Newsgroups: alt.ufo.reports
From: kymhorsell@gmail.com
Subject: mediocrity and our place in the universe

[uploaded 44 times; last 28/09/2024]

You get a lot of time to think, waiting for AI's to churn through all
the data and tell you what is most reasonable.

I'm sitting here watching them now. Churn, churn, churn. They're
looking at patterns in sightings of interactions between military
aircraft and odd things in the sky the Pentagon will probably call
Chinese weather balloons. Or something else -- anything else -- that
isn't "conclusively aliens".

And, somehow, a few pieces of a bigger puzzle fell into place.

It's often assumed in textbooks -- certainly the ones I grew up on
over a few decades dipping in and out of college -- that the earth
and/or the sun are "average". The so-called "assumption of mediocrity"
says that if you don't have any other information, start out by
assuming whatever you are thinking about is an average example of its
type. It makes mathematical sense.

But the problem is. We have information. A growing list. The earth and
the sun are not average. Assuming they are will lead to bad conclusions.

I listened to astronomers talking on one of those docs about the
planets they are discovering now via space telescope. Some of them
complained their idea that many of the stars -- maybe most of them --
would have solar systems like ours turned out to be wrong. With a list
of several 1000 cases now -- NONE OF THEM LOOK LIKE US. Most of them
not even close.

The sun is a very late bloomer. Most of the G-type stars in our Milky
Way are long dead. The bulk of the G population bloomed billions of
years before our sun was even a glint in papa's eye. So now G-type
stars like our sun are only 5-10% of the galaxy's population.

So when we assume the average star out there might have MIGHT have
life like ours and access to a radio and we beam some gibberish in
that direction and don't receive anything back, it isn't because
no-one is there. It is that almost everyone that might have started
out similar to us because they lived in the Goldilocks Zone around a G
sun is now billions of years in advance of us. I think if you
calculate it out given you might only be using radio for 100-200 years
before you find something much better then the nearest civilization in
our state of childhood is likely on the rim of the Milky Way and
10-20,000 light years away. On top of that, fat chance many of them
are in the same state of using radio for communication. We can assume
maybe that astronomers on those remote planets EVENTUALLY do the
calculation and find contacting any other "baby" is pretty futile and
they stop listening for signals. Around that time they stop sending signals.
They discover they are surrounded by... well... let's think about that...

If we are NOT average and are, in fact, the youngest or as good as
youngest planet in the galaxy, what have the other civilizations been
doing in the past 13 billion years?

Well we can guess the answer. They have been growing and spreading
out.  That's life for you.  Various astronomers have advanced the idea
that even travelling at sub-light speeds any civilization willing to
spend what we spend on arms on space flight instead could make it to
the core region of the Milky Way in 100,000 years and then after a
similar time radiate out to explore and/or colonize every suitable
star in the whole galaxy in another 100,000 years.

Given there are possibly going to be a few more than 1 such
civilization in the past 14 billion years then you can imagine the
price of real estate in most of the galaxy is sky high about now
because of the demand.

Avi Loeb has calculated that even if 1 Core civilization had bothered
to start exploring at the height of when G-type stars were a new thing
all that time ago, and spend a defence budget each year up until now,
and sent out probes at sub-light speeds, then by now there would be 1000s
of them floating around in our own solar system our here on The Rim.

But he stops short in his written musings from the follow-on thoughts
-- they would have probably followed their probes to the promised
lands they found soon after they found them. And if the first
civilization was typical then many others would have done the same
thing pretty much.

So if you're wondering why all these ufo's seem to be a hodge-podge of
different things -- not only shapes and colors but also apparently
some are only partly material objects and some are so crazy they don't
seem to fall under headings of matter or energy or even reason -- and
if you're wondering why all kinds of paranormal stuff seem to also be
connected with ufos and lake monsters and goblins and all manner of
other barely understandable stuff... then maybe if you consider the
neighborhood might be full of 1000s of different competing groups that
came out here in the past few billion years and never left. Well... it
starts to STARTS to make some kind of sense.

The Fermi Paradox. Why is no-one sending radio messages? Maybe because
you get to a certain stage in your civilisation where you discover the
neighbours have been living across the road all this time.  You don't
need long distance radio. You can just walk over there and knock.

As one group of theories go -- the earth is maybe a wilderness
preserve. Sure. Many of "them" grow food here since it's conveniently
close to a yellow star and has above-ground oceans. But the place is
otherwise like "back home" was billions of years back and just HAS to
be persevered like that. "They" are greenies.

So now comes the hard part. For many of us. If such a situation turns
out to be the case we have to learn to accept it. Over the past few
years I've chatted with various people about various way-out ideas.
And some have argued they would be seriously distressed if it turned
out earth was somehow a colony or zoo or prison or had been seeded by
some advanced race. Yeah. I get it.

In my younger years I walked the earth -- as they used to say --
looking for my roots. I ended up at one point in Lapland where it
turned out some of my father's people came from. And it turned out by
total co-incidence my mother's people had links with islands off N
Russia probably also considered to be part of Lapland. It was last
century so hardly anyone is alive that can remember anything from back then.

Anyhow, I ended up someplace talking or trying to talk with a local
wise woman of some tribe. In the 1970s people up there still lived in
tents and followed reindeer herds around and otherwise lived by
hunting and gathering. They also spoke 1000 "mutually
incomprehensible" languages so finding anyone around that could speak
English or 1950s Norwegian and translate it to the local dialect and
back was tricky.

But I was managing to converse with this old dear and she wanted to
know what the heck I was doing back there on the other side of the
planet and how many reindeer did I herd back home and such. And I told
her I was training to be a scientist.  She had a vague idea of what
that was. I tried to describe what it involved. She though for a
moment and told me I would have a tough life. Probably thinking about
her own pretty tough life as the village wise woman aka witch she said
the hardest part of trying to figure out how the world works was then
accepting the truth of what you had found. Her words translated to
having to "surrender to the truth" and how hard it could be if not
impossible.

Maybe it's a lesson the whole planet will be learning in time.

--
The US government portrays itself as the world's preeminent
superpower, so to acknowledge that there are things in their
airspace, whatever they are, that are faster and more manoeuvrable
and run rings around fast jets doesn't play very well.
So there's the embarrassment factor, and maybe a little bit of
fear that either an adversary has made a quantum leap in
development, which has left the US in a poor second place, or, as
some believe, this really is extra terrestrial, in which case we're
not at the top of the food chain anymore.
-- Nick Pope, 02 May 2023

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts,
foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that
is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market
is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-- JFK

Physics Thinktank Proposes Method for Detecting Extraterrestrial Spacecraft
Using Gravitational Waves
The Debrief, 16 Dec 2022
An international team of scientists has written a paper showing how to
detect extraterrestrial spacecraft using gravitational waves.
[The reason LIGO hasn't been looking for "warp signatures"?
Nobody thought of it].

Most Sun-like stars formed billions of years before the Sun, a time lag
much longer than the time it takes chemical rockets to cross the Milky
Way disk. If only one out of the tens of billions of Earth-Sun systems
in the Milky Way galaxy gave rise to a peaceful, space-exploring
technological civilization over the past 10 billion years, and if that
civilization launched probes at an annual cost of 2 trillion dollars
for a million years, then there would be ten thousand objects from this
spectacular civilization within the solar system now.
-- Avi Loeb, "The Allegory of the Cave: An Interstellar Interpretation",
The Debrief, 15 Mar 2023

The most extreme life-forms in the universe
New Scientist, 26 June 2008
There's hardly a niche on Earth that hasn't been colonised. Life can be
found in scalding, acidic hot pools, in the driest deserts, and in ...
[Interestingly, if life is *not* found in the warm salty sub-surface
oceans of some of our system's moons it gives more weight to the idea
that life could not have formed spontaneously on Earth but came from
"outside" e.g. via meteorites aka Panspermia].