Astrobiologists have, for decades, defaulted to a conservative burden of proof that leans into two aphorisms coined by Sagan … life … should be considered a “hypothesis of last resort,” largely because “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” But what if Sagan had it all wrong?
“The dozen most solid UFO cases seem to me plenty solid by our usual testimony standards.”
Given that we know the sky is large and filled with objects, and that there are vast distances involved, and that the sun creates optical illusions, I have been extremely unimpressed with the UFO “evidence.” You also have to take into account the fact that we are better than monitoring the sky than ever, and so much here depends on eye witness testimony. I asked ChatGPT and Claude whether there is a single confirmed case of a UAP appearing to violating the laws of physics that *does not depend on eye witness testimony* and they both said no. If that’s not the standard, since this is what UAP advocates claim, then I don’t know what the grounds are for considering unidentified objects to be aliens.
I’ll say that I agree we should have a high prior of aliens being somewhere in the universe, maybe some life on Mars. But I just don’t see the UAP phenomenon being that impressive, and I think it would be pretty strange if aliens were advanced enough to remain hidden except for a few individual readings and sightings.
Well, I'm a bit confused, because when I listen to UAP advocates, what they always stress is seeing objects that violate our known laws of physics, so therefore must be an advanced technology.
If one is going to be impressed with UAP sightings that don't violate the known laws of physics – meaning they are shaped and move like objects we are familiar with – what is left of a UAP sighting? I've always understood the idea that these objects violate the known laws of physics as the justification for the idea that they might be aliens of an advanced civilization or supernatural.
I've looked into a handful of cases, and always found the debunkings a lot more plausible than the claims of aliens.
Yes that’s why I say *known* laws of physics. They claim feats of movement, propulsion, acceleration, etc that we can’t engineer today and theoretically might not be possible. And I don’t see evidence of that beyond eye witness testimony, which you wouldn’t expect to be reliable in such cases. My question to AI was if we have non-testimonial evidence for that.
I lowered the standard and asked Claude whether there were cases where non-testimonial data showed advanced technology. It says no to that too.
Of course it would be amazing to learn about intelligent life elsewhere. I am highly motived to want to believe it's there.
It helps to think about the issue of visitors to Earth using the template: if this was happening, what else would be true? It’s not hard to imagine that if advanced civilizations were ubiquitous enough that they could visit us. It IS hard to imagine ubiquitous civilizations visiting us and not leaving their mark on the galaxy in some visible way. Waste heat, weird cooling, coherent light emission, stellar engineering? If aliens are everywhere, it means they’ve been around for a while. You need special pleading to accept that they are ubiquitous and also perfectly low impact in the environment of the cosmos.
When it comes to visitors, it’s easy to believe that aliens that could travel for light years could also do amazing things technologically--go fast, do weird stuff with waste heat, use exotic propulsion, hide from us well and easily. What’s not easy to understand is why aliens would take steps to avoid being approached closely--and perhaps hide or avoid us most of the time--but be perfectly fine with being observed on radar or with grainy infrared cameras. I don’t claim to understand an alien mind. But if they have light year travel and probably advanced AI and molecular nanotech or femtotech, and they behave as if they are avoiding us most of the time (they never just hover over an airport or near anyone with a decent camera) …why do they not care about being observed almost constantly, as long as it’s by people with camera equipment that isn’t quite up to the task? Lots of poor evidence does not sum up to good evidence.
When the lighting conditions are bad; when the camera is using digital stabilization or dynamic range adjustments or other digital correction at the edge of its performance specs; when the frame of reference is changing, we get what we would expect: confusing observations.
Can you provide a list of what you consider the top UFO cases? You have mentioned a few times that you find the top cases to be pretty reasonable and convincing but since I have spent very little time reading about UFOs I am not sure what you are referring to, a list would be pretty helpful to assess the claim myself
When I read the title I mistakenly read it with a comma. “Aliens are not crazy, unlikely” and then was looking for the argument that aliens were sane. Took me a while, but then I’m a bit slow. Are aliens more likely to be crazy or sane? Are you more likely to survive as a species by being sane or crazy?
Wait. there's a pretty serious bait and switch happening here.
> For a typical murder trial, the base rate is roughly 1/1000 that a particular death was a murder, and there are roughly 1000 associates who might have done it, giving a roughly one in a million prior for an accusation that X murdered Y.
There is close to 1 that murders occur somewhat frequently, and for most murder convictions there is lots of even-more-unlikely-if-no-murder evidence (the chance that the bullet marks match a random gun is well under 1 in a million, for instance), and the chance that the victim slept with exactly the accused's wife is 1 in billions, right?
The reference class problem hits ALL of these questions, but ET life and ET intelligence are WAY less repeated than murder investigations, so much harder to pick reasonable comparisons.
For me, ET life at historical times in our solar system seems pretty likely, and ET technological intelligence contemporaneously on earth seems extremely unlikely. Like 5-8 orders of magnitude difference in priors. Additionally, the evidence for life is at least mildly strong, and the evidence for UFOs being alien much weaker. Even if stronger than some other commonly-accepted (or at least not bothered to debate) phenomena, it's just not true that the priors are anywhere near (for me; I do acknowledge that it's very hard to debate "correctness" of prior, and you're entitled to be more credulous - there's not enough compelling evidence in either direction to definitely prove someone wrong).
And the problem of carrying costs and counterparty risk (oh, and difficulty in defining resolution, given it could be millennia before the smoking gun is found) makes prediction markets or just individual wagers not very attractive for the question. Even if I'd give it 100K:1 and you'd only give it 10k:1 (note: made up - I haven't quantified my beliefs that closely, and I'm not sure you've published an estimate), we have no easy way to arbitrage the difference.
Anti-faith is the deep commitment--not justified by evidence--to refuse to believe something.
A person's religion is whatever set of beliefs they hold as as unfalsifiable, as axioms that require no proof, whose prior probabilities they keep fixed at 100%. In other words, it's whatever beliefs in which they put unskakable faith.
“The dozen most solid UFO cases seem to me plenty solid by our usual testimony standards.”
Given that we know the sky is large and filled with objects, and that there are vast distances involved, and that the sun creates optical illusions, I have been extremely unimpressed with the UFO “evidence.” You also have to take into account the fact that we are better than monitoring the sky than ever, and so much here depends on eye witness testimony. I asked ChatGPT and Claude whether there is a single confirmed case of a UAP appearing to violating the laws of physics that *does not depend on eye witness testimony* and they both said no. If that’s not the standard, since this is what UAP advocates claim, then I don’t know what the grounds are for considering unidentified objects to be aliens.
I’ll say that I agree we should have a high prior of aliens being somewhere in the universe, maybe some life on Mars. But I just don’t see the UAP phenomenon being that impressive, and I think it would be pretty strange if aliens were advanced enough to remain hidden except for a few individual readings and sightings.
I said nothing about UFOs violating laws of physics, and in fact said the opposite. How many of the top cases have you reviewed?
Well, I'm a bit confused, because when I listen to UAP advocates, what they always stress is seeing objects that violate our known laws of physics, so therefore must be an advanced technology.
If one is going to be impressed with UAP sightings that don't violate the known laws of physics – meaning they are shaped and move like objects we are familiar with – what is left of a UAP sighting? I've always understood the idea that these objects violate the known laws of physics as the justification for the idea that they might be aliens of an advanced civilization or supernatural.
I've looked into a handful of cases, and always found the debunkings a lot more plausible than the claims of aliens.
They stress that UAPs show abilities far beyond ours today. But these don't obviously violate physics.
Yes that’s why I say *known* laws of physics. They claim feats of movement, propulsion, acceleration, etc that we can’t engineer today and theoretically might not be possible. And I don’t see evidence of that beyond eye witness testimony, which you wouldn’t expect to be reliable in such cases. My question to AI was if we have non-testimonial evidence for that.
I lowered the standard and asked Claude whether there were cases where non-testimonial data showed advanced technology. It says no to that too.
https://claude.ai/share/a6e4c6b7-970f-4d81-8c47-6b64432f5e28
Of course it would be amazing to learn about intelligent life elsewhere. I am highly motived to want to believe it's there.
It helps to think about the issue of visitors to Earth using the template: if this was happening, what else would be true? It’s not hard to imagine that if advanced civilizations were ubiquitous enough that they could visit us. It IS hard to imagine ubiquitous civilizations visiting us and not leaving their mark on the galaxy in some visible way. Waste heat, weird cooling, coherent light emission, stellar engineering? If aliens are everywhere, it means they’ve been around for a while. You need special pleading to accept that they are ubiquitous and also perfectly low impact in the environment of the cosmos.
When it comes to visitors, it’s easy to believe that aliens that could travel for light years could also do amazing things technologically--go fast, do weird stuff with waste heat, use exotic propulsion, hide from us well and easily. What’s not easy to understand is why aliens would take steps to avoid being approached closely--and perhaps hide or avoid us most of the time--but be perfectly fine with being observed on radar or with grainy infrared cameras. I don’t claim to understand an alien mind. But if they have light year travel and probably advanced AI and molecular nanotech or femtotech, and they behave as if they are avoiding us most of the time (they never just hover over an airport or near anyone with a decent camera) …why do they not care about being observed almost constantly, as long as it’s by people with camera equipment that isn’t quite up to the task? Lots of poor evidence does not sum up to good evidence.
When the lighting conditions are bad; when the camera is using digital stabilization or dynamic range adjustments or other digital correction at the edge of its performance specs; when the frame of reference is changing, we get what we would expect: confusing observations.
Can you provide a list of what you consider the top UFO cases? You have mentioned a few times that you find the top cases to be pretty reasonable and convincing but since I have spent very little time reading about UFOs I am not sure what you are referring to, a list would be pretty helpful to assess the claim myself
See the film and book I cited.
> Also, Mars had much land then while Earth was long totally covered in water.
Isn't life on Earth believed to have started in the water, with that more likely to support life?
When I read the title I mistakenly read it with a comma. “Aliens are not crazy, unlikely” and then was looking for the argument that aliens were sane. Took me a while, but then I’m a bit slow. Are aliens more likely to be crazy or sane? Are you more likely to survive as a species by being sane or crazy?
Wait. there's a pretty serious bait and switch happening here.
> For a typical murder trial, the base rate is roughly 1/1000 that a particular death was a murder, and there are roughly 1000 associates who might have done it, giving a roughly one in a million prior for an accusation that X murdered Y.
There is close to 1 that murders occur somewhat frequently, and for most murder convictions there is lots of even-more-unlikely-if-no-murder evidence (the chance that the bullet marks match a random gun is well under 1 in a million, for instance), and the chance that the victim slept with exactly the accused's wife is 1 in billions, right?
The reference class problem hits ALL of these questions, but ET life and ET intelligence are WAY less repeated than murder investigations, so much harder to pick reasonable comparisons.
For me, ET life at historical times in our solar system seems pretty likely, and ET technological intelligence contemporaneously on earth seems extremely unlikely. Like 5-8 orders of magnitude difference in priors. Additionally, the evidence for life is at least mildly strong, and the evidence for UFOs being alien much weaker. Even if stronger than some other commonly-accepted (or at least not bothered to debate) phenomena, it's just not true that the priors are anywhere near (for me; I do acknowledge that it's very hard to debate "correctness" of prior, and you're entitled to be more credulous - there's not enough compelling evidence in either direction to definitely prove someone wrong).
And the problem of carrying costs and counterparty risk (oh, and difficulty in defining resolution, given it could be millennia before the smoking gun is found) makes prediction markets or just individual wagers not very attractive for the question. Even if I'd give it 100K:1 and you'd only give it 10k:1 (note: made up - I haven't quantified my beliefs that closely, and I'm not sure you've published an estimate), we have no easy way to arbitrage the difference.
'ET technological intelligence contemporaneously on earth seems extremely unlikely.' - You seem to be assuming a short random visit.
Anti-faith is the deep commitment--not justified by evidence--to refuse to believe something.
A person's religion is whatever set of beliefs they hold as as unfalsifiable, as axioms that require no proof, whose prior probabilities they keep fixed at 100%. In other words, it's whatever beliefs in which they put unskakable faith.
No gods or other supernatural entities are real and there are some 10k years of reports on them.
UFOs aren't supernatural, and testimony re gods seems to quite poor relative to UFO testimonry.