those predicates.
  - Reubend 3y ago
    Sure, what's preposterous about that? We can't assume that getting "help" is trivial just due to the volume of travel. Commercial airplanes can't rescue each other, just as an example. I don't believe that aliens are making contact with Earth. But I don't find your argument against that possibility convincing either. In my mind, a much better argument would simply be that with 7 billion people on this planet, the likelihood of alien crashes staying secret seems miniscule. We would have solid conclusive evidence already if it had happened multiple times, like alledged.

edgyquant 3y ago

Or it could be you’ve made a ridiculous assumption by comparing commercial airlines to UFOs in the first place.

potsandpans 3y ago
...yes. and what else floats? A duck! who are you, so wise in the ways of science?
cowboysauce 3y ago
I'm asking if alien craft are a safer method of transport than air liners. Alternatively, if we replaced air liners with these craft, would fewer people die? If they are safer then the sky should be flooded with them to result in 12 crashes so far. This doesn't seem to be the case so there must instead be a smaller number of more dangerous craft to result in 12 crashes. So either the sky is flooded with invisible alien craft or their craft are a more dangerous method of travel than our air liners.
- pleb_nz 3y ago
  Or maybe it's better to compare to personal modes of traffic and not airliners?
  - cowboysauce 3y ago
    I mean sure. Cars, for example, are significantly more dangerous than airliners and people crash all the time. But if alien craft are as safe as cars then that just leads back to my original point that airliners are better at traveling safely through our atmosphere than physics-defying alien craft.
    - pleb_nz 3y ago
      Or there is a hell of a lot more than we think
isitmadeofglass 3y ago
[dead]

Reubend 3y ago

Your logic is based on the assumption that those alien crafts were intending to come to Earth. Perhaps they were intending to go somewhere else, and crashed into Earth mistakenly? Then the volume of total flights could be much larger, and the proportion of crashes could be much smaller.

cowboysauce 3y ago
So instead of thousands of craft flying daily over the US, there are potentially millions commuting past Earth? And those crashes still happen despite an abundance of help nearby?
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  I can't quite put my finger on why, but somehow these exchanges with fringe theorists strongly remind me of one-sided versions of those "who would win" arguments that people have between Star Trek technology versus Star Wars. The real objective seems to be to show off one's ability to creatively avoid being pinned down by argument from scientific knowledge while affecting that one's own claims are grounded in it.
  - Reubend 3y ago
    I'm not sure if you're directing that at me, or the parent comment. But I'm not a fringe theorist, and I don't believe that aliens have been crashing into Earth either. I find the parent comment's argument very unconvincing. It makes assumptions which don't seem reasonable in the context of the subject matter at hand. If aliens did exist, they could be much more numerous than humans. Their spacecraft could be more dangerous than airplanes to operate. Their method of travel could perhaps result in collisions with Earth even if it wasn't their intended destination. My overall point is that we should minimize the assumptions we make here. There's no point in assuming various things and then proposing arguments based on those predicates.
- Reubend 3y ago
  Sure, what's preposterous about that? We can't assume that getting "help" is trivial just due to the volume of travel. Commercial airplanes can't rescue each other, just as an example. I don't believe that aliens are making contact with Earth. But I don't find your argument against that possibility convincing either. In my mind, a much better argument would simply be that with 7 billion people on this planet, the likelihood of alien crashes staying secret seems miniscule. We would have solid conclusive evidence already if it had happened multiple times, like alledged.