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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

> The fact that people think we could easily shoot down alien craft is slightly concerning.

What’s wrong with that? If there were Martians, they would not have problem destroying our craft we sent on Mars so far.

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Aliens originating in the solar system is pretty unlikely at this point, so we can infer that any advanced alien activity will come from outside the solar system. Aliens that can visit from other solar systems are virtually guaranteed to have a big technology advantage on us, given that we can scarcely even imagine traveling to other solar systems ourselves.

You are correct but there are other possibilities like aliens from other dimensions. That sounds like it would also require high technological ingenuity, but not necessarily. For example, maybe going from their dimension to our dimension is trivial compared to us trying go to their dimension. Perhaps when they trip on something like the dimensional equivalent of DMT they show up on our planet?

Or maybe it’s a simulation and aliens are simply users of the program.

Or it’s just more psychological warfare.

I have no idea what is going on and these are just random ideas, my point is simply that we have been seeing similar stuff for a long while now. We say it’s not us or china. If it’s not us or china, I don’t see it being another countries. If it’s private companies, what are they doing and why? Flying without transponders is highly illegal and unethical so maybe some sort of massive criminal organization that is highly technical and super secretive but that seems improbable. It’s not extraterrestrials exceeding the speed of light or extraterrestrials from the solar system because those are also improbable. So WTF is it then?

I think people make the assumption that aliens will be super advanced and super advanced means invincible. This comes from assuming that they will be advanced everywhere and that interstellar travel means magical tech. It ignores that there are physical limits to realistic travel or may be limits to magic ones. Finally, they can have blindspots like using cheap drones and assuming they can escape their attackers.

I was thinking of scenario where sailboat drone washes up on North Sentinel Island. Our civilization is much more advanced, they can't touch our airplanes or spacecraft. The drone is advanced, with solar panels, computers, and plastic, but is cheap and disposable. The islanders could row out in canoes and defeat it with stones and sticks.

Think how simple minded that would make them seem though: "Ugg ugg me see me no understand me attack"

As much as I want ETs to exist, I really hope we wouldn't shoot them down if they were just observing.

If they’re so smart, they better figure out the complex geopolitical realities we have to deal with!

I imagine they’re resolve those realities the same way we do: “Start negotiating or prepare to lose thousands/millions”

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