It wouldn't really be that difficult to fake. It's just some white dots flying around the sky. Using a program like Adobe After Effects, you can easily track hand held footage to superimpose objects that look like they were there when it was shot.
It says that this was shot near the BBC building in London, which is an area full of video production houses. It's not hard to imagine that a lot of people in the neighbourhood would have the skills to produce a pretty convincing fake video.
Oh god yes. I can make it pretty easy with a glow effect and key framing with a smoothing effect not even what you see in this tutorial. However, this camera is a compact home product. Pretty crappy video image. You can tell by the tracking itself when the guy moves his shaky hand. When you get a hold of this stuff you can zoom in on the HD material and actually compare pixels. This is where (because of the HD compression) you can see the edit. A better camera would be easier to fake a real look and get away with it.
Let me say, I HOPE and would be so excited to think we are actually going to meet an alien civilization in our lifetime. To me it would be the biggest event in human history with incredibly profound consequences.
But my long obsession with astronomy, astrophysics and all things nerd when it comes to our cosmos has me doubtful that this will happen anytime soon.
There's huge obstacles for not only us, but those aliens out there for us to find each other. Here's my list of why I think we're in for a long wait to make first contact.
#1. The size of our known Universe. Its staggeringly huge, so big in fact its incredibly hard for us to even imagine the hugeness. By this sheer fact, even if life is very common in the Universe and advanced alien civilizations are out there exploring right now, its still very unlikely for us to make contact.
#2. Tied to the first one, because of the size of our cosmos, another huge hurdle is traveling vast distances. The laws of physics as we currently know them prevent anything faster than the speed of light, and even if we could travel 99.999999% of the speed of light, a short journey to our closest neighbor Andromeda would take 2.4 million years to say hi. The time for the traveler would be short, but is it worth traveling when you come back to earth 4.8 million years have passed. *see note at bottom.
#3. If Aliens are aware of us, its highly unlikely they would not attempt contact, even though we all love Star Trek's prime directive and how noble it sounds. Because intelligent life recognizes others like it, you'd have to assume they wouldn't come all this way just to not say hi.
#4 Slightly more abstract, but if you red Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted world, you'll see that humans have this long standing tradition of seeing demons, witches, ghosts, angels, and now more recently Aliens. The book goes into much more detail so you should just read it and be cool like me.
Lets listen to Carl explain why we're still waiting for first contact.
Often people bring up the radio noise from earth being heard by alien civilizations and that would bring them to visit us, mostly this is because they saw the movie Contact with Jody Foster
To see why this is unlikely, go to 2:38 of this video to see how much space our radio signals in our Galaxy, spoiler, its tiny.
Finally because he's so awesome, lets her today's modern Carl Sagan, Mr Neil deGrasse Tyson on UFO's:
* I'm going to touch upon this since it will be brought up. I am aware it is very possible advanced civilizations have technology to bypass the time/distance issues I'm talking about; however it might simply not be possible, we have theorized about wormholes, folding space/time, etc.. However its also very possible we cannot go around the laws of physics, and we are stuck only being able to exist and explore in first person our own solar system and not much more. Leaving real exploration to robotics, and AI intelligent creations of humans in the future.
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They were probably on their way to say hello, but accidentally received a transmission of 2 and a Half Men followed by Charlie Sheens twitter account and left forever. Thanks Charlie Sheen.
As awesome as your post is, and as much as we'd like to believe that advanced Alien Civilizations would be interested in us for more then random yet hilarious anal probings and the sexual enslavement of our woman, I have my doubts that some alien culture thats advanced itself to the point of interstellar travel would even consider us to be life forms worth contacting let alone even be able to contact.
First and foremost they might see the universe though different eyes, maybe they see on some infrared level. or something entirely different.
Their concept of lifeforms might be entirely different, maybe they're not carbon based, maybe their stringent defininition of life procludes us.
Maybe those huge spaceships are piloted not by hundreds, but by one huge alien in which case we would be ants, and maybe the aliens have a 5 year old mentality which means they like to stomp ant hills and ignite the survivers with a magnifying glass.
We do know that their language and cultural sense would be entirely different, maybe their math is different and how they think is completely alien, which means that we can't merely translate their language.
Maybe they're living rocks and have lived among us for generations and we don't know they're here.
Maybe they're student drivers or joy riders.
I can see where we'll have contact with alien life forms, we already have. I have my doubts that there are a lot of intelligent civilizations out there and that we will overcome all the factors that we would need too to communicate with them.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
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As awesome as your post is, and as much as we'd like to believe that advanced Alien Civilizations would be interested in us for more then random yet hilarious anal probings and the sexual enslavement of our woman, I have my doubts that some alien culture thats advanced itself to the point of interstellar travel would even consider us to be life forms worth contacting let alone even be able to contact.
Now see this is the kinda thing that's fun to discuss
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First and foremost they might see the universe though different eyes, maybe they see on some infrared level. or something entirely different.
So true, we could have very unusual species out there, who knows maybe silicone based life, maybe they hate us dirty carbon based life and want to rid our universe of us. That is also why I laugh at the alien drawings people always have of the 'grey's since they are so very much like us and that is just too neat a coincidence.
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Their concept of lifeforms might be entirely different, maybe they're not carbon based, maybe their stringent defininition of life procludes us.
I think intelligent life that on a planet wide scale produces massive cities and has space vehicles, satellites, probes (not anal ones), etc.. is what any alien intelligence would be curious about, likely we're very very primitive but they probably share a similar evolution of technology to us, and would be interested in seeing how we got here and would pop in for tea, or an anal probe.
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We do know that their language and cultural sense would be entirely different, maybe their math is different and how they think is completely alien, which means that we can't merely translate their language.
Math should be the same, I can't conceive of how it wouldn't in fact its likely communication with alien's would start with math, and science; because its likely our only way of real communication.
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I can see where we'll have contact with alien life forms, we already have. I have my doubts that there are a lot of intelligent civilizations out there and that we will overcome all the factors that we would need too to communicate with them.
Not to mention, what if intelligent life like ours has a very limited time frame to exist as a rule, look at us, we are destroying our home and have very dangerous weapons stockpiled, with much scarier stuff coming in the next 100 years; who's to stay this isn't a problem with many alien civilizations.
Or how about the fact our universe is very unfriendly to life, we have already seen massive extinctions here on earth, a few close calls for humans as well; and if we manage to die off in the next 1,000 years for whatever reason our reign will have lasted all of 500,000 years, which in the space of time is but a tiny blip.
I love that Hawking suggested aliens might even be very hostile, or like how it was for native's after the damn stinky white man came and took over their lands x1000. If evolution on other planets/asteroids follows similar paths as we have on earth, and civilizations follow a similar trend we can hope they having reached such a pinnacle of technology to be able to travel vast distances, to me its likely they are going to be friendly.
“The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms... Life exists on other planets and we will find it within 20 years,” Andrei Finkelstein, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Applied Astronomy Institute, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.
Finkelstein’s institute runs a programme launched in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War space race to watch for and beam out radio signals to outer space.
“The whole time we have been searching for extraterrestrial civilisations, we have mainly been waiting for messages from space and not the other way,” he said.
They've already been here. Infact, in 1982 many alien botonists descended from the skies into a red wood forest in the United States. There, they extracted samples of our plant life. Unfortunately,a government agency found their location and they hastily retreated into their craft and left. In their panicked escape, they left one of their own.
This now abandoned alien took refuge in the house of a suburban family. For reasons unknown, its' health began to decline and he was found by that previous government agency. The creature passed away despite all efforts to sustain its life. Just when things looked bleak, this Extra Terrestrial, was able to reanimate itself in time to receive notification that a rescue party was on its way. Frantically, the government attempted to stop the escape but it was too late and our space-born friend was headed home. The government has forbidden anyone to speak of this, but I know the truth.
Smith: My underlying point is that we must be more appreciative of the fact that humanity and its home are extraordinarily special — perhaps unique.
Again the key clarification: by 'alone' I mean specifically in terms of communicating with other intelligent species; finding amoebae on Mars or around a far-off star will be stupendously interesting, but that still leaves us alone, with no one to talk with, no one to learn from, and no one to teach.
I've always thought that if an Alien civilization had the technology to travel from millions of light years away, that they would at least have the technology to know we were here without having to visit us.
Furthermore, as a civilization, they'd likely be much more interested in our art than our science, because theirs would be so far ahead of ours we couldn't even fathom it.
