Are we alone? The question is worthy of serious scientific study
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, "You have absolutely no idea what is out there!" The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there's plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
See also: Released FAA recording reveals pilot report of a UFO over Long Island
I-Team Exclusive: Nevada senator fought to save secret UFO program
Related: Pentagon's UFO Investigation Program Revealed
UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt': Former Head Of Pentagon Program
Newly-Released Video Shows 2015 U.S. Navy Sighting of UFO
Related Stories
Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program
In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find. Which was how the Pentagon wanted it. For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon's C Ring, deep within the building's maze.
The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.
The existence of UFOs had been "proved beyond reasonable doubt," according the head of the secret Pentagon program that analyzed the mysterious aircrafts.
In an interview with British broadsheet The Telegraph published on Saturday, Luis Elizondo told the newspaper of the sightings, "In my opinion, if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of 'beyond reasonable doubt.'"
"I hate to use the term UFO but that's what we're looking at," he added. "I think it's pretty clear this is not us, and it's not anyone else, so no one has to ask questions where they're from."
Since 2007, Elizondo led the government program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, investigating evidence of UFOs and alien life. It was shuttered in 2012.
Its existence was first reported by The New York Times last week.
Elizondo was not able to discuss specifics of the program, but told The Telegraph that there had been "lots" of UFO sightings and witnesses interviewed during the program's five years.
Investigators pinpointed geographical "hot spots" that were sometimes near nuclear facilities and power plants and observed trends among the aircrafts including lack of flight surfaces on the objects and extreme manoeuvrability, Elizondo told The Telegraph.
Previously: Pentagon's UFO Investigation Program Revealed
A group linked to Luis Elizondo, the former leader of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, as well as other former military and government officials, has released a video showing a 2015 UFO encounter involving U.S. Navy pilots:
A newly-released video which shows U.S. Navy pilots encountering an unidentified flying object (UFO) in 2015 has garnered calls for more research into what these mysterious objects could be. "What the f--- is that thing?" one pilot can be heard saying in the video. "Wow, what is that, man?" the pilot adds. "Look at that flying!"
The footage was released Friday by To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA), a private scientific research and media group. It is led by Dr. Hal Puthoff, a NASA and U.S. Department of Defense adviser and James Semivan, a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency service member. The clip is said to be "an authentic DoD video that captures the high-speed flight of an unidentified aircraft at low altitude" and "reveals a previously undisclosed Navy encounter that occurred off the East Coast in 2015," according to a statement from TTSA.
From my work with To the Stars Academy, which seeks to raise private funds to investigate incidents like the 2004 Nimitz encounter, I know they continue to occur, because we are being approached by military personnel who are concerned about national security and frustrated by how the Defense Department is handling such reports. I am also familiar with the evidence as a former Pentagon intelligence official and a consultant who began researching the issue after the Nimitz incident was brought to my attention. On several occasions, I have met with senior Pentagon officials, and at least one followed up and obtained briefings confirming incidents such as the Nimitz case. But nobody wants to be "the alien guy" in the national security bureaucracy; nobody wants to be ridiculed or sidelined for drawing attention to the issue. This is true up and down the chain of command, and it is a serious and recurring impediment to progress.
Also at USA Today and NextBigFuture.
Related: UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt': Former Head Of Pentagon Program
[An] upcoming study in The Astronomical Journal, which we learned about from MIT Technology Review, suggests humanity has barely sampled the skies, and thus has no grounds to be cynical. According to the paper, all searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, have examined barely a swimming pool's worth of water from a figurative ocean of signal space. "We haven't really looked much," Shubham Kanodia, a graduate student in astronomy who co-wrote the study, said during a NASA "technosignatures" workshop in Houston, Texas on September 26.
[...] In their study, Kanodia and his colleagues built a mathematical model of what they consider a reasonably sized cosmic haystack.
Their haystack is a sphere of space nearly 33,000 light-years in diameter, centered around Earth. This region captures the Milky Way's bustling core, as well as many giant globular clusters of stars above and below our home galaxy.They also picked eight dimensions of a search for aliens — factors like signal transmission frequency, bandwidth, power, location, repetition, polarization, and modulation (i.e. complexity) — and defined reasonable limits for each one. "This leads to a total 8D haystack volume of 6.4 × 10116m5Hz2s/W," the authors wrote. That is 6.4 followed by 115 zeros — as MIT Technology review described it, "a space of truly gargantuan proportions."
The Government's Secret UFO Program Funded Research on Wormholes and Extra Dimensions
The Department of Defense funded research on wormholes, invisibility cloaking, and "the manipulation of extra dimensions" under its shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, first described in 2017 by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
On Wednesday, the Defense Intelligence Agency released a list of 38 research titles pursued by the program in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.
[...] One such research topic, "Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy," was led by Eric W. Davis of EarthTech International Inc, which describes itself as a facility "exploring the forefront reaches of science and engineering," with an interest in theories of spacetime, studies of the quantum vacuum, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Another project called "Invisibility Cloaking" was helmed by German scientist Ulf Leonhardt, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Leonhardt's research pertains to theoretical quantum optics, and in 2006 his work on theoretically creating "an invisible 'hole' in space, inside which objects can be hidden" was cited by Nature.
Yet another title, "Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions," was attributed to theoretical physicist Richard Obousy, director of the nonprofit Icarus Interstellar, which claims to be "researching technologies that will enable breakthroughs in interstellar travel." Obousy was credited by Gizmodo in 2009 for creating "a scientifically accurate warpship design" that could hypothetically be propelled through space by manipulating dark energy.
Also at Teslarati.
Previously: Pentagon's UFO Investigation Program Revealed
UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt': Former Head Of Pentagon Program
Newly-Released Video Shows 2015 U.S. Navy Sighting of UFO
Related: Are We Alone? The Question is Worthy of Serious Scientific Study
You Can Now Easily Download All CIA UFO Documents to Date:
In anticipation of the government’s official UFO report coming in less than six months thanks to the COVID-19 omnibus bill, you can now download all of the publicly available CIA documentation on UFOs.
The Black Vault, a clearinghouse for declassified documents, has released a downloadable document archive filled with PDFs containing CIA files on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), the government's preferred term. . Some of the reports date all the way back to the 1980s, and according to the site's founder, John Greenewald Jr., the spy agency claims this is all of its documents on UAPs.
[...] “Around 20 years ago, I had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA,” Greenewald said in an email to Motherboard. “It was like pulling teeth! I went around and around with them to try and do so, finally achieving it. I received a large box, of a couple thousand pages, and I had to scan them in one page at a time.”
[...] “Plain and simple, the public has a right to know!” Greenewald said. “When I began researching nearly 25 years ago at the age of 15, I knew there was something to this topic. Not because of viral internet hoaxes. Not because of back door meetings wherein I can’t tell you who, but I promise it was mind-blowing information. No, none of that. It was simply because of the evidence that I got straight from the CIA. And the NSA. And the Air Force. And the DIA. I feel I am achieving what I set out to do. Easy access, to important material, for people to make up their own minds on what is going on.”
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @01:59AM (5 children)
Most people are alone in a room filled with other people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Monday July 02 2018, @02:11AM (1 child)
The oracle agrees. [theoatmeal.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by MostCynical on Monday July 02 2018, @02:33AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3Dw6Q3mHyzn78 [youtube.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @02:40PM (1 child)
Alone means you can't communicate, not that other's are not there.
If I lock you in a room with nobody else to communicate with you are alone even if you know there are other folks in the next room.
The question is not how many others are in the Universe. That's big enough to there have to be others because we have on reason to think we are that special.
The question is are there others close enough in space and time to for us to know of their existence.
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday July 02 2018, @03:04PM
Interesting paper:
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/Xenopsychology.htm [rfreitas.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @03:45PM
If you're in a room filled with people, you have no need to feel alone as long as you have some anti-social media apps on your mobile phone.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday July 02 2018, @02:08AM (35 children)
This is why American high schools were a good thing, at least when I attended them. Because GATE classes were big on Orwell, Nietzsche, Conrad, Hesse, Camus. So those students already experienced that temporary hurdle in life, when they were listening to Nirvana and complaining about how nobody "understand them."
Then if you're smart and patient enough to slog through those messes, you get to the Big Boys like Dostoevsky. Then if you survive that, you come full-circle into the cold and harsh anticlimax: Humans are sensuous meatbags. This must be especially problematic for space nutters, because they were fed since childhood shit like Asimov all the way up to Star Trek, where the future is so wonderous and awesome, and then the come to the cold realization that they will never in their over-educated careers experience anything they were fed growing up.
Welcome to the real-world kiddos, and this harsh lesson doesn't just apply to space. You hope for something higher, and all you get is unmet expectations and even the fanciest shit you manage to engineer is only a small ass-hair, if you're lucky, in the grand scheme of things. You're not gonna see a moon-base, or interstellar travel. What you will see plenty of, is bullshit politics and a world run by idiots who "just don't understand you."
And you in your folly try to understand why I drink and watch Star Trek while listening to Megadeth for fun, rather than work on becoming a Zephram Cochran.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @02:36AM (2 children)
Fuck this. With our new Space Force we'll finally learn the truth and start brining home extraterrestrial trophies to hang on our space station walls.
BTW, Trump learned the truth about Roswell. That's why we're starting up Space Force. Fools like you want us to believe what you're shoveling. Not any more. Not with a Space Force.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday July 02 2018, @03:10AM (1 child)
1970's American Military Officer 1: " Hey, let's violate some treaties they signed in good faith and make space weapons, blow up a few Russian Satellites! Journalists don't know what happens in space!
1970's American Military Officer 2: " Groovy. Let's do it! "
Public-facing 2015 American Senior Military Officer: "We have just now figured out that the Russians have been weaponizing space. This is why gibsmedat taxpayer monies so we can buy weapons, to start a new Space Force to counter Russian aggression in the cosmos. "
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @03:36AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty [wikipedia.org]
That particular treaty barely does anything to stop you from having fun with Space Marines. Except that we already know what the Space Force would be doing: the same shit the Air Force does. They will launch GPS, spy satellites, maybe the occasional X-37B. And instead of stormtroopers, they will have keyboard warriors with an easier job than the drone pilots, since you can't get PTSD from looking at a bunch of numbers.
The Space Force is just a repackaged boring wing of the Air Force. But it does have great meme potential.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @02:42AM (1 child)
"Existential Crisis" in the 80s sounds kinda lame?
During the last of a few trips (a tiny little fleck of windowpane), I was convinced that everything I knew about acid and pop culture (Albert Hofmann and Sandoz, Kesey and the Pranksters, other writers, Grateful Dead and the Acid Tests, other psychedelic music, etc) was all my hallucination. I was the acid. A few hours later, I came down...
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday July 02 2018, @03:03AM
Yeah, but at least the writing was good. And I'm not an acid freak, merely a drunk. The point I am trying to make is that the guy described in the summary is an uncool Geezer in the most sincere sense of the phrase because if he were a normal person, he would have been a Cure fan around the time of young adulthood and we wouldn't have to hear about why being an engineer sucks now.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @02:53AM (22 children)
There are basically hundreds of billions or trillions of exoplanets in our galaxy, if not more orders of magnitude. Subsurface oceans seem to be very common in our solar system, so there are probably trillions of planets or moons in the galaxy with life inside, except it is probably locked in, microbial, and will never develop much complexity or any technology. However, many exoplanets also appear to be in "habitable zones" (except still not clear if red dwarf systems could host life). The start date for life on Earth has been pushed back repeatedly. [soylentnews.org] That's important, because if life started very soon after the Earth cooled, then you could expect it to start very early on every other potentially habitable planet. Maybe 99% of them have at least microbial life if they are at least 1 billion years old. It took billions of years for upright apes to get smart and edgy on Earth, but there are stars in our galaxy that are at least 10 billion years old rather than ~5.
So we can make a good case for the galaxy to be teeming with life. So why the Fermi paradox? Here's a really good solution: normal radio transmissions are fucking weak. Unless a nearby civilization blasts a directed message at our planet at a time when we are listening in a certain direction, nobody will notice.
How do you find life if you can't find it on the radio? You do it with big optical telescopes aimed at exoplanets. Keep in mind that the first exoplanet was discovered in 1988, and the gas giants are the easiest ones to find. We have barely scratched the surface here. JWST has been delayed to shit (insert conspiracy theory here). Maybe JWST will discover life, but the best telescopes for looking at exoplanets would use the Sun as a gravitational lens at 550+ AU away. Which we are not doing for several decades without fancy rockets and propulsion (insert SpaceX or other conspiracy theory here).
Finally, with all that in mind, we arrive at the UFO subject. You've probably heard that a spacefaring civilization doesn't need faster-than-light travel to conquer/explore the entire galaxy. They just need to go from one star system to the next, build ships there, send them out, rinse and repeat. But if a civilization did have something like a warp drive, they would be able to explore the galaxy in luxury. And they would probably find us soon enough.
We've had reports of UFOs for a long time, centuries arguably. You have Air Force pilots, astronomers, and many others seeing them (and leaning towards "alien craft" rather than merely unidentified). If you can accept that the galaxy is full of life, which seems plausible based on what we've learned in the last decade, then maybe some UFO sightings are alien in origin. You don't just detect an alien TV broadcast, but you can capture video with your crappy camera if they show up in your backyard. And if we somehow manage to invent a warp drive in the next century, that will be an "aha" moment, as in: "Yeah, we have been visited by alien tourist scum."
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Monday July 02 2018, @03:12AM
That person had better be named Cochrane :)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Monday July 02 2018, @07:06AM (12 children)
What is to say that a cluster of stars is not conscious?
Also, UFOs have vanished after invention of mobile cameras.
My guess? It will be more like Solaris [imdb.com] - life as we don't know it.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday July 02 2018, @08:08AM
http://escapepod.org/2018/05/10/escape-pod-627-humans-die-stars-fade/ [escapepod.org]
That proves they are controlled by intelligent beings. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @09:59AM (10 children)
They haven't. There are still plenty of sightings, videos, etc. Mobile cameras aren't great for recording distant objects in the sky, and it gets even worse in low light conditions.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday July 02 2018, @12:01PM (6 children)
One thing that is true to say is that the credibility of the sightings has not increased alongside the phenomenal improvements in the technology available to record and document the claimed sightings.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @12:56PM (5 children)
An amateur taking video of a distant light in the sky is going to look like crap even after decades of improvements. Maybe drones will make an impact by putting cameras closer to where alien spacecraft would be flying, but they could also cause UFO reports as well.
How is the data being collected? North of God's Burgerland, sightings appear to be increasing [ctvnews.ca]:
If you are counting orgs like MUFON but not getting estimates that take into account YouTube, maybe you aren't counting very well at all. Ask a teenager if they have even heard of MUFON.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 02 2018, @01:19PM (4 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @01:40PM (3 children)
Perhaps the "data" is not being studied properly. Hence TFA.
Is the smartphone camera so great at recording things in the sky? No. Are people reporting their sightings using "traditional" avenues? Maybe, maybe not. Would an excellent-looking UFO video gain traction in the age of deepfakes? Maybe, maybe not. There's a dilemma for you: any improvement in the camera situation will be overshadowed by the massive tide of online video and the ability to fake more things with machine learning. A "good" UFO video is no different than a funny cat video or meme; its viral popularity depends on factors that are not so easily reproduced and have little to do with whether an actual alien craft is recorded on camera. And the deepfakes trend will make it easier for people to produce partially or completely [wired.com] faked videos of UFOs, politicians, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 02 2018, @02:04PM (2 children)
Things that violate the laws of conservation of momentum and conservation of energy are reported constantly, but never recorded. DC and Marvel probably have to take some of the blame.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @02:20PM (1 child)
There have been fakes before deepfakes, like the 2013 Wired article I linked where literally everything in the video was CGI, or the many crappier looking fakes. What deepfakes will do is help muddy the waters even further by putting powerful tools in the hands of the public, and will be used for more than just UFO sightings. Fake news for your eyes. Although maybe people will be too busy making deepfakes celeb porn to bother with faking UFO sightings.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:20AM
https://sites.google.com/site/ourenthusiasmsasham/blah/mayanenergybeamexplained [google.com]
The above is a scientific explanation of why taking photos of strange phenomena with a smart phone does not immediately lead you to the truth.
People will jump to all kinds of weird Erich von Däniken explanations of things that have perfectly rational explanations. Don't be fooled.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday July 02 2018, @12:29PM (2 children)
They have decreased a lot, though. There are plenty articles about this drop in fact.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @12:47PM (1 child)
That could mean any number of things. You don't need a video to make a report, but you don't need to make a report to MUFON/etc. either. Maybe the Instagram generation doesn't care about MUFON et al. and they just throw the video online, where it can sink into the abyss of thousands of other obscure videos and the many fakes, deepfakes, and reuploads.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @02:00PM
They do look up from their phones from time to time but that's just to avoid being crushed by a bus or similar.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 02 2018, @12:14PM (7 children)
I'd note the loose use of "probably" here. The problem with these arguments (and the Drake equation and the supposed "paradox") is that we have exactly one data point where we know life evolved. That's not enough to extrapolate, much less develop a probability distribution.
We have absolutely no idea how common life is, microbial or otherwise. Your solution to the paradox appears to be to lower the probability of evolution of large-scale or sentient life, but the bottleneck could be other places. It could be abiogenesis itself, which we understand a lot less in some ways than evolution. Yes, biologists have a rough blueprint of how they think it might happen -- but it could be something that if you have roughly the right temps and roughly the right chemical mix, life just happens 90% of the time. Or it could be that you need really just the right temp and the right chemicals for a particular stage in the development, and if you don't life doesn't happen 99.9999999999999999% of the time. Anyone who even knows basic chemistry knows that many reactions can be incredibly sensitive to conditions.
We just don't know. This isn't an argument against your assumption -- it's just that none of it is "probable." It's mathematically indeterminate.
Where? How? By extrapolating from one data point? Once we have maybe even one more data point where life evolved to extrapolate from, maybe we can go somewhere... but so far, we have only one. It could be that the "necessary conditions for life" you assume are a lot more selective than you think... or even a lot less selective. We simply have no data to base any supposition on.
Yes, because humans have only been broadcasting such stuff for only ~100 years, and it's only been a few decades since we've even made it into space. But hey, we should be able to assume what civilizations that may be BILLIONS of years old can and can't do -- and obviously they'd only be broadcasting on radio! So -- huzzah! -- we've got a "good solution" to the Fermi paradox.
Once again, sure... maybe. Again, arguing from a very parochial perspective based on one very young species that's only been playing with tech advanced enough to be noticed outside our planet for a VERY short time.
Yes, and we've had similar numbers of reports of ghosts, elves, gnomes, fairies, strange workings of gods, etc. in the past too -- frequently believed by many of the "best authorities" of their age.
Yes, and we have lots of smart people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, often molested sexually or tested or whatever. Except it turns out that a lot of those stories are remarkably similar to older stories of things like an "incubus" or "succubus," demons who terrorize people at night. And both UFO "abductions" and these demonic phenomena are likely explained in a large number of cases by sleep paralysis [wikipedia.org]. I've experienced cases of sleep paralysis myself, and they can be terrifying. I've also had experiences when I was younger that were bad lucid dreams, but -- were I so inclined -- I might have interpreted them as involving "aliens" or some other "presence" (demonic?)... except now that I've learned about sleep paralysis, I understand exactly what was going on.
Interesting how right around the time that sci-fi stories start becoming popular in the mid-20th century, reports of incubi and succubi no longer appear, but instead human subconscious minds now ascribe them to aliens who abduct them, huh?
But you might say -- you're not talking about some wackos who might have had a bad dream: you're talking about reputable folks who were wide awake. Sure. Except, as with basically all "ghost sightings" and a lot of other supposed "paranormal phenomena," even reputable scientists have difficulty being sufficiently skeptical. Which is why James Randi had a thing going for so long: because he realized that people were able to fool others -- even research scientists -- if they aren't sufficiently skeptical and look for every possible other explanation for a supposed "phenomenon." As is well-known, the Pentagon, CIA, etc. spent loads of money conducting "psychic research" and other BS because smart people are very, VERY capable of believing in weird crap.
Lastly, I'd just also note the cluster of human cognitive biases like pareidolia [wikipedia.org], where we tend to see visual patterns in random data. Past generations (and still sometimes present ones) see the Virgin Mary in a piece of toasted bread. And yet we should trust many supposed UFO sightings that are unsupported by good evidence? Generally, humans have a cognitive tendency toward apophenia [wikipedia.org] -- i.e., seeing patterns that aren't really there.
Now, given all that, and the LONG history of humans seeing patterns in natural phenomena and ascribing meaning to them (calling them "gods" or various other supernatural things instead of "aliens"), how confident am I in reports of UFOs, which seem to be the collective delusion (see "abductions" above, which millions of Americans claim to have been part of) of the moment? Could lots of smart reputable people be ascribing meaning to stuff that isn't there? Yeah, I definitely think so.
That said, believe it or not, I do have an open mind. And it's certainly possible aliens are visiting earth. So give me a link to your best evidence, and I'll look at it. I'm always interested in looking at stuff. But I've researched this stuff a few times before, and I've always been shocked by the paucity of strong evidence given these quotes about how so many reputable folks claim this stuff exists.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @01:24PM (6 children)
We are learning more about that one data point. Continually pushing back the start date for life on Earth MEANS SOMETHING. It means that abiogenesis or panspermia happened very quickly after the formation of the Earth. If life forms very quickly in an Earth-like environment, then the barriers to life forming are low. Obviously, I'm going to extrapolate this to other planetary systems. If you have Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars within habitable zones, you should expect similar outcomes.
There's little use arguing about it much longer. The stage is set for us to know more within 10 years. TESS will find exoplanets orbiting Sun-like stars, including a handful of high orbital period exoplanets. JWST will attempt to characterize exoplanet atmospheres to look for biosignatures. With another 10 years of development, and cheap BFR payloads, we could get larger telescopes like the Kilometer Space Telescope [nasa.gov] concept up with the goal of directly imaging exoplanets.
I already addressed it all in my comment. If there are no physics barriers to humans slowly spreading to other star systems, then there is an avenue for alien visitors to get here. If we were to develop faster-than-light technologies, then there is a much better avenue for alien visitors to get here. In both cases, you don't have to talk to aliens to make a conclusion about them. You use humanity's own technological development to get an idea of what is possible.
A galaxy full of life, including the more interesting surface life (rather than locked in an icy crust), is plausible based on what we know today. We have greatly increased our knowledge of exoplanets with Kepler, and TESS, JWST, and future missions will help fill in the gaps.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 02 2018, @02:39PM (5 children)
Yes it does.
Yes -- and let's be very clear there -- that's all that means. Which means absolutely nothing in terms of arguments about how commonplace life is, because a minor change in chemical conditions could introduce many orders of magnitude differences in the likelihood of a reaction. Shifting the start date of life from a billion years after formation to a few hundred million years is nowhere near as significant as potential chemical bottlenecks.
Well, also "very quickly" is relative. I admittedly don't keep up with the detailed science on this, but from what I remember reading in the past few years and what I can find in searches, it looks like the best solid evidence is still around 500 million years after the earth formed. Whether that's "very quickly" or not, I don't know, because "quickly" is a relative term, and we have nothing to compare it to.
There's the slippage again. What is sufficiently "Earth-like"? You don't know. You can't know. What you're relying on is basically a version of the mediocrity principle [wikipedia.org], which is an expansion of the Copernican principle [wikipedia.org]. The latter states that Earth is not cosmologically "special," in terms of its place in the universe, the local laws of physics, etc.
And yes, the Copernican principle can and has been reasonably extended to show there are other stars like our own and that they have other planets, some of which likely have some similar characteristics (size, temperature, some basic chemical composition, etc.). Great.
But extending this principle to assume that life is everywhere is a bit different in my view. The chemistry of life is so different and much more complex than what we find in other basic physical processes. Could it be that such chemistry naturally emerges if you only get the basic conditions right? Again, as I said, that certainly could be the case. But it could also be that there's some bottleneck somewhere in the abiogenesis or evolutionary series of steps that require very specific conditions (and certainly could be more than one). I'm not saying it's likely there is one -- I'm saying until we either (1) discovery life on a few other planets (not merely basic organic chemicals, but actual life), or (2) successfully reproduce all stages of abiogenesis in a laboratory and understand the constraints in those processes, we have absolutely no way of quantifying whether life is likely to arise on 1 out of 10 planetary bodies in the universe, or 1 out of 100, or 1 out of a million, or 1 out of a quadrillion.
Agreed. I'm not arguing your argument is implausible, by the way. I'm arguing that we simply have too little evidence to have any idea who the probabilities are. Therefore, speculating on the reason for the "Fermi paradox" is all just an exercise in speculation until we have more data points.
I don't mean to be argumentative here, but you're changing your claims significantly. In your last post, you were asserting that there are lots of UFOs, lots of reputable people claiming they are likely extraterrestrial in origin. I asked you for the best evidence to support such claims -- because I'm legitimately interested.
And instead, you give a vague argument saying you've already addressed it, and we can look at our own "technical development to get an idea of what is possible" but then couple it with "***If*** we were to develop faster-than-light technologies...." Setting aside that I think it takes an incredible amount of hubris to presuppose what a billion-year-old civilization may or may not choose to do, what its behavior might be, etc., also given we have absolutely no idea of what sort of constraints there might be on biology within the universe let alone possible psychologies of aliens.... setting aside all of that, I was legitimately asking for some decent corroborated scientific evidence by the pilots, astronomers, etc. you mentioned so I could evaluate said claims. Because, once again, without said evidence, your argument devolves into "But, other places/beings COULD be like us!!... and thus maybe they're coming here!!" Yes, that's true, but we have no evidence that they should be or how likely it is that they might be.
Maybe the coming decades will prove you right. I certainly hope the universe is teeming with life, because that might be a lot more interesting than if it weren't. But so far, we have very little evidence to suppose that's more "likely" than the rare Earth hypothesis [wikipedia.org] or many other random arguments.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @04:00PM (1 child)
A good starting point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_analog#Attributes_and_criteria [wikipedia.org]
0.8 to 2 Earth masses. The upper limit could be conservative but that remains to be seen. Not enough mass gives you a Mars situation with atmospheric loss. Too much mass could result in a water world or very high atmospheric pressure.
Terrestrial. Not a gas giant.
Average temperature allows liquid water to exist on the surface.
We can measure or infer some of these right now. There are a number of exoplanets for which we know the mass, radius, and temperature. Hubble was used [soylentnews.org] to find indirect evidence that water could exist on the surface of some of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets. A 2.4-meter aperture telescope launched in 1990 and upgraded in 2009 will not be the best tool for the job for very long.
We are doing the best we can. Enough to come up with estimates such as: Number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy: Tens of billions [arstechnica.com].
My ultimate conclusion was that "maybe some UFO sightings are alien in origin" and that if we develop faster-than-light technology, we could be almost certain that we have been visited. Faster-than-light travel would give civilizations the ability to absolutely litter themselves across the galaxy, perhaps allowing them to exist for millions or billions of years by making them resistant to extinction. Part of the civilization can die while the rest live on. Instead of presupposing what a civilization will do, presuppose that, given the capability, some small groups will likely break off the main group, following their own objectives.
The Fermi paradox fails if we are being visited by aliens this very moment. So when you have eyewitnesses attesting to that, it becomes a possible solution to the paradox. Yes, it is too bad there is no hard proof.
We have estimates of billions of potentially habitable exoplanets within the galaxy based on observations by Kepler and other missions. The Rare Earth hypothesis is dying piece by piece.
I have laid out why I think it is plausible that, given X billion potentially habitable planets (defined as having all of the fixings of Earth, particularly liquid water), something like 0.9 * X billion could develop microbial life. Maybe I'm dead wrong, but we have good reasons to be optimistic about that while remaining agnostic about the intelligent life related parameters in the Drake equation.
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 02 2018, @11:39PM
Those aren't criteria for planets that will support abiogenesis or where life can evolve efficiently. Those are criteria where life (at least as we know it) can survive. Those may be the same criteria, or they might be very different criteria. We have no current way of judging, since we have not observed life evolved except in the evidence from a single case.
Except I never much doubted that there would be other potentially habitable planets in the universe or in our galaxy. We just hadn't observed them, but once astronomers figured out the basics of stellar formation and system formation, it seems a reasonable supposition that you'll get some planets in the "habitable zone" with various characteristics like Earth. Yes, some of the actual authors of the original "rare Earth hypothesis" focused on a few elements that might be more commonplace than they thought -- but hardly all.
And really they didn't even deal much with my issue -- which is really mostly about abiogenesis, since it's the part of the process I think we know least about in terms of all the details... and there are a lot. Yes, there's an outline and a lot of theories. But last time I checked, we're leagues away from being able to synthesize life from basic organic compounds in a lab (at least using processes that could reasonably be "random" and happen in a natural environment). Correct me if I'm wrong.
I mean, have you ever looked in depth at how cell replication works and how many pieces have to come together to make that possible? I'm no expert, and I'm not arguing for "intelligent design" or some such thing -- I just think it's reasonable to withhold judgment about what is "likely" until we understand the process more... and not just go around assuming any planet that has vaguely enough liquid and a vague mix of the right elements is likely to sprout up microbes.
Well, you've laid out that you're willing to just make the assumption that life will magically sprout up on 90% of such worlds. You have presented absolutely no evidence to support that 90% number, which could very well be 90% or 99% or 1% or 0.0001% or 0.00000000000000000000001%.
I don't think that last one seems the most likely (though I have no evidence to support that judgment either, and I'll be straightforward about that), but from a logical and mathematical and scientific standpoint, the rational conclusion until we have further evidence of the sort I outlined in my last post is that judging among those estimates must be indeterminate, which means speculating on the reasons for the Fermi paradox is an exercise in futility.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 02 2018, @09:06PM (2 children)
What "minor change" happens over an entire planet? Let us recall that most such things are very local and on something the size of a geologically active planet over hundreds of millions of years, there's a vast number of local environments. So while a global "minor change" can shift some environments out of whatever zone is particularly susceptible to life, it would also shift other environments into those zones.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 02 2018, @11:46PM (1 child)
Yes, obviously. The question is how "special" the particular "soup" (for lack of a better word) must be. Do you assume that life just develops everywhere on a planet because it's so easy? Or is it something that needs such particular conditions that only one "soup" in one zone of Earth over one span of a few thousand years had just the right conditions... and then it gradually spread elsewhere? The latter is certainly possible. Or maybe there were various intermediate stages that served as bottlenecks and had to happen in a particular order. And if so, you don't need to worry about a change taking over an entire planet -- you have to worry about one pool meeting the criteria one time EVER and what the likelihood is.
I'm not saying that's the way it happened. But given how different the chemistry of biology is from most other basic natural processes and how complex it is, I really don't know how hard it would be for it to spontaneously emerge. Maybe it just takes a few million years at the right vague conditions -- but we really have no evidence of that, as far as I know. (Correct me if any lab experiment has shown otherwise... otherwise it's all speculation.)
I can make something incredibly improbable happen right now -- I can shuffle a deck of cards. It's unlikely that particular order has ever occurred in the history of the universe (even if there were millions of other civilizations out there continuously shuffling cards). Extremely improbable events happen all the time. Is the emergence of life one of those? I have no idea, but it's certainly a reasonable answer to the Fermi paradox (at least as reasonable as any other) to assume that maybe it actually depends on a chain of seemingly simple but collectively improbable events like ordering a deck of cards.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 05 2018, @04:42AM
Of course not.
Pretty much. The problem here is that small changes may move the "particular conditions" around, but they don't eliminate them.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Subsentient on Monday July 02 2018, @06:30AM (5 children)
The truth is, no matter whether we achieve interstellar travel or not, humanity is the keepers of their own sorrow.
Moon base? Draconian authoritarian corporatocracy.
Interstellar travel? Genocide of primitive aliens.
Interstellar trade? Interstellar war.
Colonies in other star systems? See moon base.
The future is bleak, regardless of whether we achieve interstellar travel or not, and regardless of if there's alien life visiting us right now.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by bzipitidoo on Monday July 02 2018, @01:14PM (2 children)
Life doesn't have to be tragic. Try a more positive outlook.
For example, on that Existential Question, suppose the nihilists are correct. Life has no meaning! Nothing matters! Whether or not there is a God, either way, life has no point. God's life has no more purpose or meaning than any of ours. Serving His purposes, no matter what they may be, does not add meaning to existence. Now what? You could sink into despair, crying that existence is so cold and empty and purposeless, and life is boring and tedious. Feel the ennui. Or, you could enjoy your Freedom. Freedom from crazy religious commandments. The Freedom from others' fear of a terrible, angry, strict, but entirely invented God. Freedom to explore the human condition.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday July 02 2018, @01:47PM (1 child)
My comment had nothing to do with the absurdity of existence or nihilism. It was about the innate, unfortunate nature of the human species.
I made peace with nihilism long ago. There was a time when it tormented me, but that time has passed.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 02 2018, @09:21PM
Not really much of a difference. Good opportunity to feel superior to your fellow man.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @01:52PM (1 child)
Utopia with self-sufficient utilization of available resources.
Possible, but seems more unlikely than not.
Bad economics. There is enough solar system material within 0.05 light years to support trillions. You can get more real estate by conquering the next star system over, but there may never be a competitive advantage to shipping material from one star system to another. You are better off finding some of the millions of interstellar asteroids/comets that are supposedly entering the solar system every year, and redirecting them so that they stay within our reach permanently instead of zipping back out.
Let's say we colonize an Earth-like exoplanet, and it turns out that way. Your complaint is really about how your life is organized here on Earth is right now. The colony at least offers a chance to start over far away from the control of existing governments and orgs. If you're unsatisfied with Earth governments, maybe experiment with anarchy. Make the most of your bleak, sad life.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 02 2018, @05:37PM
Unfortunately, any space habitat is going to need a strong (central?) authority running it to make sure the airlocks are maintained, etc. The hopeful idea is that this strong authority could be a "Friendly AI". If so, then it could *appear* to be rather loosely organized. A more likely idea is that freedom in that situation is going to have to move into virtual reality.
Currently the main blocker to permanent space habitats is our lack of the ability so design stable societies. There are lots of others, but in my evaluation that's the main blocker. And it's one that it's crucial to solve, as our life on Earth is running into the same problems. I think the problems may be inevitable given a dense population, fast transport, and rapid communication, but I really don't want to get rid of those. Another factor is high powered weaponry. I'd be really rather happy to get rid of that, but it's a situation where everyone needs to get rid of it at the same time, and this means all forms of weaponry....unfortunately I also don't want to get rid of advanced medical capability, and there's an conflict there, too. (I'm not just talking about nuclear weapons.)
This comes up to one of my solutions to the Fermi Paradox: High technology civilizations destroy themselves. It's one possibility, and probably a part of the great filter. I don't think it inevitable, but we've already come within 30 seconds of doing it to ourselves. I don't think humans are capable of running a high tech civilization. We've got too many strong impulses, and vicious heuristic thought processes. They may be inherent in any naturally evolved sentient. But we're also on the brink of a strong AI, which won't necessarily have those thought processes (though it will have different ones). And it may be able to take advantage of our inherent laziness to take over running the world(s). This may be the best outcome possible. Or not.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday July 02 2018, @05:34PM
Meanwhile, back in reality, I carry a Star Trek communicator in my pocket and build robots as a hobby.
Don't conflate being unwilling to be dragged into the 21st century with being unable to be dragged into the 21st century.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @03:16AM (4 children)
If we can have private companies launching rockets, listening for signals from outer space, why do we have to wait around for the government to study UFOs?
We've tried the government approach and that seems to satisfy nobody. So let the true believers have a crack at it. Make them prove their claims or at least not dimiss disproof out of hand.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @03:31AM (1 child)
"So let the true believers have a crack at it."
--
Ok, sounds good. First thing in the morning, I'll start a Go Fund Me for my own Very Large Array radiotelescope.
Your donations are welcome !
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 02 2018, @09:34PM
It's not that hard. Build a prototype to start with and you just might be able to fund a few dozen more.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @03:37AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Listen [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Initiatives#Breakthrough_Watch [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @03:47PM
Because anything that private companies can do, the government can do for even more money, more time and greater inefficiency. THAT'S WHY.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @03:27AM (25 children)
I've been around aircraft my entire life. I've flown many, and I have seen nearly any aircraft you can name fly at least once. Suffice it to say I am familiar with what aircraft can and cannot do.
*
I have seen one UFO that did something no manned aircraft could do. I don't know what was operating it, but I do know that absent some sort of device which could negate the effects of acceleration on a human, no human could have been on board this UFO and survived, because the rate of acceleration this UFO displayed would have killed any human. The UFO in question was observed by me hovering motionless when it suddenly accelerated to a very high rate of speed such that it disappeared from sight over the horizon, in a few seconds. I don't know what the UFO was, but I know I've never seen anything do what it did, before or since.
*
To those who make statements like "faster than light travel is impossible", I submit that many things we now accept as part of every day life would have been considered utterly impossible several hundred years ago. A few hundred years is a short period of time in the larger scheme of things. Rather than make blanket statements like "x is impossible", it might be more prudent to say "humanity, given the sum of human knowledge at this time, is unable to accomplish "x", but over time "x" may become possible. In other words, keep an open mind and be aware that the limits of our knowledge do not define the limits of what may be possible for an entity which has more knowledge.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @03:47AM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @03:57AM
They had to invent paper too.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @10:39AM (4 children)
what are you talking about?
if two lines are parallel, they cannot cross. not if they are straight lines in Euclidian geometry.
the notion of "parallel" is in fact only adequate for Euclidian geometry.
if you're going to extend it to "lines that do not cross", then you can do that, but then THEY DO NOT CROSS.
if you're going to say "light rays that are initially parallel can cross"... you're just playing with the definition of parallel again.
and the fact that you can draw some lines on a piece of paper and then bend the piece of paper has absolutely no relation to what you can physically do with geodesics in the objective universe.
even black holes (arguably the strongest perturbations of space-time observable in the universe) are nowhere near a "bend the piece of paper" phenomenon.
and wormwholes have never actually been observed (I will admit that there are people working on trying to link observable phenomena to the concept of wormhole: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.024040; [aps.org] https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.024031). [aps.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @03:58PM (3 children)
I think I found the problem!
As Adam Savage from Mythbusters would say: there's your problem!
Euclidian geometry is a nice hypothetical idea to think about. But it is a fantasy world that does not reflect physical reality.
Space is curved in a dimension we cannot observe. Example, here is one of the proof of relativity. Once upon a time, there was this thing called Mariner 9. It was happy in its transfer orbit to Mars. Even happier when it got there. Given that the humanoids on Earth understood the layout of the solar system, they knew at all times how far away their baby Mariner 9 was from Earth. To prevent separation clingxiety, as with puppies, humanoids on Earth could stay in contact with Mariner 9. The line of communication, that is, the straight line between Earth and Mariner 9 would always be a known distance. But when Earth and Mariner 9 were positioned such that the line of communication came close to the sun, the apparent distance (and thus round trip time) increased quite measurably -- as relativity predicted.
It seems that as you get closer to a massive gravitational source, like the sun, there is more space there. Let's suppose you took a few boxen of tinkertoys, and constructed a square. All four sides equal length. One edge of the square is tangent to the orbit of Jupiter. The opposite edge of the square is close to the sun. Guess what? That edge of the square close to the sun is going to need A LOT more tinkertoy sticks to complete its length than the number of tinkertoy segments at the opposite edge of the square near Jupiter.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by notrandom on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:38AM (2 children)
viking not mariner
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1979ApJ...234L.219R [harvard.edu]
(Score: 1) by notrandom on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:42AM
and if you read the abstract, the conclusion is kind of meh.... large margin of error, kind of inconclusive...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:55PM
Thank you for pointing that out.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @04:31AM (5 children)
IMO, FTL "might be possible", but require finding some other physics rule.
That said it would be related to another point along with the relativity theory: since time would pass differently for someone travelling really fast, you can't really go on a holiday in alpha centauri then go back home on earth, thousands/millions of years would have passed, the same for the destination and maybe when you arrive, the galaxy would have moved on to some other location.
So even if we were to find FTL travel tomorrow, using it right away will give other troubles.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @04:43AM (4 children)
A warp drive that bends space would not result in the time dilation you're talking about. Presumably, other FTL technologies such as wormholes would work the same way. If you're not actually traveling faster than c, you don't get the time dilation.
You don't even need FTL to get your scenario. If you get your velocity to a significant % of c, you will experience noticeable time dilation:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/timedial.html [fourmilab.ch]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @10:44AM (3 children)
special relativity says that you can go on vacation on the other side of the galaxy (time dilation allows you to get there and back in a reasonably short subjective time), but what you observe while there is far in the future of the pictures from the flier, and what you find back home is even further into the future (for instance it's likely that your car will have been moved from the spaceport parking lot because it had become an eye-sore).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @11:50AM (2 children)
Time dilation only kicks in if your velocity approaches the speed of light or if you are near a strong gravitational field. If you are not actually moving, e.g. bending spacetime with a warp drive or wormhole, time dilation does not apply. That's not to say that either method of travel is conclusively possible. But if they are, they could work around time dilation and give you the results you would expect (for example, if your warp capable ship takes a month to travel to Proxima Centauri, about a month of time passed for both passengers on the ship and people back on Earth).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @09:38PM (1 child)
as far as i understand it the alcubierre drive allows for time travel.
I really doubt time travel ispossible, because of the temporal Fermi paradox (if time travel is possible, where are the time travelers, because there's an eternity of them?).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:45AM
Even if it could allow you to observe Earth as it appeared in the past (for example, instantly move 5 light years and see Earth as it was 5 years ago from that distance), that's not real time travel and it does not mean that a glut of time travelers are coming.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @07:57AM (4 children)
well, here's my problem with your statement: you're an anonymous coward on the internet.
your statement has absolutely the same value as the statement: "I went up on a mountain, God showed himself as a burning bush and told me we should listen to these here rules".
in case you are sincere, I apologize if my assessment is insulting.
if you are a pilot, than I assume you are quite rational, and you can understand that if you were in my position you'd react the same way.
with the risk of further insulting you: it is quite possible for you to be sincere and wrong at the same time.
this is a general problem.
when we question the laws of the universe, we discover that we do not have enough time to personally review every claim that has been made.
I don't have an intuition about the Earth being round.
however, I have seen a couple of lunar eclipses, I've visited a couple of different latitudes and saw the sun setting at 23:00, hell I've skyped from the US to Europe and the time of day was different.
I really don't have an intuition about general relativity, and I can only take people's word for it that you need to account for GR in order for GPS to work (I haven't actually taken anything apart and I haven't checked their code).
but I believe that there is no great conspiracy to fool me into believing the wrong theory of gravity, because people are consistent about it.
with your UFO story, I'm sorry, but it's not a verifiable statement, independently of whether you believe you are telling the truth.
it's like claiming that you placed a drop of ink in a glass of water and saw it diffuse for a few minutes, then it reformed into almost the initial shape, and then it diffused again.
there is a well known theorem in dynamical systems (Poincare's recurrence theorem) that says such an event is possible, but it's extremely unlikely (in the sense of "in general we expect the drop to reform after many ages of the universe").
if anyone witnesses such an event and they don't have irrefutable evidence for it, no physicist will ever believe them --- the claim is not verifiable in practice.
I'm not saying your observation is just as unlikely, I'm just saying that in practice it's also unverifiable, because the only rational explanation for the lack of other evidence is the fact that we're dealing with intelligent agents who are actively hiding from us, i.e. any experiment we make in order to "measure" their existence is not, in practice, repeatable.
if you are sincere: while it may be unfair, I find it more reasonable to discount the "extremely fast moving object" experience that you claim to have had.
there is evidence which I think should be investigated: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-42405205/ufo-spotted-by-us-fighter-jet-pilots-new-footage-reveals [bbc.com]
but I don't have the knowledge to do it.
when this video was discussed here, there were a few people who pointed out inconsistencies in this video itself; in fact with today's technology I would only trust a video claiming to show nonhuman technology if every TV station in the world would be claiming it's true.
but you don't even have something like this.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday July 02 2018, @08:16AM
No, his/her statement has tremendous more value.
First, it was using correct English (or at least few enough errors that they didn't jump on you on reading; I didn't go through it to find errors).
Second, it was a much better read, even when ignoring the language issues.
What it is not is a reliable source for judging the existence of UFOs.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @11:33PM (2 children)
OP here.
I don't care whether you believe me or not.
What you wrote is your opinion, and you are entitled to it, but if you think your opinion
negates the opinion of others, you are in the grip of severe ego issues.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:30AM
I didn't want to offend you, I'm sorry if I did.
what I would like is for you to make an official statement, using your own identity, in front of witnesses who can confirm you are sane. if others like you come forward as well, it may turn out that my initial assessment is wrong. I mean... there are less than one in a thousand people who understand GR, yet I believe GR is a good description of the universe. if there's a significant number of aviation/astronomy experts who say "there are things that are seen and cannot be explained as conventional human technology", that would certainly make your statement worth investigating (in the sense of society setting aside resources to look at this carefully).
but your statement, in the context of this discussion, is frustrating. I would like to believe you, but I can't. I assume the situation is also frustrating to you, and I can understand why you would not want to do the "official statement" I described above, since it's likely most people you know professionally would have my reaction.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 05 2018, @04:47AM
The problem here is that it does. When there's nothing backing the opinion, then one opinion is just as good as another. You need more than opinion if you want us to take you seriously.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @11:00AM (6 children)
in the edward norton hulk there is a scene where a human is on a table and begins transformation into the hulk. as the transformation proceeds, the table breaks because of the increased weight. THAT is impossible, it would have been called impossible a few hundred years ago, and I call it impossible now. that scene breaks conservation of mass. I'm sorry to say this, but current physics points to "you can't go faster than light" being just as true as mass conservation (well, we call it energy conservation). I could be wrong, but it's very unlikely.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @11:41AM (5 children)
Bending spacetime is the way to work around the faster-than-light limit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @12:25PM (4 children)
the "negative energy" part makes those things extremely unlikely.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @12:40PM
No one said they weren't.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 02 2018, @05:51PM (2 children)
Actually, negative energy exists. Look up Casimir Effect. It's (probably) a result of a situation where some of the virtual particles that normally appear is space-time are prohibited from showing up. I sure don't see how you could use that to stabilize a wormhole, though. When Forward was trying to justify them he felt he had to invoke negative mass (different from anti-matter). Negative mass is theoretically possible without violating any extant laws, and there are obvious reasons why we've never seen any. But it's really dubious, particularly as it would make the dark matter problem even worse (though it could be used to justify dark energy). And since it would be repelled by gravitational fields, it wouldn't make the dark matter problem *that* much worse. You just wouldn't find any within a galaxy, and probably not within a galaxy cluster.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by notrandom on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:48AM (1 child)
All the Feynmann in the world will not convince me about the exzistence of virtual particles as anything more than a math device...
I'm sorry .. I'm dumb :D
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:38PM
Well come up with a different explanation then. The effect is observable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @05:34PM (1 child)
But if you're talking about intelligent life then yes maybe I'm alone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @08:21AM
because alien life may have technology that can solve some of our problems (cheap energy therefore cheap food/clothing/housing, and separately some life-prolongation method).
once we get those, it will also be fun to learn about their version of chess/go/whatever (and try to beat them at it), maybe read their books etc (very long life means we may actually get bored with human books).
oh, and there is a remote possibility that something sexual could happen. I guess it's certain that at least some humans will want to have some sort of sex with whatever aliens they meet, but it may turn out to be a more general thing (i.e. relevant for the general population).
oh, and best of all: I get to say "religious fundamentalists are wrong" for a whole new reason.