All this talk of national security is eerily familiar… They actually did the same after 9/11. I think they are just trying to get more military funding for a war against aliens that never comes, and drum up fear so they can take away even more rights from the people, all in the name of “national security”.
Climate catastrophe is getting harder and harder to negate. Gotta have a way to keep the peasantry in line
Why would they need that? They never needed such a big excuse for more funding before, they kind of just do it anyway regardless of public opinion...
I don't know, perhaps they want to double the budget and they need a better excuse.
"What can be told without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"
Until they back their claims with evidence open to the scientific community and press, that's just smokescreen and diversion. The are more important things to care about right now.
Until the dude making all of these claims presents actual proof I don't believe a word of it. So far all he has is hearsay, he can't identify the people who told him things, the few people who he did identify haven't come forward to my knowledge, and all of the documents he claims to have are top secret and not releasable to the public.
When you're making a claim as big as "aliens are here and the government has their ships and some bodies from them and is also covering it up," you need to provide more evidence than "I know because multiple people have told me but I'm not allowed to say who, also ive never seen them, and I have documents to prove it but you can't see them because the government says so."
Yup. Show me the actual UFO and I'll pay attention.
Also, nearly everyone has at least a 1080p/4K camera on them at all times these days, so why can't anybody seem to produce clear video of one?
Most people don't have phones that can record in infrared and when all they've shown us is FLIR images well that might be a problem with your "everybody has a 4k camera" theory
About the same as I feel about Jesus toast. The proof is dubious, and until I see better, my default opinion is one of skepticism.
Every UFO "sighting" throughout human history has amounted to absolutely nothing, so I have the same expectations here
CIA planning docs show that when they overthrew the Guatemalan president in 1954, they plotted planting "flying saucer" stories to distract the media.
Another declassified study shows the Air Force misled the public in the 1950s about UFOs to conceal the CIA's spy plane testing.
Just something to think about...
Show
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Recent developments have confirmed a huge number of completely unrelated whacked/fascist CT as the flock looks at one possibly real wolf and decides therefore all the wolf hallucinations are real.
What "news"
Since 2015 they keep repeating the same shit in the news about the exact same navy shit with literally every article having the same fucking FLIR image of a tic tac thing but there has literally at no point been any new information for the last 7 fuckdamn years straight. It's been wild watching the same story get news play every few months for 7 ffucking years
So anyway what new information is there? Are there new images? Did they ever reveal literally anything about the supposed recovered materials Luis Elizondo and others claim to have had access to? Or is it more of the same old shit, AGAIN?
Not sure which UFO sightings are you referring to, but UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. It means that something was flying but they couldn't identify what it was, it doesn't mean aliens.
That's a bit pedantic. The term is commonly understood to be aliens, and modern usage is pretty much always aliens. UAP is used instead for the more literal meaning.
It's not really pedantic. If the air force is using the term "UFO", they're referring to the technical definition. Means, flying things without known radar or visual references. The problem is when mass media relays the message, they deliberately muddle the definition because it's good for ratings.
I don't think there's an actual government conspiracy regarding the ufo hearings, but a simple media conspiracy for ratings. I might be wrong, but that's the simplest explanation for what's going on at the moment.
The Air Force will never use the term UFO anymore, because that term has become synonymous with aliens in popular culture. This is why they use UAP. The definition has shifted in the past 50 years.
Its not so much a mass media problem when there's nutjobs testifying under oath that the government has alien corpses. At that point they're just reporting on it.
For the same reasons we would visit them, for cultural exchange or to steal their resources in the case of the US empire.
I appreciate the stab at the US empire, but if I may be serious for a moment: It makes no sense to come here to steal our shit when there's countless stars and planets in the universe. I don't even think it makes the least bit of sense for humans to ever go to Mars and mine minerals there, given the logistics involved. Any alien smart enough to come here is going to be smart enough to realize that going to the pub is way easier and more fun.
The only question you need to ask to determine practicality is, "What is the return on investment?" We don't mine the seas or asteroids because they wouldn't be worth it. However, as soon as the technology becomes cheap enough, you can bet that there will be investors putting money into extracting resources from those locations. The same principle applies to other planets – if it's profitable, it will be pursued.
"What is the return on investment?"
In the case of 3Body,
spoiler
it wasn't about profit but the about the survival of the entire ecology. The planet was doomed to fall into one of the stars and so the race was picking up and moving as much as it could to the next-most-habitable region.
That's only very loosely a "profitable" enterprise. Certainly, the initial generations won't see any kind of profit simply due to the length of the journey.
The same principle applies to other planets – if it's profitable, it will be pursued.
But a practical ROI can only really be measured within a single lifetime. And extraplanetary travel will always have a return of $0, as anyone deciding to perform extra-planetary exploration today will not see the benefits for generations. One might argue a more Ursula LeGuin-esque view of interstellar colonization - as a struggle for survival that simply expands beyond the frontiers of a single planet. But then, what we're really talking about with Martian colonization or extra-Solar travel is some kind of politically or ecologically motivated Exodus. Because the economic exploitation of the New World was mostly just hit-and-run raids early on. The Virginia Company was an abject failure as an economic exercise. It cost far more to maintain than it yielded.
The real motivating force behind early colonization was the 30 Years War and the flight of the Protestants. What you're ultimately going to need are some Huguenots with space ships. Even then, the real labor force in colonization were indentured servants and slaves. And there's not going to be a Trans-Atlantic Triangle to move people from Earth to the spacial frontier, because... Its space. There's nothing out there.
Launching spacecraft from earth and putting them into various orbits needs a lot of energy. It's just going to be cheaper to mine stuff on earth or recycle. With fully automated robots and something as close as Mars and mining something super rare and valueable maybe, but it gets exponentially stupider when you need to send humans or go to another solar system.
The maximum likelihood estimate date for AGI according to metaculus is 2027
After we achieve AGI you don't need to send humans anywhere because a robot could do anything a human can and probably better.
And this Kurzgesagt video explains how asteroid mining could be done. Unlimited Resources From Space – Asteroid Mining
You are right that it wouldn't make much sense going to other solar systems or invading alien planets when there are so many minerals on asteroids and planets closer to Earth like Mars.
Yeah the artificial intelligence gurus are deluded. And don't get me started on Kurzgesagt, those fucks think a couple of billion dead due to climate change is reason to be hopeful, and that Bill Gates' investing in carbon capture is going to save the rest, because, err,
magical thinkinghe gives them money.
I ask myself the same question all the time. So you supposedly have this super advanced space-travelling civilization, and they're somehow interested in us, who aren't even able to colonize another planet yet, and are destroying our only one planet in the meantime. We're like monkeys in a zoo to them. Why should we be interesting for a much more advanced civilization? At best, they'd monitor our "progress" as a civilization from afar, and maybe make contact once we've become a Kardashev type 2 or 3 civilization. If or when that happens. Still a long way. We haven't even ensured that our home planet is safe from us. Or maybe they want specific resources from Earth. But then we'd get much more visitors, who also wouldn't be friendly I guess. So I think it's highly unlikely, which means I also think this is being staged, intended to gain more funding.
Cynical take: To kill us. Dark forest style. Send out automated drones and kill off all other life that could pose a threat.
Other thoughts: If aliens showed up it we wouldn't detect them in atmo, not as a quick fly by. We'd detect something huge like engines or something going real fast way out in space. Like on the edge of the system. If they were in our atmosphere they would make themselves known one way or another at that point.
Cynical take: To kill us. Dark forest style.
As a sci-fi explanation for the Fermi Paradox, I found Dark Forest Theory compelling and thrilling.
As an actual IRL explanation for a lack of First Contact, I'm totally underwhelmed. Space is big. The speed of light heavily truncates both travel and communication. Extraterrestrial life certainly isn't common, as evidenced by all of the planets in our own Solar System that are lifeless.
It should be noted that
spoiler
across three different books, the humans and tri-solarians never actually meet. The whole build-up is ultimately a bust, as both humans and aliens end up fleeing Dark Forest attacks by other alien races who have only just barely noticed their presence and attack on reflex. Fun dramatic twist, but it really banks on everyone being invested in outcomes that are hundreds of generations into the future.
That strikes me as highly implausible.
Other thoughts: If aliens showed up it we wouldn't detect them in atmo, not as a quick fly by. We'd detect something huge like engines or something going real fast way out in space. Like on the edge of the system. If they were in our atmosphere they would make themselves known one way or another at that point.
The sheer amount of energy for super-luminal travel would suggest we either can't see them or can't miss them.
But one posits a degree of technological advancement so beyond our current scope that we can barely conceive of it. And the other posits a kind-of soft ceiling to scientific advancement, such that alien life just can't be an issue even in another thousand lifetimes.
If first contact is anything, it will more likely be communicative than a literal fly by. Humans tuning into the extraterrestrial equivalent of AM radio will be the first to discover an advanced off-world civilization.
Going back to 3Body, one of the most compelling plot beats for me was
spoiler
when the Tri-solarians started producing daytime drama TV shows about star-crossed lovers communing across a great distance, in order to influence humans into sympathizing with the refugee colony ships they intended to send Earthward.
Like, that's what I imagine a real human/alien interaction would look like for... centuries. Long before either saw the other one face-to-face.
The waifus are coming. They want to meet their senpais. Be patient, nyaah.
Not a single shred of physical evidence has been presented for any of the 'sightings'. Basic photography and physics explain the new videos. Just lens flare, bokeh effect, parallax motion, etc. Nothing extraterrestrial, just your average unintelligent American pilot.
