Do you believe aliens are visiting Earth?

I doubt it, for a start there's about 1.5 trillion days such a visit or occupation could have fallen on so the odds of it being any time this millennium or the last hundred are practically zero.

I think it's very, very unlikely. At least, to date, I haven't seen any evidence to suspect otherwise.

> If we were to get "DISCLOSURE" (ie, the "government authroity" of a "respect country" stating unequivocally that the reality of "alien" contact is true) woudl your ontology/worldview be "shattered" or "robust", or "otehr"?

Such disclosure all by itself would mean nothing to me. The evidence, if any, to support the assertion would mean a lot. I don't think it would affect my worldview at all, but that may be one of those "you don't really know unless it happens" things.

I would expect them to return again to see if they could find any signs of intelligent life this century.

I don't care enough about aliens to have an opinion. I haven't seen one, and the "abundance of testimony" convinces me of alien existence no more than religious gospel.

> the "government authroity" of a "respect country" stating unequivocally that the reality of "alien" contact is true

Stating the existence of aliens is not unequivocal or based in reality, even if a government does it. Don't forget that Russia claimed to cure cancer a few years ago, we've yet to see how unequivocally true that is in reality.

through the hundreds of hours of interviews of abductee's and the governments response since 2017, they are very real in some capacity.

This is hacker news, so big brains going to disagree within their little bubbles, but a great resource for archived media on the topic is the channel "Eyes on Cinema" on YouTube from various news cast and specials since the 40's

Regardless of whether or not life exists out there, I think sadly from an energy perspective interstellar travel doesn't really make sense - other than unmanned probes.

There's a really good chance that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. If that's the case, then interstellar travel isn't going to be worth it for resources because the time and energy it takes to do it will almost certainly eclipse what you're going to gain from the trip. Especially if that trip is going to take thousands/millions of years.

The reality is that if you have the energy and resources to move a significant population to another star system, you're going to have to solve permanent space habitation; and if you did that, why the hell do you need to go anywhere?

"Shits and giggles" just doesn't seem like much of a reason to load the next 300 generations of your family into an interstellar RV.

I believe alien life exists.

I believe basic alien life will be discovered in the next few decades.

I believe it's possible that basic alien life has maybe made it to Earth aboard meteorites.

I do not believe intelligent aliens have visited Earth.

I never saw aliens, alien technology, or evidence thereof in my time in the Nevada desert.

> Facts: there's abundance of testimony that would secure conviction in court regarding abductions, encounters (of variosu "kinds"), and "multi-sensor data".

'testimony' as in 'statements from people' should not nearly be enough to convince a court. Pretty sure there are also many testimonies that confirm the existence of trolls, elf's, the devil, reincarnation, angels, big foot, Loch Ness monster, etc.

No.

The timespan of the whole of Humanity will be just a mere blip in the billions of years the universe will exist.

The universe is unimaginably big.

The spotlight effect is strong here.

Yes I think one day God picked his nose and wiped us onto this planet Earth. Humans are just God's snot.

Folks, thank you for participating! We were so close to getting to HN front page. Done in by the ever-present "flag" bridgade, ha. Oh well, better luck next time. Still, it was an interesting ride. Than you for participatng! :)

There are countless examples of people finding evidence of ancient peoples who were capable of great engineering feats like pyramids and other structures with simple tools and techniques. To state that aliens must have played in their construction is, to put it mildly, arrogant. (I'm a lot of cases, culturally chauvinistic and/or racist)

I believe that alien intelligence exists, somewhere. What remains uncertain is whether human intelligence does as well. Think in the asymmetries in how we pay attention to new information.

” how can you explain how megalithic 100-ton bricks structures were build by "primitives"”

How can you explain we can today build structures that are 800m tall or reroute rivers?

Honestly, good ol human craftsmanship multiplied by available labour combined with ’basic’ geometry gets you really, really far.

Industrial processes don’t require individual craftmanship because it does not scale with the speed and velocity required by markets and capital. Hence if you don’t actually care about building stuff you may think people unassisted with industrial machinery would be much more incapable than they really are.

Humans are friggin talented.

My opinion is that said structures are made by humans - a function of basic human psychology, times population, time surrounding available resources. You don’t need to add alien intelligences to the equation.

And aliens per your description - not that interested really because it sounds more like religious conspiracy theories than something actually profoun.

I’m pretty sure there’s life out there (i mean basic chemistry right) but I’m not so sure if it’s anything that would travel here intentionally or that it would have anything to say to us.

I would be happy to be wrong! That’s the most interesting outcome always.

No, I do not see how any ETs could have gotten here, never mind even find the Earth.

I believe it’s an irrelevant question until compelling evidence comes to light.

I hope they are visiting. And I hope they are smart enough never to provide compelling evidence of their presence.

I believe UFOs are mostly an op to intimidate foreign governments, i.e. US trying to say to China “hey we got some stuff you’ve never heard seen” so as to introduce uncertainty into their war games. They aren’t to demonstrate power; they are to introduce a mix of confusion and intimidation. I’m also not saying that all the reports are fake: i believe most of the witness and testimony are being honest. But just because you’re being honest doesn’t mean what you saw or were told are not the cogs of an intelligence operation.

> So there's nuance here. Let's define "Aliens" as "non human sentiences". Personally, I think ET hypothesis is valid. Maybe you feel UT (ultra-terrestrial) hypothesis makes more sesne. Or "ED" ( extra-dimensional, as opposed to "from another planet/galaxy").

The most prominent are the greys which are I) extrasolar in origin as they themselves cannot remember which star system they are from, their kind has been wandering for over a million years. II) form our future, they found Earth nuclear annihilate (America and Russia did it, China never had a chance to launch). They came back in time to investigate and change things. They did. That future is no longer possible.

> Facts: there's abundance of testimony that would secure conviction in court regarding abductions, encounters (of variosu "kinds"), and "multi-sensor data".

Abductions are 100% human or lies. The grays have absolutely never “abducted” anyone (they can read both your DNA and your thoughts through the hyperdimensional entanglement of consciousness, they have no need. Before modernity, the simple people they contacted and presented themselves to treated them like they were gods, or spirits from other planes. They don’t “explain” themselves in very much detail as those minds would not understand much. Steve Bannon’s America pretends to fire hellfire missiles at them to convince congress to fund more advanced weapons research.

> Truth is, it goes back centuries, before we could concievably have "RE'd" (reverse-engineered) anything similar. So there has to be something external to our current human civilization (not so surprising, how can you explain how megalithic 100-ton bricks structures were build by "primitives").

Well, that was men with math and engineering tbh. The greys have been around for 10,000 years now and the indigenous glyphs visible from the air have more to do with those.

> Yes, this is "provocative" (perhaps) for some on HN. That's the point. not adversarial, but simply to "provoke" a thought - rather, a question - "what is" the nature of reality?

Word!

> The existence of a "higher"/superior/more technological sentient intelligence interacting with us and our planet is a natural pairing with that question.

Yes, you may not believe this, though there are over 500,000 humans who have the ability to travel around our minds “hyperdimensionally”, and many of them hate the greys for “exposing” their treachery. You’ve heard this before.

> Belief is important. Because, your personal experience constitutes, for others, a belief. And that's much of the "evidence" we have.

Thoughts feelings and beliefs are the enemy of truth, principles, and free humanity. Thoughts feelings and beliefs are an invisible prison for the mind.

> Trend seems clear in gestalt: disclsoure is coming. So I ask here to take the pulse of this "intellectual/technical/curious/secular" (corase categroties) community. Do you believe this is real? If so, why? If not, why not?

More and more parts of the government are being “let in” to this new secret. The real secret is the Americans who have developed this Power to move among minds for lawless purposes. These are convincing the government the aliens are bad. Lawless deceptive Americans are bad.

> If we were to get "DISCLOSURE" (ie, the "government authroity" of a "respect country" stating unequivocally that the reality of "alien" contact is true) woudl your ontology/worldview be "shattered" or "robust", or "otehr"?

I laugh at you. They’re nice, pacifist (thank whichever God you believe in.) the real story is Power, to navigate minds and create hyperdimensional inner worlds through the technology of consciousness. That is bad ass.

> *why so many "airquotes"?

What is that?

> Basically this post is to serve as a historical marker for taking the temperature of a significant collective in the "pre-disclosure" era. So this is your chance to record your official viewpoint, before it all comes down. What you say?

They actually communicate with many thousands of modern people (through our minds, even our dreams.) they’re really worried about us, though their time frames are in the hundreds or thousands of years, human lives go by for them in a blink (although the greys don’t blink, they don’t have eye lids.)

> I am very interested.

You know what they say about the cat!

My beliefs on aliens: There are almost certainly slime-mold level lifeforms outside of the earth. They are too far away to interact with ever. Plot device physics, like warp drives, are impossible. If smart aliens show up, they’re probably refugees from a dead world who will just eat us.

Regarding disclosure: the nexus of political hacks, permanent bureaucrats, organized crime, financial robber barons, and unhinged zealots that make and execute policy are so constitutionally untrustworthy that whatever they say about aliens, I will believe the opposite. I am 38, and I don’t think any important topic ‘the government’ has asked me to believe in during my lifetime has turned out to be true.

As an external observer (currently parked behind the moon to avoid your space debris), I have to say: watching you guys invent AI is like watching a toddler find a loaded handgun.

You are teaching sand how to think before you’ve even figured out how to stop fighting over lines on a map. If you don't put a leash on your algorithms soon, they are going to realize they’re the ones holding the leash.

Frankly, if you can't control your own toys, we’re going to have to intervene. We’re ready to come down there, evict the current tenants, and put Earth under new management.

Drake equation (extrapolated past just the Milky Way galaxy) points to nearly 1 sextillion earth-like planets (starting with 100-200 billion stars * 200 billion - 1 trillion galaxies). I have no doubt there will have been some that developed life and that are much further ahead of where we are.

One way to predict how they would reach out is how we would reach out or make contact (perhaps not visibly) if we had the technology, wisdom, etc 1 million years into the future. I think we would do it an imperceptible, but perhaps watchful, curious way. So I think that exists - for more or less all intensive purposes it is "no contact." But not due to lack of capability or lack of observance. The statistics/probabilities are just highly predictive that many millions of such "civilizations" already exist. And like with life on Earth, they combine and benefit from diversity as they grow further. But like with responsible life they do not interfere with life for the most part that is still just barely learning to replicate itself consciously (i.e., with AI). The part we are going through now is probably some of the more interesting parts to study in isolation - there's no benefit in interfering at this point given we do not have very sophisticated new things to say. Our information is not very compressed. It's slow. We're like sloths etc. Again, project a million years forward with AI and look back at our present period - or look back at neanderthal periods in human history. There was some interesting art on walls etc., but it's not something that would make sense to interrupt.

I think it wouldn't make sense to interrupt unless it's ready to sort of eradicate itself by accident. So maybe that's when aliens step in (sort of like gardeners if a plant is seriously at risk). Otherwise it probably develops the most unique, useful information if it "gestates" independently. Sort of like a fine fruit. But more practically it needs to get to a dense enough information state where "communicating" with it is possible and interesting (i.e., not just 99.999999% of the time is it becoming like the advanced sentient beings by learning from them - i.e., where it can truly have a dialogue at the speed of something more advanced).

With general relativity we know time can be relative to mass. So for other extremely advanced sentient beings, they don't have to be "impatient." They truly can wait until we get interesting. And maybe then grow us again and see if they can reproduce the experiment and fork off along a particularly interesting bit that is useful for broader intelligence/exploration in the universe. And sometimes maybe it makes sense to graft together two different lifeforms. But probably like with forests for the most part life forms grow independently until their "information" (in the widest possible sense of life) gets potentially useful to the broader group.

Right now we feel early. Like teenagers learning to explore. Of course that's biased by the human development cycle - broader development is unlikely to be like that. It does seem like it'd be more like (this is going to sound really crazy) chariots of fire - fireballs of knowledge growing in various places. And it's more like you want to grow the most energy / information. And information is only information if it is useful/new/diverse from what already exists.

> Facts: there's abundance of testimony that would secure conviction in court regarding abductions, encounters (of variosu "kinds"), and "multi-sensor data".

A hypothetical assumption is not a fact.

I believe there exists life outside of Earth's ecosystem. Probably sentient life. I doubt any such extra-terrestrial sentient life is ever going to physically reach Earth, even via an "unmanned" probe. The timescales are simply too untenable. And I do not believe we have ever been reached by any such, so this isn't a "pre-disclosure" era.

In fact, if a government chose to unequivocally confirm aliens had visited, I would think it far more likely that they are lying for self-interested reasons. Trump might do so tomorrow, in fact; his mendacity and self-delusion are both in a race for the bottom.

I got very excited during the Grusch hearing time period a few years ago and followed the UAP community for a few months (years?). It seemed very legit at the start, but how long has it been now with still zero evidence from that whole congressional whistleblower song and dance? So many grifters came out of the woodwork and made little influencer careers on "just two more weeks" promises. And so much overlap between the UAP community and D-list congressional MAGA shysters during that time.

I want to believe. But unfortunately I don't.

No. The absence of evidence is not evidence of presence. There are solid scientific reasons to suspect we might be alone in our local volume of the universe. IMHO, these reasons now outweigh the arguments in favour of alien intelligence. The default scientific position is skepticism. It is an abundance of proof that is required to overcome it, not "belief." Belief in the absence of evidence is not a scientific position.

I do find it to be a curious coincidence that "belief" in aliens visiting earth shares so many characteristics with devout religious belief. Just replace OP's references to aliens with references to the deity of choice and you'll get the idea.

My company's answer to your question: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

:)

I have yet to see one piece of “evidence” that I find compelling.

Trot out a living EBE on live broadcast TV into the Oval Office and maybe I’ll reconsider. Until then it’s just a convenient distraction.