Eric Wargo's defense of the extraterrestrial ("nuts & bolts") hypothesis

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Welcome to the Noöverse: Big Data, Deep Anthropology, and Von Neumann Probes

“Space Aliens” are no longer fashionable as an explanation for UFOs, but the trajectory of human science shows why the extra - terrestrial hypothesis (ETH), with some modifications, should be kept on the table.

When Vallee published his “Five Arguments” in 1990, the term “big data” was still a decade in the future. But the picture of ET space science limiting itself to thin-slicing data collection, isolated visits to reconnoiter and gather samples, coupled with remote monitoring of our TV broadcasts, did not take into account the scientific possibilities created by virtually unlimited data gathering, storage, and analytic capabilities emerging in the 21st century. It also misses a whole side of biological and behavioral research: experiment and replication. These become greatly enhanced in power and possible to automate on a large scale with the intertwined developments of big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics.

We all know how robots have or will soon take boring and dangerous tasks like vacuuming our floors, driving our cars, and fighting our wars out of human hands. Most people don’t realize what an infinitely tedious task it is to do good science. In not too long, we will have the ability to automate not only the gathering of information but also the very posing of research questions, and one of the first things we will teach AI to do (besides not kill us) is to ask questions and then answer them in a scientific fashion—that is, form hypotheses based on prior findings, and then design and conduct experiments to test those hypotheses. . . and then repeat this over and over and over. Already big data and machine learning are vastly accelerating scientific advances in health, astronomy, and many other fields.

This is where the ancientness and ubiquity of the UFO phenomenon starts to make sense in terms of what we might call “machine ETH.” Given the likelihood that countless ET civilizations have arisen over the past few billion years that are capable of populating space with such machines, a planet like ours could potentially have been swarmed with untold millions of probes, not only quietly observing and recording but also overtly interacting with the local flora and fauna for the purposes of experimentation and hypothesis-testing over the full course of the planet’s history.