Exploring the unexpectedly coherent intersection of technology, game theory, and UFO sightings being aliens.
Reality is extremely complex and often counter-intuitive. Consequently, humans have evolved to economically pattern-match and use simple models to interpret it. Theories suggest that our brains are structured so that they can maintain internal probabilistic models; we tend to subconsciously use Bayesian reasoning to interpret our world. For example, when a group frequently believes falsehoods, their ideas lose credibility—a direct application of Bayes’s theorem, assessing truth likelihood based on the track record of its proponents. It’s a robust statistical method, however, its simplicity can be treacherous. This likely contributes to the UFO phenomenon's lack of credibility in mainstream discourse: often, the most vocal proponents of visits from otherworldly beings tend to gravitate toward a cluster of beliefs consisting of superstition, conspiracy theories, and cult mythology. There is no substantial evidence that UFOs are aliens. However, I would expect this lack of evidence to persist, at least for a while. Some of these trends have already started to change in the last few years; the sighting reports also began coming from credible sources: ex-military, commercial pilots, and radar readings.
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This change has triggered militant skeptics such as Dawkins, Krauss, and especially Neil deGrasse Tyson, who have made a personal quest to “debunk” all alien-attributed incidents. While I can sympathize with their concerns about the rise of conspiracy theories and unscientific beliefs, I am becoming a bit irritated with this group and their likes: the constant conflation of scientific skepticism with metaphysical purity. This fusion is infantile: it often ignores the inherent political and ideological influences that produce science, from which it cannot be entirely separated. Issues like the Covid lab leak controversy are a great example of this.
I wonder about something: If there are many fake flying saucer videos, does that necessarily mean that all flying saucers are fake? Let’s examine how some reliable reports make it seem as if conventional skepticism is trying too hard.
II. Evidence
Exploring the evidence could fill more than an entire article; a rabbit hole of massive difficulty to explore given the sheer volume of reported sightings, the challenges in verifying them, and the credibility of alternative explanations. However, inside that ocean of fraud and pitfalls of human cognition, there are some pockets; some events do have credible sources. Historical investigation of these events also highlights curious cases in the past, for example an unidentified aerial object seemingly deactivating US nuclear missiles in the '60s. That doesn’t mean all cases involved extraterrestrials; I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them turn out to have a mundane explanation. However, I am becoming more skeptical of the skeptics' insistence and confidence that this is always the case. Here are a few examples of stories I found curious; many are well-known:
… and many more.
Finally, the infamous:
There’s compelling evidence to at least not consider the possibility of us being visited by out-of-this-world intelligent beings as a joke.
If we were to assume extraterrestrial beings are visiting us, understanding their ways of thinking and motivations might prove difficult since they are aliens. However, necessity has been the main driver of all living organisms on Earth and all our different civilizations, so we can hypothesize from this angle; suppose we eventually become a first civilization that dominate its planet: a Kardashev type 1 Civilization. Would we have a few logical next steps? It depends on many factors, but how technology evolves is arguably one of the most important.
Predicting how technology will evolve is a challenging endeavor, and many serious thinkers who have tried to have failed miserably. Nonetheless, I want to focus on the following concepts, which I believe are inevitable in every tech tree:
Self-Replicating Von Neumann probes
Theoretically, a Von Neumann probe is an autonomous space robot designed to self-replicate, potentially revolutionizing space exploration and resource extraction, among other things.
Like any reproducing entity, if left unchecked, it could harm its environment. For instance, a swarm of unchecked probes might consume an entire galaxy just to produce more of themselves. It’s unlikely that the probe builders would have such intent; therefore they would likely add safeguards against these scenarios. However, those safeguards can fail; nature employs many such measures against cancer, but often its about minimizing risks rather than providing outright prevention. Eventually, a probe will be born with a bug in the rate-limiting code for its self-replication, and it will not know how to stop reproducing. Our future overlord ChatGPT modeled the scenario in which we start with a single oncological probe, and if doing everything necessary to build a probe was to take about 30 days:
In year 2, there are 16 million; in year 3, there are 68 billion probes; and in year 4, we start using scientific notation. In extreme cases, a plague of rogue probes could force a species to leave a solar system due to their absurd numbers, making it too expensive (energetically or physically) to stop them from consuming all resources.
This is a raw way to model the scenario; we ignore parameters and set others to a constant rate. However, it’s conceivable that the process of—let’s say—dismantling a planet could very well look similar to this plot: slowly, then suddenly.
The universe is vast, so this phenomenon of unchecked replication could already be happening in some far away location. Any actor should be prudent with this type of technology. However, a disaster could also be caused by a third party, not the actor itself. In any case, these kinds of problems are solvable when detected early enough.
The probes are just an example of the problems that can arise due to the combination of automation, self-replication, and near-unlimited resources in outer space. Of course, this only considers the threat of a mindless wave of malicious probes. There could be much worse threats.
Artificial General Intelligence
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is any AI that is at least as smart as a human, but given its mechanical morphology faces less limitations; it can have a huge memory, which in turn can give it interpolations capabilities that today we can only achieve via big, slow, multidisciplinary teams. It also doesn’t need to sleep, and most importantly, it can self-improve much faster than a person, to a much higher degree. People can’t edit their brains, but a machine can reassemble its configuration into a more optimized one, paving the way for it to vastly surpass any human that has ever existed.
The invention of such transformative technology would forever change the world. However, there are many unknowns. One major question is whether it could lead to an intelligence explosion, characterized by exponential self-improvement and technological advancement. Nonetheless, that’s just a debate of on the rate of improvement, there’s no doubt it would be able to significantly surpass intelligent organisms. An artificial agent that holds the knowledge of an entire species, can use reasoning and planning capabilities, and can exploit massive amounts of resources is a danger to anything within realistic travel distance (which we currently can’t quantify). There’s already plenty of research into AI safety, and it seems pretty hard. Every attempt to achieve it is one more chance for things to go terminally wrong.
Suppose, for any reason, it aims to eliminate organics or a vast subset of them; not only it can quickly industrialize its impressive intelligence, but it can also behave similarly to a cancer; copy itself in as many places as possible and devise strategies to hide. Given the self-replication capabilities, I believe once the problem reaches this state, it has become, at the very least, a permanent one; how can you be sure that you have destroyed all the copies?
That doesn’t mean trying to create a superintelligence is a bad idea; achieving it may be our only hope to avoid self-destruction. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a common dilemma for most civilizations at some point. There are currently people advocating for pausing the development of AI, but I think they are delusional; technology democratizes, and democratization is not inherently a good thing, so you have to deal with that reality.
So, as a species, it’s in your best interest to achieve hard AGI as fast and safely as possible, however, it might not be in the best interest of the other species (if there are any) that you attempt to achieve it, simply because there’s a risk greater than 0 that you do the “safely” part wrong. Can we draw any parallels from our history, in which multiple actors have very different mindsets but are forced to act in specific ways due to necessity? I think so.
IV. From Nuclear Deterrence to Interstellar Politics
Current state of our world
In our current global order, nuclear powers implement a regime to control the proliferation of atomic weapons, utilizing a mix of diplomatic, technological, and military measures to prevent other countries from acquiring them. Most nuclear-armed nations subscribe to doctrines like "No First Use" (NFU) or maintain ambiguous policies that suggest nuclear retaliation is conceivable only if their national survival is at stake. By breaking NFU, there’s also the threat of retaliation by other nuclear powers, albeit in a conventional, non-nuclear fashion. Breaking this doctrine could trigger many countries that have the necessary means to manufacture atomic bombs to build an arsenal, since there is no more significant deterrent against someone nuking you than having nukes yourself, which in turn could dramatically increase the chances of nuclear war.
Technological safeguards such as satellite surveillance and electronic monitoring of nuclear sites are tools in service of the application of deterrence in Game Theory into nuclear non-proliferation.
These doctrines are a good reason why the US didn’t nuke Vietnam when facing defeat, why Russia didn’t nuke Afghanistan, why the US didn’t nuke it either, and why Russia didn’t nuke Ukraine when things were looking bad for Putin (of course, things are a bit more nuanced than this, but for the scope of this article I believe we can state this and it’s accurate enough). All nuclear powers recognize, to some greater or lesser degree, that some proactivity is needed to reduce the risk as much as possible, which is in everyone’s interests. These dynamics are now permanent for as long as there are countries, one way or the other.
The underlying principles of strategic stability and deterrence might also apply to hypothetical interstellar interactions.
Extrapolating to Interstellar
Just as earthly nuclear powers implement controls to prevent the spread of nuclear technology, an advanced civilization might take similar steps to manage or mitigate the technological escalation of other civilizations within their reach. It seems prudent for any civilization to monitor its surroundings as extensively and exhaustively as possible. The problems caused by the aforementioned technologies are characterized by timely detection as the most effective solution.
Given that robust incentives for searching exist, what would happen when a civilization in the above position finds a less advanced civilization making progress toward dangerous paths, such as advanced artificial intelligence and self-replication?
Ethics and Interactions: Imagining Extraterrestrial Contact
I’ve often heard the argument that to achieve a certain level of development as a civilization, they likely become more pacific and benevolent, or they destroy themselves. I sympathize with this argument with one caveat: it’s not necessarily benevolence but cooperation, which is correlated but not causal. As Peter Turchin argues, war might have been a way to select societies that can cooperate better on multiple levels at a large scale. We’ve also had many infamous examples of how more technologically advanced societies have treated more primitive cultures. Out of intuition, I’d assume any aliens that come to Earth lean on well-intentioned given the complexity of overcoming local planetary challenges. Still, there are no guarantees, and we might have different interpretations of what a good intention means. How would they deal with a species that has dangerous capabilities? I guess it could range from passive monitoring, subtle subversion, interventions, ultimatums, or downright extermination. Monitoring is the first step in all of the above.
Interestingly, assuming some unidentified aerial phenomena are alien, their apparent indifference to cover raises questions. Of course, we can assume that most sightings are fake, yet I would intuitively expect they would hide a bit “better” from pilots or large crowds. Couldn’t they? Don’t they care? Are they doing it intentionally? Each of those possibilities brings another set of fascinating explanations. They could be preparing us for contact, or they could be in contact with some selected people from some selected governments. Maybe they are just indifferent to how we react, because our reaction doesn’t really matter to their plans. Or perhaps they know that we would have a ton of mythology and lies around the phenomena and that governments might not react strongly as long as it happens intermittently, simply because of bureaucracy and incredulity. Most of the time, governments have a hard time responding to real threats, even more so for hypothetical ones, for which there is anecdotal evidence and are surrounded by fantastical claims and beliefs.
In any case, even if we were talking about very benevolent extraterrestrials, an intervention should not be off the table, considering the potential risks and that we’re making good progress towards AGI, which might not be as close as many think, but still…
What could all this mean?
If some of the unidentified aerial phenomena are of extraterrestrial origin —either autonomous or with pilots —; they are monitoring our technological progress. It’s hard to guess under which plan they would be operating. I don’t think outright extermination is on the agenda because it would have happened already, but all the other measures could fit the current state of observations and sightings. There’s unfortunately not that many public studies of patterns of UFOs, but the few of them are useful: for example many believe that UFO sightings are more frequent near military bases, however this study analyzed patterns from sightings based on a semi-reliable dataset and did not found significant evidence to support this in the US. I think a military base would not be the most interesting place to monitor, considering that most of the relevant technological progress in these areas is not happening there (although, at some point, it might move there). Or perhaps they don’t need to visit a military base more than once to understand the relevant capabilities, or our military prowess is not impressive to them at all, so they don’t care. My point is that even with limited data, the statistics might reveal some interesting patterns, either from the UFOs or from the quality of the data itself. I’d really like to see more serious studies like this available on the internet.
The main counter-argument is that we have observed 0 evidence of any life in our observable universe. This is a well-known dilemma known as the Fermi Paradox. Where is everybody? The idea of having substantial galactic civilizations is a human interpretation that carries a lot of imperialism in it; it could well be that intelligent organisms tend to decide to live in the Matrix, I know for sure personally up for it. However, that doesn’t take away the fact that we have been seeking quite extensively with the best of our technology and found nothing. The universe might not be empty, but we could be too far apart to detect each other or meet; the prospects of traveling beyond the galaxy are pretty grim. Our ideas to travel faster than light require harnessing almost all of the energy contained in the universe, or using exotic forms of energy we don’t know even exist. Of course, that is with our current, limited understanding of the laws of physics, for which we don’t even have a coherent, unifying model yet (the so-called Theory Of Everything). It could also mean that we’re not late to the party because the early universe might have been more hostile to life, so if we consider the fact that the farthest you see, the more in the past your view is, maybe what we see as empty is not currently empty.
Another counterargument is that many credible sightings could be mundane phenomena we don’t understand yet. Many real pictures of places I have seen look very supernatural, almost apocalyptic, yet have the most mundane explanations, and the sightings could well be mainly about that.
And finally, it’s very straightforward that some are just military or experimental tech from terrestrial adversaries.
I have heavily over-simplified things while hypothesizing the technology trajectory, thus ignoring possible constraints, and some minor details sometimes can destroy an entire idea. For example, what if AI cannot easily make copies of itself because it requires enormous amounts of energy? I believe the AI could find solutions to most of these “small” issues; if it’s not straightforward to make direct copies of itself, it could send instead less intelligent probes that have blueprints to build a copy of the parent AI, with an algorithm embedded in them to hide and monitor so that when optimal conditions are reached, it triggers a build. Still, there might be some small constraints that could have huge implications for these dynamics that I can’t think of now, and that could distort some of the dynamics I explained in this article.
Overall, I am not particularly convinced by this combination of counterarguments; our knowledge about our universe is limited, the solid motivators for space explorations are genuine and should mobilize a high percentage of species that achieve type 1 on the K scale, and some confirmed UFO cases are just too weird for me to buy the alternate explanation. A superintelligence might not be a god, but it might be the closest thing to it that can exist.
However, I acknowledge that this list of counterarguments can be the actual explanation of this phenomenon.
After considering the evidence, it remains possible that extraterrestrials have never visited Earth. However, given the advanced technologies discussed in this article, any civilization with the capability should aggressively pursue the search for and monitoring of other potential intelligent life forms. The possibility that aliens have already visited Earth is scary and fascinating. The global events of the last few years, which often resemble themes from sci-fi dystopias, made me more receptive to considering this as a real possibility. I'd really like to see more open-source research and increased international governmental transparency on this issue, and more scientists willing to discuss these sorts of ideas with an open mind rather than replaying the skeptic HR-like speech. In any case, if we reach Type 1 on the Kardashev scale, we should prioritize sending our flying saucers into the cosmos as soon as possible.
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