Reditt has some of the smartest 12 year olds on the planet. They seem convinced that they can change the world without leaving thier room. If you disagree with their group your comment will be down-voted off the page and no one will ever read it. Oh well, they will move on to the latest TIkTok.
It is easy to confuse optical aberrations, or normal Earth objects with what you believe to be things of extraterrestrial origin.
Just last week I was out photographing my neighborhood from atop a hill at nighttime. There was nothing out of the ordinary, just a typical night sky over a quiet suburban town.
Then, all of a sudden a very odd object flew past my line of sight. It was quite blurry and emitted what sounded to me like some sort of alien language! Good god, I thought, we’re being attacked by a hostile advanced civilization from outer space! Luckily, I got a shot of the object before it sped off.
I went home, developed the photo, and was about to send it to the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and NATO—this could be a situation in need of full military strength.
But, then I examined the photo more closely with a magnifying glass and realized what I thought was a UFO with evil intent, was just a duck. Imagine my embarrassment if I had actually mailed that photo to the government!
I feel that this view of aliens as ‘little green men’ visiting us in spaceships is a little myopic, in the scheme of universe-scale timeframes. When we consider the amount of scientific and technological progress mankind has made in the last 100 years as a point of reference, what degree of advancement and sophistication would an alien species have made that started a million years before us? It would, surely, be beyond our comprehension. Quandaries like the nature of dark matter & dark energy, or how to break the speed of light would seem like trivial, infantile and barbaric concerns to them - these beings would be essentially godlike, and more than capable of observing us (and acting upon us), with or without our realising (with that last point entirely at their discretion).
That’s not to say that these beings would be any morally (spiritually, ethically or whatever…) superior to us - they may well be assholes - but their technology would be so in advance of our own that they could, to all intents and purposes, operate completely invisibly to us. Is it possible that somewhere in the universe, a form of intelligent life evolved with a similar trajectory of technological progress to ours, but a million years before us? Easily, given the sheer scale of the place. Is it possible, nay likely, therefore, that we are being monitored in some way by a super-intelligent alien life form out there somewhere, but in ways which we couldn’t possibly comprehend? I’d vote for that too, although there would be no way of knowing.
But, if we’re talking about alien species which are still relying on clunky 21st-century tech (i.e. actual physical aircraft, which fly through and between planetary atmospheres), the odds get a lot slimmer. If they’re still needing to physically manoeuvre hunks of matter about the place in order to explore it, that suggests they’re not-as-advanced-as-all-that, and that they are therefore expending finite and precious resources for nebulous aims. And, even more suspiciously, they seem to be doing it exclusively in United States airspace.
If you look at a map of UFO sightings you will notice a reasonably strong correlation with english-speaking countries (even Australia and New Zealand seem to have a disproportionate number of sightings considering their relatively low populations).
This suggests two possibilities:
- Aliens are very interested in english-speaking countries .
or - English speaking countries tend to share a similar background in ‘Aliens from Outer Space!’ movies that started around the 1950s, and so the idea has been implanted into their population’s consciousness, resulting in objects from weather balloons to low-flying ducks being incorrectly identified (or rather, ‘unidentified!’).
Technological advances tend to form “s”-shaped curves when graphed. Progress remains mostly flat for a long time, then shoots upwards at a rapid rate, then flattens out again. People living in the rapid rise period of a technology seem to often assume that the rapid rise will go on forever. It won’t. Yes, we have home computers today a thousand times faster than we had 30 years ago, but people 30 years from now will not have home computers a thousand times faster than today. And we do not have cars or planes 1,000 times faster or cheaper than 30 years ago. If we met aliens a million years more advanced than us, I’m sure many of their toys would be impressive. But probably most of them will be disappointingly less impressive than you might expect.
I suppose we’ll have to wait and see 
I’ve no doubt that the rate of technological progress seen in the last 100 years or so is unsustainable in the long term. But a million’s a lot more than a hundred, it doesn’t need to be. My conjecture - although it is utterly unproveable - is that in a million years’ time, our ancestors (such that you can call them that, and assuming there are any) won’t be physical beings flying around in spaceships. Rather, their very physical means of existence and being will be completely unrecognisable and incomprehensible to us.
Because they’ll still be dead?
And there’s also limits on our capacity, as individual beings, to learn new things. Back when I was in University, we learned stuff in first year that people like Einstein won Nobel prizes for. It was noted at the time that lots of such ground-breaking work happened in those people’s younger years, but that this was becoming harder to do. We had so much to learn just to get to the point where we were capable of doing new work, that we ended up using up a lot of those “really good years” of creativity.
It’s been often noted that these days, jobs that used to require a Bachelor’s degree now need a Master’s, and what used to require a Master’s now require PhDs. That’s probably only to get worse. Imagine if it took 50 years to learn just the fundamentals of some particular science; how much innovation would still be happening?
This is why so many people are keen on Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity. Because if we’re stuck with just human minds, we will quite soon reach the educational limits of human minds.
whoops - successors
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) launches website full of compelling, unresolved UFO visual media:
Can you explain what is compelling?
“I can’t easily say what normal thing it is.”
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
The Buddha
I agree with you.
I think people don’t appreciate how big a deal it would be for a species to be technological for millions of years. It doesn’t sound a big deal because life has been around for deep time, but the rate of progress of a *generalized intelligence*, using language to make incremental progress, is a whole different thing.
I would agree of course that ETs cannot do anything against the laws of physics. And who knows, perhaps our knowledge of the universe happens to be close to complete? I doubt it, but we can’t rule it out.
However, let’s put it this way: there is a large set of engineering and biological problems that seem like practical impossibilities to us…Well, to an advanced ET, those problems will belong to their trivial set; solved long ago by their ancient ancestors. Our attempts at solving those problems will look much more primitive than our ancestors chipping flint into sharp points looks to us.
Yeah, they ain’t crash-landing in a field.
That could be attributed to Euro-centric reporting as well.
And the idea that aliens would be humanoid, bipedal, two arms and legs with a head on top and two eyes is so rediculous as to be laughable. Star Trek, latex forehead, fantasy.
I agree with Professor Brian Cox. If there were more advanced technological civilisations in our own galaxy the evidence would be obvious. We are likely to be the only advanced, technological people in our entire Milky Way galaxy. That is the answer to the Fermi Paradox. We don’t see others because we are the only ones, or maybe two, in the entire galaxy.
There are so many other galaxies in the universe that there must be some other intelegent civilizations out there, but other galaxies are so remote that the possibility is meaningless.
Are We The Only Intelligent Life in the Universe?? | Joe Rogan & Brian Cox - YouTube
I think that’s ridiculous.
We have no way of detecting a civilization like our own that was a close as the nearest star. To say that means that we are alone in a galaxy 100,000 LY across is a stretch.
But we thought the Pentagon was doing a big coverup!
He did say “more advanced” though.
The point is, given that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, the chance of a species being just a little more advanced than us is remote. Even with constraints like needing a 3rd generation star.
So making megastructures, powerful beacons, self-replicating bots etc will be child’s play.
None of those thing are going to be able to be detectable with out technology, from any reasonable distance (say, 50 LY). Unless FTL travel is possible, the galaxy could have millions of advanced civilizations that are all unknown to each other.