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  1. #26

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    It's possible life could exist elsewhere in the universe. It's not possible they could reach us. If you think that's possible you completely don't understand astronomical distances.

    As Betz quoted, if you take the example of our fastest spacecraft going at 38,000 m/h, it would take millennia just to get to the nearest star. Just the nearest star! Ok so the aliens have faster spacecraft, galaxies are 100,000 light years across. What are they gonna do, live in their spacecraft for hundreds of millennia?
    Last edited by Jimmy Smith; 09-28-2023 at 11:48 PM.

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  3. #27

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    Quote Originally Posted by wolflen
    pauln wrote ...

    As far as problems of long distance space travel and other things we have not even thought of, I believe that with billions of years to work on it, there is no problem that can't be solved. Whatever the level 4 folks are, I tend to think they may travel from one galaxy to another with about the same effort as Samantha used to wiggle her nose (Bewitched). All of our protestations that something can't be done are echos of needing horses on the Moon... as are all the ideas of "people" visiting in space craft. Basically, we may probably not be in any position to imagine, recognize, or perceive whatever other intelligence forms are out there (statistically they must be ahead of us on the order of our regard for the microscopic multicellular worm).



    so..you are saying ..that our space brothers/sisters can travel MUCH faster than the speed of light

    or as the Moody Blues said..thinking is the best way to travel
    "Faster than light, if you want to..." (after a few billion years of advancement...)

  4. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by pauln
    Well, there you've done it - opened a most crawly can of worms.

    It begins with the Drake equation, estimating the number of intelligent life forms within our galaxy where communications might happen. The equation multiplies a series of terms:

    average rate of star formation
    fraction of those stars with planets
    average number of those planets potentially supporting life
    fraction of those planets that actually develop life
    fraction of those planets that develop intelligent life
    fraction that develop a technology, detectable signs of their existence
    length of time the send detectable signals

    The insidious thing about the Drake equation is that if you feed in the current best estimates and then reduce each of them by 50% or even 90% just to be real conservative, the resulting number of stars hosting intelligent life is huge, and the subsequent galactic density estimate to figure where the nearest might be is pretty close. That is why Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?"

    There is a pretty good possible answer, but people don't see it in the same way that people imagining space travel a few hundred years ago might have imagined they would need to take horses with them to the Moon.

    First, review how we got to today.

    4.6 billion years ago
    the Earth forms
    4 billion years ago
    self replicating, organic molecules, structure without cell walls
    3.4 billion years ago
    prokaryotic organisms, microscopic, single-cell with cell walls, single chromosome, no nucleus
    1.4 billion years ago
    eukaryotic organisms. larger microscopic, single-cell, with a nucleus, other inclusions like mitochondria
    560 million years ago
    soft-bodied organisms, fairly to barely microscopic. first multicellular (worms and plants)

    So, in short
    replicating molecule to microscopic worn in 3.5 billion years
    microscopic worm to man with just another 0.5 billion years

    Now, we look at distant galaxies to find the earliest indication of high metalicity stars (cosmologists call all elements beyond hydrogen and helium as "metals") for the formation of rocky planets and... opps! We find them to be 11.2 billion years old, a little too soon to have formed after the Big Bang in the current theories.

    The presumed rocky planets hosting life might be early or late in their development of life - we might be observing them as the Earth was 4.6B years ago (or as the Earth is now if the age of the universe is extended from current 13.8B to 15.8B), so the intelligent life there could be between 6.6 to 11.2 billion years ahead of us... lets go with a conservative 6B years ahead of us.

    We saw that 3.5B years got from molecule to worm and 0.5B years more got to man. It is time to think about what intelligent life as we know it (us) might become after another 6 billion years of development - what the aliens might be right now...

    If you're still with me, let's look at the ancients, who believed that the fundamental particles had agency rather than being dead matter (earth, water, air, and fire). The modern view it to consider the fundamental particles as dead and shift the agency to fields, which are invisible and immeasurable without placing a test particle and attributing its motion to the field (this is considered an improvement).

    So let's replace fire with light; they thought of the Sun and stars as fire, but light seems to be a better description, and now we can examine the levels of life schematically as we know it on the Earth.

    Level 1
    Modern view is that earth, water, air, and light have no agency, know nothing, are dead matter.

    Level 2
    Plants, which display some agency - they grow roots down into earth and branches up, actively seek water and light, exchange light and air for energy, etc.
    Level 2 has some "awareness" of level 1, is all about and around level 1, reside on it and in it, and consumes it for its own purposes, and level 1 knows nothing of this.

    Level 3
    Animals live in and around and about level 2, make their homes in it, consume it, and display strong agency and awareness of level 2 (and level 1). Level 2 has no knowledge of level 3.

    What can be said as a level 3 (us!) about the nature of level 4, whatever that might be. We might guess that the hierarchical relationship and its asymmetries might continue in form:

    Level 4 would be
    - totally aware of us and all levels below 4
    - invisible, inaudible, untouchable, totally imperceptible to us
    - about, around, and within us all the time, unknown to us
    - live in us, consume us in some fashion for their own purposes

    There may likely be more levels. Douglas Adams described an advanced intelligence as "a super-intelligent shade of the color blue.” Those that have studied the extremely long term future of the universe will recognize a resemblance to the time when only cold black holes remain encircled by orbiting light.

    As far as problems of long distance space travel and other things we have not even thought of, I believe that with billions of years to work on it, there is no problem that can't be solved. Whatever the level 4 folks are, I tend to think they may travel from one galaxy to another with about the same effort as Samantha used to wiggle her nose (Bewitched). All of our protestations that something can't be done are echos of needing horses on the Moon... as are all the ideas of "people" visiting in space craft. Basically, we may probably not be in any position to imagine, recognize, or perceive whatever other intelligence forms are out there (statistically they must be ahead of us on the order of our regard for the microscopic multicellular worm).
    "Horses to the moon" Ha! Brilliant! Contemplating possible advanced forms of intelligence through a contemporary anthropomorphic lens is what we do. Guessing as to why a higher intelligent being would bother to visit Earth is assuming we know what/how/why they're thinking, or even that they "think" at all! The idea that such beings may be "inter-dimensional" is the stuff of Science Fiction for many of us, but even that can't be wiped off the table just yet. After all, we still know far too little about Cosmology, and we don't really have a clue about things like Light, Gravity, Time etc... basic stuff...

  5. #29
    Quote Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
    ...
    Also, on a side note, that was the vaguest op I've ever read. The only content I could decipher about the topic was NHIs. I have no idea what that means. I also searched it and nothing relevant came up.
    Sorry, I thought everyone knew NHI stood for Non Human Intelligence, and am shocked you weren't able to search out its meaning! But surely everything else in the OP was clear enough?

    Edit: Hey you're right, just googled "NHI" and it comes up with "National Health Index"! I wrongly assumed the term had been around for a while because I see it a lot in these types of discussions. But it must be a newish term borne out of this current new wave of interest in all things UFO related...

  6. #30

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    Quote Originally Posted by pauln
    As far as problems of long distance space travel and other things we have not even thought of, I believe that with billions of years to work on it, there is no problem that can't be solved. Whatever the level 4 folks are, I tend to think they may travel from one galaxy to another with about the same effort as Samantha used to wiggle her nose (Bewitched). All of our protestations that something can't be done are echos of needing horses on the Moon... as are all the ideas of "people" visiting in space craft. Basically, we may probably not be in any position to imagine, recognize, or perceive whatever other intelligence forms are out there (statistically they must be ahead of us on the order of our regard for the microscopic multicellular worm).
    Nice, thanks for posting that!

  7. #31

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    "Horses to the moon" Ha! Brilliant! Contemplating possible advanced forms of intelligence through a contemporary anthropomorphic lens is what we do. Guessing as to why a higher intelligent being would bother to visit Earth is assuming we know what/how/why they're thinking, or even that they "think" at all! The idea that such beings may be "inter-dimensional" is the stuff of Science Fiction for many of us, but even that can't be wiped off the table just yet. After all, we still know far too little about Cosmology, and we don't really have a clue about things like Light, Gravity, Time etc... basic stuff...
    Thats not quite fair. Our theories of physics are incredibly good at making experimental predictions. Annoyingly so, because it may be that we can’t gain access to energies in plausible physics experiments that might break the current theories, which could be a real problem for theoretical physics.

    In the early 20th century you had real issues with the orbit of mercury, the mickelsen-Morley experiment, the nature of the atom, the ultra violet catastrophe and so on that c19 physics had no ability to deal with. So new theories were required to explain experiment and be verifiable through further predictions.

    Not so today. todays problems are more philosophical - the most glaring of which is that we have two mutually incompatible models, one for for the very small, one for the very big. But both work EXTREMELY well for their respective domains. The Standard Model might be a horrendous Heath Robinson monstrosity that everyone hates but it does its job absurdly well. ‘Elegance is for tailors’ I guess.

    So we don’t ‘understand’ what light or gravity really ‘IS’ but our models work just great thank you. Perhaps the issue is that they are purely ‘models’. For most applications the understanding of what exactly the Schrödinger wave function represents IRL, for instance, is beside the point. It works!

    So, most working physicists don’t worry or care, but it’s a headache for the theoretical physicists of course and a tremendous boon for the publishing and podcast industry.

    Cosmology is an interesting one. I’m not crazy about CDM-Lambda (wth is up with the Lambda bit exactly? That’s my main issue) but it’s the most successful theory by a long way. There’s something up IMVHO, but I’m just an educated layperson, making layperson objections, so what do I know?
    Last edited by Christian Miller; 09-28-2023 at 06:15 AM.

  8. #32

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    For an argument that dismisses my (or should I say, the mainstream) objections to FTL you might want to watch this



    I find Hossenfelder’s thoughts on *physics* often quite interesting (and I wish she’d stick to that tbh)

    I do get a heavy contrarian vibe, at least that’s what I feel not personally being someone plugged into the field on an academic level. She is a CDM Lambda critic for example.

    Otoh She is tbf a professional theoretical physicist herself…
    Last edited by Christian Miller; 09-28-2023 at 06:47 AM.

  9. #33

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    The visitors are not aliens from another galaxy; they are humans from the future.

  10. #34

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    Quote Originally Posted by Litterick
    The visitors are not aliens from another galaxy; they are humans from the future.
    So why do they not understand our anatomy, thus always (ALWAYS) test the bodies of those whom they contact? Why do they need to use those probes if they're so advanced? I wanna know!!

  11. #35

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    I’m quite certain that we have very little notion of what human beings are and what the “universe” is. Yes, absolutely there is other intelligent life.

    As for whether it is visiting us from another place, or whether it has always been here, or whether it’s here at all, I was a bigger believer in “UFOs” before the government started saying it was true. Now I have my doubts.

  12. #36
    Quote Originally Posted by Kirk Garrett
    .... I was a bigger believer in “UFOs” before the government started saying it was true. Now I have my doubts.
    Yeah, me too, which leads to some questions, like -

    Has the Govt been forced to declare leaked information that it would have preferred to conceal? If so, is it being extremely selective with it's "disclosures"?

    Or do you think the Govt is creating a smokescreen to distract the populace away from top secret technologies (their own, or their enemies')?

    Or is this "secret part of the Govt" interested in creating a new fake fear campaign (the aliens are coming, and they're not our friends!) in order to shore up more trillions in funding for it's military?

    It's interesting to read the thoughts of some observers that claim that the Govt has in fact been "staging" UFO sightings and even abductions for decades towards this end. More interesting still is yet another claim that the Govt is conducting these events using actual reverse engineered technology obtained from, you guessed it, actual retrieved crashed alien crafts! Sounds fucking crazy, I know, but it's not just recent whistleblowers like David Grusch saying these things, but a whole list of names that go back decades like Bob Lazar, Richard Doty and Steven Greer etc. Sure, the debunkers find ways to discredit them all usually with Ad Hominem attacks on their character (a tactic that always makes me suspicious), but by golly these people can seem so darn compelling, check 'em out and you'll see what I mean. If they're actors, then they're damn good ones!. Certainly a cut above the low level pop UFO cranks you see on the History Channel, or the hundreds of crappy youtube videos etc.

    So, are they real whistleblowers? Or are they under cover agents? Who knows, after all, we all know that counter intelligence operations run deep, and have done so for decades if not centuries. I think I can safely say that at least, without being ridiculed as a conspiracy nut job?

  13. #37

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    So, are they real whistleblowers? Or are they under cover agents?
    IMO they're just cranks, looking for publicity.

  14. #38
    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    Thats not quite fair. Our theories of physics are incredibly good at making experimental predictions. Annoyingly so,....So we don’t ‘understand’ what light or gravity really ‘IS’ but our models work just great thank you....
    Yes, of course there is a lot of frighteningly clever stuff out there that tries to make sense of it all, I mean for example, String Theory actually makes perfect sense to some people as an elegant model that can provide many if not all the answers.... but the pre Copernicus models of the solar system were also beautiful systems that contained "all the answers", no? Surely Science not only leaves a trail of dead religions, but also of dead (redundant) Science?

  15. #39
    Quote Originally Posted by sgosnell
    IMO they're just cranks, looking for publicity.
    Possibly, yes, although I'm not sure that this David Grusch fellow fits that description.

  16. #40

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Yes, of course there is a lot of frighteningly clever stuff out there that tries to make sense of it all, I mean for example, String Theory actually makes perfect sense to some people as an elegant model that can provide many if not all the answers.... but the pre Copernicus models of the solar system were also beautiful systems that contained "all the answers", no? Surely Science not only leaves a trail of dead religions, but also of dead (redundant) Science?
    Oh sure … and one of these is Kepler’s cosmic polyphony! see I could tie in music theory somehow…

    Copernicus’s system was pretty cranky actually. Because he was still sold on spheres and circles from Ptolemaic cosmology he had an equally complicated system. It took Kepler and his laws of planetary motion to make heliocentric cosmology more elegant than what came before.

    but Galileo’s actual observations meant that the heliocentric systems days were always numbered.

    (Galileo played lute and had his own theory of acoustics and music btw that no one today cares about and his dad was a sort of c16 Rick Beato.)

    The criticism of the string theorists and m-theorist and so on is most of these theories provide no testable predictions. This is a big problem. Sure it’s nice…. Well actually I have no idea because I can’t understand the math. I presume it is.

  17. #41

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Yeah, me too, which leads to some questions, like -

    Has the Govt been forced to declare leaked information that it would have preferred to conceal? If so, is it being extremely selective with it's "disclosures"?

    Or do you think the Govt is creating a smokescreen to distract the populace away from top secret technologies (their own, or their enemies')?

    Or is this "secret part of the Govt" interested in creating a new fake fear campaign (the aliens are coming, and they're not our friends!) in order to shore up more trillions in funding for it's military?

    It's interesting to read the thoughts of some observers that claim that the Govt has in fact been "staging" UFO sightings and even abductions for decades towards this end. More interesting still is yet another claim that the Govt is conducting these events using actual reverse engineered technology obtained from, you guessed it, actual retrieved crashed alien crafts! Sounds fucking crazy, I know, but it's not just recent whistleblowers like David Grusch saying these things, but a whole list of names that go back decades like Bob Lazar, Richard Doty and Steven Greer etc. Sure, the debunkers find ways to discredit them all usually with Ad Hominem attacks on their character (a tactic that always makes me suspicious), but by golly these people can seem so darn compelling, check 'em out and you'll see what I mean. If they're actors, then they're damn good ones!. Certainly a cut above the low level pop UFO cranks you see on the History Channel, or the hundreds of crappy youtube videos etc.

    So, are they real whistleblowers? Or are they under cover agents? Who knows, after all, we all know that counter intelligence operations run deep, and have done so for decades if not centuries. I think I can safely say that at least, without being ridiculed as a conspiracy nut job?
    Government smokescreen? Have you seen our governments lately? Maybe that was a more credible story at the height of the cold war…

    Anyway I like a good UFO yarn as much as the next person… there’s some good’uns. And I love the X files.

  18. #42

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    It must be remembered that 'science' is not a settled and static entity. Scientific knowledge changes constantly, and theories have to be revised to adapt to new knowledge. No credible scientist would ever claim that we know everything, nor that we will ever know everything. Science advances largely by someone floating a theory, which can be confirmed or falsified with experimental data. Some are accepted, some are rejected, and some are just too hard to test with current technology and data. But we stagger on, as best we can.

  19. #43

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    May the Force be with you !

  20. #44

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  21. #45

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    Well, at least the truth as presented in a commercial TV series is out there...

    There are sane and reliable TV science shows, mostly on PBS, but accepting any commercial TV or movie as real is akin to believing in Santa and unicorns. The same goes for most YouTube videos. Anyone with a smartphone can put anything at all on YouTube, or any other social media, without any evidence or accountability.

  22. #46

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    When discussing this subject, we have to remember how little we know and we don't know what we don't know. I would like to think there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe, but I simply can't KNOW that for a fact. It can be implied in various ways, but there is no solid proof; only blurry images purported to be UFOs along with various conspiracy theories and whatever science pieces together as possibility or even probability.

    Tony

  23. #47

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    ........ paraphrasing Woody Allen - --

    " Not only that, just try to find a plumber on weekends. "

  24. #48

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    Quote Originally Posted by pauln
    One AU is 8.317 light-minutes
    161.5 AU is 22.38 Light HOURS
    Good catch! Must have moved a decimal point somewhere . . .

    Anyway, I believe the fundamental point still stands that Voyager 1 has still made virtually no progress at crossing an interstellar distance. And that makes no allowance for relative directions of travel between our sun and Proxima Centauri. It could easily be moving away from the sun faster than Voyager 1 is traveling, if Voyager 1 was heading in that direction, which it isn’t.

  25. #49

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    About a year ago, a friend told me to check out some of the documentaries on Bob Lazar, a whistleblower who claims to have worked at Area 51 dismantling captured UFO technology. I came across one docu called "Unacknowledged" that describes the activities of a group who is actively trying to contact alien life forms by gathering in remote areas and group-thinking their openness to contact; the leader of this movement is Dr. Steven Greer. Supposedly, this activity frequently results in contact. Generally, they see lights and light formations that perform maneuvers our own flight technology cannot, but on one occasion they claim to have seen a humanoid figure. This docu posed the interesting idea that these vehicles and life forms are not physically present but "teleporting" their visual presence (similar to what one poster suggested wrt the Hindi gods.) Consider that an image on a TV looks real but the thing that the TV is showing you is not physically present. And they also suggested that these images can fade in and out, like a half-tuned radio signal. It's as plausible an explanation as any other for working around the impossibly large distances and forces that one would have to overcome for physical interstallar travel.

    Greer also posits that the sudden uptick in sightings coincides with our first use of atomic weapons, and that a majority of sightings take place in the vicinity of nuclear reactors and sites that house atomic weapons. There is even one story that is apparently documented by a number of sources in which all of the nuclear-armed weapons at more than one site went offline simultaneously, with no known external stimulus provoking the failure. Green suggests that extraterrestrials are more than curious, they are actually concerned about our use of nuclear technology. Where it gets waaay over my head is the explanation that uses string theory to suggest that a nuclear detonation in our world could wreak havoc in other parts of the universe; he suggests that the use of atomic weapons at the end of WWII and nuclear testing since then has attracted the attention and concern of other intelligent life forms.


  26. #50
    Quote Originally Posted by starjasmine
    About a year ago, a friend told me to check out some of the documentaries on Bob Lazar, a whistleblower who claims to have worked at Area 51 dismantling captured UFO technology. I came across one docu called "Unacknowledged" that describes the activities of a group who is actively trying to contact alien life forms by gathering in remote areas and group-thinking their openness to contact; the leader of this movement is Dr. Steven Greer. Supposedly, this activity frequently results in contact. Generally, they see lights and light formations that perform maneuvers our own flight technology cannot, but on one occasion they claim to have seen a humanoid figure. This docu posed the interesting idea that these vehicles and life forms are not physically present but "teleporting" their visual presence (similar to what one poster suggested wrt the Hindi gods.) Consider that an image on a TV looks real but the thing that the TV is showing you is not physically present. And they also suggested that these images can fade in and out, like a half-tuned radio signal. It's as plausible an explanation as any other for working around the impossibly large distances and forces that one would have to overcome for physical interstallar travel.

    Greer also posits that the sudden uptick in sightings coincides with our first use of atomic weapons, and that a majority of sightings take place in the vicinity of nuclear reactors and sites that house atomic weapons. There is even one story that is apparently documented by a number of sources in which all of the nuclear-armed weapons at more than one site went offline simultaneously, with no known external stimulus provoking the failure. Green suggests that extraterrestrials are more than curious, they are actually concerned about our use of nuclear technology. Where it gets waaay over my head is the explanation that uses string theory to suggest that a nuclear detonation in our world could wreak havoc in other parts of the universe; he suggests that the use of atomic weapons at the end of WWII and nuclear testing since then has attracted the attention and concern of other intelligent life forms.

    Yeah, I found their stories interesting too. But check out the vids below and see if you think both these guys are credible.