Oliver O’Connell Greg Cochran says he’ll be writing up a long West Hunter blog post on how to think about the possibilities of highly different levels of technology. I will mention that he pointed out the long history of how pilot sightings of “sprites,” bright colored upper-atmospheric lightning or Transient Luminous Events far above the clouds of conventional lightning storms, weren’t taken seriously for over 60 years until they were finally captured on video by the Space Shuttle in 1989. Scottish Nobel laureate C.T.R. Wilson explained how they’d work in the 1920s and they were sighted frequently by pilots during WWII. But because they were so fast that they were easier to see with the eye than record with a film or video camera, pilot reports of the existence of sprites weren’t taken seriously by the scientific establishment for over 60 years even though a Nobelist had correctly predicted their existence in the 1920s. Pilots eventually tired of mentioning what they’d seen because it seemed more likely they’d lose their licenses than get anybody to take them seriously.