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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Ok, the big hole in ‘the aliens are here’ is, well, that this is one case where absense of evidence is literally evidence of absense. Any method by which aliens could approach the earth would be visible to amateur astronomers, every researcher in the world, every military and government more sophisticated than say, Sudan’s, etc. This is true even if you allow for a bunch of fringe physics and exotic effects- an Alcubierre drive or heim theory spaceship should leave an otherwise inexplicable signature that is readily observable by an enormous number of institutions and individuals on earth, to say nothing of an interstellar torch ship(and Annunaki from Nibiru still need a torch ship even if we ignore that a tenth planet can’t be habitable for temperature reasons).

There being aliens requires either a Truman show level conspiracy that goes beyond anything David icke and Alex Jones and the guy with the hair on the history channel could come up with if you locked them in a room full of drugs, or Star Trek level difference in the laws of physics.

Any method by which aliens could approach the earth would be visible to amateur astronomers, every researcher in the world, every military and government more sophisticated than say, Sudan’s, etc.

They could have sent a robot probe millions of years ago, with instructions to observe and nothing else. Basically a more sophisticated version of the Mars rover. There's no "approach" we could see, because it approached long ago. And if it's small, and moving at high speed through the atmosphere and ocean, that would still be pretty hard to spot. Look how hard it was to find that Malaysia Airlines plane that went off course, for example.

Well, it’s a good thing we aren’t just using probes. The meat of our observations come from telescopes and radio telescopes that can see trillions of miles into space, and can detect all manner of radio signals from deep space. Even if the aliens avoid detection by probes, they can’t avoid Hubble and James Webb and the radio telescopes we use on earth all day long.

There's still room for doubt, since most of our radio telescopes aren't really looking for Alien signals. They look for more "mundane" astronomical data, and radio signals fall off rapidly with the inverse square law, so unless an alien signal was beamed right at us, we could have easily missed it. This is starting to change now, but this is a recent change from billionaires like Paul Allen and Yuri Millner funding SETI-type projects that couldn't get much government funding before.

I think you’d still see megastructures and anomalies caused by engines. There’s nothing like that found yet. How do you launch a ship capable of crossing interstellar space without also constructing space stations and long distance probes and other forms of technology?

I don't think even a very advanced probe could survive millions of years in the atmosphere or ocean. In space, sure, but then UFOs have been spotted in all sorts of places. I don't think that this would explain anything.

Why would you assume "aliens" not "previous Earth civilization" in that case?

Because there's no evidence of a previous Earth civilization, and it would raise strange questions? Whereas the Fermi Paradox is a pretty famous question of "wait, logically there probably should be aliens, somewhere..."

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

If advanced civilisation, comparable to ours, existed on Earth millions years ago - then we would likely fail to detect it.

Ok that's a bit more scientific than the "ancient aliens" stuff I expected. Still seems pretty speculative though. How is it we have fossils from the dinosaurs, but not anything from this much more recent civilization?

Definitely speculative, merely discussion how in this case lack of evidence is quite weak sign that such thing never existed - and we may still find something!

For that thing: dinosaurs are existing (and continue to exist, to be strict "non-avian dinosaurs" if often used) for about 240 000 000 years.

You can have civilisation appear and collapse in thousands of years.

We have entire species living not even single fossil. In fact, vast majority of species left not even single fossil.

I’m skeptical of a robot that lasts for millions of years but admit to it not being an obvious violation of the laws of physics- that being said, it’s a motte to the Bailey of ‘there could totally be aliens here, bro’.

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