Now there are multiple private teams who could actually pull it off. Or maybe not... I have no idea how hard it would be to make a signal source appear from Earth as if it came from a fixed star, but I suspect it would be extremely difficult to accomplish for any length of time. It's not as if you could just park it someplace. Then there's parallax to consider.
In any event, the message wouldn't be "Build a spaceship with technology no one has ever seen before." The message would be "Get your act together or we'll bulldoze your planet to make room for a hyperspace bypass," or "Take the red pill LOL" or "Get Amazon Prime today. The bargains are out of this world!"
The Iraq war?
It's a bit much to start an entire deductive reasoning based on such a blatant assumption.
What you say is true. But here's the problem. 99% of people in this world are people you don't know well and don't know personally and they aren't famous enough for you to trust them.
Thus by probability an extraordinary claim that is true is highly, highly likely to come from someone you will never have any form of "extraordinary" trust for. So your statement, which I quoted, is, from a practical standpoint, completely useless. By your logic all extraordinary claims in existence will all pretty much be mistrusted by you. It's a statement of complete denial of anything that sounds outlandish. It's the definition of being closed minded.
Being extremely closed minded tends to be better than being extremely open minded where you believe every freaking thing you hear. But the best place to be in is at neither extreme. Rather then deny all extraordinary claims you should be skeptical.
You need to search for techniques in which will help you determine whether you CAN or CANNOT trust someone you do not already have "extraordinary" trust for.
To which I throw this statement at you:
If someone makes a statement without any ulterior motive that results in net benefit to them, you can place more merit on the fact that they are telling you what they believe to be the truth.
So take for example a stranger tells you there's a bomb in the building and you have to get out. You get the hell out because that stranger had nothing to gain from telling there's a bomb.
If a person with a camera is recording you and he told you there's a bomb in the building. Well that's different right? The key difference here is that in one situation there's a clear ulterior motive. In the other situation there was no motive.
Follow the motive.
The person making the claim... what is his motive?
That's not how we gain extraordinary trust (remember, Kyrie Irving is pretty darn famous).
We expect all statements to be independently verified and attested by a bunch of experts, with eg. journalists verifying they are indeed experts (that's journalists' expertise). The more people who've you learned to trust in that chain of verifiers, the higher your trust.
When it comes to extraordinary claims like this, I usually go back to the "implementation": why and how did another civilization solve all of the physics problems of interstellar flight (if it did), how did they go undetected by other countries and amateurs, and why did they not simply reach out in an attempt to communicate?
At that point I can even buy that these "intelligence officers" believe what they are saying, but I still don't buy that their claims are true.
Nope. It is how you gain extraordinary trust. It really depends on what they are famous for. There are many famous people or scholars who you respect and trust due to their fame. You trust them, because others trust them.
Fame can also cause distrust too. But it does cause trust as well.
>When it comes to extraordinary claims like this, I usually go back to the "implementation": why and how did another civilization solve all of the physics problems of interstellar flight (if it did), how did they go undetected by other countries and amateurs, and why did they not simply reach out in an attempt to communicate?
This is too much speculation. There are an infinite number of explanations here. Better to follow the the chain of events from the anomalous claim and start piecing together things forwards rather then just claim it's impossible because you can't think of any valid way for it to happen.
Additionally the claim itself is "extraordinary" so basically there is likely no mundane explanation for it if the claim is true.
>At that point I can even buy that these "intelligence officers" believe what they are saying, but I still don't buy that their claims are true.
So that's the first step right? They believe what they are saying. So from their perspective they witnessed extraordinary evidence. So what made them believe it? What did they actually see? Are they correct? Even if following this thread leads to something different then their claim, one can still learn something interesting.
Closed mindedness often involves logic that works backwards. You need to move forwards. If you see a path, moving forwards means following the path. Moving backwards means ignoring the path because you made a guess that there's nothing at the end of the path.
I don't trust "famous" people. I trust that it's unlikely for a large group of "famous" (eg experts in relevant fields, which is a more specific interpretatiin of "famous"), unrelated people to not trust each other, and only once they reach a common ground, would my trust of their extraordinary claim rise.
Yes, I wouldn't trust Einstein proclaiming speed of light is finite, but when corroborated with independent claims of experiments from Michelson proving likewise, and others from 30 years ago, I would.
Basically, if it's too few people, I'd question how did others, unrelated people not see it: science mostly progresses these days when the body of knowledge is such that simply the next thing is in front of us, and multiple people simultaneously "discover" it. As it's many people making similar claims, I'd start considering it seriously.
This is how science works, and I am happy to follow that with media reports as well. It's not at all backwards IMO.
Sure, if I was working on a hypothesis, I would certainly venture into less trusty sources, but I would need to be ready to accept for my hypothesis to be disproven too.
I have answers, but discussing them would just be further excuses to try to dilute away this fundamental truth, so I decline. It's their responsibility to figure out how to be more trustworthy if they want it, not mine. (Helpful tip: They can start by not lying about everything, all the time.) It's my responsibility not to trust known, repeated, huge liars.
So it'll take a lot to convince me that this is real. But let's say for an instant that it is.
And you're the government, and you need to handle "announcing" this to the people without freaking them out. I guess you set the scene, monitor for a while what people do (decades of denial), then when it seems like the people are doing alright/don't care about it much, start to say you'll actually look into it (couple years ago with official release of documents). Then monitor the reaction... again people don't really care. Kind of exciting for some people for a day or two but still go work in the morning, life goes on. Then you start to drop the other shoe.
I guess? I'm skeptic but if there was a world in which there are alien UAPs, where the govt knows, where the govt hides it, I can construe this scenario as a good reason why govts would have gone about it in this way.
When speaking of the us government and its agencies we must remain ever cognizant that the official story is rarely truthful whether explicitly or by omission. Relatedly, we’ve seen extraordinary measures taken against individuals leaking pretty minor and generally suspected details like wholesale warrant less surveillance via direct taps on arterial comm lines. Thus, it is more likely that this guy has nothing and no power, else he’d be in an Ecuadorian embassy/Russia or an as of yet unknown black site instead of doing interviews.
Much less commonly said, but still true, is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary trust. I do not trust the people saying these things. That I can not 100% guess their motivations for this is not particularly relevant. They have a long history of consistent and large lies. Failing to take that into account when they're making this sort of claim is foolishness.
In fact at this point they're really in a Catch-22... if they really do try to come out with "Yes! Aliens! Really!" then we have the question of, why then were you lying the up to this point then? Because if they are real you've been lying and lying and lying and lying beyond my capacity to express in a single sentence... why should I trust you now, then?
I mean, it isn't that hard to imagine how "alien threat!" will require us to, once again, give them more power. It's absolutely astonishing how no matter what the problem is, the solution is to give them more power.