We would all be very surprised - of that I am certain.
But why do you think that a mothership would equate to an invasion? And even then, why would we try to fight something that can sterilize the planet from afar and could have done so long ago?
On your other points: you could look into radiance technologies, their hires and funding. Maybe read the UAP part in the NDAA for this year, and tune into the congressional hearing next week with the AARO director mentioned in the article. I don't mean this is the evidence you are looking for, but it is still all very intriguing.
Having some experience with this topic, it is interesting to watch. I feel that things are even more complicated than anyone imagines. I think our ignorance is by design and has some good reasons.
Yes, sometimes you want to de-duplicate pieces of information by a part of the piece and preserve order. The article tldr sounded like you can only de-duplicating by first sorting with package sort if you don't have to preserve order. However as I just wanted to point out, it works if you have to preserve order just as well.
Edit: I see now that the original article meant preserving output order. And i have not clarified that i meant input order.
The TED talk is old and maybe not the right format to discuss details. There are long-form discussions with Donald Hoffman on Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal I can link:
He goes into more details (it's over 3 hours…), but I am not sure his arguments are satisfying. It is really hard to prove this concept. The idea itself is very old. Plato's Cave is only one example.
From my reading focused on this specific issue of the GDPR and the national laws of member states, this is not the case. Opt-in is specifically required for personal information. The telemetry data outlined in the proposal would not fall under this requirement. You can even retain time-limited IP logs with some special caveats. The GDPR is actually quite reasonable and fair.
Russ Cox is a very intelligent and effective engineer. He has a history of projects where he first analyses the problem space, then arrives at great solutions. He puts a lot of effort into discussing the problems and proposal with the community, especially after the widely criticized go mod decision by the go team (which is now mostly accepted as unfortunate, but in the end, the correct decision, I would think).
My point is: We all suspect Google and telemetry to be bad. But can we be charitable enough to separate the Go project, that is run by individual humans, and telemetry from our superficial cliches to actually read the proposal?
Plato's Cave, Jungian Archetypes, Valee's Control System all hint at the same insight, that founders of many religions also try to communicate: We live in a symbolic consensus reality, made up of individual dreams, if you will, that is quite malleable if we all agree.
The new AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has a Marcus Aurelius quote in Latin on the proposed Logo, used in the presentation slides by the director: "The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it".
Maybe they understand more than I thought after all?
I do remember the comment thread on the 2017 time article here on hn. Opinions already have changed considerably in the last 5 years. It also appears as if the process of disseminating information still accelerates (with promis coming out as experiencers and so on). I can only advise everyone to consider C.G. Jung and read Jaques Vallee.
This situation is very complicated, but not at all bad in the end. As far as I can tell, nobody got the real answers, not the pentagon, nor the religions.
All I can recommend is to meditate, get in touch with your spirituality and reading up on the ancient concept of a hero's journey might help you.
Hang in there, don't be afraid, do nothing drastic, live healthy and go into nature!