Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to This even showed me the following

I wonder if we're approaching a tipping point...
McFly — (archived)

With the ever-more widespread existence of high-quality camera phones, sooner or later we'll either get a clear pic or video, or we'll come to realize that even though everyone (including farmer Jones) has a megapixel camera with a powerful zoom, all we continue see is the same old snapshot of the sky with perhaps a 5 pixel smudge in the middle...or a video of a moving dot. Anyone offering such images as "proof" should be considered to have one strike against them, imo.

Of course, at the same time as we put better cameras into the hands of Joe Public, we also get far improved (digital) means of faking images and videos...so even a "good" picture would need to be very carefully scrutinized.

So what are we really left with? Even physical "evidence" can be ambiguous. What does a circle in a wheat field prove? Nothing, except that there's a circle in a wheat field.

I think maybe anything short of a demonstrably non-terrestrial artifact will leave room for serious (and sensible) doubt.

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