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I actually briefly worked as a "paranormal investigator" when I was hard up for money --- someone came to me with some satellite photos they felt had evidence of UFOs.

I found a scientist who ran said satellites, who explained what seemed odd were artificacts of the instrument, and they were only noticed because they occured in the area of the Nimitz[1], which then got heavily OSINTed by the woo woo crowd.

I never took another of those kinds of job, because when the guy got an answer he didn't like he blew up on me, accused me of being part of the "deep state" and some kind of X-Files level man in black. (I offered him his money back because I got the sense he was a "true believer" and had dipped into savings, and it had only taken a few emails from my old uni email to show I wasn't a crank to clear up his questions, to no avail.)

I am glad we've gotten to the point that saying life is "out there" isn't considered wackadoo, even if couched with the caveat it may be so far away we may never interact, which is my stance.

It is my understanding that part of why the "wow signal" is so... "wow"... is that it did not repeat.

We have at times, in science, encountered stellar phenomon which sound artificial. Repeated noises/radiations -- classic example being when we first discovered pulsars in the 60s.

The thing with the "wow" signal is... it happened once then... nothing.

Now, maybe there's some natural phenomenon that does it's thing on a very long timescale but it's my understanding that they've ruled out terrestial sources, and so... the mind jumps to crazy stuff like the enterprise going to warp 10 or whatever.

I'll go ahead and say right here if it's definitively proven to be aliens, I'll give a hundred dollars to the Tor Project.

I'll also go ahead right here and say that while it was unusual, I think that we will one day find out the source was extraterrestrial but not "alien" in the sense of another civilization sending us a signal or us picking up something from a spacecraft.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200514012341/https://www.nytim... [2] "When observations with another telescope confirmed the emission, it eliminated any sort of instrumental effects. At this point, Bell said of herself and Hewish that "we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?"[12] Even so, they nicknamed the signal LGM-1, for "little green men" (a playful name for intelligent beings of extraterrestrial origin). " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#Discovery

2 comments

One guy I know had one of those UFO pics. When I saw it I knew instantly it was an iridium flare. I knew it because I was dead set on seeing a good one with several apps on my phone to track them. I showed him exactly where he was standing on a map, the time of day, and which satellite it was and when he could see it again by time/date/location. He had none of that. He became totally mad at me. I was kinda sad as I was just wanted to see one good iridium flare of that magnitude.

  > I was kinda sad as I was just wanted to see one good iridium flare of that magnitude.

They are absolutely beautiful! I was lucky enough to once see a meteor (presumably) bounce off the atmosphere. Was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. For an instant (and not any longer) it was almost like day and there was a green ripple that quickly dissipated. Seen nothing like it before or since.

The world is full of amazing and beautiful phenomena. Many of which also contain deep mysteries. It is a shame that people like that are so set on having answers that they prevent themselves from being part of such rewarding a rewarding journey. I guess it happens a lot even to normal people too. Even if the answer they are so set on isn't half as fantastical.

I was sitting with my dog in my yard one night and a green meteor lit up the evening sky like the day. It also made a sizzling noise (or maybe crackling).

I found out that the green was probably nickle content and the sizzling sounds also has an explanation which I don't recall.

What amazed me was that until I understood what I saw was a natural phenomenon, it seemed absolutely mind blowing and still stands out as one of the coolest things I've experienced yet no one I talked to saw it, there was no mention of it on the city subreddit, etc.

This was before the age of everyone having dashcams and doorbell cameras but something that remarkable happening over a densely populated suburban area at around 9pm not even being noticed by a single person I knew or was in contact with on socials suprised me.

Thanks for sharing. I think we're seeing a lot of the same thing occurring in these comments. :(

You'd probably be interested in my main comment too[0]. The signal has always been a terrible candidate for alien communication. Classic conspiracy problem where people become fixated on one aspect while ignoring all others.

Like Carl Sagan said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary science". It's sad but I think a lot of people just have these deep misunderstandings of what science actually is and how it works. There's also the really unfortunate human bias in how we read people in positions of authority[1]. Science makes you second guess and forces you to consider everything probabilistically. Nuance and detail dominate. Hard truth is that the world is noisy and figuring things out is hard.

But I think one of the most important things I have learned in life is that truth has a lower bound in complexity while lies don't. You should make things as simple as possible but to make simpler requires losing accuracy. Just because something can't be explained to a layman doesn't mean the person doesn't understand it, it means the topic is complex. Simplicity only ends up coming after a lot of work and dealing with the complexities.

To get side tracked a little, I have a proposal for a great filter: complexity. Any naturally evolved civilization is likely to have brains that preference simplicity and push against complexity. It's natural because complexity simply requires more computational power and that'd be a poor evolutionary strategy. You want enough to get the advantage but nor more. So when these civilizations advance they are likely to get to a point where the system they have created is far more complex that their brains can naturally handle. I think humans are in such a situation right now. No one person can understand the complexities of current issues be that from Global Warming to Geopolitics. We can do these things collectively but not individually. It's absolutely amazing what we've been able to accomplish, but I think if we're to continue we'll also have to recognize how incredible these accomplishments actually are. So the great filter is not some concrete event like Nuclear War or Global Warming (things that there's a good chance those civilizations also face), but the more abstract filter of abstraction itself. Eventually a civilization needs to cross the bridge from where its people can understand enough to navigate major problems of their world to one they aren't. Just seems unlikely brains would evolve fast enough to keep pace, since it is easier to create complexity than to understand it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034860

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45000418

I would put forward that we can do many things collectively but not individually because we are part of a collective organism much more than we are individuals, though we are unable to see it due to a human having a limited perspective of only a part of a whole.

It is a common tendency to see humanity as a set of standalone humans[0] (if we cannot do something individually, but we can collectively, then we sort of can’t do it). However, a human only exists in context of others, and all we do is always in many ways (even if not real-time) a collaboration (starting from our education).

I’d argue an individual human being able to understand enough to navigate major problems of their world can’t be expected to exist and was probably never the case.

What is an alarming issue is that sometimes even a figurative anthill of many humans, as a collective super-entity, cannot adequately understand and navigate the reality it is facing.

[0] It is not helped by sci-fi that depicts various aliens as being collective beings, somehow contrasted with humans. In reality, we almost never go completely alone[1] for prolonged periods (except pathological cases), we are smarter when there is multiple of us, and the core of our interpretation of consciousness/sentience requires it to be social (anything else, and I don’t think we would even recognize it as consciousness—maybe that somehow relates to the great filter, too).

[1] When we do, our consciousness still supplies models of others in our lives, one way or another motivating our actions.

I don't think you're wrong, I think it is just semantics. I mean as long as you're agreeing we're not like the Borg or some other hive mind collective haha. But yeah, the old saying has stayed true: it takes a village to raise a child.

Just that I think there's a lot of utility in using the terminology of "individual" to talk about each human. It's true, we're dependent on one another for our survival and reproduction. But the "independence" is not a description of our capacity of survival but in that our consciousness is independent.

We have terms like community (and a ton which make implicit approximations about the size) to describe what you're talking about.

I think maybe that part of the problem is, as you point out, there's often a misunderstanding in ants themselves. It is easy to see the emergent behavior of them operating as a group. As if there's some collective mind. But you're absolutely right you could say the same about humans. We know a lot more about ants than we did centuries ago and do know they do operate independently. While it is much more like a monarchy structure, each ant operates, in some form, as a self contained unit. It can exist outside a colony. It's not likely to survive long, but this distinction is worth assigning some word to, right? Clearly there's a distinction from were I to claim that the ant's body were independent from its head. We'd claim that false because the separation causes an immediate (or rather an exceptionally quick) death.

Maybe that is semantics, but I think those semantics are helpful to us communicating and we would be the worse were we to call these things the same.

  > I’d argue an individual human being able to understand enough to navigate major problems of their world can’t be expected to exist and was probably never the case.

Fwiw, I actually believe this too. I stated it the way I did because I think most people underestimate complexity (there's definitely advantages to that trait lol). But to refine my position more, I'd say that the current complexity of the world and what is required to solve its problems vastly exceeds that of millennia ago. I'd agree, the world has always been too complex for one man to understand, but certainly the scale of things has changed. In the past the forces pushing on a person or even community were primarily local. There were still global phenomena but if you go to 10000 BC a person's actions on the Eurasian continent had no meaningful effect on a person living in the Americas. Maybe Genghis Khan killed so many he that there was a small change in global temperature, but even then the main reason was that even just 1k years ago there were so few people that their combined efforts itself had little effect on the global temperature haha. Today, these things aren't true. One ship gets stuck in one canal and the whole system is put into chaos. There's lots of advantages to this global interaction but that's for the same reason these issues exist. With an over simplification that I think can be helpful to extrapolate from, just treat every person on the planet as a node and their relationship to others as an edge. Nor only do we have more nodes, but the average node also has more connections.

Your take on complexity as a filter reminded me of a fascinating paper I read. You might find it interesting because it claims that evolution does tend to favor simplicity, except when under a certain kind of pressure.

The paper is titled "Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of parasitism: evolution of complex replication strategies" and you can find it at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210441

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that paper. It definitely is interesting!

But I'd be careful generalizing too much from it. I'm not saying my proposal is correct but rather just recognizing issues with the paper. The reason for my proposal is that 1) here we are as complex entities. We humans exist. 2) One of, if not the, things in physics we are most confident about is that everything will be in its lowest possible energy state. It's true for the electrons that emit light while doing so just as much as it is true that creatures need to eat more to do more.

Notice something subtle but important in the paper. Their focus of efficiency is based on string length and reaction time. They note that string length decreases. Think about this a bit. For these strings to reduce it must mean that there was redundancy or excess in them. If mutations are random then modifying some of the characters in those strings will have no effect. We should also similarly look at parasites and see that these are a lower entropy state, in that they are able to leverage the information from the other "microbes" to perpetuate their own reproduction. They can't dominate because they can't live without the hosts but also at the same time this means they can't mutate as much and survive. There is a self selection bias to the results that isn't being properly accounted for. A survival bias that needs to be accounted for.

Now let's contrast to our more complex forms of life that my proposal is being based on. These lifeforms have lots of repetition in their genetic sequences. This is actually an important fact that the foundation of things like CRISPR are based on: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Even the acronym is a bit repetitive (which makes it great!). This is a defense mechanism made so that we're robust to mutations. My proposal is dependent on some complex life already existing. I don't know how to explain how life got to this complex level (something these researchers are working on), just that we are here, that I myself exist. I hope this is not a contentious axiom :)

They're tackling a really interesting problem and in no way am I trying to diminish their work. The best way to solve complex problems is to first solve overly simplified variants of them. Even if those result in completely inaccurate results the process is highly beneficial to tackling the more complex variants. Due to this we need to take results being mindful of the context. A post on the Relativity of Wrong hit the front page this morning[0] and it links to a page I've had bookmarked for over a decade. It captures what science is really about: being less wrong. Despite my disdain for that site (because it often runs contrary to the meaning of those words), the sentiment is right. Jun8's comment in [0] hits on this. It's not about being right, because "right" does not exist in an absolute sense. There is always more specificity that can make something more right. So instead, it is about decreasing our error. Just because you can't reach an idealized thing doesn't mean you can't get closer to it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45025600

> I have a proposal for a great filter: complexity.

That's one of the interpretations of Gibson's "Jackpot" - that there's just too much potentially dangerous stuff going on, interacting in too many ways to manage. Though I tend to identify global warming (and related environmental damage like deforestation) as the "core" problem at the center of that tangle.

> truth has a lower bound in complexity while lies don't

Very well said

I don't think that word salad really means anything. People fall for complex lies all the time. We just experienced it with 'public health experts' who had never done a single cost vs. benefit analysis in the real world nearly destroy civilization because they were enjoying the power trip. And they lied their asses off to us and many of you on HN still believe it because it's a huge blind spot for your intellects.

I don't think any truth is fundamental at all, I think it all has to remain up for review perpetually even though it irritates the living hell out of some people that it has to be is like that. You all seem to want "settled science" but science is never settled, nor is truth. Just the mere mention of "global warming" on here as an issue creates a knee-jerk reaction in people which makes me realize what we are up against is really a clash of incompatible personality types that will one day have to be sorted out violently. The winners of that conflict will determine "truth."

  >  People fall for complex lies all the time.

This is not in contention with what I said.

The existence of a believable but complex lie does not disprove the existence of a believable yet simple lie.

Nor have I made the claim that because something is complex that it must be true.

Maybe it would help if I wrote like this

  min(complexity | truth) > x
  min(complexity | lie)   = 0

I've said nothing about max complexity, only that some lower bound of complexity must exist when something is true.

And again, this statement does not imply that the complexity of something can indicate if it is truthful or not.

We could also write it this way if you want: min(complexity | truth) > min(complexity | lie)

  > I don't think any truth is fundamental at all

You and I are actually in agreement. But to be clear, while I do not think anyone can make a claim (in a finite amount of time) that is perfectly correct, I am quite certain that there are things that are more correct than others. Science can always improve, and my previous comment stated as much. It would be wrong to say "the Earth is flat" but certainly it would be more wrong to say "the Earth is the sound a Gorilla makes while eating the color purple." And there's definitely statements even more wrong than that. At least that one was intelligible, even if incoherent.

> People fall for complex lies all the time.

Of course. My comment was nothing about what people choose to believe.

> I don't think any truth is fundamental at all

Neither did I mean that.

> You all seem to want "settled science" but science is never settled, nor is truth.

I don't think there was any intent of this in my comment or in the comment I replied to.