Citizen Hearing on Disclosure of Extraterrestrial Presence

[photon]

One of the former members of congress had a falling out with a 9/11 conspiracy group, something like he ended up in charge of the bank account, and then when the organization folded (or didn't get some status or something), the law stated that the donated money had to either be returned to the people who donated, or transferred to another non-profit organization, so the guy simply moved the money into some of the other non-profits he's involved in. Good times.

[GoinAllTheWay]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

I personally believe there is plenty of life out there, I just do not believe they are spending light years of time to make it to our crap hole planet just to fly around a bit and then piss off.

How do we know it takes them a long time to get here? For all we know, cruising 90million light years takes them a few days. A mere 150 yrs ago, it would have taken us almost a month to get to Australia. Today we can get there in 13 hours.

As to why they would come? Who knows? Maybe they find it interesting to watch a civilization develop. Especially one on the verge of space travel.

Maybe a trip to earth for them was like a trip down to Australia for Darwin.

[Cowperson]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

I believe that there is other life out there. I have trouble believing they would travel like 90 million light years to jam objects up our a$$es

Well, honestly, isn't that what we would do ala Captain Cook, moon landings and such?

Take specimens, poke and prod them, cut them open with scalpels to check out the gizzards., etc, etc.??

Travelling 90 million light years is the part thats hard to believe. If they could manage it though, they might be very human in their curiosity when they got here.

Cowperson

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

How do we know it takes them a long time to get here? For all we know, cruising 90million light years takes them a few days. A mere 150 yrs ago, it would have taken us almost a month to get to Australia. Today we can get there in 13 hours.

As to why they would come? Who knows? Maybe they find it interesting to watch a civilization develop. Especially one on the verge of space travel.

Maybe a trip to earth for them was like a trip down to Australia for Darwin.

Even if the distance aspect was somehow figured out (which I would think would be almost impossible), you would also have to hope that those species and civilizations exist at the same moment in time as we do... and by moment, I mean on a cosmic scale. At least on this planet, species only last a for fleeting moment (and it's possible and even likely the same thing applies on other planets).

You would have to hope that not only another planet in our galactic neighbourhood developed life, but also that they learned to manipulate the laws of physics, but that they also did it at the same fleeting moment that human civilization exists.

[Yasa]

Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction

Even if the distance aspect was somehow figured out (which I would think would be almost impossible), you would also have to hope that those species and civilizations exist at the same moment in time as we do... and by moment, I mean on a cosmic scale. At least on this planet, species only last a for fleeting moment (and it's possible and even likely the same thing applies on other planets).

You would have to hope that not only another planet in our galactic neighbourhood developed life, but also that they learned to manipulate the laws of physics, but that they also did it at the same fleeting moment that human civilization exists.

Been reading Slaughterhouse 5, have you?

[Dion]

nm

[photon]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

A mere 150 yrs ago, it would have taken us almost a month to get to Australia. Today we can get there in 13 hours.

Well yes but getting to Australia in 13 hours wasn't thought to violate the laws of physics, just to violate our abilities.

Our understanding of physics will always improve, but that doesn't mean that our current understanding will become completely invalid either, all of our current understanding will have to be rolled into whatever new understanding comes forward.

If faster than light travel were possible, and intelligent life was something that had even a remote chance of developing, I would expect to be able to see artifacts of intelligence out there among the stars, even if they were relics.

Either the artifacts are out there and we just haven't found them yet, intelligent life is so remote that civilizations are too far and few between spatially/temporally to see each other, or getting out of one's own solar system is so challenging (it'd take a year's worth of the world's energy to send a probe to a star in human lifetime timeframes, ignoring how you store that energy and assuming 100% efficiency, double if you want to slow down) that few if any ever accomplish it to any significant degree.

[troutman]

Just finished Existence by Brin, which includes a very good summary of all the arguments for and against the Fermi Paradox.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by troutman

Blog summaries of the Hearing:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3200580.html

Citizen hearing on UFOs producing lots of Mulders, no Scullys so far
http://doubtfulnews.com/2013/05/citi...cullys-so-far/

Six former members of Congress, who were paid $20,000 each, plus expenses, heard testimony in a setting designed to resemble a Capitol Hill hearing room.

So these errr people paid 120k plus expenses for 6 former congressmen to play hearing?

Wow, its true there are suckers in this world.

[photon]

Credibility ain't cheap!

[GoinAllTheWay]

Originally Posted by photon

Well yes but getting to Australia in 13 hours wasn't thought to violate the laws of physics, just to violate our abilities.

Our understanding of physics will always improve, but that doesn't mean that our current understanding will become completely invalid either, all of our current understanding will have to be rolled into whatever new understanding comes forward.

If faster than light travel were possible, and intelligent life was something that had even a remote chance of developing, I would expect to be able to see artifacts of intelligence out there among the stars, even if they were relics.

Either the artifacts are out there and we just haven't found them yet, intelligent life is so remote that civilizations are too far and few between spatially/temporally to see each other, or getting out of one's own solar system is so challenging (it'd take a year's worth of the world's energy to send a probe to a star in human lifetime timeframes, ignoring how you store that energy and assuming 100% efficiency, double if you want to slow down) that few if any ever accomplish it to any significant degree.

I disagree. I think if you were to describe modern air travel to people back then, most would consider it to be complelty impossible. "What you are going to do is climb inside this big metal bird that doesn't flap it's wings, weighs 735,000 pounds before you and 400 people AND your luggage get inside, cruises at 40,000 + feet at a speed of 800 miles per hour", most would scoff at the idea and follow it up with a few "Cool story, bro"s.

And to really blow some hair back, you could point at the moon and say "Oh ya, btw, we have had humans walk on that thing" Pretty sure you would be getting dragged off to the loney bin or at least labeled as the town drunk.

It wasn't all that long ago that we thought breaking the speed of sound was physically impossible. Not only is it done daily today, the US just launched an aircraft that can do mach 5.

[CaptainCrunch]

Hey remember when the first cars came out and there was a serious backlash because Scientists believed that the body couldn't handle the stress of going faster then 30 miles an hour and would basically explode into a pink greasy cloud.

[troutman]

NASA Actually Working on Faster-than-Light Warp Drive


http://techland.time.com/2012/09/19/...ht-warp-drive/

Has someone finally proven special relativity wrong?

Not at all, but with respect to travel between the stars, someone did come up with a radical-sounding hypothetical workaround 18 years ago.

In a paper titled “The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity” published in science journal Classical and Quantum Gravity in May 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested a mechanism for getting an object from one point to another at faster-than-light speeds without running afoul of Einsteinian relativity.

Alcubierre’s idea: bending space-time in front of and behind a vessel rather than attempting to propel the vessel itself at light-speeds.

The only catch: Alcubierre says that, “just as happens with wormholes,” you’d need “exotic matter” (matter with “strange properties”) to distort space-time. And the amount of energy necessary to power that would be on par with — wait for it — the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

So we’re back to “fuhgeddaboudit,” right?

Maybe not. According to NASA physicist Harold White, the energy problem may actually be surmountable by simply tweaking the warp drive’s geometry.

White, who just shared his latest ideas at the 100 Year Starship 2012 Public Symposium, says that if you adjust the shape of the ring surrounding the object, from something that looks like a flat halo into something thicker and curvier, you could power Alcubierre’s warp drive with a mass roughly the size of NASA’s Voyager 1 probe.

In other words: reduction in energy requirements from a planet with a mass equivalent to over 300 Earths, down to an object that weighs just under 1,600 pounds.

Instead of taking “decades or centuries,” White says this would allow us to visit a spot like Alpha Centauri — a little over four light years from us — in as little as “weeks or months.”

Why Don’t We Have Faster-Than-Light Travel?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...ravel-14962670

Miguel Alcubierre imagined a bubble of normal space–time around a spacecraft that would allow for FTL travel by expanding space itself behind the ship and compressing it in front. Normal physics still applies within the bubble, and so the passengers don’t feel any acceleration at all. Rather than violating known physics, the Alcubierre drive actually conformed to the General Theory of Relativity.

The problem is, physicist Dave Goldberg tells PM, "there is literally zero experimental evidence that they’d be possible." Outlining the obstacles for io9, Goldberg points to the following:

You can’t get in or out of the bubble.
You can’t destroy the bubble.
You might destroy your destination.
It requires energies that might be impossible (or incredibly difficult) to achieve.

[GoinAllTheWay]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Hey remember when the first cars came out and there was a serious backlash because Scientists believed that the body couldn't handle the stress of going faster then 30 miles an hour and would basically explode into a pink greasy cloud.

I think they had the same concerns with trains too

[Daradon]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

I disagree. I think if you were to describe modern air travel to people back then, most would consider it to be complelty impossible. "What you are going to do is climb inside this big metal bird that doesn't flap it's wings, weighs 735,000 pounds before you and 400 people AND your luggage get inside, cruises at 40,000 + feet at a speed of 800 miles per hour", most would scoff at the idea and follow it up with a few "Cool story, bro"s.

And to really blow some hair back, you could point at the moon and say "Oh ya, btw, we have had humans walk on that thing" Pretty sure you would be getting dragged off to the loney bin or at least labeled as the town drunk.

It wasn't all that long ago that we thought breaking the speed of sound was physically impossible. Not only is it done daily today, the US just launched an aircraft that can do mach 5.

Still not the same. People still had an understanding and idea of physics. They knew some things did move fast, faster than we could. They knew things could fly, which we couldn't yet. I'm not exactly sure how much they knew in terms of space and the universe in comparison to the time when the Wright Brothers made their historic flight, because I'm not sure on exact dates, but higher physics was becoming more and more relevant in that time period.

The point Photon makes is correct. Breaking those speeds and making those achievements was a test of our abilities and our acquired knowledge. But this is completely different. This would have to break the laws of physics, which are changing every day true enough, but have stood since the time of Newton and before.

And it's not just us as humans that are bound to these rules. It's everything. Unlike different beings that might crawl, or walk, or swim, or fly based on their evolution and abilities, EVERYTHING is bound by the rules of physics. Matter, light, energy. It's really quite a different argument. Not sure how to explain it better though.

Shoot we have concept vehicles that we know mathematically should be able to reach 1/10th of the speed of light, maybe even greater. Building them is not within our grasp yet, that's kinda more the argument you are talking about. The change of progress and invention and knowledge. Similar to us looking up at the birds once upon a time and going, 'you know what, we SHOULD be able to do that somehow...'

But once you get to that magic number at the speed of light, the same argument doesn't hold up. And unfortunately that number is very important because when you are talking about billions of light years away, well, if you can't even get to 1 without breaking the laws of physics...

[photon]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

I disagree. I think if you were to describe modern air travel to people back then, most would consider it to be complelty impossible.

What most people consider possible/impossible isn't a very good way to judge certain things.

A bird and an airplane flying are a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference.

Going faster than light is a qualitative difference to every single fact (observation) ever anywhere.

That doesn't make it impossible, but it does put constraints on and tell us, if it were possible, what it can't look like.

Who said breaking the speed of sound was physically impossible? "People"?

[GoinAllTheWay]

Originally Posted by photon

What most people consider possible/impossible isn't a very good way to judge certain things.

A bird and an airplane flying are a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference.

Going faster than light is a qualitative difference to every single fact (observation) ever anywhere.

That doesn't make it impossible, but it does put constraints on and tell us, if it were possible, what it can't look like.

Who said breaking the speed of sound was physically impossible? "People"?

Really? Why do some of the vets on this board have to become douchy like this? Really not necessary.

I can't give you an exact name if that's what you are looking for, it was mentioned on a documentary on the X1 I was watching some time ago.

To be more specifc, they said a machine couldn't be built that could exceed the speed of sounds as turbulence could tear the aircraft apart and controls would become unresponsive amongst other issues.

I was reading just recently in popular mechanics that scientists think they can develop a computer model for warp drive. Obviously a number of challenges ahead but there are those in the scientific community that think it can be done.

The article Troutman just posted gets into this.

[Daradon]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

Really? Why do some of the vets on this board have to become douchy like this? Really not necessary.

I can't give you an exact name if that's what you are looking for, it was mentioned on a documentary on the X1 I was watching some time ago.

Photon is easily one of the most measured posters on the board, I don't believe it was his intent to be douchy.

Just trying to figure out how to illustrate the difference between opinion, however knowledgeable it may be, and measured data, or empirical evidence.

IE 'people' may have believed/said going faster than the speed of sound is impossible, but science never did. Same with the flight example.

However science does say, going faster than the speed of light is impossible.

[GoinAllTheWay]

Originally Posted by Daradon

Photon is easily one of the most measured posters on the board, I don't believe it was his intent to be douchy.

Just trying to figure out how to illustrate the difference between opinion, however knowledgeable it may be, and measured data, or empirical evidence.

IE 'people' may have believed/said going faster than the speed of sound is impossible, but science never did. Same with the flight example.

However science does say, going faster than the speed of light is impossible.

Well if he wasn't trying to be, my apologies, but it certainly came across that way.

If science today is saying that FTL travel is impossible, why are organazations like NASA working on it? If it's 100% certain, nothing can be done about it, why work on it?

Science is not infallable. It's been wrong before. Now this is a different demon, I totally agree. If you can't break the laws of physics, maybe bending them is the answer? I dunno. However I don't think the human race has been around long enough or knows enough to say 100% certain that the light barrier can never be broken.

[Daradon]

Impossible is a bad word to use, not exactly what I meant. As usual Photon explains it far better than I. The difference between the problem we were talking about and the example you were using is the difference between quantitative and qualitative differences.

But he already mentioned that bending the rules or passing the speed of light MAY be possible in the future. And yes, I guess anything is possible.

'Going faster than light is a qualitative difference to every single fact (observation) ever anywhere.

That doesn't make it impossible, but it does put constraints on and tell us, if it were possible, what it can't look like.'

As for science being wrong, it's not the science that's wrong, it's the people conducting it. Problems with the experiment or the conclusions that were reached. But we have come to laws and theories that will never be wrong. They may be added to, but they can't be wrong.

As usual I'm probably explaining it a little wrong, maybe Photon can do it better. I don't want to give out wrong information.