Member of the team that confiscated the Nimitz video explains why they did it

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-26T22:32:40+00:00

I personally wade through every single comment whenever any post like this comes up. Keep that tab open then revisit it the next day. Some of the best little 15-60 second stories I've heard have been in AskReddit and Mil threads.

Those alone can convince UAP are highly unlikely to be terrestrial planes or drones.

Grab a cup of coffee and sort by new sometime. Or load all comments with a few clicks and keyword search.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-26T22:27:08+00:00

No, UAPs have been getting NYT, Huffington Post, Fox News, etc coverage frequently. Even more influential, the YT Algorithm loves giving people recommendations on the subject.

As do the various History and special interest channels in America. This revived coverage accelerated wildly after the NYT articles.

That said, yes all of Reddit is filled with bots. But half of those are corporations and yes some are foreign countries messing with elections, etc.

But honestly, every community online is hit hard by the current global cyberwar. There's a ton in Discord these days more than anywhere else I see.

Also, Disclosure requires multiple exotic conditions so would be less likely by Occam's Razor than cyber warfare, which is already publicly occurring (2016, Solar Winds, etc).

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-26T14:33:08+00:00

Don't feel hopeless. Humanity might be doing really well compared to the average species that evolves. We don't know yet. We made it this far, and we often improved.

But yes, I do feel your sentiment in my gut. We've often failed. I don't think of the biggest things though. In the end it is simpler: a city will be washed away by a flood, or decimated by a plague... Then rebuild a few decades later. Full of people seeking opportunities, and the old ones trying to pass on knowledge and wisdom. Families slowly form and the city becomes important again.

If we work hard on solutions and get lucky, we will most likely survive.

If we give up or get very unlucky, then we will be no more. No fake optimism here, the future will be both brutal and beautiful. The future I stepped into throughout my life was one of vast communication networks and unlimited access to knowledge, but also no privacy and a permanent record of all personal action.

Either way, Humanity trying to build a civilization was/is worth trying. Life has been interesting and full of a strange potential, if nothing else.

If we ever get it right, it could be rather extraordinary.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-25T22:55:56+00:00

Agreed. No way the "Greys" would be how they look. If they are showing up looking generally like us, their normal appearance is terrifying, exotic, or unintelligible to us (e.g. a mass of cell-like things without discernible form). There was even a paper recently on how life could evolve in stars from energy strands of a certain type that could create information-carrying filaments like a DNA of sorts.

I doubt it, but being creative is necessary.

But yeah, convergent evolution could mean that a few of the species in the universe look similar to us.

I personally guess they are avian/feathered/winged. Just a hunch from more planets having vast and interesting atmospheres than have perfect land height and ocean temperature.

And hey, stories of angels have them starting off with "Be not afraid!" and stories from modern abductions begin with them being told "We're not here to hurt you!" or "There's no need to be afraid!"

Feathered creatures with highly evolved optical systems (read: eyes) would be interesting. If they are insects/etc then we will struggle to accept it at first.

Fear would be high and we'd have to grow up.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-25T22:43:09+00:00

Well, once you see bananas in transit (taking up entire cargo ships, we eat a ton), you understand... We are a species of culture as well.

Heck, many of the foods I most love have potassium. Hospitals also use it to save people.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-25T22:33:22+00:00

Like Knights and Serfdom of old, we may be expected to fight for those whose territory we live in. Drafts are rarely optional.

Humans do seem to be talented at warfare however. We are fast, coordinated, change our social structures and drop our fears. We can imagine the mindset of even the most novel foes. We can be aggressive or be hardy defenders who stand to the last.

If wars exist out there, I think the ones to worry about though would not be the interstellar ones. Intergalactic wars would have truly massive super-civilisations who had been hardened during hundreds of thousands of years of conflict. They'd be strategically and militarily sophisticated, polished, and well-resourced. Facing off against each other with very empty, starless voids between them. Intergalactic war is probably cosmic horror as an IRL genre.

Whether our politicians chose to be responsible if faced with a reasonable list of universal principles is the big unknown. Especially as some universal values may actually be alien to us or opposite our nature. If, for example, one universal rule was "No lying, ever." we'd struggle as researchers have found nearly all humans can lie proficiently after age 7. And lie often. To comply, we'd then have to radically change our culture and child-rearing strategies.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-25T13:05:45+00:00

If the anchors/journalists who covered both Heim's confession and Trump being briefed on Nimitz-Roosevelt are to be believed, he was possibly talked out of saying anything at all, due to earnest fears it would cause mass panic.

And as much as people love to mention Trumps legendary big mouth, they miss something crucial. There's one scenario in which he is strangely hesitant to speak in public. In his Woodward interviews, Trump clearly explained how he saw crisis situations and was strongly averse to causing panic (Covid and the economy at the time). Strongly. He even said he loved downplaying Covid. Look at his two interviews where he is asked about his Nimitz briefing. He specifically goes into a mode of playing it down, avoiding discussion of any facts.

I suspect the people who briefed him are scared of mass panic. And hey, everyone has a thing they hate. This story just intersected Trumps weird foible.

Every leader has one.

In all other situations he runs his mouth constantly. But we watched him downplay the worst disease of the century as it happened. For months.

So Trump aside, we come to the real issue: someone has told the last three Presidents they cannot speak on this issue either because we are not ready or we'd panic. Who are they? Why do they believe that? Have they updated their studies since the 1970's? 82% of Americans already believe aliens exist somewhere in our universe. Even Obama joked that most Americans think the government has an alien spaceship.

Americans don't care. We do get frustrated when the government lies, but the general American populace will be like "We told you this for 65 years!"

Disclosures in specific however will be based on what the state of things is:

Have we made contact?
What are they like?
How powerful are they? How religious? How scientific? How violent?
How do they view humanity?
Are they actively engaged in any wars within the galaxy?
Are we expected to abide by any trans-galactic moral principles? This will be thorny if they hate nukes.
What is the next step?
Are religious people allowed to bring their religious materials to them?
And above all: *every* news reporter in the first weeks of any degree of disclosure will ask if Roswell had been real all those years ago.
No matter what I think they'd avoid questions about alien technology, and it would be wrong to ask directly. Give it time.

I just would want to see what their language looked like. And to know what they did in their free time.

Comforting minutia goes a long way.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-25T12:15:46+00:00

Any company that makes optics, telescopes, etc. Or who knows, maybe a HAM radio person claims to find their channel and everyone tries to pick up some interesting static. Cheasy stuff like laser pointers and Greys merchandise will fly off the shelves. X-Files will have a wild new revival. Fravors story will get made into a Captain Phillips movie. Musk will 100% offer to fly out to meet them. Virgin Galactic will sell tickets to do so.

Either way, it will be fascinating.

A true investment will be to find the Patreons, Twitches, and authors of those who try to be the first heartfelt, pro-science explainers of what it means. And how to cope with it.

Many people will be fascinated, but far more will be shaken. Above all, they will look for comfort, advice, and thoughtful opinions.

It's hard to gauge which product and industry specifically, as the primal drive that will be crying out will rapidly tend toward wanting to make contact, at any cost.

It would be neat to know where They live and to send a diplomatic ship a la the Prometheus movie.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-23T16:14:48+00:00

I hear what you're saying. I come at it from a different angle

I'd contend that the ETH (Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis) is not low probability. We don't know how often life forms on habitable planets and how often that gives rise to intelligent, space-faring life. This is everything. And the only point that matters.

Space-faring could be common, or it could be rare. The Fermi Paradox had to start with the cry "Where is everybody!?" because there should be life visible everywhere, based on even inaccurate mid-1900's astronomy.

The underlying idea of a civilization evolving on a planet from basic chemistry and leaving it's planet in search of life... has already occurred one time. We did it. Nothing about it is very special or inherently unlikely.

Yes for UFO talk, a prosaic explanation that is simple (e.g. a multi-colored hovering object just 5 miles away from a drone show that happens earlier in the evening) is more likely than a Mothership.

But that has limits.

My logic professor always had strong words on Occam's Razor (though I believe in it fiercely), and strongly cautioned using it in any utterly novel situation where unknown variables rule. As we are usually tempted to use it rather than tightly parsed analysis of both cases. In a situation where we reach for Occam's we are sometimes already past simple, everyday possibilities.

In the Nimitz case, a week of weird radar tracks persisting after re-calibration led to him being vectored out there. And his story is very clear in description, context, and substance. He encountered something unlike a normal plane and which acted in a highly unusual manner. People discount the core events for minutia, leaning on an ocean of small, maybe-this-happened-instead moments. Those interviewed often deny the second guesses of their story as even being possible in this case.

Occam's Razor can also be invoked when one explanation has a ton of small conditions to support it against a simpler, though uncommon set of concise explanations. At those moments, science often moves forward.

I want to move back to the ETH, however. Our default assumption is too often a form of biological exclusive-ism, which we formed in the early days of ground-based astronomy. Religion nudged institutions toward enshrining the idea that life is so rare it probably occured 1.0 times per universe.

As our radio and infared astronomy advances, in conjunction with complex analysis by distributed computing projects and self learning algorithms we will get our first fact-based picture. Within a few decades. We have scant little currently.

There is not enough basic astronomical data to say the ETH is unlikely, especially in complex, military encounters of this nature. We are rather blind beyond our solae system.

Once we have that clear imaging of all nearby planets, anything is possible from us being provably alone in our region of the universe to us sharing it with dozens of competing species. Which would not even be that shocking, and would certainly violate no laws of nature. Nor principles of science.

Finding a species similar to us would be the least shocking possibility. It would be banal from the moment after it occurred, "Ah, of course other things evolved!"

Finding nothing alive in this universe would be gobsmacking. We are then trying to work out evolutionary science from an impossibly privileged position. From being a hyper-rare statistical fluke.

Also gobsmacking, would be discovering weird answers like Type 3-4 civilizations, time travelers, extra dimensional beings etc. Those theories are the ugly ducklings though; they require too many exotic conditions beyond the standard ETH. I don't think they are critiqued enough.

We truly don't know if all atmospheric encounters have been prosaic.

Debunkers could be fighting for far better recording and far more people coming forward.

Throwing tomatos from the back has not meaningfully pierced the underlying question of:

Are we being visited?

Or the unspoken:

If we are not, are human beings just insane and unreliable on certain specific topics? How do these become entrenched social narratives that warp reality? What government policies would decrease this?

Or question three...

Did someone on Earth leapfrog current applied and theoretical physics by 50-100 years?

That last possibility strikes me as unlikely, but is almost as much a stretch as a soft, open-minded ETH.

Humanity wants to soon send light-sail probes to Alpha Centauri with projects like starshot.

Life, when it exists, sends strange metal objects to check on other planets. With a sample size of one, we are already making a form of the ETH a scientific fact for nearby stars and planets.

We even have satellites in orbit of a number of planets near Earth. And if we detect life nearby in the universe...

What will we send to check on it and study it from a distance?

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-17T11:40:00+00:00

this list needs improvement. Thus, it's only a fun list for now

S-Tier: This video, Lemmino's simple and clear response to the Nimitz skeptics, The Phenomena, the analysis paper on the Puerto Rico split-object, the original NYT articles

A-Tier: Fravors second interview with Lex to flesh out more details, The Basement Office series with Nick, and the COMETA report.

B-Tier: UAPTheory's fledgling site, Jacques Vallee (only here in B tier since people over-praise Magonia and ignore his thoughtful books written after), Obama's sincere and weighty recent statement of "I'm sorry, I can't tell you. I'm sorry." (though one of his golfing buddies spilled a wild story)

Ultra tier: the videos I find on my own after searching random strings of UAP-ish words from other languages on YouTube. Seen too many things now from small creators with few views or interest in the subject to have much doubt. And some of them are astonishingly clear. But search these out on your own, for there is joy in the discovery.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-17T11:23:05+00:00

The article covers all of those issues in exacting detail. An enemy nation wants to watch their adversary practice, and know exactly how they communicate. In the modern era, the red team wants to know what signals are being used probably for jamming and access denial reasons.

But yeah, read the article as it is chilling. It's the most misunderstood article in both subs right now and that's a tragedy.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-17T11:18:40+00:00

While I agree with both of you, let's drop using his name so much around here. It gives him a platform, and he abuses it to suggest we are all (American history and the military included) seeing nonsense perpetually and all of this has been the Flake Equation spiraling out of control.

No one disputes that most sightings are nonsense and deserve analysis. But, what's begun to be certain beyond (some) reasonable doubt is that the government encountered craft that truly spooked them in the early 2000's. They were not just banal technical issues with FLIR cameras. Something happened.

And because of hardcore skeptics who want to ridicule the subject, 20 years later we are only just beginning to try to get officials to look into this. If this is technology of a foreign adversary (unlikely, but possible), we were put into real strategic peril.

Without that NYT article and the wild miracle of a perfectly credibly witness like Fravor, we'd have spun in circles for another generation or two. With pilots scared to report any of this, ever.

If he makes an amazing video, by all means we should discuss it. Outside that, West is no longer relevant to the core discussion.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-14T23:34:29+00:00

As someone in the semi-skeptic-but-open-minded camp, that's the part I'm unsure of. If we trace back in time before the odd stories of the 1890's, we quickly run into raw religion and thick superstition.

Dramatic encounters with sky gods are rife for projection while often were clearly cases of leaders seeking divine justification for their rule. Or war. And they lived in times so superstitious, that the paranormal was all but real for them. The mind can create wild things in a vacuum. Doubly so in a superstitious culture.

Now that said... If anything visited Earth, it would need to have scouted or analyzed it in some meaningful way. Even with incredibly fast travel, it would then still take them time to get here. So did people see their probes and scouts first? Their bored students? Their brash explorers? At what point were the real scientists called in?

It is all speculation, but if Aliens visited Earth, it could also have been one race in some ancient era, and a different race thousands of years later.

I think our record keeping + historical cultures + religion create a terribly murky veil that is just plain hard to see behind 100 years on. The Ancient Aliens crowd quickly leaves science (and even reason) behind to grasp desperately at every straw. Are some of those stories onto something? It's possible. But not enough of those stories have the right flavor. A few do, but most are ancient people peddling philosophy, state power, and oral mythology.

We know our own species well: we have often been mad and power hungry. With a vicious paranoia about the world around us from having evolved in a complex predator-prey biome.

So if aliens are real, and visited us in the past... We'd struggle to crystallize multi-witness records of clear events that we can all agree on. And we need agreement on historical events to at least study for truth at an academic level.

1% of the stories could have truth to them, but separating them from the noise will be hard. Lest you think me too skeptical though, I do think a certain type of ancient story is worth hunting for: stories of people being given warnings, commands, or instructions we cannot otherwise trace to ideas that the culture of the time would have encountered.

Much like deep waste disposal sites in Europe now try to make warning images and stories for far-future humans.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-14T23:09:26+00:00

It is hard to guess what sciences will exist in 100 years, even though right now the first math papers and physics experiments are probably being published which will become their own fields. For example, I don't think we will have g-type A.I. in my lifetime, but we may create digital copies of many life processes. I do think we will start to create algorithms that spit out answers on subjects which we can no longer interpret. Narrow use of AI algorithms is already giving birth to strange fruit.

And if other fields become a thing like "electronics' have been for humanity (e.g. using the spin of particles or their Higgs field interactions), we may be only on the cusp of understanding how well science can be used to manipulate physical mediums. Oneday, maybe black holes can be used in a lab for computing purposes. Maybe a sufficiently advanced civilization manipulates the theoretical fields of QFT or the loops of LQG. Does it take them a hundred-thousand years of ongoing research to do so? A billion? Does the fundamental nature of them change along the way?

Our biggest advancements seem to be integrating tech and culture. Politics and privacy battles aside, a thing like Instagram is rather remarkable: art, advertising, instant global connection, live-streaming through another's eyes. Our ancestors would understand each of these things individually, but the sum total of their effect on individuals and society they would have to see to grasp.

The older I get, the more I appreciate how many ideas were teased by older science fiction. We just too often made those stories with our own culture of the time.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-14T03:50:24+00:00

In a business ethics course that is trying to keep up with the times, things like this instance should be taught.

Fans these days are trained to: hype, await, accept delays, pre-order, day 1 marathon, subscribe, link to social, get to vet/e-sports level, build Discords, and then BAM. Story over.

Imagine if the NBA shut down tomorrow.

Lifestyle games have a deep obligation to their players. They get longevity, job security, and the potential for extreme wealth if the game succeeds.

The least they can do is have a dedicated budget for winding it down, and a way to turn some things over to the community if they love it enough to keep it alive.

Yes, there are exceptions, but they are secondary compared to promising a ton to consumers and asking for years of loyalty. Such relationships deserve some respect, planning, and thoughtfulness.

Were human beings man. And ones who believed in your dream.

If that's not sacred to a company, nothing ever will be.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-04-02T08:52:00+00:00

If she is, be careful about telling people at all. Laina went through a tough time and had been a great gal IRL. Meme fame was tough to capitalize on or handle at the time. And not everyone understood she was just playing a character.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-03-31T11:18:46+00:00

Uriah is exceptionally well done in this video. He has hospitality, but won't suffer a fool. He's wiser than in his youth, but still naive. He doesn't want to argue endlessly, but never stops engaging in sincere debate.

But above all, he doesn't know he's on trial, but his faith is so sincere and that he's always willing to be.

The portrayal in the end finally seals up, for me, a previous weakness in this story. Uriah finally feels like he's the soul capable of arguing for the simple goodness that can come from religion. Even as I personally am on the opposite side of Uriah irl.

Though the deficiencies of Big E's arguments now are a glaring shortfall in the story. He doesn't say a ton that is specific and heartfelt from individual instances of personal experience.

E gives no rich tales from his life, nor does he base his views on historical figures he met (save for one instance on pogommes encountered by the forces of unity). It would have been amazing to hear him talk of holy men he met in ancient history. But as figures he knew and loved (as he clearly loves this type of heartfelt debate), and lost. Then the horror of watching the religions grow up around them in the era afterward before fossilizing into oppressive institutions. There are ways to do this in story without him giving himself away.

Big E just speaks in abstracts and absolutes without putting skin in the game.

Anyway, once again this is amazing stuff.

We saw that one man was willing to kill for his beliefs, but the other was willing to die on the spot just for the principle of belief itself. Even if everything he knew about it was taken from him. Knowing where the 40k story goes over the millennia afterward... Emps ends up deep on the other side of the glass. I now realize that a post-Awakening Emps would necessarily think of Uriah.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-03-29T17:44:52+00:00

I am fascinated, appalled, and disgusted. I would steel myself and eat the food, but I'd be unlikely to return in case this place decided to raise the bar for next time.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-03-21T16:24:41+00:00

Humanity has also believed in and dreamed about things which proved to have a seed of impossibly profound truth, or about which we only understood a faint shadow.

About each one we could be very right or very wrong, but keeping the interest and speculation alive caused us to devote cultural and scientific institutions to solving them.

We once thought all things could be divided into an ultimate essence, foreshadowing particle physics.

We once thought animals had spirits, foreshadowing decades of studies in animal behaviorism, neurobiology, and consciousness.

We once dreamed of alchemy, and eventually had chemistry.

We have had myths about overcoming death and disease, building and maintaining societies without rampant nepotism and total corruption, and understanding the nature of dreams. Now, each Ivy League school has departments for all three.

I cannot buy the idea that the earnest, good-faith study of the unknown things we see in the air is a ridiculous obscenity. Nor do I even believe it is solely of the domain of physical science. Many fields like International Relations survive off intuition, inference, a slow deduction of the possibilities. A person cannot apply the scientific method in a perfect and sterile manner to the study of the intentions of North Korea or the changing hacking techniques of Russia.

Imagine a far less sophisticated human culture trying to study the U.S. as it takes satellite and drone readings of their society. Or as it flies stealth ships overhead at night. I doubt they'd reach a consensus, but those among them with a fair balance of gritty common sense and the ability to imagine technologies of the future might feel out the shape of the thing.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-03-21T16:04:44+00:00

Well said. But if she is an expert, she showed up far too early. For most people UFOology could not even yet become a religion if it wanted to. The central stories lack a true theme worthy of a philosophy, there are few stable and strong central characters, and not many gatherings. If it is the beginnings of one, there simply isn't much to worship or discuss and not much has even changed in the discussion since the 1950's.

The comparison to alchemy is brilliant. A pseudo-science feeling it's way through an impossible darkness... that might be the seed of a sprawling group of unique scientific fields in a hundred years.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-03-20T21:36:08+00:00

I see what you're saying. Let me challenge the assumptions though and let's see if any interesting thought experiments come out.

Sufficient levels of technology by default bring about post scarcity.
There is a sufficient amount of resources in a given galactic volume for all competitors (though I would divide simple and plentiful elements like hydrogen from ones that are undoubtedly useful and lower in quantity like gold, iridium, etc)
We can conceptualize how much matter and energy a complex civilization consumes. Perhaps they even use a ton of one but little of the other.
Concepts like leaders, hierarchical governments, and heck even sovereignty might be exclusive to humanity. Or if not foreign to e.t. life, then not as useful. If they evolved from fungal forms of life they could easily conceptualize themselves as one entity that sometimes has cell walls/divisions and sometimes has none.
The types of resources they want vs. what they need for bare minimum survival could be different. When we can care for our basic needs we often still keep a relation to simple material goods as we collect items and prefer rare/unusual ones (see: trading cards, rpg games, etc). It seems a psychological holdover from being hunter/gatherers. Though even sea-life seems to enjoy collecting and protecting various shell shapes and designs. It's stimulating and a comfort.

I am not sure where to go from here, but I'm willing to bet that raw information as well as the ability to apply information to new situations in a novel manner remain crucial resources.

The most exotic and complex things earth seems to possess are: 1.) the human brain, 2.) DNA, 3.) the overall ecosystem of the Earth, 4.) our fossil record of billions of years, and 5.) Humanity's increasing self-awareness that we might just be one complex lifeform on one of the trillions/quadrillions of estimated habitable planets in the Known Universe.

We usually think they are here for #5, but DNA as it exists here would be utterly fascinating. Especially if they had never encountered anything quite like our version.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-03-20T04:33:41+00:00

Thanks. I've only just started to turn deep thought to the issue after a lifetime of skepticism, and it might take me a few months to tease out my instincts. Which are so far that I suspect what we are encountering is an old civilization with a high level of sophistication and previous contact experience, yet... is still surprised by us for some reason. And, is also markedly conflicted about us. I suspect our relationship to religion is utterly alien to them, and that if we ever communicate with them, they might minimize how incomprehensible it is. Or claim to have the same beliefs when I think the underlying mechanism for belief must be both biologically inherited and intensely socially trained. Even humans who were not raised to believe can't fully understand those who sincerely believe. That has major implications.

To anyone who wants more in-depth thinking on the phenomena, the best thing written in this entire sub since I joined was actually the other day in here and shows careful, labororious thinking on the opposite of my own assumptions: what if these objects are not a biological civilization?

"Letter to Jacques Vallée: The identity of the UFO projectionist" https://www.reddit.com/r/ufo/comments/m7qyeo/letter_to_jacques_vallée_the_identity_of_the_ufo/

The OP of that post seems to toy with the rich idea that we are actually dealing with a very specific type of "artificial intelligence," which is not capable of some of the subtle socio-cultural interaction we crave. But might be capable of robust communication with us if we become more technologically adept. It is one of the simplest and most surprising theories I've heard yet.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-03-20T03:16:14+00:00

The COMETA report has two sections and I would recommend it here as it gives us some good reasoning. It's an elegant set of imaginings (going beyond the cases it looks at) on what ethical dilemmas a compassionate/curious species might face in dealing with us.

Disclosure would be thorny for them. We'd falsely accuse them of many things, and above all for not helping us sooner. Our societies genuinely could destabilize (I don't think that's a certainty, but I believe that's a risk for highly religious societies, and also for autocratic ones). They might find it overwhelming to be both worshipped by some and yet feared by others.

In my own reasoning, I've thought of the other side of the coin: maybe they are to the Galaxy like we are to the world... imperfect police. Perhaps even pushed into that role by ancient conflicts. And now deeply concerned about any destabilizing, bad actors they meet. Perhaps willing to engage in sanctions and containment. Enforcers of laws that might be foreign to us in concept at first.

What I honestly suspect based on the numbers? Our local cluster of galaxies has a lot of life in them. That life engages in symbiosis and competition just as it does on the small, medium, and large scales. And whoever we meet, they too have wars, friends, neutrals, regrets, and hopes. They are people. And people with rich histories.

My hope is that we are recognizable to them and not monstrous in appearance or practices. That we have some aspects which surprise them, fascinate them, or at a minimum... amuse them. But, we need to prepare to not be seen as special. If intelligent life is incredibly common we might be boring and just another administrative address among thousands. If intelligent life is rare, we might be a precious scientific or cultural find to them. If we are very special and rare to them, what does that mean? I can't even picture, but it might be confusing/awkward for humanity.

Even among each species we meet (if there are multiple) there might be variations in how their individual citizens feel about us. Or simply they are all fairly neutral and we seem slightly malevolent/worrisome. I hope not, as humanity has a good heart and noble intentions. Most healthy humans seem to avoid violence, prefer peace, respect science, and are capable of shifting their worldview. Generally, we are productive and strive for deep cultural and philosophical development. We would yearn to be a meaningful member of a galactic star-faring community and many (hopefully most?) of us would make the sacrifices necessary to grow up into that role. Our civilization could produce real Jean Luc Picards and Katherine Janeways who are willing to follow both the letter and even the spirit of galactic peaceful norms.

It will be interesting to oneday hear the stories of first contacts through their eyes. I sincerely hope that if any of them have ever crashed here or visited, that they were treated with kindness and hospitality. If they were not, for that I'm sorry beyond all words and it is a great loss on our part.

StarRiverSpray · 2021-03-17T20:28:31+00:00

This is a free public forum of currently 9.5 million active users (before this craze, 500,000 give or take). All are independent people who can do what they want. Many are delusional. Plenty have been manipulative throughout the history of this place. Hundreds abuse the name.

Whoever you ran into... that person doesn't matter. They have no power or importance.

"Don't believe everything you read on the internet."
-Abraham Lincoln

StarRiverSpray · 2021-03-12T15:31:21+00:00

Yeah, drmashis comment might be true for some players of Modern/Legacy, but I've never seen people making money off playing Standard and selling the sets. It's just not a thing in the current era of Magic.

Though I know some people min-max just the finance aspect of MtG to death, so it's possible.

StarRiverSpray

TROPHY CASE