The Pentagon acknowledged a program has been running at least 2007 to 2012 investigating military and other reports of events in an attempt to determine the source of the technology or disturbance as it could be a threat to the country from foreign power or nature. This space is to discuss and debate information released or new reports to poke holes in theories and stay as skeptical as possible as well as being OK to think we don't have all the answers. Please keep this to as much fact as possible in the report and state when you start to speculate. Let's all be respectful of everyone and talk about what we don't know!
If it seems like I’m chiding anyone, my apologies. I’m familiar with all the arguments posted here explaining fermi’s paradox, and I’ve even advocated for them in the past. They’re good, convincing arguments. Personally, the cosmic speed limit really seems to be difficult to break, even given limitless energy and technology. The galactic scale one I’m more dubious of since the age of the universe weakens it somewhat, but it’s still a good argument.
If anything I’m a little surprised at the antipathy I’m getting toward my reluctance to accept that aliens definitely exist just by virtue of statistics and unexplored space. I realize the scale in this analogy is off but: we’ve only mapped <10% of the world’s oceans, but I’m still pretty confident there isn’t a bustling Atlantean metropolis down there.
I’m actually more or less agnostic on whether aliens exist or not, but I’m leaning towards probably yes simply because earth life existing shows us that it’s possible which turns the question strictly into a numbers game, and the universe is so big it gives chance a nearly infinite amount of opportunities.
I do find the “why don’t we see dead alien civilizations” a bit of a weird argument, though, not just for the reasons other people listed but the MOST obvious reason: entropy. Shit breaks down over time, bombarded by space dust, radiation and debris. Orbits decay and things spiral into the nearest gravity well or get flung randomly off into the void, too tiny and irrelevant to detect. The vast age of the universe is actually an argument against being able to see dead civilizations.
While I admit it would be cool to find "aliens" aka space faring adventurers, its not what I'm after.
I just want to find "life" whether microbe or animal with significant intelligence.
But its more like "I can't wait till we find it" rather than "will we find it?"
I realize the scale in this analogy is off but: we’ve only mapped <10% of the world’s oceans, but I’m still pretty confident there isn’t a bustling Atlantean metropolis down there.
Yeah, only off by a few thousand orders of magnitude! 
More accurate to say "I looked in this glass of water and didn't find civilization in it, so there's definitely none in the ocean".
Correcting the scale shows the absurdity of the argument.
The space debris thing is really odd too since we are only able to analyze light coming from distant stars to determine whether they have planets and get some indication of elements that may include water.
Seth wrote:I realize the scale in this analogy is off but: we’ve only mapped <10% of the world’s oceans, but I’m still pretty confident there isn’t a bustling Atlantean metropolis down there.
Yeah, only off by a few thousand orders of magnitude!
More accurate to say "I looked in this glass of water and didn't find civilization in it, so there's definitely none in the ocean".
Correcting the scale shows the absurdity of the argument.
Haha, maybe! Then again, if someone told me there was an underwater city that had been down there since before oceans existed, then yeah I might think it’s weird that the glass of water didn’t have Atlantean micro plastics or mermaid porn or I dunno, SOMETHING weird in it!
Haha, maybe! Then again, if someone told me there was an underwater city that had been down there since before oceans existed, then yeah I might think it’s weird that the glass of water didn’t have Atlantean micro plastics or mermaid porn or I dunno, SOMETHING weird in it!
Maybe all Atlantean tech was based on something whose remnants are so ubiquitous in our world it’s a part of everyday existence that we don’t even question anymore. Like mitochondria or viruses.
Fish scales?
Haha, maybe! Then again, if someone told me there was an underwater city that had been down there since before oceans existed, then yeah I might think it’s weird that the glass of water didn’t have Atlantean micro plastics or mermaid porn or I dunno, SOMETHING weird in it!
To be fair, we don't know what mermaids' preferred jazz-fuel is, so maybe it IS full of mermaid porn and we don't realize it.
Much like alien signals from space!
I have no idea about UFOs or alien visitation.
But, count me on the side of the Universe is probably teaming with intelligent life, and if FTL is possible, some have probably figured it out.
Why can't we see signs, or at least their garbage? How about that we are hairless (and sometimes rage infected) monkeys that are nowhere near as smart as we think we are? Hell, we can't even rule out that there have been previous intelligent species on earth. Billions, even hundreds of millions of years are stupid long time periods, and shit decays. Galactic garbage tech floating through the either, or sitting on Mars would have long since been blasted to nothing by cosmic rays, radiation, whatever the hell dark matter is and so on.
It wouldn't even surprise me if their are multitudes of FTL civs out there that do know about Earth. Why haven't they said hello? Again, see rage infected monkeys.
The wild thing is that Star Trek could be mostly real (minus humans) and we wouldn’t know it since the Prime Directive would prohibit them from any sort of contact with us.
Unless nonhuman Kirk wants to have relations, then obv the Prime Directive is suspended.
In my mind, it goes along the following lines, and this is already said by various Goodjers:
Universe big. Could be multiverses but we'd never know based on our current or forseeable knowledge.
Probability suggests we aren't, weren't, or won't be, living on the only planet in the entire universe which sustains living organic material (or living non-organic material).
Radiation weakens over distance. We're truly a dot in a vast galaxy which itself is one of an exponentially high number of other vast galaxies that have existed or may exist over time and space. We're all hurtling away from the centre of the known universe.
We can't find others, and it seems they can't find us. Even if one were to discover the other, given the magnitudes of distance and time to even get from one vast galaxy to another, it's either improbable we can reach each other in time or we're merely observing events taking billions/millions of years to reach each other.
Further, it's likely with such distances and time spans involved, cosmic annihilation would have occurred for any sorts of reasons.
Realistically, to get alien contact to happen, against all probability, they'd have to be the ones to spot us and somehow break the presently known laws of the universe (at least as we understand them) to achieve FTL travel. Even at C, they wouldn't get to us (and we wouldn't get to them) in time for inter-species interaction.
But then, why would a FTL spacefaring being bother with coming to our backwater corner of the Milky Way? More proximate resources and whatnot.
Then you've got the "dark forest" concept from the Three Body Problem series where, yknow, maybe it's not a good idea to broadcast your presence because once you do, it's a lighthouse beacon to unwelcome visitors.
It all makes for great scifi though!
I really don’t like the Dark Forest concept and think it’s one of the most inane concepts introduced into recent sci-fi. It posits civilizations so powerful that they can obliterate entire solar systems from halfway across the galaxy yet are completely incapable of defending themselves so cower in fear, only poking their heads out to take potshots at other signs of life. It’s a bad idea and Cixin Liu should feel bad.
But then, why would a FTL spacefaring being bother with coming to our backwater corner of the Milky Way? More proximate resources and whatnot.
It'd probably come down to how many other alien lifeforms they've encountered. If they've managed to crack FTL, there's a good chance they're curious and that they like to explore (why bother trying to achieve FTL otherwise?). If we were the first alien civilzation they've come across, they'd likely be thrilled to visit just for the chance to meet actual alien life, regardless of how uninteresting our backwoods corner actually is. If we're the hundredth alien civilization they've detected they'd be much more likely to just catalogue us as they pass us by unless there was some weirdly specific thing that piqued their interest.
I have to respectfully disagree with Ruhk re C X Liu, I mean, there's all sorts of "lazy" SF writing, including the concept of the protomolecule in the Expanse series. It boils down to, with no idea on what motivates a hypothetical alien, one can only make up a convenient plot outline to drive the rest of the story.
One has to assume a hypothetical alien, having so much technological prowess, would only be visiting Earth for a handful of reasons. One might be conquest, one might be guardianship of a pre-FTL planet, perhaps tourism. That hypothetical alien, unless having the means to exceed the speed limit of C, would be doomed to a one way trip in much the same way as any Earth based visitor to Mars would be.
An ability to "break" the laws bounding our conceptualisation of time space matter and energy is consistent with an object behaving erratically from a human perspective. I suppose we'll never be able to understand alien tech at our current level on Earth even if it presented itself because to reach us it is inconceivable they used on par technology to get here in the first place. I guess this is what makes any media portraying serious human resistance against an alien invader so laughable if one didn't first suspend disbelief.
It boils down to, with no idea on what motivates a hypothetical alien, one can only make up a convenient plot outline to drive the rest of the story.
That must be why Liu makes up a new plotline every chapter.
The most plausible part of a Dark Forest scenario to me is that if humans ever achieve interstellar dominance, it would absolutely be a dark forest scenario for everyone else. Terraforming is just another word for xenocide depending on who you ask.
If you think about it, our planet exists as a dark forest scenario already. Any living thing that shows itself as even a potential threat to us gets managed or eradicated.
Edit: Supporting evidence! Animals are becoming nocturnal to avoid humans.
I really don’t like the Dark Forest concept and think it’s one of the most inane concepts introduced into recent sci-fi. It posits civilizations so powerful that they can obliterate entire solar systems from halfway across the galaxy yet are completely incapable of defending themselves so cower in fear, only poking their heads out to take potshots at other signs of life. It’s a bad idea and Cixin Liu should feel bad.
The way it’s explained in the book made sense to me. The best defense is a good offense!
If they've managed to crack FTL, there's a good chance they're curious and that they like to explore (why bother trying to achieve FTL otherwise?).
Maybe they screwed up and completely messed up the balance of the ecosystem on their home planet, so they had to develop FTL travel in order to search the universe for somewhere else to live.
That's probably a complete fantasy, though. I don't know what kind of race would be dumb enough to completely ruin the planet they live on.
All I keep reading from the naysayers is strictly around the current realm of human understanding. There is zero reason to believe we would even be able to perceive alien life forms or their communications.
The blips and blobs flying around might just be all we can perceive with our instruments and our physical capabilities
Multidimensional entities might seem like science fiction to us but completely ordinary to others.
Life on this one planet has been remarkably resilient and varied. It stands to reason that given the billions of other planets there are thousands of alien “beings”.
For sure, and even our definitions of life and intelligence are probably inadequate. They certainly aren’t able to explain how elephants are religious or how corvids hold funerals or how orcas can be sadistic toward sharks. We don’t even have a working definition for consciousness yet.
For me personally, though - as someone who has had real (to me) personal anecdotal experiences with the fae that live in my forest, the woods where I reside, I am looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life that can’t also be used to justify the existence of fairies, because I’m not going to go around evangelizing the dangers of fae traps based on my own intuition.
Great conversation about alien and interdimensional intelligence. I want to try and bring this back to the news topic at hand. I came across this which I think is overshadowed by the "spacecraft recovery & aliens" story. In the end this is about gov faud being whistleblown, just so happens the ICIG also got a lot of confidential evidence regarding recovered craft and NHI along the way.
You don’t know me, but I’m a retired Army JAG so I know about whistleblower stuff, and how IGs work and I hear people say he isn’t a whistleblower and he didn’t see the alien bodies himself and he doesn’t have any first hand evidence aliens exist—or it’s hearsay, these comments aren’t wrong, but he’s not whistleblowing by testifying aliens exist to congress and congress barely cares about aliens—if you listen closely to the comments of @timburchett, @aoc, and @mattgaetz, I’m sure they believe the part about aliens, but that’s not their big issue. They’re mad about how defense contractors are in control of our military.Here’s the TLDR. Grusch perfectly meets the definition of a whistleblower because he got professionally crushed (I’m pretty sure) when he discovered and reported contract fraud around these SAPs).Bbut it’s funny because a lot of people are distracted by the sensational aspect of these special access programs—aliens and alien space ships. Remember, Grusch isn’t whistleblowing to you or to congress. He blew the whistle to the IG. The IG found this credible and told congress.
I suspect Grusch asked an SAP contractor for his contract statement of work to see what was being done for the SAP and they didn’t show him, then he probably said show me the invoices for your work so I can see what you do (because I do the oversight now) and they couldn’t show him invoices for the SAP work they were doing, so he probably brought one contractor in and put him under oath in the SCIF and he got him to confess that they overbill for hammers and toilet seats to launder money so they can pay saps under the table (by padding invoices for other legit service contracts) that aren’t authorized by contract to avoid congressional oversight. Then some General probably fired Grusch who uncovered this government contract fraud/waste/abuse. So the IG checks the math and agrees, and they take it to congress because it’s DoD/pentagon senior leader misconduct that might indicate the defense contracting industry (military industrial complex) has bribed the most senior leaders of the pentagon with 7-8 figure salaries in post military retirement employment—so it’s getting gnarly fast and the fact that everything is to cover up the existence of aliens and alien space ships is just trivia at this point.
Then Grusch’s life is threatened and @rosscoulthart steps in and offers him an interview to go public because once he does it makes no sense to kill him, it will only become more public—so he gives the interview. But DOD approves it and they probably said ok, you can talk about aliens a little but you can’t talk about how the pentagon is corrupt. So he’s definitely a whistleblower and he s given all the evidence about that he needs to to the IG. He’s not whistleblowing to the public or congress to prove his claims—the IG has it and they believe him. But you feel like he’s trying to convince you aliens exist and we have recovered flying saucers—they do and we have them, but that’s what you care about, congress cares about the DoD corruption and the military industrial complex capture of the pentagon and them not being in control of how tax payer dollars are spent, Grusch doesn’t care what we believe, he says if you want to know—I told the IG where everything is—look for yourself. And he’s suing the military for firing him from his job in the military and federal government because he discovered fraud and he got hammered over it, which absolutely makes him a whistleblower.
That’s what I sorted out from everything that was said at the congressional hearing on July 26. Pretty sure that’s the situation. I hear Grusch saying believe what you want—I’m telling you they exist and if you don’t believe me I told the IG everything I know and you can go see for yourself—and he thinks the people should be told and the tech/knowledge doesn’t belong to these aerospace companies.
The aliens (if they're here) are here for one out if two reasons
1. Measuring the drapes so they can start again when we go extinct
OR
2. To watch us go extinct. I'm guessing intelligent civ's are rare. Could be like a supernova like event. It can't be every day one slams smack dab into the great filter.
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