Many governments outside of the USA, bear in mind, have opened their UFO records, and acknowledge the phenomenon. Britain, Belgium, France, and many others. The USA is waaaay behind the curve. Don’t let the skeptics distract you, and read this if you haven’t!
UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record - Leslie Kean
She was one of the writers of the New York Times piece. Great book.
I actually just picked it up from the library.
I’ve been wanting to discuss her NYT article for a while, but it’s hard to find discussions that will speculate without going off the rails into crazytown. (Hacker News was very dismissive and said it’s probably a stealth aircraft)
My pet theory is either drones with AI (not piloted by biological beings) so the speed of light isn’t as big a barrier, or interdimensional.
It’d be really interesting if we are alone in the universe… but the universe is not the only universe…
Yeah, that FTL limit will still be there, but an AI pilot sure could pull a lot of G’s without blacking out or turning to mush.
The problem is that the transmitters are not directional and that the signals are not coordinated, so they will be at random phases with respect to each other and, in average, cancel out.
A perhaps overlooked area of possible SETI is in the realm of the microscopic. One efficient way an advanced civilization might pursue interstellar colonization is by ‘spraying’ itself across the stars through the use of a ‘smart dust’ or ‘nanopollen’ composed of nanomachines propelled across space by vast solar pumped lasers. A von Neumann cloud spreading interstellar civilization like a contagion. This dust would have the dual purpose of serving as both molecular assemblers and data storage, each microscopic machine storing a small piece of information spread redundantly across the vast cloud of dust.
Decelerated by the light pressure of target stars, this dust would settle on the natural bodies there like pollen, activating in the presence of the right chemical elements and conditions. They would then assimilate the material around them to begin constructing larger systems, growing like mold or lichen and gathering up other dust particles around them to collect and assemble the information they contain instructing their further construction. Eventually they would assemble enough of their collective information to build/grow into outposts, establish communications with home, deploy robots and local exploration spacecraft, then eventually the same vast solar-pumped laser systems spraying more smart dust clouds elsewhere. There might even be enough potential data storage in the dust clouds that the digitized consciousness of ‘settlers’ might be included to be transferred to synthetic bodies locally made for them.
Such smart dust might also serve a ‘sentinel’ role. Perhaps its activation is cued by something that indicates the local presence of intelligent life, like exposure to coherent light or a certain kind of microwave signal or radiation its creators believe particular to a certain level of technology.
And so, perhaps evidence of alien civilizations might be waiting to be found not in radio-space but in the dirt under our feet, the mud on the sea floor, or dust on the Moon and asteroids. Indeed, we don’t know the purpose of evolution, if it has any. Perhaps our own planetary life and civilization is a process of colonization and geo-engineering for another civilization that seeded the cosmos in eons passed. Imagine, hidden in the stuff of terrestrial life, even our own bodies, the deeply encrypted software of ancient minds waiting for their time. I think it was Richard Dawkins who posed the question of whether birds exist to make nests or do nests exist to make birds?
Not necessarily. On a world with liquid water, you’re going to get dissociation of the hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere when water gets zapped by the sun. Ozone slows this down but doesn’t stop it. The hydrogen promptly rises to the top of the atmosphere and gets swept away by the solar wind, leaving the O2 behind. Hypothesize a world like Earth but with lots more water. After ten or so billion years, you’d have oxidized everything there is to oxidize, the excess oxygen would build up, and you can get an oxygen atmosphere without any life.
Said beacons were only detectable as an faint murmur anyway. Once you get more than a few light years from earth, IIRC, the signal strength fades to indecipherability, no matter how big a telescope you build to detect such signals.
The main hope for SETI researchers is that there’s an exocivilization out there who feels lonely and decides to spend quite a bit of energy making a cosmic beacon to shout to the galaxy, “we are here.”
Yeah, it’s my understanding that the craft in the pentagon video was doing things incompatible with a human pilot based on our current understanding.
The point where conventional, white male SETI loses me, is the opening premise that human beings will be the only species that the neighbors will be interested in communicating with. Douglas Adams made it into a joke, but before we go assuming that homo sapiens is entitled to the telephone call, we’d better assign that factor to a variable in the Drake equation, and leave it open to some kind of debate.
A question that’s been nagging me lately, is how common are naturally occurring mirrors? We are quite familiar with reflections off water, and with mirages, the fata morgana less so… What if there are similar naturally occurring mirrors on multiple scales, working with multiple senses?
My next thought is that SETI is just a more modern version of the same ancient search, and that the mirror effect that led the Bibles authors to saying, “God created man in His own image”, is just as likely to have us defining ETI as “just like ourselves, only cooler”.
YHIHF staking my claim to the band name cosmic gorillas
A stupid movie with one line which smacks of complete brilliance or the effects of pharmaceuticals taken by the writer:
"At what point on the graph do “must” and “cannot” meet? "
I wasn’t able to find any examples where this happened. Do you have some citation maybe? Because I’m having trouble finding a time scale where it might be possible. because “10 or so billion years” is going to be nearly the oldest planets we’ve found. The universe is just under 14 billion years old. The oldest known gas giants are a surprising 13 billion old, among low metallicity starts of the early Universe.
Even at 1g, travel times for an observer on the ship are shorter than you would think. It implies an exponentially increasing energy requirement, though, as velocity approaches c.
Okay, head-stretching time, everybody! What’s the most alien alien you can imagine?
Here’s my entry. The sun has a complex system of magnetic fields. This is kept going by a flip of the poles every 11 years, but the local detail is preserved unless you are at the site of a flare. There is a very complex fine structure to the granules. Could the Sun’s magnetic field be intelligent?
Personally, I doubt it is, but I suspect my reasoning is far from rigorous. There is at least the possibility for long-term memory, or at least pattern preservation of a sort.
If the Sun’s magnetic field was intelligent, it will have been the only intelligence it has ever known. It cannot see outside itself, though it may be able to faintly sense Jupiter. If it is a single intelligence, it may be unable to conceive of another intelligence, like the creature in the Abyss of No Dimensions in Flatland.
Good luck striking up a conversation with that.
What’s your definition of “alien?” Clearly not biological life, based on your example. I too would tend to lean toward some information-based entity, but then again, I think at our core we ARE that.
I haven’t got a definition. Indeed, if I had one, it would risk cutting off some of the more interesting options. I think we have a rough idea that an ‘intelligence’ has to sense, to store, and somehow to analyse its environment. There is some less well-defined requirement to be, somehow, unpredictable in a way that a computer with a random number generator isn’t. But exactly where these requirements are coming from is not clear to me.
Okay. Here’s another one. The world telephone system has a similar number of nodes and connectivity to the human brain. It is perhaps capable of being intelligent, as well as being a lot of phone calls. I suspect it isn’t because it is too young, and I can think of no evolutionary drive that rewards the development of an intelligence.
Can anyone come up with a definition and a proof that such complex systems are not intelligent? I suspect that is a thing that one particular form of intelligence cannot do by itself, but there may be a cunning line of reasoning that short-cuts this.
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