As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)

Re:As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anom... by godelski on Monday February 06, 2023 @03:49AM (#34674947)

Sure, I actually wrote a longer comment here[0]. My understanding of what you're saying (no FTL) kinda falls under point 2 that I made. While I understand the mechanism you're discussing, is a civilization willing to spend a billion years waiting for the information to travel back home? I'd be under the impression that this would be a pure data collection pov and a quite risky one at that. You can't act on that information in a meaningful way since the life evolves drastically within that billion years (but you can study it!). Even in a thousand things change a lot, but at least not evolutionary. The risk is that if anything goes wrong (glitch, crash, etc) then you've kinda contaminated that life system (this includes the transmission of their data). But maybe they don't care and it is an acceptable risk to them. I'm not an alien, I don't know their ethics. Do also take into account that such a project would be a rather massive undertaking and the idea of mining planets left and right is quite noisy. We're about the at the point where we'd start detecting such stuff since we're looking at exo-planets on the regular now.

I'll bring up another point that I didn't in my longer post though. Maybe these lifeforms solved things like longevity and so such time constraints aren't meaningful to them. What's a few hundred years when you live millions?

> But billion of years at 0.1c is still huge chunk of universe. Are we sure that no civilization born within this radius billion years ago?

That's 1,000,000ly fwiw. That does cover the entire Milkey Way (but doesn't get us half way to Andromeda). But also consider that the Milkey Way is 13.6bn years old and life on Earth is 3.7bn.

I'm not saying that your idea is crazy, it is definitely possible (and has been proposed by others, in quite high detail). I just think there isn't any evidence for this and there's reason to believe that this would be quite difficult to pull off. But we'll see as time goes on.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672241

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Re:As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anom... by vbezhenar on Monday February 06, 2023 @04:08AM (#34675094)

But what kind of evidence could we have?

Sure, if we would find crashed space ship, that would be good evidence. We don't have that (or it's not public knowledge anyway).

Anything less than that would be hard to consider evidence. Especially if those things are trying to minimize encounters.

As to mining planets. I think that it makes more sense to mine asteroids. You don't need to overcome gravitational well and asteroids are quite rich when it comes to resources. Asteroid belt is huge. You can build lots of stuff there without fear to be noticed. Also it's not really clear how far can you go with minituatirization. We think about big ships but if you can operate on molecular level, may be you can stay small. Think about robots size of bacteria, size of ants and stuff like that. Alien anthill in some asteroid pit might be never noticed.

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Re:As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anom... by godelski on Monday February 06, 2023 @04:14AM (#34675132)

> But what kind of evidence could we have?

The lack of evidence does not support a claim. Otherwise we'd make arguments about ghosts, invisible unicorns, and flying spaghetti monsters. Just to be clear. You're right that it is hard to consider evidence when it doesn't exist. So my believe of aliens visiting earth is in the probability ranges of these other things.

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