Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were “real”. How could these events happen? Physical aliens would be grabby, we wouldn’t see stars next to us lacking Dyson swarms, if the aliens arrived recently you would expect to have seen their starship decelerating in a flare of gamma rays. (Assuming propulsion methods we know of, most high isp high thrust engines emit such a flare).
When I brainstormed this I thought of one kinda unsatisfying idea. In parallel universe theories, the earth may be an attractor for parallel earths, and we could be seeing bleedover from these parallel realities. Simulator glitches would also explain this. Neither is a satisfying explanation and not obviously exploitable or reproducible, this is just me trying to understand what could do this. If real, we could be seeing the ghosts of other flying machines from other timelines or corrupt memory from a simulator showing essentially the same.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were “real”. How could these events happen?
One possibility:
Suppose that our 3D-ish reality is actually a tiny part of something much, much larger.
And when I say “larger”, I don’t mean just “more dimensions” or “parallel universes”. It’s worth remembering that our impressions of space, time, object, etc. are basically bits of software interface that let us interact with… something… in ways that seem to be relevant to our survival. That doesn’t mean they represent reality as it actually is, any more than the folder icons on your computer desktop represent the state of your computer as it actually is.
If there’s something we’d interpret as entity-like when it interacts with our tiny corner of existence, but whatever that something is operates mostly in the bigger context, we’d find its behavior immensely baffling. Kind of like ants trying to make sense of an anteater, or of a storm.
Or a kid fucking with the ants out of passing curiosity.
The kinds of things we think of as resources only make sense in the context of our survival. What if “survival” as we think of it looks about as meaningful to mega-”entities” with a larger perspective as our watching a rock finish rolling downhill? Oh no, it stopped moving. The horror. And how callous of us not to care about the rock-in-motion’s possible desire to keep existing!
And I mean this much, much more vastly than with UFO-type stuff. We don’t know where the laws of physics come from for instance. We notice beautiful symmetries and fascinating correspondences between different parts. But what that shows is a kind of consistency. A river is relatively consistent too. It still makes sense to ask where the river comes from, even though you can fully explain the river’s local behavior based on the shape of the terrain and the presence of already-moving water. It’s awfully strange to pretend we know everything about the river because we can give these explanations. Those explanations miss almost everything about almost everything.
So I think there’s a lot of room for reality to be pretty immensely vast. Far more vast than even this already mind-bogglingly overwhelmingly huge physical universe.
Mostly we just talk about the tiny thing humans are used to talking about.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were “real”. How could these events happen? Physical aliens would be grabby, we wouldn’t see stars next to us lacking Dyson swarms, if the aliens arrived recently you would expect to have seen their starship decelerating in a flare of gamma rays. (Assuming propulsion methods we know of, most high isp high thrust engines emit such a flare).
When I brainstormed this I thought of one kinda unsatisfying idea. In parallel universe theories, the earth may be an attractor for parallel earths, and we could be seeing bleedover from these parallel realities. Simulator glitches would also explain this. Neither is a satisfying explanation and not obviously exploitable or reproducible, this is just me trying to understand what could do this. If real, we could be seeing the ghosts of other flying machines from other timelines or corrupt memory from a simulator showing essentially the same.
(I think pReal is small, less than 5 percent)
One possibility:
Suppose that our 3D-ish reality is actually a tiny part of something much, much larger.
And when I say “larger”, I don’t mean just “more dimensions” or “parallel universes”. It’s worth remembering that our impressions of space, time, object, etc. are basically bits of software interface that let us interact with… something… in ways that seem to be relevant to our survival. That doesn’t mean they represent reality as it actually is, any more than the folder icons on your computer desktop represent the state of your computer as it actually is.
If there’s something we’d interpret as entity-like when it interacts with our tiny corner of existence, but whatever that something is operates mostly in the bigger context, we’d find its behavior immensely baffling. Kind of like ants trying to make sense of an anteater, or of a storm.
Or a kid fucking with the ants out of passing curiosity.
The kinds of things we think of as resources only make sense in the context of our survival. What if “survival” as we think of it looks about as meaningful to mega-”entities” with a larger perspective as our watching a rock finish rolling downhill? Oh no, it stopped moving. The horror. And how callous of us not to care about the rock-in-motion’s possible desire to keep existing!
And I mean this much, much more vastly than with UFO-type stuff. We don’t know where the laws of physics come from for instance. We notice beautiful symmetries and fascinating correspondences between different parts. But what that shows is a kind of consistency. A river is relatively consistent too. It still makes sense to ask where the river comes from, even though you can fully explain the river’s local behavior based on the shape of the terrain and the presence of already-moving water. It’s awfully strange to pretend we know everything about the river because we can give these explanations. Those explanations miss almost everything about almost everything.
So I think there’s a lot of room for reality to be pretty immensely vast. Far more vast than even this already mind-bogglingly overwhelmingly huge physical universe.
Mostly we just talk about the tiny thing humans are used to talking about.