I think you have to update against the UFO reports being veridical descriptions of real objects with those characteristics because of just how ludicrous the implied properties are. This paper says 5370 g as a reasonable upper bound on acceleration, implying with some assumptions about mass an effective thrust power on the order of 500 GW in something the size of a light aircraft, with no disturbance in the air either from the very high hypersonic wake and compressive heating or the enormous nuclear explosion sized bubble of plasmafied air that the exhaust and waste heat emissions something like this would produce.
At a minimum, to stay within the bounds of mechanics and thermodynamics, you’d need to be able to ignore airflow and air resistance entirely, have the ability to emit reaction mass in a completely non-interacting form, and the ability to emit waste energy in a completely non-interacting form as well.
To me, the dynamical characteristics being this crazy points far more towards some kind of observation error, so I don’t think we should treat them as any kind of real object with those properties until we can conclusively rule out basically all other error sources.
So even if the next best explanation is 100x worse at explaining the observations, I’d still believe it over a 5000g airflow-avoiding craft that expels invisible reaction mass and invisible waste heat while maneuvering. Maybe not 10,000x worse since it doesn’t outright contradict the laws of physics, but still the prior on this even being technically possible with any amount of progress is low, and my impression (just from watching debates back and forth on potential error sources) is that we can’t rule out every mundane explanation with that level of confidence.
Thanks for your comment. I basically agree, but I would stress two points.
First, I’d reiterate that the main conclusions of the post I shared do not rest on the claim that extraordinary UFOs are real. Even assuming that our observed evidence involves no truly remarkable UFOs whatsoever, a probability of >1 in 1,000 in near aliens still looks reasonable (e.g. in light of the info gain motive), and thus the possibility still seems (at least weakly) decision-relevant. Or so my line of argumentation suggests.
Second, while I agree that the wild abilities are a reason to update toward thinking that the reported UFOs are not real objects, I also think there are reasons that significantly dampen the magnitude of this update. First, there is the point that we should (arguably) not be highly confident about what kinds of abilities an advanced civilization that is millions of years ahead of us might possess. Second, there is the point that some of the incidents (including the famous 2004 Nimitz incident) involve not only radar tracking (as reported by Kevin Day in the Nimitz incident), but also eye-witness reports (e.g. by David Fravor and Alex Dietrich in the case of Nimitz), and advanced infrared camera (FLIR) footage (shot by Chad Underwood during Nimitz). That diversity of witnesses and sources of evidence seems difficult to square with the notion that the reported objects weren’t physically real (which, of course, isn’t to say that they definitely were real).
When taking these dampening considerations into account, it doesn’t seem to me that we have that strong reason to rule out that the reported objects could be physically real. (But again, the main arguments of the post I shared don’t hinge on any particular interpretation of UFO data.)
I think this almost perfectly describes my problem with these videos/accounts/sensor readings. The same thing that makes them better evidence of aliens also makes them less likely to be real evidence. The crazier the physical constraints, the more likely “if this is real, the explanation is extra-terrestrial” becomes, but the less likely “it is real” becomes. Evidence that significantly increases the probability of “this is real” without significantly decreasing the probability of “if this is real, the explanation is extra-terrestrial” seems necessary yet elusive.
The discussion of UAPs lately reminds me of the “How would Magnus Carlsen beat me at chess?” example that is popular in alignment these days. The still-unexplained phenomena that people will demand explanations for must be rare and hard to explain without a lot of good observations, or they wouldn’t still be unexplained.
It seems similar to assuming that dark matter must be far more mysterious than just a particle, because we have so much trouble confirming any explanation of it, despite the fact that its observed behavior tells us that it should be extremely hard to confirm for any methods available to us.
I think the fact that the accelerations are close to, but not, a complete violation of physics is the most interesting, but it depends on how likely you think it is that a non-extraterrestrial explanation for a rare phenomena would also not seem to violate those laws. Or how likely a non-extraterrestrial explanation might be to appear to violate the laws of physics before further investigation. I do think this actually would make me update a bit in favor of extra-terrestrials if I thought about it more.
I wish my thoughts on this were better formulated, but I’ve been avoidant of UAP stuff for a while because engaging with it usually left me very frustrated and annoyed, and I don’t think it’s something we are likely to make meaningful progress on.
I think you have to update against the UFO reports being veridical descriptions of real objects with those characteristics because of just how ludicrous the implied properties are. This paper says 5370 g as a reasonable upper bound on acceleration, implying with some assumptions about mass an effective thrust power on the order of 500 GW in something the size of a light aircraft, with no disturbance in the air either from the very high hypersonic wake and compressive heating or the enormous nuclear explosion sized bubble of plasmafied air that the exhaust and waste heat emissions something like this would produce.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/
At a minimum, to stay within the bounds of mechanics and thermodynamics, you’d need to be able to ignore airflow and air resistance entirely, have the ability to emit reaction mass in a completely non-interacting form, and the ability to emit waste energy in a completely non-interacting form as well.
To me, the dynamical characteristics being this crazy points far more towards some kind of observation error, so I don’t think we should treat them as any kind of real object with those properties until we can conclusively rule out basically all other error sources.
So even if the next best explanation is 100x worse at explaining the observations, I’d still believe it over a 5000g airflow-avoiding craft that expels invisible reaction mass and invisible waste heat while maneuvering. Maybe not 10,000x worse since it doesn’t outright contradict the laws of physics, but still the prior on this even being technically possible with any amount of progress is low, and my impression (just from watching debates back and forth on potential error sources) is that we can’t rule out every mundane explanation with that level of confidence.
Thanks for your comment. I basically agree, but I would stress two points.
First, I’d reiterate that the main conclusions of the post I shared do not rest on the claim that extraordinary UFOs are real. Even assuming that our observed evidence involves no truly remarkable UFOs whatsoever, a probability of >1 in 1,000 in near aliens still looks reasonable (e.g. in light of the info gain motive), and thus the possibility still seems (at least weakly) decision-relevant. Or so my line of argumentation suggests.
Second, while I agree that the wild abilities are a reason to update toward thinking that the reported UFOs are not real objects, I also think there are reasons that significantly dampen the magnitude of this update. First, there is the point that we should (arguably) not be highly confident about what kinds of abilities an advanced civilization that is millions of years ahead of us might possess. Second, there is the point that some of the incidents (including the famous 2004 Nimitz incident) involve not only radar tracking (as reported by Kevin Day in the Nimitz incident), but also eye-witness reports (e.g. by David Fravor and Alex Dietrich in the case of Nimitz), and advanced infrared camera (FLIR) footage (shot by Chad Underwood during Nimitz). That diversity of witnesses and sources of evidence seems difficult to square with the notion that the reported objects weren’t physically real (which, of course, isn’t to say that they definitely were real).
When taking these dampening considerations into account, it doesn’t seem to me that we have that strong reason to rule out that the reported objects could be physically real. (But again, the main arguments of the post I shared don’t hinge on any particular interpretation of UFO data.)
I think this almost perfectly describes my problem with these videos/accounts/sensor readings. The same thing that makes them better evidence of aliens also makes them less likely to be real evidence. The crazier the physical constraints, the more likely “if this is real, the explanation is extra-terrestrial” becomes, but the less likely “it is real” becomes. Evidence that significantly increases the probability of “this is real” without significantly decreasing the probability of “if this is real, the explanation is extra-terrestrial” seems necessary yet elusive.
The discussion of UAPs lately reminds me of the “How would Magnus Carlsen beat me at chess?” example that is popular in alignment these days. The still-unexplained phenomena that people will demand explanations for must be rare and hard to explain without a lot of good observations, or they wouldn’t still be unexplained.
It seems similar to assuming that dark matter must be far more mysterious than just a particle, because we have so much trouble confirming any explanation of it, despite the fact that its observed behavior tells us that it should be extremely hard to confirm for any methods available to us.
I think the fact that the accelerations are close to, but not, a complete violation of physics is the most interesting, but it depends on how likely you think it is that a non-extraterrestrial explanation for a rare phenomena would also not seem to violate those laws. Or how likely a non-extraterrestrial explanation might be to appear to violate the laws of physics before further investigation. I do think this actually would make me update a bit in favor of extra-terrestrials if I thought about it more.
I wish my thoughts on this were better formulated, but I’ve been avoidant of UAP stuff for a while because engaging with it usually left me very frustrated and annoyed, and I don’t think it’s something we are likely to make meaningful progress on.