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I respect some of the impressive science based discussions I've witnessed on these forums over the years, and I suspect that some of you guys are harbouring some thoughts about the recent hoo-ha that has made it's way to Congress recently regarding NHI's etc. It's a BIG story, whether it's a cover-up, or a psy-op, so let's hear your take on it all. FWIW, I'm skeptical bordering on agnostic, but will admit that part of me wants to believe we are not alone....
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09-27-2023 11:53 AM
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It would explain some JGO members
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I think the idea of us being the only intelligent life in the universe is pretty ridiculous. Of course there's something else out there.
Have they visited? I doubt it. Any life advanced enough to have the means to visit the Earth from another galaxy would also have the means to see there's absolutely nothing here for them.
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There's a saying- it's terrifying to think we're alone and terrifying to think we're not.
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we have a loooong way to go before "science" saves us from ourselves..
the big bang "theory" is just that
the age and size of the universe will continue to change and increase as we learn more about it
in a recent science faux pas ..the estimated number of galaxies in the universe .. from billions to TRILLIONS
dame decimal point !!
intelligent life ..out there..if so..why come here..to learn from us..highly doubtful..to teach us..well.we are very slow learners..
one may wonder..with all the "sightings" and considering all the available vid capturing devices available
yet not ONE clear/clean capture of a vehicle or pilot of same to be had..
sound contact you say..not a hopeful sound of communication of far away life
my take
if such, beyond our imagination, intelligence can travel thousands of light years ..why the need for a vehicle at all
the Hindu gods just materialized before their devotees ..that makes as much sense
I often wonder..why did all the miraculous things happen thousands of years ago
today we seem only to get a slight image of an top religious icon in a pizza
ahhh time for some re-runs of the X-Files
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My gut feeling is life in the universe is not uncommon but intelligent tool using life is incredibly rare.
The increasing number of ways in which we are discovering the Earth and the Sol system in general appears to be Very Extra Special seems to suggest this to me. Plate tectonics & the carbon cycle, a moon that stabilises axial tilt, a quiet star, and so on. OTOH basic microbial extremophile life seems to have got started very quickly on the hellish early earth. So….
But - we only have one example of how life can happen so maybe that’s very narrow minded. Perhaps intelligence can arise from different situations. The universe has a habit of surprising us.
That said we’ve only just started with SETI. our radio signals have gone 70 or 80 light years and are WEAK. The Galaxy for comparison is around 100,000ly end to end.
I doubt the aliens are here and pranking jet fighter pilots or joyriding their vehicles into the ground and US government hands. But who knows what ET and the gang do for kicks.
(I always enjoyed Joe Dante’s Terran media addicted teenage aliens in Explorers, underrated movie haha.)
Everything we know about interstellar space travel suggests it’s incredibly energy expensive however you do it, so seems an odd use of one’s resources.Last edited by Christian Miller; 09-27-2023 at 01:57 PM.
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I do know that I find Avi Loeb really bloody irritating
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If we are the only intelligent life in the universe, the universe is in real trouble - a cliche by now, but worth considering.
I know one person who was involved in Project Blue Book who told me that the purpose of that project was not to prove the existence of UFOs, but to debunk the various sightings. Further, he said that there were less than 1% of the sightings that remained unexplained and those went to a small group in the Pentagon and were never heard about again.
As far as I personally am concerned, I try to be very aware of what I do and don't know, and in the case of intelligent life in the universe, I don't know. I can say it seems reasonable to me, but I can't know that it exists with certainty. My own feeling is that if there is intelligent life in the universe, it must know enough to not waste time with us.
Why UFOs have suddenly come into prominence again, I don't know. I do know that happens periodically. The late 1940s and into the 1950s had that culturally too, and then again for a short while in the 1970s, though those reports smelled of people looking for their "15 minutes of fame". So it is really "same old, same old".
So the question of the day: was it real or was it Memorex (or just a weather balloon masquerading as a UFO)?
TonyLast edited by tbeltrans; 09-27-2023 at 04:19 PM.
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Actually that’s wrong … I assumed Foo Bird meant ‘Foo fighter’ being an early term for UFO, but actually I think it’s something else.
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Apparently, the "Foo Fighter" thing during WWII is documented - 3' diameter balls that flew alongside fighter planes. I don't think anybody knows what they really were though. There are several youtube videos on the subject, though I typically take that sort of thing with a grain of salt.
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Tony
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AFAIK long distance space travel taking at least several years is fraught with danger from radiation, space debris trashing your ship etc, and any sentient organic life form gangster until it's time to actually board an experimental warp drive spacecraft for the first time. Anyway, why physically come here?
Those objects described as cubes within spheres which defy the known laws of physics are prolly data-gathering or observation devices from some distant future human civilisation which figured out how to do that. They could even be on a nostalgia trip, who knows?
It's as good a theory as any other I've read
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I mean I’d state it stronger than that. I think limited interplanetary travel is just about possible in the next few decades for very hardy souls. I think interstellar travel maybe functionally impossible for biological human beings. Maybe we can fix that in the distant future… but … Originally Posted by Peter C
One thing we’ve learned from Voyager is that interstellar cosmic radiation is much worse than that within the solar system, and even that is extremely hazardous to human life over the long term.
Even within the solar system Apollo astronauts reported seeing little flashes within their eyeballs even when their eyes were shut. These were high energy cosmic rays smashing into molecules in their vitreous humour and creating flashes of light….. I think people underestimate exactly how hostile space is.
Then, imagine accelerating all of that sh*t into your face at a sizeable faction of light speed (presuming you’d like to get the nearest star in less the centuries AND you somehow could build the engines and find the fuel.)
Not a fun time.
(And there’s just the mundane awful stuff weightlessness does to the human frame over months.)
I doubt FTL will exist for the same reason as Time Travel on account of them being functionally the same thing, meaning events can effectively precede their causes (‘Closed Timelike Loops’ to use the jargon). That’s a problem for a sane universe although in theory you can always devise solutions of the equations of relativity that do this (Kurt Gödel trolled Einstein with one of these back in the day), in practice all the FTL travel schemes anyone has come up with so far (wormholes, warp drives etc) invariably violate important energy conditions in General Relativity. While that might not always be the case for sure, it does seem as if the maths of the Einstein field equation conspire to kill threats to causality. Which is interesting.
Rather neat, you could say. Suspiciously so.
So, what’s good for physics on the ongoing sanity of the universe less good for Star Trek… but the universe is a surprising place. Maybe time travel is fine, who knows?
I’m sure there’s a science fiction story like that?Those objects described as cubes within spheres which defy the known laws of physics are prolly data-gathering or observation devices from some distant future human civilisation which figured out how to do that. They could even be on a nostalgia trip, who knows?
It's as good a theory as any other I've read
Last edited by Christian Miller; 09-27-2023 at 05:23 PM.
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And that’s why we can’t have nice things.
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Even if they did come, best way to scare the mofos off is by exposing them to a bit of Swatkins on the talkbox.
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No idea, and I certainly don't have the time to write it Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I also don't remember much of my high school physics, so that would be a problem right there.
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The real problem, ISTM, is that even at the speed of light it would take millions of years to reach us from even the nearby galaxies. The universe is so vast that it takes light billions of years to reach us, so we're seeing very distant galaxies as they were billions of years ago. Even if there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe, the odds of it finding us here in a remote backwater among the trillions of galaxies extant is vanishingly remote. The hoo-ha in Congress is just more evidence of the complete lack of intelligence among a certain set of congress-critters. No science, and nothing remotely scientific, was presented, just the usual conspiracy theories.
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Look behind the curtain...
Tony
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According to the JPL, Voyager 1 is the fastest moving object we have ever created. It is currently traveling away from the sun at a bit over 38,000 mph. The mission elapsed time is 46 years 22 days. It is currently 161.5 AU (astronomical units) from the sun, which calculates out to 0.0025 light years, or almost 22 light minutes. The nearest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.24 light years away. So, comparatively speaking, Voyager 1 is not even half an hour into a trip that would take 4 1/4 years at the speed of light.
Assuming we make it (people, I mean) we will develop faster craft than chemical rockets. But the speed of light is 670,616,629 mph (I know, in a vacuum). Voyager 1 would have to speed up 100 times (to 3,800,000 mph) to get to 0.005% light speed.
It’s just too darn big.
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Light speed, yeah, but what about ludicrous speed?
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And leave a trail of plaid?
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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).
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One AU is 8.317 light-minutes Originally Posted by Betz
161.5 AU is 22.38 Light HOURS
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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
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