[f02a]

As someone who has personally seen a couple of these things, I'm convinced that either extraterrestrial anthropologists are observing our planet, or human governments are operating highly advanced, top-secret craft. (I tend to think it's probably both.)

Think of it this way: if a group of violent, power-hungry monkeys on a nearby planet invented ICBMs and nuclear weapons, you'd want to keep an eye on them... wouldn't you?

[clouddrover]

Why would I want to keep an eye on them when "nearby" is an interstellar distance that they have no practical possibility of crossing any time soon, when I have technology that massively outclasses theirs, and when I know where they are but they don't even know I exist?

Wouldn't I have better and more interesting things to do with my time?

[bsamuels]

> Wouldn't I have better and more interesting things to do with my time?

Not if you're a Xeno-Anthropologist!

[gdy]

See Liu Cixin's cosmic sociology)

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/11/11/the-big-idea-liu-cixi...

Second: technological explosion. It took humans about a hundred thousand years to advance from stone tools to the age of agriculture, but only two hundred years to go from the steam age to the information age. Explosive advances in technology could occur at any moment in any civilization in the universe. Thus, even a primitive civilization that appears as harmless as a baby or a sprout is full of potential danger.

[clouddrover]

Pure fantasy. The only real advance in the last 400 years has been the development of an organised, systematic approach to science. The scientific method has driven all development. And the science says we're not travelling between stars any time soon.

[gdy]

There was similar attitude at the end of the 19th century - some people thought all major scientific discoveries had already been made.

[f02a]

Obviously, for the extraterrestrial theory to work, you have to imagine you can warp or fold spacetime to get where you need to go, rather than using a conventional engine. Then the universe gets a bit smaller.

[krapp]

>Obviously, for the extraterrestrial theory to work, you have to imagine you can warp or fold spacetime to get where you need to go, rather than using a conventional engine.

That's fantasy, though. One might as well imagine aliens coming to Earth riding dragons through magic portals, as far as reality is concerned.

For any extraterrestrial theory to work and be plausible as a speculative explanation for real world events, it has to assume the speed of light is an inescapable hard limit on everything, because that seems to be the universe we actually live in.

[klingonopera]

Wormholes can exist on hard and solid physics theories, and people are trying to find out if they can make this work in practical situations.

Therefore, your "fantasy" of them coming to earth through magic portals may not be so far off. Whether or not a dragon makes for a good spaceship remains to be seen...

[krapp]

> Wormholes can exist on hard and solid physics theories, and people are trying to find out if they can make this work in practical situations.

You kind of skipped over the part where someone discovers that wormholes do actually exist, and that it's possible for anything to traverse them, much less circumvent the speed of light while doing so. There is, as yet, not "this" to make work in any practical situation. Theories abound, but not all of them agree that wormholes, if they were to exist, are even practical[0].

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19665563

[postalrat]

I favor the theory that they send out unmanned craft that have the ability to manufacture more craft when they reach a star system and repeat the process. I imagine we might have similar technically within 1000 years or so and might just do it. Then it's just a matter of 100s of thousands of years to visit all systems in our Galaxy.

[akimball]

No, you just need to be patient and/or fast.

[hackerbabz]

Consider that we could be on other planets and on our way to the stars right now if we could cooperate better.

We know how to do it, we just chose not to.

Maybe that is unusual in the rest of the galaxy.

[acct1771]

This is coming from the same species that's trying to decide if it should intervene in a war between rain forest people.

[clouddrover]

Listen, I've got to obtain that unobtanium somehow. Or at least get a further four movies out of it.

[nothal]

I want to believe... But Occam's razors makes me think it's birds, meteorological phenomena, and other things you can misconstrue for more in a high stress situation (or through IR cameras).

[f02a]

I don't want to believe... it's simpler not to. There's a huge stigma against belief in this sort of thing. It's obvious by the responses on this thread; even if you have radar that corroborates sightings filmed on an IR camera, our collective response is still disbelief.

I think this problem is difficult for science to study because it's not readily reproducible. Not only that, but any evidence that /does/ exist has been ridiculed, suppressed, and/or outright ignored for too long. Now we're seeing efforts to reduce the stigma, and I applaud that.