Hey Hubskiers - There's been some interesting UFO news from the US military that has come out the last year. From one angle, you can say they may have evidence of aliens visiting Earth. There's also the real-world physics that put hard limits on traveling long distances in space, that says nobody is visiting us (or even can visit us) at all.
While I like to ascribe the Navy blips to computer glitches, sensor anomalies, and plain old weird shit in the sky, I always entertain the possibility/hope that an alien race will visit us someday.
But then I bump up against the very real world of physics (as we understand it) and the pure magical thinking and incomprehensible leaps of faith it takes to believe in faster-than-light travel.
Especially for recreational purposes!
I don't have a question to ask here ... I'm trying to spark some conversation on the topics of Aliens visiting Earth with the smarty-smarts and clever types and poets and painters and peoples of Hubski. What have you got to share about aliens in the space between the US Military's "evidence" and the facts of physics?
There are no aliens. Not intelligent ones at least. And so far, every bacteria, virus, fungi etc known to man, even the ones under Antarctic glaciers, in thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean and in caustic chemical pools in Yellowstone all have DNA and RNA pointing towards a common single ancestor that lived as soon as organic chemistry could function on the earth as it cooled, some 4.2 billion years ago. There are no aliens. Mick West has been debunking this nonsense for at least 15 years on Youtube. He's at the point now where not only can he explain that what you are looking at is a plane, but by figuring out the time stamps on the videos, which plane and contrail you are looking at. The reason these videos are coming out now is because the problems with the tech that caused the oddities, along with better training are no longer a national security risk to our military. The take away from the "go fast" video, debunk below, is not OH SHIT ALIENS! The take away from these videos should be OH SHIT WE CAN SEE A LARGE BIRD FLAP ITS WINGS FROM A CAMERA TRAVELING SUPERSONIC SPEEDS FROM FIVE MILES AWAY. And now that this video and information is declassified, what can they see and find now? (hint the software is better at finding these glitches and blips and hiding them from the pilots so they can focus on drones and stealth aircraft) There are no aliens. If there was anything sentient within 250 light years we would be picking up their airport radars by now. There is a subset of people that have been lost in all the chaos of the last 30 years that want a savior but don't go to church, so they invent little green men visitors. There are no aliens, and There are no aliens. We want there to be because humans are garbage at fixing problems on our own.
I'm not convinced aliens visited or sent probes to Earth, but I accept the high likelihood of extraterrestrial life. 'Oumuamua and Loeb's arguments are strong, definitely more than many "exotic rock formation illuminated from just the right angle with two dozen parameters frozen at pre-set values" explanations I've seen in some papers. When you reach that point, the alien probe hypothesis deserves to be considered on equal grounds. It really doesn't. You can get spinless localizable tahyons from assuming the existence of particles whose relativistic mass doesn't depend on relative velocity. Magical? Hardly. There's no reason, be it physical or purely mathematical, why it's prohibited. Hell, even for something as simple as rest mass = dynamic mass, you get all the special relativity working as intended and it's a valid solution to the Klein-Gordon equation. it's called Cox-Hill tachyon formulation if memory serves. This doesn't even get into the general relativity with all its gravitational weirdness. Just kinda spitballing physics here, though. Last time I did well while pissed-out drunk, but we can try it your way and stay sober.the pure magical thinking and incomprehensible leaps of faith it takes to believe in faster-than-light travel.
(1) damn that was an awesome thread get in here am_Unition (2) Humor an old man - last I heard, tachyons were on about the same theoretical footing as phlogiston and even if they were verifiable, the zeroth law of thermo prevented us from ever observing or interacting with them. Has the consensus view moved on that one?
Regarding detection, I'll need to do some further reading, but I think it's entirely dependent on the formulation. In principle, they should be able to interact gravitationally like anything else with mass and energy. Then again, I could probably design you an interaction scheme by the afternoon, and some poor experimentalist would need fifty years to test it. Regarding consensus, as kind of an outsider to the field myself, I'd say it's getting to the level of "it can't hurt to fund a theorist or two working on it" when it comes to recognition. And, really, the off-chance of tachyons yielding reward IMO trumps 98% of string theory research, and we keep funding that 11-dimensional monstrosity.(2) Humor an old man - last I heard, tachyons were on about the same theoretical footing as phlogiston and even if they were verifiable, the zeroth law of thermo prevented us from ever observing or interacting with them. Has the consensus view moved on that one?
Okay, let's back up. The conception of "tachyon" I learned (from the number two guy at LIGO no less) was that c, nature's speed limit, meant getting past the speed of light consumed all the energy in the universe thus you ain't gonna do it. However, since E=mc^2 can be solved hyperbolically as well as parabolically, relativity doesn't rule out particles that are just as bound to move faster than the speed of light, never to slow to it. However, you have to turn mass into an imaginary number and things null out real good when you try to cross the asymptote. I'm definitely the straight guy who delivers "but professor" exposition in these stage plays, though.Regarding detection, I'll need to do some further reading, but I think it's entirely dependent on the formulation.
All of that is true, yes. I'm sorry I don't have an off-hand response, but I'm trying to use Einstein-Maxwell equation to check if we could see something propagating <c in the gravitational curvature from, say, the point of tachyon creation. Unfortunately, with less-than-stellar intuition on my part.
So, the good thing is that I'm non-trivially wrong. Essentially, I wanted to see what would happen with the spacetime curvature around tachyon-containing bubble of elecromagnetic field. My messup is very mathy, but traces to a discontinuity at the spacetime point at which tachyon originates. Oh well. My bad, learned something, it was fun. I still think there's a lot of potential here, though.
Thank Christ Gohmert (R-TX) is there to out-science scientists. I never thought of finding over 71 brazillion gillapetbytes of fuel for the 359 googellian Watt-erages of energy to boost Earth to a 1.01 AU semi-major axis! Seriously, the Trump energy budget of a nuke vs. a hurricane was wayyyyy less of a discrepancy than Gohmert's (lack of) understanding here. It's sad that lawyers constitute such a huge percentage of Congress. Maybe scientists should start flexin'.
Wow, I didn't get kb's comment until reading this. It's certainly something to make up plans like that. He's like an exquisitely dim-witted Bond villain. You, and many many others, were saying that since that March for Science. There's too much inertia, not unlike with the Moon.It's sad that lawyers constitute such a huge percentage of Congress. Maybe scientists should start flexin'.
My wife showed me a thread in one of the Facebook groups she subscribes to as a naturopathic physician. There were maybe 50 people worrying over the fact that keys stick to them now. There were only a couple people going "did you ever try sticking your keys to your body... before you were vaccinated?" There were zero people going "have you checked to see if your keys are, in fact, magnetic? With like... a magnet?" One of the two political parties of the most powerful nation on earth has evolved to embrace the following platform: - knowledge is suspect - science is false - infectious vulnerability is virtue - social protections are evil And granted, once you've started down that road it's really hard to turn off of it. But it's also really hard to recruit new members to your cause.
Is he that stupid or do you think he was trolling? One could read the subtext to be, "Climate change is a fantasy so here's a fantasy solution." I am probably giving him too much credit, but I just can't believe that he's ever asked a question whose premise stipulates that climate change is even a thing.
Oh no... Gohmert is dumb as shit. Here's an article from FIVE YEARS AGO showing just some of the batshit crazy things he has said. Here's another - entirely different - list from 2013. This is when he said that Texas native caribou would go on dates next to the oil pipeline for the warmth... The worst part? He knows he's the dumbest man in Congress.
Particle physicist friend had this one taped to his office door: A tachyon walks into a bar (tachyons move backwards in time)The bartender says "We don't serve tachyons here"
"Well, Gnork, we've been traveling for 18 generations but we've finally crossed the 4.3 light years from Alpha Centauri to Sol. Are you ready to commence our civilization's finest work?" "Indubitably, Glork. Let us find some extremely low-resolution imaging equipment to fly in front of briefly!" I'm about to give up on Westworld, for the third or fourth time, at S01E03. Not just because it's a Nolan, and all-things-Nolan suck balls, but because it follows the Standard Android Trope: - All humans are fundamentally mean and utterly without empathy - So they create sentient robots to exercise their cruelty on - Who feel some sort of pain or remorse so that humans can get their jollies on - So the sentient robots develop the concept of vengeance - The end, which shall be dragged out for as many minutes, hours or days as the author can get paid for. HBO's Westworld, Ex Machina, Raised By Wolves, the Terminator movies, I Robot, fuckin' every robot you've ever seen in the movies is a stand-in for Christ so that we have empathy and a stand-in for Charles Bronson so we can have vengeance. Of course the narrative is always broken because it has to become "every human on earth lacks empathy EXCEPT YOU" which means the story is actually "every character in the movie lacks empathy EXCEPT THE PROTAGONIST" which means these things are always tragedies because they have to be morality plays about how humanity fucking sucks and since the protagonist is human they suck too the end." I bring this up because we fuckin' personify everything. People feel bad about getting rid of a blender that's worked for them. We don't throw away clothing unless we can transfer our emotional attachment onto "the needy" who will properly appreciate our anchored trash. Sentient fucking androids? Gimme a break. The Bay Area would give them passports and rent control before their operating systems were on 1.02. Emotional intelligence is a better predictor of success than IQ. Those who can empathize with their fellow man get further in life (those who do not understand what 'fellow men' are get the furthest but that's another story). So you have to understand that the people writing about UFOs aren't the idiots. They think you're the idiot. They think YOU are the one who doesn't understand the way other people think. And based on evidence, they're right. 'cuz apparently the number of people capable of going If I were capable of crossing the gulfs of space in a Tic Tac that does Mach 30, what would I do? is smaller than the people who default to "mars needs women."
Thinking more, and realizing aliens themselves won't be the first to visit us... they'll send a probe or robot. And that's not going to turn out well. May have already happened! :-)
Anyone ever give you a houseplant? "Here's a thing you didn't ask for that you now have to take care of forever, think of me?" My mother gives me houseplants a lot. "oh, you like plants? Here's one you didn't pick!" That fucking robot? "Hi, there. We're elitist snobs that totally want to obligate you to help out our thesis project in personification, guilt and obligation, particularly in the shadow of internet-based mooching. Wanna play?" People who have never had nothing don't understand that vandalism is a way to strike back at your own powerlessness. "Kilroy was here" is a fundamental expression of identity and autonomy, and "take care of this instrumented lump of shit for social media" is a fundamental negation of that. HitchBOT's inevitable demise says everything about academic tone-deafness and nothing about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Q: how many "for a good cause" adventurers have completed similar journeys without experiencing any malfeasance? A: all of them.
We have had some interesting conversations here on Hubski about space travel (like this one) , and it led me to another spacey/alieny thought... There are some of these potential interstellar drives that do things like generate black holes in their wake, or engulf the destination in a black hole ... ... and some people are saying that our world is a simulation, or that things just don't add up ... ... so what if someone already tried to visit us and inadvertently threw us into a ... time warp? An alternate whatchamacallit? The description of the book Spin is what got me thinking that maybe there ARE aliens, maybe they tried to visit us... and screwed it up... and are trying to make things right by sustaining our reality for us.
There's a show I have just started watching, possibly on Amazon, called "Debris". The idea is that a derelict spaceship of enormous size enters our solar system, and breaks up. Debris of various unknown properties and purpose begins raining down on Earth. What happens next? It's interesting to think that the first aliens to make contact with us could possibly be dead... their ship broken in some way that failed to support their life. What do we do then? (Was that what Oumuamua was? AKA, "Rama", as KB will say?)
Read Roadside Picnic, and Amazon says I bought Spin back in 2016 ... but haven't read it yet. Derp. I shall get on that. Roadside Picnic was ... interesting. Clearly the makers of Debris have read it, and decided to go more sparkly-vampire with the story, but I like the idea anyway.
It take 1 million year for a 10% light-speed civilization to conquer our entire galaxy Since it hasn't happen in the 4 billion history of Earth, means we are alone in this galaxy. Or Aliens are very lazy
This assumes modern human as a basis with on-schedule fertility, births and mortality, consistently, over hundreds of thousands of years without lag or stop. Using those same modern humans for my example, the estimate delivery date for the book I ordered from Spain is between 1 week and 4.5 months. I'm still waiting, it says nothing about existence of books or Spain, though.
This is the fundamental problem when considering this question, isn't it? We are viewing the question from inside our own heads and experience. It's like asking a deaf-from-birth person what it is like to be deaf... I mean... what else do they have to compare it to? It's all they have ever known. If we look at the math of HUMANS traveling across the galaxy, then the distances and times become insurmountable. But what about beings with longer lifetimes? Or a predictable hard-coded evolutionary path, so you equip your ship with microbes, and eventually people step out at the other end of the trip. And how do those beings "connect" with the ones that sent them? And why were they sent to us?
This is one of those "fucking magnets how do they work" intellectual traps people get sucked into, though. There are only a couple different bases for life, and that's if you count silicon, which has a serious paucity of orbits for metabolic chemistry to utilize. Photosynthesis is likely to be green, yellow or red. We've evolved a truly thunderous array of biological shapes and adaptations, and in many cases nature has coalesced on the same solution a few different ways. Any intelligent life out there is unlikely to be standard Star Trek headbumps'n'makeup humans, but if you look at it, sentience is evolving on this planet through primates, cetaceans, corvids and mollusks. When we watch an octopus being clever, we go "whoa clever octopus" we don't go "my mind is blown at the task of conceiving of intelligence in a shape and form so different than mine." We're also at like 150 years of electricity and have long since defaulted to sending our tools ahead of us. A Mars lander looks nothing like us, it looks like the best solution we could come up with for a specific task. And every time we launch a probe we attach a little bit of us to it to push the dark back a little bit. I think it's reasonable to assume that any intelligent alien life we encounter will be mechanical, comprehensible and altruistic.
Yes, but it's not that hard to theorize outside that bony box. Bacteria can survive on ionizing radiation alone, I'd have no problem with a species that goes "3.6 Roentgen? Yum!" that traverses space in a fissionable self-sustaining arc. Gonna sleep on those questions, though.We are viewing the question from inside our own heads and experience.