In close to four decades of doing research, I’ve come up with and run down hundreds if not thousands of ideas. If I’m to be entirely honest, not a single one of my ideas has genuinely, spectacularly worked out. Sure — there have been some modest successes, but those have been both few and far between.

A hard-won benefit of of all the disappointment is that I can now state with good statistical confidence that 99% of ideas don’t work out. The hope which springs eternal is forever in anticipation that that next idea will be the one to push far out into the far right-hand side of the distribution.

A particularly good indication one one’s hypothesis is wrong is the “and then” construction…. ‘Oumuamua formed out of hydrogen ice in a 2.7K region of a giant molecular cloud and then experienced significant mass wasting prior to passing through the Solar System.

Where does one semi-responsibly draw the line? When is it really not OK to spin up appealing scenarios and diffuse them out into the ether? Scenarios that are plausible, mind you, scenarios that could have happened?

With the interstellar objects and the flying saucers (UAP in the modern parlance), one runs into this dilemma right away. The grainy videos are out there. NASA has stood up a blue-ribbon task force. Senators demand answers. Robotic cameras watch the skies. On Metaculus, a carefully tuned aggregation from the best-predicting minds estimates a 0.4% chance that the UFO puzzle will have an “ontologically shocking” explanation. Ontology — for some reason, I simply can’t keep the definition of that slippery word in mind. Always have to look it up.

So what the hell. Let’s trip the irresponsibly speculative light fantastic. Let’s assume for sake of argument that the the UFOs are real technological artifacts that weren’t built by us. After all, 0.4% odds are forty times higher than the part-in-ten-thousand that Buffon declared to be the smallest practical probability. What could be going on?

Given that we’re painted into the metaphorical corner, the most reasonable explanation would be that we’re sensing various von-Neumann style machines, perhaps activating — waking up — in response to the directed procsses that are currently unfolding here on Earth. Somehow, in this age of LLMs, of non-human intelligence right at the chat window prompt, this seems vaguely less far fetched than even a few years ago.

To assist in connecting the dots: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07483, https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02215.