They do this amazing thing by flying halfway across the cosmos to get to us, and manage to get caught out by drunk-ass Cleetus driving home from his last bender. They’re just visible enough to get noticed but always just inconspicuous enough to avoid getting a clear photo taken.
There’s a reason the sightings are always from a distance and indistinct. Can you guess why?
Everyone close enough to see the object distinctly can tell it isn’t an alien spaceship.
My answer is that science already knows that the speed of light can be exceeded under certain circumstances. The light barrier applies locally. We already have evidence that there are galaxies moving away from us at speeds GREATER than the speed of light. If you curve space, and we cannot yet produce that kind of energy, you will get from point A to point B much faster than light.
One thing to consider is that UFO sightings are heavily weighted towards countries with English as their primary language, mainly the US and the UK, rather than by general worldwide population density.
That tends to indicate there’s a social component to it rather than an objective reality to it. Remember several years ago there were stories about uncontrolled acceleration in Toyota cars? As it happens, the vast majority of reported incidents happened in the 3 months after the story broke. But that doesn’t make sense - if there were actually a problem, you’d expect such problems to persist throughout rather than peak in a frenzy for a few months. People were influenced by what they saw in media and as soon as the news cycle passed, they stopped reporting on it.
There’s a large component of that going on here. Tales of UFO sightings are now an old and well established part of American culture. And apparently British culture (?). Basically, it’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. UFO sightings feed more UFO sightings.
What are they? Could be anything. But mostly it seems to be the good old tendency of people not to be particularly good or objective witnesses of physical phenomena bolstered by our tendency to fall back on our folk tales and beliefs (and, yeah, UFO sightings as signs of the extraterrestrial are a modern, mostly American folk belief)
So do I. There may have been thousands of visits over the history of the Earth. But even if we assume four thousand visits by extraterrestrial probes, that would mean less than one visit every million years. Since these probes have left no verifiable evidence, they may as well not exist.
From ancient times people have postulated that the world around us is a dream, and not real. A glitch in the Matrix would be, dreams don’t make sense.
Which doesn’t mean what you suggest it means,
But the expansion of space plays a more important role, particularly on larger scales. If you envision the fabric of space as a ball of dough, with raisins throughout it (representing gravitationally bound structures like galaxies), then any raisin will view the nearby raisins as receding slowly in an omnidirectional fashion. But the farther away a raisin is, the faster it appears to recede, even though the raisins aren’t moving with respect to the dough. The dough is expanding just like the fabric of space is expanding, and all we can do is view the total redshift.
https://blogs-images.forbes.com/startswithabang/files/2017/09/Raisinbread.gif?
The Universe really is expanding, and the reason we see the light from distant objects as so severely redshift is due to the expanding fabric of space, not due to the motion of galaxies through space. In truth, individual galaxies typically move through space at relatively slow speeds: between 0.05% and 1.0% the speed of light, no more.
I had this idea to write a story in which the explanation for all of the alien visits is that they want to witness solar eclipses, as that’s not something you can see just anywhere in the galaxy.
Just to be clear, I don’t think that we are being visited by aliens. I don’t 100% discount the possibility, but I think it’s very very unlikely; that all ‘UFO’ sightings likely have natural in-world explanations.
But the speed of light restriction is not necessarily a deal breaker for why we have not been visited by aliens, or seen any sign of aliens, yet. At least, not as far as Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski were concerned when they had lunch one Summer in 1950. What became known as The Fermi Paradox was the question: if life is as common throughout the universe as it’s assumed to be, why haven’t we encountered any evidence of a technological civilization yet? A life form that had, say, a million year head start on us and became technologically advanced, would have had plenty of time to at least send out unmanned probes throughout a large swath of the galaxy by now.
I’m not trying to hijack the dabate with a discussion of the Fermi Paradox, which we have done to death in other threads. I’m just saying that smarter minds than us did not think that the speed of light was necessarily an impossible barrier to our being exposed to technologically advanced alien species, if in fact they are out there.
Exactly. The sightings always occur in the Low Information Zone, where no-one can take a good picture or make a good video. There are eight billion potential witnesses on this planet, some of them with very good recording equipment. A good proportion of them have dashcams nowadays, and practically every meteor that happens over inhabited areas gets recorded. But no good UFOs/UAPs.
Do the UFO/UAP operators have Low Information Zone detectors, so they can avoid the locations where humans have good cameras? I hardly think so, since a large proportion of reports occur over cities and towns (but these sightings never get recorded except as fuzzy blobs).
One good clear unfaked photo or video with good provenance would solve the mystery, but this will probably never happen… until the next time real extraterrestrials come this way, which might be half a million years from now.
My honest question when I run into this though process is this: So this alien culture 10,000 years more advanced and can now travel light years in a short period of time, but are somehow so inept that they can’t hide their existence when they get here? They can travel faster than the speed of light, but Hal, living with his mom can see their craft from his bedroom window in the basement??
It’s like when hunters use duck blinds. They camouflage themselves with a simulated environment, like the aliens that masqueraded as a cloud in Nope. Sometimes though, a pesky native pulls the curtain.
Seriously, we tag birds to study their migration patterns. Aside from the inconvenience of being captured, the birds don’t seem to mind. Plus, since they use chirping to attract mates or to warn of danger, they can’t effectively communicate that aliens inserted probes into their bodies. Maybe we’re literal birdbrains that can’t provide enough consistent testimonies to be taken seriously.
This ties in with the Genius Fool paradox (as described by a former Doper), which also applies to other “controversies”.
Extraterrestrials, like the organizers of massive conspiracies here on Earth, have enormous resources, technologies we cannot comprehend and the power to readily vaporize their enemies.
And yet they make idiotic mistakes allowing their plots to be discovered by curious amateurs, who are allowed to plaster their evidence all over the Internet, in books, movies etc.
It all comes back to amazingly incompetent superbeings, like the one who couldn’t even make it down the staircase from his spaceship, as shown in the Far Side cartoon posted earlier.
I’ve had the opposite thought. I’ve heard it said that if a sufficiently advanced alien civilization is visiting and observing us, we may not be aware of them any more than ants are aware of us.
But, we’re not ants. We’re actually fairly clever apes, who’ve been able to detect stuff like the residual background radiation caused by the Big Bang. Alien spacecraft would give out some pretty noticeable energy signatures, I would think, and would travel paths that are different than the paths taken by natural objects in space. We keep a pretty close eye out for asteroids that may be headed on a collision course. It seems like we’d likely be able to notice an alien spacecraft coming from a pretty long way out.
I think this is more evidence for not having been visited by aliens. I think that, however much they try to hide or cloak their presence, we would be able to detect something odd or amiss. But maybe this is human hubris on my part, and the aliens are so unimaginably advanced than us that we indeed can’t detect their existence any more than ants can know we exist.
I wonder if anyone can find hard information on the following topic, because I think it would be a good point of comparison. During World War Two there really were a small number of enemy spies in the USA and Britain. Moreover they were in the public consciousness because the government constantly warned people not to talk about anything war sensitive, and enemy spies were a popular theme in fiction. I have no hard numbers but I suspect that the intelligence and security apparatus were flooded with enormous amounts of bullshit, probably something like 10,000 reports for every real spy.
This is an extremely interesting book about that very issue: If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb. (https://www.amazon.ca/Universe-Teeming-Aliens-WHERE-EVERYBODY-dp-3319132350/dp/3319132350/ref=dp_ob_image_bk).
After reading it I believe that humans may be, for all intents and purposes, all there is. Even if not, it’s worth bearing in mind that, because of distances, time, and speed of light, as often mentioned upthread, even if there around thousands of intelligent and far more advanced species out there with a universal equivalent to earth’s commercial air traffic system, maybe Earth only gets visits once every few millennia.
There’s like 200 sextillion galaxies out there, with an estimated 700 quintillion planets. How many of those can support life and what’s the chances they find us specifically? And repeatedly. And so often. And now? I would say pretty much zero. The math seems to spectacularly out there to be virtually impossible.
you do realize that as soon as we have an explanation, it becomes a ‘natural in-world explanation’ - even IF (and thats a big fucking IF) the UFO is truly of extra-terrestrial origin.
The issue with all of these “super natural” explanations is that you have no way of deciding which of those are accurate - and as soon as one is found - it is no longer ‘super natural’ - its just ‘natural’.
Despite the fact that I love talking about the Fermi Paradox, I’m going to try hard not to hijack this thread with it. I will say that my take is that, though the formation of life on other planets may not be uncommon, the formation of intelligent, technologically advanced life may be extremely rare. There’s nothing about natural selection that mandates life to automatically become more intelligent, just as adapted to its environment as possible.
Any few, extremely rare technology-having species that may be out there are then stymied by the cosmic speed limit of light.
When I said ‘natural in-world explanation’ I meant ‘of this world’, so not extraterrestrial. I probably should not have used the term ‘natural’. If extraterrestrials are proven to exist, then they are of course natural, not supernatural.
What is so interesting about us - this backwards planet that is 10000 years (or more) behind in technology - that they would be visiting, observing in the first place? The very idea that we (as a species) or our planet is that fucking interesting is absurd.
Speaking of which, here’s what Wiki has to say about the original report of “little green men”. Little green men - Wikipedia. Apparently the term long precedes accounts of UFOs, and was actually misapplied to a reported encounter.
