Elon Musk: I don't see any evidence of aliens.

Isn't this just an argument of incredulity after you boil it down?

Your argument presupposes constraints that are subjective: that star travel takes thousands of years, that more mass = greater infeasibility, that Musk's tech is sufficient to detect aliens.  These are subjective because the argument presumes our current understanding of physics is completely explanatory.  They aren't, as we all know, and there's a certain amount of irony in all this considering the state of cosmological physics at present.

This does not strengthen the claims (for aliens) of course.

It is important not to conflate complex cosmological models based on assumptions about processes that have occurred over billions of years, which we cannot experimentally verify, with fundamental physical facts that can easily be tested in a laboratory and are applied in our everyday technology. It is indisputable that baryonic matter cannot move at velocities greater than the speed of light - in fact, it cannot even reach that speed, only getting infinitely close to it. In my view, this is as certain as the fact that the Earth is round. The reason I like to compare the "hidden aliens" hypothesis with the "flat Earth" hypothesis is that both are fundamentally based on the idea that there exists an elite that is completely lying to the rest of the world's population and that Newton and Einstein never happened (dam those two are inconvenient, let's just pretend gravity doesn't exist).

But does anyone have any reason to believe you possessed fairy dust or that goblins stole it?

I think the difference here is that there are witnesses of objects that seem to be craft. Personally I don't believe extraterrestrials have come here, and even the possibility of interdimensional "ultra-terrestrials" coming in vehicles is unconvincing...

But I do think the fact that witness reports speak of supposed craft puts it above claims of fairy dust. Similarly there are figures that different people have claimed had some transcendent/supernatural status, for example to pick one far removed from today's religions/politics:

• Eunapius, The Lives of the Philosophers
  

Now was Iamblichus really [able] to do any of this? No idea, but my understanding is most historians at least think he was a real person. That to me is different than insisting someone like the Scorpion King from the Mummy movies existed in some ancient time?

My post was only in relation to Silence's argument concerning the laws of physics.

It is important not to conflate complex cosmological models based on assumptions about processes that have occurred over billions of years, which we cannot experimentally verify, with fundamental physical facts that can easily be tested in a laboratory and are applied in our everyday technology. It is indisputable that baryonic matter cannot move at velocities greater than the speed of light - in fact, it cannot even reach that speed, only getting infinitely close to it. In my view, this is as certain as the fact that the Earth is round. The reason I like to compare the "hidden aliens" hypothesis with the "flat Earth" hypothesis is that both are fundamentally based on the idea that there exists an elite that is completely lying to the rest of the world's population and that Newton and Einstein never happened (dam those two are inconvenient, let's just pretend gravity doesn't exist).

The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science

Nancy Cartwright

The picture of the world offered us by the physicists is of one governed by a relatively few, simple, allembracing laws; a world where order and regularity reign. It is a vision that would have been familiar to Scottish philosopher David Hume in the eighteenth century: just as he said, we see regularities in nature and we infer causal connections on the basis of those regularities. The problem Hume saw, of course, was precisely in the nature of that inference. The fact that up to now, a pair of events have always been observed to go together in such a way as to give rise to a description in terms of cause and effect, doesn’t necessarily mean that they will always be so conjoined in the future. What we require is some kind of necessary connection between the two events themselves if we are to be assured that nature will not change tomorrow, and such necessity can never be read off from what are merely regularities.

To assume that the laws of physics are supreme is to remain within the confines of this Humean world. Physical laws assert what are supposedly eternal regularities, but there is nothing necessary about them: we can have no guarantee that the law that holds today will hold tomorrow or, for that matter, that it isn’t just a local effect applying only to our observable part of the universe, and that different laws may apply elsewhere.

For Nancy Cartwright this is all the wrong way about. For her, the world presented by the laws of physics is largely a fiction. The world in which we live, unlike that inside the laboratory, is a messy, unpredictable place, marked by discontinuities and fractures. The regularities promised by physics are rarely apparent. It is a more dangerous – in some ways a more interesting place – than the supposedly absolute and eternal laws of physics would suggest. There is a lack of fit between the laws and reality as we know it: to find the regularities promised you need to look hard and deep and under certain special conditions; you need, ideally, to be in a laboratory.

It is important not to conflate complex cosmological models based on assumptions about processes that have occurred over billions of years, which we cannot experimentally verify, with fundamental physical facts that can easily be tested in a laboratory and are applied in our everyday technology. It is indisputable that baryonic matter cannot move at velocities greater than the speed of light - in fact, it cannot even reach that speed, only getting infinitely close to it. In my view, this is as certain as the fact that the Earth is round. The reason I like to compare the "hidden aliens" hypothesis with the "flat Earth" hypothesis is that both are fundamentally based on the idea that there exists an elite that is completely lying to the rest of the world's population and that Newton and Einstein never happened (dam those two are inconvenient, let's just pretend gravity doesn't exist).

I don't disagree with your logic.  All I'm pointing out are its limitations.

Let's start here: Are there theoretical methods of travel/comms to/at great distances that don't violate matter travelling at speeds greater than light?  Folding space, entanglement, multiple dimensions, etc.

All I'm saying is that using our current knowledge of the universe to assert the impossibility of alien visitation is simply hubris.  Nothing more.

I don't disagree with your logic.  All I'm pointing out are its limitations.

Let's start here: Are there theoretical methods of travel/comms to/at great distances that don't violate matter travelling at speeds greater than light?  Folding space, entanglement, multiple dimensions, etc.

All I'm saying is that using our current knowledge of the universe to assert the impossibility of alien visitation is simply hubris.  Nothing more.

We'd need a new kind of entanglement for FTL communication (and ideally not violate causality!), but there is to my understanding some hypothetical means of FTL travel such as the "warp drive" papers...

We'd need a new kind of entanglement for FTL communication (and ideally not violate causality!), but there is to my understanding some hypothetical means of FTL travel such as the "warp drive" papers...

Warp drives are mathematical solutions to Einstein’s field equations without any observational support. When someone demonstrates the existence of negative gravity (a gravity that repels baryonic matter instead of attraction) I will start paying warp drives serious attention. (They are highly unlikely to exist as they will also enable time travelling).

Warp drives are mathematical solutions to Einstein’s field equations without any observational support. When someone demonstrates the existence of negative gravity (a gravity that repels baryonic matter instead of attraction) I will start paying warp drives serious attention. (They are highly unlikely to exist as they will also enable time travelling).

Sure it's hypothetical, and yeah if there is any retrocausation I'd say it's impossible on logical grounds.

However I'm not certain a warp drive, if possible, genuinely involves time travel. Similarly there is an argument that FTL communication would destroy causality that AFAICTell is true in standard physics but may not be so bad under a future physics...

Sure it's hypothetical, and yeah if there is any retrocausation I'd say it's impossible on logical grounds.

However I'm not certain a warp drive, if possible, genuinely involves time travel. Similarly there is an argument that FTL communication would destroy causality that AFAICTell is true in standard physics but may not be so bad under a future physics...

The point of the discussion was to highlight the enormous implausibility of crashed nuts-and-bolts UFOs in American deserts (we lack deserts here in Europe, so we don’t have that lore).

The general discussion about UFOs and what they might be is a whole different conversation. Here, we can postulate on less hypothetical grounds that they could be something completely different than 'nuts and bolts.

The point of the discussion was to highlight the enormous implausibility of crashed nuts-and-bolts UFOs in American deserts (we lack deserts here in Europe, so we don’t have that lore).

The general discussion about UFOs and what they might be is a whole different conversation. Here, we can postulate on less hypothetical grounds that they could be something completely different than 'nuts and bolts.

I just don't think "violates the known laws of physics" is a major objection. 

It does count to some degree since physical UFOs crash landing from other planets would suggest they need to obey some kind of physics like we've discovered. But I don't think Starlink's failure to detect any presence is a real consideration, only partly b/c I think Musk is exaggerating the degree of coverage Starlink offers for business purposes.

I think Emerson Green and Jimmy Akin, in the video I posted, qualify or outright rebut a lot of skeptical talking points on UFOs. While I remain unconvinced that the US or any other government is hiding craft or corpses from other planets, it did make me less able to outright dismiss the "nuts and bolts" claims.

I just don't think "violates the known laws of physics" is a major objection. 

Any unknown physics is bound to be causally disconnected from the physics we can interact with or will be totally inconsequential except at massive energy scales. Maybe it's instructive to take what's going on inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as an example. Each proton being smashed is accelerated to 7 TeV in the 27 km long ring of superconducting magnets. How much is that? Using the formula for kinetic energy E = 1/2 * m * v^2, we can calculate the energy of the protons at these relativistic speeds to be equivalent to an insect (60 mg) flying at 20 cm/s.

1/2 * 6 * 10^-5 * (0.2)^2 = 1.2 * 10^-6 J

Converting this to TeV:

1.2 * 10^-6 J * (1 eV / 1.602 * 10^-19 J) * (1 TeV / 10^12 eV) ≈ 7.5 TeV

But in comparison, this insect has 36 thousand trillion nucleons, and we are comparing with just 1 proton. Now let's assume the "big honking mothership" example being used by the two Star Wars kids Emerson Green and Jimmy Akin is of identical mass as the USS Gerald Ford (~100,000 tons) (using their bigger spaceship must mean we should take it more seriously logic). Such a steel construction contains, using some approximations, on the order of magnitude 1.078 * 10^33 nucleons. If each of these were to be accelerated to the same speed as the protons in the LHC, the total kinetic energy of our spaceship would be:

7 TeV/proton * 1.078 * 10^33 protons = 7.546 * 10^33 TeV

Converting this to joules:

7.546 * 10^33 TeV * 1.602 * 10^-7 J/TeV = 1.209 * 10^27 J

In comparison, the energy output from the sun in a whole year is approximately 1.209 * 10^34 joules, which gives a relative difference of:

1.209 * 10^27 J / 1.209 * 10^34 J = 10^-7

Even given these extreme energies, the LHC has found no new physics (and now they are talking about building a 62-mile long successor to the LHC using even more incredible energies).

So, what you discard as a mundane argument is actually an incredibly solid argument for why we absolutely have no interstellar nuts & bolts aliens flying around here.