Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
5 otherayden 7 8/27/2025, 12:19:19 AM
Seems like a topic that doesn’t come up so much in popular discourse now that we have AI taking up a lot of air time. I personally do, but I wonder if some of you have some thoughts about it
2. Do I believe other intelligent life forms visit earth in their flying saucers, abduct people, anal probe them, abduct and slaughter cows, build pyramids, and - apparently - crash often? No, not really. I mean, I can't rule it out, but my personal subjective Bayesian prior towards this notion would probably be something like 0.001 or so. But that's actually up from years past, as we learn more about more possibly inhabitable planets that are closer to Earth than was previously known, etc.
I’ve come to believe in the Great Filter theory more and more in recent years.
Does it matter whether the aliens have visited earth, or only that life exists elsewhere in the universe?
Do they need to be intelligent aliens, by some definition of intelligent?
And do they have to still exist today, or is it enough to think life may gave existed elsewhere at some point?