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Ask Slashdot: What Is Your View On UFO Sightings?
dryriver writes: UFOs sightings have been reported in the tens of thousands over the last decades. In the past, some have seen flying cigar-shaped craft (blimps?), some flying triangles, some more rounded-looking flying saucers. Often the apparent spacecraft does something improbable like standing completely still in the sky and then shooting off to somewhere at an incredible speed. Some sightings are just lights or light formations flying around or dancing around in the night sky -- which could be military aircraft like helicopters and F16s training at night. There seem to be people who genuinely see stuff that is hard to explain, people who fake UFO sightings, photos and videos for profit to keep the "UFO industry" of websites, radio shows and magazines afloat, and yet others that think a regular airplane flying at night with its lights on is a UFO. What is your view on all this? Are we being visited from outer space? Is it prototype aircraft that look like UFOs to the untrained eye? Was some 190 IQ inventor-prankster having fun with quadcopter drones with colored lights four decades before quadcopters became a thing (hey, tons of people have created fake crop-circles in the past)? Where do all these supposed UFO sightings and reports come from? Did events like the famous "Battle Of Los Angeles" actually happen? And do you find any UFO reports credible at all?
go away and watch tv
UFOs are just that - Unidentified Flying Objects.
The hoopla around them is just because for *some* people, their existence is more exciting than the boring reality of human existence.
Personally, the more boring something tends to be (like water, air, gravity), the more grounded in reality I find it to be.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
But because they are by definition unidentified, it's unreasonable to claim they are of extra-terrestrial origin.
I have noticed that UFO sightings were a lot more common when people weren't carrying smartphones with integrated cameras with them. Now that everybody's got one, the UFOs have disappeared.
If it is unidentified and appears to be flying, it's an UFO.
The connection "strange lights in the sky -> it must be advanced ships from another galaxy" is the faulty logic step.
Once you exclude the UFOs that can be confirmed as something mundane, then what else a UFO could be is effectively unfalsifiable. Either it's classified, or a one-off unrecorded meteorological/optical phenomenon laymen are ignorant of, or something 'new to science'. Completely new macroscopic phenomena are very rare nowadays, because anything that conspicuous was likely to have been noticed thousands of years ago, and thoroughly explained hundreds of years ago. Every now and then a legend is confirmed real, but sometimes is debunked (Loch Ness monster.)
More relevantly, aliens are passe in American culture now. They've lost credibility as a trope in media, having been replaced by Zombies and Vampires, who more closely resemble our current cultural anxieties. Xenophobia led to broad fear of space aliens, and the cold war Red Scare led to general fear of invasion. The fall of the USSR was accompanied by a shift in anxieties to fear of the internal moral collapse of one's society. Vampires represent the hidden minority slowly corrupting society, whereas Zombies represent a foolish majority clamoring for society's downfall.
In a society that promotes coexisting with other ethnicities, or even pluralism, it's difficult to take "nuke the little green men because they're all evil!" seriously.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This is quite similar to psychokinetic and telekinetic powers. About 200 years ago, mediums could use the 'power of the mind' to move very heavy objects such as tables or people. And somehow, during the 20th century, the 'movable' size decreased while the ability to detect frauds increased. Nowadays people with powers can barely move teeny weeny objects and only when the conditions are good (aka no expert watching them to detect frauds).
UFOs are a bit like that. They are still sittings but most of the proofs, usually videos, do not resist a careful analysis by a CGI specialist or anyone with a true critical mind. See for instance the Oskar Jungell videos on YT. https://www.youtube.com/user/O...
Of course, one could argue that aliens want to remain undetected (e.g. the Star-Trek Prime Directive) and consequently they stopped visiting us when the risk of being caught on camera became too high. That is a reasonable argument but that does not help to prove that aliens really exist and have visited us.
Stephen Hawking once said that if aliens visit us they will most likely not be friendly. Whether or not he is correct is irrelevant because the aliens aren't coming. Ever.
The idea of aliens coming to earth has been the subject of countless novels, movies and television shows, and even though those stories are entirely fictional, they have greatly influenced the way we think about the idea of encountering beings from other worlds. Unfortunately, our thinking on this subject is very small and limited. If we step back and think a little bigger, we will realize that any aliens with the ability to come visit us almost certainly would not care to.
Sci-fi stories can ignore the bits that aren't very interesting. Movie aliens rarely get sick or worry about eating. Sci-fi stories rarely mention gravity because, given our limited view, we expect gravity to just work and shooting a movie without it would be a huge pain. So, screw it, all movie aliens and all future civilizations have invented artificial gravity. After all, warp-drive engines and pew-pew energy-blasters are much more fun to think about.
In the real world, however, science tends to advance in all directions, because advances in one field almost always results in advances in many others. For example, the invention of the computer resulted in many advances in other fields of human science.
In order for aliens to reach earth, they will have to, at a minimum, perfect faster-than-light travel or perfect a way to travel for thousands of years at sub-light speed, conquer the long term biological effects of space radiation and weightlessness, and master extreme long distance space navigation. All of this just so they can come to earth and . . . what? Say hello? Steal our water?
That just doesn't make sense.
So why *WOULD* aliens come to earth?
Do they really want our water (or minerals or whatever)? That implies an economic model in their decision. By definition, they need those resources and coming here to get them is their most economical choice. Getting them somewhere closer to home or manufacturing them must be more "expensive" (in some sense of the word) than the cost of traveling all the way here, gathering our resources and flying them home.
While not impossible, that seems unlikely - both technologically and economically. Even we have (expensively) already mastered alchemy. We have the tech to create matter from energy. Imagine that tech in a few hundred years. What would be cheaper and better -- making stuff at home or building a fleet of galactic warships and sending them (along with thousands of soldiers and miners) to some far off planet?
Currently, we're not even able to get to Proxima Centauri (the closest star outside our solar system) much less get to a place where we think there's an actual planet. Getting us to Proxima Centauri in less than a few hundred years would require technology that is several orders of magnitude beyond what we have now. If getting humans to another star system is a 100 on some "technology ability scale", then we're currently at about 2, which is not far ahead of poodles who are probably at 1.
What about the idea that aliens might come to Earth to colonize the planet (and maybe vaporize us in the process)? You could argue that terraforming (or maybe aliens would call it xenoforming) could be a technology more advanced than FTL travel. With that assumption, you could imagine an alien race that can travel across the galaxy but not alter planets to suit their biological needs. Coming to colonize Earth could make sense. But this ignores the fact that several other requisite technologies would probably make their need to colonize obsolete.
Before they had FTL travel, they likely spent many decades traveling at less that light speed and so chances are their ships are quite comfortable. In fact probably more like sailing biodomes than ships - someplace they could live indefinitely. Assuming their other scientists were hard at work while their engi
Mine was much better. We were driving west on I40 and passing west of Winston-Salem when we saw -- my wife and I together -- a light that literally rippled in the sky, lights flashing like they were rolling around on some invisible shape. It flew first to the right of the road, then made an impossible turn and came back diagonally across the road in front of is, then rose and zipped back to the right and came directly towards us, parallel to the road, the lights growing brighter and brighter and with the whole thing literally glittering with rippling sparkles of light. I'm a physicist, she's a physician and at no time did we actually believe we were being visited by aliens following I40 in to attack Winston, but we certainly could not identify what we were seeing -- it was absolutely a Unidentified Flying Object!
Then it smoothly passed us on the right about a mile away, and we could see that it was a biplane towing an advertising display, heading back for another pass over some stadium where they were apparently playing football. We were barely too far away to see exactly what they were selling, but damn, that display rippled and sparkled in the night JUST LIKE lights spinning around on a flying disk, one that constantly tumbled or changed shape.
The moral of the story is mixed. Lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack, and one anecdote cannot address every UFO sighting in the history of mankind. However, as I've pointed out to my sons -- who are much more inclined to give credence to the idea that we are constantly being watched by aliens and that their experiences like this one HAVE no natural explanation -- during the 50's through the 80's, the US was more or less constantly under the threat of air attack and ICBM attack from the USSR and to a lesser extent China. SAC had every border lit up with radar that was being watched continuously for "unidentified flying objects" that without question would have been interpreted as an attack by the USSR, not visitation by snoopy space aliens. Every commercial airport was equipped with radar and flight control, (and still is today) and any object not identified by procedure and law would be immediately detected and in all probability investigated, especially post-9/11.
So sure, space aliens could be masters of stealth AND nefariously snoopy AND could be malevolent (spying us out To Serve Man) or constrained by THEIR laws and customs not to interfere while we rush to destroy each other, waiting to see if we survive long enough to build a peaceful global society. Science fiction novels delight in this kind of stuff. But Bayesian assessments of stacked arguments of this sort are never very convincing. Every special explanation required decreases the probability of the truth of the conclusion. Our governments -- all of them -- have to be members of a global conspiracy to hide "area 51" evidence. Reliable sightings have to be suppressed. The alien stealth has to be almost perfect to hide from civilian radar, or civilian radar has to be part of the conspiracy (which by now has grown to include the entire air force, NASA, the top levels of every government, all of the major intelligence and police services -- worldwide). AND we need psychotic aliens because REAL aliens intent on invasion would have crafted a killer virus long before now and collapsed civilization or would have just fired a few nukes at Russia and the US simultaneously and than sat back snacking on popcorn while we collapsed it for ourselves and left them some simply mopping up to do before they took over the rest of the world without credible opposition, and REAL aliens interested in making friend would have made friends long ago. But Bayesian reasoning is a bit difficult for most folks, sadly, and explosion of premises/priors (a.k.a. common sense, withholding a significant degree of belief in the absence of credible evidence AND a credible, evidence supported explanation) is all too rare.
After all, roughly 80% of the people on Earth believe in malevolent and beneficent
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.