The Paranormalization of the Plastic Bag

February 5, 2024 9:15 PM

No, Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise? via Longreads. "Thoughtful, sensible-seeming, non-crankish people at Harvard, at The New Yorker, at the New York Times, and at the Pentagon seemed to be drifting ever closer to the conclusion that alien spaceships had visited Earth. Everyone was being appallingly open-minded. Yet even after more than 70 years of claimed sightings, there was simply no good evidence. In an age of ubiquitous cameras and fancy scopes, there was no footage that wasn’t blurry and jumpy and taken from far away."

"...There was just this guy Grusch telling the world that the government had a “crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program” for flying saucers that was totally supersecret and that only people in the program knew about the program. Grusch said he had learned about it while serving on a UAP task force at the Pentagon. He interviewed more than 40 people, and they told him wild things. He said he couldn’t reveal the names of the people he interviewed. He shared no firsthand information and showed no photos. He said the program went back decades, back to the saucer crash that happened in Roswell, New Mexico."

---
"Something unusual was going on, that’s clear. And the reports had elements in common: roundish wobbly objects, shiny, grouped together, connected, tethered.

What were these people looking at?

I’m going to have to say it, and I’m sorry because I know UFO people roll their eyes at the word balloons. But they need to get over it because balloons of various kinds — high-altitude weather balloons, cosmic-ray research balloons, sound-detecting balloons, thunderstorm-study balloons, aerial-reconnaissance balloons, “rockoons” that shoot missiles, propaganda balloons, toy balloons, and, most secret, crop-warfare balloons —
are at the heart of this high-altitude adventure we’ve been on as a culture. None of it is paranormal, but it’s still strange."

---

And strange it is - General Mills, biological warfare, space-age plastics...

posted by storybored (132 comments total)

you know when someone winks and then does it again and then a few years later, do it again, they just have new data.

"a necessary progress towards which they had no moral responsibility. They did not realize that this security of progress was a thing still to be won or lost, and that the time to win it was a time that passed. They went about their affairs energetically enough, and yet with a curious idleness towards those threatening things. No one troubled over the real dangers of mankind."

-H.G.Wells. 'The War in the Air.' 1908.
posted by clavdivs at 10:05 PM on February 5 [6 favorites]

Not only are the distances involved in interstellar travel just unimaginably huge, the time dilation involved in sending craft to other solar systems means the travelers could (in theory and somehow) spend 200 years voyaging while 25,000 years pass on the home planet.

There’s just no plausible version of interstellar travel that doesn’t involve massive implausible loopholes in the fundamentals of physics. It’s staggering to me that otherwise intelligent people ever kick it around as a possibility.
posted by argybarg at 10:05 PM on February 5 [45 favorites]

Also generally what bullshit artists are selling is bullshit.
posted by Artw at 10:15 PM on February 5 [17 favorites]

There has never been a worse time to be a UFO skeptic. Last month, Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon office responsible for investigating unexplained aerial events, stepped down. He said he was tired of being harassed and accused of hiding evidence, and he lamented an erosion in “our capacity for rational, evidence-based critical thinking.”

Sean Kirkpatrick actually strikes me as ridiculously open minded to the point of his brains almost falling out, but unfortunately for him not a bullshitter and actually concerned with the existence or nonexistence of evidence, so this entire ridiculous hearing process was aimed at ousting him and replacing him with someone dumber or more corrupt. Guess it’s succeeding.
posted by Artw at 10:20 PM on February 5 [21 favorites]

Could there be Alien Balloons?
posted by sammyo at 10:21 PM on February 5 [16 favorites]

“If Mick were really interested in this stuff,” Kean told The New Yorker, “he wouldn’t debunk every single video.” She and Blumenthal wrote more UFO pieces for the Times, republishing the “Gimbal” video as if it still meant something when it almost certainly means nothing at all.

A song for all the true believers
posted by flabdablet at 10:25 PM on February 5 [1 favorite]

This article does a decent job capturing that both the mainstream scientific consensus and the view from seasoned UFO watcher watchers is that there isn't anything new or evidentiary here.

The latter is maybe a little more interesting. Ken Hite, a game designer who loves the odd and weird ('eliptonic' in his made up word), looked at Grusch and basically commented that the US military doesn't spend time rejecting qualified candidates just because they are committed UFO hobbyists. The Ross and Cary podcast had basically the same reaction watching his testimony.

The mainstream press is basically "reporting the controversy" on this, without looking into it in any depth. It's been a generation or two since the last wave of big hype, so to a lot of reporters this feels new and thus they imagine it's different. ("Credible dupes are a renewable resource" is a relevant line from Ken Hite.)

Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard

The blogger Mark Palko pointed out the Loeb is exactly the sort of person the press has issues with. Impeccable credentials that sound great on the subject (Ph. D. in astrophysics, massively well respected leading researcher) who has no actual expertise on the sort of thing he's talking about. (His work is in things like gravitational lensing and black holes, not observing asteroids or the chemical composition of metals.)

This happens. As a young chemist I really want to believe Linus Pauling, one of the greatest chemists to have ever lived, big contributor in many areas around biochemistry, not to mention force for world peace; and yet a font of bad information on human vitamin C pathways.
posted by mark k at 10:32 PM on February 5 [22 favorites]

At this point, it seems weird that, if they are bullshit peddlers, they haven't hopped on dalle and generated some photographic evidence of, for instance, the craft that is larger on the inside than the outside. I'm not sure what that means.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 10:52 PM on February 5 [1 favorite]

Not only are the distances involved in interstellar travel just unimaginably huge, the time dilation involved in sending craft to other solar systems means the travelers could (in theory and somehow) spend 200 years voyaging while 25,000 years pass on the home planet.

There’s just no plausible version of interstellar travel that doesn’t involve massive implausible loopholes in the fundamentals of physics. It’s staggering to me that otherwise intelligent people ever kick it around as a possibility.

I hope we can all enjoy the irony that the second paragraph assumes that the everything in the first paragraph was knowledge handed down on stone tablet from upon high, and yet the everything in there wasn't even imagined nor proven until just barely 100 years ago.

An untold number of ideas are "massive implausible loopholes in the fundamentals of physics" until a patent clerk thinks up a new theory and and that theory is proven correct by a solar eclipse a decade later.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:58 PM on February 5 [17 favorites]

Anybody who honestly believes that visits from extraterrestrial aliens or beings from "another dimension" are a serious contender for an explanation of any observation ever made to date is an ignorant rube with nothing even close to any real sense of proportion.

People accuse me of being offensively condescending and closed-minded when I say things like that. Well, accuse away. On this issue, I'm just right and they're just not. Simple as that. And I am fed up to the back teeth with being expected to walk on eggshells around fools purely to help them keep on being fools.

Ignorance is unavoidable, part and parcel of conscious existence, but wilful ignorance is contemptible. If you don't want people pointing and laughing at you for believing stupid things, don't believe stupid things.
posted by flabdablet at 11:00 PM on February 5 [38 favorites]

Anyway, based on my recent perusal of the UFO related subreddits over the last ~6 months, if you made a scale of 1-10 and put the "Disclosure" folks at 1 and the "there is no evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence exists" at the 10, the very worst "Stop the Steal/Trump Actually Won" insane person you can think of is like an 8.5. It is unbelievable over there.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 11:02 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]

The idea that extraterrestrial spacecraft visit this planet on the regular should be unbelievable.

It isn't. More's the pity.
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]

the time dilation involved in sending craft to other solar systems means the travelers could (in theory and somehow) spend 200 years voyaging while 25,000 years pass on the home planet.

But that also means that if an alien craft can get close to the speed of light, then the alien can reach just about anywhere in the galaxy within his/her lifetime--no need to hibernate or to build a multi-generation ship. Of course, that alien can't go back home because, as you say, 1000s of years will have passed on their planet of origin.

But if aliens just want to explore and don't mind one-way trips, then this time dilation actually makes it more likely an alien will come visiting.
posted by eye of newt at 11:50 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]

I think we all still have a colonialist interpretation of history more deeply embedded in our thinking than we realise. We tacitly take it for granted that the great story of humanity, the history of ‘progress’ is one of exploration. That means it is psychologically necessary to us to think that there are still new lands out there: that Mars must be a rational target for colonisation and even the stars must be accessible. It follows that Earth must be accessible to rival colonial powers from out there, and why wouldn’t they be here already?
posted by Phanx at 11:52 PM on February 5 [39 favorites]

I mean, did nobody really listen to ‘The Last Resort’??
posted by Phanx at 11:53 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]

I fly balloons. It's really fun. Since the Chinese Spy Balloon I have stopped, half because of expenses but half because I feel like I'm going to be attacked in the next 'satanic panic' wave of hysteria
that people have about flying objects.

The ignorance is massive and self-reinforcing
posted by eustatic at 11:57 PM on February 5 [23 favorites]

It follows that Earth must be accessible to rival colonial powers from out there, and why wouldn’t they be here already?

It's conquest all the way up.
posted by flabdablet at 12:00 AM on February 6 [4 favorites]

I fly balloons. It's really fun.

As an irresponsible youngster, I once flew a home made kite out to the end of a whole kilometre of fishing line just to see if I could.

It was a lovely warm summer afternoon, the kite caught a thermal and began to circle, and that line ended up pointing straight up into the sky as it came off my reel. All of it, all the way to the fixing knot. Stayed up for a full hour before I began to reel it back in.

I had to use binoculars to be able to actually see the kite once it had got more than half way out. Fuck knows what kind of panic it would have started had I made it from metallized mylar instead of black builder's plastic.
posted by flabdablet at 12:08 AM on February 6 [23 favorites]

Black plastic just means you created a Mothman instead of a flying saucer.
posted by Scattercat at 12:19 AM on February 6 [17 favorites]

"But that also means that if an alien craft can get close to the speed of light, then the alien can reach just about anywhere in the galaxy within his/her lifetime--no need to hibernate or to build a multi-generation ship."

Space ain't a perfect vacuum and the interstellar medium has about one atom per cubic centimeter on average and you'll hit an actual dust particle about every 1000km. Traveling at relativistic speeds is fun until you've hit enough of those at near light speed. You'll need some serious ablation shielding. An example calculation for just the actual dust I've seen suggests you'd loose about 112m of front facing material just traveling to Alpha Centauri from Earth at 0.99c.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 12:21 AM on February 6 [24 favorites]

you created a Mothman instead of a flying saucer

No mysterious circling glint in the sky, though. Even through the binocs, my kite might plausibly have been taken for an eagle.
posted by flabdablet at 12:22 AM on February 6

You'll need some serious ablation shielding

No, see, this is where we just use our magical Bussard ramjet to suck up all that stuff and use it for propulsion. Having a spacecraft-sized object generate a planet-scale magnetic field shaped exactly how we'd need it should be no problem, it's obviously just a simple matter of engineering. We'll have that by Thursday, just ask Elon.
posted by flabdablet at 12:31 AM on February 6 [12 favorites]

An untold number of ideas are "massive implausible loopholes in the fundamentals of physics" until a patent clerk thinks up a new theory and and that theory is proven correct by a solar eclipse a decade later.

This happens much much less often than it seems. The belief that it's frequent is part of what drives the hype around things like NFTs and "AI": things that seem inevitable often aren't.

It's possible that some of the things that seem impossible are not, of course. But there is no way to tell ahead of time which is actually impossible/completely unworkable. It is not true that all technological barriers yield to time/effort/people/money, and what fruits remain to be had from that tree are up higher and higher. And the speed of light has proven to be a very durable constant.
posted by JHarris at 12:39 AM on February 6 [26 favorites]

Traveling at relativistic speeds is fun until you've hit enough of those at near light speed. You'll need some serious ablation shielding.

That's an interesting thought. I'm (probably obviously) not a physicist, but I just read on a DOE site that "as an object approaches the speed of light, its observed mass becomes infinitely large", so that alien's mass will be much higher when getting close to the speed of light (at least it will appear that way from the point of view of the dust particle) so maybe not so much shielding is needed.

But then again, the same site says that energy needed to get close to the speed of light approaches infinity, so maybe we are down to 10-30% the speed of light.

The odds are probably just about zero anyway considering how rare life appears to be, much less intelligent life, and even much less intelligent life that decides to take this crazy one-way trip, and somehow picks our planet out of billions, and happens to reach Earth at exactly the extremely narrow time period when there is intelligent life on this planet.
posted by eye of newt at 12:48 AM on February 6 [6 favorites]

he lamented an erosion in “our capacity for rational, evidence-based critical thinking.”

Maybe it is the carbon dioxide.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:36 AM on February 6 [6 favorites]

Coming soon to a government commission near you: the existence of fairies with the bodies of nubile women and butterfly wings.
posted by Metacircular at 1:40 AM on February 6 [10 favorites]

There's no privileged reference frame for how that math shakes out, unfortunately. Interstellar dust has a mean mass of 3*10-16 kg, and at 0.99c the dust's apparent mass and thus its kinetic energy is increased comparably, which means the dust speck is hitting your hull with 164.17 joules of kinetic energy.
And, if I'm doing the math right based on the aforementioned dust specks every 1000km, you're taking around 300 of those hits every second at 0.99c. Which works out to your spaceship needing to cope with a continuous 50,000 watts of dust impact energy. (And if you're using a magic forcefield to collect the dust and bring it with you for fuel you need to be putting 50 kilowatts of power into your forcefield to do that, since that too involves negating the kinetic energy of the dust relative to yourself.)
posted by NMcCoy at 1:40 AM on February 6 [6 favorites]

You can spot a crackpot theory because it often includes another crackpot theory that has to also be true.

So: (a) Aliens from an unfathomable distance away have visited earth, and (b) You've never seen one because a huge organization of government officials, shady characters, and aliens works tirelessly to keep the secret.

I'm a tiny bit open-minded about (a) -- in an infinite universe and given enough time maybe an alien intelligence exists, and maybe it could visit us -- but (b) assumes a level of sheer efficiency and competence possessed by hundreds of plain old 21st-century human beings. THAT I can't believe.
posted by mmoncur at 2:06 AM on February 6 [42 favorites]

if you're using a magic forcefield to collect the dust and bring it with you for fuel you need to be putting 50 kilowatts of power into your forcefield to do that, since that too involves negating the kinetic energy of the dust relative to yourself

Oh, you nattering naysayers with your needless negativity. Where are the bold visionaries the people cry out for, is what I want to know. Fucking universe isn't going to colonize itself now is it. Get cracking, science men. And knock if off with the "oh it's so haaaaard" whining. Nobody wants to hear that.
posted by flabdablet at 2:07 AM on February 6 [9 favorites]

As I've said in these discussions before, I doubt we've had physical visitations from aliens because the science doesn't really back that up. But to me, that's not the end of the conversation, rather it opens up more questions about the psychological and sociological reasons for this phenomenon. Or, in my more wooey moments, questions about consciousness and how we interpret reality and how reliable that is.

So I'm in the agnostic camp and while the atheists calling me a moron might be right, they are decidedly less fun at parties.
posted by slimepuppy at 2:58 AM on February 6 [9 favorites]

The argument of “science has been surprised by findings about fundamental forces in the past, therefore all fundamental forces are infinitely negotiable” is a terrible one.

Interstellar travel is nigh-impossible and always will be.
posted by argybarg at 3:27 AM on February 6 [15 favorites]

When I was a kid I fully bought into UFOs. I read my share, and several other people’s shares, of paranormal books. I honestly think that if it hadn’t been the case that my secondary school’s library had a subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, I’d have continued on that path. Ironically, it was a picture of a UFO on the cover that attracted my attention.

Being presented with the skeptical side of the UFO question was eye-opening, and I ended up reading through all the issues of the magazine at the library. Looking back to the 1990s, what’s so peculiar is that back then there was ready access to television shows, books and magazines that espoused a belief in UFOs, but the skeptical side rarely got an airing.
posted by Kattullus at 3:43 AM on February 6 [7 favorites]

"All true," he said.
"True?"
"To a greater or lesser degree, but all true. Strange phenomena that were previously ascribed to gods, magic or the devil are now put down to science. Today a shape in the sky or a wandering dot against the darkness of night is an aeroplane or a satellite, or Chinese fire-lanterns, or luminous bats escaped from a CIA laboratory. A hundred years ago they were phantom airships; a hundred years earlier they were floating islands; and before that they were angels or witches on broomsticks. The lights remain the same, only the explanations change."
"What are they, though?" I asked. "These lights in the sky?"
"Venus," Alexandyr said. "Always Venus. She loves a practical joke."
(From The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (third edition), by an author I am too modest to name.)
posted by Hogshead at 3:46 AM on February 6 [28 favorites]

If an alien civilization could overcome all of the issues associated with extreme space travel you'd expect them to do more once they got here than occasionally buzz around like a bunch of drunk teenagers in dad's car on a Saturday night.
posted by tommasz at 5:03 AM on February 6 [12 favorites]

Tommasz, I think that makes the myth all the more alluring. If one allows oneself to accept the possibility of the visitor, then the question of why the visit becomes available as well. Throw in a cover-up and one has an endless supply of theorizing to do — including the very important “me vs them”. If space travel were easier, I suspect that alien conspiracies would be less common.
posted by dbx at 5:36 AM on February 6

"No, Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?"

Because they want to believe, duh. Because aliens are a lot more fun than just more damn weather balloons. Heck, I'd love to "believe" except all of the "evidence" is consistently crappy.

You can spot a crackpot theory because it often includes another crackpot theory that has to also be true.
So: (a) Aliens from an unfathomable distance away have visited earth, and (b) You've never seen one because a huge organization of government officials, shady characters, and aliens works tirelessly to keep the secret.
I'm a tiny bit open-minded about (a) -- in an infinite universe and given enough time maybe an alien intelligence exists, and maybe it could visit us -- but (b) assumes a level of sheer efficiency and competence possessed by hundreds of plain old 21st-century human beings. THAT I can't believe.

Agreed.

Today a shape in the sky or a wandering dot against the darkness of night is an aeroplane or a satellite, or Chinese fire-lanterns, or luminous bats escaped from a CIA laboratory. A hundred years ago they were phantom airships; a hundred years earlier they were floating islands; and before that they were angels or witches on broomsticks. The lights remain the same, only the explanations change."

Vorlons. It's totally Vorlons.

Coming soon to a government commission near you: the existence of fairies with the bodies of nubile women and butterfly wings.

I'll say the same things I do every time aliens come up: (a) aliens are always disappointing, (b) I have decided it's far more fun and "plausible" to buy into the theory of ultraterrestrials instead. Like seriously, if fairies exist, they're ultraterrestrials, dude!

As Baron Munchausen points out, throughout history there's always been UFO sightings of what the hell ever, we just have different explanations over the years. If it wasn't weather balloons in 1800-whatever, then what IS that? But annoyingly, the fairies in spaceships fly so well we can't get evidence, and here we are again.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:38 AM on February 6 [4 favorites]

What I find implausible is the idea that interstellar spacecraft will traverse the entire galaxy, navigate through god knows what avoiding rogue asteroids and dust and black holes and supernovas with no problem at all, then when approaching our tiny blue marble, they’ll suddenly for no apparent reason lose all control and crash and die so we can find them

I mean sure that totally checks out
posted by caution live frogs at 6:08 AM on February 6 [19 favorites]

We tacitly take it for granted that the great story of humanity, the history of ‘progress’ is one of exploration.
Phanx

Because it is and has nothing to do with colonialism.

Humanity spent tens of thousands of years spreading across the globe before colonialism. Ancient humans achieved astonishing feats of exploration like the ancestors of Polynesians spreading across the Pacific.

Exploration is fundamental to being human.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:44 AM on February 6 [7 favorites]

And the speed of light has proven to be a very durable constant.
JHarris

A constant itself proved a mere 119 years ago, prior to which the accepted idea among even the most intelligent and accomplished scientists and mathematicians of the day such as Lorentz and Poincaré were the various Aether theories.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:56 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

I've always felt there's a nonzero chunk of the UFO delusion being based on the simple premise that we are the most important thing after all. Of course aliens would want to come see us, just like the angels did, because we're awesome and God says so.
posted by aramaic at 6:56 AM on February 6 [7 favorites]

We're curious creatures. It's hard not to assume that intelligence goes hand in hand with curiosity & the desire for exploration.

You know what would be hilarious? If the first extraterrestrial contact happened by accident. They aren't curious and they don't have the slightest interest in us, our resources, or anything. They pop in, go "oh shoot", get their bearings and leave because they'd accidentally taken a wrong turn on their interdimensional freeway or something.
posted by Baethan at 6:58 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

Check out Mick West's videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MickWest/videos . He examines specific videos of purported UFOs/UAPs and explains exactly where an object is, how it is moving, where and what a camera is doing, and what can be explained by artifacts or aspects of e.g. infrared nightvision, camera motion, zoom, etc.
posted by thefool at 7:11 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

Mekka Okereke pointed out that the best evidence possible that we have not been visited by aliens is the presidency of Donald Trump.

If the US government had convincing evidence of aliens, the president would know, thus Trump would know.

And that would mean he had... decided to keep quiet about something he could be bragging about? For the best interests of the country?

Please.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:18 AM on February 6 [34 favorites]

(Ah, saw he's mentioned in TFA, sorry! But still recommend browsing some of the "debunking" videos.)
posted by thefool at 7:26 AM on February 6

I simply can never get past the quite arrogant concept of beings who have mastered interstellar travel visiting Earth. Why would they do this? The idea seems akin to humans creating time-travel and using it to go way back and looking at the slime molds floating in some primordial pond.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:38 AM on February 6

Baethan: You know what would be hilarious? If the first extraterrestrial contact happened by accident. They aren't curious and they don't have the slightest interest in us, our resources, or anything. They pop in, go "oh shoot", get their bearings and leave because they'd accidentally taken a wrong turn on their interdimensional freeway or something.

That’s pretty much the premise of the excellent Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers. Here’s how it’s explained by one character in the book (handily quoted on the Wikipedia page):

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

posted by Kattullus at 7:42 AM on February 6 [17 favorites]

Space exploration becomes much more feasible if you can get rid of the fleshy meat-sacks... Throw a bunch of AI (or uploaded humans or whatever) in a probe with an organic chemistry kit. Send thousands of copies to the nearest stars, where they will identify and adapt some version of life to the conditions of the best available planet. Design shit that will for last 10k years of sub-light travel. Play the long game...
posted by kaibutsu at 7:47 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

If the US government had convincing evidence of aliens, the president would know, thus Trump would know.


Nah. Presidents come and go. If there were an alien secret I doubt every president would be made of aware of it, and trump is definitely the kind of president you would not tell.
posted by Liquidwolf at 7:59 AM on February 6 [3 favorites]

I was walking east one night. The sky was very dark, because of clouds. Suddenly, a very bright light appeared, motionless in the sky. I couldn’t tell what it was. Then, abeam of light extended north and south away from it in straight lines, bright steady lines that reached the horizon. The central light began to expand, like it was coming closer. With a bit of relief, I realized a cloud front was moving east, and the moon light up the trailing edge of the cloud line.

The sky is weird, guys.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:00 AM on February 6 [6 favorites]

One key irony of the UFO + government coverup conspiracy theroies is that it requires interpreting so much military or other institutional reporting as if was infallible (and entirely objective) expertise-based, authoritative data. But, these reports/photos/videos were almost all done in the context of incomplete and error prone processes, and by nonexperts, and with plenty of biases and mistakes. (E.g. just ignorance or misinterpretation of how their cameras or other equipment works, maybe an officer or investigator just getting some cursory and shoddy reporting done so they can move on to real work, or people making conjectures and comments just to sound smart or knowing or getting attention [don't we all do that to some extent?].)

That said I still love the overall UFO mythos and what it reveals about our culture and psychology. (And don't doubt there are plenty of rare phenomena on earth and space that we just don't know much about yet.)
posted by thefool at 8:03 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

While I'm certainly not saying UFOs are visiting Earth right now, I'm always a bit perplexed by the declaration that it could never happen, or that aliens would never do such and such, or that these things are all impossible. We keep saying over and over again that we have a fundamental understanding of how things work, only to be proven wrong time and time again, it seems like we would stop making sweeping declarative statements of how the universe has to be.
posted by Zargon X at 8:07 AM on February 6 [10 favorites]

I always want to scream: "If secrets like this are 'only known by those covering it up', then how did you find out?"

Then accuse them of covering it up, I suppose.
posted by grubi at 8:08 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

The historical reports of UFOs are clearly people witnessing military drone research. All of the classic elements of those reports (erratic movements, acceleration or maneuvering too fast for a regular plane/lethal to a human pilot, etc.) exactly describe drone flight. It’s just that in 1960 if you saw an experimental military drone prototype whizzing around in the night sky as you drove by a military base you’d have no clue what you’re looking at.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:09 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

I'm always a bit perplexed by the declaration that it could never happen, or that aliens would never do such and such, or that these things are all impossible. We keep saying over and over again that we have a fundamental understanding of how things work, only to be proven wrong time and time again, it seems like we would stop making sweeping declarative statements of how the universe has to be.

Agreed. We project human ideas and motivations onto a phenomenon that may be very different than our current understanding of reality.
posted by Liquidwolf at 8:19 AM on February 6 [3 favorites]

So the argument in this seems to be that people who are reporting having seen things are flat-out wrong because space is big? Things don't have to be coming from very far away for them to be something new. "Here's why it can't be space aliens from millions of miles away" doesn't address all the possibilities.

I come down more on the side of unidentified being a deliberate wording choice over unknown. A lot more is known than what's being identified for everyone. The US shot down a Chinese balloon clearly being used for surveillance, and then later shot down a few other things that we didn't get to see. The US isn't obligated to keep Chinese secrets secret, so I think the fact that there were pictures of that balloon but not the other objects is a big clue as to whose secrets those were.

In any case, I think this article came out before the publication of the unclassified version of the inspector general's report, which — US-centric, yes —talks about how the lack of coordination between the various branches of the military with respect to what members of the military are reporting they've witnessed is a bad idea.
posted by emelenjr at 8:19 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

The frustrating thing is it often feels like these people could be allies in enjoying the amazement and scariness of the size of the universe. There are undoubtedly other lifeforms in the universe and at least some that or more or less advanced than us in technology and culture (we have the worst culture in the universe, to our knowledge). However, they're still bound by the same principles that bind everything else too, which means that ever making contact or travelling is so astronomically unlikely that we will never do it, but if we did, it would never be the kind of thing you just pop in for a quick stealth survey and oops get spotted by all kinds of rednecks and goobers with the naked eye. Can figure out travelling interstellar distances, just drop the ball at the last moment inexplicably.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:32 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

"Here's why it can't be space aliens from millions of miles away" doesn't address all the possibilities.

"Millions of miles" does not even begin to put the ghost of a scratch in a smudge on a dent in the distances involved, and the more potential sources of visitation get posited in any likelihood calculation the bigger those distances need to be. Like I said: no real sense of proportion.
posted by flabdablet at 8:38 AM on February 6 [14 favorites]

Avi Loeb isn’t a conspiracy theorist, he’s a sexist jackass making astrophysics and SETI hostile and unwelcoming. But that shouldn’t discount the field he’s working in: “artifact SETI.”

Artifact SETI is the idea that while it’s improbable that aliens are continuously visiting our solar system, it’s not impossible to imagine detecting technological artifacts of previous, visitations or accidental flybys, even if these artifacts are extremely ancient. This is a far cry from constant alien visitation and really shouldn’t be lumped with the other UFO stuff.
posted by Headfullofair at 8:55 AM on February 6 [4 favorites]

Someone has probably already made this comment, as I'm only half-way through the piece and haven't started the thread yet, but...

Winzen soon left General Mills and formed his own balloon company, Winzen Research, which manufactured plastic balloons as tall as 20-story buildings. Sometime around 1950, Moore took Winzen’s place as head of aeronautical research and development at the cereal company.

What the fuck??
posted by slogger at 8:59 AM on February 6 [7 favorites]

it's far more fun and "plausible" to buy into the theory of ultraterrestrials instead.

From the DEEP ARCHIVES:

Sharp, of course, asks questions. Specifically, who is after him?

"THEY are ultra-terrestrials," says Hunter.
"Aliens!?" says Sharp.

"THEY are mystical-metaphysical entities who exist on the borderland between matter and energy, between dream and reality. THEY create a fog of confusion around themselves and use it to assert complete control over so-called reality."

"I don't buy it," says Sharp.

"Yet it owns you," says Hunter, "And it's hungry as a god. And so am I." He leads Sharp onto a rickety old service elevator, moving upward now. "Let's get some breakfast."

posted by philip-random at 9:02 AM on February 6

Historical note—Otto Winzen may have done some early engineering on plastic balloons at General Mills, but it was his then-wife, Vera Winzen, who actually figured out the manufacturing and was his business partner in Winzen Research. Later, Vera Simons continued to be the world’s premiere balloon builder and oversaw design, inflation and launch of the balloons in the Navy’s Manhigh program.
posted by Headfullofair at 9:08 AM on February 6 [7 favorites]

If there were an alien secret I doubt every president would be made of aware of it,

I heard Bill Clinton once asked the CIA for the real story on UFOs and the JFK assassination, and they wouldn't tell him.

A song for all the true believers:

and another: Praying to the Aliens
posted by Rash at 9:10 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

From the DEEP ARCHIVES

From what?
posted by neuron at 9:12 AM on February 6

"The Space People will contact us when they can make money by doing so." - from Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense liner notes
posted by neuron at 9:14 AM on February 6 [3 favorites]

I simply can never get past the quite arrogant concept of beings who have mastered interstellar travel visiting Earth. Why would they do this?

because they're Beatles fans obviously. Unfortunately arriving a bit late to the party.
posted by philip-random at 9:18 AM on February 6

It's hard not to assume that intelligence goes hand in hand with curiosity & the desire for exploration.

I would vastly prefer it to be hard not to assume that intelligence goes hand in hand with curiosity about and respect for the web of life of which we form a part, and the desire to live to a ripe old age in peace and contentment in numbers insufficient to fuck ourselves and our neighbours over, but alas, you're probably correct; the colonialist mindset does indeed seem to rest on a horribly skewed idea of the kinds of traits that "intelligence" should refer to.

Sallying forth on expeditions to elsewhere is the crudest and stupidest way for an intelligent species to deal with local insufficiencies. We pat ourselves on the back as this massively smart exception to the general run of life and yet show precious little evidence of that being the case. If we were actually smart, we'd work out how to organize ourselves into something more closely resembling a multicellular planetary organism than a candida overgrowth with spore ejection aspirations.
posted by flabdablet at 9:20 AM on February 6 [3 favorites]

I simply can never get past the quite arrogant concept of beings who have mastered interstellar travel visiting Earth. Why would they do this?

Because Earth is a planet with intelligent life. Why wouldn't they want to visit it?
posted by Liquidwolf at 9:22 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

Picking up Fox broadcasts for a few parsecs would be a pretty strong deterrent.
posted by flabdablet at 9:24 AM on February 6 [3 favorites]

We keep saying over and over again that we have a fundamental understanding of how things work, only to be proven wrong time and time again

This is excellent news for my perpetual motion machine! Yes, yes, all the physics boffins will tell you that it's impossible BUT what if they're wrong? If they are wrong, then my machine will be the single greatest discovery in all of human history, significantly outclassing fire and the wheel!

It's impossible, they say, but what if they're wrong? My machine will fundamentally alter the universe, allowing us access to hitherto-fore unimagined powers. We will be able to move entire planets hither and yon as we please! We can lift entire continents into space if we like! My over-unity device will make anything requiring energetic inputs trivial to achieve.

Now, I only need $100,000 to finish up getting this thing UL listed, patents, and so on. Send me that money, and I'll make you a 50% owner. IF this thing works (despite those unpleasant physics boffins all saying I'm insane), you will be wealthier than any entity that has ever existed. A literal God-Emperor with whole civilizations bowing at your feet.

Sure, odds are this thing doesn't work! BUT you cannot say with absolute certainty, can you? I mean, the physics guys all have absolute certainty, but I'm sure you know more than they do, and the rewards are so utterly gigantic that it approaches Pascal's Wager, except with money, so a $100,0000 spent now is well worth it. Let's say, a 0.1% chance of working? With the rewards approaching several Trillion dollars? You'd be insane not to take that wager, it's just math!

C'mon, gimme the money.

No?

Huh, I wonder why not?
posted by aramaic at 9:27 AM on February 6 [8 favorites]

With the rewards approaching several Trillion dollars?

Wow, that sure sounds like a lot! I bet it's nearly a million, even!

I'm in.
posted by flabdablet at 9:31 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

I mean, the physics guys all have absolute certainty,

you may even be onto something ...

The Absolute Certainty Principle (ACP) Revolutionizes Quantum Physics

Abstract

When the ubiquitous quantum, acting as an active principle, generates meteons in the System of the World, the Absolute Certainty Principle (ACP) regulates the characteristics of their motion. This newly uncovered law of Nature suggests that the cosmos is filled with an “aether”, as Newton and others—even Einstein!—called it in their days, and explains quite simply why we stand erect vertically on the surface of the Earth and why the universe is in expansion.

Keywords

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Quantum Meteorites, Absolute Certainty Principle, Energy, Gravitation, Newton, Einstein, Universe Expansion

posted by philip-random at 9:39 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

Frankly - and this is pointed at flabdablet as a proxy for the Rationalist MeFi contingent - if I may extrapolate from the dialogue on other threads about AI, most of you think you're much more incisive and intelligent than you actually are. Because - to continue being frank - most of you don't understand a whit about contemporary developments in AI and machine learning and have demonstrated that repeatedly while being oblivious to your deficiencies. Now, if that sounds like a personal attack, maybe it is but the precedent was set elsewhere in this thread by, ahem, *other* people.

Which is to say: you need to doubt the surety of your dismissiveness a bit more. Not a lot more; just a bit more. This particular subject begs by history and reason to be dismissed - but for reasons based on human nature not for arguments based on the apparent physical implausibility of extraterrestrial or extratemporal transit or attempts at insight into alien interests. Humans surely do not have a firm enough grasp on physics to dismiss that possibility completely.

Now, I'm awfully skeptical of all of this hoo-hah. I mean, the photographic evidence is just dogshit. If someone wanted to really provide "disclosure", the easiest thing would be by providing a fucking clear picture or a guided video walkthrough of a non-terrestrial craft and they haven't. But at the same time, there do seem to be people of some repute who are privy to classified information - I'm thinking more Congresspersons than the people upstream to the Gruschs of the world - who indicate there is an unresolved and not out-of-hand dismissible hinkiness.

Which is why I'm running for Congress!
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 9:45 AM on February 6 [3 favorites]

If I get to dismiss the shit out of AI scammers and UFO scammers at the same time I’m all in, TBH.
posted by Artw at 9:51 AM on February 6 [8 favorites]

You're too kind.
posted by flabdablet at 9:52 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

Lol. Ok, while I do actually think there is a slim chance of a not completely disregardable something weird going on, I do enjoy you guys dumping on grifters.

Edit: Also, 5 bucks gets you a "I sent DeepSeaHaggis to congress to provide evidence of extraterrestrial visitation and all I got was this fucking sticker" sticker.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 9:53 AM on February 6

For some reason, I'm reminded of when my dad would buy lottery tickets with the justification, "well, someone has to win, why shouldn't it be me?"
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:56 AM on February 6

In Carl Sagan's novel 'Contact,' the aliens are pretty clear about why they haven't contacted humans. A major factor they cite is that humans lack the social development required to be a part of galactic civilization. When they finally reach out, they tell Ellie Arroway (in the movie, I can't remember if this line is in the book) "You’re capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares." But they promise that more small steps are coming to help humanity out.

Yes, yes, we know that physics and the vastness of space and time make the possibility of communicating or meeting species from another planet basically impossible. But the reason so many people are so eager to entertain that possibility is because we desperately wish that some guiding hand might come save us from ourselves.

When the movie version was made, I think Americans were vastly more optimistic about the future and humanity's potential. As a 15 year old, I fell deeply in love with that movie and its message. Now I'm 40, and the Dark Forest hypothesis is what seems more likely. I sort of feel bad for that 15 year old who thought benevolent aliens were right around the corner.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:58 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

(One reason I find the Dark Forest Hypothesis to be vastly more likely is based on the fact that life, anywhere it exists, is going to be subject to the same natural selection that rewards all the aggressive and expansionist species on earth--I'd love to hear someone's explanation of how else spacefaring aliens might evolve)
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 10:01 AM on February 6

I'm sure belief in visitors from space and visitors from heaven/hell are symptoms of the same weird little instinct-jumbled part of the human mind.
posted by pracowity at 10:09 AM on February 6 [3 favorites]

the same natural selection that rewards all the aggressive and expansionist species on earth

Aggressive, expansionist species tend toward lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

Healthily biodiverse communities tend to feature a wide range of species that both put more resources into nurturing their offspring and have longer individual lives than the faster-reproducing damaged-ground colonizers, which are basically nature's scab-forming platelets.

Humans put a lot of resources into nurturing our offspring and we also have long lifetimes compared to other species of comparable size and composition. That suggests to me that we are among the species that natural selection has rendered best fitted for living in high-biodiversity surroundings, which we dominate and/or dismantle and/or abandon at our peril. Aspiring to aggressive expansionism is short-sighted and contrary to our own best interests.
posted by flabdablet at 10:26 AM on February 6 [8 favorites]

I've one friend who enjoy alien visitation theories, so I proposed an even more entertaining conjecture..

Aliens have already saved us from ourselves and departed.

How? Aliens helped us become dependent, not merely upon burnning coal, but upon burning relativelty rare oil, which solves several problems:

We'll burn up most of the oil instead of turning it into plastics. We'd have destroyed our biosphere completely if we'd created too much really dangerous plastic. As is, planetary boundaries works rates climate change only their third worst risk, and rates "novel entities" as the worst risk, mostly plastics & PFAS.

We'll run out of fuel much faster, than if using coal more directly, so then our civilization speads consumption much less equally, and collapses much sooner. We'll still destroy most of our biosphere, wash too much phosophous and nitrogen into the oceans, etc, but maybe less completely since everything plays out faster, meaning we avert collision with the biosphere integrity and biochemical flows planetary boundaries too.

We'll make the tropics uninhabitable to humans, but again better than a more coal based economy being buisness-as-usual untill 2150. We'll have famines that'll reduce the human population by 99% too, but maybe that's a best case scenario for an intelegent species like humans who must still learn their physical limits.

In other words..

The universe has mostly kind & caring aliens, so maybe like star trek but anyways the opposite of a dark forest. You cannot fight physics, the maximum power principle, etc, so kind & caring alience should minimize damage by tricking young species into destroying their resources and collapsing early.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:30 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

There’s a great film called Quiet Earth where the scientist finds out they altered the universe because the constants of the universe started to change. We already have some wild theories that are plausible about quantum tunneling, teleportation, etc. What’s there to say the aliens need to physically visit us or be in our same universe? Maybe they’re spinning a cesium atom just enough to violate all we know about cesium atoms and we begin to learn it can’t happen naturally and rather than send a ship to visit planets that exist with life for a mere hundreds of millions of years manipulated all of time space with a message that an advanced civilization could decipher.

That sounds like sci-fi mumble jumbo but to me seems like a more plausible and non-intuitive route than aliens coming in ships like the Aztecs. It wasn’t like they saw Cortez’s ships and said they must have violated their notion of how ships work: no they were just bigger ships.
posted by geoff. at 10:58 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

One reason I find the Dark Forest Hypothesis to be vastly more likely

most people here would find any hyper-competitive scenario to be reasonable, we have grown up with a diet of survival-of-the-fittest and any number of movies and shows that teach us a type of lesson from the moment we set eyes on a screen

doesn't make it universally so
posted by elkevelvet at 11:04 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

Balloons? Do they blow up into funny shapes and all?
posted by ckoerner at 11:14 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

Well, no. Unless round is funny.

If they are wrong, then my machine will be the single greatest discovery in all of human history, significantly outclassing fire and the wheel!

Oh, yes, I think I read about this.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:15 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

I'm partial to the zoo hypothesis. I saw an utterly unexplainable flying object as a kid.
I believe the odds are that or something or someone has been studying Earth, and in particular her hominids, for a very long time(in short: because we would if we could). I really want to believe.

So every now and then I check what's happening in UFO obsessed internet corners.

The videos are always some stupid misidentification of things like insects or novelty balloons or multirotors or distant aircraft or atmospheric lensing or sensor/compression artefacts or often just outright fakery. There is often one or two comments pointing out the obvious Occam's razor answer but they are ignored at best(unless it's truely glaringly prosaic). The UFO crowd are not looking for proof, they already believe. It's about the insider secret knowledge vibe.

I still want to believe but the UFO folk are largely a bunch of uncritical marks primed to be fleeced... and of course, there is no shortage of grifters.
posted by neonamber at 11:18 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

doesn't make it universally so
Why would survival of the fittest not be universal? And how would evolution happen without it?
posted by pracowity at 11:33 AM on February 6

Survival of the fittest does not imply survival of the most aggressively competitive. There are as many kinds of fitness as of ecological niches to fit within.

Survival of the human species in particular, if history and archaeology are any kind of guide, has been largely down to our anomalously highly development of cooperative skills. That's our brand of fittest.
posted by flabdablet at 11:40 AM on February 6 [7 favorites]

Interstellar travel sounds incredibly horrible to us, but our society has not yet adapted to its planetary boundaries. It's plausible interstellar travel feels less horrible to a species who've adapted to their planetary boundaries.

Indeed, one "economy" cannot necessarily adapt to planetary boundaries, meaning any plausible alliance, world government, etc inevitably obeys the maximum power principle, and abandons sustainability, after which they eventually experience collapse of their economy, population, etc. As a solution, you'd have multiple "economies" who avoid trade or other economic collaboration, and instead form an "ecology" in which they actively sabotage one another: If you emit too much methane, PFAS, etc then someone will make your stuff blow up. It's a "light forest" theory for a single world.

In this word, interstellar travel means giving up some freedom to live in an even smaller planned economy, but you avoid many risks involved with living on a "light forest" planet.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:46 AM on February 6

As for the article..

ctrl-F Robert Bigelow yields nothing about the billionaire conspiracy nut who started the current conversation.

Interstellar travel maybe impossible, but Avi Loeb saying “Biology cannot survive the journey across interstellar distances” feels unconvincing. We know larger animals like elephans and whales have much lower odds of cancer. If enough science & technology survives our civilization collapsing, then maybe we'll eventually learn enough biology to add better error correction. We're nowhere near AGI, but maybe after another thousand years. Your water can be your shielding. etc

Alien visits looks impossible though: We've only emitted radio waves for like 120 years, but negigable odds alien life exists so close by, well not even so many stars. The milky way is 100,000 light years across. If aliens came, then they'd likely travel in really huge ships, even if they made themselves small, so even 1% of the speed of light require enomrous amounts of energy. It'd require 850,000 terrawatt-hours to accelerate New York City to 1% of the speed of light.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:46 AM on February 6

any plausible alliance, world government, etc inevitably obeys the maximum power principle, and abandons sustainability, after which they eventually experience collapse of their economy, population, etc.

I live on a continent that's seen continuous human occupation by multiple nations for roughly sixty thousand years, and it was run on a largely cooperative and highly sustainable basis until the British arrived and fucked it all up as is their way.

You and I clearly have differently calibrated plausibility meters. I can easily envisage colonialism dying of the septicemia induced by its many self-inflicted foot wounds after a mere few hundred years, after which we can all just get back to the customary business of properly looking after ourselves and each other.
posted by flabdablet at 12:05 PM on February 6 [5 favorites]

Why would survival of the fittest not be universal? And how would evolution happen without it?


I mean, there's more than one set of selective pressures out there. But, even if there weren't other considerations, "fittest" for Earth isn't consistent from place to place or time to time, or even ecological niche to ecological niche.

So, I'm really not confident saying that any particular strategy that worked for Earth at some times/places is gonna be the one that works best at all times/places.
posted by Gygesringtone at 1:04 PM on February 6 [3 favorites]

Could there be Alien Balloons?

Nope.
posted by Artw at 1:17 PM on February 6 [2 favorites]

I live on a continent that's seen continuous human occupation by multiple nations for roughly sixty thousand years
flabdablet

That’s interesting. Say, how did they get there?
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:09 PM on February 6

that energy needed to get close to the speed of light approaches infinity, so maybe we are down to 10-30% the speed of light.

Didn’t forget you’ll have to spend an equivalent amount of energy decelerating. To prevent you from getting mashed to a pulp from the G forces, you’ll also need to decelerate for a long time, negating much of the time dilation.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:26 PM on February 6 [4 favorites]

My personal theory is that with twelve billion years or so, and however many billions of potentially life-generating planets just in the local galaxy, it's inevitable that intelligent alien life has already been here.

Think about it. Dig long enough and wide enough and you eventually find evidence of prior human civilizations—doesn't matter if you're digging in Germany or Peru or Afghanistan or Siberia. Why do we assume that our intelligent life is the only intelligent life that's been here?

Our going-in assumption should be the opposite: that everything we see was built or manipulated by some other intelligent civilization before we ever arrived. Whatever it is, it's here because someone put it here.
posted by newdaddy at 2:29 PM on February 6

Actually North America provides nice examples, flabdablet. At a high level, peoples were kept relatively sustainable thanks to a combination of physical limits and low intensity conflict with other peoples, enabled by having little enough trade so different groups never overly aligned economically.

We do want more scientific and technological progress though, but this make physical limits less immediate, which then makes something like the Comanche empire dangerous. You'd need a different perspective on this low intensity conflict part, like maybe peoples view the externalities by other peoples as acts of war.

I'd envision colonialism ending becuase I envision trade declining dematically. Yes, we'd also care more for our "tribe" members once we're no longer always jockying for trade relationships. At the same time, one tribe would hopefully figure out they must poison the cattle some other tribe started raising, due to fear of the methane emissions.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:35 PM on February 6

argybarg: "There’s just no plausible version of interstellar travel that doesn’t involve massive implausible loopholes in the fundamentals of physics. It’s staggering to me that otherwise intelligent people ever kick it around as a possibility."

I'm in no case in the I-want-to-believe camp and find the current broo-ha-ha ridiculous, however, the assumption that 20,000 years in a spaceship is a long time is based on a very human- and Earth-centric viewpoint. There could exist a kind of sentience that considered 20,000 or 20,000,000 years a brief stroll.

I'm not saying this is the case, but just ruling it out based on our very limited and biased knowledge of what forms sentient beings take is not supported by any kind of evidence or data.
posted by signal at 4:01 PM on February 6 [4 favorites]

flabdablet: "You and I clearly have differently calibrated plausibility meters. I can easily envisage colonialism dying of the septicemia induced by its many self-inflicted foot wounds after a mere few hundred years, after which we can all just get back to the customary business of properly looking after ourselves and each other."

This, 100%. Anybody making broad assumptions and claims of anything inevtiable pertaining the economics and politics of any kind of being evolved on a different planet (or not on a planet at all) is extrapolating an awful lot from a single data point.
posted by signal at 4:04 PM on February 6 [3 favorites]

Antarctica has never been colonized because there's nothing there humans want. Once we start speculating about post-relativity physics and FTL then there's really no context to guess what resources or locations might be valuable: we might be the penguins living in a galactic Antarctica, left alone because we live in an inhospitable, hard to reach desert.

("Preposterous", says the penguin, "we have abundant fish, and plenty of room to nest, and protection from the seals. All intelligent life, no matter how strange, would be subject to similar evolutionary pressures as us and would undoubtedly covet our bountiful resources for themselves. No, no, it's clear we are the only intelligent inhabitants of this planet.")
posted by Pyry at 4:21 PM on February 6 [8 favorites]

An untold number of ideas are "massive implausible loopholes in the fundamentals of physics" until a patent clerk thinks up a new theory and and that theory is proven correct by a solar eclipse a decade later.

I really hate this attitude. I find it to be anti-knowledge, anti-intellectual, anti-science. This is the same sort of thing that young-Earth creationists and climate change deniers say.

We should assume that there exist things that we are wrong about. But when we talk about anything specific, we should assume that the state of scientific consensus is basically right, unless we have a specific reason to reject it. Because, you know, if we didn't have good reasons to believe it, then it wouldn't be the scientific consensus. To assume otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
posted by nosewings at 4:42 PM on February 6 [9 favorites]

I'm not sure why the vast distances of space are really that relevant. Maybe aliens have been traveling for millions of years? Maybe they have generational starships. What else do they have to do? Maybe they're as stupid as we are and they destroyed their planet and now this is just their whole deal, an interstellar Greyhound rambling through the night until the wheels fall off. They're aliens. Who the fuck knows what their story is?

That said, I'm pretty sure they aren't here. Trump would have talked. Biden...well, to be real, if Biden did talk they'd just say it was a gaffe, that doesn't count.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:18 PM on February 6 [3 favorites]

"There’s just no plausible version of interstellar travel that doesn’t involve massive implausible loopholes in the fundamentals of physics.

Friend, I just heard some wild shit about time crystals today. I don't know WTF it all means but apparently some loopholes still exist.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 5:34 PM on February 6

METAFILTER: they destroyed their planet and now this is just their whole deal, an interstellar Greyhound rambling through the night until the wheels fall off.
posted by philip-random at 5:43 PM on February 6 [5 favorites]

Antarctica has never been colonized because there's nothing there humans want.

I disagree with both halves of this sentence. There's no reason to think that the colonization of Antarctica will fall back from its current level unless the supply chains become too difficult to maintain. There are plenty of things there that humans want, some tangible, some not.

Point taken, though, that our great place to be (because it produced us) may not be hospitable or interesting to other beings.
posted by inexorably_forward at 7:38 PM on February 6

I don't know WTF it all means

Seems to me that the sounder response to that state of affairs is to look into it, as opposed to simply throwing up one's hands and declaring it to be mysterious, and therefore equivalent to all other mysteries, and therefore evidence for the plausibility of whatever ill-informed speculation happens to pop up next.

Humanity has never had such easy access to knowledge. Perhaps that has something to do with why so many seem to value it so much less.
posted by flabdablet at 10:48 PM on February 6 [3 favorites]

This happens. As a young chemist I really want to believe Linus Pauling, one of the greatest chemists to have ever lived, big contributor in many areas around biochemistry, not to mention force for world peace; and yet a font of bad information on human vitamin C pathways.

mark k, you may be interested in Better Living Through the Placebo Effect (link goes to NIH), which provides the best explanation I can imagine for Linus Pauling's claims around vitamin C. Much like UFO research, what you believe can have a big effect on the results you get.
posted by pmb at 12:16 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

I pop my daily 500mg vitamin C because ms flabdablet thinks it probably does me good, I'm fully convinced it does me no harm, it's one little thing I can do to contribute to her happiness, and it costs me virtually nothing (I've been working through the same huge jar of tablets for two years at this point and it's still well over a quarter full).

We call it my daily spousebo.
posted by flabdablet at 5:45 AM on February 7 [1 favorite]

So, I've seen weird otherworldly creatures on multiple occasions, my parents both saw weird stuff (UFOs) on multiple occasions, the neighbors saw UFOs and had (they claimed) filmed evidence, the people with whom I went to school had stories, and the people I worked with had stories too. Going by that sample, the number of people having seen hard to explain stuff in the world must be in the tens or even hundreds of millions? It's not like I talked about my experiences all the time either, quite the opposite, since I'm not a believer (despite what I've seen). Either there's a constant churn of weird creatures and UFOs out there, or people in general are just really really predisposed to see this specific thing at random times that doesn't exist.
posted by jabah at 7:46 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

Either there's a constant churn of weird creatures and UFOs out there, or people in general are just really really predisposed to see this specific thing at random times that doesn't exist.

those are two possibilities, and there are certainly additional possibilities. sensory hallucination, and simply getting sensory data 'wrong', is not uncommon.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:55 AM on February 7 [7 favorites]

simply getting sensory data 'wrong', is not uncommon

Case in point, my mother (an atheist, and not raised even slightly Catholic-adjacent) once saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

...not really, of course. It was a cactus growing near the bend of the road, and one night driving home her headlights hit it in exactly the right way and her brain instantly went "holy shit, it's the Virgin Mary!!"

Except it wasn't. It was a cactus, and a half-second later her brain went "no, it's just that stupid cactus again"

But for that split second, her brain pattern-matched on something that was entirely wrong and impossible. She was pretty insistent that the rest of us learn a lesson on that and, IMO, lots of people could stand to learn that lesson as well.
posted by aramaic at 9:00 AM on February 7 [1 favorite]

Except my reaction wasn't "Oh gosh, an alien from another solar system!" It was, "What the fuck is that?!" And that's still my assessment all these years later, which is why I don't consider myself to be a believer.
posted by jabah at 9:33 AM on February 7 [3 favorites]

sensory hallucination, and simply getting sensory data 'wrong', is not uncommon

Another possibility is that the person seeing whatever it is simply has neither the knowledge nor the education to connect that visual information in any meaningful way with anything they already understand.

Everybody has gaps in their understanding because we are small and parochial and the world is huge and wild. There's nothing wrong with that. Being unable to explain the unexplainable is kind of the point of the unexplainable.

One night I was sitting around our front yard fire pit with a neighbour when her face suddenly lit up bright blue-green, and as she raised it to the sky and I spun around and looked up, we both saw this massive coruscating lumpy disintegrating streak trail take maybe five seconds to cross maybe ninety degrees of arc heading roughly south-east before sputtering and fading.

I'm guessing it might have been de-orbiting space junk because it moved slower than any meteor I've ever seen (still bloody quick though), but I don't know. Don't expect I ever will know. It was a one-off experience. I've seen nothing like it before or since, so I have fuck-all to go on except maybe it had copper in it because that would account for the glow colour. So I have it filed under Personally Observed Unexplained Aerial Phenomena.

And you know what? I'm fine with that. I'm glad I saw it because it was truly spectacular, but not being able to say with any precision what it actually was doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Tell you what it wasn't, though. It wasn't fucking aliens.

But, but, but, comes the tedious refrain, you can't be sure of that! You just finished telling us you don't know what it was, so there's a chance it could have been aliens! Why be so dogmatic and closed-minded?

Well, that would be because I'm all for keeping an open mind, but not so open that my brain falls out. There is a literally endless list of things that any UAP might have been that are orders of magnitude more likely than aliens. So if you want to seize on a Just So story with no defensible basis in reality then you go right ahead, but I will point and laugh if you start acting like you prefer that story to the far more accurate and honest "I don't know".

Except it wasn't. It was a cactus

Can't tell you how many times I've been driving the bush road between here and Lakes Entrance and had to brake hard to avoid having that wallaby jump out in front of the car, only to find that it wasn't a wallaby but a shrub or log or rock. Or how many times I've been badly startled when what I'd taken to be a shrub did jump out in front of me. I've learned to drive that road slowly at night.

Confirmation bias works at all levels, even all the way down into basic visual object recognition, and sometimes it takes a lot of extra visual input to force the brain to let go of a sticky first impression.

If you've ever accidentally stepped barefoot on a great big slug, you'll know how astonishingly hard you can scrape and scrub under cold water or hot water or with soap or without and still have that sticky disgusting slimy mess cling to your sole. Way harder to shift than wet dog turd, even.

That's how I feel about predisposition to belief in alien visitation. I'd rather avoid getting it on me in the first place.
posted by flabdablet at 10:15 AM on February 7 [7 favorites]

The worst part about being a skeptic of this kind of stuff is realizing I'm on the same team as some giant, galactically large even, assholes.
posted by Jarcat at 3:23 PM on February 7 [4 favorites]

I'm guessing it might have been de-orbiting space junk because it moved slower than any meteor I've ever seen (still bloody quick though), but I don't know.

my guess is your guess is probably correct. I saw something similar one evening some years ago (though it was more orange-red than blue-green). I was watching TV with my roommate and there they were, maybe five bright streaks zooming across the night sky which was visible out our main window. This was before the interwebs, so it took until the next day to hear on the news that it had indeed been some space junk, last seen fading to nothing roughly two hundred miles further east ...
posted by philip-random at 11:55 PM on February 7 [1 favorite]

Survival of the human species in particular, if history and archaeology are any kind of guide, has been largely down to our anomalously highly development of cooperative skills. That's our brand of fittest.

Jesus Christ, where do you get your drugs?.To paraphrase the old lady ln When Harry Met Sally, I'll have what you're having.

If history and archeology are any kind of guide, those cooperative skills from time immemorial were most applied in the practice of war. Starting at the hunting and gathering band level and working our way up through tribe, city state, nation and empire. Colonialism? A euphemism for war. At which we got better and better and better and bloodier and bloodier and bloodier until we got to the 90 seconds until midnight on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock where we are now. And you sneer at people wondering about aliens -- such crust. To paraphrase Edward G. Robinson in The Ten Commandments, Where's your anomalously highly development of cooperative skills now, Moses? Man, I am fed up to the back teeth with being expected to walk on eggshells around fools purely to help them keep on being fools, too.
posted by y2karl at 12:57 AM on February 8 [1 favorite]

It's no better if you actually *have* evidence, people will naysay you and insult you and call you crazy. That is if they even care to look at the evidence, which most don't. They just put you in the "liar like the other grifters" bucket and call it a day.

Aliens hacked my phone, and I've posted about this before. Text messages were inserted in a conversation I had (with a mefite, as it so happens), and he calls me crazy and thinks I faked the screenshots. So it goes. The content and timing of the messages point to no human or other source. See the link if you care to look further.

But most people don't. Their worldview is ironclad-skeptical and they will admit no possibility of other explanations. I used to be a skeptic, too, for 49 years. So I know the drill.

It's weird, because I understand some more stuff now, after being contacted. Disclosure is being slow-rolled on purpose, For Reasons, and that makes perfect sense. The profusion of liars and grifters in UFOlogy circles means that even real evidence will be discounted.

We live in a strange superposition of a clockwork universe (where the skeptics reside), and a magical universe (where I and the other believers reside). It's quite wondrous, actually. I write a lot about this stuff, and I'm working on some books.

But yeah if you want to call me a liar and an idiot to my face, my discord link is on my webpage and in my profile. I'm friendly and chatty and like talking to people.
posted by cats are weird at 1:46 AM on February 8 [1 favorite]

I read your site, and I'm not going to point and laugh at you because my best guess is that you're voyaging through inner space along a route I recognize. Best of luck with it. Stay safe. Keep a lookout for buses coming back the other way.
posted by flabdablet at 2:58 AM on February 8 [7 favorites]

If history and archeology are any kind of guide, those cooperative skills from time immemorial were most applied in the practice of war. Starting at the hunting and gathering band level and working our way up through tribe, city state, nation and empire.

You're putting your focus on the aggression and conflict aspect of that, but aggression is an animal thing rather than specifically a human one. I'm more interested in the entities between which those conflicts occur - that succession of ever-larger groups of cooperating humans.

Because that's not a thing you also find in our musk ox cousins. Hunter-gatherer bands would never have been able to coalesce into something empire-sized without the extraordinary range of social skills facilitated by human languages.
posted by flabdablet at 4:56 AM on February 8 [3 favorites]

I'm more interested in the

Sounds like a great thing to make a post about, champ.
posted by Jarcat at 10:54 AM on February 8 [1 favorite]

If history and archeology are any kind of guide, those cooperative skills from time immemorial were most applied in the practice of war.

it's true. we did the brutal aggression thing for as long as we could ... but that all climaxed with Hiroshima, August 1945. History's exclamation point as Marshall McLuhan put it. Past that, we've basically had to evolve our way of thinking and acting.

There's still no shortage of savagery and brutality at play among us humans but, against all conceivable odds, we have collectively managed to step back from (or certainly not go over) that edge that we spent hundreds of thousands years rampaging toward.

Maybe aliens were involved.
posted by philip-random at 10:59 AM on February 8

You I'll happily point and laugh at.
posted by flabdablet at 11:49 AM on February 8 [3 favorites]

it's true. we did the brutal aggression thing for as long as we could ... but that all climaxed with Hiroshima, August 1945. History's exclamation point as Marshall McLuhan put it. Past that, we've basically had to evolve our way of thinking and acting.

There's still no shortage of savagery and brutality at play among us humans but, against all conceivable odds, we have collectively managed to step back from (or certainly not go over) that edge that we spent hundreds of thousands years rampaging toward.

Now where have I heard something like that before? Oh, yes...

According to the Austrian countess Bertha von Suttner, Alfred Nobel, as early as their first meeting in Paris in 1876, had expressed his wish to produce material or a machine which would have such a devastating effect that war from then on, would be impossible. The point about deterrence later appeared among Nobel’s ideas. In 1891, he commented on his dynamite factories by saying to the countess: “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” Nobel did not live long enough to experience the First World War and to see how wrong his conception was.

Alfred Nobel’s Thoughts about War and Peace

See also

Wikipedia: List of nation's with nuclear weapons

According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the worldwide total inventory of nuclear weapons as of 2021 stood at 13,080. Around 30% of these are deployed with operational forces, and more than 90% are owned by either Russia or the United States.

In its recent research, SIPRI estimated the total number of nuclear warheads acquired by nuclear states reached 12,512 in January 2023.

Approximately 9,576 are kept with military stockpiles. About 3,844 warheads are deployed with missiles. Two thousand warheads which are primarily from Russia and United States are maintained for high operational alerts.

[We] have collectively managed to step back from (or certainly not go over) that edge that we spent hundreds of thousands years rampaging toward?

12,512 nuclear warheads in January 2023 may not have crossed over your line but it is not much of a step back in my humble opinion.
posted by y2karl at 2:25 PM on February 8

There's a little talking-points piece that circulates in the laissez-faire economics bubble illustrating the frankly astonishing degree of organized cooperation required to manufacture even the most familiar everyday item. That pales into insignificance next to what's required to manufacture a nuclear weapon, and as you point out, we've made tens of thousands of those.

So as a species we've clearly no shortage of cooperation skills. Many of us, however, remain confused on the point of what it's worthwhile to cooperate for. The existence of nuclear weapons provides a very stark example of the kind of stupidity that can afflict any of us if we allow it to.

So collective stupidity can indeed leverage our cooperative skills in frighteningly destructive ways, but I disagree with your implied view that collective stupidity is anywhere near as central a human characteristic as our ability to organize. I see collective stupidity as a symptom of poor cultural health and therefore plausibly correctable on a much shorter timescale than would be typical for biological evolutionary processes.

Our ability to cooperate, though? That's hardwired. We won't be changing that any time soon regardless of how many of us the stupidity-afflicted manage to kill off in the short to medium term.
posted by flabdablet at 10:09 PM on February 8 [2 favorites]

Just in case not already clear: I rate "I want to believe" as the wilful opening of a mind to stupidity, an attitude that I think we each have a moral duty to suppress. I've thought that for a long time. It's why I reacted to the first showing of The X Files with something pretty close to disgust and its subsequent popularity with something pretty close to despair.

I don't want beliefs. I want defensible bases for confidence.
posted by flabdablet at 10:45 PM on February 8 [5 favorites]

We live in a strange superposition of a clockwork universe (where the skeptics reside), and a magical universe (where I and the other believers reside).

For the idea labelled by the word "universe" to be of any use, it needs to be all-encompassing. I can't support the exclusivity implied by attaching it to mere aspects of itself in this fashion. I think the contradiction that proceeds directly from that move is the entire basis for the perceived strangeness of any subsequent "superposition" required to resolve it.

Clockwork and magic can both be used as metaphors within any genuinely workable worldview without either of them being a defining characteristic of the whole of it.

Clockwork and magic both have rules even though magic's are more malleable, so both reason and skepticism are usefully applicable to either. In particular, I would invite you to reflect on the extent to which, in your experience, wishing for a certain state of affairs to become the case has proved to be sufficient or necessary for it to have happened.

My own experience tells me that both clockwork and magic have many failure modes, and the more complicated are the systems based on either, the harder it becomes to predict what those will be.

Nor are they exclusive categories. Any sufficiently complex clockwork is indistinguishable from magic, and any sufficiently reliable magic is indistinguishable from clockwork.
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 PM on February 8 [1 favorite]

We seem economically committed to rampaging across around four lines that matter.

We fixate upon individual events as bad or good, but overall individual events cannot typically cause much harm to our species or life more broadly. It's our economy acting at ever-larger scales that causes the real harm.

In particular nuclear winter is a grose exageration. If you run Owen Toons' favorite estimate backwards, then Canada's wildfires last year represent the same amount of hot soot as a nuclear exchange of 2000 megatons. We mostly deploy warheads in the 100-300 kiloton range, so that 2000 megatons maybe exceeds what's deployed. James Anderson says climate change shall cause the wet stratosphere that brings nuclear summer.

It follows climate change shal be much much worse than nuclear war. And three planetary boundaries look more dangerous than climate: novel entities like plastics and PFAS, biochemical flows like our fertilizers washing phosphorus and nigrogen into the oceans, and biosphere integrity. War itself is bad for us individually, but war itself seems irrelevant to the survival of our species.

We do however need some balance that halts this global trade collaboration that keeps our economy destroying everything.

Anyways..

I remarked upthread that our radio signals have probably not reached many worlds in habitable zones yet, which makes even detection by aliens unlikely thus far.

At least some "I want to believe" types instead choose to believe the "alien visitors" were here all along. At least to me, this sounds like belief in angels or something, violates the maximum power principle, etc.

Also..

All these interstellar travel fantasies originate from our energy blindness. Interstellar spacecraft cannot carry enough fuel to go fast, so instead they'd depend upon external forces. Among these, the halo drive and dyson slingshot enables the grandest fantasies. A halo drive accelerated, decellerates, and powers a ship by having a laster slingshot around a binary or spinning black hole.

At this point, the universe imposes an entertaining flavor of the "prime directive" from StarTrek: Interstellar travel can only be fast-ish between black holes. You could therefore only meet aliens in person by developing a collony ship which becomes a settlement orbiting a black hole, powered by its own halo drive.

We've a black hole only like 1500 light years away. We human-like apes emerged 200-300k years ago, so maybe in another 200k years some descendants of ours could reach that black hole, see if anyone else lives there, and start thinking about where else to go.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:34 PM on February 10 [3 favorites]

All these interstellar travel fantasies originate from our energy blindness

Energy blindness, to me, is an example of widespread general scale blindness, the thing I labelled "no real sense of proportion" upthread. The further removed any idea becomes from the scale of one person's immediate experience, the closer to 100% becomes the prevalence of faulty or missing reasoning about it.

Cultivating even a crudely useful sense of scale requires more work than it seems most people see any value in doing. Which, given that I have already watched people more than double to more than eight billion on the only planet that any lifeform evolved here will ever have any real prospect of thriving on, is very disappointing.

We have met the enemy and he is us. Aliens will no more save us from ourselves than any other deus ex machina that we've ever wished would. We have no option but to do it ourselves and no place to do it but here.
posted by flabdablet at 10:22 PM on February 10 [2 favorites]

There could exist a kind of sentience that considered 20,000 or 20,000,000 years a brief stroll.

FWIW, my own expectation is that if interstellar spacefaring life exists it will most likely be in a form that would appear fungal or fungal-ish to us (maybe something more like a lichen, i.e. in some fashion combining photosynthetic abilities with the rest of the fungal skillset). And if interstellar spacefaring life exists that fits our narrative frames for "sentience" or "consciousness," it will have found a strategy for dispersion that bears more resemblance to a (highly sophisticated) fungal spore than anything that would fit our narrative frames for a spacecraft.

And as long as I'm opining without any particular support, I'll just say that I don't see any particular reason to look down on people who believe in UFO-aliens any more than people who believe in sentience/consciousness. I tell myself comforting stories to explain why I made a decision instead of having to acknowledge that it was just some accident of neuronal activity. Likewise the idea of "alien spacecraft" imposes a comforting order on confusing visual stimuli from flying plastic bags or oddly-shaped clouds whatever. They're both just framing devices we use to comfort ourselves in a world that, while not necessarily beyond human understanding, will always be beyond any of our individual abilities to understand in the moment.

Of course that can lead to some dark places and UFO conspiracies can definitely be a gateway drug to fascism, but I think we would do better by interrogating what is leading people to seek particular forms of narrative comfort. Focusing on the truth or falsehood of the specific stories believers tell is just going to give us answers to the wrong questions.
posted by Not A Thing at 9:07 AM on February 11 [2 favorites]

Aliens must evolve somehow, so individuals lifetimes should be relatively short, both in biological and cultural sences. As Max Planck said "Science advances one funeral at a time." It's possilbe they change themselves later of course.

Yes, space travel becomes simpler if you could package up some spores for a few thousand years, but you cannot slow down a beam powered craft easily, so your spores still travel slowly.

> we would do better by interrogating what is leading people to seek particular forms of narrative comfort

Yes of course, but I'm dubious aliens beliefs lead into fascism so easily? Anecdotally aliens visitation beliefs cause problems by convincing otherwise intelligent & informed people that they could safely ignore real problems, especially really big ones like climate change & other planetary boundaries.

AI obsesives, both advocates and x-riskers, have a clear track record of promoting fascism: AI advocates often want fascism so their AIs can run society. AI x-riskers like Nick Bostrom have watched too many mad scientist movies, so they want fascissm to restrict building superweapons, AIs, etc. AI & aliens obsesions have some parallels, so maybe I just do not know the aliens believers literature.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:31 PM on February 11

The entire field of scams and grifting, the field the people in TFA inhabit, is fascism adjacent these days. As soon as you have a THEM that is suppressing the truth, well… you know who THEY are, don’t you?
posted by Artw at 2:39 PM on February 11

Yes, space travel becomes simpler if you could package up some spores for a few thousand years...

I seem to recall a movie on this premise.
posted by y2karl at 12:02 PM on February 13