Going just on headline (paywall) this isn’t a surprise. Even astronomers will tell you they see things they can’t identify right away. Some are birds, some are balloons etc. it doesn’t always mean every UFO is an alien.
Shout out to that time in 1998 when the world-leading astrophysicists at CSIRO solved the 17-year-old mystery of the signals they were picking up and couldn’t explain. Turns out they were caused by the office microwave whenever it was opened before it was finished.
I disagree. If things went the way we think they should have gone humanity shouldn’t even exist. Billions of years ago some alien race should have mined out this entire solar system.
The fact that we are here and we have no solid evidence of aliens shows that something is very wrong with our understanding. Distances mean nothing when you have billions of years even without magical FTL travel.
Put some basic numbers to it. The oldest piece of metal (shapes by humans) we have found is about 7,000 years. I am going to make it worse and assume that there is metal we didn’t find 10k years ago. With nuclear propulsion ship the nearest star is reachable. Let’s assume it takes us with travel time 5,000 years to do this. Humanity goes from copper to two star systems in 15k years.
Now earth is going to be lazy and wait another 15k years before doing this feat again. Our new colony needs to grow so I am going to give them 15k years as well. We got a pace now. The star systems we have will double every 15k years.
Let’s round down assuming some colonies fail and it makes the numbers easier. In 150k years humanity has 1k star systems. As a point of reference that is about the time difference between us and the first homo sapiens sapiens. In 300k years we have hit a million. At 450k years a billion. About 550k years, depending on how many stars there are in the galaxy, every star is now populated. 1/1000th of the time required from the Cambrian explosion until now.
From our understanding life was possible in our galaxy many billions of years ago. On average stars have 1.2 planets. There are about 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy. Of those about .2% are candidates for life. Based on our solar system there is about a 20% chance of life given the right conditions. From our dataset of 1 it takes 4 billion years to get sentient tool making social animals. Low end estimates of the number of aliens like us number in the thousands AT THIS MOMENT.
Again. We should not exist. Something is very wrong with our models. I am positive we will find the answer one day and I am betting it is going to break a whole bunch of theories.
It’s just the MASSIVE amount of whereand when that something exists makes it incredibly unlikely that something just happens to be right next to us at the same time that we exist.
There might be “people” out there with near-light speed travel that could possibly reach us. But when did they exist? We won’t be seeing them if they lived and died out a billion years ago.
Space (crazy huge) times Time (crazy huge) is just an incomprehensibly big number. What are the chances that aliens are visiting a planet at the exact moment that the planet just so happens to be full of crazy people that claim to see aliens and make movies of aliens and seem obsessed with aliens?
I’m not sure why aliens that are going around the galaxy taking resources from various systems would exploit the resources of a system with life on it when there are probably trillions of exploitable systems that have no life.
I also am not sure why aliens who have technology so advanced they can achieve practical interstellar travel would need to mine entire solar systems for resources.
Because growth eats everything. Even if your economy only grew at .1% per year that would still mean a doubling every 720 years. For our 15k doubling species that would be a bit over 20x. About a million fold increase.
Secondly we don’t see evidence that they did mine out uninhabited systems. There are over 5,000 exoplanets found that are terrible candidates for life. Yet they are there. Not used.
Third our system alone. Life would have been fine without Saturn. Even if our aliens are nice they still could have snagged that and not really impacted us.
Ok can you please point to the part that I was factually wrong about? I did take the time and energy to use real numbers and the probabilities that people in this field use.
No and it has no bearing on the discussion. Whether it’s likely or not is immaterial unless you’re gambling or building policy/making decisions around it.
We are. We are the winner. The chances of someone winning the cosmic lottery is astronomically low. The chances that there is another winner nearby is (astronomically low)2.
Right so as I pointed out the distances don’t really matter all that much. A galaxy infestation of sentients doesn’t require FTL. A nuclear propelled ship could bring the nearest star systems within range in under a century. Additionally we are at the edge of the solar system which means it would be slightly harder for us than it would be on average for sentient life forms.
The 15k doubling time I gave includes travel time. We can make the numbers worse if you would like. Make it a 45k doubling time and it takes 1.5 million years. About 3 orders of magnitude more time than is needed. You would need a double time of roughly half a million years to break it. Which would mean that earth sends out a colony ship once every 50x the duration of human civilization. The first one goes out in say 2030 the next one goes out in 500,002,030, the third 1million 2030 AD.
I am not sure the issue is clear here but I’ll put it another way.
If I roll a D100 and get a number - any number - there was a 1% chance I’d get that number. Whether that number has value to me, such as rolling a 100 for a good outcome or a 1 for a terrible one, is immaterial. Every single outcome is 1% likely to happen.
Should I discount the 1% chance outcome just because i got the exact outcome I did or didn’t want?
I think the problem might be sociological. It may be impossible for a very large interstellar civilization to be stable let alone expand beyond a certain point.
More and more people are talking about Earth’s population declining. The demographics curve may not be an exponential increase as civilization develops, but the planetary population may decrease as technology and wealth improves.
Aging populations may not have the resources to spend on interstellar travel, regardless of their relative wealth.
And these tendencies may be universal. The galaxy may be full of old, aging and slowly dying advanced civilizations and have few upstarts such as ours.
Sure and you know what? Three generations ago what you just said would be nonsense. The typical fertility rate of an American women prior to 1955 was 5!
Culture is fast. Demographics can spin on a dime. One decade everyone has kids and the next no one has them. All it takes is for a single culture on earth to push for growth and you get growth. We have about 190 countries. Pretend only one figures out the way to keep their population above replacement levels indefinitely. Given enough time what will happen to the other 189? Adapt or die. In order to stop growth you have to stop it fully. Even if there are alien species thst collectively decided to point a gun at their reproductive organs and butcher anyone who decides to make a better life for themselves, it still wouldn’t explain what we see.
As I said, at any given moment there should be thousands and that has been true for Billions with a B years. Go ahead and play with the numbers. Make 99.9% of them act like pandas. That .1% will still Dyson sphere up everything.
Our models are wrong. Some step(s) in the process is/are basically impossible.
Well, your models are wrong. In both examples, you assume exponential growth will continue forever. Resource limits are a thing in the real world, as evidenced by every population in history (humans or animals).
I assumed linear growth and I assumed a frankly absurdly low growth rate. Under this model earth is only sending out a colony ship once every 15,000 years. Does that seem likely? We made 6 trips to the moon and about 50 years later are now planning more. Is there a single thing you can mention that humanity would only bother doing once every 15k years?
What is far far more likely is waves of ships, pauses of a century or less, more waves of ships…
Additionally I didn’t assume forever. I assumed a malthusian growth pattern where by aliens keep growing until nothing is left.
Yeah, you assumed no catastrophic failures. On long timelines there are going to be world or civilization ending events.
There are so many species that were wiped out through their actions or just naturally. That’s the point of the Drake equation; the sky should be full of other civilizations, but it isn’t.
The common answer is that there may be a “great filter”, some event that all advanced species encounter. Maybe it’s ahead of us, or maybe it’s behind us. It could be something simple like “walking upright is rare” or it could be some powerful weapon everyone discovers.
I’d suggest reading the article. It’s here in the comments several times. The video of the hearing is well worth watching and pretty significant. That video is also here in the comments.
Name one part of that hearing that was significant, because not only did he not have any evidence, he didn’t have any evidence that there is evidence. I watched it and frankly I want my time back.
This is the UFO equivalent of “my uncle works at Nintendo.”
Going just on headline (paywall) this isn’t a surprise. Even astronomers will tell you they see things they can’t identify right away. Some are birds, some are balloons etc. it doesn’t always mean every UFO is an alien.
Shout out to that time in 1998 when the world-leading astrophysicists at CSIRO solved the 17-year-old mystery of the signals they were picking up and couldn’t explain. Turns out they were caused by the office microwave whenever it was opened before it was finished.
I thought I was in for the worlds worst u/shittymorph attempt for a second.
The size & age of the universe pretty much tells us that it’s never an alien.
I disagree. If things went the way we think they should have gone humanity shouldn’t even exist. Billions of years ago some alien race should have mined out this entire solar system.
The fact that we are here and we have no solid evidence of aliens shows that something is very wrong with our understanding. Distances mean nothing when you have billions of years even without magical FTL travel.
Put some basic numbers to it. The oldest piece of metal (shapes by humans) we have found is about 7,000 years. I am going to make it worse and assume that there is metal we didn’t find 10k years ago. With nuclear propulsion ship the nearest star is reachable. Let’s assume it takes us with travel time 5,000 years to do this. Humanity goes from copper to two star systems in 15k years.
Now earth is going to be lazy and wait another 15k years before doing this feat again. Our new colony needs to grow so I am going to give them 15k years as well. We got a pace now. The star systems we have will double every 15k years.
Let’s round down assuming some colonies fail and it makes the numbers easier. In 150k years humanity has 1k star systems. As a point of reference that is about the time difference between us and the first homo sapiens sapiens. In 300k years we have hit a million. At 450k years a billion. About 550k years, depending on how many stars there are in the galaxy, every star is now populated. 1/1000th of the time required from the Cambrian explosion until now.
From our understanding life was possible in our galaxy many billions of years ago. On average stars have 1.2 planets. There are about 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy. Of those about .2% are candidates for life. Based on our solar system there is about a 20% chance of life given the right conditions. From our dataset of 1 it takes 4 billion years to get sentient tool making social animals. Low end estimates of the number of aliens like us number in the thousands AT THIS MOMENT.
Again. We should not exist. Something is very wrong with our models. I am positive we will find the answer one day and I am betting it is going to break a whole bunch of theories.
I’m not doubting that something is out there.
It’s just the MASSIVE amount of where and when that something exists makes it incredibly unlikely that something just happens to be right next to us at the same time that we exist.
There might be “people” out there with near-light speed travel that could possibly reach us. But when did they exist? We won’t be seeing them if they lived and died out a billion years ago.
Space (crazy huge) times Time (crazy huge) is just an incomprehensibly big number. What are the chances that aliens are visiting a planet at the exact moment that the planet just so happens to be full of crazy people that claim to see aliens and make movies of aliens and seem obsessed with aliens?
How does this compare to the distance from my house down the street to the chemist’s?
Peanuts
not hella far, but i still wouldn’t want to walk it
I’m not sure why aliens that are going around the galaxy taking resources from various systems would exploit the resources of a system with life on it when there are probably trillions of exploitable systems that have no life.
I also am not sure why aliens who have technology so advanced they can achieve practical interstellar travel would need to mine entire solar systems for resources.
Because growth eats everything. Even if your economy only grew at .1% per year that would still mean a doubling every 720 years. For our 15k doubling species that would be a bit over 20x. About a million fold increase.
Secondly we don’t see evidence that they did mine out uninhabited systems. There are over 5,000 exoplanets found that are terrible candidates for life. Yet they are there. Not used.
Third our system alone. Life would have been fine without Saturn. Even if our aliens are nice they still could have snagged that and not really impacted us.
> > > Again. We should not exist. Something is very wrong with our models. > >
I get why you feel this way but that’s not really how stats works.
Ok can you please point to the part that I was factually wrong about? I did take the time and energy to use real numbers and the probabilities that people in this field use.
The numbers aren’t the issue. You can’t say “something happened that was very unlikely therefore the number saying it’s unlikely was wrong.”
Ok so it is likely? You know exactly what I said.
No and it has no bearing on the discussion. Whether it’s likely or not is immaterial unless you’re gambling or building policy/making decisions around it.
The chances of winning a lottery is astronomically low, yet there is a winner every week.
Yes which is my point. There should have been a winner and there wasn’t.
We are. We are the winner. The chances of someone winning the cosmic lottery is astronomically low. The chances that there is another winner nearby is (astronomically low)2.
Right so as I pointed out the distances don’t really matter all that much. A galaxy infestation of sentients doesn’t require FTL. A nuclear propelled ship could bring the nearest star systems within range in under a century. Additionally we are at the edge of the solar system which means it would be slightly harder for us than it would be on average for sentient life forms.
The 15k doubling time I gave includes travel time. We can make the numbers worse if you would like. Make it a 45k doubling time and it takes 1.5 million years. About 3 orders of magnitude more time than is needed. You would need a double time of roughly half a million years to break it. Which would mean that earth sends out a colony ship once every 50x the duration of human civilization. The first one goes out in say 2030 the next one goes out in 500,002,030, the third 1million 2030 AD.
I am not sure the issue is clear here but I’ll put it another way.
If I roll a D100 and get a number - any number - there was a 1% chance I’d get that number. Whether that number has value to me, such as rolling a 100 for a good outcome or a 1 for a terrible one, is immaterial. Every single outcome is 1% likely to happen.
Should I discount the 1% chance outcome just because i got the exact outcome I did or didn’t want?
I think the problem might be sociological. It may be impossible for a very large interstellar civilization to be stable let alone expand beyond a certain point.
More and more people are talking about Earth’s population declining. The demographics curve may not be an exponential increase as civilization develops, but the planetary population may decrease as technology and wealth improves.
Aging populations may not have the resources to spend on interstellar travel, regardless of their relative wealth.
And these tendencies may be universal. The galaxy may be full of old, aging and slowly dying advanced civilizations and have few upstarts such as ours.
Sure and you know what? Three generations ago what you just said would be nonsense. The typical fertility rate of an American women prior to 1955 was 5!
Culture is fast. Demographics can spin on a dime. One decade everyone has kids and the next no one has them. All it takes is for a single culture on earth to push for growth and you get growth. We have about 190 countries. Pretend only one figures out the way to keep their population above replacement levels indefinitely. Given enough time what will happen to the other 189? Adapt or die. In order to stop growth you have to stop it fully. Even if there are alien species thst collectively decided to point a gun at their reproductive organs and butcher anyone who decides to make a better life for themselves, it still wouldn’t explain what we see.
As I said, at any given moment there should be thousands and that has been true for Billions with a B years. Go ahead and play with the numbers. Make 99.9% of them act like pandas. That .1% will still Dyson sphere up everything.
Our models are wrong. Some step(s) in the process is/are basically impossible.
Well, your models are wrong. In both examples, you assume exponential growth will continue forever. Resource limits are a thing in the real world, as evidenced by every population in history (humans or animals).
I assumed linear growth and I assumed a frankly absurdly low growth rate. Under this model earth is only sending out a colony ship once every 15,000 years. Does that seem likely? We made 6 trips to the moon and about 50 years later are now planning more. Is there a single thing you can mention that humanity would only bother doing once every 15k years?
What is far far more likely is waves of ships, pauses of a century or less, more waves of ships…
Additionally I didn’t assume forever. I assumed a malthusian growth pattern where by aliens keep growing until nothing is left.
Yeah, you assumed no catastrophic failures. On long timelines there are going to be world or civilization ending events.
There are so many species that were wiped out through their actions or just naturally. That’s the point of the Drake equation; the sky should be full of other civilizations, but it isn’t.
The common answer is that there may be a “great filter”, some event that all advanced species encounter. Maybe it’s ahead of us, or maybe it’s behind us. It could be something simple like “walking upright is rare” or it could be some powerful weapon everyone discovers.
Yeah, but all the other times it’s aliens.
I’d suggest reading the article. It’s here in the comments several times. The video of the hearing is well worth watching and pretty significant. That video is also here in the comments.
Name one part of that hearing that was significant, because not only did he not have any evidence, he didn’t have any evidence that there is evidence. I watched it and frankly I want my time back.
This is the UFO equivalent of “my uncle works at Nintendo.”
Yes a person specifically employed to find information who then reports said information is 100% the same as dumb shit you said on a playground.
Exactly the same.
Nothing in that hearing says otherwise
You have definitely not seen the hearing and it is beyond weird that you’d pretend otherwise on the internet.
I’m being very honest here when I say I want to be wrong. Can you tell me what to revisit? What seemed revelatory or important to you?
The evidence and witness info provided have the committee members calling for a select committee with subpoena powers.
When Grusch said “I can’t say that here” that was never going to be the end of that discussion
> > > select committee with subpoena powers > >
That’s literally every house committee by default.
> > > when Grusch said “I can’t say that here” that was never going to be the end of that discussion > >
That tells us a literally nothing other than he was unwilling to do it or unable because of a myriad of potential reasons.
In that entire hearing those are literally the only two things that made you think this is credible?