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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38489 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I think if aliens were on Earth and leaving evidence like that, it makes no sense. Why would aliens with such advanced technology drop by, leave a couple vehicles but only for top secret departments and show up blurrily on bad cameras, and do nothing else? I would expect aliens to either be totally undetected, or to show clear evidence of their existence. Not some weird thing where they leave just enough evidence to get some people to believe and expose themselves to the best militaries but only them.

Robin Hanson has a theory to explain this. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/our-alien-stalkers

And I think that theory is still silly. If it was true, aliens would be less discreet. They would conclusively show their existence so we could figure out the "message" Robin hypothesizes they have. Especially since, even if some UFOs really were aliens, I'm sure a lot of others were not aliens, and any possible message being communicated would be garbled by us not knowing which appearances were part of the message and which were faulty sensors/weather balloons/whatever.

But why not just land on the White House lawn, meet with our leaders, and explain their agenda? Because once they start talking to us, we will have a lot of questions. Such as on their nature, practices, history, and future plans. And many of us would surely hate some of their answers. They are complete aliens after all, and we are often offended by humans from slightly different cultures. They reasonably guess that we are just not as open-minded as we like to think.

Sure, maybe if they understood us really well they could just say “no comment” when a discussion got near something likely to offend us. But we’d then reasonably infer that they were hiding bad news near there, make a guess at what it is, and get somewhat offended at that. Far simpler and more robust to not talk at all, except in dire emergencies.

Does this not answer that criticism?

They don't have to answer questions, just do a fly by over the Superbowl, or hover above Times Square for five minutes. Instead they only ever appear to us in ways that could potentially be sensor malfunctions or people lying.

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