There does not yet appear to be any solid evidence to believe the story is true just yet.
And here is a discussion expressing some possible reasons for skepticism:
https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/143k3oz/some_reasons_for_skepticism_regarding_recent/However, the existence of life outside of Earth has significant implications for our ultimate end-game and anti-technologist and anti-Yahwehist principles. This deeply concerns me.
There are estimated to be 200 billion galaxies in the universe, and an estimated one septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars. In the interview with Kaku in the previous post, he says in the Milky Way alone there are at minimum 100,000,000,000 planets, each one of which is orbiting a different star.
Life exists on Earth. Intelligent life exists on Earth. Intelligent life on the cusp of creating sentient machines exists on Earth. Therefore, the probability of such things is non-zero, and, on a large enough scale, _will_ occur again somewhere else in the universe.
In the past, it seems the movement's general attitude has been that searching for life outside of Earth and helping it transcend would be a never-ending goose chase involving the necessity to create increasingly advanced technology and reproduce for a near-infinite amount of generations, and we will simply have to have faith that noble forces outside of Earth will similarly transcend the material realm.
It may be time to reopen our thoughts on what the ultimate long-term end-game will have to be if non-Earth life has truly found us.
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If this is real, the assumptions I think we can make are:
-The non-Earth "craft" are sentient machines and do not involve "biological" organisms directly piloting them. Based on lifeforms on Earth, travelling vast distances across the galaxy or between galaxies will be excessively difficult due to our lifespans and food/environmental requirements. Machines would also be able to enter more extreme environments with a greater level of pressure, toxins, etc. than a biological organism, as well as fit inside a smaller craft and be able to tolerate higher amounts of acceleration/g-forces.
-It also seems unlikely that they are piloted remotely by biological organisms (for example, like a human Mars rover). There is significant lag time in commutations (governed by the speed of light) that is evident even in Moon missions, so the base for a remotely piloted craft would have to be somewhere in our solar system, which does not seem likely.
-The sentient machines and their creators probably originate from somewhere close to us, most probably within our own galaxy or Local Group of galaxies (5 million light year radius):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_habitable_zonehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group-They could not have originated more than a 16 billion light year radius away from us. This is the current cosmic event horizon (read below.)
-If a giant mothership, on its way to enslave all of us, was going to reach Earth within our lifetimes, astronomers would probably have noticed something unusual by now. But future generations may not be as lucky as us. We have a duty to them to take this seriously before it becomes an unsolvable crisis.
-If the claims are credible, Grusch (the whistleblower) and others associated with him are claiming the earliest evidence of humans capturing UFOs dates back to 1933. I.e. whatever is happening has been ongoing for at least 90 years.
https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/143ivlu/sunday_newsnation_report_is_possibly_going_to/-Trying to deal with this issue in a society which operates using democracy and private, uncontrolled, economic enterprise will be an unfathomable risk and disaster. In other words, besides the (human-made) AI crisis and the climate crisis, the we-are-not-alone/ultra-high-tech-recovered-from-aliens crisis represents another angle that pressure can be applied in order to return to a functional form of government.
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In terms of physics and astronomy, what do we have to work with to understand the ultimate fate of the universe?
Our understanding of physics is that light speed is the fastest speed possible for a particle to travel.
Our understanding of the observable universe is that it is expanding, and at an accelerating rate.
The speed of light is ~299,792 km/s, which means that if space between two points in the universe is expanding faster than that, it can never be reached with our current understanding of physics. (Something like "wormholes", multi-dimensionality of the universe, or studies of quantum mechanics invalidating our current knowledge could change this assumption). This threshold is called the cosmic event horizon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizonOur understanding of physics is that an object with mass cannot actually reach the speed of light. Therefore, the time to reach the cosmic event horizon for spacecraft is smaller than the time to reach the horizon for light. I am not familiar enough with the topic to make any estimates of how much less time.
Here is a further explanation of the cosmic event horizon.
because the expansion of the universe is accelerating, it is projected that most galaxies will eventually cross a type of cosmological event horizon where any light they emit past that point will never be able to reach us at any time in the infinite future,[30] because the light never reaches a point where its "peculiar velocity" towards us exceeds the expansion velocity away from us (these two notions of velocity are also discussed in Comoving and proper distances#Uses of the proper distance). The current distance to this cosmological event horizon is about 16 billion light-years, meaning that a signal from an event happening at present would eventually be able to reach us in the future if the event was less than 16 billion light-years away, but the signal would never reach us if the event was more than 16 billion light-years away.[28]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Universal_expansionHow can the universe expand faster than light travels?
[...]
A key feature of this expansion is how uniform it is.
[...]
It means that if you look at a galaxy 1 megaparsec away, it will appear to be receding away from us at 68 km/s. If you look at a galaxy 2 megaparsec away, it recedes at 136 km/s. Three megaparsec away? You got it! 204 km/s. And on and on: for every megaparsec, you can add 68 km/s to the velocity of the far-away galaxy.
https://www.space.com/33306-how-does-the-universe-expand-faster-than-light.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_lawUsing a relatively new and potentially more precise technique for measuring cosmic distances, which employs the average stellar brightness within giant elliptical galaxies as a rung on the distance ladder, astronomers calculate a rate — 73.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec, give or take 2.5 km/sec/Mpc — that lies in the middle of three other good estimates, including the gold standard estimate from Type Ia supernovae. This means that for every megaparsec — 3.3 million light years, or 3 billion trillion kilometers — from Earth, the universe is expanding an extra 73.3 ±2.5 kilometers per second. The average from the three other techniques is 73.5 ±1.4 km/sec/Mpc.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/08/how-fast-is-the-universe-expanding-galaxies-provide-one-answer/The universe is estimated to have a radius of 45.7 billion light years, so we are at least safe from ~96% of the universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universeThe real question is, when will we reach the point where cosmological horizon is so small that space colonization is no longer possible? If random Wikipedia quotations can be trusted, it could take between 100 billion to 1 trillion (100,000,000,000 - 1,000,000,000,000) years from now for the Local Group of galaxies to be inescapable. The Local Group is comprised of the Milk Way, Andromeda Galaxy, and their smaller satellite galaxies. It has a radius of 5 million light years. (Remember, currently space colonists can travel a maximum of 16 _billion_ light years).
...For perspective, Earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, life formed by at least 3.7 billion years ago, ancestors of mammals have existed for ~250-200 million years, and primates around 85-55 million. "Modern humans" have been around for only ~160,000 years. There were 156 years between the theory of evolution being introduced and the first gene-edited human (2015). There were 66 years between the first flight and first humans on the Moon. It's taken 76 years from the invention of the transistor to arrive at the cusp of sentient machines. What will happen in the next 100 billion years?
...The universe itself is estimated to only be ~13.8 billion years old.
Coalescence of Local Group and galaxies outside the Local Supercluster are no longer accessible
The galaxies in the Local Group, the cluster of galaxies which includes the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, are gravitationally bound to each other. It is expected that between 10^11 (100 billion) and 10^12 (1 trillion) years from now, their orbits will decay and the entire Local Group will merge into one large galaxy.[5]
Assuming that dark energy continues to make the universe expand at an accelerating rate, in about 150 billion years all galaxies outside the Local Supercluster will pass behind the cosmological horizon. It will then be impossible for events in the Local Supercluster to affect other galaxies. Similarly, it will be impossible for events after 150 billion years, as seen by observers in distant galaxies, to affect events in the Local Supercluster.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#Coalescence_of_Local_Group_and_galaxies_outside_the_Local_Supercluster_are_no_longer_accessibleThe Sun will turn into a red giant star approximately 5 billion years from now, engulfing Earth or at least rendering it uninhabitable.
However, we may have to battle Earth-originating-space-colonists and non-Earth-originating Yahwehists for
95 billion more years after that occurs.
To make things more depressing, that is only the amount of time before inter-galactic colonization originating from our region of the universe becomes impossible. Intra-galactic colonization within the merged Local Group, within solar systems, and within individual planets will still be able to occur.
The physical/chemical reactions needed to support life will only completely cease with the heat death of the universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universeIt seems estimates of when the heat death will occur are around ~10^100 years from now.
That is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years from now.
More realistically, however, the chemical energy needed to sustain life will likely be unachievable within half or a quarter of this time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#Possible_ionization_of_matterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#Future_with_proton_decayhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#Future_without_proton_decayEven more realistically, I think a reasonable assumption is that the conditions to support complex life will be unlikely to exist within 1/7th of the time, i.e. 10^15 (1 quadrillion) years from now. However, who knows what kind of technology could be invented by then to permanently prolong living conditions of engineered machines/lifeforms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#Planets_fall_or_are_flung_from_orbits_by_a_close_encounter_with_another_starSmall matters seem so trivial with all this at stake.
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