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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

Presuming there was actually some aliens/UFOs to know about in the first place (I'm pretty confident there aren't any actual alien UFOs, but that doesn't mean there aren't secret programs dedicated to UFOs), it is likely that most of congress wouldn't know about it and only a few congressmen on the right committees would know. Not every member of congress is informed of all the secrets the American government has. Particularly, those 17 on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence know a lot more than the rest. And even they may be kept in the dark about some things.

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I have always felt that given how far away they must be, and the challenge involved in crossing that space, the most ridiculous belief is that some extra-terrestrial intelligent life is simultaneously able to build ships that get here (meaning they're far more technologically advanced than us) and yet not able to hide them from us. Or that they get here and have a breakdown right over New Mexico. Or their drone couldn't just self-destruct before we got it. Etc.

While the odds are almost 100% that there's intelligent life somewhere, the idea that it got here and then made a mistake seems strange to me.

And I've always thought the military didn't investigate these UFOs because they weren't unidentified to them. They're just FOs when you're the one who built them.

I really doubt we've been visited by aliens but one could have stolen a ship and took a ride here not knowing how to fully operate it. It's entirely possible their government is suppressing the existence of aliens and we've been visited by their whistleblowers/journalists.

I really hope that is the case because it’s a great story.

I also can’t imagine a species that has interstellar travel, but manually operated ships. I think we are not that far from humans not operating any forms of transportation anymore, and we are at best thousands of years from having the technology to visit anywhere life may exist.

Would you self destruct your broken down car so that ants couldn't get a hold of the technology? Would you care if the ants you are studying notice you?

I imagine it would be kind of similar to how we feel about those remote tribes in Brazil or India, or places like that where governments intentionally and prohibit contact, yes. I mean I can’t be sure of that by any means, but I think that if we discovered life on another planet, we would probably leave it alone, unless, of course, it had something we need. And it’s hard to imagine one planet having any resources that are important to somebody who already has faster than light travel.

> While the odds are almost 100% that there's intelligent life somewhere

I disagree, it's pretty easy to make "Drake equations" go to zero, particularly if you limit the scope to just the Milky Way galaxy (only 10^11 stars.) The Rare Earth Hypothesis is consistent with all of our empirical observations of the universe thus-far.

I don’t think it’s easy to make the Drake equation go to zero, though it is within the relatively limited section of the universe from which of visitor could get here.

Two or three independent "one in a million" chances will push the Drake equation to near zero in the milky way. Such chances could be things like "chance of multicellular life developing from unicellular" (took billions of years on earth, maybe it was never likely to happen in the first place) or "chance for multicellular life to invent radios" (overwhelming majority of multicellular life on earth was never going to invent radios. Evolution isn't directed to create tool-inventing apes.)

Or it could be a few dozen 50/50 chances that need to be cleared, or some mix of the two. Drake equations only spit out "aliens likely" if you assume earth-like planets will inevitably create human-like life but that's a hell of an assumption. And then we look into the night sky and see/hear nothing from the aliens that supposedly must be up there and call it a paradox... well it's not a paradox if the Rare Earth hypothesis is true. If the empirical evidence is saying one thing and the speculative math is saying another thing, it's probably the speculative math that's wrong.

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