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Comment by seventytwo | Hacker News Reader

An alien visitation would be THE single most significant event to ever happen to humanity. The idea that it would be able to be kept secret is ridiculous.

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Moreover, ridiculous is that aliens would be content with staying in the closet and at risk of be uncovered, like a lover in cheating wife's closet.

Whatever the USG wishes, the first contact will be on the arriving party's terms. This is unless they made some very strong agreement with local governments to keep things secret. Which would be a a sign of a very bad thing for us.

My theory is they are real but they’re not aliens. They are another hominid species who live here on Earth. My explanation is actually pretty good if you condition on the assumption that they are real - if you do that, ET is very unlikely comparatively. I can kind of explain everything you see in various ways, some hard to vary, some not.

No, it's another fish like species and they came from the inside of the moon. My explanation is actually pretty good if you condition on the assumption that they are real - if you do that, ET is very unlikely comparatively. I can kind of explain everything you see in various ways, some hard to vary, some not.

It is impossible that another hominid species will have their own tech. They sure have no factories. So it would be a non-issue to announce if they are at stone age of development, unless these hominids are obligatory Homo Sapiens social parasites.

The hypothesis is this all happened 10-20k years ago, and they virtualized their society into VR. They somehow managed to eliminate enough of the evidence of their development phase on the surface to the point where we have no conclusive evidence. There is glancing evidence that there were advanced civilizations quite a bit earlier than we thought.

Where's their datacenters and generation there? If they're in space, they've probably seeding these probes themselves for a long time. If they're on Earth, where would they hide these? Needless to say, any human government will go a great length to do whatever pleases them for peanuts of the knowledge that they have. The issue here is being that humans are catching up and eventually it will all be revealed.

Figure out what physics says about the physical footprint of say 10 million small hominids who want to remain alive but live life entirely in virtual reality pods. I think you’ll conclude that from first principles you can say very well hidden, have a sustained existence as long as you fix the population, if you solve the engineering problems of situating your hardware in a void in the ground. Particularly if you know a priori you only need to do it for a few millennia.

I'm not sure why they would rule over a small void in the ground instead of ruling over the galaxy.

Light speed can’t be overcome and virtual reality can be made so you optimize for minimizing latency between minds and expanding into space strictly for scientific purposes or safety reasons. (Ie, to probe it for knowledge and danger.)

Virtual people don't die of old age so they can go from star to star in "just" thousand years and would now span a great chunk of spiral arm. Also, since they can be copied over (can they?) they will never have to split up, they will just fork() the whole colony and say themselves goodbye.

That doesn’t make any sense to me. I would never risk anything someone told me would move my consciousness into another machine since I would have no way to know a priori if the person on the other side would still be me. Ergo I think civilizations probably just take on the precautionary principle and maintain their minimal biological form to ensure a fully linked chain of confidence they will preserve their own consciousness, but that’s the threshold and they virtualize everything else like their incoming qualia.

Even if you do not trust their authenticity, you can still fork them to shoot into Proxima.

Like reptilians or hollow Earth or what?

Small humanoid sibling species living in VR pods adapted physically initially for subterranean life but eventually artifically selected for sensory override VR pods. (Hence the large eyes, grey skin, no reproductive organs, absorbitve digestion, and so on.)

Interesting hypothesis. Do you have an essay where these ideas are fully fleshed out?

No, I made a GPT that does, if you search for Intraterrestrial Hypothesis. I’m gonna write an essay though.

There is 1 legitimate reason to keep it a secret. If the technology will guarantee our destruction. For example, if for some reason the technology makes it possible for anyone to create a nuclear bomb level device from their living room.

Why do people assume we'll get their technology? If there is an alien race capable of visiting us, it is them who will set the terms. I guess it's always human nature to overestimate ourselves; the aliens calling the shots creates a strong mental dissonance.

There's three hypotheses I've heard from UFO types. One is that UFOs are sort of like disposable probes, so them crashing isn't evidence of their incompetence. The second is that alien civilizations are giving us this technology as a gift for our advancement, and they otherwise don't interfere but are there to stop nuclear war. The third is that we are already actually integrated into a galactic civilization, we have a secret base on Mars where we collaborate with aliens, etc.

Not sure that would fly with the likes of SH, Gaddafi, Turkmenbasy, Mugabe, the Kims or all those african tin pot dictators.

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