7 ms·

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

59 points by Inu 4y ago

colordrops 4y ago
Funny enough I was just reading the book "In Plain Sight" [1] before I flipped over to hacker news. It's a book about the serious investigation into UAPs by various governments, and is heavily sourced, with often times a half dozen references per page, many official and declassified sources. It's hard to come out of reading it without being strongly convinced that these UAP are not of human or natural origin. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57734614 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57734614 Edit: really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale.
- api 4y ago
  Well hey, one possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn't one.
  - echelon 4y ago
    I like to think the reason for non-detection is that an alien civilization already had their AGI moment. The AI proliferated throughout the galaxy, to several galaxies, and ultimately found a way to "break" our classical and limited understanding of physics. That the reason we're not seeing them is because we're looking for industry and megastructures, waste gasses, EM spectrum activity, etc., but that their needs are well beyond any of these things. That they don't have massive material or energy needs. And that maybe they've already been here, but consider us to be too primitive to acknowledge. Or that maybe they're actively here now reconstructing our light cone to learn about us (ie. we've already all long since passed, and now we're all just holographic shadows of something that once happened long ago). Or that maybe it's future us / Earth-AI doing that archeology. Or a future AI "Space Jesus" is resurrecting our neural connectomes from non-lossy backwards projection of photons. Or the same thing, except we'll all be put into museums or played with for sport. An outcome somewhat adjacent to Roko's Basilisk. Of course this is all just mortal fantasy. Dark forest is my other frequently thought about scenario, but that one scares me.
    - dhsysusbsjsi 4y ago
      Or they are so advanced that their “bodies” are made up of individual units teeming with nanotechnology components, most of which are atoms wide, working to generate power from atoms absorbed from external environment, self repair and more. Units take on different roles. Advanced energy transport system that stores hydrocarbons and carries around highly volatile elements on iron structures in a liquid directly to the site needed for energy. Billions of these nano machine units take on a form to create an ultra low power, powerful neural network capable of self learning as well as passing on learned behaviours. Oh wait that’s humans.
      - echelon 4y ago
        It's an exceedingly slow to adapt algorithm. Extinction is a fairly common result for stumbling upon an ecological niche, maximizing fit, and then having that niche disappear. Novel information sharing is slow, lossy, and the information stores themselves quickly degrade. Incredibly poor solution in the limit.
    - behnamoh 4y ago
      I think AGI would love to keep increasing its storage and computation power. Unless the very fabric of the universe serves as that, I don't know how an AGI would "break" our classical understanding of physics and not make a super giant computer the size of galaxies... But if that's the case, does it mean we're living in a matrix made by an AGI?
    - api 4y ago
      If dark forest were true I doubt we would be here. Earth has been broadcasting that it is a likely biosphere since the atmosphere became oxidizing. This much free oxygen is not likely to exist without some process constantly replenishing it and I’m not aware of any natural options for that at planetary scale.
  - krono 4y ago
    This would be covered by the zoo hypotheses[1] I think. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis
    - sterlind 4y ago
      not necessarily. UFOs might not hide intentionally; maybe they don't care but happen to rarely hang out in populated areas. for instance, maybe they just care about the sea floor, and only surface to beam data back. or they're preferentially attracted to fast-moving objects like fighter jets, or sources of unusual EM signatures. if UFOs are alien drones trying to hide, why do they suck at it?
      - krono 4y ago
        Interesting points that I had completely overlooked! By the way, without knowing how many there might be in total and how often they were seen/discovered, we can't really say if hiding from us is something they'd suck at :)
      - api 4y ago
        Maybe they’re very good at it. We see them rarely and see them clearly or get good photos almost never but they’re actually all over the place. The ones we see are malfunctioning in some way or flukes caused by chance conditions of light, angle, etc.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      The ZOO hypothesis is uncannily attractive, because it a) sort-of humbles our egos and b) would actually be plausible even within humanity itself. If we discovered another human civilization with a living and technological standard of Europe of 1022 AD, we would be able to keep an eye on them without revealing ourselves much. An occassional slip-up would be possible (a crashed drone), but most of the time, we would be able to let them live as they wish without interfering with them much. Probably to the point that the targeted civilization might consider any hypothesis of our surveillance a hoax or heresy. And that is mere 1000 years of technological development on Earth. If the gap between us and hypothetical aliens is, say, 100 million years, I can't even begin to imagine the difference.
- ducktective 4y ago
  >Edit: really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale. Unless Elon tweets about this or VCs start funding UFO startups, average programmer is gonna say BS on anything that challenges the status quo especially in ideology department.
  - cbdc_watcher 4y ago
    Excellent deducktion
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    Personally, I 100% believe that UFOs and alien life both exist. After all, it would be hubris of the highest order to claim that we could identify every aerial visual phenomenon. And I find it extremely hard to believe that in the vastness of the universe, this infinitesimal speck we live on is the only place that the thing we call "life" exists. What I don't believe is that UFOs and aliens are connected, or that aliens routinely visit this planet. First of all, if aliens did visit this planet, why here? There have to be many more interesting planets to go look at than Earth. If they stumbled on this planet by accident at some point, why would they bother to come back? Even if there aren't more interesting places, what's the probability that an alien being could even breathe the air here? I'm not willing to go full on Signs and speculate that contact with water might be deadly to them, but it's pretty reasonable to guess that aliens would have evolved in places with significantly different atmospheres than Earth has. And, of course, none of this even touches on the vast distances in interstellar space and the level of technology that it would take to come here. It's certainly conceivable that aliens who are 5 million years ahead of us in societal development might have such technology, but how probable is it? And if they had that level of technology, why not just send a stealthy probe with the alien equivalent of a Really Damn Big Telescope(tm) and park it somewhere out in the asteroid belt if they're that interested in the antics of 7.7 billion primitive bipeds? Nothing really seems to add up for me in the direction of "aliens visit the Earth frequently and UFOs are evidence of those visitations."
    - ducktective 4y ago
      1- Those "aliens" and UAPs could be terrestrial. Imagine an underwater civilization evolved independently from humans in a time scale much larger than our written history. 2- They can have all sorts of agendas. There are discussions that they have visited or interacted with human civilization since thousands of years ago. They may want to affect the course of our development for example.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  > really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale. Not downvoting, but I used to be a huge "UFO fan" around the ages of 8-11. I read book after book, all breathlessly outlining the "reams of evidence" available. I watched documentaries on television, saw UFO topics covered in the newspaper, and I had a shelf full of books all in agreement. Must be true, right? Except that even as young child I started noticing that all of the photos were blurry. All of them. Focus dispels UFOs just like turning on the light dispels the monster in the bedroom.[0] Years later I read a book by a "UFO fan" who remained a fan into his adulthood, and got the opportunity to research them as his day job. He was looking into crop circles and cattle mutilation specifically around the time of their peak popularity[1] but as a result of his investigations he rapidly converted from a life-long believer to a sceptic. Why? Because he noticed that that evidence of UFO visitations respected state borders. Specifically, there are state-level laws[2] in the USA related to things such as insurance claims related to dead livestock. Cows are stupid, eat poisonous or dangerous things all the time and die. One dead cow represent a loss of hundreds to thousands of dollars. Many dead cows could be a serious financial problem, so there is insurance available for lifestock. The policies apply differently in different jurisdictions, and some would cover "unexplained external causes" such as little green men anally probing cattle for mysterious reasons, and in some areas the policies would not cover this. Unsurprisingly, cattle mutilations and the associated evidence like crop circles would only turn up in areas where the insurance covered it, and never in areas where it wouldn't, even if that was across the road in a paddock owned by the same farmer. Odd huh? One theory -- that sells books -- is that little green or grey men visit our planet across interstellar distances and amuse themselves by cutting holes into cattle. But not low-value livestock like chickens. Just the high-value ones, like cattle. The other theory is that selling books and making insurance claims is the only reason anyone talks about any of this seriously. That people see a dozen dead cows, have nothing they can legitimately put on an insurance claim, and are staring down the barrel of financial ruin. What to do? Just drive the tractor in circles over still green crops, bending them down, call Janice from the local news, claim that the circle is impossible, and point at the dead cows you cut a few times with a sharp box cutter a few hours before the news crew turned up. Suddenly, there's "evidence" that you can put on an insurance claim and your farm will survive until the next year. > many official and declassified sources The word "declassified" makes UFO fans excited because it's got all the elements of an official secret that they uncovered through their intelligence and sleuthing. It's the same addictive narrative that made QAnon popular. Most (all?) military observations of potential enemy aircraft are classified! That means nothing. The value of these observations isn't particularly higher than anyone else's either. If one young pilot sees a splotch on the IR feed that "moves oddly", people run off with that and claim that "government has evidence of UFOs!" This recent one is the best example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q At first blush that looks exactly like an optical effect such as Glory [3] that appears to move only because the observer is moving with respect to nearby clouds. The background is moving, and Glory remains stationary relative to the observer because the Sun doesn't move in the sky like the clouds do. It "accelerates away" because the IR camera is on a gimbal on the tip of a Javeline missile and reached its limit. It stops tracking the "target" which then seems to "shoot away" in the picture. This and similar "evidence" is about as good as it gets. I've never seen anything even remotely convincing. Nonetheless, book after book just collates and rehashes the same evidence, including pictures long since discredited[0] as clear fakes. The authors get paid and can feed their families. The readers get to be entertained just like I was when I was a kid. Everyone gets something, but we don't get to invite visiting alien dignitaries to speak at a UN convention in much the same way that Air Traffic Control doesn't schedule flights differently on Christmas Eve to avoid hitting Santa. [0] Several famous UFO photos that adorned book covers published by legitimate print houses turned out to be chandeliers that the photographer had thrown into the sky like a frisbee and then quickly snapped an out-of-focus picture of. On commission for the print house. [1] Speaking of which, isn't that odd all by itself? Crop circles weren't a "thing" until they were. And then vanished again. While they were popular, like a meme on Reddit, there were all sorts of interesting variations. Similarly, the aliens themselves evolve just like bad Fifty Shades of Grey fan art. Some traits are never mentioned by any "witnesses" until after a particular story, and then it's a common trait many people claim to have seen. [2] I read this over 15 years ago so I might be confusing a legal boundary with a corporate "coverage area" boundary in a contract, but the gist of the story is the same either way. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon)
- beders 4y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The fascination around UAP has been around for decades and basically each decade there's new reporting and new pictures or even videos. And also, every decade, once actual scientists and debunkers get their hands on the material, those phenomena are readily explained. It takes a certain expertise and a Navy pilot simply doesn't have that. These stories make great clickbait though.
  - jablongo 4y ago
    This comment thread is attached to an article by “actual scientists”
  - nprateem 4y ago
    Blah, blah, blah. The usual rebuttal. Like climate deniers, debunkers gonna debunk. It's strange that these people are trusted to handle and launch nukes, but apparently when squadrons of UAPs show up simultaneously on the most advanced sensor systems in the world they suddenly can't be trusted.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      At that level, trust and skill are specialisms, not generic statements. By analogy, I'm a skilled software developer, graduated 2006, learned to read from a Commodore 64 user manual etc., but I make iOS apps, put me on a Rust project and don't even know the syntax. I trust a fighter pilot to be really good at spotting potential hazards in the air, and also things which are not responding to the appropriate IFF signals. While I know too little about what they do to guess much of what else they're good at, I suspect that suggesting they're too good to make mistakes is like suggesting I'm too good to write bugs.
      - nprateem 4y ago
        No, but in aggregate, I trust them to be able to collectively say "something weird is going on". 100+ ex-service personnel testified in front of Congress about UFOs interfering with and disabling nukes in siloes over several decades. Can't find a link ATM but it's on Youtube somewhere I think.
- BerislavLopac 4y ago
  I think there is one very powerful argument against the idea that any alien life form has visited Earth since the humanity existed: the humanity still exists.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    That makes a lot of unfounded assumptions about the nature of advanced alien life.
    - BerislavLopac 4y ago
      Maybe, but it fits 100% with all of the advanced life we have observed so far.
- elif 4y ago
  There's certain topics on HN you have to pay the karma tax for broaching. It wasn't always this way but it is where we are.
motohagiography 4y ago
Fun topic because the question of under what conditions would we as humans would contact another less advanced civilization in space opens up some pretty interesting but simple criteria. We would need for that civilization to not be a danger to us, not only from a technology angle, but from an ontological perspective. When you look at how insane other creatures in nature are and the biological economics of their survival, we wouldn't adopt them into our own societies, and the ones we do are cats and dogs and other pets. This is how much we can trust another being we can only share a small part of our experience with by keeping them confined or on leashes. We probably don't want rich aliens to breed us in captivity and buy us as pets for their kids to ride. So there's a bar we would need to meet to not become that. The question I have would be, what would we as a species need to demonstrate to be allowed "off leash," in a community of other spacefaring civilizations? What consistent understanding would each person as a random human need to have to be able to be relied upon to interact safely with a spacefaring being? What would we equip a civilization with to evolve with those tools before arranging to meet them without destroying the equillibrium of their societies as they compete for our favour and become dependent on us? Reciprocity of respect for life and the ability to apprehend some universal shared truth seems like the only thing that would separate an animal from another conscious being capable of reason. I would wonder what that prerequisites or criteria for us as humans encountering a new civilization would be.
- grishka 4y ago
  One thing that sets humans and animals apart is language. The ability to transfer abstract thoughts and ideas between individuals. Would you adopt an alien creature capable of reasoning and and expressing its thoughts as a pet? Or would you consider that enslavement?
  - adrianN 4y ago
    It's all a matter of degrees. My cat certainly is able to communicate with me and there are smarter animals around that we keep in captivity (e.g. dolphins).
    - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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ducktective 4y ago
>Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected So they are now calling them literal ships, not ufo or uap Also, from their methodology and instrumentation (color cameras) it seems they could have done it in like 80s. Why coming out now?
- defrost 4y ago
  The paper is by three Ukranian astro photogrammetrypeople .. I was going to comment on "ships" for the bias but figured I can mark that down to non native English speakers and some translation issue. Nothing in the eight pages screams "we believe in aliens", it's essentially about not yet catogorised observed phenomona high up in the troposphere. With limited data on fast objects that appear in only a few frames they write about two classes of "things". The earth, of course, sees an infall of roughly 48.5 tons of material per day of various sizes and composition, much of which never reaches the surface directly, instead breaking up and falling as dust.
  - nomel 4y ago
    The crescent shape looks like it could be side view of the ionized part of a shock wave (maybe there’s a better word for it).
    - jacknews 4y ago
      "moon"?
    - TechBro8615 4y ago
      The paper isn’t clear about this, but the crescent in that image is the moon, AFAIU. They’re using it as a baseline for luminosity of the UAPs, which are the multiple (less bright) white speckles in the image.
  - TechBro8615 4y ago
    The phrase “squadron of ships” seems like deliberate word choice. And to me, “squadron” is a more alarming word than “ships,” because it implies cooperation between multiple intelligent entities. But the paper does not describe much compelling evidence for any intelligent “swarming” behavior, so I interpreted the word choice as bias.
Apocryphon 4y ago
I was listening to a fun podcast episode about a couple of folks who founded a UFO-related political third party: https://www.buzzsprout.com/760511/11204787-gabriel-green-the-campaign-from-alpha-centauri https://www.buzzsprout.com/760511/11204787-gabriel-green-the... And it mentioned there was a flying saucer craze in 1947- Roswell wasn't even the most interesting story then. It made me think, these myths and legends are highly historically and culturally contextual. Alien UFOs replaced phantom airships replaced fairies and so forth. Perhaps in just a century, the idea of anthropomorphic aliens will be as dated and quaint as changelings are to us now. Wonder what will be the future myth then? Simulation glitches?
- mojomark 4y ago
  Seems to be ghosts in dem machines https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-fired-sentient/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...
- euroderf 4y ago
  The most interesting story was the flying saucer invasion of Washington DC in the early 60s.
sellador64 4y ago
"Our astronomical work is daytime observations of meteors and space invasions." Just a day in the life. Watching for falling rocks and space invaders.
nomel 4y ago
They’re relying heavily on illumination. I can’t help think that they could be bugs, front illuminated by whatever is around the telescopes.
lettergram 4y ago
> The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of unidentified phenomena in the atmosphere. To me this sends up a couple of thoughts: (1) this sounds like a way to spy on Russia and (2) quite possibly could be technology from Russia (such as hypersonic missiles). Then I read the speed: > An object contrast makes it possible to estimate the distance using colourimetric methods. Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 - 12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s. ... that's 33,500 mph ... Re-entry speed from something out of the atmosphere is something like 8km/s; or 19,000 mph. Of course that generates an insane amount of heat and is still half the reportedly measured speed. TBH it seems like a possible sampling error for the speed calculations. If we assume that to be the case, then it seems likely (if real) that these are some sort of hypersonic test craft / missile system.
- torotonnato 4y ago
  That's what I thought too. Why not create a bit of distance to a possible reputational damage and spy on Russia at the same time too? Not many data points, but fig. 4 (page 3) is interesting: a linear relation between luminosity and speed. For meteors should be, as intuitively expected, proportional to kinetic energy, hence quadratic. Does this relation holds for missiles too? EDIT: they are not related to NASA, it's in the second sentence of the abstract (ops) ...The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of UAP also...
- godelski 4y ago
  > 15 km/s That's over mach 40 and would allow you to circumnavigate the globe in 45 minutes. There are flight vehicles that travel mach 20+, but 40 sounds insane. Mach also isn't the best numbers to use. The HTV-2 goes Mach 20+ but that's 5.7 km/s. Granted it is 2010 technology (first flight) but it would be insane to think we've doubled the speed and are testing these vehicles. It isn't like you can fly vehicles that fly that fast secretly. They make A LOT of noise. Measurement errors sounds like a better explanation. Especially when we have such strong evidence of other things (like tic-tac) being measurement errors.
dhsysusbsjsi 4y ago
I did some quick googling to put things in perspective: Mach1 is ~ 0.3 km/s (+/- 0.1 varies with altitude) Artillery is ~ 1 km/s Earth orbital escape velocity is ~ 11 km/s 6km high is 20,000 ft, around low regional turboprop aircraft. 10km high is 32,000 ft, around airliner cruise altitude. 15km high is 50,000 ft, where Elon Musks private jet sits. 20km high is more where U2 and SR71 start to operate and require space suits. ISS orbit is ~ 400 km Elon's Starlink is 550km
rehevkor5 4y ago
"Our astronomical work is daytime observations of meteors and space invasions." Is something being lost in translation? They can't literally mean that...
- rehevkor5 4y ago
  Oh... invasions of their airspace, not invasions from space, right?
galaxyLogic 4y ago
Reason to be skeptical: For the last 10 years (?) or so most everybody has a mobile phone with high-quality camera in it and most people carry their phone with them all the time. Shouldn't that mean that the quality and quantity of UFO evidence should have exploded since about 10-15 years ago? But I haven't seen any articles about how much more and how much better quality UFO evidence we have now that anybody whose sees a UFO can take a snapshot or video of it. Further when a group of people see a UFO, they could each take their own video of it taken with their different cameras. If I saw a UFO I would certainly try to take a video of it.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Could it be that phone cameras just aren't even remotely optimized for videos being taken in the dark. I'd imagine that's when most sightings happen.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    Could be but I don't understand why UFOs would only show up at night? Is that what the existing evidence shows? Or is it just that in the dark it is much harder to identify an object and therefore there are more un-identified objects at night?
- nprateem 4y ago
  But there is video. It just looks crap or CGI because it's hand held, because who expects to see a UFO, and shot by amateurs.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    There is video, there is evidence. I'm juts wondering why the evidence isn't accumulating many times faster now that everybody has a cell-phone and they have good cameras in them? They are not the best possible equipment for taking pictures of UFOs, but surely they are much much better than what average person had with them 20 years ago. So that means in my calculation that the quality and quantity evidence should be much better now. So really my question is, is there any evidence that the evidence about UFOs is much better now that it was 20 years ago?
nprateem 4y ago
There are a few interesting documentaries online. Check out unacknowledged, disclosure and close encounters of the fifth kind. What's interesting to me is that the ce5 protocol meditation is almost identical to some Taoist meditation I learnt 20 years ago. Of course there's also loads of bullshit too, but for me the UFO question was answered years ago. They're here. The AATIP/UAP angle is a good one to rebrand the subject and make it more palatable to the mainstream after decades of mockery, allowing governments a way to research it seriously too.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Where did you learn this taoist meditation? Do you recall the name?
  - nprateem 4y ago
    Yeah it was in Mantak Chia's books. Healing Light of the Tao IIRC https://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-Light-Tao-Foundational-Practices-ebook/dp/B071GZNV25/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-Light-Tao-Foundational-Prac...
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
As Mick West suggests, unless you can rule out things like insects flying past the camera, then further proof is necessary.
- yuvadam 4y ago
  Did you read the paper?
  - Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
    Show me where they discuss sources of error - as a paper it's poorly written, I mean what kind of academic whacks this into an abstract and decides it's OK. "We present a broad range of UAPs. We see them everywhere." Everywhere? In the cupboard at home? In the local movie theatre? Nowhere they discuss sources of error - it's a description of their setup, and then a straight dive into here's a taxonomy of all the UAPs. Plus, there's not enough there to reproduce their rig if indeed UAPs are "everywhere".

59 points by Inu 4y ago

Funny enough I was just reading the book "In Plain Sight" [1] before I flipped over to hacker news. It's a book about the serious investigation into UAPs by various governments, and is heavily sourced, with often times a half dozen references per page, many official and declassified sources. It's hard to come out of reading it without being strongly convinced that these UAP are not of human or natural origin. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57734614 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57734614 Edit: really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale.

api 4y ago
Well hey, one possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn't one.
- echelon 4y ago
  I like to think the reason for non-detection is that an alien civilization already had their AGI moment. The AI proliferated throughout the galaxy, to several galaxies, and ultimately found a way to "break" our classical and limited understanding of physics. That the reason we're not seeing them is because we're looking for industry and megastructures, waste gasses, EM spectrum activity, etc., but that their needs are well beyond any of these things. That they don't have massive material or energy needs. And that maybe they've already been here, but consider us to be too primitive to acknowledge. Or that maybe they're actively here now reconstructing our light cone to learn about us (ie. we've already all long since passed, and now we're all just holographic shadows of something that once happened long ago). Or that maybe it's future us / Earth-AI doing that archeology. Or a future AI "Space Jesus" is resurrecting our neural connectomes from non-lossy backwards projection of photons. Or the same thing, except we'll all be put into museums or played with for sport. An outcome somewhat adjacent to Roko's Basilisk. Of course this is all just mortal fantasy. Dark forest is my other frequently thought about scenario, but that one scares me.
  - dhsysusbsjsi 4y ago
    Or they are so advanced that their “bodies” are made up of individual units teeming with nanotechnology components, most of which are atoms wide, working to generate power from atoms absorbed from external environment, self repair and more. Units take on different roles. Advanced energy transport system that stores hydrocarbons and carries around highly volatile elements on iron structures in a liquid directly to the site needed for energy. Billions of these nano machine units take on a form to create an ultra low power, powerful neural network capable of self learning as well as passing on learned behaviours. Oh wait that’s humans.
    - echelon 4y ago
      It's an exceedingly slow to adapt algorithm. Extinction is a fairly common result for stumbling upon an ecological niche, maximizing fit, and then having that niche disappear. Novel information sharing is slow, lossy, and the information stores themselves quickly degrade. Incredibly poor solution in the limit.
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    I think AGI would love to keep increasing its storage and computation power. Unless the very fabric of the universe serves as that, I don't know how an AGI would "break" our classical understanding of physics and not make a super giant computer the size of galaxies... But if that's the case, does it mean we're living in a matrix made by an AGI?
  - api 4y ago
    If dark forest were true I doubt we would be here. Earth has been broadcasting that it is a likely biosphere since the atmosphere became oxidizing. This much free oxygen is not likely to exist without some process constantly replenishing it and I’m not aware of any natural options for that at planetary scale.
- krono 4y ago
  This would be covered by the zoo hypotheses[1] I think. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis
  - sterlind 4y ago
    not necessarily. UFOs might not hide intentionally; maybe they don't care but happen to rarely hang out in populated areas. for instance, maybe they just care about the sea floor, and only surface to beam data back. or they're preferentially attracted to fast-moving objects like fighter jets, or sources of unusual EM signatures. if UFOs are alien drones trying to hide, why do they suck at it?
    - krono 4y ago
      Interesting points that I had completely overlooked! By the way, without knowing how many there might be in total and how often they were seen/discovered, we can't really say if hiding from us is something they'd suck at :)
    - api 4y ago
      Maybe they’re very good at it. We see them rarely and see them clearly or get good photos almost never but they’re actually all over the place. The ones we see are malfunctioning in some way or flukes caused by chance conditions of light, angle, etc.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    The ZOO hypothesis is uncannily attractive, because it a) sort-of humbles our egos and b) would actually be plausible even within humanity itself. If we discovered another human civilization with a living and technological standard of Europe of 1022 AD, we would be able to keep an eye on them without revealing ourselves much. An occassional slip-up would be possible (a crashed drone), but most of the time, we would be able to let them live as they wish without interfering with them much. Probably to the point that the targeted civilization might consider any hypothesis of our surveillance a hoax or heresy. And that is mere 1000 years of technological development on Earth. If the gap between us and hypothetical aliens is, say, 100 million years, I can't even begin to imagine the difference.
ducktective 4y ago
>Edit: really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale. Unless Elon tweets about this or VCs start funding UFO startups, average programmer is gonna say BS on anything that challenges the status quo especially in ideology department.
- cbdc_watcher 4y ago
  Excellent deducktion
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  Personally, I 100% believe that UFOs and alien life both exist. After all, it would be hubris of the highest order to claim that we could identify every aerial visual phenomenon. And I find it extremely hard to believe that in the vastness of the universe, this infinitesimal speck we live on is the only place that the thing we call "life" exists. What I don't believe is that UFOs and aliens are connected, or that aliens routinely visit this planet. First of all, if aliens did visit this planet, why here? There have to be many more interesting planets to go look at than Earth. If they stumbled on this planet by accident at some point, why would they bother to come back? Even if there aren't more interesting places, what's the probability that an alien being could even breathe the air here? I'm not willing to go full on Signs and speculate that contact with water might be deadly to them, but it's pretty reasonable to guess that aliens would have evolved in places with significantly different atmospheres than Earth has. And, of course, none of this even touches on the vast distances in interstellar space and the level of technology that it would take to come here. It's certainly conceivable that aliens who are 5 million years ahead of us in societal development might have such technology, but how probable is it? And if they had that level of technology, why not just send a stealthy probe with the alien equivalent of a Really Damn Big Telescope(tm) and park it somewhere out in the asteroid belt if they're that interested in the antics of 7.7 billion primitive bipeds? Nothing really seems to add up for me in the direction of "aliens visit the Earth frequently and UFOs are evidence of those visitations."
  - ducktective 4y ago
    1- Those "aliens" and UAPs could be terrestrial. Imagine an underwater civilization evolved independently from humans in a time scale much larger than our written history. 2- They can have all sorts of agendas. There are discussions that they have visited or interacted with human civilization since thousands of years ago. They may want to affect the course of our development for example.
jiggawatts 4y ago
> really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale. Not downvoting, but I used to be a huge "UFO fan" around the ages of 8-11. I read book after book, all breathlessly outlining the "reams of evidence" available. I watched documentaries on television, saw UFO topics covered in the newspaper, and I had a shelf full of books all in agreement. Must be true, right? Except that even as young child I started noticing that all of the photos were blurry. All of them. Focus dispels UFOs just like turning on the light dispels the monster in the bedroom.[0] Years later I read a book by a "UFO fan" who remained a fan into his adulthood, and got the opportunity to research them as his day job. He was looking into crop circles and cattle mutilation specifically around the time of their peak popularity[1] but as a result of his investigations he rapidly converted from a life-long believer to a sceptic. Why? Because he noticed that that evidence of UFO visitations respected state borders. Specifically, there are state-level laws[2] in the USA related to things such as insurance claims related to dead livestock. Cows are stupid, eat poisonous or dangerous things all the time and die. One dead cow represent a loss of hundreds to thousands of dollars. Many dead cows could be a serious financial problem, so there is insurance available for lifestock. The policies apply differently in different jurisdictions, and some would cover "unexplained external causes" such as little green men anally probing cattle for mysterious reasons, and in some areas the policies would not cover this. Unsurprisingly, cattle mutilations and the associated evidence like crop circles would only turn up in areas where the insurance covered it, and never in areas where it wouldn't, even if that was across the road in a paddock owned by the same farmer. Odd huh? One theory -- that sells books -- is that little green or grey men visit our planet across interstellar distances and amuse themselves by cutting holes into cattle. But not low-value livestock like chickens. Just the high-value ones, like cattle. The other theory is that selling books and making insurance claims is the only reason anyone talks about any of this seriously. That people see a dozen dead cows, have nothing they can legitimately put on an insurance claim, and are staring down the barrel of financial ruin. What to do? Just drive the tractor in circles over still green crops, bending them down, call Janice from the local news, claim that the circle is impossible, and point at the dead cows you cut a few times with a sharp box cutter a few hours before the news crew turned up. Suddenly, there's "evidence" that you can put on an insurance claim and your farm will survive until the next year. > many official and declassified sources The word "declassified" makes UFO fans excited because it's got all the elements of an official secret that they uncovered through their intelligence and sleuthing. It's the same addictive narrative that made QAnon popular. Most (all?) military observations of potential enemy aircraft are classified! That means nothing. The value of these observations isn't particularly higher than anyone else's either. If one young pilot sees a splotch on the IR feed that "moves oddly", people run off with that and claim that "government has evidence of UFOs!" This recent one is the best example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q At first blush that looks exactly like an optical effect such as Glory [3] that appears to move only because the observer is moving with respect to nearby clouds. The background is moving, and Glory remains stationary relative to the observer because the Sun doesn't move in the sky like the clouds do. It "accelerates away" because the IR camera is on a gimbal on the tip of a Javeline missile and reached its limit. It stops tracking the "target" which then seems to "shoot away" in the picture. This and similar "evidence" is about as good as it gets. I've never seen anything even remotely convincing. Nonetheless, book after book just collates and rehashes the same evidence, including pictures long since discredited[0] as clear fakes. The authors get paid and can feed their families. The readers get to be entertained just like I was when I was a kid. Everyone gets something, but we don't get to invite visiting alien dignitaries to speak at a UN convention in much the same way that Air Traffic Control doesn't schedule flights differently on Christmas Eve to avoid hitting Santa. [0] Several famous UFO photos that adorned book covers published by legitimate print houses turned out to be chandeliers that the photographer had thrown into the sky like a frisbee and then quickly snapped an out-of-focus picture of. On commission for the print house. [1] Speaking of which, isn't that odd all by itself? Crop circles weren't a "thing" until they were. And then vanished again. While they were popular, like a meme on Reddit, there were all sorts of interesting variations. Similarly, the aliens themselves evolve just like bad Fifty Shades of Grey fan art. Some traits are never mentioned by any "witnesses" until after a particular story, and then it's a common trait many people claim to have seen. [2] I read this over 15 years ago so I might be confusing a legal boundary with a corporate "coverage area" boundary in a contract, but the gist of the story is the same either way. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon)
beders 4y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The fascination around UAP has been around for decades and basically each decade there's new reporting and new pictures or even videos. And also, every decade, once actual scientists and debunkers get their hands on the material, those phenomena are readily explained. It takes a certain expertise and a Navy pilot simply doesn't have that. These stories make great clickbait though.
- jablongo 4y ago
  This comment thread is attached to an article by “actual scientists”
- nprateem 4y ago
  Blah, blah, blah. The usual rebuttal. Like climate deniers, debunkers gonna debunk. It's strange that these people are trusted to handle and launch nukes, but apparently when squadrons of UAPs show up simultaneously on the most advanced sensor systems in the world they suddenly can't be trusted.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    At that level, trust and skill are specialisms, not generic statements. By analogy, I'm a skilled software developer, graduated 2006, learned to read from a Commodore 64 user manual etc., but I make iOS apps, put me on a Rust project and don't even know the syntax. I trust a fighter pilot to be really good at spotting potential hazards in the air, and also things which are not responding to the appropriate IFF signals. While I know too little about what they do to guess much of what else they're good at, I suspect that suggesting they're too good to make mistakes is like suggesting I'm too good to write bugs.
    - nprateem 4y ago
      No, but in aggregate, I trust them to be able to collectively say "something weird is going on". 100+ ex-service personnel testified in front of Congress about UFOs interfering with and disabling nukes in siloes over several decades. Can't find a link ATM but it's on Youtube somewhere I think.
BerislavLopac 4y ago
I think there is one very powerful argument against the idea that any alien life form has visited Earth since the humanity existed: the humanity still exists.
- colordrops 4y ago
  That makes a lot of unfounded assumptions about the nature of advanced alien life.
  - BerislavLopac 4y ago
    Maybe, but it fits 100% with all of the advanced life we have observed so far.
elif 4y ago
There's certain topics on HN you have to pay the karma tax for broaching. It wasn't always this way but it is where we are.

motohagiography 4y ago

Fun topic because the question of under what conditions would we as humans would contact another less advanced civilization in space opens up some pretty interesting but simple criteria. We would need for that civilization to not be a danger to us, not only from a technology angle, but from an ontological perspective. When you look at how insane other creatures in nature are and the biological economics of their survival, we wouldn't adopt them into our own societies, and the ones we do are cats and dogs and other pets. This is how much we can trust another being we can only share a small part of our experience with by keeping them confined or on leashes. We probably don't want rich aliens to breed us in captivity and buy us as pets for their kids to ride. So there's a bar we would need to meet to not become that. The question I have would be, what would we as a species need to demonstrate to be allowed "off leash," in a community of other spacefaring civilizations? What consistent understanding would each person as a random human need to have to be able to be relied upon to interact safely with a spacefaring being? What would we equip a civilization with to evolve with those tools before arranging to meet them without destroying the equillibrium of their societies as they compete for our favour and become dependent on us? Reciprocity of respect for life and the ability to apprehend some universal shared truth seems like the only thing that would separate an animal from another conscious being capable of reason. I would wonder what that prerequisites or criteria for us as humans encountering a new civilization would be.

grishka 4y ago
One thing that sets humans and animals apart is language. The ability to transfer abstract thoughts and ideas between individuals. Would you adopt an alien creature capable of reasoning and and expressing its thoughts as a pet? Or would you consider that enslavement?
- adrianN 4y ago
  It's all a matter of degrees. My cat certainly is able to communicate with me and there are smarter animals around that we keep in captivity (e.g. dolphins).
  - 4y ago

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ducktective 4y ago

>Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected So they are now calling them literal ships, not ufo or uap Also, from their methodology and instrumentation (color cameras) it seems they could have done it in like 80s. Why coming out now?

defrost 4y ago
The paper is by three Ukranian astro photogrammetrypeople .. I was going to comment on "ships" for the bias but figured I can mark that down to non native English speakers and some translation issue. Nothing in the eight pages screams "we believe in aliens", it's essentially about not yet catogorised observed phenomona high up in the troposphere. With limited data on fast objects that appear in only a few frames they write about two classes of "things". The earth, of course, sees an infall of roughly 48.5 tons of material per day of various sizes and composition, much of which never reaches the surface directly, instead breaking up and falling as dust.
- nomel 4y ago
  The crescent shape looks like it could be side view of the ionized part of a shock wave (maybe there’s a better word for it).
  - jacknews 4y ago
    "moon"?
  - TechBro8615 4y ago
    The paper isn’t clear about this, but the crescent in that image is the moon, AFAIU. They’re using it as a baseline for luminosity of the UAPs, which are the multiple (less bright) white speckles in the image.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  The phrase “squadron of ships” seems like deliberate word choice. And to me, “squadron” is a more alarming word than “ships,” because it implies cooperation between multiple intelligent entities. But the paper does not describe much compelling evidence for any intelligent “swarming” behavior, so I interpreted the word choice as bias.

Apocryphon 4y ago

I was listening to a fun podcast episode about a couple of folks who founded a UFO-related political third party: https://www.buzzsprout.com/760511/11204787-gabriel-green-the-campaign-from-alpha-centauri https://www.buzzsprout.com/760511/11204787-gabriel-green-the... And it mentioned there was a flying saucer craze in 1947- Roswell wasn't even the most interesting story then. It made me think, these myths and legends are highly historically and culturally contextual. Alien UFOs replaced phantom airships replaced fairies and so forth. Perhaps in just a century, the idea of anthropomorphic aliens will be as dated and quaint as changelings are to us now. Wonder what will be the future myth then? Simulation glitches?

mojomark 4y ago
Seems to be ghosts in dem machines https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-fired-sentient/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...
euroderf 4y ago
The most interesting story was the flying saucer invasion of Washington DC in the early 60s.

sellador64 4y ago

"Our astronomical work is daytime observations of meteors and space invasions." Just a day in the life. Watching for falling rocks and space invaders.

nomel 4y ago

They’re relying heavily on illumination. I can’t help think that they could be bugs, front illuminated by whatever is around the telescopes.

lettergram 4y ago

> The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of unidentified phenomena in the atmosphere. To me this sends up a couple of thoughts: (1) this sounds like a way to spy on Russia and (2) quite possibly could be technology from Russia (such as hypersonic missiles). Then I read the speed: > An object contrast makes it possible to estimate the distance using colourimetric methods. Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 - 12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s. ... that's 33,500 mph ... Re-entry speed from something out of the atmosphere is something like 8km/s; or 19,000 mph. Of course that generates an insane amount of heat and is still half the reportedly measured speed. TBH it seems like a possible sampling error for the speed calculations. If we assume that to be the case, then it seems likely (if real) that these are some sort of hypersonic test craft / missile system.

torotonnato 4y ago
That's what I thought too. Why not create a bit of distance to a possible reputational damage and spy on Russia at the same time too? Not many data points, but fig. 4 (page 3) is interesting: a linear relation between luminosity and speed. For meteors should be, as intuitively expected, proportional to kinetic energy, hence quadratic. Does this relation holds for missiles too? EDIT: they are not related to NASA, it's in the second sentence of the abstract (ops) ...The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of UAP also...
godelski 4y ago
> 15 km/s That's over mach 40 and would allow you to circumnavigate the globe in 45 minutes. There are flight vehicles that travel mach 20+, but 40 sounds insane. Mach also isn't the best numbers to use. The HTV-2 goes Mach 20+ but that's 5.7 km/s. Granted it is 2010 technology (first flight) but it would be insane to think we've doubled the speed and are testing these vehicles. It isn't like you can fly vehicles that fly that fast secretly. They make A LOT of noise. Measurement errors sounds like a better explanation. Especially when we have such strong evidence of other things (like tic-tac) being measurement errors.

dhsysusbsjsi 4y ago

I did some quick googling to put things in perspective: Mach1 is ~ 0.3 km/s (+/- 0.1 varies with altitude) Artillery is ~ 1 km/s Earth orbital escape velocity is ~ 11 km/s 6km high is 20,000 ft, around low regional turboprop aircraft. 10km high is 32,000 ft, around airliner cruise altitude. 15km high is 50,000 ft, where Elon Musks private jet sits. 20km high is more where U2 and SR71 start to operate and require space suits. ISS orbit is ~ 400 km Elon's Starlink is 550km

rehevkor5 4y ago

"Our astronomical work is daytime observations of meteors and space invasions." Is something being lost in translation? They can't literally mean that...

rehevkor5 4y ago
Oh... invasions of their airspace, not invasions from space, right?

galaxyLogic 4y ago

Reason to be skeptical: For the last 10 years (?) or so most everybody has a mobile phone with high-quality camera in it and most people carry their phone with them all the time. Shouldn't that mean that the quality and quantity of UFO evidence should have exploded since about 10-15 years ago? But I haven't seen any articles about how much more and how much better quality UFO evidence we have now that anybody whose sees a UFO can take a snapshot or video of it. Further when a group of people see a UFO, they could each take their own video of it taken with their different cameras. If I saw a UFO I would certainly try to take a video of it.

barbazoo 4y ago
Could it be that phone cameras just aren't even remotely optimized for videos being taken in the dark. I'd imagine that's when most sightings happen.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  Could be but I don't understand why UFOs would only show up at night? Is that what the existing evidence shows? Or is it just that in the dark it is much harder to identify an object and therefore there are more un-identified objects at night?
nprateem 4y ago
But there is video. It just looks crap or CGI because it's hand held, because who expects to see a UFO, and shot by amateurs.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  There is video, there is evidence. I'm juts wondering why the evidence isn't accumulating many times faster now that everybody has a cell-phone and they have good cameras in them? They are not the best possible equipment for taking pictures of UFOs, but surely they are much much better than what average person had with them 20 years ago. So that means in my calculation that the quality and quantity evidence should be much better now. So really my question is, is there any evidence that the evidence about UFOs is much better now that it was 20 years ago?

nprateem 4y ago

There are a few interesting documentaries online. Check out unacknowledged, disclosure and close encounters of the fifth kind. What's interesting to me is that the ce5 protocol meditation is almost identical to some Taoist meditation I learnt 20 years ago. Of course there's also loads of bullshit too, but for me the UFO question was answered years ago. They're here. The AATIP/UAP angle is a good one to rebrand the subject and make it more palatable to the mainstream after decades of mockery, allowing governments a way to research it seriously too.

colordrops 4y ago
Where did you learn this taoist meditation? Do you recall the name?
- nprateem 4y ago
  Yeah it was in Mantak Chia's books. Healing Light of the Tao IIRC https://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-Light-Tao-Foundational-Practices-ebook/dp/B071GZNV25/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-Light-Tao-Foundational-Prac...

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

As Mick West suggests, unless you can rule out things like insects flying past the camera, then further proof is necessary.

yuvadam 4y ago
Did you read the paper?
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  Show me where they discuss sources of error - as a paper it's poorly written, I mean what kind of academic whacks this into an abstract and decides it's OK. "We present a broad range of UAPs. We see them everywhere." Everywhere? In the cupboard at home? In the local movie theatre? Nowhere they discuss sources of error - it's a description of their setup, and then a straight dive into here's a taxonomy of all the UAPs. Plus, there's not enough there to reproduce their rig if indeed UAPs are "everywhere".