I’m truly not sure what to say… This is a big deal I think.

    • Pigeon@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      Aye. If it’s a U.S. official this time… So?

      If we’ve learned anything lately, it’s that plenty of U.S. officials are corrupt or idiots or both.

      Shenanigans and/or misapprehensions VASTLY more likely than alien visitors, in this scenario as in all others.

      I believe aliens are very likely existant, maybe even common, given the huge numbers of potentially habitable exoplanets that have been identified. But who knows how often intelligent life, and with also the needed access to the necessary tools and resources for spaceflight, arises. And the distances involved are huge.

      So. Super advanced aliens develope space flight tech, send a ship or unmanned probe on a really really really unfathomably long journey, only for it to crash in a conveniently mostly unnoticed and unobserved fashion on a teeny tiny little planet full of cell phone cameras and radio receivers and surrounded by a cloud of satellites (none of which it hit)? Which would mean either it was aimed at us, and hit the target despite how exceedingly difficult it is to aim even across ‘short’ space distances like from the Earth to the moon, but something else went wrong at the end of that unfathomably huge and expensive engineering feat, or it hit us by coincidence, which given the sheer size of outer space vs Earth is again ludicrous. All without generating radio or other signals we can detect?

      And now the astounding new evidence presented so far is… hearsay, once again (but official hearsay! Pfft).

      I don’t buy it.

      If ever I am proven wrong, and the astoundingly unlikely turns out to be true, I will be beyond delighted and will gladly eat my hat.

      But yeah, no, much as I wish I could get confirmation of alien life in my lifetime, I expect the best I can hope for is microbes under the ice in Europa, or maaaaaaaybe a little fish thing there, if wildly lucky. Or maybe some microbes in the clouds of Venus. Even just someghing like that alone would mean a lot, though, honestly, because it would confirm life is likely rather than rare, and it’d be fascinating to see what did or didn’t differ from Earth life.

      Edit: and if there is a genuine vehicle, HOW could anyone even feasibly diagnose technology as “not of Earth/human origin”? Vs just… Another nation has secretly built a really damn cool and complicated spy plane? Unfamiliar tech never automatically means aliens.