Sora came along about a week before all this stuff with the drones started to happen, so it's basically now impossible to trust anything coming out of anywhere except the Federal government and local authorities. Social media is flooded with images of unknown provenance, the Federal government is clearly lying, and local authorities are consistent that something is up.

Ironically, I can't be as confident betting in this market anymore not because I think it's NO, but there's no way to figure out what's actually going on anymore. Every site is flooded with videos of such poor quality that it's conceivable that Sora could have generated them.

Therefore, I am betting in this market now, which is the direct cause of the problem: /SteveSokolowski/will-a-majority-of-manifold-respond I think that it's going to resolve to YES.

@SteveSokolowski in classic fashion none of this makes sense as video editing software capable of making similar low quality videos has been available for decades and the videos are also easily made by just taking shots of consumer drones in low light conditions. You can buy a drone and test this yourself with a cell phone camera. Sora is irrelevant.

The market was also always about it being "revealed to be world shattering" so even if you think it is world shattering, if this can be obfuscated it's still NO on being revealed and you think it's a YES for this market.

@SteveSokolowski I haven't seen a single Sora video that is indiscernible from real, even poor quality video. Not yet.

Maybe relevant. I'm pretty curious about this one (POLL):

https://manifold.markets/DanHomerick/is-believing-in-conspiracy-theories

My theory about what's happening is starting to coalesce.

The drones in New Jersey are some operation started by the government, or a rogue defense contractor, with some sort of new advanced power source. Biden ordered this to start, or the defense contractor ordered it to start, on a Monday during a lame duck period after Harris lost, taking off on Thanksgiving, and working during evening hours so as not to pay overtime during the late night. Whatever the purpose of these drones is is irrelevant. They're telling the truth they pose no threat. However, the timing suggests that Biden wanted to do this and punt the consequences to Trump.

There probably has not been an actual increase in non-human activity (the orbs and actual unidentified craft.) They have always interfered with military installations and shut down nuclear weapons. What's occurred is that the vitriol directed at people who report what they see with their own eyes has completely evaporated.

That shameful attitude society directed towards such people was so strong that it's led to a 100x increase in reporting of true UFOs, because 99% of citizens had been conditioned to believe they were insane.

The White House caused this to occur with their obvious lies, destroying the aura of ridicule that they were able to hide under for decades. So, now everyone who sees this stuff records it, shares it, and more people look up. They do see a lot of planes, but they also see things that are inexplicable and which have always been there. And all of a sudden, legitimate journalists are beginning to notice that there are strange orbs doing weird things, that this is a real story, and that we should get answers.

@SteveSokolowski this right here is why no one takes UFOs seriously. It's conspiracy theorism all the way down.

@SteveSokolowski One scintilla of evidence would be helpful with this analysis. You wouldn't want to come off "half-cocked".

@KevinBlaw How do you have enough time in your day to visit every market I participate in and demean me? I thought you just stuck with pretending to be a lawyer.

@SteveSokolowski Evidence, please. You should know what that word means if you are going to be a litigator.

@SteveSokolowski do you consider the government or rogue defense contractor a worldview-shattering origin?

My prior on Aliens existing is essentially 0, maybe 10^-20.

Too many people are greatly underestimating the fact that life on earth is essentially a coincidence that depends on likely thousands (if not millions) of factors due to confirmation/survivorship bias.

Life isn’t a "goal of the universe" it's basically a happy accident.

Believing in aliens is probably the transhumanist (not sure if that's the correct term) equivalent to religion since there's never any evidence and there never will be but the blind faith in "not being alone" is everlasting.

@ChinmayTheMathGuy the anthropic principle is probably the least convincing argument against UFOs I can imagine, lol

Why would US being alive lead you to LOWER your estimate on alien life, haahhaha

@ChinmayTheMathGuy my prior on "UFOs" existing is essentially 0, maybe 10^-5 or so. If your prior against ANY aliens existing in the UNIVERSE is 10^-20, you're just bad at probability

@benshindel especially since the universe is believed to be literally infinite in size, the probability of them existing somewhere is approximately 100%

It's just that due to the Great Filter, Dark Forest, and Grabby Aliens hypotheses they're all currently either stuck in the precambrian, wiped themselves out, hiding terrified of each others' superweapons, or too far away to be noticeable yet

@TheAllMemeingEye well, I wouldn't go so high as ~100%, but I'd say it's very likely above 1% and lower than 99% XD

@ChinmayTheMathGuy The rare Earth hypothesis surely does not have credence much above 99%, definitely not 1-1e-20.

@TheAllMemeingEye according to the current scientific consensus the universe is unbounded, not infinite. There's not infinitely many stars and planets.

Also, UFOs and aliens are two very different things. Aliens very probably exist. UFOs would be space-faring aliens careless or incompetent enough to get caught, like some very poorly-designed animal spy cameras.

@RatUziCat

according to the current scientific consensus the universe is unbounded, not infinite. There's not infinitely many stars and planets.

My understanding (largely based on Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe) is that unbounded -> geometric flatness -> infinite size -> ~100% probability that anything physically possible exists far enough away. Is this incorrect, and if so, could you help me understand the difference?

Also, UFOs and aliens are two very different things. Aliens very probably exist. UFOs would be space-faring aliens careless or incompetent enough to get caught, like some very poorly-designed animal spy cameras.

Yeah I agree, see my earlier debate with Steve:

could you give a concise explanation for how you feel UFO sightings being actual extraterrestrials fits this better than people misidentifying regular earth aircraft/drones? i.e. if there were extraterrestrials here wouldn't it be super unlikely they'd do this rather than harvest the sun, successfully hide, establish benevolent dictatorship etc?

what I'm getting at is that said premise of extraterrestrials flying around in the evening in visible slow craft itself fails at the second Occam's razor factor given the broader premise of extraterrestrials being here at all, because they would almost certainly have different goals resulting in either total visibility or total invisibility.

@TheAllMemeingEye unbounded means that there's no boundary. A spaceship going in a straight line will never be stopped, as long as it avoids celestial bodies of course.

"Infinite size" would contradict that the Big Bang happened 14 billion years ago: at some point the size of the universe would have changed from finite to infinite. The universe has always been unbounded however.

@RatUziCat >"Infinite size" would contradict that the Big Bang happened 14 billion years ago: at some point the size of the universe would have changed from finite to infinite

I do not think it would contradict Big Bang. You can have spatially infinite universe that, at particular point in time, had infinite (or close to infinite) density of matter. Expansion of this infinite space would just gradually reduce the density. I do not think there is a contradiction.

@RatUziCat My understanding (based on https://www.mrob.com/pub/math/ln-2deep.html#univ_size) is that even at the Big Bang, the universe was still infinite in size (unless it has spherical rather than flat-euclidean or hyperbolic geometry), but also infinite density, with infinitely distant regions of space moving away at infinite speed (since movement of space itself isn't limited to the speed of light like matter within space is)

@TheAllMemeingEye @Irigi look up "expansion of the universe", "cosmic inflation", "initial singularity"

@RatUziCat My understanding of expansion of the universe (based on my physics degree and many astronomy documentary/books I've seen/read) is that space itself is expanding rather than the objects in it, and that with flat-euclidean and hyperbolic spaces there is no edge and it's essentially infinity expanding into infinity, like if you kept applying a stretch transformation to the number line of all real numbers.

My understanding (again from Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe) is that cosmic inflation was kinda like a stage of the big bang during which density was so high that it formed a state of matter with even higher bond strength than between quarks in hadrons, such that distortion from tiny quantum fluctuations was storing enough energy to create more matter than would fit in the created space, triggering an exponential chain reaction of expansion until transitioning into regular matter.

My understanding of the initial singularity (based on kurzgesagt videos) is that it was basically the stage of the big bang where the density everywhere would've been on the level of black hole singularities inside event horizons, and also at a temperature where photon wavelengths would've been shorter than the Planck length, and thus the current equations of relativity and quantum mechanics break down, and we are currently unable to predict the phenomena that would've been occurring.

Are these understandings incorrect? If so could you help me understand?

@TheAllMemeingEye I'm not a professional physicist, I'm just interested in the topic. So, as you have education in this field, I'm really starting to question my understanding of the consensus. Sorry that I sounded like a jerk.

When I read your comments I assumed you were simply confused between unbounded and infinite. I knew about the idea of an unbounded universe with a finite amount of matter in it, but apparently that would indicate either a spherical curvature or some kind of asymmetry or anisotropy – the universe would have an edge. Which is not what is observed: the universe is flat and isotropic. Now I see that there are indeed some scientists who think the universe really could have an infinite amount of matter in it. That goes against years of regularly reading about the number of galaxies, stars, or atoms in the universe being very big but finite numbers. And it blows my mind.

@RatUziCat to be fair I'm probably in the bottom quartile of physicists in terms of understanding this topic due to:

• Not having done a masters or doctorate

• Not specialising in cosmology

• Having very little free time to do reading in

• Finding pretty much all modern physics papers to be buried in totally impenetrable terminology, thus relying on documentaries, popsci books, and accessibly written textbooks instead

So it's possible you might be better read up on this than me.

When you say unbounded universe with finite matter and anisotropy, do you mean like a universe with infinite space but all the matter is in one finite sized volume of it, beyond which is an infinite empty void (kinda like what was depicted in one of the recent Dr Who episodes with David Tennant)? Or could it be a mix up of the observable universe and the whole universe?

@TheAllMemeingEye I thought of finite space, finite matter, with possibly a topology of 3 torus or icosahedron if I recall correctly, with opposite faces connected. Those were the two examples of finite space and matter without boundaries I heard of. But apparently that's not possible in a flat universe like ours.

@RatUziCat My understanding is that General Relativity gives equations only for the local curvature of the spacetime. The topology is not fixed. So any of the following options are open:
1] Infinite volume with infinite matter (negative curvature or flat)
2] Finite volume and positive curvature (3-sphere or more complicated topologies)
3] Finite volume and negative curvature or flat (3-torus or more complicated topologies)

Basically always when there is option to have infinite space, you can think about alternative where you are inside a polyhedron that has some sides identified and results in unbounded but finite volume. This can be done also for a negative curvature. So I think that the only excluded option is probably infinite space with positive curvature, because it would intersect itself. (And here I am also not quite sure, because the space is not embedded in any flat space - one can probably imagine a manifold that locally always looks like a sphere, but is infinite.)