As US Govt Releases UFO Report, 'X-Files' Creator Remains Skeptical (nytimes.com) 158
Space.com reports:
The U.S. government needs some more time to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery. That's the main take-home message from the highly anticipated UFO report released Friday.
"The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the report's executive summary states, using the military's now-preferred term for "UFO" (presumably because that older acronym has a lot of baggage attached to it).
Or, as CNET puts it, "all those sightings of bizarre things in the sky over the years fall into several categories, require more study and remain largely unexplained and unidentified." (Though they point out the Department of Defense's "UAP" Task Force reported eleven "documented instances in which pilots reported near misses...")
The report drew a response from Chris Carter, who created The X-Files, a TV drama about a government conspiracy hiding evidence of UFO's. Filming the show brought Carter in contact with real-world people who claimed they'd seen aliens, and he still thinks that when it comes to UFO, most of us are not quite there yet — but want to believe: The universe is just too vast for us to be alone in it. Carl Jung wanted to believe, as did Carl Sagan. Both wrote books on the subject... Can the new report, or any government report, give us clear answers?
I'm as skeptical now as I've ever been... [F]or me, the report on U.F.O.s was dead on arrival. Ordered up by a bipartisan group of legislators during the Trump administration, the interim report revealed nothing conclusive about U.F.O.s or their extraterrestrial origins. And the portions that remain classified will only fuel more conspiracy theories.
This is "X-Files" territory if there ever was any...
"The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the report's executive summary states, using the military's now-preferred term for "UFO" (presumably because that older acronym has a lot of baggage attached to it).
Or, as CNET puts it, "all those sightings of bizarre things in the sky over the years fall into several categories, require more study and remain largely unexplained and unidentified." (Though they point out the Department of Defense's "UAP" Task Force reported eleven "documented instances in which pilots reported near misses...")
The report drew a response from Chris Carter, who created The X-Files, a TV drama about a government conspiracy hiding evidence of UFO's. Filming the show brought Carter in contact with real-world people who claimed they'd seen aliens, and he still thinks that when it comes to UFO, most of us are not quite there yet — but want to believe: The universe is just too vast for us to be alone in it. Carl Jung wanted to believe, as did Carl Sagan. Both wrote books on the subject... Can the new report, or any government report, give us clear answers?
I'm as skeptical now as I've ever been... [F]or me, the report on U.F.O.s was dead on arrival. Ordered up by a bipartisan group of legislators during the Trump administration, the interim report revealed nothing conclusive about U.F.O.s or their extraterrestrial origins. And the portions that remain classified will only fuel more conspiracy theories.
This is "X-Files" territory if there ever was any...
UFOs (Score:5, Interesting)
What does the government gain from hiding the existence of aliens from people? Seems like they won't gain anything. Why would aliens even go along with it? People think of themselves as super important. Frankly, there is no reason to fool you, what service are you providing to such a powerful entity that is able to cover up and fake so much? To aliens, humans can serve as either entertainment or food. That's assuming we are tastier than an Aldebaranese sea horse, or funnier than an Arcturan clown.
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There was a theory the UFOnauts threatened gov'ts to keep quiet about them so that they could continue to do their experiments (or whatever the hell they are doing). If a gov't piped up about UFO's, then the UFOnauts would remove leaders from power.
Continuing this theory, the UFOnauts decided that official inconclusive reports don't change anything, so rather than try to hide everything, govt just releases vague "WTF" reports. It
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They would have interest in us, sure; but, it might be incidentally more likely to be interest on the order of us studying a new species of beetle discovered in the Amazon than the discovery of intelligent life on Titan.
Re: UFOs (Score:2)
You never know. The main thing their craft would demonstrate is that our understanding of physics is incomplete or wrong. There may be a scientific even physical reason to keep a small footprint here in terms of things altered...Like one of those time travel movies where they dont want to mess up the past.
Mr. Zorg on a budget also (Score:2)
That's pure speculation since we don't know what they are actually using. Further, you are assuming we are "important" to them. They may not wish to devote a lot of resources to our planet and/or it's expensive to be here. Thus, they may have the equivalent of a "budget".
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Re: UFOs (Score:3)
When humans were the technologically advanced aliens (e.g. Capt. Cook or Christopher Colombia), they (a) didn't have any way to talk to the local leaders without revealing themselves to the regular people and (b) had no interest in conducting experiments on the local people or remaining secret.
The idea that aliens are in conspiracy with world leaders to remain hidden is just a way to cling to a belief that doesn't fit the observed reality.
BTW, the gov't explanation is the simplest one that fits the facts. "
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Could be alien, could be illusion, could be something else. We don't know.
Absolutely.
...
But the list actually goes more like this:
1. Illusion
2. Something else
1000. Aliens.
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Well number three, Profit! is already on store shelves. So we're already ready.
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3. Profit!
was one of the redacted entries.
Re:UFOs (Score:4)
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Who knows. We might be special. We certainly are unique. We went from stone tools to deducing the building blocks of the universe (quarks and such) in about 5,300 years (if we agree that the Stone Age ended in 3,300 B.C at the start of the Bronze Age).
That seems pretty fast to me. That's only fifty-three 100-year-old people living back-to-back. Rocks to Lasers and Spaceships in 53 human lifetimes?
Imagine where we're gonna be after 53 more people live to 100 and die, back to back.
I highly doubt we'
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To get to Alpha Centauri in 5300 years (a single trip), you'd have to go more than three times as fast as any human-made object ever has.
Maybe you should have more doubts.
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That seems pretty fast to me.
To you? As a human?
What an impressive point of view you have.
Come on, man.
If you look at human history, you could optimize our technological progression down to a few hundred years.
I'm quite sure we didn't set any speed records.
Re:UFOs (Score:5, Insightful)
You have absolutely nothing to support that being special in any way. It's your belief, nothing more.
Re: UFOs (Score:3)
You think a community of humans could live on a spaceship for 53 generations without killing each other? How long before factions start getting no created and wars break out? Frankly even 53 years sounds too long let alone 5300. Has any human civilization even lasted that long? Who has the record? Egypt? They didnâ(TM)t have advanced weapons like today.
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I posted this in another thread recently, but it applies here too. The lifespan of countries, governments, and even religions isn't sufficient for them to survive a trip to the stars. So a huge issue is how you continue a mission after just one generation, let alone two or three. How do you ensure that a spaceship stays in touch and doesn't go rogue? How do you ensure they stay loyal to the government which sent them?
But on top of that, the institutions that sent them will evolve, grow, and die. If the Nazi
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How do you ensure that a spaceship stays in touch and doesn't go rogue? How do you ensure they stay loyal to the government which sent them?
I think something you are missing is that these go both ways. It seems just as likely that governments will decide that they dont give a fuck about that mission 40 years after starting it. This could come about from reasonable technological advance such as a breakthrough that doubles thrust to weight ratio and a new mission does the thing the original was supposed to do, as an afterthought.
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Imagine where we're gonna be after 53 more people live to 100 and die, back to back.
Well and rightly fucked because we didn't take AGW seriously?
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We spent about three million years in the stone age, with about 300,000 years of that including having anatomically modern humans around. And at least 40,000 years with behaviorally modern humans around.
It could be that most species with our capabilities n
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But if it is some non-human entity it would probably behave in a non-human way, which we aren't going to be able to reason out.
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History has shown that when humans come across a new species, we generally either try to eat it, try to kill it off for threatening our crops or livestock, or set out to destroy it's environment in order to strip it clean of natural resources or make new farmland. We better hope aliens are not like us, just in case some ever *do* manage to visit us.
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You're constraining your evidence to times when there was a need and race for more land (and the profits it could bring) to get ahead in the global contest of power.
I.e., this behavior is not "natural", it's an adaptation to the requirements of the time.
Civilization progressed, and now we're spending significant amounts of resources attempting to undo the stupid shit we did when we were kids, civilization wise.
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This one thousand times. Humans think they are so special that aliens would go through all the trouble to come all the way here to hide from us.
If you ever saw the ST:TNG episode of First Contact [wikipedia.org], it would be perfectly reasonable for an advanced civilization to observe without being observed. If you're looking for other intelligent societies, you've had to figure out where they stand in the grand scheme of things, what is their government structure, how does their society operate, what technology do they have, etc? The same questions apply if you're looking to invade and conquer (or even wipe out the indigenous life).
For all we know, if these are
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They're not trying to assess how far we are from being a threat to them.
This is of course all pretty nonsensical anyway.
The math is pretty easy. If there's really cheap and easy FTL travel, a
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Oh, horseshit. We humans are enamored of the idea that there are "others", some below and some above our level.
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You base your knowlege on a fucking episode of star trek? Imbecile. Naive imbecile.
If you ever saw the ST:TNG episode of First Contact, it would be perfectly reasonable for an advanced civilization to observe without being observed.
Take a moment to read what you wrote again. I weep for you.
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We humans do it all the time. We create blinds from which to observe animals without being seen, we set up hidden cameras along trails and other places for the same purpose.
Not sure why you snowflakes are so up in arms against common sense.
Re: UFOs (Score:2)
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What does the government gain from hiding the existence of aliens from people?
We can't get people to believe scientific facts that were proven centuries ago using simple methods. Flat earthers are a prime example.
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Follow the money. There is a huge globalist conspiracy according to many, globalists sell globes, globes are worth more then flat maps. So the globalists have convinced us the world is not flat to sell globes.
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That is a non-answer. That a lot of people do not believe in facts does not provide a gain for the government.
If anything, the opposite.
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What does the government gain from hiding the existence of aliens from people? Seems like they won't gain anything.
It helps them maintain control. Same reason they would not report about an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Hearing there is an intelligent species elsewhere in the universe and they can actually get to us physically certainly puts political power squabbles into a different realm of importance.
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While I am not saying the government is hiding aliens, I could definitely come up with reasons to hide alien contact. One such reason would be to keep the contact to a single nation's leadership. Perhaps government X makes contact, pretends to represent the entire human kind, maybe even gets some technology transfers from the aliens. You think it is inconceivable that such government would like to keep others from making contact too?
Now putting on my tin foil hat, have you seen the Chinese "space elevator"
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The reason does not only have to explain one government doing so; it also has to be plausible. It is simply not plausible that aliens are around to the extent that they can be contacted with ONE nation, and none others. That would require an immense amount of coincidences - or possibly the aliens being so weak they can be intimidated. Neither of that is feasible.
And even then, that would be a reason to TRY to hide alien contact, by SOME government agents. But for others, this would be a solid reason to NOT
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And exactly how in fuck are they going to prevent a superior civilization from contacting any damn one they want to?
Because the superior civilization is too stupid to look at news broadcasts?
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Autocrats gain the one thing they crave most, the illusion of control, so they can use and abuse you and your children. The anal retentive control freak rarely confesses error or ignorance, demanding to be accepted as right not matter how fucking wrong they know they are, arseholes.
Psychopaths and Narcissist infest government, the lie to cheat the system, they lie about their knowledge, they lie about their mistake, they always take credit for other people's work.
Why do those people in government lie BECA
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PS logically an ice cream cone shape is best for FTG development, it will go in the pointy direction, so various experiments can be conducted to figure how far, how fast and what actual direction all under what programmed conditions. Flying saucers should also work and cylinders are the most efficient for large scale. With no bits hanging off to make it more sci-fi looking, everything on the inside of the fields being generated.
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Stability mainly.
Here's the thing. It does not have to be aliens. There are a hundred other explanations, some cryptozoologic in nature, some scientific, some straight up scifi.
Like, let's assume for the sake of skepticism that aliens do not exist, have never existed, and parallel universes do not exist. That means whatever is causing these activities, must exist on the planet already.
The first most logical explanation is a limitation of lenses, glass and even the CCD/CMOS sensors. Pretty much anyone who ha
Re: UFOs (Score:2)
Watch X Files. You will get a new reason every season.
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Consider the extent to which humans study other life forms on earth. Scientists have a voracious appetite to study every kind of living thing that exists, no matter how big or small or "important." Why wouldn't alien scientists have the same thirst for knowledge about humans, however "unimportant" we might be?
This by no means implies that I believe the UFOs are aliens among us, but the argument that we are "uninteresting" doesn't really hold up.
Re: UFOs (Score:3)
Tell us more
Yes, but what about Paris? (Score:5, Funny)
What does Paris Hilton think about this UFO report? It is important to interview all the Hollywood types on account of their expertise in such matters. And William Shatner. Be sure and ask him.
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Paris Hilton was never on Star Trek.
You may be thinking of Tom Paris, B'Elanna Torres' husband on Voyager.
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I never said nor implied Paris Hilton was on Star Trek. She's a Hollywood celebrity, so she must be an expert on UFOs. Star Trek isn't required, but if you have something to do with making movies, your input on such matters must be solicited because you are so important.
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It's A Conspiracy! (Score:3)
The coverup continues!
My cousins brother's uncle was taken from his RV by extra terrestrials, right after he'd finished his last case of Schlitz, and rectally probed for days. But the government denies this fact! FACT!
Aliens are REAL! Wake up sheeple!
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You jest, but there is a very real link between those who believe conspiracy theories in general, and UFO "aliens" specifically. People who believe one conspiracy theory are likely to believe other conspiracy theories, on any subject. From https://www.apa.org/research/a... [apa.org]: "Another of your studies found that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are more likely to believe in others, even when those theories directly contradict each other."
Vast Universe: No way to travel. (Score:2)
True, but anyone traveling the Universe would need FAR better methods of travel than humans have.
I'm guessing: Any beings able to travel the universe would have good methods of communication and of travel. They wouldn't be annoying.
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If you can travel the cosmos then you don't need anything anyone else has, because the cosmos is vast and there is some of what you need somewhere that nobody is sitting on yet.
You might however WANT something someone else has. And either you want to learn about it in order to figure out how to make it for yourself, or you want to take it because it is rare and special, i.e. a creative work.
If you have FTL but don't have transporter technology, then you might well wind up being annoying when you acquire stu
Joe Scott credibly dispenses with many of these (Score:5, Interesting)
Joe Scott (on Youtube) has a video where he explains the behavior of many of these UFO's *perfectly* matches camera artifacts.
Recommended viewing for anyone rational.
I'm not saying UFO's don't occur. Just a huge class of the most mysterious ones look and behave identically to camera artifacts.
His channel is simply outstanding on many levels and worth watching for general science news.
I also recommend Anton Petrov (for basic physics and astronomy), Two Minute Papers (for AI research), and of course... Potholder45 (a retired geologist and general nonsense debunker with lots of sourcing).
For covid news, I recommend Dr John Campbell (evidence based, rational) and Medcram (Dr. Sehault- a bit wonky and in the weeds at times)
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Joe Scott: Link to the video. Mod parent UP! (Score:2)
"... a huge class of the most mysterious [UFOs] look and behave identically to camera artifacts."
Video mentioned: All Right. Let's Talk About The UFO Thing | Answers With Joe [youtube.com].
Anton Petrov (Youtube) also covered it n/t (Score:2)
What I saw (Score:2)
This youtube video is similar to what I saw [youtube.com] when I was photographing the lunar eclipse recently.
My wife and I were out on our deck and I had my camera set up taking photos of the lunar eclipse. I've photographed eagles hunting, helicopters, military and civilian jets as well as simply observing things flying in the sky like drones, zooming in on commercial aircraft, photographs of mars and looking at Jupiter's moons. She decided to hang out with me for the duration of the lunar eclipse while I photograph
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I can't speak much on your personal experience, but the video you linked does however not seem like convincing evidence of aliens or advanced technology.
The initial segment shows what are very likely a flock of birds, which appear similarly bright as the last segment's UFO. Note that the UFO is significantly larger and faster at the beginning of the segment than at the end, indicating that it was flying overhead at a very low altitude. Although there's no location, date, or time information included, I woul
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It may sound unthinkable, but how can you be sure the UFO was high up and fast, and not near and slow?
Before anyone asks, I hadn't takes any drugs or alcohol. I was completely sober as I had been planning to get some great shots of the lunar eclipse. Like I had taken photos of Mars and observed Venus, Jupiter and Saturn in the sky.
My deck overlooks a rather large body of water and I view about to about 20 kms at sea level. I've been able to zoom in on commercial jets flying at cruise altitude with astronomy binoculars. I'm on the side of a hill and I can see them fly well past the horizon at sea level,
Re:Joe Scott credibly dispenses with many of these (Score:5, Interesting)
Another thing to consider is the workload on the pilots. I'm reminded of the cases where police officers mistake a cell phone for a handgun. On the face of things this seems impossible; who would know what a handgun looks like better than a cop? This leads many to jump to the conclusions that the officers intentionally shot an unarmed person and are lying about it, but if you've studied psychology -- I'm not talking Freud here, I'm talking the much more scientific branches [wikipedia.org] of the discipline -- you realize that it's all too possible to make this mistake.
The super-HD experience of the world we enjoy is largely an extrapolation constructed by our brains. The part of our visual field acute enough to distinguish between a phone and a gun at a distance is surprisingly small, a little bigger than your thumbnail held at arms length. Under normal situations your eye flits around and fills in the details of the scene, but under stress it goes to what your brain considers most relevant to your survival -- say the center of mass you need to shoot at, or the instruments you need for targeting weapons -- and your brain fills in the blank spots in the picture with something that will trigger your flight or fight response.
One early morning I encountered an animal on a city sidewalk that was furry and shambling and about the size of a Shetland pony. I was so startled I leapt out into the street, and when I looked again I realized it was a filthy city raccoon, so sooty that its mask was invisible. The instant I recognized it for what it was, it *shrunk*, like I was looking through a zoom lens that was zooming out. Perception didn't evolve to give us *accurate* pictures of the world. Perceptions evolved to enhance our survival.
"Near Miss" Hypothesis (Score:2)
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That's why there are big loud fucking alarms that try to wake them up from whatever weird fantasy their brain has just concocted.
A huge amount of avionics exists just to keep humans from being humans.
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Fiction writers? (Score:2)
Now we consider fiction writers to speculate on that? Gimme a break ...
Mick West, who has been analyzing UAP events methodically, has a walk-through of the Congressional UAP report [youtube.com].
No aliens at all, and the reports never mentions anything remotely related to that concept ...
Here are a few interesting points:
- "Sightings tend to cluster around US training and testing grounds" i.e. collection bias.
- "UAP probably lack a single explanation". They group them as "airborne clutter", "Natural atmospheric phenomena
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I'll quote.
The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management. Additional rigorous analysis are necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data. We are conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated.
Note the distinct need to determine if the data is even valid
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Yes, it turns out optical artifacts move rather rapidly. They have very limited practical utility though.
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If you're a good writer, you've done way more research than the average person and are in a good position to explain to non technical people.
Not aliens. (Score:2)
My thoughts on this are two-fold:
First, for most alien species interstellar travel is probably not a trivial thing. They're going to be investing significant amounts in it even if it's common (think cargo ships), and they probably don't want to attract attention from unknown civilizations that might not be friendly. If they're doing first-contact at all, they're sending specialists in it and trying hard not to be spotted and given the tech level needed for FTL travel at all they're going to be doing a very
Re:Not aliens-Vichy Earth (Score:2)
And in the latter case things probably aren't going to go well for us.
Such a common belief there's a trope [tvtropes.org] dedicated to it.
So, why not time, not space? (Score:2)
On the one hand, we have the apparent impossibility of traversing interstellar space on a reasonable timescale, without an apparently large and not obvious advance in our understanding of physics and energy (the latter because of the energy requirements of doing things like powering a ship to near light-speed, or opening and maintaining a wormhole).
On the other hand, we have the apparent impossibility of time travel, forward or back, without an apparently large and not obvious advance in our understanding o
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Yes, of course - I think you're referring to relativistic time dilation - but if you imagine time travel something like science fiction pictures, visitors from the future don't have to be 200 light-years away in distance, don't have to face an "impossible to traverse in many lifetimes" gap.
Really just speculating, not wedded to this oddball thought.
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Re: So, why not time, not space? (Score:2)
Fair point. Not sure whether your focus is on the navigation aspect or the distance traversal aspect.
For the former, we can assume it's calculable, and a negligible problem compared to time travel.
For the latter, yes, I can see that perhaps one might need to traverse significant, though perhaps not interstellar-scale distances.
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we can assume it's calculable
That's a bold assumption.
The laws of physics basically prohibit you from knowing all the momentum you have in various directions while in freefall.
I.e., you could estimate it, but you're literally guaranteed to be wrong.
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There's no space travel without time travel
That's a nonsensical statement.
There's no anything without "time travel" by that metric.
There is no privileged clock. Your and my clocks move at different rates, right now, this very second. Which of us is the time traveler?
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but if one thinks of time travel vs. space travel (given a 4+dimension spacetime),
Noh!
It's spacetime, not space and time.
They do not function independently of each other.
Well, at least not yet.
That's basically the root of the incongruence between GR and QM, and nothing has come close to changing it.
As much as the QM guys hate it, it still appears that spacetime is real. It's a single fabric.
Beyond that- a thought experiment for you:
Is one impossibility more likely than the other? Hard to estimate that, but if one thinks of time travel vs. space travel (given a 4+dimension spacetime), perhaps time travelers are "nearer" to us in space, perhaps right on this planet, just offset in time.
If I travel 30 minutes into the future, i.e., my 4 vector is [+0, +0, +0, +30m], what happens?
Fuck it- I'll just answer. I die spectacularly in the v
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All species that would do this eventually figured out some attribute of physics that makes it more or less impossible to attempt to expand at a galactic scale in any way that could benefit their desires.
I.e., galactic expansion becomes a lot less interesting if you figure out there's no such thing as FTL.
Solar systems have a truly fucking immense amount of resources.
If you have to spend some obscene fraction of them to get your shit to another star system in a reasonable a
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So, in my mind it's perfectly reasonable that a space-faring alien species might want to check us out for their own mysterious reasons - although I'm more inclin
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Who's to say (Score:2)
Even if all they do is send out autonomous space probes (what we may call UFOs or objects like Oumuamu) I would
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I agree with your main point, that humans would indeed be interesting to alien scientists, just as human scientists are interested in every conceivable life form they can study on earth, no matter how "small" or "unimportant."
Still, if we are to believe the literally millions of UFO sightings, it's inconceivable that not a single alien ship has never been found, or even photographed up close. Even the best of alien technology would be flawed in some ways, just as all human technology is flawed. Some percent
By definition (Score:2)
So did I understand this correctly? The report is specifically on unidentified aerial phenomena? So presumably, if an aerial phenomena is reliably identified as an extraterrestrial spaceship from Venus, it is no longer unidentified and can be removed from the UAP report, right?
Area 51 Syndrome (Score:2)
I was thinking that part of Nevada that everyone knows about but the government says nothing of it. Creative people come up with all kinds of stories they are testing space alien spacecraft or have space aliens freeze-dried from the Roswell crash. With all sorts of stories like this, the government will never say anything to debunk them. "If they ain't saying anything, then they gotta be hiding something!" So people can make up whatever, who will prove them wrong. This same syndrome can be used for many oth
Aliens made public would be massive budget boost (Score:2)
I read the report within minutes of it coming out. (Score:3)
It came to the obvious and what should be uncontroversial conclusions that: (1) If you sort UAP/UFO events into explanatory categories, you end up with a few you can't categorize satisfactorily, and (2) we should probably have a more systematic way of collecting information on events we can't categorize yet.
This in itself is not particularly surprising or disappointing, Barring secret knowledge, like frozen alien corpsicles being stored in a xeno-mortuary at Area 51, you couldn't reasonably expect them to have anything enlightening to say on the alien question.
What's disappointing to me is that the paper did not have more data in it -- like how many UAP events are believed likely to be in the foreign drone category.
Another thing that the paper doesn't go into is exactly what kind of skill sets are needed to investigate this residue of inexplicable events. The 60 Minutes interviews are impressive because of the experience of the aviators being interviewed -- who else would be more expert in figuring out what happened than someone who probably has a thousand hours or more of flight time? But then it struck me: the event they are describing is something that happened just *once* to them in their long careers, and after they'd exhausted the familiar explanations they'd be as stuck as anyone would be. What you need in that situation is experts in fields like instrumentation, photogrammetry, and psychophysics.
The final disappointing thing is that it says nothing about the scope and nature of the government's existing efforts to categorize these phenomena.
Taking these omissions into account, it raises a slightly hair-raising possibility: that the proportion of these events that aren't even remotely explainable may be much higher than the government wants to admit, and this might well remain the case despite significant efforts by the government. Or, alternatively, that nobody has really made much effort to look into this stuff, which given the security threat foreign technology presents is hair-raising in a different way.
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It's conceivable they have a threshold after which they'd start caring about life on a given planet. Shooting EM radiation and rockets out of your planet would be a reasonable threshold. Because at that point it could conceivably start affecting them. They won't automatically know what our tech tree looks like, where we are in it, or how fast we are advancing. Even discounting scholarly interest in us (which I don't), keeping an eye on potential threats means keeping an eye on any species leaving their home
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It's conceivable they have a threshold after which they'd start caring about life on a given planet. Shooting EM radiation and rockets out of your planet would be a reasonable threshold.
You need to make up your mind.
If they're afraid of our rockets, then we can kill them with our rockets.
In which case, one thinks they'd probably be a bit more cautious.
Now, if they can't be killed with our rockets... well, then they're not really worried about our rockets, are they?
Your argument isn't self-consistent.
It's silly to think an alien that can cross interstellar distances gives one flying fuck about your ability to barely toss shit at the escape velocity of your star.
Because you know what
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Sure. But we invented radio only about 125-ish years ago, and spaceflight another 70-ish years after that. Give it another century... maybe they noticed us beginning to muck up our atmosphere with the industrial revolution... and that means those aliens' own homeworld could be no farther than 225 light years. Really, they'd have to be much closer to allow for travel time for them to get here. But even at 225 LY, if there were a high-tech civilization capable of interstellar travel, we'd also be able to
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OMG, are you saying they are here to reproduce?!
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