It’s not aliens. It’ll probably never be aliens. So stop. Please just stop

I think there are two separate questions:<p>1) is there other life in the universe?<p>2) is other life visiting Earth?<p>Considering the number of stars in the universe and the potential number of planets around those stars, IMO it is extremely unlikely that our particular star &amp; planet are so special that we are the only life that exists and has ever existed.<p>If you believe that yes, we are that unique, then of course you cannot believe in anyone visiting Earth. If you do believe there is other life in the universe, it&#x27;s reasonable to believe they travel around, just like we have traveled around.<p>But also, because of the vastness of the universe, if there is other life, IMO it&#x27;s likely to be so far away that we will never cross paths. It&#x27;s like 2 grains of sand on a beach getting next to each other.

Genuine question, because I just realized I don&#x27;t know.<p>Is the obsession with aliens&#x2F;UFO&#x27;s a human thing, or just an American thing?<p>Like is the average person from France, Nigeria, or China just as excited about &quot;ooh what if they&#x27;re aliens?&quot; Are human beings in general so captivated by extraterrestrial contact that shooting down balloons immediately tantalizes them? Or does the rest of the world go, &quot;oh those loony Americans who&#x27;ve been watching too many movies.&quot;<p>If you said &quot;Area 51&quot; to people outside of North America, does it mean anything at all? And if so, is it just a joke?

This whole fuss around UFO and all other acronyms is a self perpetuating clusterfuck that feeds off the unknown and resulting to unhelpful labels. Including the headline of this article.<p>Stuff is flying in our airspace and we need to focus on identifying those objects. Of course the likelihood of alien technology is rather low. That’s not the point. The point is we need to stop labeling and jumping to conclusions so we can open up to actual discussions that may lead to proper scientific examination of evidence.

Eh. It’s extremely probably not aliens this time, though there is a very small chance it is. Given the trajectory of humanity, the alien scenario explaining an unexplained phenomena is not unreasonable, though almost always very unlikely. I find that a major portion of people fear the possibility so much that they’re unable to entertain the probability.

Isn&#x27;t the whole &quot;existence of aliens&quot; question functionally religious? If you believe in God as an origin of life, we are the only intelligent life in the universe. If you believe in abiogenesis, we aren&#x27;t. Obviously that&#x27;s a big generalization and there&#x27;s lots of room for fun sci-fi speculation, but that&#x27;s kind of the big turning point, no?<p>As for explaining UFO&#x27;s&#x2F;UAP&#x27;s as aliens, that seems to be the least likely explanation, but shutting down all talk of UFO&#x27;s&#x2F;UAP&#x27;s because of the association of the terms with aliens&#x2F;&quot;I want to believe&quot; people is silly. There&#x27;s plenty of room for conversation both valuable (what terrestrial technology and motives could be behind these?) and just fun and enjoyable (wild speculation about technology and motives).<p>I love scifi, this strikes me as a community filled with people who love scifi, I am excited about secrets and technology and a future filled with continued technological advancement. I&#x27;ll never stop enjoying this type of speculation.

True. But billions of people Want Something To Believe In. And &quot;it&#x27;s aliens!&quot; is (relatively speaking) a harmless belief.<p>So - every once in a while, try to care more about other humans than you do about being Right On The Internet.

Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding, as Avi Loeb says. We aren&#x27;t going to get definitive proof if we continue having a knee-jerk reaction to ridicule the subject.<p>If we don&#x27;t know what an object is, then we don&#x27;t know what it isn&#x27;t either. This much is obvious. The people jumping to the conclusion that it _must_ be mundane are making the same mistake as the people who claim the opposite. We simply need better evidence.

I get fatigued when people at bars or parties try to preach at me about how alien life is obviously behind the UFOs and if I don&#x27;t believe them I&#x27;m a &quot;sheep&quot;. Same goes for the wave of girls who think they&#x27;re witches because they bought Tarot cards off Amazon.<p>It&#x27;s depressing how uneducated, gullible people think they&#x27;re clever for having &quot;super secret&quot; info no one else has.

My primary school age UFO Alien abduction experience was just a hallucinogen and hypnotherapy, with crappy 1970&#x27;s BBC special effects, which the state are now trying to cover up, perhaps by coming out of the ECHR. Probably secret Autistic Psychopathy experimentation which is a life long experiment if my life of being exposed to extreme violence is anything to go by. Not really on imo, because you dont get a say in it!<p>Edit. Keep being censored by ycombinator. In response to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34791803" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34791803</a><p>Yeah... but have you noticed that Youtube is towing the Govt line and preventing anyone from seeing the scene where the military create a spoof train wreck to evacuate people from the area? Was Steven Spielberg trolling the govt all those years ago?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=close+encounters+of+the+third+kind+train+wreck+evacuation">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=close+encounter...</a>

Absolutely nothing of meaning in this article

Any entity capable of interstellar travel will possess the ability to harness energy in ways that are almost impossible for us to imagine.<p>If they transit space rapidly (on a human scale) they will be able to discharge energy in amounts so vast as to be incomprehensible.<p>If they transit space slowly (on a human scale) they will be able to store energy in amounts so vast as to be incomprehensible.<p>They&#x27;ll be able to pluck individual hydrogen atoms out of the vast emptiness of interstellar space and reconstitute them into any element whose existence is possible. They&#x27;ll be able to generate and arbitrarily manipulate gravity. They&#x27;ll be able to approach, disassemble, store, and reassemble entire stars.<p>They won&#x27;t be lazily floating in a car-sized object above the Canadian wilderness, bouncing around in the jet stream.

... ok, but it&#x27;s more fun to pretend it&#x27;s aliens.

I&#x27;d like it to be aliens, but knowing that about myself, I&#x27;m going to need rock-solid proof.

I know that it will never be aliens, but it&#x27;s really really fun to imagine it being aliens.

We already know that the object over the great lakes was a balloon with metal structural support, different in size and payload than the one we shot down over the Atlantic coast, but a similar object. There was a memo released about it reported on CNN.<p>What concerns me is that the countermeasures (missiles) we are using to destroy these things likely cost an order of magnitude more than the balloons cost to create. Certainly less than spy satellites that can do the same job. If we are going to defend our airspace from these surveillance platforms, we have to find more cost-effective means of taking them down than $1M missiles.

Any alien race with technology to reach Sol will also have superior technology to defend themselves. Only start worrying when the “balloon” shot down the F-18s and F35s that were scrambled to shoot it down.

So when it’s politically problematic for there to be public animosity against the CCP, especially after a confirmed spy balloon overflight gets folks all riled up, we get UFO narratives flowing into the media about 3 more additional “objects” making their ways into our airspace.<p>So now we are talking UFO and aliens invasions rather than the CCP. Amazing how misdirection works. The old mythologies still work well to avert our eyes and hearts.

My current theory (other than nefarious state actors) is that it’s somehow just industrial inflatable gas storage devices that got filled with lighter than air gas and took off.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.indiamart.com&#x2F;proddetail&#x2F;portable-biogas-balloon-10714158448.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.indiamart.com&#x2F;proddetail&#x2F;portable-biogas-balloon-1...</a>

Human tribes branched before recorded history and pursued different rates of technological advancement. Thus, invasions from more technologically advanced &quot;alien&quot; branches of life have been happening for all of recorded history.<p>The last one I can think of was a mere 225 years ago (Hawai&#x27;i).<p>It&#x27;s foolish to expect history to not repeat.

If it&#x27;s aliens, it&#x27;s either going to be very very obvious for years before they arrive or never going to be noticed until they want to be noticed. Positing a sweet spot between our competence and their incompetence is not reasonable. It does make for better stories.

The Roswell incident, has not helped the whole weather balloon thing. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roswell_incident" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roswell_incident</a>

It isn&#x27;t aliens. Life that has advanced as far as human life is a freak of nature, a number pulled out of an infinitely long string of random numbers that happened to be the correct seed at the perfect time.<p>It.Will.Never.Be.Aliens.

Talking to you, Tom DeLonge!

you know who wants us to think that?<p>ALIENS

And if it is ever aliens please for the love of humanity please do not shoot at them. They might return fire assuming they even see us as a threat.

Pretty poor article. In summary:<p>&quot;the universe is big -&gt; it&#x27;s unlikely aliens can visit -&gt; so it&#x27;s not aliens&quot;.<p>Thanks for that, that&#x27;s ground-breaking.

&gt;It’s not aliens. It’ll probably never be aliens. So stop. Please just stop<p>Yes, but what if it&#x27;s really aliens?<p>(cue Not Saying It&#x27;s Alien But It&#x27;s Alien meme)

&gt; It’s not aliens. It’ll probably never be aliens.<p>Borrowing from the world of Finance: past performance is not a guarantee of future results :-)

There are aliens in the universe and they want nothing to do with us. We&#x27;re coming off as desperate.

On the one hand, that seems reasonable<p>On the other, it’s exactly what a collaborator working with the aliens would say.

It&#x27;s not aliens because we wouldn&#x27;t have made a dent let alone &quot;shot it down&quot;

I think a lot of us desperately want it to be aliens because life is so dull.

I&#x27;m just seeing Three Body tv show and you do t want to have aliens.

SMBC had a comic about this. A scientist says &quot;we just don&#x27;t know&quot;. They mean &quot;There are several reasonable competing theories but we haven&#x27;t the data to know which is true.&quot;<p>The public hears &quot;It&#x27;s magic, aliens or Jesus&quot;

If it is ever aliens, we will <i>know</i> about it.

It’s not aliens, it’s a campaign to distract us from the clusterfuck literal train wreck in Ohio and the US bombing the nord pipeline.

Jesus is going to descend from the heavens. The Second Coming!<p>We&#x27;ll send him to the bottom of Hudson Bay.

Tell that to SETI.

I don&#x27;t even think there&#x27;s such thing as &quot;aliens&quot;, and if there is, it&#x27;s like the most primitive life on Earth (microbes and such). The idea of being visited by anthropomorphic yet foreign beings from another planets is fun, but I&#x27;m certain it will never happen.<p>&gt;inb4 the drake equation