UFOs

[Sir T]

Comes partially from the old idea that there is only one path of development a civilization can take, which, naturally, the Europeans were further along than anyone else. Its very possible that some extraterrestrial civilizations gave up on the Horrid polluting technologies and went "back" to an agricultural or even hunter gathering base as just being a better quality of life.

[Rendakor]

First of all, I wonder how come a civilization capable of building interstellar craft can't build them well enough to avoid crashing so often?

The simple answer is that the first few you build are almost inevitably going to crash.

[schild]

I'm glad you responded to that, it's a weird comment. Do you think our best pilots could take cutting edge crafts into an environment they've never been and like, perform flawlessly? You don't know if there's air out there.

[Khaldun]

You'd think also if you were building cheap drones via some kind of automatic assembly and they had self-piloting instructions, if that's the scenario, some are gonna crash. I mean, even birds fuck up now and again after hundreds of thousands of years of flight.

[Typhon]

Drones were my immediate answer to, "why they not talk to us?!"  Maybe a (now-dead?) civilization created drones that self-replicate and the core instruction set is to explore and report back.  And, "learn language" and "conduct diplomacy" aren't in the instruction set.

It's not like any of our Mars probe can talk to Martians.

[Trippy]

Perseverance can, in fact, "talk" to Martians.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/markings/



Edit: and Pioneers and Voyagers, of course, famously have their plaques and records

[Rendakor]

I mean, even birds fuck up now and again after hundreds of thousands of years of flight.

Look at this guy, still believing birds are real!

[Kail]

I always find this stuff really frustrating, because every time stuff like this happens, a huge chunk of people immediately jump to aliens with no proof and it never goes anywhere.  Stars fluctuating in brightness, must be aliens.  Oumuamua, must be aliens.  Unexplained videos, must be aliens.  But a year down the line, the answer is always either "we don't know and we have learned nothing" or "not aliens".  Not once have we actually been able to conclusively say "yep, that is definitely aliens, and here's what we've learned about them."  Even if this Air Force stuff is legit, even if it happens fifty more times, we STILL won't know if it's aliens, because it's just blurry dots being blurry dots.  We've had blurry dots for decades, I am already well convinced of the existence of blurry dots.

Like, can you imagine what would happen if just one of those videos had a single clear frame of detailed close-up information showing actual proof of alien life?  The titanic amount of scrutiny it would get, the breakthroughs in astronomy and physics that we'd be looking at if we had one undisputed picture of an actual alien spacecraft?  What it looked like, what it was shaped like, what it's surface was made of, does it have control surfaces or exhaust ports or a door or landing gear, are there external markings or lights, are there windows to the inside, can we actually see the occupants...  but instead we get Youtube videos of vague blobs narrated to the tune of  "ooh, look, we don't knooooooow what it iiiiiiiis, maybe it's aaaaaaaaaliens, isn't that spooooooooky?!"

I guess I've just been interested in aliens for a long time, and I've been looking at pictures of blurry Lights in the Sky for actual decades at this point, and they don't really do it for me any more.  It would be nice for SOMETHING to happen, just once, for there to be SOME kind of progress since I first picked up "World of the Unknown: UFOs" in third grade.  Just one step, one fact, one photo, anything.

[MahrinSkel]

Jesus christ, somebody comes up with a new Korean/Czech/Argentine fusion bulgagi tapas meat roll and I've got 20 megapixel food porn images all over my FB feed even though I'm not a "foodie", but we haven't got an unambiguous image of an alien, or bigfoot? Yeah, at some point, absence of evidence actually is evidence of absence.

--Dave

[Trippy]

Ooh Argentina-style live fire grilled Bulgogi (vs gas or electric grills) sounds super tasty. I want some of that

[Tebonas]

Yeah, same as with Nessie and Bigfoot. Modern Technology removes any Aura of mysticism and makes these things easy to disprove. There is no chance somebody wouldn't already have shot a selfy about his/her Alien Abduction and the internet would be in the middle of an Anal Probe challenge 20 minutes after an UFO had landed.

[Sky]

SURELY THE HILL FOLKS CANNOT BE WRONG ABOUT THIS

OR BILL GATES

[Khaldun]

I've been reading the book by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer, on Oumuamua. I think he does make a fair point that many of his colleagues are quick to reduce the range of plausible or possible hypotheses about some observations in ways that seem unscientific. If you take the case of Oumuamua, whatever it was, we didn't see it in time, with all the observational capabilities we have, to get a good look at it regardless. On some level, that's to be expected: the solar system, let alone the immediate galactic neighborhood we're in, is vast and even if we funded vastly more astronomical capacity than we have now, we might miss an object with Oumuamua's properties because of its nature--whatever it was, it was unusual in relation to things we have seen in the time we've been capable of seeing them. And at least one thing that's fair to consider is that sapient designers of a probe who didn't want to be detected might design a probe that's hard to see, not because of any exotic technological properties but simply because of how it enters and exits a solar system. Or it might not be intentional: maybe any probe that you fire off from a very long distance at solar systems in your immediate neighborhood (within 10 LY, say) is going to behave like Oumuamua did--coming in from an extra-solar vector straight at the sun and then zooming off very quickly at a sharp angle. Or maybe it's just a weird rocky body expelled out from its solar system of origin due to a violent collision event and just happening to intersect our solar system.

I think with Bigfoot or Nessie etc., it's completely right to say: if these things were real, we'd have absolutely solid evidence by now. Every once in a while, we still find new species of mammals or fish in environments that are extremely difficult for human beings to traverse: dense flooded rainforest, deep ocean, etc. But the Pacific Northwest, even with some areas of wilderness, is relatively densely inhabited and regularly seen, and Bigfoot is, by all accounts, big. If it's there, it would have been concretely seen and clearly filmed by now.

But with UFOs, well, first off, take some of the explanations for some recorded incidents--say, the balloon explanation. In a sense, the same expectation applies to those explanations as to anything else. If that's what it is, then the Air Force has all sorts of motivations to gather evidence for that explanation and definitively confirm it. Anything that's a reasonable explanation should be highly motivating for an organization that has to care about pilot safety and extremely expensive military assets--if what pilots are seeing and recording is in any sense a physical object, you have to care about it just as a possible danger to operations (and as a distraction to pilots). We didn't fuck around when dumbasses started shining laser pointers into cockpits on planes in the air.

Now if this is some kind of human technology, even if it's just optical foolery that some countr(ies) is messing around with, possibly to confuse enemy pilots in future conflicts, ok, there are reasons why the US military or government wouldn't confirm that even if they were quite certain that this is what it was. That's part of the problem here too: official secrecy is real, and some lines of explanation might require both that the cause of whatever people are seeing is trying to keep from being clearly seen or studied and/or that the people who are seeing and recording have decided not to share all their data or explanations. That doesn't apply to most other "mysterious" things.

Yes, that's a line of thinking that quickly leads to being able to argue that anything at all might be real. Famously it pops up in Christian theology--that God tests human faith by purposefully putting evidence out there that makes it seem like he's not real and the job of the faithful is to see through the trick. So yes, you can very quickly descend into madness and stupidity by convincing yourself that something's real, or that something GOT to have a particular explanation, and then fitting everything to it accordingly. But I think there's at least reason in this case to say, "Maybe there's something in all this that we don't understand or haven't yet seen properly".

For years, pilots also told scientists that there were electrical discharges from cloud systems that were different than lightning and that some of them went upward, and that was regarded as fanciful by most (despite some models going back to the 1920s suggesting upper-atmospheric discharges were possible) until we started getting pictures of sprites, blue jets and ELVES in the 1990s. There are real things in this world that are hard to photograph or verify because of what they are, where they are, or how they move or behave--or because people involved try to make it hard for them to be photographed. Think of all the things that we're all sure are happening or have happened between people because of a wealth of other kinds of evidence even if we have no images at all of them--torture, military operations, domestic abuse, petty or everyday crimes, etc.

[Kail]

I've been reading the book by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer, on Oumuamua. I think he does make a fair point that many of his colleagues are quick to reduce the range of plausible or possible hypotheses about some observations in ways that seem unscientific.

The problem is that you can tack aliens on to any theory you want, and it just pointlessly complicates the hypothesis unless you have actual proof that there's people in there, which we don't.  You could make the argument that he's not saying it's DEFINITELY aliens, but then so what?  Where does that get us?  He'll never be able to prove it either way and it gives us precisely zero useful information about who the aliens are or what they're like.  It's an un-falsifiable dead end.  The mainstream scientific discussion about it has led to theories about hydrogen ice and the composition of deep interstellar space, while the theories claiming it's an alien craft have just been "wouldn't it be cool if it were aliens or something?  Maybe they exist" the end.

I don't need to be convinced that there's phenomena we don't understand.  I DO need to be convinced of the explanation.

Which is the main problem for like 99% of paranormal research, in my opinion.  It's not hard to look for weird stuff that doesn't make much sense, but you don't get to stop there and declare that you've figured it out and the answer is aliens because, well, what else could it be?  There's a million things that are possible, telling me that something is a mystery or an unidentified flying object (in the literal sense) is just step one, you can't just jump from there to "aliens" with no proof.  I don't need convincing that there's stuff I don't understand in the world, I don't understand a lot, I need convincing that it's aliens.

The Ancient Aliens guys infuriated me because they were always doing this.  They outright refused to believe in the existence of gods, just on philosophical grounds as far as I can tell.  Then they proceed to show how ancient people couldn't possibly (in their view, disclaimer, etc.) have built some big monument or whatever, and infer that therefore it must have been aliens.  But why not just say gods did it?  There's the exact same proof for either aliens or gods, both of them are basically distant beings with whatever powers or limitations the author wants to attribute to them and they are allegedly so far beyond us that their motives are inscrutable.  Just like with gods, you could use aliens to explain away any event, past, present, or future, if you wanted to, because nobody can go "hey, aliens wouldn't/can't do that," the concept is so vague and undefined that it includes everything.  Could Oumuamua have been aliens?  Sure, could have.  Could aliens have made the pyramids?  Sure, could have.  Could those blips on the air force tapes have been aliens?  Sure, could have.  Could aliens have inspired the bible?  Sure, could have.  Who knows.  Can we prove any of that is true?  No.  So why do we have to do this song and dance every single time something unknown pops up?  What's the point of reminding everyone that, hey, maybe THIS TIME it's aliens before we have anything like proof or evidence?

[Khaldun]

The Ancient Aliens guys were full-stop racists. You don't have to go any farther than that: they flatly disbelieved that non-Western people were capable of building pyramids, making giants in the sand, what have you. And of course it's stupid even as an "aliens did it"--wait, aliens came all this way and the only fucking thing they do is make stone pyramids and giants in the desert? Fuck those guys. That's subpar "God is fucking with you by making shit that makes you doubt him unless you have the right esoteric signs to understand" stuff even at that level. Like, put some shit in your bullshit stuff that only aliens with post-industrial technology could make, space cunts.

Oumuamua? I dunno. I mean, maybe sending probes to other solar systems is crude shit on some level. We've sent some little robots beyond the solar system with little plates on them that we utterly, laughably, think would be coherent to aliens. Maybe the best some other group of fumbling assholes can do is send cigar-shaped rocks to travel over millions of years, take some pictures and then send signals home across 10-50 LYs to civilizations that might not even be there any longer. There's nothing ridiculous about it. Oumuamua at least had some weird properties that need *some* kind of explanation, as opposed to "who built these stone pyramids using technologies that human beings had at the time in social contexts that we understand perfectly well and have plenty of evidence about?"

[Goumindong]

And at least one thing that's fair to consider is that sapient designers of a probe who didn't want to be detected might design a probe that's hard to see, not because of any exotic technological properties but simply because of how it enters and exits a solar system. Or it might not be intentional: maybe any probe that you fire off from a very long distance at solar systems in your immediate neighborhood (within 10 LY, say) is going to behave like Oumuamua did--coming in from an extra-solar vector straight at the sun and then zooming off very quickly at a sharp angle

This is indeed the case at least for us. The solar systems primary axis is offset from the rest of the milky way. So any extra solar probe from another solar system will enter at a high angle when we're looking for things primarily from our own OORT could since there are a lot more dangerous things there to us.

But with UFOs, well, first off, take some of the explanations for some recorded incidents--say, the balloon explanation. In a sense, the same expectation applies to those explanations as to anything else. If that's what it is, then the Air Force has all sorts of motivations to gather evidence for that explanation and definitively confirm it. Anything that's a reasonable explanation should be highly motivating for an organization that has to care about pilot safety and extremely expensive military assets--if what pilots are seeing and recording is in any sense a physical object, you have to care about it just as a possible danger to operations (and as a distraction to pilots). We didn't fuck around when dumbasses started shining laser pointers into cockpits on planes in the air.

They do. But there is only so much you can do and eventually you will come back with some "unidentified things" and sometimes you will come up with "unidentified" because the researchers are preventing from knowing for very legitimate reasons (for instance the people who do know what it is cannot tell the researchers since this is a data breach, and there are at least three reasonable explanations that fit that type of classification barrier for why things would be UAP even if we knew)

So what you have is a form of survivorship bias.

As an example of this consider WWII. Planes came back from sorties and we looked at the damage and determined where to armor them.

Planes that came back looked like this: where red indicates damage from an enemy round



With the "aliens" explanation what we are doing is looking at that diagram and saying "well we should armor all the places where the bullet holes are since these obviously get hit more" and this is, of course, entirely backwards. Those are the places where it doesn't matter if you get hit. Because the distribution of damage is actually pretty uniform but planes that get struck elsewhere don't return to get counted into your sample.

Our survivorship bias is "things that get identified don't show up in our UAP sample". Only the things for which there will never be enough evidence to positively identify show up in our sample because if we had recorded enough evidence we would have identified it.

As to how this kind of thing can happen that is also very easily explained.

Imagine for a second a cancer test. There are two types of error in a cancer test. The probability that it misses the cancer that is there and the probability that it says cancer is there when there isn't actually cancer. The final probability that you have cancer depends both on the error rates of the test but also on the probability that any particular person has cancer. If the probability of being cancer free is 99%. And the test has a 1% false negative rate with a 1% false positive rate(a pretty good test!). Then for 1% of people 99% of them pop positive. And for 99% of people 1% of them pop positive. So for 100% of people 1.98% of them pop positive... so of the people who pop positive half of them don't have cancer even if we're really good at identifying whether or not people have cancer.

Even with a good identification rate there are still going to be a LOT of things that that fail to get identified that are mundane. There are probably thousands of pilots in the air at any one time and the majority of radar and other surveillance operated is by the military(hence why the military sees more things). And so even if we can never identify an alien (which seems... unlikely) the probability that a UAP is an alien is still pretty close to zero. Now to be fair, we don't know the ratio of "just other phenomena" to "aliens" but i am pretty confident that its pretty close to 100% "just other phenomena" because i can do basic physics and i know how hard it would be to get to this planet. And i am pretty confident, in the way i am pretty confident that the sky is currently blue as i look upon it outside my window as i type this, and that the sun will come up in the east tomorrow morning, that there are zero aliens on earth.

[Khaldun]

It's a good observation but.

First off, the plane-damage-where should we armor point is subject to two further refinements (abstractly): 1) maybe you literally can't armor the plane where it doesn't commonly survive a hit without the plane failing its basic aerodynamics; 2) maybe the no-hit portions are a product of being armored already/difficult to hit. Meaning this isn't just "you always spot your keys under the lights and wouldn't find them otherwise". Maybe there is no class of explicable objects like the inexplicable ones that we don't even pay attention to; maybe long-tail events in the whole distribution are important despite being unusual. (Maybe being unusual is what makes them important.)

There are many events which are highly, highly unusual in cosmology and physics where being unusual does not rob them of being extremely important. Neutrino collisions would be "survivorship bias" if we didn't have a model already prior to making detection mechanisms that explains why they should be highly, highly unusual except under specific conditions.

There's a huge excluded middle between "it's just balloons" and "it's aliens", and the leap to "it's aliens" is indicative of a failure to think about that middle systematically.

[MahrinSkel]

But...aliens, man. How cool would that be?

--Dave

[Sky]

Thinking of this thread when I read this yesterday: https://imgur.com/gallery/y8Syvye

Fermi paradox stuff

[Khaldun]

Yeah, this is part of the argument summarized in Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth--that maybe being a small rocky planet with a large rocky moon that was a result of a collision event in the early evolution of a solar system is necessary for having a biosphere. I think it's a leap from that to "maybe that's super rare" is a much bigger one, because exo-planet research at the moment can't really see other solar systems at that level of detail unless the rocky planet it's seeing is in an orbit really close to its parent star. Much as guessing that complex life requires an environment that in most respects closely reproduces Earth's in terms of stability, biochemistry, etc.: that feels like a soft form of geocentrism, of assuming that everything is either like us or it doesn't exist.

[01101010]

So what happens when we eventually find some type of lifeform somewhere in our solar system (my vote is one of the ice moons around Jupiter, do UFO reports fly off the charts after that discovery and verification?

[Khaldun]

I kind of think the opposite: folks will at least for a short time focus intensely on the specificity of that discovery. As with all things, most people will stop paying attention after that--it's not like you hear people still marvelling over Io's volcanos or Titan's surface etc. But moving astrobiology from the hypothetical column to a data-driving science will right away pay some kind of dividend in terms of reorienting the paradigm.

[Khaldun]

The balloon thing, by the way, is expressly addressed in the published report, and one episode is definitively reclassified as a balloon. The report seems moderately careful to me? But YMMV. It's a pretty small class of the UAPs that end up "we really have no idea but it seems like a real physical object that did some shit we can't explain but that we have high confidence actually happened."

[schild]

So what happens when we eventually find some type of lifeform somewhere in our solar system (my vote is one of the ice moons around Jupiter, do UFO reports fly off the charts after that discovery and verification?

the first million is the hardest

[Sky]

Why aren't we talking about the crab people tho

[Count Nerfedalot]

Yeah, this is part of the argument summarized in Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth--that maybe being a small rocky planet with a large rocky moon that was a result of a collision event in the early evolution of a solar system is necessary for having a biosphere. I think it's a leap from that to "maybe that's super rare" is a much bigger one, because exo-planet research at the moment can't really see other solar systems at that level of detail unless the rocky planet it's seeing is in an orbit really close to its parent star. Much as guessing that complex life requires an environment that in most respects closely reproduces Earth's in terms of stability, biochemistry, etc.: that feels like a soft form of geocentrism, of assuming that everything is either like us or it doesn't exist.

I dunno, while the imgur guy dealt with all sorts of things that almost inevitably end up being based on geocentric assumptions, I thought he managed to skirt a lot of that better than most. The head-on impact by a large outer system planetoid thing pretty much has to be a rarity by it's statistical (im)probability. And he didn't even get into how biologically important the large moon combined with a large amount of water and resulting oceans with tides are to life. Probably because that does step over the line into geocentrism. But still, it's pretty hard to imagine other mechanisms for enabling a planetary biosphere to collectively breathe, circulate nutrients and flush wastes out, maybe wind?

My biggest complaint is his repeated claims that "this happened" when "this" is not at all scientific consensus (yet?) and even if it is may well be wrong. He did kind of weasel/prevaricate around the idea that we still just don't know in the intro and conclusion, but all the stuff in the middle was presented as established fact. Even if he set it up as a hypothetical thought experiment (if so, I missed that) it's really dangerous to not include disclaimers that this is speculation on almost every single statement, or risk some ignorant journo misquoting him out of context and the misquote being all that the general public remembers.

[Sir T]

Hmm. While people seem to be tiptoeing around the Obvious assumption in this, from my perspective it does not actually preclude life being elsewhere. Just becasue "the Great Maker" set up something extraordinary to happen on this piece of rock, it does not preclude it making something different but equally extraordinary happening somewhere else.

It really will be the "Gosh I didn't think of that but it seems so obvious now" effect if and when we do run into something else, and try to have sex with it.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, this is part of the argument summarized in Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth--that maybe being a small rocky planet with a large rocky moon that was a result of a collision event in the early evolution of a solar system is necessary for having a biosphere. I think it's a leap from that to "maybe that's super rare" is a much bigger one, because exo-planet research at the moment can't really see other solar systems at that level of detail unless the rocky planet it's seeing is in an orbit really close to its parent star. Much as guessing that complex life requires an environment that in most respects closely reproduces Earth's in terms of stability, biochemistry, etc.: that feels like a soft form of geocentrism, of assuming that everything is either like us or it doesn't exist.

I dunno, while the imgur guy dealt with all sorts of things that almost inevitably end up being based on geocentric assumptions, I thought he managed to skirt a lot of that better than most. The head-on impact by a large outer system planetoid thing pretty much has to be a rarity by it's statistical (im)probability. And he didn't even get into how biologically important the large moon combined with a large amount of water and resulting oceans with tides are to life. Probably because that does step over the line into geocentrism. But still, it's pretty hard to imagine other mechanisms for enabling a planetary biosphere to collectively breathe, circulate nutrients and flush wastes out, maybe wind?

My biggest complaint is his repeated claims that "this happened" when "this" is not at all scientific consensus (yet?) and even if it is may well be wrong. He did kind of weasel/prevaricate around the idea that we still just don't know in the intro and conclusion, but all the stuff in the middle was presented as established fact. Even if he set it up as a hypothetical thought experiment (if so, I missed that) it's really dangerous to not include disclaimers that this is speculation on almost every single statement, or risk some ignorant journo misquoting him out of context and the misquote being all that the general public remembers.

There's a dude who used to fucking send me out of my chair in annoyance who wrote for Gizmodo who specialized in reading scientific papers that were doing some kind of totally hypothetical model-building or speculative argument from evidence acknowledged as thin or fragmented who would always be like "CONFIRMED: EUROPA IS TEEMING WITH INTELLIGENT ICE LEECHES" and you wouldn't find out until the last paragraph that he was misquoting/misinterpreting/misstating a published paper's basic claims and methods. Dvorsky or something like that. I don't mind speculation; I do mind when people consciously lose track of what they're doing as speculation from some initial premise.

[Count Nerfedalot]

That pretty much describes everything coming out of the Cosmology department these days.

[Khaldun]

Actually the cosmologists I know are pretty careful to say WARNING: UNPROVABLE SPECULATION in beginning, middle and end. It's just that people strip off the warnings when they pass it along.

[Endie]

Coming back after a long break it's strange to find this thread on the most cynical, jaded, frankly over-sceptical forums I've ever experienced where a surprising chunk of posters are so openly keen to believe in something that's at least a wee bit of a stretch.

"Yes well you see we keep seeing them because it must be hard for them to learn to fly in our strange, alien atmosphere." Mate we're lucky if this is in the first hundred thousand rocky worlds with an atmosphere they've taken a look at. You know this.

"There really haven't been any major scientific advances since computers and the internet so who says that they're all that advanced compared to us" yes well that's pretty arguable (c.f. medical sciences) but I dunno I think that between now and making autonomous space scouts capable of navigating interstellar distances then converting to highly capable atmospheric craft to explore their destinations I think we might come up with one or two other neat tricks that would baffle 21st century mankind. Etc.

Edit: reading the Coronavirus thread from page one has been genuinely gripping stuff, however. Some people were fairly consistently nailing it from a surprisingly early point. Later edit: Lawl though some people were not.

[Teleku]

I think the main thing is that we are seeing a lot of videos and even governments openly admitting they are seeing something they can't explain, with video.  That alone puts this well beyond big foot or loch ness monster shit.  Running with that, we have to take into consideration we are seeing real life shit we can't explain, so are then having fun discussing what that might actually mean.  I think we are all cynical enough to still keep heavy doubts about if any of this is true or not, but it's got more real world traction from legitimate sources at this point than anything else, so we can have fun debating the hypotheticals.

Also, since your back, we also have a Discord server a lot of us have started posting/chatting on way more than is healthy for the last few years.  If your interested, you can join that cluster fuck also.

[Endie]

I think the main thing is that we are seeing a lot of videos and even governments openly admitting they are seeing something they can't explain, with video.  That alone puts this well beyond big foot or loch ness monster shit.  Running with that, we have to take into consideration we are seeing real life shit we can't explain, so are then having fun discussing what that might actually mean.  I think we are all cynical enough to still keep heavy doubts about if any of this is true or not, but it's got more real world traction from legitimate sources at this point than anything else, so we can have fun debating the hypotheticals.

Also, since your back, we also have a Discord server a lot of us have started posting/chatting on way more than is healthy for the last few years.  If your interested, you can join that cluster fuck also.

Ace. I love me another discord tab. All the fewer reasons to work at any given time.