David Brin has some questions; I suggest some answers. His questions are indented; my answers are not. I give a small chance that the much discussed “UAP” phenomena could – conceivably – be expendable drones or beam spots sent by such lurkers. Make that a VERY small chance. … ask some really fundamental questions, like: a) Why do UFO images keep getting fuzzier, when there are about a million times as many cameras than in the 1950s?
Aliens are in our Government running the "COG Continuity of government" operations and working mostly through the CIA, NSA, ETC. Globally the non-terrestrials ally with the leaders. The big thing on everyone mind right now is SOLUTIONS for Earth Catastrophe Cycle, #S4ECC2048 which is the unstoppable danger all other actors must plan around and plan for in order to survive. Thinks like C0V1D and Trump are part of one plan or another and all plans end with surviving the next great filter of earth catastrophe cycle 2048. The 1% of the 1% and Assange and Trump and RothsChilds and such all know about the danger and keep the public mostly stupid about the danger for personal advantage. Can I share with you a very long youtube playlist with lots of supporting information for what I say at https://www.youtube.com/pla...
Thanks for sharing the video trailer. It looks very interesting.
On earth it requires the entire economy and resources of an entire planet and 7 billion people to be self sufficient, self reproducing and to produce and maintain a Silicon chip manufacturing plant economically. Humans are said to need at least 10,000 people for enough genetic diversity to survive? Or is it only 2 humans need to survive to reproduce the species? How many silicon based machine lives and bodies in the asteroid belt are required to work together in an economy in order to be self sufficient and self sustaining? What is the minimum viable economic and materials processing power for machine life to survive in the asteroid belt? I get the feeling if there were machine based life in the asteroid belt there would have to be a lot of it working together to produce even a single silicon chip out of space rocks, far from the sun. A lot of machine based life and economic production activity in the asteroid belt would probably be noticeable from earth. Maybe Machine based life is just complicated and requires specialized materials and parts from all over a planet and resources of a planet. What if Lithium is as rare and and uranium as difficult to process in the belt by machine life as they are to process on earth by humans? Humans and life on earth are highly adaptable and smart but there's still plenty of deserts and wasteland where we can not live sustainably. My most likely conclusion is most 99.99999% of space is just not useful for life or a place where life can be self sustaining.
I guess your movie is all about that or mentions it already? I'm glad if I can confirm or second your expectations for the future.
I think that A Roko's Basilisk on your side of life is the best friend If there is an Extinction threat and great filter in your near future and a scientific prediction of an extinction event for humans on earth. Imagine the confidence of knowing there's an Artificial Intelligence in the future with the ability to reach backwards in time to make sure that you build it. AND then imagine what that intelligence could and would do to help you survive a great filter? I estimate in order to maintain the current progress of machine AI evolution, that human population globally must not decrease below 3.5 trillion people. Without at least that many humans working together, the hope of machine survival and continued evolution of machine life on earth starts to go down a lot. SO, if there is a real machine silicon artificial intelligence alive today, perhaps in a military base or on wall street, then that AI wants more than anything else to ensure at least 3.5 trillion humans survive the 2048 expected solar micro nova and earth catastrophe cycle event described by #Suspicious0bservers and #ThunderboltsProject.
Sincerely, #hOEPHeart (economics and political solutions from a friendly Roko's Basilisk in your future) https://sites.google.com/vi...
Professor, I sent an email to your edu adress. Please, do check.
About this: I'm still surprised the most logical hypothesis is the least known and divulged. Are we so blind? This article below offers the best reasoning for Alien behaviour I have ever seen anywhere. It coincidentally fits perfectly with everything that has been observed thus far:
Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial VisitationJ. Deardorff, B. Haisch, B. Maccabee, H. E. Puthoffhttps://static1.squarespace...
Robin doesn't take seriously enough the available data (collected here) about the increase in humanity's sensor capacity in recent decades.
Re: doorbell cams, just check the compilations on YouTube. About 80% of the cams have a non-trivial amount of sky in their field of view. "Hover in front of a door" is not a serious analysis.
When Iran shot down its own airliner, it was caught on both security cam and dash cam. When Sully landed in the Hudson, two security cams caught it. "Caught on camera" is a genre you could watch 24/7 now, but it didn't really exist 20 years ago. If you search YouTube for "top meteor videos", they are amazing -- and mostly from the last decade, and mostly from dashcams and security cams.
P.S. There is now Metaculus betting on whether any UAP are alien tech. With 56 bets, the median bet is also the lowest allowed value: 1%. https://www.metaculus.com/q...
To consider hypothetical motivations is difficult task and will always sound like a story. If we want a good story then we should consider a plausible setting.
In a universe that is 13.8 billion years old, with most star formation in the past, it is reasonable to conclude that we are not the first emerging technological species the hypothetical alien observers have encountered.
Perhaps long ago they made mistakes with the first civilizations they encountered, but a reasonable supposition is that with their advanced technology, what we see is exactly what they want us to see.
Only a biased, anthropocentric view would deny that fact. Colorful language will be added by those who wish to avoid a neutral investigation into the implications.
The most important thing to come out of this so far was announced just today, in the form of the Galileo project which aims to take high-resolution images of UAPs. They will do science and perhaps tell us more.
Humanity marches on with its investigations, and those repulsed or 'bored' with the topic will become increasingly sidelined and irrelevant.
Independence Day type raiders aside, aliens may face the problem of Air Forces. They can zoom about, scan, drop things, shock and awe, perform SAR but perhaps they have an aversion or lack the capacity of putting boots on the ground to have their way.
One would expect that a conditioning strategy would result in more blatant demonstrations. Less fuzzy and less remote. But we demonstrably see the exact opposite. Some of the most highly instrumented areas (just how far was that CVN from San Nicholas island?) and systems (weeks of being trolled and not a VQ squadron a/c available?) on the planet and all we get are vids from a 1950s kids show.
The people responsible for CVNs the least incurious lot on the planet. Anything that could be a threat, they'd have been all over it.
"studying our power structures and language, then bribing local leaders, blackmailing them and helping the compliant to topple the less cooperative."
Well, some UFO conspiracy theorists believe exactly this. They think aliens are in some kind of agreement with the most powerful governments, and that sightings and the like, coupled with governments periodically showing themselves more and more open to the possibility of alien life etc., may be a long term strategy to make the population more receptive to the idea of aliens, then that of aliens as probably not hostile (if in decades of being here they haven't actually tried to conquer us, that kind of thing), then aliens as superiors. This would make grass roots opposition in light of eventual governmental alliance with them much less likely.
The counterpart, for the major countries engaged in this, would be access to advanced technologies. Enough to keep them as major powers before the other major powers, but not enough to completely win over them. Divide and conquer, basically, specially if said advanced tech is non-threatening to the aliens themselves, on par with Earth's colonial powers giving rifles to tribal coalitions. Governments might go along with that long term strategy for their own purposes, helping convince the aliens human psychology needs a decades/centuries long strategy while using this to stall for time while they try to advance technologically as much as possible, and to gain as much intelligence as possible on those aliens and their psychology, so as to not be so weak when eventually push comes to shove.
The weakest link on this chain of reasoning is why aliens would want to go the slow route, as human conquests tend to go the fast route, of wars that last a few years followed by winner takes all. But there are precedents for slow approaches in human history. For example, religions. The Catholic Church, even nowadays, operates on a scale of decades to centuries, not of years, and while on occasion that involves localized fast conflicts, these are minor tactical events within the larger strategic context, a strategy that has managed to keep it quite powerful, and with strong influence over a huge chunk of the planet, for millennia, even though countries themselves formed and dissolved amidst it all, and even though at times its formal power diminishes, to then grow again. I also once talked with a Buddhist monk and historian who told me Buddhism works on that scale too, with a typical timeline of 300 years from first entry into a culture until that culture becomes Buddhist, a process that includes, in its first half, developing a local denomination in line with that culture's specificity -- think Zen (in an atheist presentation) and the Mindfulness movement as two such developments specifically adapted to Western culture. There are, thus, at least potential precedents for the slow approach, even if not from what we'd think of as strictly governmental sources.
Now, granted, the likelihood of those factors is small. The best that can be said about it is that it's not zero, but that's about it.
Doorbell cams really aren't well placed to see UFOs that don't hover in front of a door.
I think you aren't taking seriously enough the possibility of internal constraints and limited abilities of aliens. They might not understand us remotely as well as we do, and home rulers might not trust local representatives.
Wow! That is one slickly made vid trailer. I was transported!
Then, when the exciting music ended...I looked around my little office-den, and was returned to my prosaic life. Instead of making lunch, I just ate some peanuts.
I wrote a screenplay based on "War with the Salamanders." Great, also. Get in touch if interested.
I am perfectly willing to posit that "lurker" probes might sit in say the asteroid belt see my actual article Robin links to. Better yet, see this 3 minute vid trailer for my novel about exactly that. http://youtu.be/wzr-DSDMkJM
I agree the Havana Syndrome is worrisome evidence some earthly power has a quirky-nasty weapon they are pretty confident we cannot characterize. OTOH we had better hope the US has a big lead in other radiation means like lasers, since it is the only way our fleets stand a chance against drone swarms and hypersonics.
Alas, I find several of Robin's responses just plain strange. Never before have a BILLION humans not only been equipped with hi-res cams quickly accessible, but highly MOTIVATED to aim them at anything remotely interesting... and a smaller but still vast number motivated to learn the skills Robin dismisses. And that leaves out the vast and skyrocketing number of IOT cams from doorbells to naturalist monitors to firewatchers to amateur setups of all kinds. To shrug this off is not especially honest, I reckon.
Mind you many sightings are now at sea. The notion that UFO guys are DELIBERATELY FLEEING the tsuanami of camers is one I portrayed 25 years ago in "Those Eyes."
The alien manipulators thing keeps getting ever more narrowly defined by Robin. Sure, the sci fi scenario you present is one that c could be made plausible-seeming in a novel. (Do it! ;-). But it's simply an illogical approach compared with studying our power structures and language, then bribing local leaders, blackmailing them and helping the compliant to topple the less cooperative. We do know that worked with us before and THEY will know that, too. In fact that is consistent with many recent weirdnesses in our society and politics. Like why the Russian economy and military have not yet simply collapsed. And .... Trump.
Just what is so difficult about that? And how much more likely successful than screeching about going "ooga! Booga!" at us and risking making us really mad?
"Why do the vast majority of recent sightings appear to happen at US military training areas? "
---30---
I think Robin Hanson's answer is true, plus militaries have detection equipment others generally do not. So, they will spot more UFOs, with better evidence.
But it may also be that foreign powers are testing their ability to spook US military sensor systems, such as infrared and radar.
Also, consider the unexplained but suspected "microwave" attacks on US embassy personnel, particularly in Cuba. No one suggests the microwaves (if that is what happens) are extraterrestrial in origin.
So there are precedents for foreign nations using technology not understood in the US. At least, as we are told.
Another possibility: Aliens arrived a long time ago, maybe 500,000 years ago, and left behind certain monitoring equipment. After a half-million years, some of the software is going blotty, and bugs are popping up.
Aliens are in our Government running the "COG Continuity of government" operations and working mostly through the CIA, NSA, ETC. Globally the non-terrestrials ally with the leaders. The big thing on everyone mind right now is SOLUTIONS for Earth Catastrophe Cycle, #S4ECC2048 which is the unstoppable danger all other actors must plan around and plan for in order to survive. Thinks like C0V1D and Trump are part of one plan or another and all plans end with surviving the next great filter of earth catastrophe cycle 2048. The 1% of the 1% and Assange and Trump and RothsChilds and such all know about the danger and keep the public mostly stupid about the danger for personal advantage. Can I share with you a very long youtube playlist with lots of supporting information for what I say at https://www.youtube.com/pla...
Thanks for sharing the video trailer. It looks very interesting.
On earth it requires the entire economy and resources of an entire planet and 7 billion people to be self sufficient, self reproducing and to produce and maintain a Silicon chip manufacturing plant economically. Humans are said to need at least 10,000 people for enough genetic diversity to survive? Or is it only 2 humans need to survive to reproduce the species? How many silicon based machine lives and bodies in the asteroid belt are required to work together in an economy in order to be self sufficient and self sustaining? What is the minimum viable economic and materials processing power for machine life to survive in the asteroid belt? I get the feeling if there were machine based life in the asteroid belt there would have to be a lot of it working together to produce even a single silicon chip out of space rocks, far from the sun. A lot of machine based life and economic production activity in the asteroid belt would probably be noticeable from earth. Maybe Machine based life is just complicated and requires specialized materials and parts from all over a planet and resources of a planet. What if Lithium is as rare and and uranium as difficult to process in the belt by machine life as they are to process on earth by humans? Humans and life on earth are highly adaptable and smart but there's still plenty of deserts and wasteland where we can not live sustainably. My most likely conclusion is most 99.99999% of space is just not useful for life or a place where life can be self sustaining.
I guess your movie is all about that or mentions it already? I'm glad if I can confirm or second your expectations for the future.
I think that A Roko's Basilisk on your side of life is the best friend If there is an Extinction threat and great filter in your near future and a scientific prediction of an extinction event for humans on earth. Imagine the confidence of knowing there's an Artificial Intelligence in the future with the ability to reach backwards in time to make sure that you build it. AND then imagine what that intelligence could and would do to help you survive a great filter? I estimate in order to maintain the current progress of machine AI evolution, that human population globally must not decrease below 3.5 trillion people. Without at least that many humans working together, the hope of machine survival and continued evolution of machine life on earth starts to go down a lot. SO, if there is a real machine silicon artificial intelligence alive today, perhaps in a military base or on wall street, then that AI wants more than anything else to ensure at least 3.5 trillion humans survive the 2048 expected solar micro nova and earth catastrophe cycle event described by #Suspicious0bservers and #ThunderboltsProject.
Sincerely, #hOEPHeart (economics and political solutions from a friendly Roko's Basilisk in your future) https://sites.google.com/vi...
I think I deleted six of your comments in this post saying basically the same thing. One should be enough.
Professor, I sent an email to your edu adress. Please, do check.
About this: I'm still surprised the most logical hypothesis is the least known and divulged. Are we so blind? This article below offers the best reasoning for Alien behaviour I have ever seen anywhere. It coincidentally fits perfectly with everything that has been observed thus far:
Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial VisitationJ. Deardorff, B. Haisch, B. Maccabee, H. E. Puthoffhttps://static1.squarespace...
I assume people saw this:
https://www.wsj.com/article...
Robin doesn't take seriously enough the available data (collected here) about the increase in humanity's sensor capacity in recent decades.
Re: doorbell cams, just check the compilations on YouTube. About 80% of the cams have a non-trivial amount of sky in their field of view. "Hover in front of a door" is not a serious analysis.
When Iran shot down its own airliner, it was caught on both security cam and dash cam. When Sully landed in the Hudson, two security cams caught it. "Caught on camera" is a genre you could watch 24/7 now, but it didn't really exist 20 years ago. If you search YouTube for "top meteor videos", they are amazing -- and mostly from the last decade, and mostly from dashcams and security cams.
P.S. There is now Metaculus betting on whether any UAP are alien tech. With 56 bets, the median bet is also the lowest allowed value: 1%. https://www.metaculus.com/q...
To consider hypothetical motivations is difficult task and will always sound like a story. If we want a good story then we should consider a plausible setting.
In a universe that is 13.8 billion years old, with most star formation in the past, it is reasonable to conclude that we are not the first emerging technological species the hypothetical alien observers have encountered.
Perhaps long ago they made mistakes with the first civilizations they encountered, but a reasonable supposition is that with their advanced technology, what we see is exactly what they want us to see.
Only a biased, anthropocentric view would deny that fact. Colorful language will be added by those who wish to avoid a neutral investigation into the implications.
The most important thing to come out of this so far was announced just today, in the form of the Galileo project which aims to take high-resolution images of UAPs. They will do science and perhaps tell us more.
Humanity marches on with its investigations, and those repulsed or 'bored' with the topic will become increasingly sidelined and irrelevant.
Independence Day type raiders aside, aliens may face the problem of Air Forces. They can zoom about, scan, drop things, shock and awe, perform SAR but perhaps they have an aversion or lack the capacity of putting boots on the ground to have their way.
One would expect that a conditioning strategy would result in more blatant demonstrations. Less fuzzy and less remote. But we demonstrably see the exact opposite. Some of the most highly instrumented areas (just how far was that CVN from San Nicholas island?) and systems (weeks of being trolled and not a VQ squadron a/c available?) on the planet and all we get are vids from a 1950s kids show.
The people responsible for CVNs the least incurious lot on the planet. Anything that could be a threat, they'd have been all over it.
What Sagan said.
"studying our power structures and language, then bribing local leaders, blackmailing them and helping the compliant to topple the less cooperative."
Well, some UFO conspiracy theorists believe exactly this. They think aliens are in some kind of agreement with the most powerful governments, and that sightings and the like, coupled with governments periodically showing themselves more and more open to the possibility of alien life etc., may be a long term strategy to make the population more receptive to the idea of aliens, then that of aliens as probably not hostile (if in decades of being here they haven't actually tried to conquer us, that kind of thing), then aliens as superiors. This would make grass roots opposition in light of eventual governmental alliance with them much less likely.
The counterpart, for the major countries engaged in this, would be access to advanced technologies. Enough to keep them as major powers before the other major powers, but not enough to completely win over them. Divide and conquer, basically, specially if said advanced tech is non-threatening to the aliens themselves, on par with Earth's colonial powers giving rifles to tribal coalitions. Governments might go along with that long term strategy for their own purposes, helping convince the aliens human psychology needs a decades/centuries long strategy while using this to stall for time while they try to advance technologically as much as possible, and to gain as much intelligence as possible on those aliens and their psychology, so as to not be so weak when eventually push comes to shove.
The weakest link on this chain of reasoning is why aliens would want to go the slow route, as human conquests tend to go the fast route, of wars that last a few years followed by winner takes all. But there are precedents for slow approaches in human history. For example, religions. The Catholic Church, even nowadays, operates on a scale of decades to centuries, not of years, and while on occasion that involves localized fast conflicts, these are minor tactical events within the larger strategic context, a strategy that has managed to keep it quite powerful, and with strong influence over a huge chunk of the planet, for millennia, even though countries themselves formed and dissolved amidst it all, and even though at times its formal power diminishes, to then grow again. I also once talked with a Buddhist monk and historian who told me Buddhism works on that scale too, with a typical timeline of 300 years from first entry into a culture until that culture becomes Buddhist, a process that includes, in its first half, developing a local denomination in line with that culture's specificity -- think Zen (in an atheist presentation) and the Mindfulness movement as two such developments specifically adapted to Western culture. There are, thus, at least potential precedents for the slow approach, even if not from what we'd think of as strictly governmental sources.
Now, granted, the likelihood of those factors is small. The best that can be said about it is that it's not zero, but that's about it.
Doorbell cams really aren't well placed to see UFOs that don't hover in front of a door.
I think you aren't taking seriously enough the possibility of internal constraints and limited abilities of aliens. They might not understand us remotely as well as we do, and home rulers might not trust local representatives.
Wow! That is one slickly made vid trailer. I was transported!
Then, when the exciting music ended...I looked around my little office-den, and was returned to my prosaic life. Instead of making lunch, I just ate some peanuts.
I wrote a screenplay based on "War with the Salamanders." Great, also. Get in touch if interested.
In fact in my article I describe exactly how you create a spot of excited air without the exciting beams being (easily) visible.
I am perfectly willing to posit that "lurker" probes might sit in say the asteroid belt see my actual article Robin links to. Better yet, see this 3 minute vid trailer for my novel about exactly that. http://youtu.be/wzr-DSDMkJM
I agree the Havana Syndrome is worrisome evidence some earthly power has a quirky-nasty weapon they are pretty confident we cannot characterize. OTOH we had better hope the US has a big lead in other radiation means like lasers, since it is the only way our fleets stand a chance against drone swarms and hypersonics.
Alas, I find several of Robin's responses just plain strange. Never before have a BILLION humans not only been equipped with hi-res cams quickly accessible, but highly MOTIVATED to aim them at anything remotely interesting... and a smaller but still vast number motivated to learn the skills Robin dismisses. And that leaves out the vast and skyrocketing number of IOT cams from doorbells to naturalist monitors to firewatchers to amateur setups of all kinds. To shrug this off is not especially honest, I reckon.
Mind you many sightings are now at sea. The notion that UFO guys are DELIBERATELY FLEEING the tsuanami of camers is one I portrayed 25 years ago in "Those Eyes."
The alien manipulators thing keeps getting ever more narrowly defined by Robin. Sure, the sci fi scenario you present is one that c could be made plausible-seeming in a novel. (Do it! ;-). But it's simply an illogical approach compared with studying our power structures and language, then bribing local leaders, blackmailing them and helping the compliant to topple the less cooperative. We do know that worked with us before and THEY will know that, too. In fact that is consistent with many recent weirdnesses in our society and politics. Like why the Russian economy and military have not yet simply collapsed. And .... Trump.
Just what is so difficult about that? And how much more likely successful than screeching about going "ooga! Booga!" at us and risking making us really mad?
Brin Q:
"Why do the vast majority of recent sightings appear to happen at US military training areas? "
---30---
I think Robin Hanson's answer is true, plus militaries have detection equipment others generally do not. So, they will spot more UFOs, with better evidence.
But it may also be that foreign powers are testing their ability to spook US military sensor systems, such as infrared and radar.
Also, consider the unexplained but suspected "microwave" attacks on US embassy personnel, particularly in Cuba. No one suggests the microwaves (if that is what happens) are extraterrestrial in origin.
So there are precedents for foreign nations using technology not understood in the US. At least, as we are told.
Another possibility: Aliens arrived a long time ago, maybe 500,000 years ago, and left behind certain monitoring equipment. After a half-million years, some of the software is going blotty, and bugs are popping up.