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Comment by casperc | Hacker News Reader

It’s weird, given the premise of seeing something alien, that you would assume properties of their propulsion or which emmissions they are making.

Sure, if the thing is some new earth tech or natural phenomena there are plenty of assumptions you can make. But in the face of something else?

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The point is that you can make any number of stories about aliens trying to explain the phenomenon, and there would be some that would be way more believable then some object breaking pretty well established known physical laws with the only explanation that "aliens have ADVANCED SCIENCE"

For example, Aliens living among us for a while, undetected, and having the ability to place false memories in peoples heads because they mapped out how human brain works down to the neuron level (thanks to their massive compute clusters) is way more believable.

Why does it have to be off world tech? Take a smartphone back enough years and people are going to be similarly blown away.

Also you act like the science and the laws are settled but we all know science doesn't work like that. New discoveries happen all the time its that for the laws of physics those changes don't happen often.

What laws of physics revelations will the next Newton or Einstein offer us?

For a smartphone to be fundamentally unexplainable by relevant experts one would have to go back more than 100-200 years, I think. The first trans Atlantic radio transmission was in 1902, for example. Though I guess even the experts of the day might struggle to believe that the device is practically realizable, since it probably would defy many a conception of what is doable (if not theorically possible). There are some things now that seem impossible, which in 200 years might be commonplace. Idk, maybe residential grade or even portable nuclear power.

> There are some things now that seem impossible, which in 200 years might be commonplace.

Like flying very fast without producing a shockwave and only leaking some residual light and heat?

Man how awesome would a home reactor be.

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