5 ms·

It's just so unfathomably unlikely that aliens would (a) be able to and (b) actually care sufficiently to visit our planet. Faster-than-light travel breaks all

by muglug 3y ago

It's just so unfathomably unlikely that aliens would (a) be able to and (b) actually care sufficiently to visit our planet. Faster-than-light travel breaks all our current long-established & well-tested physics. But sure, Jan, some aliens really did stick a probe up your butt.

lagrange77 3y ago
And it's hilariously more unlikely, that a civilisation that accomplishes a) and b), suddenly experiences a warp piston seizure in earth orbit, crashes and gets captured by some apes.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  I've long thought it would be hilarious if the only evidence we had of alien life was 8 seconds of panicked alien screaming/swearing over radio, a crater in Minnesota, and some small fragments of strange alloys.
  - junon 3y ago
    Seth MacFarlane picked up on the absurdity of this long ago with Roger, the bisexual alien from American Dad. Somewhere in the series, we find out Roger long since thought he was an "important" alien sent to earth for an important purpose. He then finds out he is really just a crash test dummy replacement.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  All three points are legitimate. Embarrassing to have that level of tech and then "his tiny boat sparked as he turned to graze our city..."
  - lagrange77 3y ago
    I like your blog!
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      You remind me that I have been ignoring it for too long.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    There's other ways to conceptualize it however. Assume for a minute NHI craft have crashed, what plausible alternative hypotheses can explain that against our objection of: If they are so advanced, and bother to come all the way here, then they just crash and discard it? ? Here's a few possibilities: - They are so advanced. Coming here is as easy for them, as riding a cheap bicycle to the store is for us. We discard our bicycles (just take a look at Shanghai, for instance). They break or get beat up, we don't stress it (I'm not speaking to the morality of that -- personally, I feel, "Those poor little abandoned bicycles!") -- and maybe they have a similar relationship with their crafts. And maybe even with their occupants, which may simply be pilots that are just avatar bodies, or drones. - They're not that advanced and it's easy for them to come here (obviously via some means or pathway which is hard for most of us currently Earthbound humans to imagine right now!) and they fuck things up. But, their fuckups are cheap. Simple. - They are actually here all the time, in great numbers. Let's say 40,000 per second, zipping around Earth, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. And let's say, in a good year, the government detects and picks up 16 - 20 crashed objects. Let's generously say there's 2x that that actually crash. So they have odds of crashing of around 1 in 30 billion trips. Our best air travel safety is 1 in 11 million flights. So they are around 1000 times safer than commercial air travel, at significantly (to our minds) higher demands. So that reframes their crashing from this incredible thing that splinters the fantasy of their apparently advanced natures, and paints it instead as, a pretty low defect rate indicative of a level of capability orders of magnitude beyond ourselves. In other words, not all that contradictory as we, in our own human limitations, first would think! Hahaha! :)
    - lagrange77 3y ago
      > - They are actually here all the time, in great numbers. While this would explain the advancement/crash conflict, wouldn't the vast number of them also likely cause other artefacts, besides crashes? Even in near space, which we observe closely. Also: do you imagine a cloaking tech or dimension travelling for that scenario?
      - keepamovin 3y ago
        I think there's a number of aspects to that, including cloaking, potentially dimension traveling, and other artefacts such as huge numbers of tracks on advanced radar. Definitely they are cloaked, or invisible. Besides the support of corroboration with our hypothesis explaining crashes, this is also supported by inconsistent visual confirmation for objects seen on radar, or FLIR. Sometimes people can see these radar/FLIR tracks with their eyes, sometimes not. People have also reported seeing them fade out, or instantly disappear. Some amount of this invisibility could be due to teleporting, going through subspace, going to another dimension, or something else we don't really understand so well, rather than just optical camouflage. Other artefacts are an interesting aspect, too. In such large numbers, we'd expect them to be picked up very frequently on advanced radars used by Earth's militaries. However, militaries have demonstrated a clear policy of withholding information that arises from these classified sensor platforms in order to protect the secrecy of their capabilities. In other words, they've basically admitted to the public that even if they were detecting them with advanced radar in large numbers, they wouldn't be telling us. If we imagine them moving by teleporting discretely from point to point (with say a maximum jump distance of a few tens of km) rather than moving continuously, it could explain many things about both their anomalous "non interacting, transmedia, high speed, maneuverability", and also that, if they were so crowded, their 'traffic lanes' would also be sparse in motion as they skip large distance by moving discretely.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Is it? Isn't this like saying "any civilization that is able to launch rockets into space and land someone on their planet's Moon would be hilariously unlikely to crash-land anything on Mars, or be suffering basic takeoff failures for rockets decades later". Yet that is what happens to humanity. If an alien race did develop FTL travel then it makes sense that they'd make a beeline for the most interesting things in their local vicinity, and it makes sense that the most interesting thing would be a planet with intelligent life on it. So we'd expect a visit from nearby aliens soon after they invent FTL. But that means they'd be doing so when the tech is new and the kinks are still being worked out - they'd be doing the equivalent of voyages across the Atlantic in the 1600s. You'd expect a fairly high accident rate.
  - lagrange77 3y ago
    > they'd be doing the equivalent of voyages across the Atlantic in the 1600s. You'd expect a fairly high accident rate. Yeah, but if you take the vast distances they would have to travel into account, it would be like your 1600s ship sinking on the last nanometer right at the destination harbour wall.
    - mike_hearn 3y ago
      Ships do tend to get shipwrecked near the coast.
api 3y ago
We have no parameters for any of the terms in any model of this, so we have no idea how likely or unlikely it is.
- permo-w 3y ago
  exactly. GP's comment is wild speculation purporting to be fact. would be nice if they could provide some justification
  - nurettin 3y ago
    We can scan the known universe, mapping the positions of galaxies and filaments composed of those galaxies in the grander scale. We can detect blackhole collisions, but we haven't seen an iota of evidence for FLT. So there is pretty strong evidence FLT doesn't exist and is not attainable. Even if it is, it is completely justified to think that an intelligence so advanced would have no motivation to probe Jan.
    - api 3y ago
      You don’t need FLT to go to the stars. You just need very long life spans or the ability to hibernate easily. OR you need crazy physicists nightmare engines like antimatter rockets. One or the other.
      - nurettin 3y ago
        Let's entertain the idea of wanting to send a few members of your very long timespan species to neighbouring star systems however suicidal it sounds. You still need a capsule that can shield you from interstellar space dust and radiation for centuries or eons. It is pretty likely you will get hit.
yungporko 3y ago
i really don't understand the "aliens would be more advanced than us so they wouldn't care about us at all" line of thinking. we study less advanced animals and plants from this planet extensively and how "advanced" any of it is just isn't a factor. if we had the opportunity to study even primitive alien life, it would unequivocally be the most interesting and profound moment in the entire history of our species.
- muglug 3y ago
  > we study less advanced animals and plants from this planet extensively Yes, but we generally don't have to go to a lot of trouble to find specimens.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    That's anthropocentrism limited thinking. For us, coming all the way here would be "a lot of trouble". We can't assume it's the same for them, however.
  - yungporko 3y ago
    yes we do? it's a load of trouble to get deep into rainforest, desert, ocean, mountains, artic, antarctic habitats to study the flora and fauna there.
    - throwitaway1123 3y ago
      Exactly. There are entomologists that travel around the world to study bugs.
keepamovin 3y ago
"An unknown object behaving in ways that defies our understanding doesn't immediately suggest unknown physics for me. It does, however, suggest clever engineering, at the very least" - Kevin Knuth "I'm also skeptical of scientists who assume an anomalous observation must be an error, because we know our physics. It's surprising to me because we don't know our physics: we don't have a quantum theory of gravity. And quantum theory makes a difference." - Kevin Knuth "Engineering is the act of using physics to find workarounds to problems and unfamiliar engineering can look a whole lot like anomalous physics." - Kevin Knuth Unfathomably unlikely to be able to? But we don't know what an alien species would be capable of? So preemptively limiting their capabilities only to the sphere of what we currently know, or a little beyond that, seems like it would not be a faithful model of alien capabilities. Unfathomably unlikely actually care sufficiently to visit? I think there's two parts to this: if we assume it is easy; and if we assume it is hard. If it's easy for them to visit here, we don't need the "care" factor in that product to be so important. It's easy enough, then they don't have to particularly care about it very much to be here. But if it's hard for them to be here, I agree that's a tricky question. How do you discern intent without interrogating an alien or reading their mind? Hahaha! :) Kevin Knuth lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlYwktOj75A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlYwktOj75A
- Izkata 3y ago
  > "An unknown object behaving in ways that defies our understanding doesn't immediately suggest unknown physics for me. It does, however, suggest clever engineering, at the very least" - Kevin Knuth Don't we even already have an example of this one? I remember triangle-shaped UFOs with either 3 or 5 lights being a thing for a while, then years later we find out about the B-2 bomber, which looks like that when it's landing.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Yes! But clever engineering doesn't only mean, engineered by humans from Earth, haha! :) Definitely there are secret programs that have cool tech built with clever engineering from humans from Earth. Some of this engineering may be even beyond conventionally accepted propulsion, as discussed in this American Alchemy video by Jesse Michels where he talks about the B-2 potentially using the Biefield-Brown effect, or ionic lift to reduce drag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTEWLSTyUic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTEWLSTyUic JM wants to suggest that most UFOs could be 'prosaic' secret program technology. Certainly some are, and USAF CI has used fake UFO stories to protect those secrets in the past. But I think the idea that all or even most are human tech, or that humans have tech that can replicate the 'anomalous observables' (5000G maneuvers, no flight control surface, no propulsion, no exhaust, super speed, transmedium), is very unlikely. Some reasons: - the UFO disinfo narratives heavily bias towards this suggestion, and extend to various colors of what is most likely fantasy: a secret space program that's gone interstellar, a breakaway civilization that lives on Mars, Space Nazis, etc...The point is, if you're trying to control perception so much, you're unlikely to have any results in reality (as much as you may want them!) - if we had this tech why wouldn't we have deployed to dominate economically or geopolitically? - historical UFO sightings (1800s) predate our technological civilization. - reliable reports of UFOs in the 30s - 50s that have the same anomalous flight, but predate modern aerospace, materials and electrical sciences. - if any of what is identified as supposed human-made human-operated anomalous craft are actually genuine ET/NHI spaceships, these could be from civilizations 1000s to millions of years advanced of us. It's unreasonable to think we could catch up with such lofty achievements in just 100 years, clever as we may be! Haha :) - the argument the government doesn't tell us because it's our own secret program is weaker than the government doesn't tell us because we have no secret programs that can compare to this. Ass covering and relative incompetence are more likely than anomalous uber tech that we sly-brag about but haven't really used.

by muglug 3y ago

lagrange77 3y ago

And it's hilariously more unlikely, that a civilisation that accomplishes a) and b), suddenly experiences a warp piston seizure in earth orbit, crashes and gets captured by some apes.

saalweachter 3y ago
I've long thought it would be hilarious if the only evidence we had of alien life was 8 seconds of panicked alien screaming/swearing over radio, a crater in Minnesota, and some small fragments of strange alloys.
- junon 3y ago
  Seth MacFarlane picked up on the absurdity of this long ago with Roger, the bisexual alien from American Dad. Somewhere in the series, we find out Roger long since thought he was an "important" alien sent to earth for an important purpose. He then finds out he is really just a crash test dummy replacement.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
All three points are legitimate. Embarrassing to have that level of tech and then "his tiny boat sparked as he turned to graze our city..."
- lagrange77 3y ago
  I like your blog!
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    You remind me that I have been ignoring it for too long.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  There's other ways to conceptualize it however. Assume for a minute NHI craft have crashed, what plausible alternative hypotheses can explain that against our objection of: If they are so advanced, and bother to come all the way here, then they just crash and discard it? ? Here's a few possibilities: - They are so advanced. Coming here is as easy for them, as riding a cheap bicycle to the store is for us. We discard our bicycles (just take a look at Shanghai, for instance). They break or get beat up, we don't stress it (I'm not speaking to the morality of that -- personally, I feel, "Those poor little abandoned bicycles!") -- and maybe they have a similar relationship with their crafts. And maybe even with their occupants, which may simply be pilots that are just avatar bodies, or drones. - They're not that advanced and it's easy for them to come here (obviously via some means or pathway which is hard for most of us currently Earthbound humans to imagine right now!) and they fuck things up. But, their fuckups are cheap. Simple. - They are actually here all the time, in great numbers. Let's say 40,000 per second, zipping around Earth, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. And let's say, in a good year, the government detects and picks up 16 - 20 crashed objects. Let's generously say there's 2x that that actually crash. So they have odds of crashing of around 1 in 30 billion trips. Our best air travel safety is 1 in 11 million flights. So they are around 1000 times safer than commercial air travel, at significantly (to our minds) higher demands. So that reframes their crashing from this incredible thing that splinters the fantasy of their apparently advanced natures, and paints it instead as, a pretty low defect rate indicative of a level of capability orders of magnitude beyond ourselves. In other words, not all that contradictory as we, in our own human limitations, first would think! Hahaha! :)
  - lagrange77 3y ago
    > - They are actually here all the time, in great numbers. While this would explain the advancement/crash conflict, wouldn't the vast number of them also likely cause other artefacts, besides crashes? Even in near space, which we observe closely. Also: do you imagine a cloaking tech or dimension travelling for that scenario?
    - keepamovin 3y ago
      I think there's a number of aspects to that, including cloaking, potentially dimension traveling, and other artefacts such as huge numbers of tracks on advanced radar. Definitely they are cloaked, or invisible. Besides the support of corroboration with our hypothesis explaining crashes, this is also supported by inconsistent visual confirmation for objects seen on radar, or FLIR. Sometimes people can see these radar/FLIR tracks with their eyes, sometimes not. People have also reported seeing them fade out, or instantly disappear. Some amount of this invisibility could be due to teleporting, going through subspace, going to another dimension, or something else we don't really understand so well, rather than just optical camouflage. Other artefacts are an interesting aspect, too. In such large numbers, we'd expect them to be picked up very frequently on advanced radars used by Earth's militaries. However, militaries have demonstrated a clear policy of withholding information that arises from these classified sensor platforms in order to protect the secrecy of their capabilities. In other words, they've basically admitted to the public that even if they were detecting them with advanced radar in large numbers, they wouldn't be telling us. If we imagine them moving by teleporting discretely from point to point (with say a maximum jump distance of a few tens of km) rather than moving continuously, it could explain many things about both their anomalous "non interacting, transmedia, high speed, maneuverability", and also that, if they were so crowded, their 'traffic lanes' would also be sparse in motion as they skip large distance by moving discretely.
mike_hearn 3y ago
Is it? Isn't this like saying "any civilization that is able to launch rockets into space and land someone on their planet's Moon would be hilariously unlikely to crash-land anything on Mars, or be suffering basic takeoff failures for rockets decades later". Yet that is what happens to humanity. If an alien race did develop FTL travel then it makes sense that they'd make a beeline for the most interesting things in their local vicinity, and it makes sense that the most interesting thing would be a planet with intelligent life on it. So we'd expect a visit from nearby aliens soon after they invent FTL. But that means they'd be doing so when the tech is new and the kinks are still being worked out - they'd be doing the equivalent of voyages across the Atlantic in the 1600s. You'd expect a fairly high accident rate.
- lagrange77 3y ago
  > they'd be doing the equivalent of voyages across the Atlantic in the 1600s. You'd expect a fairly high accident rate. Yeah, but if you take the vast distances they would have to travel into account, it would be like your 1600s ship sinking on the last nanometer right at the destination harbour wall.
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    Ships do tend to get shipwrecked near the coast.

api 3y ago

We have no parameters for any of the terms in any model of this, so we have no idea how likely or unlikely it is.

permo-w 3y ago
exactly. GP's comment is wild speculation purporting to be fact. would be nice if they could provide some justification
- nurettin 3y ago
  We can scan the known universe, mapping the positions of galaxies and filaments composed of those galaxies in the grander scale. We can detect blackhole collisions, but we haven't seen an iota of evidence for FLT. So there is pretty strong evidence FLT doesn't exist and is not attainable. Even if it is, it is completely justified to think that an intelligence so advanced would have no motivation to probe Jan.
  - api 3y ago
    You don’t need FLT to go to the stars. You just need very long life spans or the ability to hibernate easily. OR you need crazy physicists nightmare engines like antimatter rockets. One or the other.
    - nurettin 3y ago
      Let's entertain the idea of wanting to send a few members of your very long timespan species to neighbouring star systems however suicidal it sounds. You still need a capsule that can shield you from interstellar space dust and radiation for centuries or eons. It is pretty likely you will get hit.

yungporko 3y ago

i really don't understand the "aliens would be more advanced than us so they wouldn't care about us at all" line of thinking. we study less advanced animals and plants from this planet extensively and how "advanced" any of it is just isn't a factor. if we had the opportunity to study even primitive alien life, it would unequivocally be the most interesting and profound moment in the entire history of our species.

muglug 3y ago
> we study less advanced animals and plants from this planet extensively Yes, but we generally don't have to go to a lot of trouble to find specimens.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  That's anthropocentrism limited thinking. For us, coming all the way here would be "a lot of trouble". We can't assume it's the same for them, however.
- yungporko 3y ago
  yes we do? it's a load of trouble to get deep into rainforest, desert, ocean, mountains, artic, antarctic habitats to study the flora and fauna there.
  - throwitaway1123 3y ago
    Exactly. There are entomologists that travel around the world to study bugs.

keepamovin 3y ago

"An unknown object behaving in ways that defies our understanding doesn't immediately suggest unknown physics for me. It does, however, suggest clever engineering, at the very least" - Kevin Knuth "I'm also skeptical of scientists who assume an anomalous observation must be an error, because we know our physics. It's surprising to me because we don't know our physics: we don't have a quantum theory of gravity. And quantum theory makes a difference." - Kevin Knuth "Engineering is the act of using physics to find workarounds to problems and unfamiliar engineering can look a whole lot like anomalous physics." - Kevin Knuth Unfathomably unlikely to be able to? But we don't know what an alien species would be capable of? So preemptively limiting their capabilities only to the sphere of what we currently know, or a little beyond that, seems like it would not be a faithful model of alien capabilities. Unfathomably unlikely actually care sufficiently to visit? I think there's two parts to this: if we assume it is easy; and if we assume it is hard. If it's easy for them to visit here, we don't need the "care" factor in that product to be so important. It's easy enough, then they don't have to particularly care about it very much to be here. But if it's hard for them to be here, I agree that's a tricky question. How do you discern intent without interrogating an alien or reading their mind? Hahaha! :) Kevin Knuth lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlYwktOj75A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlYwktOj75A

Izkata 3y ago
> "An unknown object behaving in ways that defies our understanding doesn't immediately suggest unknown physics for me. It does, however, suggest clever engineering, at the very least" - Kevin Knuth Don't we even already have an example of this one? I remember triangle-shaped UFOs with either 3 or 5 lights being a thing for a while, then years later we find out about the B-2 bomber, which looks like that when it's landing.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Yes! But clever engineering doesn't only mean, engineered by humans from Earth, haha! :) Definitely there are secret programs that have cool tech built with clever engineering from humans from Earth. Some of this engineering may be even beyond conventionally accepted propulsion, as discussed in this American Alchemy video by Jesse Michels where he talks about the B-2 potentially using the Biefield-Brown effect, or ionic lift to reduce drag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTEWLSTyUic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTEWLSTyUic JM wants to suggest that most UFOs could be 'prosaic' secret program technology. Certainly some are, and USAF CI has used fake UFO stories to protect those secrets in the past. But I think the idea that all or even most are human tech, or that humans have tech that can replicate the 'anomalous observables' (5000G maneuvers, no flight control surface, no propulsion, no exhaust, super speed, transmedium), is very unlikely. Some reasons: - the UFO disinfo narratives heavily bias towards this suggestion, and extend to various colors of what is most likely fantasy: a secret space program that's gone interstellar, a breakaway civilization that lives on Mars, Space Nazis, etc...The point is, if you're trying to control perception so much, you're unlikely to have any results in reality (as much as you may want them!) - if we had this tech why wouldn't we have deployed to dominate economically or geopolitically? - historical UFO sightings (1800s) predate our technological civilization. - reliable reports of UFOs in the 30s - 50s that have the same anomalous flight, but predate modern aerospace, materials and electrical sciences. - if any of what is identified as supposed human-made human-operated anomalous craft are actually genuine ET/NHI spaceships, these could be from civilizations 1000s to millions of years advanced of us. It's unreasonable to think we could catch up with such lofty achievements in just 100 years, clever as we may be! Haha :) - the argument the government doesn't tell us because it's our own secret program is weaker than the government doesn't tell us because we have no secret programs that can compare to this. Ass covering and relative incompetence are more likely than anomalous uber tech that we sly-brag about but haven't really used.