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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

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.
      - lagrange77 3y ago
        While i have no objections to the discrete drive, a conspiracy of the world's militaries seems a little far-fetched to me.
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.

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.
    - lagrange77 3y ago
      While i have no objections to the discrete drive, a conspiracy of the world's militaries seems a little far-fetched to me.

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.