Why I'm skeptical about the UFO phenomenon

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

If you are “flexing” then you drip man.  Used to mean almost the opposite until Gen Z fixed it.

[UnseenParticipant]

Want to talk about opposites, Reg? Until a short while ago (at least here in the U.S.) the expression was “something is different FROM something else” but it’s morphed into “something is different TO something else.” From and to are total opposites in meaning.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Terrific Unseen and I will try to deal with homonyms rather that getting all polysemous about it.

What makes a word real?  (Ted Talk, 17 mins).

[UnseenParticipant]

Here’s a levelheaded assessment of the recent allegations re: a “black” sub rosa off-the-books secret program that collects alien spacecraft and alien beings (dead? alive?) by a channel normally devoted to discussing military hardware. His conclusion: “Skeptics have little reason to believe David Grusch’s story and believers sometimes need little to believe in the first place.”

Michio Kaku’s mind is open but he’s waiting for the evidence. The script has flipped now, and instead of Grush proving his allegations to be true, the Pentagon must prove David Grusch’s allegations false.

[UnseenParticipant]

There are good reasons to remain skeptical and top of the list is the whistleblower himself. He may lack or fail to apply basic critical thinking skills. He may be delusional.

The GOP has been teasing 17 tapes proving that Pres. Biden is corrupt, BUT they can’t produce the tapes.

(No, I’m not posting in the wrong thread.)

Let me translate that into the plainest possible terms: They are smearing Joe Biden but they ask us to just trust them that there is evidence.

The new whistleblower makes a very similar claim with very similar non-evidence.

Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he’s being fooled. Maybe it’s just a “telephone game.” Or, maybe it’s all true and this is a partial hangout or “soft reveal” of the fact that aliens are here, but can’t fly their own aircraft safely.

 

[UnseenParticipant]

So, the House of Representatives Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee held a hearing on UFO’s and all we got was more jawboning. Lots of testimony indicating that UFO’s are real and are not from Earth, but as soon as things started looking like actual evidence might be discussed, it was determined that classified matters were involved and so the investigation needed to be moved into a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility).

I ask you, is there any better way to foster and justify conspiracy theories?

When actual evidence is offered, we get this sort of thing:

So, I remain a skeptic and I have to consider a conspiracy theory that for whatever reason, the government wants us to just think aliens are flying around on the planet. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Pentagon funding? A misdirection away from something else? Your guess is as good as mine.

I still think it unlikely that aliens are visiting our planet because it just boggles the mind that beings from light years away have the technology to get here and then they get a flat tire.

[UnseenParticipant]

I’m thinking that the idea that living beings from light years away coming to Earth is so unimaginable that another hypothesis has to be considered only for the reason that it boggles the imagination less, and that is that such beings don’t have an off-Earth origin but are native to Earth.

True, that is unlikely verging on impossible, but tell me what makes it less likely than the almost impossible hypothesis that they are from a source many light years away?

[_Robert_Participant]

I think that any “life” that could traverse these distances would most-likely not be “Earth-type”, carbon-based, DNA-based life. That is to say they might not share the same prototype that all Earth life originated from.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

_Robert_ wrote:

That is to say they might not share the same prototype that all Earth life originated from.

Maybe they could go into suspended animation, like tardigrades.

[_Robert_Participant]

Simon Paynton wrote:

_Robert_ wrote:

That is to say they might not share the same prototype that all Earth life originated from.

Maybe they could go into suspended animation, like tardigrades.

Like bears do, LOL. So far only objects with super-small mass such as particles are known to approach the speed of light. Let’s say you were going at 0.1 times the speed of light, c. I’d hate to hit something, even if it was very small. Look what an asteroid barely moving (relatively speaking) and less than 10 miles across did to our dino-friends.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

_Robert_ wrote:

Let’s say you were going at 0.1 times the speed of light, c. I’d hate to hit something, even if it was very small. Look what an asteroid barely moving (relatively speaking) and less than 10 miles across did to our dino-friends.

Good point.  Statistically, the crew would almost certainly be obliterated during their journey.

[UnseenParticipant]

Simon Paynton wrote:

_Robert_ wrote:

That is to say they might not share the same prototype that all Earth life originated from.

Maybe they could go into suspended animation, like tardigrades.

Or, maybe time passes differently for them, being a different sort of “life.” Which is scary, because they might not see us as “life” at all. Of course, the faster they go the more time dilation slows their time down. But traveling at almost he speed of light is impossible according to what we know about physics.

Travel through space is so fraught with dangers that could destroy any craft traveling at a high fraction of the speed of light, that I have a hard time imagining beings coming from light years away.

One major problem is that, despite the popular notion that space is an empty vacuum, it is not empty. There is the “interstellar medium” which refers to the matter and energy that exists between stars within a galaxy. It’s a vast and complex space filled with various particles, gases, dust, and radiation.

Hitting a small object at half the speed of light would likely be fatal to the crew and detecting such an object far enough in advance to avoid it would be hampered, ironically, by speed the craft would be traveling. And the distances involved greatly increase the chance of such a collision.

[UnseenParticipant]

During the congressional testimony, the possibility of interdimensional aliens came up.

As the physicists explains, that’s crazy talk that doesn’t apply to alien beings.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by  Unseen.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Unseen wrote:

Hitting a small object at half the speed of light would likely be fatal to the crew and detecting such an object far enough in advance to avoid it would be hampered, ironically, by speed the craft would be traveling. And the distances involved greatly increase the chance of such a collision.

Yes, it sounds like it’s impossible, for all those reasons.  If they could travel relatively slowly in suspended animation, that’s the only way they could do it.

The alternative would be to communicate using radio waves.

[UnseenParticipant]

Simon Paynton wrote:

Unseen wrote:

Hitting a small object at half the speed of light would likely be fatal to the crew and detecting such an object far enough in advance to avoid it would be hampered, ironically, by speed the craft would be traveling. And the distances involved greatly increase the chance of such a collision.

Yes, it sounds like it’s impossible, for all those reasons. If they could travel relatively slowly in suspended animation, that’s the only way they could do it. The alternative would be to communicate using radio waves.

I’m not clear on why you’re bringing up communication.

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