It sort of makes sense if they occasionally. need to get some probes down on the surface to collect detailed information—that is after all exactly what we do on other planets—and they have a high level objective of avoiding interference, but realize that some humans will believe in UFOs without any evidence, and others will not even believe if their governments admit and provide compelling evidence, and thus they have some significant operational leeway.
Regardless the most compelling ‘evidence’ for UFOs is simply the high prior probability that aliens exist given the high prior probability of the copernican principle that sol is a typical sample combined with the vast number of stars like sol, and the apparent lateness of sol/earth compared to the timescale of biological evolution.
But it’s just that we don’t see any evidence of alien civilisation when we look at the stars, implying that any alien civ that does exist has a very, very strong preference for not being seen… which doesn’t square at all with the “oh well if humans see us a bit it’s no big deal” attitude, this is a civilisation who has hampered its own technological growth probably for millenia (required for travel between stars) in order not to be seen. The seas are so vast compared to the area that fighter jets can survey, and apparent capabilities of the alien ships so incredible, that it should be trivial for them to evade literally all observation. ( And the CMV temperature placed an upper bound as a function of time on the lowest temperature you can achieve in outer space anyway)
We don’t see any evidence for what I would call stellavore civilizations, but that was always a strange model of the future anyway. Regardless it just seems incorrect to have a stronger prior on the future of technological civilization than the copernican prior on the uniqueness of earth. In other words the prior that aliens never developed anywhere in the galaxy before us starts as something like (1−X)N, where X is the probability that a specific alien star developed civilization and is constrained by the copernican/anthropic considerations and can’t be a tiny probability, but N is a very large number in the billions.
We know the value of N more or less, and via copernican/anthropic arguments we have some confidence X can not be too small, which leads to more confidence that aliens exist than justified confidence that we know the shape of future tech civilizations. So from that we can rule out stellavores.
Stellavores are literally stupid anyway as they can’t utilize exotic reversible/quantum computing at scale—exploiting the latter requires moving out into the cold dark void. Any advanced tech civ will need to achieve near zero temp, and doing that at scale naturally results in being difficult to detect.
The way to actually make the universe colder and preserve all the energy currently going to waste in stars is to dump all the matter in your galaxy in two giant spinning black holes, and then extract energy via the Penrose process. There’s no way that a civilisation would just say “oops, we want to use reversible computing, I guess we now have no use for all those stars and giant gas clouds, let’s just leave them be as they are now...”
No offense, but I don’t think you understand the physics/engineering of far future computation even remotely close enough to have anything remotely justifying the insane confidence you’d need to override the prior (as nobody does). As just one example, advanced civs may be able to subtly alter the laws of physics via accumulated acausal trade over the seed params of new universe creation through a bubble nucleation process, and they would always favor new hidden physics which allows for expansion of local compute to continue exponential or hyper-exponential growth. Expanding into the stars is complete stagnation in comparison as it allows only weak polynomial growth.
In other words, you are assuming expansion rather than transcension, and have no possible reasons to justify an extremely high prior against transcension to overcome the update that we indeed to not see the expected evidence of expansion.
It sort of makes sense if they occasionally. need to get some probes down on the surface to collect detailed information—that is after all exactly what we do on other planets—and they have a high level objective of avoiding interference, but realize that some humans will believe in UFOs without any evidence, and others will not even believe if their governments admit and provide compelling evidence, and thus they have some significant operational leeway.
Regardless the most compelling ‘evidence’ for UFOs is simply the high prior probability that aliens exist given the high prior probability of the copernican principle that sol is a typical sample combined with the vast number of stars like sol, and the apparent lateness of sol/earth compared to the timescale of biological evolution.
But it’s just that we don’t see any evidence of alien civilisation when we look at the stars, implying that any alien civ that does exist has a very, very strong preference for not being seen… which doesn’t square at all with the “oh well if humans see us a bit it’s no big deal” attitude, this is a civilisation who has hampered its own technological growth probably for millenia (required for travel between stars) in order not to be seen. The seas are so vast compared to the area that fighter jets can survey, and apparent capabilities of the alien ships so incredible, that it should be trivial for them to evade literally all observation. ( And the CMV temperature placed an upper bound as a function of time on the lowest temperature you can achieve in outer space anyway)
We don’t see any evidence for what I would call stellavore civilizations, but that was always a strange model of the future anyway. Regardless it just seems incorrect to have a stronger prior on the future of technological civilization than the copernican prior on the uniqueness of earth. In other words the prior that aliens never developed anywhere in the galaxy before us starts as something like (1−X)N, where X is the probability that a specific alien star developed civilization and is constrained by the copernican/anthropic considerations and can’t be a tiny probability, but N is a very large number in the billions.
We know the value of N more or less, and via copernican/anthropic arguments we have some confidence X can not be too small, which leads to more confidence that aliens exist than justified confidence that we know the shape of future tech civilizations. So from that we can rule out stellavores.
Stellavores are literally stupid anyway as they can’t utilize exotic reversible/quantum computing at scale—exploiting the latter requires moving out into the cold dark void. Any advanced tech civ will need to achieve near zero temp, and doing that at scale naturally results in being difficult to detect.
The way to actually make the universe colder and preserve all the energy currently going to waste in stars is to dump all the matter in your galaxy in two giant spinning black holes, and then extract energy via the Penrose process. There’s no way that a civilisation would just say “oops, we want to use reversible computing, I guess we now have no use for all those stars and giant gas clouds, let’s just leave them be as they are now...”
No offense, but I don’t think you understand the physics/engineering of far future computation even remotely close enough to have anything remotely justifying the insane confidence you’d need to override the prior (as nobody does). As just one example, advanced civs may be able to subtly alter the laws of physics via accumulated acausal trade over the seed params of new universe creation through a bubble nucleation process, and they would always favor new hidden physics which allows for expansion of local compute to continue exponential or hyper-exponential growth. Expanding into the stars is complete stagnation in comparison as it allows only weak polynomial growth.
In other words, you are assuming expansion rather than transcension, and have no possible reasons to justify an extremely high prior against transcension to overcome the update that we indeed to not see the expected evidence of expansion.