this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
26 points (96.4% liked)

Moving to: m/AskMbin!

1325 readers
1 users here now

### We are moving! **Join us in our new journey as we take a new direction towards the future for this community at mbin, find our new community here and read this post to know more about why we are moving. Thank you and we hope to see you there!**

founded 1 year ago
 

I bring this up because it seems to once again be gaining traction in the zeitgeist: I cannot comprehend why UFO hunters put so much time and effort into trying to force governments to "reveal the truth about extraterrestrial contact", but I also cannot fathom how they think aliens even have a chance of successfully contacting us in-person in the first place.

a) Why does anyone believe extraterrestrials would be able to track us down at all? Space is BIG.
b) If aliens knew we existed in the first place, please explain the math of how they'd get here. Even taking Star Trek logic into account and considering warp drive as a possibility, when considering relativity, Newton's third law and the mathematics of achieving the right conditions of either for deep space travel, warp drive still seems implausible.
c) In the mathematically improbable situation where intelligent life did manage to get here, why would they be tiptoeing around in the background for seemingly 80 or so years when they are clearly technologically superior to us and nothing humanity has available to itself could remotely stop them? It seems silly to imagine these incredible lifeforms getting here and then having an "oops we crash landed" event.
d) Lastly, governments successfully covering up such an event(s) for decades is a fairy tale. Governments playing around with flight and stealth technology for the last 100 years? Yeah that seems likely.

Do I think intelligent life exists? Absolutely. Is there a chance those beings have contacted or reached us? 99.9999999% no. Is it fun to speculate about the possibilities and portray those possibilities in stories? Of course. Should people be spending time and money forming organizations to "force the government to tell the truth", thereby wasting everyone else's time and resources and ultimately being drains on society? Absolutely not. I don't get it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, yeah, not disagreeing with the high-level point you're making, just talking about the timeframe.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I didn't think about pre-cold war. I knew there were sightings in WWI, but didn't realize there were official investigations,