I, for one, 100% believe that at least some of this is advanced, non-human tech.
Trying to convince HN about the "why" is at best problematic. I could give evidence from my own observations and experiences, but they would be easily dismissed due to lack of evidence.
I'll just say that we, as humans, do not fully understand how consciousness works. I'm certain that there are others in this galaxy who do, and I have personal experience to back that up. What percentage of HN is going to believe that I, for whatever reason, have come into contact with an advanced, non-human intelligence?
Spoiler: near zero. That's why I post about this topic on a burner account.
I mean, I’ll believe that something happened to you that has completely convinced you, and it’s a nice piece of data that helps explain why some people believe differently than I do. The goal of every discussion doesn’t have to be to convince the other person, just acknowledging the existence of differences is enough sometimes.
Since this is the HN crowd, I'll explain it this way: if you assume your brain is a biological machine, what if you could decipher its firmware and hack into it? What if you could remotely exploit it and take over its sensory inputs? It's hard to say if a contact is "conscious" or not because "they" seem to have the power to exploit and control it, to communicate by sending symbolic language and imagery.
Contact is difficult to explain to this crowd; when I turn the tables and imagine someone explaining their experience to me, it would sound like something indistinguishable from magic. Something so unbelievable that you would immediately discount it and look for alternate explanations, or question the person's sanity.
That is exactly the difficulty. I have a picture of an object in the sky (which I reported to MUFON) that occurred before this happened. But I have no evidence, other than the fact that other humans also witnessed the object, that it was real.
Just a reminder that Fermi's paradox is no longer a paradox if "they" are already here. ;-)
I'm not saying there are little green men in these unidentified aircraft, but if you were part of an interstellar civilization in this galaxy, and you identified there was a life-supporting planet a few light years away, you'd send probes there for sure... wouldn't you? We certainly would, if we had the means.
I don't think anthropomorphizing aliens is a good way to speculate on how they possibly would behave. I really don't have a better system, but I see this tendency in alot of discussions about 'them'. (Disclaimer: I usually play as isolationist in Stellaris)
I don't think it's anthropomorphism so much as logical deduction. Our planet's chemical makeup has been advertising its life-supporting properties for millions of years. Lately we've been (perhaps foolishly) advertising ourselves to the galaxy via radio, etc. Surely it would be interesting to other observers in the galaxy.
Perhaps by setting off nuclear weapons, we advertised ourselves as a potential threat, inviting more scrutiny.
Here's an article that discusses this concept in more detail, if you're interested:
In my view, reasoning "this is what we would've done" or placing logical deduction based on -our- understanding of a fantasized encounter is exactly anthropomorphism.
While I'm not a stranger to the notion that eventual intelligent alien beings might in many regards have similar behaviors, wants and needs as humans, I'm personally inclined to think of aliens as much, much higher on the kardashev scale (c.f. ghosts and angels as discussed elsewhere in this thread) than something I personally imagine as a couple of hundred years into-human-future tech.
Autonomous / AI probes is a pretty nice theory and I somewhat adher to it myself as a techie, but it does reek of anthropomorphism IMO.
In either case, all our fantasies are colored by our experiences, I guess what I'm saying is that even though I think anthropomorphizing aliens is bad, I'm just explaining it from my frame of reference, too.
I think too often UFO debates become too "either or". People will say "it can't be aliens; it's advanced technology from Russia or China!"
In all cases... why not both? I think we should open our minds to all the possibilities.
I think it's unlikely that humans are "special". There are billions of possibilities regarding how life could have evolved elsewhere. (And that's not even considering panspermia theories; it could also look very much the same in certain pockets of our, or other, galaxies, due to effects like that.) I think there is likely to be a wide variety of life. I think there are probably other human-like life forms in the universe, just as there are probably life forms that are so different that they might resemble ghosts and angels to us.
One interesting thing about UFO reports is that there are a wide variety when it comes to descriptions of the craft. You have the "classic" saucer shape, cigar shape, "tic tacs", spheres... (etc, etc). I think a lot of the confusion on this topic is due to this inconsistency. What if we're being visited by multiple types of interstellar life?
Anyway, some life in the universe might be more easily anthropomorphized in this way. Some not at all. I certainly don't want to anthropomorphize this phenomenon fully; then I would have to assume that there is a colonization ship on its way and we're all doomed. I hope advanced life in the galaxy isn't the same as humanity, otherwise our planet probably has a very violent future.
>I think there is likely to be a wide variety of life. I think there are probably other human-like life forms in the universe, just as there are probably life forms that are so different that they might resemble ghosts and angels to us.
>Anyway, some life in the universe might be more easily anthropomorphized in this way.
I completely agree.
>What if we're being visited by multiple types of interstellar life?
Sure, that's a possibility. This makes me think of that university (and more places certainly exist) that was simultaneously hacked by two different APTs (if memory serves me). Maybe humans/Earth is really that interesting that there are several different kinds of aliens, or alien ship designs from the same species, at the same time here. Intuitively that doesn't sit well with my gut instinct, on the other hand as it is an unknown, unexplained, speculative phenomenon, I guess all bets are off...
You can look to how other animals behave on the Earth if you want to step outside of the "anthropomorphic" lens. Perhaps it would still be a "terrestropmorphic" but I think it's well established on Earth that beings that need certain conditions to continue existing seem to be interested in signs that lead them to other areas that advertise those conditions. Species all across the phylogenetic tree exhibit this behavior regardless of intelligence, size, etc.
There was a nice article in Ars Technica[0] about the number of civilizations on other planets that could have detected our human civilization, it was depressingly low.
Speaking as someone who has seen evidence that remove viewing actually works, put simply: we don't know. But it certainly implies that we don't know everything about the universe and how it works.
I would also point out that any non-obvious technical advancement wouldn't have a plausible mechanism of action, until we learn enough to figure it out.
It's a puzzle I would certainly like to figure out. But it's also a puzzle with far-reaching implications for both physics and society. It would have massive implications for privacy, and even calls free will into question. (If it's possible to remote-view the future, is that just one possible future, or is it /the/ predetermined future?).
You know what? On second thought, even having seen it work, I would be more comfortable staying in denial and assuming it's bullshit. (And THAT is why all this is classified.)
Exactly, except for your last sentence I totally agree. I wish this was a more widely held view. How interesting would it be to build devices that interact with this effect, among other benefits that could come from research and wide use.
I don't know if there's classified accepted theories about how this works, but I think there's no public info that has been supported by science.
Your last sentence I think it's maybe a factor why it's classified... But I think the fact that this is a weapon and intelligence source must be the main one. But given that, why would there be so much unclassified from center lane? I think it only makes sense logically if they have a countermeasure... Which is super interesting in itself.
About the future I don't think it changes it or affects free will as much as people think and not more than anything else. For instance say you're driving down the highway and you're trying to get to some place and what can you do you don't have a map you can just read the signs and try and make the right turn offs and then find your way there. But if I stop your car and give you a GPS suddenly you know exactly how to get there and maybe the information is not always accurate but it's better than not having a map at all. It lets you see down the highway and down the path much further than if you didn't have that augmented information. I think this ability is just like that. Did the GPS change your future because it told you that there's traffic up ahead or this particular route is going to be quicker than this other route or does it mean you don't have free will because it showed you the correct turn off starts here and you then take it, whereas if you didn't have this GPS you were going to miss it.
I think every creature needs to have some idea of the future in front of it so I think everybody's always getting some sort of model of or information about their possible futures and they're making choices with regard to that.... does that information or them having choices mean that the future is predetermined or there's multiple paths...I think that's a separate maybe philosophical question. But I think all that this kind of ability does is augment and provide more information about those possibilities. I don't think it's fundamentally changes the game on the question of free will or predetermination.
I have my own theory about how it works. That there's the informational field, which contains all information about everything that ever exists, and you can tune into, and query this. I think there's quantum structures in our brains that are transceivers to access this. I wonder what's the overlap between consciousness and this informational field.... And is the informational field encoded in particles/fields we can already detect, or something else.
Well, to be honest my last sentence was a bit tongue-in-cheek. I truly do want to know why and how it all works. I'm just not comfortable with the idea that anyone with the know-how to do this can invade my privacy, and there's nothing I can do about it.
And I'm not comfortable with the idea that a skilled enough person can use remote viewing to predict the future with near-100% accuracy. Firstly, it just doesn't seem fair. :) Secondly, it makes me question my own free agency in the world. For example, imagine I remote-view your future 5 years from now. Today you might scoff, thinking it's likely to be bullshit. But imagine that ALL my predictions eventually come true. It would feel like the exact opposite of the butterfly effect... as if the moment I viewed your future, it was "observed" and thus became reality. Every decision that you make (or anyone in your life makes) was, from the moment of my prediction, set in stone. I would like to think that the world doesn't work like that... but strangely enough, that's what I've experienced.
That's really interesting. Does predicting it alter the path and fix it more than if you didn't know? I suppose you can always, "choose against" once knowing... But i think most people can relate they have moments of free will and moments where they felt out of control, such as suddenly overcome with emotion in the moment and said or did something they might not have had they thought more. Interesting, I wonder if no matter how far you try to run from your "fate", these little moments of "giving in to temptation" drag you back to the predicted path... Who knows
Anyway, I'm really curious to know the story and details of what happened. If you don't feel like sharing here, you could email me if you still wanted to tell it :)
I think I'm a caffeine addict. If I try to quit caffeine, I'll have flu-like symptoms and migraines for at least a week or two. I can see how that's less bad than a heroin addiction, but isn't addiction somewhat of a spectrum?
As someone who has personally seen a couple of these things, I'm convinced that either extraterrestrial anthropologists are observing our planet, or human governments are operating highly advanced, top-secret craft. (I tend to think it's probably both.)
Think of it this way: if a group of violent, power-hungry monkeys on a nearby planet invented ICBMs and nuclear weapons, you'd want to keep an eye on them... wouldn't you?
Why would I want to keep an eye on them when "nearby" is an interstellar distance that they have no practical possibility of crossing any time soon, when I have technology that massively outclasses theirs, and when I know where they are but they don't even know I exist?
Wouldn't I have better and more interesting things to do with my time?
Second: technological explosion. It took humans about a hundred thousand years to advance from stone tools to the age of agriculture, but only two hundred years to go from the steam age to the information age. Explosive advances in technology could occur at any moment in any civilization in the universe. Thus, even a primitive civilization that appears as harmless as a baby or a sprout is full of potential danger.
Pure fantasy. The only real advance in the last 400 years has been the development of an organised, systematic approach to science. The scientific method has driven all development. And the science says we're not travelling between stars any time soon.
Obviously, for the extraterrestrial theory to work, you have to imagine you can warp or fold spacetime to get where you need to go, rather than using a conventional engine. Then the universe gets a bit smaller.
>Obviously, for the extraterrestrial theory to work, you have to imagine you can warp or fold spacetime to get where you need to go, rather than using a conventional engine.
That's fantasy, though. One might as well imagine aliens coming to Earth riding dragons through magic portals, as far as reality is concerned.
For any extraterrestrial theory to work and be plausible as a speculative explanation for real world events, it has to assume the speed of light is an inescapable hard limit on everything, because that seems to be the universe we actually live in.
Wormholes can exist on hard and solid physics theories, and people are trying to find out if they can make this work in practical situations.
Therefore, your "fantasy" of them coming to earth through magic portals may not be so far off. Whether or not a dragon makes for a good spaceship remains to be seen...
> Wormholes can exist on hard and solid physics theories, and people are trying to find out if they can make this work in practical situations.
You kind of skipped over the part where someone discovers that wormholes do actually exist, and that it's possible for anything to traverse them, much less circumvent the speed of light while doing so. There is, as yet, not "this" to make work in any practical situation. Theories abound, but not all of them agree that wormholes, if they were to exist, are even practical[0].
I favor the theory that they send out unmanned craft that have the ability to manufacture more craft when they reach a star system and repeat the process. I imagine we might have similar technically within 1000 years or so and might just do it. Then it's just a matter of 100s of thousands of years to visit all systems in our Galaxy.
I want to believe... But Occam's razors makes me think it's birds, meteorological phenomena, and other things you can misconstrue for more in a high stress situation (or through IR cameras).
I don't want to believe... it's simpler not to. There's a huge stigma against belief in this sort of thing. It's obvious by the responses on this thread; even if you have radar that corroborates sightings filmed on an IR camera, our collective response is still disbelief.
I think this problem is difficult for science to study because it's not readily reproducible. Not only that, but any evidence that /does/ exist has been ridiculed, suppressed, and/or outright ignored for too long. Now we're seeing efforts to reduce the stigma, and I applaud that.
