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Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

UFOs exist. Alien spaceships do not.

Occam's Razor.

Also, having the technology to fly light years through interstellar space, means that you should surely be able to construct a craft that doesn't crash on Earth (Roswell), or waste your time flying for years to dip into the atmosphere, do a little light show and fly off, or harassing a farmer in the middle of nowhere vs landing in Central Park.

The gimbal video and others have all be plausibly explained.

Everyone on planet Earth now carries the best photographic equipment in human history in their pockets. Where are 20MP pictures of flying saucers? Similarly Bigfoot (Bigfeet?), Yetis, the Loch Ness monster, and so on.

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Occam's Razor is a heuristic. It does not determine what is real or not. According to your usage of the Occam's Razor, relativity and quantum mechanics would be invalid because classic mechanics is much simpler. That's not how science works.

No, because classic mechanics isn't an "explanation" for observed reality.

God this is such an awful thread.

UFO stuff seems mostly driven by the west, wouldn't be surprised if it was just a psy-ops. To get some more defense funding for the space force.

If you can generate almost infinite energy to cross deep space to probe some humans I'm not sure I would take such an alien race serious. It would be more like how global factions on earth fight over resources, so I subscribe more to the Dark forest view of things. If they reckon crossing deep space is worth it, they will come over here to invade not to probe and troll farmers.

> UFO stuff seems mostly driven by the west

This is what smells the most, to me. Why are almost all the sightings we hear about in the US? You'd expect them to be evenly distributed.

Probably because you speak English and don’t engage in communities that aren’t in English.

I'm Greek and live in Greece, I don't know of anyone here having seen an alien spaceship or anything that looks like one.

I have a feeling this has something to do with scale.

I'm sure there are plenty of Greek folks who think they've seen an alien.

There may be other culturally appropriate explanations. Strange lights in the sky were reported as dragons in Northern England a 1000 years ago, for example.

If you can generate almost infinite energy, what would you gain by invading earth vs, say, consuming resources from an uninhabited planet? Earth makes up a small amount of the mass in our solar system.

But the inverse is also just as likely (fantastical): if you can generate almost infinite amounts of energy, what else is there to do other than troll rando life forms (farmers)?

Both cases do have one thing in common: humans sure do think highly of themselves and the one, small planet they inhabit.

Good point could also ask why invade earth when you have a lot of easily minable resources in the asteroid belt. Given they can already generate almost infinite energy I'm pretty sure they will have mastered space resource extraction.

Why even come to this solar system when the amount of minable resources that isn't our solar system is so much greater?

That also a thing, why even take the effort to go. if I'm not mistaken there's a asteroid in the belt that if it could be mined could make every person on earth as rich/poor as Bezos.

> what else is there to do other than troll rando life forms (farmers)?

I would love it if we really lived in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy universe and "teasers" were really a thing.

> infinite energy, what would you gain

Also "they're coming for our water!" despite more existing in the asteroids and moons outside of our, and the Sun's gravity well. There's literally very few reasons to come to Earth other than to say "hi!".

Having seen a flying orb along with a complete stranger who also saw it, there is no time to just pull out my phone and snap a picture. Additionally, seeing something that is seemingly unreal is spell binding.

And let’s be real, if there was a high quality photo, you would just claim it was photoshopped. You need to see it to believe it, and that’s fair.

Not to deny your orbs (though, orbs are pretty "common" - like ball lightning)... but I saw 3 flying orbs in the 90s that I thought were ufos (or, one ufo) - like they were kind of linked, but moving independently. Weird looking. I woke my parents to come and verify I wasn't crazy. I called the telephone operator (lol, trust me, they were a thing once) to get the number for the observatory and the operator said "You saw them too? Let me know if you find out what it is!". The observatory was closed and I never chased it up.

I started thinking about that again recently and went to see if others had the same experience. Ended up finding video footage of exactly what I saw, and... US spy equipment. I have the program name written down somewhere - it wasn't Black Triangle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_triangle_(UFO)) - but it was something similar. I was so disappointed.

I saw 3 flying orbs in the 90s that I thought were ufos (or, one ufo)

This terminology is all screwed up. You did see "unidentified flying objects". But you thought, and were ultimately hoping, they were "identified flying objects": identified as extraterrestrial in origin.

Which is to say that there's a lot of confusion over when a "ufo" implies "alien".

Occam's Razor postulates that the simple solution is often the right one. That does not mean it's always so. For the longest time Occam's Razor would have favored a flat earth, before we knew better.

Alien intelligence would also be alien enough if it wasn't interstellar. Interplanetary, inter-dimensional or subterranean would be alien by my standard, too.

The Videos might have been plausibly explained, but i would argue that the pentagon has certainly more footage and sensor data to base their statement on.

And please do try to take photos of planes in the night sky with your smartphone camera. The image quality is not great.

Medieval people did not think the Earth was flat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

Medieval people certainly believed that. The linked wikipedia page does not say otherwise. It states that "European scholars and educated people during the Middle Ages believed the Earth to be flat". Most people in Medieval times were not scholars or educated. Furthermore I haven't even said anything about Medieval times.

There are other examples like rocks falling from the sky or the earth- or solar-centric cosmos, if you prefer.

That Wikipedia page can be edited by any visitor, therefore it is not a reliable authority on the posted information. Take a look at the revision history page for your link, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Myth_of_the_flat_.... Half of the edits appear not to be attributed to people but to unnamed ip addresses.

i.e. Don't believe everything you read.

To illustrate this point, go to different Wikipedia page that shows the opposite of what you wrote, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth and look at the Early Middle Ages of Europe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#Europe:_Early_Middl....

So what would you consider a reliable source? How much time are you willing to put into evaluating your source?

Pretty much anything on the internet is written by random people, all of whom could be great authorities on the subject or complete crackpots.

A couple more sources on the Myth of the Flat Earth, written by random people on the internet and found by a google search:

[0] : https://www.discovery.org/v/the-flat-earth-myth/

[1] : https://jameshannam.com/flatearth.htm

[2] : https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003172170708800...

[3] : https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2012/12/20/why-did-so-many-peop...

"Occam's Razor postulates that the simple solution is often the right one. That does not mean it's always so. For the longest time Occam's Razor would have favored a flat earth, before we knew better."

Actually this is problem with the simplifying Occam's Razor. It is not about simple solution, it is about fewer assumptions. Actually with each assumption you are limiting the domain of the question.

Actually before we observed more (like before we knew better), earth being flat is the correct solution vs earth being round.

There is nothing "simple" about the concept of flat earth. It's one set of exceptions on top of another set of exceptions, ad infinitum.

To use the pre-enlightenment list of exceptions: It's flat, but not infinite. It's a disc. Ringed by mountains. Held up by giant elephants. On the back of a turtle. On the back of another turtle.

The modern "rationale" for flat earth is just as complex (not simple) an explanation of exceptions upon exceptions. The Copernican, Galileo-an and Newtonian attempts to explain things are much closer to "simple", despite being incomplete, because they are experimentally gathered and predictive and not just mentally created from whole cloth.

Anytime I try to take a good nighttime photo of something small far away, it looks awful & is quite difficult to make out - even on my iPhone XR.

I really don't buy the argument that our advanced phone cameras are capable of capturing conclusive images of anything unexplainable, since they can barely capture good images of things that are explainable.

Maybe not the silver flying saucers claimed to have been seen hovering over barns in the mid-west, but I recommend reading Extraterrestrial for a fascinating argument for Oumuamua's likelihood in being an extraterrestrial object.

Reference:

Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth - by Avi Loeb

> Harvard’s top astronomer lays out his controversial theory that our solar system was recently visited by advanced alien technology from a distant star.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48930288-extraterrestria...

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