What is your "red line" that would make you unambiguously and sincerely say with full belief, "Aliens are real and are or have been on Earth"?

[John J.]

Just can't wrap my head around the idea of bringing up a tweet post by that [moderator edit for politeness] individual L Elizondo just to make an as much preposterous question to me... Amazing.

Hope you get to read this @Rick Robson ...
I had recently been reading Ann K.'s thread about Mr Elizondo's latest apparent claim of some "reveal" ("...early to mid 2024").
So that was in my mind when I read

you'll have to wait no longer than half an year or less for their conclusions to be made public

...and the similarity of timelines struck me.
My question

is that a tie-in with Mr Elizondo's timeline?

was a genuine one, not rhetorical. In fairness I guess I'd be dischuffed if someone asked me "Do you spend your weekends in the garage making models with Billy Meier?" or something similar; I wasn't trying to imply that you and Lue regularly tour the New Mexico wilderness looking for UFO debris in matching sweatshirts.
Your response was very clear that your "half a year or less" is unequivocally not connected to Lue's "early to mid 2024"!

Maybe you could expand on the "half a year or less" thing though?
I hope that you return to the forum soon as.

In the interim, I've made you an early Happy New Year card.

 

[Rick Robson]

Maybe you could expand on the "half a year or less" thing though?
I hope that you return to the forum soon as.

In the interim, I've made you an early Happy New Year card.

Thank you for you wishes @John J., much appreciated. And sorry for refusing to go into further details about that statement, but as I said I find no sense whatsoever in continuing that discussion. And due to so much interesting stuff these days to spend our times on, I've realised I'm getting increasingly obsessed with the effective use of it.

BTW, as of late I've been interested in acknowledging what's the current developments being done with propulsion systems and what are the alternative studies being carried out by credible scientists on this subject. I'm not yet fully aware of its current breakthroughs to start a thread about it, but would be glad if someone feels comfortable to start it.

Happy New Year to you too!

 

[Scaramanga]

The thing is it would take a remarkable short time span (a few 10s of million years, compared to the universes 13.4billion) to visit nearly all stars in our galaxy, travelling at ~10% speed of light.

Meh.....no, I think the whole Von Neuman self replicating robots thing is pure nonsense. As the home civilization advances, they'd have the equivalent of Model T Fords out there replicating. The distances involved would make it impossible to update them in any meaningful timescale. You wouldn't have a single civilization spreading out. At best you'd have a pile of outdated junk turning the galaxy into yet more outdated junk. In fact I think for that very reason Von Neuman probes would likely be outlawed.

 

[JMartJr]

In fact I think for that very reason Von Neuman probes would likely be outlawed.

Assuming intelligent life is reasonably common (I don't make that assumption, I vote "insufficient data," but it is at least not a totally unreasonable guess) then a given society being "likely" to outlaw them leaves the potential for a number of societies NOT outlawing them... disturbing notion, depending on how much you trust an unknown society to safeguard against the end-state of a galaxy made of probes that have eaten everything else...

(If that's what Dark Matter turns out to be, remember you saw it baselessly speculated here first -- unless somebody else already speculated about it when I was not looking...)

 

[MapperGuy]

Meh.....no, I think the whole Von Neuman self replicating robots thing is pure nonsense. As the home civilization advances, they'd have the equivalent of Model T Fords out there replicating. The distances involved would make it impossible to update them in any meaningful timescale. You wouldn't have a single civilization spreading out. At best you'd have a pile of outdated junk turning the galaxy into yet more outdated junk. In fact I think for that very reason Von Neuman probes would likely be outlawed.

I think the greatest argument against Von Neuman probes is the time factor. People explore to see "what is on the other side of the hill". But those sending them out would never get to see that "other side of the hill". Their descendants million of years later might, but not the senders. This lack of feedback in anything like a reasonable time is the best argument against spending the resources to send them out. Build a generation ship and let your descendants go see for themselves that "other side of the hill".

 

[deported_from_magonia]

Yes, you are claiming that in your next sentence. You want the cases with indufficient data to be kept on the table.

And this is a claim ("there's a trove of information") that, in your next sentence, you deny making.

The assumptions are founded.

Your claim that these old UFO cases have some kind of value ("trove") is not founded.
And, when asked, you've refused founding it

Sorry if this is bad form to jump in, but you are incorrect. That data should absolutely be on the table. Insufficient-- I'm going to take the liberty of reading that as 'incomplete'-- data is NOT useless data: Say a 'complete' case has a dataset of, idk, 10 parameters. If you are looking at a set of 100 cases, but they are all incomplete, with data on b/t 1 and 9 parameters....you can still do basically everything with that dataset that you could with complete info.

Old cases have value. Like, really? Why would you toss information on a thing where the biggest topic is evidence? You can approach it from unconventiional direcdtions, such as not deciding what it is beforehand. I just joined this place, I am quite confident in my conclusion that there is signal in the noise, and it's not prosaic. It's one of a finite number of possible things. Play with the data, form hypothesis, test them. Repeat. That's what people mean when they keep saying ther eis tons of evidence. Evidence is NOT proof, but it seems to be treated as such here.

 

[Ann K]

Say a 'complete' case has a dataset of, idk, 10 parameters. If you are looking at a set of 100 cases, but they are all incomplete, with data on b/t 1 and 9 parameters....you can still do basically everything with that dataset that you could with complete info.

But we are never "looking at a SET of 100 cases". We are looking at 100 different cases with 100 different appearances and 100 different explanations. There is no single phenomenon to be studied, and indeed the notoriously wide variation in appearance and behavior likely precludes classing them all together. Each individual sighting or photograph needs enough of its own data to be examined in detail, and for a good many of them that is not the case. If we want to classify them into types, that has to be done AFTER they've been analyzed, at which point we can say runaway balloon / aircraft / meteorological phenomenon ...or "unknown because we don't have enough information".

 

[Gary C]

I am quite confident in my conclusion that there is signal in the noise, and it's not prosaic. It's one of a finite number of possible things.

The more time I spend looking at the data and talking to people who cite the volume of evidence as a sort of proof in itself, the more I hear this particular signal,

social contagion​

Updated on 04/19/2018
the spread of behaviors, attitudes, and affect through crowds and other types of social aggregates from one member to another.

Source: https://dictionary.apa.org/social-contagion

 

[Mendel]

Sorry if this is bad form to jump in, but you are incorrect. That data should absolutely be on the table. Insufficient-- I'm going to take the liberty of reading that as 'incomplete'-- data is NOT useless data: Say a 'complete' case has a dataset of, idk, 10 parameters. If you are looking at a set of 100 cases, but they are all incomplete, with data on b/t 1 and 9 parameters....you can still do basically everything with that dataset that you could with complete info.

Hypothetical counterpoint: You have Harvard admission data, and you want to do a study on student obesity. Since the data does not contain the students's heights or weights, it is insufficient, and absolutely useless for your purpose. You can not do with that dataset what you could do with data that suffices for the task.

This thread has numerous examples of what people would consider sufficient evidence for alien visitors. There's no way for the existing "evidence" to become that.

"incomplete" suggests that the information could be completed, and then do the job.
"insufficient" means the data is what it is, and can't do the job.
Historical UFO data is typically insufficient.

Old cases have value. Like, really? Why would you toss information on a thing where the biggest topic is evidence?

Because there is no way to separate information from misinformation.
If you have 100 "witnesses" to a murder, 50 say the killer was white, 30 say the killer was black, 10 say the killer was hispanic, and the remaining 10 say other things; but you know that at most 1 person actually saw the killer, but you have no way of telling who, if any: how is that data "evidence" for anything?

You can approach it from unconventional directions, such as not deciding what it is beforehand.

I'd say that is the conventional direction. Just not in UFOlogy—UFO "researchers" generally decide it's something unusual before it is proven to be.

I just joined this place, I am quite confident in my conclusion that there is signal in the noise, and it's not prosaic.

Why are you confident of that, when no "signal" has ever been identified? Where does your confidence come from?

It's one of a finite number of possible things. Play with the data, form hypothesis, test them. Repeat. That's what people mean when they keep saying there is tons of evidence. Evidence is NOT proof, but it seems to be treated as such here.

You say "evidence is not proof", but where's your evidence of that?

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/evidence : "that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evidence : "something that furnishes proof"

When you have some observation, but you have no idea what caused or didn't cause it, it's at best potential evidence. If there's no way to tell whether a UFO (flying saucer) caused it, it's not evidence of a UFO.

If you find a bloody knife, but can't determine if anyone was killed with it, it's not evidence of a homicide.

Observations or reports are only evidence if they prove something. If they don't, they're not.