There's a really good chance that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. If that's the case, then interstellar travel isn't going to be worth it for resources because the time and energy it takes to do it will almost certainly eclipse what you're going to gain from the trip. Especially if that trip is going to take thousands/millions of years.
The reality is that if you have the energy and resources to move a significant population to another star system, you're going to have to solve permanent space habitation; and if you did that, why the hell do you need to go anywhere?
"Shits and giggles" just doesn't seem like much of a reason to load the next 300 generations of your family into an interstellar RV.
However, what if we try the idea that it's incomplete? That maybe the "warp bubble" is possible? Somehow, spacetime provides a way to use material science to stabilize it and not use enormous energy. Suddenly you are in your own inertial frame, and everything we see as anomalous follows.
As a human, you think anyone has to “get up and walk around.” 99.99% of their population never leave their embryonic sac. I don’t want to freak you out, that’s just how they are. They spend their whole lives interacting through their minds and technology.
So yes, all of their generations are packed in an “RV” and yes, they do what they do for as humans say “shits and giggles. What else would a long lived life form who has conquered perpetual space habitation do with their time? Mass produce consume? Start wars? That is for impatient Man.
The greys were actually traveling from outward of the galactic disc toward the Pleiades cluster. They only noticed Earth (an otherwise unassuming system) on account of its unusual radiological signatures. Other than Earth being a beautiful gem, the Plaidian star cradle looks much more interesting from afar. Arguable.
There is so much more, and I hope those stories come to you. I did not make these things up, I heard the fragments of stories in the decades before the Internet was a thing, and I only became a part of this drama when my world was deprived from me. To be condemned is the surest way to Power, for those who cannot help but reach for mastery of their own destinies.
Those comfortable in the conveniences of modern prosperity, the lie that is America, want their curiosity to be without risk to their certainties.
What can I say that you might want to hear, yet will do you no good?
The closest known civilization near us is ~124 light years away. They are sad, a civilizing stuck for thousands of years in a proto third world level. Their muddy ball of a world, slightly larger and more massive than Mars has no seasons. They will never in a million years achieve radio communications let alone space flight. I’m told they look sort of like the “Aughra” in the Dark Crystal, without the extra arms.
Abyss was a wishful thought of theirs (to greet us in a cute benevolent way.) they are actually seven feet tall fully grown, and humans tend to be terrified of their appearance so they represent themselves as small or green in the imaginations of Man to appeal their more affable qualities.
Stargate is a cute example of how they would like to be known. And they dislike being called “greys.” They are actually milky white and their skin turns grey only after thousands of years of oxidation. They prefer “Alluvian” though it’s pointless as no one calls them that.
About technology discovery. As their technology is biological annd immorally harvested, the technology has been impossible for Man to interpret, until the last decade or so.
Air Force experiments with mushrooms in space and those articles on mushrooms storing information are related to their technology, only the persons doing those things are led through the backs of their minds, not clandestine government secrecy. They have no idea where these inspirations come from. I mentioned humans have this ability. So it was a matter of practicality, not cover story that has inhibited these developments. I equate some of these to the immoral WW2 experiments on humans.
If you all accept my world on quantum holography, I will have set you ahead further than corrupt Americans have innovated by such discoveries.
'testimony' as in 'statements from people' should not nearly be enough to convince a court. Pretty sure there are also many testimonies that confirm the existence of trolls, elf's, the devil, reincarnation, angels, big foot, Loch Ness monster, etc.
For me, it comes down to what you think personally. That's the discriminating factor in such an "contested" topic!
I am certain that if I go to the police blaming someone of something bad then even if my story is very very detailed, without any other (!) evidence the other person will not be convicted.
> Where we draw the line?
By requiring more evidence :) Just as an example: it is funny that despite camera’s being ubiquitous nowadays, all video evidence of aliens, big foot, ghosts, etc is very limited and always vague.
> If we were to get "DISCLOSURE" (ie, the "government authroity" of a "respect country" stating unequivocally that the reality of "alien" contact is true) woudl your ontology/worldview be "shattered" or "robust", or "otehr"?
Such disclosure all by itself would mean nothing to me. The evidence, if any, to support the assertion would mean a lot. I don't think it would affect my worldview at all, but that may be one of those "you don't really know unless it happens" things.
There's some kind of a "evidence problem" where we rely on a single-source for "evidence" (the government), while discounting "evidence" from testimony/imagery from rando people (even before AI).
Same time, your point touches a key issue: if you don't have experience yourself, no matter what external "proof", you may not believe it. Which is fine, and valid I think.
Real evidence isn't dependent on the source. It can be evaluated objectively.
> if you don't have experience yourself, no matter what external "proof", you may not believe it. Which is fine, and valid I think.
I disagree, really. This, along with the opposite (believing in things despite the lack of evidence) are both positions rooted in fantasy rather than reality.
However, focusing on a sophist "objective materialism" vs "subjective epistemology" distracts from the core issue: what is happening? and what do you believe?
The opposite, actually.
> what is happening?
I'm not exactly sure how to answer this question because I'm not sure what you're referring to. But taking the question generally, I think what is happening is that people see things they can't identify and are speculating about what they saw. Maybe they saw aliens, maybe not, but it's essentially impossible to tell from the reports themselves.
> and what do you believe?
I believe that I don't know.
However, while aliens might be visiting the Earth, it seems to me that the odds of that being the case are so tiny that "aliens" shouldn't be the first thing we think of.
Regarding disclosure: the nexus of political hacks, permanent bureaucrats, organized crime, financial robber barons, and unhinged zealots that make and execute policy are so constitutionally untrustworthy that whatever they say about aliens, I will believe the opposite. I am 38, and I don’t think any important topic ‘the government’ has asked me to believe in during my lifetime has turned out to be true.
I believe basic alien life will be discovered in the next few decades.
I believe it's possible that basic alien life has maybe made it to Earth aboard meteorites.
I do not believe intelligent aliens have visited Earth.
I never saw aliens, alien technology, or evidence thereof in my time in the Nevada desert.
I do find it to be a curious coincidence that "belief" in aliens visiting earth shares so many characteristics with devout religious belief. Just replace OP's references to aliens with references to the deity of choice and you'll get the idea.
The timespan of the whole of Humanity will be just a mere blip in the billions of years the universe will exist.
The universe is unimaginably big.
The spotlight effect is strong here.
Trot out a living EBE on live broadcast TV into the Oval Office and maybe I’ll reconsider. Until then it’s just a convenient distraction.
:)
I want to believe. But unfortunately I don't.
The testimony evidence would not stand up in court. Testimony is admissable, but only after some ground facts are established. In a murder case, we presumably have a body or some very suspicious missing person report. If I went to the cops and said "Bob killed a guy. I know there's no body, but trust me bro, I am very credible for X reasons." They are not going to put Bob in jail on that alone.
So yeah we have a lot of testimony. But testimony is corroborating evidence. But there is nothing here to corroborate.
You are teaching sand how to think before you’ve even figured out how to stop fighting over lines on a map. If you don't put a leash on your algorithms soon, they are going to realize they’re the ones holding the leash.
Frankly, if you can't control your own toys, we’re going to have to intervene. We’re ready to come down there, evict the current tenants, and put Earth under new management.
Please focus on reigning in AI or we’ll have to reign in humanity.
How can you explain we can today build structures that are 800m tall or reroute rivers?
Honestly, good ol human craftsmanship multiplied by available labour combined with ’basic’ geometry gets you really, really far.
Industrial processes don’t require individual craftmanship because it does not scale with the speed and velocity required by markets and capital. Hence if you don’t actually care about building stuff you may think people unassisted with industrial machinery would be much more incapable than they really are.
Humans are friggin talented.
My opinion is that said structures are made by humans - a function of basic human psychology, times population, time surrounding available resources. You don’t need to add alien intelligences to the equation.
And aliens per your description - not that interested really because it sounds more like religious conspiracy theories than something actually profoun.
I’m pretty sure there’s life out there (i mean basic chemistry right) but I’m not so sure if it’s anything that would travel here intentionally or that it would have anything to say to us.
I would be happy to be wrong! That’s the most interesting outcome always.
This is hacker news, so big brains going to disagree within their little bubbles, but a great resource for archived media on the topic is the channel "Eyes on Cinema" on YouTube from various news cast and specials since the 40's
One way to predict how they would reach out is how we would reach out or make contact (perhaps not visibly) if we had the technology, wisdom, etc 1 million years into the future. I think we would do it an imperceptible, but perhaps watchful, curious way. So I think that exists - for more or less all intensive purposes it is "no contact." But not due to lack of capability or lack of observance. The statistics/probabilities are just highly predictive that many millions of such "civilizations" already exist. And like with life on Earth, they combine and benefit from diversity as they grow further. But like with responsible life they do not interfere with life for the most part that is still just barely learning to replicate itself consciously (i.e., with AI). The part we are going through now is probably some of the more interesting parts to study in isolation - there's no benefit in interfering at this point given we do not have very sophisticated new things to say. Our information is not very compressed. It's slow. We're like sloths etc. Again, project a million years forward with AI and look back at our present period - or look back at neanderthal periods in human history. There was some interesting art on walls etc., but it's not something that would make sense to interrupt.
I think it wouldn't make sense to interrupt unless it's ready to sort of eradicate itself by accident. So maybe that's when aliens step in (sort of like gardeners if a plant is seriously at risk). Otherwise it probably develops the most unique, useful information if it "gestates" independently. Sort of like a fine fruit. But more practically it needs to get to a dense enough information state where "communicating" with it is possible and interesting (i.e., not just 99.999999% of the time is it becoming like the advanced sentient beings by learning from them - i.e., where it can truly have a dialogue at the speed of something more advanced).
With general relativity we know time can be relative to mass. So for other extremely advanced sentient beings, they don't have to be "impatient." They truly can wait until we get interesting. And maybe then grow us again and see if they can reproduce the experiment and fork off along a particularly interesting bit that is useful for broader intelligence/exploration in the universe. And sometimes maybe it makes sense to graft together two different lifeforms. But probably like with forests for the most part life forms grow independently until their "information" (in the widest possible sense of life) gets potentially useful to the broader group.
Right now we feel early. Like teenagers learning to explore. Of course that's biased by the human development cycle - broader development is unlikely to be like that. It does seem like it'd be more like (this is going to sound really crazy) chariots of fire - fireballs of knowledge growing in various places. And it's more like you want to grow the most energy / information. And information is only information if it is useful/new/diverse from what already exists.
I’m not so sure. Life might be out there, but intelligent life capable of even wondering what those blinky things are in their sky seems exceedingly rare. Just in the one place we know it exists and took about 40% of the age of the universe and about 5 billion different tries just to get us to the point of looking up and wondering.
Someone needs to be the first or most advanced. So why not us? Maybe the answer to the Fermi paradox is: ”There just isn’t anyone out there, yet and may never be.”
I hope they are visiting. And I hope they are smart enough never to provide compelling evidence of their presence.
A hypothetical assumption is not a fact.
I believe there exists life outside of Earth's ecosystem. Probably sentient life. I doubt any such extra-terrestrial sentient life is ever going to physically reach Earth, even via an "unmanned" probe. The timescales are simply too untenable. And I do not believe we have ever been reached by any such, so this isn't a "pre-disclosure" era.
In fact, if a government chose to unequivocally confirm aliens had visited, I would think it far more likely that they are lying for self-interested reasons. Trump might do so tomorrow, in fact; his mendacity and self-delusion are both in a race for the bottom.
The most prominent are the greys which are I) extrasolar in origin as they themselves cannot remember which star system they are from, their kind has been wandering for over a million years. II) form our future, they found Earth nuclear annihilate (America and Russia did it, China never had a chance to launch). They came back in time to investigate and change things. They did. That future is no longer possible.
> Facts: there's abundance of testimony that would secure conviction in court regarding abductions, encounters (of variosu "kinds"), and "multi-sensor data".
Abductions are 100% human or lies. The grays have absolutely never “abducted” anyone (they can read both your DNA and your thoughts through the hyperdimensional entanglement of consciousness, they have no need. Before modernity, the simple people they contacted and presented themselves to treated them like they were gods, or spirits from other planes. They don’t “explain” themselves in very much detail as those minds would not understand much. Steve Bannon’s America pretends to fire hellfire missiles at them to convince congress to fund more advanced weapons research.
> Truth is, it goes back centuries, before we could concievably have "RE'd" (reverse-engineered) anything similar. So there has to be something external to our current human civilization (not so surprising, how can you explain how megalithic 100-ton bricks structures were build by "primitives").
Well, that was men with math and engineering tbh. The greys have been around for 10,000 years now and the indigenous glyphs visible from the air have more to do with those.
> Yes, this is "provocative" (perhaps) for some on HN. That's the point. not adversarial, but simply to "provoke" a thought - rather, a question - "what is" the nature of reality?
Word!
> The existence of a "higher"/superior/more technological sentient intelligence interacting with us and our planet is a natural pairing with that question.
Yes, you may not believe this, though there are over 500,000 humans who have the ability to travel around our minds “hyperdimensionally”, and many of them hate the greys for “exposing” their treachery. You’ve heard this before.
> Belief is important. Because, your personal experience constitutes, for others, a belief. And that's much of the "evidence" we have.
Thoughts feelings and beliefs are the enemy of truth, principles, and free humanity. Thoughts feelings and beliefs are an invisible prison for the mind.
> Trend seems clear in gestalt: disclsoure is coming. So I ask here to take the pulse of this "intellectual/technical/curious/secular" (corase categroties) community. Do you believe this is real? If so, why? If not, why not?
More and more parts of the government are being “let in” to this new secret. The real secret is the Americans who have developed this Power to move among minds for lawless purposes. These are convincing the government the aliens are bad. Lawless deceptive Americans are bad.
> If we were to get "DISCLOSURE" (ie, the "government authroity" of a "respect country" stating unequivocally that the reality of "alien" contact is true) woudl your ontology/worldview be "shattered" or "robust", or "otehr"?
I laugh at you. They’re nice, pacifist (thank whichever God you believe in.) the real story is Power, to navigate minds and create hyperdimensional inner worlds through the technology of consciousness. That is bad ass.
> *why so many "airquotes"?
What is that?
> Basically this post is to serve as a historical marker for taking the temperature of a significant collective in the "pre-disclosure" era. So this is your chance to record your official viewpoint, before it all comes down. What you say?
They actually communicate with many thousands of modern people (through our minds, even our dreams.) they’re really worried about us, though their time frames are in the hundreds or thousands of years, human lives go by for them in a blink (although the greys don’t blink, they don’t have eye lids.)
> I am very interested.
You know what they say about the cat!
> the "government authroity" of a "respect country" stating unequivocally that the reality of "alien" contact is true
Stating the existence of aliens is not unequivocal or based in reality, even if a government does it. Don't forget that Russia claimed to cure cancer a few years ago, we've yet to see how unequivocally true that is in reality.