I not sure why this speculative thread remains in Factual Questions.
Here are the facts:
We have no evidence of any life off-Earth. None, zip, nada, anywhere. Probabilities are not factual evidence, “there should be” is not factual. Not the sightest evidence of even some slime mold living under a rock anywhere. Nothing.
No evidence at all of a much more unlikely occurance of a technological race that might be capable of space flight. None, anywhere, at all, other than us.
It is nice that people can speculate about the possibilities, and probabilities, but that is not factual science.
I can say that humans are the only technological beings in the entire Milky Way galaxy and be more correct than most posts in this thread. We are the elder race in this galaxy. This matches our known facts.It is bullshit, but it matches our known facts.
Those are the facts that we currently have. Everything else is Star Trek hopes and dreams.
Well, if they are smart enough to know we exist, and smart enough to travel vast distances to get here, it’s not unreasonable to assume they know that out of 195 countries on the globe, only 9 possess nuclear weapons.
Not a sure thing of course, but it’s also not unreasonable to think that they might choose one of the 9 to visit.
That ups our odds tremendously. Especially since they apparently love to hang around Navy fighter jets.
(1) How long can a technologically advanced civilization survive before it exhausts its resources and falls back to a pre-technological state or goes extinct? Or experiences a mass extinction event? We’ve been at this civilization thing maybe 20,000 years and I’m not convinced we’ll make it another 20,000. Say we make it a million years. Possibly many technologically advanced civilizations have come and gone since the beginning of the universe, but the probability that their million year windows overlaps ours is quite small.
(2) We assume that interstellar space travel is simply a matter of time - the main problem is propulsion. It is actually a matter of a time spent in a hostile radiation environment. Can we solve the shielding problem? If we accelerate to a significant fraction of the speed of light (say 0.1c) the very thin interstellar matter becomes a cloud of high-energy particles. Any other civilization based on chemistry remotely similar to ours would have the same problem.
What I think is silly to say that some aliens flew here for 1000 years in stasis or a colony ship, and they are gonna half hide flying around in dozens of shapes and form, doing anal probes. They are gonna want to land.
But according to nearly every astronomer, that is the way to bet- even here in our solar system. I am willing to buy primitive life now that we know more about life on earth. Hell there could be life on several moons nearby.
Correct, and maybe a million ly away- possibly.
I would say you are almost certainly correct- certainly the only one within thousands of LY. OR tens of thousands.
We do tend to view the possibilities of alien life through a very modern human centric lens.
We see ourselves in whatever we expect might be out there. We don’t seem to expect much other than a mirror of our own rapacious evil selves.
Of course sending out messages to the stars that are little more than a menu is perhaps not the smartest thing we could have done.
So, the whole question about UFOs is really nothing much to do with aliens, and almost entirely about us. Where almost entirely is used in the mathematical sense of the term.
But why the U.S.? If I’m visiting Earth I’d know nothing about geopolitics. If I want to be discovered I’d land in a densely populated area, like India. If I didn’t I’d land in the Australian Outback.
I don’t think there are any alien landings at all. I’m questioning the belief of those who think the U.S. Government is hiding their existence because it’s unlikely they would end up in U.S. airspace, either intentionally or not. And it’s even more unlikely they would be intercepted before the public found out.
Is it just me, or does that map have a very strong correlation to English speaking? Either native, or as a popular second language.
Which would make for a lot of interesting thoughts. The Five Eyes members seem rather well represented.
You are correct; the data for that image is somewhat distorted, and there are significant numbers of reports from Brazil,* Russia and China, among other locations.
But this makes the problem more puzzling, rather than less; if the US can ‘suppress’ data about UFOs/UAPs from its own citizens, why would the authorities in other countries also agree to suppress information about sightings and crash-landings in their countries? Many of these countries are not particularly friendly with the US (or the West in general) and they would love to expose the duplicity of the Pentagon on this, or any other issue.
But they don’t, because they can’t, because they do not have any such evidence.
*Brazilian reports are quite different in nature and content, and often have much in common with folklore, with a ‘high strangeness’ factor that suggests they are probably a different phenomenon in many ways.
I agree that all alien reports are fanciful. No surprise there. I’d say if they were real the US government would hide the ones in the US and similar logic would cause the Brazilians or Germans or whoever to hide theirs. So no government anywhere would want to talk about it.
The bigger issue IMO is this one:
The reason the idjits who believe this stuff think it’s US-centric is because they only know about events reported in English, and overwhelmingly those from their own country, the USA.
IOW, I posit that the reports are more or less uniformly distributed across the world population, net of biasing towards folks with internet access so their reports can get past their own village elders to the wider world. It’s Americans’ awareness of those reports that’s US-centric. With probably a corresponding bias towards Australia-centric down there or German-centric over there.
I’l suggest @eburacum45’s map is showing that bias.
Update; it appears to originate from data collected by the National UFO Reporting Center (nuforc.org) - a US-based organisation is overwhelmingly a hub for US sightings, although it accepts data from other countries…
Hmm. That seems unlikely. If any government anywhere in the world had evidence and wanted to embarrass the secretive US or Pentagon, they’d share it. Why would they not?
I’d first back up a level. Why would the US gov’t choose to hide real evidence of actual factual alien visitations? Because they’re in love with secrecy for secrecy’s sake? Nope.
It’d be because they expect their populace to go apeshit at the revelation aliens are really here. IMO any rational government elsewhere would conclude the same thing.
So the e.g. Germans or even Iranians aren’t keeping their putative UFO landings a secret to spare US embarrassment. They’re keeping theirs secret for their own reasons. It’s just that every country faces the the same problem vis a vis confirmed alien visitation: human nature.
A highly controlled place like NK might be willing to spill the beans just to watch the West burn itself down, meanwhile hoping to insulate their own populace from the mania.
The true answer is quite different, I think. The Pentagon (and other countries in the West) do have some evidence of anomalous sightings in the sky, and they do not release all the relevant data that would allow skeptical observers to interpret and explain this evidence. Why is that? That is the question posed in the OP, and the reason is quite simple.
If they released all the data surrounding the recent Navy videos, for example, they would need to release the exact specifications and capabilities of the ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared) system that recorded them. One of the points of data I would like more information about is the question of glare in a rotating gimbal camera; given full disclosure on this point, I believe that most of the ‘anomalous’ qualities of at least two of the Navy clips could be fully explained.
However if this information were released, this information could also allow the enemies of the US (and the enemies of other countries in the west which use this technology) to gauge the limitations of the sensor systems, and possibly to spoof or disrupt the readings.
I don’t believe that data about intelligent aliens would hold our collective interest for very long , or cause panic; I am optimistic we may discover such evidence in the relatively near future. But that evidence will come from SETI and other telescopic surveys, not from poorly-focused cameras on the front of fast-moving jet planes.
This idea seems to underpin the whole “the government is hiding aliens” idea, but it makes no sense to me. Why would the populace panic at the revelation? More than half the population already believes that aliens are visiting Earth; it seems to me that they would rejoice at the confirmation of their maligned conspiracy theories rather than panic. I’d also suggest that the ones who don’t already believe it tend to be more intelligent and educated, so are less likely to panic in any case. The idea of a whole country panicking at ANY revelation seems fairly far fetched to me. Has it ever happened?
