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I’m pretty much convinced it’s not aliens. The physics we know doesn’t support the idea of ships fast enough to make interstellar travel plausible without generation ships. We have lots of telescopes trained on deep space including two space telescopes, and we’ve never detected any signs of civilization in deep space: no signals, no structures, no signs of life. We have only once found an object in our solar system of extra-solar origin, that was Oumoua which was almost certainly an asteroid. There’s not really much reason to think that there’s a star-faring civilization out there, let alone one that came here.
The politicians getting involved here seems less like a weird outcome of “there must be something here” and more of a way to score political points on an issue where there’s no downside to playing along. If there’s anything interesting to be known, it’s already highly classified, and probably only available to the intelligence committee in vague details. And if nothing is there, there’s obviously nothing to report. But Schumer et Al. Get in the news feed and they can talk about how they’re in favor of transparency (except for the contributions to his superPAC) which always sounds good.
I don’t see how a very small group of UFO enthusiasts could get much traction, or why it would happen exactly now, given that UFO enthusiasts have been around since before Roswell and they’ve been ignored by mainstream government for well over half a century. There’s nothing that’s substantially different now that would make congress of all places suddenly interested in what a small band of unconnected people see as their hobbyhorse.
As cover for a weapons program, I think UAPs make a lot of sense. Everyone in 2023 has a camera on their person at all times. Anything that requires real-life testing is probably going to be seen — and filmed — by someone, and that movie can with a few clicks, be shared across media platforms before the government has any idea footage exists. This is new and different. In 1948-1990 stopping the release of a movie of a new weapon or plane was as simple as confiscating the film and perhaps the old version of the UFO story was cover for that activity. People would obviously wonder why the government was taking film from private citizens, and it wouldn’t work to tell people they’d accidentally taken a picture of a classified weapon, as word would get around fast that there were classified aircraft around a given area. Blue book as a “we’re investigating these aliens” story later followed by “huh, it turns out they were mostly false positives and a lot of the observers were drunk,” fits that era.
This is much weaker "evidence" than you think. One possible explanation is that "aliens" are results of an AI driven Von Neuman probe that was activated by some human technological advancement a few decades ago. It jumpstarted factories somewhere in Ooort cloud producing more and more advanced technology that visits us, on its mission as programmed by some long dead civilization.
Similarly, no evidence of structures or signals is not evidence of nonexistence. We did not even map our own system, it is still possible that there is undetected planet X in our own solar system, we know nothing about interstellar space or other star systems.
Agreed, except to note that there's no need for aliens to be hiding in the Oort cloud - mobile and under the ocean somewhere would likely do just fine, along with a number of other close-to-home alternatives. And that the absence of observed radio signals can be explained as well by 'there are superior options for interstellar communication and aliens use those' as 'there are no aliens sending signals'.
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I’m not saying that it’s evidence aliens don’t exist, however, I think the point that I’m mostly aiming for here is that “things that are asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” And until some new sort of evidence shows up, there’s little reason to put aliens anywhere in the picture. Now if we find something, that’s when I’d start taking aliens seriously as a phenomenon. But until then, all we actually have are bizarre suppositions used to either get around or negate the problems that exist. On the evidentiary side, to be absolutely clear we have no evidence of life, let alone intelligence. Now you’re correct that we haven’t looked everywhere, but again, we have nothing that would make us think there are aliens. Likewise, we have no evidence of anything unusual going on in the Oort Cloud or AIs. As far as the evidence goes, we have one planet with any kind of life, and while we’re on the cusp of AGI in my estimation, but that’s it. Likewise, our understanding of physics is probably primitive compared to what we will know a thousand years from now. But, until we have a good reason to discard what we know about astronomy, physics, biology, and robotics, I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that we are wrong about any particular topic in science, you can’t just a priori toss it when it comes to aliens, or if you want to, provide an actual reason to doubt the stuff we know or think we know.
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For big, wet sacks of thinking meat, maybe, but you can posit many theories of interstellar travel that are congruent with physics.
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The physics we know is entirely congruent with agelessness, and we haven't come up with any reason to think machines can't be intelligent or self-repairing.
I agree on that, although I think you’d still find evidence of megastructures or ships.
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I agree with everything you've said, except the claim that we've never received an alien signal. I'd say the wow signal is most likely a signal from an alien radio telescope, although obviously we cannot have definitive proof.
https://earthsky.org/space/wow-signal-explained-comets-antonio-paris/
According to this, the most likely source is a comet that was in that part of the sky when the WOW signal was found. A very similar signal was detected when following the orbit of the comet with another radio telescope.
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