Asking EWED if the Aliens Visited

All the chatter about aliens made me want to do something new: poll my excellent co-bloggers.

Overall, this group does not put the probability of alien intelligent life existing at 0%. It is not possible to prove that aliens are nowhere in a vast universe. A separate question is whether the recent unboxing event in Mexico or the sightings by US military pilots raises the probability that aliens have visited earth. This group does find that recent evidence to be very convincing.

Here are the group thoughts, separated by paragraphs but not indented as quotes:

I don’t think that I have enough information to put a probability on aliens existing. I am not compelled by recent evidence.

I’m near 50% that they’re out there somewhere in the universe, less than 10% that they are visiting Earth, though some recent evidence (the US military videos, not the Peruvian mummies) is compelling enough to raise this slightly. The 50% is coming from the Fermi paradox, and what I find most compelling from the last few years isn’t any of these potential sightings on Earth, but rather the recent attempts to model the Fermi paradox differently. Sandberg, Drexler and Ord (2018) argue that when you use probability distributions instead of point estimates in the Drake equation, it is actually reasonable to expect that we are alone in the universe. Robin Hanson has a different model where alien life is common in the universe, but we shouldn’t expect to see them yet.

I put the probability of aliens existing between 0.01% and 10%, but I find none of the recent evidence compelling enough to have raised my probability.

Put the probability of aliens existing between 0.01% and 10%. I find some recent evidence compelling enough to have raised my probability.

I doubt that aliens exist, and I find all recent evidence uncompelling.

Joy again: Part of the reason for doing a poll is that I have not dug into this. I have not watched all of the videos, or even most of the most famous videos. I did skim “The UFO craze was created by government nepotism and incompetent journalism” and the part that makes the most sense to me is that UFO stories are great for clicks (clicks are web traffic -> money).