Given how many leaks we see routinely of supposedly confidential government information, I'm surprised that anyone thinks governments can competently keep secrets for any significant period of...
Given how many leaks we see routinely of supposedly confidential government information, I'm surprised that anyone thinks governments can competently keep secrets for any significant period of time, let alone the 65 years that the U.S. government is alleged to have possessed an alien spacecraft in Roswell. The sheer number of people who must have worked in the relevant government department in those 65 years means that, statistically, at least one of those staff members must have sneaked out some hard evidence of that alien spacecraft.
I'm not buying it.
I also note that the source for the Guardian's article is a website called 'The Debrief', which has an obvious pro-alien agenda. That website has every reason to accept these allegations without asking for evidence. And shame on the Guardian for reporting such drivel!
There's also just the physics involved. The amount of energy and/or time it would take to cross the vast distances of space is obscene. And that's before we get into the sheer random chance of...
There's also just the physics involved. The amount of energy and/or time it would take to cross the vast distances of space is obscene. And that's before we get into the sheer random chance of something finding earth. Now, we don't know everything and probably never will, so maybe it is possible in some way.
But when the default is "this is an obscenely impossible feat", you need extremely strong evidence to convince me that it's not one of MANY more likely outcomes. "Some guy said so" is so far from that it's just not funny. I know we constantly get "well this sensor picked up" and "that pilot saw" and "that camera shows" stuff, but there's plenty of more mundane explanations for such things which are often outright ignored so people can continue to eat up this drivel.
I don't want to sound like the "this is what they want you to believe"-crowd and I have no scientific knowledge about this but if we're talking about aliens isn't anything possible no matter which...
There's also just the physics involved. The amount of energy and/or time it would take to cross the vast distances of space is obscene. And that's before we get into the sheer random chance of something finding earth. Now, we don't know everything and probably never will, so maybe it is possible in some way.
I don't want to sound like the "this is what they want you to believe"-crowd and I have no scientific knowledge about this but if we're talking about aliens isn't anything possible no matter which scientific restrictions we as humans seem to think there are?
Earlier I was talking about aliens (or the lack thereof) with a friend who believes in them. I think the trouble of “anything is possible” is that it allows aliens to be utterly inscrutable and...
Earlier I was talking about aliens (or the lack thereof) with a friend who believes in them.
I think the trouble of “anything is possible” is that it allows aliens to be utterly inscrutable and therefore exist outside reason: both primitive yet advanced, everywhere yet nowhere, uber powerful yet weak.
I find it difficult to believe that aliens who presumably master FTL travel and achieved inconceivable technological prowess would come here only to pull a Boeing 737 MAX and crash on our surface at slow enough speeds that their craft can 1. be recovered and 2. not crater the earth. If a 1kg probe were to crash into earth at light speed, it would be noticeable. Very noticeable indeed.
It's just weird to be that people can both believe these aliens have FTL tech somehow but also if it comes to a war we would have a chance. If a Civilization has cracked FTL somehow then it's a...
It's just weird to be that people can both believe these aliens have FTL tech somehow but also if it comes to a war we would have a chance. If a Civilization has cracked FTL somehow then it's a safe bet their other tech is similarly advanced and a war with them would be more of a human extinction event. For the record I'm skeptical that interstellar travel is possible in a human lifespan so I'm with you on needing really hard evidence to believe something is alien.
I think people just have a vague idea of what FTL is, but don't really understand the implications. Any alien civilisation that has interstellar travel, even slower than light, can kill us from...
I think people just have a vague idea of what FTL is, but don't really understand the implications. Any alien civilisation that has interstellar travel, even slower than light, can kill us from Pluto by lightly nudging a rock. We wouldn't even know what happened.
Yep. There hasn't been enough sci-fi that demonstrates that idea to the general public. At most I've read a decent fan-fiction of the Animorphs series that involves using an FTL asteroid as a...
Yep. There hasn't been enough sci-fi that demonstrates that idea to the general public. At most I've read a decent fan-fiction of the Animorphs series that involves using an FTL asteroid as a weapon, and that left a huge impression on me.
So, I got bored/curious and just for fun asked WolframAlpha to compute the energy released by a 1kg object crashing into earth at near light speed (0.99c). 5.472 x 10^17 J of energy @ only 1kg....
5.472 x 10^17 J of energy @ only 1kg. For comparison, the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 8.786 x 10^13 J.
So if an alien spacecraft were to crash into earth near or above the speed of light, the US government's supposed secret UFO division would have to put in a lot of OT hours to cover up the fact that a US state or few are missing/vaporized.
I think the trouble of “anything is possible” is that it allows aliens to be utterly inscrutable and therefore exist outside reason: both primitive yet advanced, everywhere yet nowhere, uber powerful yet weak.
If aliens had achieved FTL travel they would have also broken causality. A crashed spaceship would be the least of our problems, effects preceding cause is a whole world of messed up.
If aliens had achieved FTL travel they would have also broken causality. A crashed spaceship would be the least of our problems, effects preceding cause is a whole world of messed up.
Keep in mind that from the perspective of any other species out there, we are the aliens. And we haven't found a way around elementary rules of physics and nature. 100% of existent data suggests...
I don't want to sound like the "this is what they want you to believe"-crowd and I have no scientific knowledge about this but if we're talking about aliens isn't anything possible no matter which scientific restrictions we as humans seem to think there are?
Keep in mind that from the perspective of any other species out there, we are the aliens.
And we haven't found a way around elementary rules of physics and nature. 100% of existent data suggests it's either not possible or if it is, complex enough that it cannot be done just because you want to.
If you also factor in what an absurdedly small chance intelligent life has in the first place (considering how many stars have to align for it to happen in the lifetime of a solar system), we're now adding another bunch on top like "In said timeline the life must not fizzle out for a myriad of reasons" and "said life must be able to overcome the rules of physics".
Sure, possible. But you'd again need extremely strong evidence to suggest that not only has all of that happened, but utterly at random said life found us in a giant ocean of empty (as evidence of us has barely reached anywhere on a galactic scale, we're essentially black against a near infinite night sky).
I don't have much of a horse in this race; personally I believe it's implausible that anything we have believed to be aliens thus far was in fact aliens. But this statistical argument is...
And we haven't found a way around elementary rules of physics and nature. 100% of existent data suggests it's either not possible or if it is, complex enough that it cannot be done just because you want to.
I don't have much of a horse in this race; personally I believe it's implausible that anything we have believed to be aliens thus far was in fact aliens.
But this statistical argument is fundamentally based on self-sampling or self-selection, which is unsound. If you construct hypotheticals in which you assume another person making the same argument, this will become apparent. For example, a stone age person who for some reason knew about the scale and makeup of our solar system, but had no idea of rocketry, could argue that "100% of existent data suggests that it is entirely impossible" for any alien species living on the moon to visit earth.
If you intend to argue about a more general group but you only have data about a more specific group, this is bound to happen. The only winning move here is to acknowledge this and say, e.g. "FTL tech might be possible, but it certainly doesn't look like it for now".
As for intelligent life existing somewhere outside of earth, I think that's a 99.9% kinda deal. The universe is just too big not to. Whether those have even had a chance to make contact is another matter.
but utterly at random said life found us in a giant ocean of empty (as evidence of us has barely reached anywhere on a galactic scale, we're essentially black against a near infinite night sky).
I'm not sure it's quite so stark. If I'm not entirely mistaken, earth has had an oxygen-rich atmosphere for something like 300 million years. If an alien were to detect that, that's a good enough reason to have a closer look. And the contents of the atmosphere are not too hard to detect even at longer distances. Might still be that the range of our currently-known methods for detecting that have physical limits that make an alien species existing within that range unlikely, I'm not sure on that.
The first part of your comment was what I was trying to say, thanks. Aren't you doing exactly what you're countering in the first part of your comment right here :)? I'm just being pedantic but...
The first part of your comment was what I was trying to say, thanks.
If I'm not entirely mistaken, earth has had an oxygen-rich atmosphere for something like 300 million years. If an alien were to detect that, that's a good enough reason to have a closer look. And the contents of the atmosphere are not too hard to detect even at longer distances. Might still be that the range of our currently-known methods for detecting that have physical limits that make an alien species existing within that range unlikely, I'm not sure on that.
Aren't you doing exactly what you're countering in the first part of your comment right here :)? I'm just being pedantic but why would we assume aliens care about oxygen in the atmosphere.
Hehe. Not quite. I was careful to explicitly scope this about "our currently-known methods". If you're talking about the part about oxygen being interesting... The reason why oxygen (the molecule,...
Aren't you doing exactly what you're countering in the first part of your comment right here :)?
Hehe. Not quite. I was careful to explicitly scope this about "our currently-known methods".
If you're talking about the part about oxygen being interesting... The reason why oxygen (the molecule, not the element) might be interesting to aliens is because -and I am making some amount of assumptions about aliens here of course- oxygen would look funny to any sentient entity with some understanding of chemistry. It is one of the most reactive elements out there; only elemental fluorine is more electronegative, so basically you'd expect oxygen to react with anything and everything to form more stable compounds. Like silicates, carbonates, metal oxides, you name it. Anything is better than molecular oxygen. If the sentience is already familiar with a mundane phenomenon that causes this (which from our perspective (!) is hard to imagine), then they might disregard it. If they've previously seen simple life forms that produce the same effect, they might just nod and say "sure, another planet with at least primitive life forms". If they have not seen either, then this is a black swan event to them and they will definitely be curious. Options two and three result in interested aliens - I don't care how big your alien empire is, a chance to have a look at the results of independent abiogenesis is interesting if you are at all curious.
In short, I'm saying that we've had in fact had an anomalous signature for millions of years, so it's plausible that aliens have already become interested. Not that they have noticed.
Note that I'm also not making statements of guarantees. I'm saying "X is possible" or "Y is not impossible". While my counterargument above was about a statement that said "X is impossible". I'm sure you'll agree the standard of evidence is different.
We would assume aliens care about O2 in the atmosphere b/c oxygen is reactive as hell. On geologic timescales, oxygen doesn't stick around in the air. It binds to stuff like rocks. So if you can...
We would assume aliens care about O2 in the atmosphere b/c oxygen is reactive as hell. On geologic timescales, oxygen doesn't stick around in the air. It binds to stuff like rocks.
So if you can detect O2 in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, you have a pretty good indication that some very interesting chemical process is pumping that O2 into the atmosphere. I say "very interesting" because the only such process we know of is photosynthesis.
Now, it's entirely possible that, on some alien world, biology harvests energy from the sun in a way that doesn't use what we call photosynthesis and doesn't produce oxygen.... but that doesn't change the fact that any planet with a bunch of free O2 in its atmosphere has something very unusual going on.
And "unusual" is pretty much the only reason you'd bother to haul ass across the galaxy to check something out up close.
That is correct, Aliens are unfalsifiable as long as you don't put any bounds on what you mean with that statement. I think this is partly an issue of making definitive statements vs rebuking...
That is correct, Aliens are unfalsifiable as long as you don't put any bounds on what you mean with that statement. I think this is partly an issue of making definitive statements vs rebuking definitive statements. If you say an FTL drive can't exist, because physics says so, and I counter that there might be physics we don't know about yet... then I know which side I stand on. Just because we haven't discovered it, doesn't mean much. We've discovered major physical phenomena as briefly as 10 years ago, so I'd say it's a bit ridiculous to consider the field closed. Particularly since aliens might have thousands or millions of years of advantage. But even if the field of physics had been unproductive for a while because humans are just too stupid, that's not a great reason either.
Simply because proof of absense is impossible, we have to remain open to the possibility. I can't rule out that god exists, that doesn't mean I believe in god. Putting certainty on either side of the belief state requires substantial evidence, and the prior belief should lie somewhere in the realm of ambiguity.
Of course, one has to keep that ambiguity in mind when "reusing" those conclusions. "FTL isn't impossible" isn't the same as "FTL is possible", and you have to be careful not to confuse the two. In a way, the point isn't that "it's aliens" is true or falsifiable or whatever, but that "it definitely isn't aliens" isn't falsifiable either.
Sure, that’s what my last sentence is about. But physics still remains. So either: 1- they know something major we don’t. While possible basically impossible to prove. 2- they are able to achieve...
Sure, that’s what my last sentence is about. But physics still remains. So either:
1- they know something major we don’t. While possible basically impossible to prove.
2- they are able to achieve a method were theoretically aware of. These take an extreme amount of energy and/or time.
So since both of those are way less likely than “someone is construing data in a way to arrive at the conclusion they want” you have to do a ton to disprove that.
And that’s before we get into-
Why would they come here quietly?
Why so few almost no one has noticed?
Why with the mass spike in public and commercial surveillance and monitoring is it just the government that knows? And why aren’t other governments saying anything? Are all the ones that are aware seriously on the same page and just as able to keep this a secret?
And so on.
So if the answer boils down to “well they’re just so powerful you can’t understand” that’s bordering on “god works in mysterious ways” which also requires a substantial amount of evidence given the claims.
Now you fly a ship over the US on footage or god parts the heavens and “No seriously stop eating shrimp” I’ll believe. But it’s going to take seriously substantial claims to prove it.
Otherwise I treat “well it could be aliens/god” about the same. It could, but under these conditions it’s impossible to prove so any other explanation is more likely until given more evidence.
There is a common public misconception that science and technology can overcome anything given enough time. That simply isn't true. The universe produces far higher energy events that anything we...
There is a common public misconception that science and technology can overcome anything given enough time. That simply isn't true.
The universe produces far higher energy events that anything we could ever conceivably produce on earth. Even a single high energy "Oh-My-God particle" that hit our atmosphere was 320 million TeV, compare that to CERN with a paltry 13TeV.
The universe has the most extreme unimaginable environments, stars collapsing. Neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, black holes along with their mergers.
Yet we have never seen the universe violate that speed of information transfer.
My problem with that subject is that, while wackos will think a weather balloon is first contact, skeptics will overcorrect by quickly putting way too much faith on any explanation that denies the...
My problem with that subject is that, while wackos will think a weather balloon is first contact, skeptics will overcorrect by quickly putting way too much faith on any explanation that denies the possibility of an intelligent cause regardless of how unlikely and exotic it is.
To be clear I don't mind dismissals, but I do believe that the blanket notion that "this is too ridiculous to even consider for a moment" is a very strong bias and I don't trust it any more than I trust the "everything is an alien" crowd.
Show me the spacecraft, and I'm totally on board (pun intended). I know there must be other life out there in the universe. Statistically, it's almost impossible for there not to be other life,...
Show me the spacecraft, and I'm totally on board (pun intended).
I know there must be other life out there in the universe. Statistically, it's almost impossible for there not to be other life, even other intelligent life, elsewhere in the universe. As a layperson who's read about physics and biology, I know that life must exist elsewhere. As a reader of science-fiction since I can remember, I want aliens to exist.
However, as to whether intelligent aliens have managed to visit our little corner of the universe and are choosing to keep themselves secret from humans and the U.S. government is holding one of their spaceships in a secret military facility... I'll choose to retain the right to ask to see some evidence.
I don't mind the notion that there's no sufficient proof to affirm an intelligent cause. But I do mind what I perceive to be a remarkably strong bias which prevents people, and even scientists,...
I don't mind the notion that there's no sufficient proof to affirm an intelligent cause. But I do mind what I perceive to be a remarkably strong bias which prevents people, and even scientists, from even entertaining the possibility of an intelligent cause at all.
While some may want to believe, it stands to reason that many want to not believe.
I promise that every scientist wants to be the one to discover extraterrestrial life. The Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, ETs, ghosts, etc - these would be discoveries of the millennium. It should...
I promise that every scientist wants to be the one to discover extraterrestrial life. The Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, ETs, ghosts, etc - these would be discoveries of the millennium. It should raise huge, blaring alarm bells when these theories are universally dismissed by scientific communities as woo instead of invested in.
Personally I don't think the perceived bias matters much, really. NASA is still sending rovers to Mars searching high and low for life (albeit primitive life). We're broadening our understanding...
Personally I don't think the perceived bias matters much, really. NASA is still sending rovers to Mars searching high and low for life (albeit primitive life). We're broadening our understanding of what parameters allow for life by finding it in unexpected places here on earth. SETI has been doing its thing for decades now. We keep sending up increasingly powerful space telescopes to peer deeper into space to find exoplanets. The science is being done, regardless of the lack of current evidence of alien life. In my opinion, as far as science goes, the bias is non-existent.
Physicists are constantly bombarded by people with grandiose claims on free energy. That they had disproven general relativity with their own superior "theory", complete with pages of mathematics...
Physicists are constantly bombarded by people with grandiose claims on free energy. That they had disproven general relativity with their own superior "theory", complete with pages of mathematics written by someone who clearly has never studied maths.
The bloody Electric Universe people will literally stalk physicists claiming that their ideas are being suppressed and the truth needs to be told.
and even scientists, from even entertaining the possibility of an intelligent cause at all.
Why would physicists entertain their far fetched unsubstantiated claims any more than the person who learns the number for their office phone and rings up wanting to talk about Quantum Mysticism.
It is a waste of their time and energy when they are trying to do real work. If later on they have actually substantiated their claims in some way, then sure they will have a look. But it isn't a strong bias, it is simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
This is probably because, statistically/physically speaking, the most unlikely and exotic answer you can think of for any of these situations, is aliens. Like if the alternative is thermodynamic...
...regardless of how unlikely and exotic it is.
This is probably because, statistically/physically speaking, the most unlikely and exotic answer you can think of for any of these situations, is aliens. Like if the alternative is thermodynamic miracle then we're in the same ballpark of absurd, but it's actually quite hard to come up with a wacky explanation as or more unlikely than aliens.
I don't mind the notion that intelligent causes are unlikely. I do mind the bias according to which that possibility must not even be seriously considered at all, ever.
I don't mind the notion that intelligent causes are unlikely. I do mind the bias according to which that possibility must not even be seriously considered at all, ever.
I really like this paper, that basically says us evolving intelligence before the earth is destroyed by the sun was incredibly lucky. Habitable planets are rare, but we can still assume some of...
I really like this paper, that basically says us evolving intelligence before the earth is destroyed by the sun was incredibly lucky.
Habitable planets are rare, but we can still assume some of them have a simple form of life, like algae.
And that's it.
Intelligent life is simply too rare for alien contact to be tangible at all, ever.
Of course you can be the optimist and say it's still possible, but that's like hoping you'll win the lottery 4 times in a row; technically possible yes, but negligibly so.
I haven’t read the paper you linked, but this conclusion pretty obviously depends on some important unverified assumptions, that I believe are probably wrong. The most basic assumption likely to...
I haven’t read the paper you linked, but this conclusion pretty obviously depends on some important unverified assumptions, that I believe are probably wrong.
The most basic assumption likely to fail are that either life or intelligence must be similar to us. We are based on carbon, and carbon, as far as we know, is unique in its degree of chemical variability. But it seems unlikely that we have discovered all possible elements, or all the possible ways the elements we have can interact, or all the possible conditions that might cause surprising interactions sufficient to create “life.”
Similarly, intelligence can be indecipherable to us. See many star trek episodes and movies for dramatic explorations of this. Heck, see star trek iv for an example of life on earth with inscrutable intelligence.
It’s hubris to presume what we see and “understand” is anywhere close to sufficient to draw these kinds of conclusions.
I think you should probably skim the paper -- it's a bit more general than assuming that life must be carbon based (see section 2.1). Really, what they're estimating is the rate at which key...
I think you should probably skim the paper -- it's a bit more general than assuming that life must be carbon based (see section 2.1). Really, what they're estimating is the rate at which key evolutionary transitions occur ("abiogenesis, eukaryogenesis, sexual reproduction, evolution of intelligence"). Even if you don't believe that this particular path is unique, it's at least a representative path towards intelligent civilizations, and certainly we shouldn't expect unknown pathways to be more probable than the known one.
It’s hubris to presume what we see and “understand” is anywhere close to sufficient to draw these kinds of conclusions.
Actually, the paper makes the same point but draws the opposite conclusion -- people are too optimistic when they attempt to estimate key evolutionary transitions (or in the case of the paper I linked, parameters in the Drake equation). By widening the priors, you find that us being alone is not a preposterous result.
Both papers make the same kind of untestable (at least beyond our field of view) assumptions. For example, it assumes that intelligence must be an endpoint of a sequential evolutionary process...
Both papers make the same kind of untestable (at least beyond our field of view) assumptions. For example, it assumes that intelligence must be an endpoint of a sequential evolutionary process that occurs in isolation, and that that process must take place at a similar rate as has occurred on earth. An even more fundamental, untestable assumption is that intelligent life must evolve on a planet of a star.
Just sitting here avoiding work I can imagine a number of scenarios that could lead all different kinds of scenarios. And honestly most of them already got discussed in star trek. First is an energy species that forms in a nebula. Or one that forms at a subatomic level. (Never mind the "quantum universe" of recent movies). Or a scenario where two forms of life from different parts of the universe meet. Less far fetched, a chemical soup that promotes evolution way faster than on Earth. What about dimmer, slower aging stars? What about life here on earth that seems it may have evolved completely isolated from the surface (and therefore completely independent of the sun?) What if our understanding of the Sun's life is way off (Arthur C. Clarke explored this I think).
Granted all my thoughts are science fiction level, but the uncertainties they rely so heavily upon in the paper make it really only more serious sounding fiction.
Again, I am not proposing ET life is evident here and now. But to suggest we might have any useful idea about its liklihood seems quite arrogant. This is, of course, not to suggest we should not think about and write "serious" papers like the ones linked. The study is important. We should just keep close in mind, and explicit in our writing, the highly speculative nature and practical uselessness of our conclusions.
These papers really don't make this sort of assumption, at least not to the sort of precision you're thinking of. The entire point of this paper ((physics.pop-ph/1806.02404)) is that if you take...
Both papers make the same kind of untestable (at least beyond our field of view) assumptions. For example, it assumes that intelligence must be an endpoint of a sequential evolutionary process that occurs in isolation, and that that process must take place at a similar rate as has occurred on earth.
These papers really don't make this sort of assumption, at least not to the sort of precision you're thinking of. The entire point of this paper ((physics.pop-ph/1806.02404)) is that if you take point estimates (or even order of magnitude estimates) for values in the Drake equation, you'll get a misleading result. And yes, that means if we were to know the rate of abiogenesis on Earth exactly, for example, it would be misleading to use that value in the Drake equation for exactly the same reason.
Instead, what they're trying to estimate is the average rate of abiogenesis in the universe on average, not the Earth in particular. To that end, they use logarithmic priors. For instance, in that paper the fraction of planets that contain life is priored according to a log-normal distribution, centered on 0.63 (i.e., centered such that life is likely to occur) but spanning 50 orders of magnitude (see section 3.1 for why they chose that prior; see Table 1 for all of the priors). Of course, they use the Earth as a reference to obtain these priors, but I don't think it likely that the situation on Earth is significantly disfavorable for life compared to the typical planet or inside nebulas or whatnot.
Of course, you're right that this paper doesn't directly address ideas like "what if intelligent life can evolve through a completely different route?" But unless those alternate routes are substantially more likely than the known one, it doesn't actually affect their final estimates. And again, we have no reason to think that unobserved pathways are more likely, and plenty of reason to think that they aren't by virtue of having never observed them.
That said, this particular paper is not saying with certainty that alien civilizations don't exist in our galaxy. They're saying it's more like a coin flip. On the other hand, they also estimate there's a few percent chance that there are millions of other detectable alien civilizations in the galaxy (see Fig 1). The posterior distribution they calculate for the number of alien civilizations is highly non-Gaussian!
Edit: my main takeaway of this paper is that, despite our gut instincts, there is a real possibility that we actually are alone. I also don't think you should put too much faith in the final probabilities they quote -- there's a great deal of uncertainty in their calculations, like you said -- but it's entirely because of those uncertainties that we should be willing to entertain the idea.
I'm pretty confident that we've discovered all of the elements or at least all of the elements that exist with beyond extraordinarily sparse traces in the cosmos. An element is determined by the...
But it seems unlikely that we have discovered all possible elements, or all the possible ways the elements we have can interact, or all the possible conditions that might cause surprising interactions sufficient to create “life.”
I'm pretty confident that we've discovered all of the elements or at least all of the elements that exist with beyond extraordinarily sparse traces in the cosmos.
An element is determined by the number of protons in the nucleus. If it's got 6 protons it's Carbon. There are a bunch of exciting isotopes of Carbon which are determined by the exact number of neutrons, but chemistry doesn't care about those because they all bond to other stuff exactly the same way. Carbon is carbon is carbon.
Add one proton and you've got Nitrogen. Take away one and you've got Boron. The number of protons is always an integer and we know about all of the elements from 1 through 118.
We also know where elements come from. They're created in stars through fusion. Mash lighter elements together and you get heavier ones. If the elements you're mashing together have fewer than 28 protons you get some free energy out of the deal. This goes a long way towards explaining the Iron Peak and the overall frequency with which we find elements in nature. Simply put, the heavier the element the more intense the gravity and pressure needed to produce it and the more energy it consumes being produced. If there are stable elements out there past 118 they're vanishingly, absurdly rare. So rare that no biological system could ever arise with them as its chemical backbone.
It would be like trying to construct a skyscraper exclusively out of metal that was verifiably touched by George Washington.
Now, could we imagine a life system based around silicon or arsenic or phosphorus? Sure. But as there is a short list of elements and chemicals which are both abundant in the Universe and can be combined into complex molecules, it is safe to assume that any chemically based life process will follow one of these paths.
We're not going to wake up one way and discover that there is an alien species from the vicinity of Betelgeuse with a biology based entirely upon Xenon though, if we do, they probably won't understand sarcasm
We have a theory of matter that has been fairly stable for a couple hundred years, but it wasn’t so long ago that seriois smart people believed they could transmut lead i to gold with some herbs...
We have a theory of matter that has been fairly stable for a couple hundred years, but it wasn’t so long ago that seriois smart people believed they could transmut lead i to gold with some herbs and a mortar and pestle.
I hold it is safe to assume that science will continue to progress, and a fundamental discovery will cause future generation to review our theories with same quaint admiration with which we view the alchemists.
But there's a huge gap between what people believe and what they can prove. Our theory of matter and its formation via fusion isn't just a belief. It is born out by experimental evidence. Heck, it...
We have a theory of matter that has been fairly stable for a couple hundred years, but it wasn’t so long ago that seriois smart people believed they could transmut lead i to gold with some herbs and a mortar and pestle.
But there's a huge gap between what people believe and what they can prove. Our theory of matter and its formation via fusion isn't just a belief. It is born out by experimental evidence. Heck, it is born out by engineering application. Because we understand how heavier elements are created from lighter elements via the process of fusion we have been able to build hydrogen bombs and fusion reactors.
I don't doubt that our ability to manipulate our physical universe will continue to improve with time but there's no more reason to presume that our evidence-based model of how matter works at the atomic and molecular scale will be upended in the coming centuries than there is reason to assume that the heliocentric model of the solar system will be.
Similarly, there's also this paper (physics.pop-ph/1806.02404) by some of the same authors. It's been a while since I read it, but the main thrust was that our priors for some of the unknown...
Similarly, there's also this paper (physics.pop-ph/1806.02404) by some of the same authors. It's been a while since I read it, but the main thrust was that our priors for some of the unknown parameters in the Drake equation are so uncertain (but biased towards small) that the tail of the distribution ("we are alone") contributes as much as the peak ("there are multiple intelligent civilizations in this galaxy").
Integrating the distribution, they find there's a 50% chance we're alone in the galaxy and a 40% chance we're alone in observable universe. If you incorporate into your prior the fact that we haven't yet detected intelligent life, the probability that we're alone becomes even greater.
I think it's even worse than that — this recent stuff alleges that lots of countries have been doing this same stuff for just as long. So not only does the US government have to be super...
I think it's even worse than that — this recent stuff alleges that lots of countries have been doing this same stuff for just as long. So not only does the US government have to be super leak-proof, everyone else does too!
Of course UFO guys would say that there HAVE been leaks, but those never seem to pass the sniff test for people who aren't already into this stuff...
It was funny, yesterday /r/UFO swore up and down it was an little-known, but super credible source with high-quality journalists. And any suggestion that they wait for a more credible source to...
It was funny, yesterday /r/UFO swore up and down it was an little-known, but super credible source with high-quality journalists. And any suggestion that they wait for a more credible source to report it was met with "the government controls the mainstream media, why would they tell us?".
What a weird little subreddit. Super fun to follow when it makes its way to /r/popular every now and then though.
Can you tell me how many successful large scale conspiracies there have been? By definition you can't! So how can we know it's impossible for one to remain secret? For all we know most haven't had...
Can you tell me how many successful large scale conspiracies there have been? By definition you can't! So how can we know it's impossible for one to remain secret? For all we know most haven't had any "leaks" at all!
That strikes me as some kind of logical fallacy. I mean, for example, the nuclear bomb of WWII was a "conspiracy" that was kept quite secret until it wasn't. Information on Osama bin Laden was...
That strikes me as some kind of logical fallacy.
I mean, for example, the nuclear bomb of WWII was a "conspiracy" that was kept quite secret until it wasn't.
Information on Osama bin Laden was kept quite secret for a long time. And there have been some large scale conspiracies that people just don't want to believe are true, and so get ignored. Many environmental catastrophes fall into this category, as well as things like the Tuckasegee experiments.
There really can be no doubt that well-placed groups within the US government have carried out some nasty stuff, and there is little doubt in my mind that there are at least as many (and as nasty) "conspiracies" that have occured that we don't know about as we do.
"ET's are here" is a problematic story for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is lack of useful evidence. But that there are verified unexplained phenomena (across many spheres) should be well acknowledged by every human, and we should study those phenomena, in whatever field, because at a minimum, the explanation will advance our understanding of ourselves and our universe.
For anyone who is interested, please fund my pamphlet, or, alternatively, explore the life and times of Charles Fort.
The Debrief reported that Grusch’s knowledge of non-human materials and vehicles was based on “extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials”.
....
Grusch does not say he has personally seen alien vehicles, nor does he say where they may be being stored.
In one of the articles it mentions that all of this will be in a book he wrote. 100% a con job. More distractions, is Trump going to get arrested again by the end of the week?
In one of the articles it mentions that all of this will be in a book he wrote. 100% a con job. More distractions, is Trump going to get arrested again by the end of the week?
There it is. I've been following the discussion on /r/UFO and I was expecting a book, or a convention, or some other money-making scheme that this was all just marketing hype for. It's always...
There it is. I've been following the discussion on /r/UFO and I was expecting a book, or a convention, or some other money-making scheme that this was all just marketing hype for. It's always either some dork trying to make a quick buck, someone misinterpreting natural phenomenon, or misconstruing "We don't know what that is yet" for "omg aliens confirmed".
I'd love to wake up and find out aliens were among us (Assuming they have good intentions), but there's just nothing tangible to prove it at all.
I would say the math even proves it to be intangible. Habitable planets are rare, those with life are rarer still, and those with intelligent life are even more rare. Intelligence evolving on...
I would say the math even proves it to be intangible. Habitable planets are rare, those with life are rarer still, and those with intelligent life are even more rare.
Intelligence evolving on Earth before the sun swallows it is a bit like winning the lottery 4 times in a row. Insanely improbable.
I agree with you completely, but because you said it, I had to look it up... ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_R._Ginther
I agree with you completely, but because you said it, I had to look it up... ;)
Joan R. Ginther is an American lottery winner. On four occasions between 1993 and 2010 she collected winnings in excess of US$2 million in state lotteries, to a grand total of US$20.4 million.
This is a good opportunity to keep track of news outlets and journalists who reveal their stupidity or sloppiness over this. A friend of mine who very much wants to believe that aliens are real...
This is a good opportunity to keep track of news outlets and journalists who reveal their stupidity or sloppiness over this.
A friend of mine who very much wants to believe that aliens are real sent me interviews by two supposedly renowned journalists who asked soft-ball questions and nothing incisive or skeptical, taking everything for face value.
Journalist: and others back you up on this?
UFO dude: yes and I was a high level intelligence officer
Journalist: (proceeds to take everything at face value and essentially facilitates the interview as a completely uncritical and open platform for the guy.)
UFO dude: yes and I was a high level intelligence officer
Journalist: (proceeds to take everything at face value and essentially facilitates the interview as a completely uncritical and open platform for the guy.)
There are no alien spacecraft. Ask me how I know. Because Donald Trump was President of the United States. I simply refuse to believe that Donald J Trump had unlimited access to the classified...
There are no alien spacecraft. Ask me how I know.
Because Donald Trump was President of the United States. I simply refuse to believe that Donald J Trump had unlimited access to the classified intelligence surrounding US national security, learned that aliens are real and that they represent a threat or asset to US national security as assessed by the Pentagon, and did not just immediately post that shit on Twitter.
Moreover, it has been some years since he left office. Dude is credibly accused of having, showing off, bragging about, and possibly selling access to classified materials since he left office. There is absolutely no way that, if there were documents detailing US assessments of the Iranian nuclear program and US assessments of the capabilities of an alien civilization, that Trump would have taken the Iranian documents. None whatsoever.
I dunno. Maybe they just didn't tell him? ;) I feel immediately reminded of that scene in Independence Day where the heroes are sitting in Air Force One, and someone brings up Area 51. The...
I dunno. Maybe they just didn't tell him? ;)
I feel immediately reminded of that scene in Independence Day where the heroes are sitting in Air Force One, and someone brings up Area 51. The president immediately and plausibly denies that there is such a base, only for the General-guy to go "Well, actually..."
Obviously neither of us really know how the national security complex would deal with alien technology. What Independence Day does is suggest that such information would be treated the same way...
Obviously neither of us really know how the national security complex would deal with alien technology. What Independence Day does is suggest that such information would be treated the same way that the DOE and the Pentagon treat nuclear weapons design.
So, for example, what is the specific metallurgy of the B61 Mod-12's fissile pit? The President doesn't know and can't even find out. US nuclear weapon design information is very-much on a need-to-know basis and there are very few plausible situations in which the President would need to know that. So he's just not told.
Independence Day riffs on that, suggesting that much of the technology the US military built and deployed is a result of experimentation on captured alien spacecraft and that the President wouldn't need to know that. But.... there's a pretty big difference.
The President does need to know about security threats, diplomatic contact, etc. Indeed, that's the President's most singular job. He's involved in other stuff, sure, but the Presidency stands almost entirely alone when it comes to diplomatic contact with other countries and the deployment of US armed forces. That is to say, when it comes to the issue of National Security.
And there could be no graver threat to US national security than a space-faring alien race. Why? Well because, having self-evidently solved the problem of interstellar travel, they would be capable of dropping a number of heavy rocks on us. Without any means of retaliation the United States (and the world, but that's less the President's problem) would be helpless to deter or resist such an attack.
So diplomacy is really the only choice we'd have and that is the sole responsibility of the President.
So, if there's an alien civilization out there and the President doesn't know about it, he is being kept from his constitutionally enumerated power by someone or something within his administration.
Also if govts knew aliens existed the world would be dumping all our money into establishing a defensive position and resource gathering in space. Like a lunar bases and factories,...
Also if govts knew aliens existed the world would be dumping all our money into establishing a defensive position and resource gathering in space. Like a lunar bases and factories, outposts/sensors further out, mining asteroids, etc. Rather we collectively have a we'll get to it when we get to it attitude right now.
A colleague at work sent me this article earlier today and I felt like I was reading some kind of X-Files-esque pilot script. The head science writer for that site is apparently an SF/F author,...
A colleague at work sent me this article earlier today and I felt like I was reading some kind of X-Files-esque pilot script. The head science writer for that site is apparently an SF/F author, which wasn’t really a surprise once I’d read through the article.
Oh of course it is David Grusch again. It is really shocking that the Guardian has jumped on his wild unsubstantiated claims. His story is wildly inconsistent, and the people he claims back him up...
Oh of course it is David Grusch again. It is really shocking that the Guardian has jumped on his wild unsubstantiated claims. His story is wildly inconsistent, and the people he claims back him up have come out and said he is talking crap.
I know that people love the idea that "The Truth Is Out There". That doesn't mean we should should drop any pretence of critical thinking.
Some very heavy doses of mainstream reductionist “humans so smart” koolaid chugged in this thread. There is an incomprehensibly large universe out there and we humans are still just barely past...
Some very heavy doses of mainstream reductionist “humans so smart” koolaid chugged in this thread.
There is an incomprehensibly large universe out there and we humans are still just barely past the Stone Age. Our most advanced, powerful energy tech (nuclear) is still just a fancy fire to boil water and spin steam turbines. Trump was president, and we still care who total strangers get in bed with.
Doesn’t it seem rather self-centered to presume a single thing about the possibilities of nonhuman intelligences?
If you take a serious look at UFOs, you’ll find a very rich and compelling history, one that stretches back for thousands of years and has been purposefully muddled time and time again by various nation states.
But most people just claim to be open minded skeptics and don’t bother to explore what is probably the most fascinating topic ever. They grow up hearing pop culture memes and assume that memes are all the phenomenon is, then ridicule those who actually have something of worth on the topic. It’s incredibly frustrating.
I’m happy to make some suggestions for serious reading material if that’s of interest.
It's less about presuming anything about nonhuman intelligence (which certainly exists somewhere in the universe), and more about having experience with human intelligence, and its bad habits and...
Doesn’t it seem rather self-centered to presume a single thing about the possibilities of nonhuman intelligences?
It's less about presuming anything about nonhuman intelligence (which certainly exists somewhere in the universe), and more about having experience with human intelligence, and its bad habits and blind spots.
People see things they can't explain. They automatically fill in the gaps. They instinctively gather together to invent answers. They build extensive narratives, and stubbornly cling to them once established.
Whether it's ghosts, aliens, flat earth, or bigfoot, the process of woo and the process of good science are very different. Woo tends to repel the scientific community, and attracts a certain kind of conspiracy minded individual.
And after this 80 year investigation into extraterrestrial life on Earth, it's easy to tell which of those is filling the ranks. Compared to other scientific developments during the same period, that should be an enormous red flag to anyone.
My skepticism is incredibly high that this has anything to do with aliens (although I admit it'd be great to have proof that there is other intelligent life out there).
My skepticism is incredibly high that this has anything to do with aliens (although I admit it'd be great to have proof that there is other intelligent life out there).
My pet conspiracy theory about these UAPs (particularly the ones that seem to move absurdly quickly and without obeying known physical laws), is that they're proof we're in a simulation, and...
My pet conspiracy theory about these UAPs (particularly the ones that seem to move absurdly quickly and without obeying known physical laws), is that they're proof we're in a simulation, and they're simply the camera being operated by whoever is running the sim.
Somehow this made me think of my favorite quote from Science of Discworld (RIP Terry Pratchett):
Somehow this made me think of my favorite quote from Science of Discworld (RIP Terry Pratchett):
“Is the solar system stable?’, which means ‘Could it change dramatically as a result of some tiny disturbance?’ In 1887 King Oscar II of Sweden offered a prize of 2,500 crowns for the answer. It took about a century for the world’s mathematicians to come up with a definite answer: ‘Maybe’.
(It was a good answer, but they didn’t get paid. The prize had already been awarded to someone who didn’t get the answer and whose prizewinning article had a big mistake right at the most interesting part. But when he put it right, at his own expense, he invented Chaos Theory and paved the way for the ‘maybe’. Sometimes, the best answer is a more interesting question.)
The point here is that stability is not about what a system is actually doing: it is about how the system would change if you disturbed it. Stability, by definition, deals with ‘what if?’. Because a lot of science is really about this non-existent world of thought experiments, our understanding of science must concern itself with worlds of the imagination as well as with worlds of reality. Imagination, rather than mere intelligence, is the truly human quality.”
Does anyone think it might be a Rick-and-Morty (ie a hyper intelligent regular person/group of people) or Wakanda-esque situation? (Assuming these claims are credible)
Does anyone think it might be a Rick-and-Morty (ie a hyper intelligent regular person/group of people) or Wakanda-esque situation? (Assuming these claims are credible)
Intelligent life evolving on earth is super incredibly lucky to begin with, so it's more likely a Rick and Morty sitch, if it's anything at all. imo this whole thing is just some guy suffering...
Intelligent life evolving on earth is super incredibly lucky to begin with, so it's more likely a Rick and Morty sitch, if it's anything at all. imo this whole thing is just some guy suffering from schizophrenia and not getting the help he needs, or, at best, trying to build up hype to sell something.
The main source for this now is NewsNation. We are not alone: The UFO whistleblower speaks, Andy Gipson, Miguel Sancho, Zoë Lake, Dana Leavitt, Ross Coulthart Personally I don't buy it -- but then...
“These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it space-craft if you will. Non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” he said.
Grusch told NewsNation that the U.S. is in possession of “quite a number” of these “non-human” vehicles.
Personally I don't buy it -- but then again, my hot take is that there are no aliens anywhere in outer space, that it's just us by some freak accident. I would love to be wrong!
I'm with you on not buying it. How is it that the aliens are only crashing in the USA? Are we to believe either that none of these "quite a number" of craft have ever crashed in North Korea?...
I'm with you on not buying it. How is it that the aliens are only crashing in the USA? Are we to believe either that none of these "quite a number" of craft have ever crashed in North Korea? China? Russia? Or instead should be we believe that every country that has retrieved this technology has both the ambition and means to keep it completely secret? It's kind of absurd.
As to your hot take, I swing the other way. I think life is probably somewhat abundant out there but the physical laws and magnitude of the universe we live in are such that the vast majority of it probably goes about its entire existence from inception to extinction in complete isolation from the rest.
Given how many leaks we see routinely of supposedly confidential government information, I'm surprised that anyone thinks governments can competently keep secrets for any significant period of time, let alone the 65 years that the U.S. government is alleged to have possessed an alien spacecraft in Roswell. The sheer number of people who must have worked in the relevant government department in those 65 years means that, statistically, at least one of those staff members must have sneaked out some hard evidence of that alien spacecraft.
I'm not buying it.
I also note that the source for the Guardian's article is a website called 'The Debrief', which has an obvious pro-alien agenda. That website has every reason to accept these allegations without asking for evidence. And shame on the Guardian for reporting such drivel!
There's also just the physics involved. The amount of energy and/or time it would take to cross the vast distances of space is obscene. And that's before we get into the sheer random chance of something finding earth. Now, we don't know everything and probably never will, so maybe it is possible in some way.
But when the default is "this is an obscenely impossible feat", you need extremely strong evidence to convince me that it's not one of MANY more likely outcomes. "Some guy said so" is so far from that it's just not funny. I know we constantly get "well this sensor picked up" and "that pilot saw" and "that camera shows" stuff, but there's plenty of more mundane explanations for such things which are often outright ignored so people can continue to eat up this drivel.
I don't want to sound like the "this is what they want you to believe"-crowd and I have no scientific knowledge about this but if we're talking about aliens isn't anything possible no matter which scientific restrictions we as humans seem to think there are?
Earlier I was talking about aliens (or the lack thereof) with a friend who believes in them.
I think the trouble of “anything is possible” is that it allows aliens to be utterly inscrutable and therefore exist outside reason: both primitive yet advanced, everywhere yet nowhere, uber powerful yet weak.
I find it difficult to believe that aliens who presumably master FTL travel and achieved inconceivable technological prowess would come here only to pull a Boeing 737 MAX and crash on our surface at slow enough speeds that their craft can 1. be recovered and 2. not crater the earth. If a 1kg probe were to crash into earth at light speed, it would be noticeable. Very noticeable indeed.
It's just weird to be that people can both believe these aliens have FTL tech somehow but also if it comes to a war we would have a chance. If a Civilization has cracked FTL somehow then it's a safe bet their other tech is similarly advanced and a war with them would be more of a human extinction event. For the record I'm skeptical that interstellar travel is possible in a human lifespan so I'm with you on needing really hard evidence to believe something is alien.
I think people just have a vague idea of what FTL is, but don't really understand the implications. Any alien civilisation that has interstellar travel, even slower than light, can kill us from Pluto by lightly nudging a rock. We wouldn't even know what happened.
Yep. There hasn't been enough sci-fi that demonstrates that idea to the general public. At most I've read a decent fan-fiction of the Animorphs series that involves using an FTL asteroid as a weapon, and that left a huge impression on me.
So, I got bored/curious and just for fun asked WolframAlpha to compute the energy released by a 1kg object crashing into earth at near light speed (0.99c).
5.472 x 10^17 J of energy @ only 1kg. For comparison, the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 8.786 x 10^13 J.
So if an alien spacecraft were to crash into earth near or above the speed of light, the US government's supposed secret UFO division would have to put in a lot of OT hours to cover up the fact that a US state or few are missing/vaporized.
Good point.
If aliens had achieved FTL travel they would have also broken causality. A crashed spaceship would be the least of our problems, effects preceding cause is a whole world of messed up.
Yeah if the MAX did a Holdo Maneuver, then sure, I'll buy the aliens story. Am onboard!
Keep in mind that from the perspective of any other species out there, we are the aliens.
And we haven't found a way around elementary rules of physics and nature. 100% of existent data suggests it's either not possible or if it is, complex enough that it cannot be done just because you want to.
If you also factor in what an absurdedly small chance intelligent life has in the first place (considering how many stars have to align for it to happen in the lifetime of a solar system), we're now adding another bunch on top like "In said timeline the life must not fizzle out for a myriad of reasons" and "said life must be able to overcome the rules of physics".
Sure, possible. But you'd again need extremely strong evidence to suggest that not only has all of that happened, but utterly at random said life found us in a giant ocean of empty (as evidence of us has barely reached anywhere on a galactic scale, we're essentially black against a near infinite night sky).
I don't have much of a horse in this race; personally I believe it's implausible that anything we have believed to be aliens thus far was in fact aliens.
But this statistical argument is fundamentally based on self-sampling or self-selection, which is unsound. If you construct hypotheticals in which you assume another person making the same argument, this will become apparent. For example, a stone age person who for some reason knew about the scale and makeup of our solar system, but had no idea of rocketry, could argue that "100% of existent data suggests that it is entirely impossible" for any alien species living on the moon to visit earth.
If you intend to argue about a more general group but you only have data about a more specific group, this is bound to happen. The only winning move here is to acknowledge this and say, e.g. "FTL tech might be possible, but it certainly doesn't look like it for now".
As for intelligent life existing somewhere outside of earth, I think that's a 99.9% kinda deal. The universe is just too big not to. Whether those have even had a chance to make contact is another matter.
I'm not sure it's quite so stark. If I'm not entirely mistaken, earth has had an oxygen-rich atmosphere for something like 300 million years. If an alien were to detect that, that's a good enough reason to have a closer look. And the contents of the atmosphere are not too hard to detect even at longer distances. Might still be that the range of our currently-known methods for detecting that have physical limits that make an alien species existing within that range unlikely, I'm not sure on that.
The first part of your comment was what I was trying to say, thanks.
Aren't you doing exactly what you're countering in the first part of your comment right here :)? I'm just being pedantic but why would we assume aliens care about oxygen in the atmosphere.
Hehe. Not quite. I was careful to explicitly scope this about "our currently-known methods".
If you're talking about the part about oxygen being interesting... The reason why oxygen (the molecule, not the element) might be interesting to aliens is because -and I am making some amount of assumptions about aliens here of course- oxygen would look funny to any sentient entity with some understanding of chemistry. It is one of the most reactive elements out there; only elemental fluorine is more electronegative, so basically you'd expect oxygen to react with anything and everything to form more stable compounds. Like silicates, carbonates, metal oxides, you name it. Anything is better than molecular oxygen. If the sentience is already familiar with a mundane phenomenon that causes this (which from our perspective (!) is hard to imagine), then they might disregard it. If they've previously seen simple life forms that produce the same effect, they might just nod and say "sure, another planet with at least primitive life forms". If they have not seen either, then this is a black swan event to them and they will definitely be curious. Options two and three result in interested aliens - I don't care how big your alien empire is, a chance to have a look at the results of independent abiogenesis is interesting if you are at all curious.
In short, I'm saying that we've had in fact had an anomalous signature for millions of years, so it's plausible that aliens have already become interested. Not that they have noticed.
Note that I'm also not making statements of guarantees. I'm saying "X is possible" or "Y is not impossible". While my counterargument above was about a statement that said "X is impossible". I'm sure you'll agree the standard of evidence is different.
We would assume aliens care about O2 in the atmosphere b/c oxygen is reactive as hell. On geologic timescales, oxygen doesn't stick around in the air. It binds to stuff like rocks.
So if you can detect O2 in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, you have a pretty good indication that some very interesting chemical process is pumping that O2 into the atmosphere. I say "very interesting" because the only such process we know of is photosynthesis.
Now, it's entirely possible that, on some alien world, biology harvests energy from the sun in a way that doesn't use what we call photosynthesis and doesn't produce oxygen.... but that doesn't change the fact that any planet with a bunch of free O2 in its atmosphere has something very unusual going on.
And "unusual" is pretty much the only reason you'd bother to haul ass across the galaxy to check something out up close.
At that point aliens are an unfalsifiable explanation and it becomes little different from claiming the same phenomena are caused by angels.
That is correct, Aliens are unfalsifiable as long as you don't put any bounds on what you mean with that statement. I think this is partly an issue of making definitive statements vs rebuking definitive statements. If you say an FTL drive can't exist, because physics says so, and I counter that there might be physics we don't know about yet... then I know which side I stand on. Just because we haven't discovered it, doesn't mean much. We've discovered major physical phenomena as briefly as 10 years ago, so I'd say it's a bit ridiculous to consider the field closed. Particularly since aliens might have thousands or millions of years of advantage. But even if the field of physics had been unproductive for a while because humans are just too stupid, that's not a great reason either.
Simply because proof of absense is impossible, we have to remain open to the possibility. I can't rule out that god exists, that doesn't mean I believe in god. Putting certainty on either side of the belief state requires substantial evidence, and the prior belief should lie somewhere in the realm of ambiguity.
Of course, one has to keep that ambiguity in mind when "reusing" those conclusions. "FTL isn't impossible" isn't the same as "FTL is possible", and you have to be careful not to confuse the two. In a way, the point isn't that "it's aliens" is true or falsifiable or whatever, but that "it definitely isn't aliens" isn't falsifiable either.
Sure, that’s what my last sentence is about. But physics still remains. So either:
1- they know something major we don’t. While possible basically impossible to prove.
2- they are able to achieve a method were theoretically aware of. These take an extreme amount of energy and/or time.
So since both of those are way less likely than “someone is construing data in a way to arrive at the conclusion they want” you have to do a ton to disprove that.
And that’s before we get into-
Why would they come here quietly?
Why so few almost no one has noticed?
Why with the mass spike in public and commercial surveillance and monitoring is it just the government that knows? And why aren’t other governments saying anything? Are all the ones that are aware seriously on the same page and just as able to keep this a secret?
And so on.
So if the answer boils down to “well they’re just so powerful you can’t understand” that’s bordering on “god works in mysterious ways” which also requires a substantial amount of evidence given the claims.
Now you fly a ship over the US on footage or god parts the heavens and “No seriously stop eating shrimp” I’ll believe. But it’s going to take seriously substantial claims to prove it.
Otherwise I treat “well it could be aliens/god” about the same. It could, but under these conditions it’s impossible to prove so any other explanation is more likely until given more evidence.
There is a common public misconception that science and technology can overcome anything given enough time. That simply isn't true.
The universe produces far higher energy events that anything we could ever conceivably produce on earth. Even a single high energy "Oh-My-God particle" that hit our atmosphere was 320 million TeV, compare that to CERN with a paltry 13TeV.
The universe has the most extreme unimaginable environments, stars collapsing. Neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, black holes along with their mergers.
Yet we have never seen the universe violate that speed of information transfer.
My problem with that subject is that, while wackos will think a weather balloon is first contact, skeptics will overcorrect by quickly putting way too much faith on any explanation that denies the possibility of an intelligent cause regardless of how unlikely and exotic it is.
To be clear I don't mind dismissals, but I do believe that the blanket notion that "this is too ridiculous to even consider for a moment" is a very strong bias and I don't trust it any more than I trust the "everything is an alien" crowd.
Both sides are way too invested for my taste.
Show me the spacecraft, and I'm totally on board (pun intended).
I know there must be other life out there in the universe. Statistically, it's almost impossible for there not to be other life, even other intelligent life, elsewhere in the universe. As a layperson who's read about physics and biology, I know that life must exist elsewhere. As a reader of science-fiction since I can remember, I want aliens to exist.
However, as to whether intelligent aliens have managed to visit our little corner of the universe and are choosing to keep themselves secret from humans and the U.S. government is holding one of their spaceships in a secret military facility... I'll choose to retain the right to ask to see some evidence.
I don't mind the notion that there's no sufficient proof to affirm an intelligent cause. But I do mind what I perceive to be a remarkably strong bias which prevents people, and even scientists, from even entertaining the possibility of an intelligent cause at all.
While some may want to believe, it stands to reason that many want to not believe.
So yeah, not talking about you specifically.
I promise that every scientist wants to be the one to discover extraterrestrial life. The Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, ETs, ghosts, etc - these would be discoveries of the millennium. It should raise huge, blaring alarm bells when these theories are universally dismissed by scientific communities as woo instead of invested in.
Personally I don't think the perceived bias matters much, really. NASA is still sending rovers to Mars searching high and low for life (albeit primitive life). We're broadening our understanding of what parameters allow for life by finding it in unexpected places here on earth. SETI has been doing its thing for decades now. We keep sending up increasingly powerful space telescopes to peer deeper into space to find exoplanets. The science is being done, regardless of the lack of current evidence of alien life. In my opinion, as far as science goes, the bias is non-existent.
Physicists are constantly bombarded by people with grandiose claims on free energy. That they had disproven general relativity with their own superior "theory", complete with pages of mathematics written by someone who clearly has never studied maths.
The bloody Electric Universe people will literally stalk physicists claiming that their ideas are being suppressed and the truth needs to be told.
Why would physicists entertain their far fetched unsubstantiated claims any more than the person who learns the number for their office phone and rings up wanting to talk about Quantum Mysticism.
It is a waste of their time and energy when they are trying to do real work. If later on they have actually substantiated their claims in some way, then sure they will have a look. But it isn't a strong bias, it is simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
This is probably because, statistically/physically speaking, the most unlikely and exotic answer you can think of for any of these situations, is aliens. Like if the alternative is thermodynamic miracle then we're in the same ballpark of absurd, but it's actually quite hard to come up with a wacky explanation as or more unlikely than aliens.
I don't mind the notion that intelligent causes are unlikely. I do mind the bias according to which that possibility must not even be seriously considered at all, ever.
I really like this paper, that basically says us evolving intelligence before the earth is destroyed by the sun was incredibly lucky.
Habitable planets are rare, but we can still assume some of them have a simple form of life, like algae.
And that's it.
Intelligent life is simply too rare for alien contact to be tangible at all, ever.
Of course you can be the optimist and say it's still possible, but that's like hoping you'll win the lottery 4 times in a row; technically possible yes, but negligibly so.
I haven’t read the paper you linked, but this conclusion pretty obviously depends on some important unverified assumptions, that I believe are probably wrong.
The most basic assumption likely to fail are that either life or intelligence must be similar to us. We are based on carbon, and carbon, as far as we know, is unique in its degree of chemical variability. But it seems unlikely that we have discovered all possible elements, or all the possible ways the elements we have can interact, or all the possible conditions that might cause surprising interactions sufficient to create “life.”
Similarly, intelligence can be indecipherable to us. See many star trek episodes and movies for dramatic explorations of this. Heck, see star trek iv for an example of life on earth with inscrutable intelligence.
It’s hubris to presume what we see and “understand” is anywhere close to sufficient to draw these kinds of conclusions.
I think you should probably skim the paper -- it's a bit more general than assuming that life must be carbon based (see section 2.1). Really, what they're estimating is the rate at which key evolutionary transitions occur ("abiogenesis, eukaryogenesis, sexual reproduction, evolution of intelligence"). Even if you don't believe that this particular path is unique, it's at least a representative path towards intelligent civilizations, and certainly we shouldn't expect unknown pathways to be more probable than the known one.
Actually, the paper makes the same point but draws the opposite conclusion -- people are too optimistic when they attempt to estimate key evolutionary transitions (or in the case of the paper I linked, parameters in the Drake equation). By widening the priors, you find that us being alone is not a preposterous result.
Both papers make the same kind of untestable (at least beyond our field of view) assumptions. For example, it assumes that intelligence must be an endpoint of a sequential evolutionary process that occurs in isolation, and that that process must take place at a similar rate as has occurred on earth. An even more fundamental, untestable assumption is that intelligent life must evolve on a planet of a star.
Just sitting here avoiding work I can imagine a number of scenarios that could lead all different kinds of scenarios. And honestly most of them already got discussed in star trek. First is an energy species that forms in a nebula. Or one that forms at a subatomic level. (Never mind the "quantum universe" of recent movies). Or a scenario where two forms of life from different parts of the universe meet. Less far fetched, a chemical soup that promotes evolution way faster than on Earth. What about dimmer, slower aging stars? What about life here on earth that seems it may have evolved completely isolated from the surface (and therefore completely independent of the sun?) What if our understanding of the Sun's life is way off (Arthur C. Clarke explored this I think).
Granted all my thoughts are science fiction level, but the uncertainties they rely so heavily upon in the paper make it really only more serious sounding fiction.
Again, I am not proposing ET life is evident here and now. But to suggest we might have any useful idea about its liklihood seems quite arrogant. This is, of course, not to suggest we should not think about and write "serious" papers like the ones linked. The study is important. We should just keep close in mind, and explicit in our writing, the highly speculative nature and practical uselessness of our conclusions.
These papers really don't make this sort of assumption, at least not to the sort of precision you're thinking of. The entire point of this paper ((physics.pop-ph/1806.02404)) is that if you take point estimates (or even order of magnitude estimates) for values in the Drake equation, you'll get a misleading result. And yes, that means if we were to know the rate of abiogenesis on Earth exactly, for example, it would be misleading to use that value in the Drake equation for exactly the same reason.
Instead, what they're trying to estimate is the average rate of abiogenesis in the universe on average, not the Earth in particular. To that end, they use logarithmic priors. For instance, in that paper the fraction of planets that contain life is priored according to a log-normal distribution, centered on 0.63 (i.e., centered such that life is likely to occur) but spanning 50 orders of magnitude (see section 3.1 for why they chose that prior; see Table 1 for all of the priors). Of course, they use the Earth as a reference to obtain these priors, but I don't think it likely that the situation on Earth is significantly disfavorable for life compared to the typical planet or inside nebulas or whatnot.
Of course, you're right that this paper doesn't directly address ideas like "what if intelligent life can evolve through a completely different route?" But unless those alternate routes are substantially more likely than the known one, it doesn't actually affect their final estimates. And again, we have no reason to think that unobserved pathways are more likely, and plenty of reason to think that they aren't by virtue of having never observed them.
That said, this particular paper is not saying with certainty that alien civilizations don't exist in our galaxy. They're saying it's more like a coin flip. On the other hand, they also estimate there's a few percent chance that there are millions of other detectable alien civilizations in the galaxy (see Fig 1). The posterior distribution they calculate for the number of alien civilizations is highly non-Gaussian!
Edit: my main takeaway of this paper is that, despite our gut instincts, there is a real possibility that we actually are alone. I also don't think you should put too much faith in the final probabilities they quote -- there's a great deal of uncertainty in their calculations, like you said -- but it's entirely because of those uncertainties that we should be willing to entertain the idea.
I'm pretty confident that we've discovered all of the elements or at least all of the elements that exist with beyond extraordinarily sparse traces in the cosmos.
An element is determined by the number of protons in the nucleus. If it's got 6 protons it's Carbon. There are a bunch of exciting isotopes of Carbon which are determined by the exact number of neutrons, but chemistry doesn't care about those because they all bond to other stuff exactly the same way. Carbon is carbon is carbon.
Add one proton and you've got Nitrogen. Take away one and you've got Boron. The number of protons is always an integer and we know about all of the elements from 1 through 118.
We also know where elements come from. They're created in stars through fusion. Mash lighter elements together and you get heavier ones. If the elements you're mashing together have fewer than 28 protons you get some free energy out of the deal. This goes a long way towards explaining the Iron Peak and the overall frequency with which we find elements in nature. Simply put, the heavier the element the more intense the gravity and pressure needed to produce it and the more energy it consumes being produced. If there are stable elements out there past 118 they're vanishingly, absurdly rare. So rare that no biological system could ever arise with them as its chemical backbone.
It would be like trying to construct a skyscraper exclusively out of metal that was verifiably touched by George Washington.
Now, could we imagine a life system based around silicon or arsenic or phosphorus? Sure. But as there is a short list of elements and chemicals which are both abundant in the Universe and can be combined into complex molecules, it is safe to assume that any chemically based life process will follow one of these paths.
We're not going to wake up one way and discover that there is an alien species from the vicinity of Betelgeuse with a biology based entirely upon Xenon though, if we do, they probably won't understand sarcasm
We have a theory of matter that has been fairly stable for a couple hundred years, but it wasn’t so long ago that seriois smart people believed they could transmut lead i to gold with some herbs and a mortar and pestle.
I hold it is safe to assume that science will continue to progress, and a fundamental discovery will cause future generation to review our theories with same quaint admiration with which we view the alchemists.
But there's a huge gap between what people believe and what they can prove. Our theory of matter and its formation via fusion isn't just a belief. It is born out by experimental evidence. Heck, it is born out by engineering application. Because we understand how heavier elements are created from lighter elements via the process of fusion we have been able to build hydrogen bombs and fusion reactors.
I don't doubt that our ability to manipulate our physical universe will continue to improve with time but there's no more reason to presume that our evidence-based model of how matter works at the atomic and molecular scale will be upended in the coming centuries than there is reason to assume that the heliocentric model of the solar system will be.
Which are talked about in the paper...
...probably should read the paper before commenting on it lol.
Similarly, there's also this paper (physics.pop-ph/1806.02404) by some of the same authors. It's been a while since I read it, but the main thrust was that our priors for some of the unknown parameters in the Drake equation are so uncertain (but biased towards small) that the tail of the distribution ("we are alone") contributes as much as the peak ("there are multiple intelligent civilizations in this galaxy").
Integrating the distribution, they find there's a 50% chance we're alone in the galaxy and a 40% chance we're alone in observable universe. If you incorporate into your prior the fact that we haven't yet detected intelligent life, the probability that we're alone becomes even greater.
I think it's even worse than that — this recent stuff alleges that lots of countries have been doing this same stuff for just as long. So not only does the US government have to be super leak-proof, everyone else does too!
Of course UFO guys would say that there HAVE been leaks, but those never seem to pass the sniff test for people who aren't already into this stuff...
I wasn't able to find anything anywhere online commenting on The Debrief's credibility, which I found very suspect
It was funny, yesterday /r/UFO swore up and down it was an little-known, but super credible source with high-quality journalists. And any suggestion that they wait for a more credible source to report it was met with "the government controls the mainstream media, why would they tell us?".
What a weird little subreddit. Super fun to follow when it makes its way to /r/popular every now and then though.
This stuff would have been on the War Thunder forums years ago.
War Thunder just needs to add some alien spacecraft to the game and somebody will post detailed schematics on what the alien craft are actually like.
Can you tell me how many successful large scale conspiracies there have been? By definition you can't! So how can we know it's impossible for one to remain secret? For all we know most haven't had any "leaks" at all!
That strikes me as some kind of logical fallacy.
I mean, for example, the nuclear bomb of WWII was a "conspiracy" that was kept quite secret until it wasn't.
Information on Osama bin Laden was kept quite secret for a long time. And there have been some large scale conspiracies that people just don't want to believe are true, and so get ignored. Many environmental catastrophes fall into this category, as well as things like the Tuckasegee experiments.
There really can be no doubt that well-placed groups within the US government have carried out some nasty stuff, and there is little doubt in my mind that there are at least as many (and as nasty) "conspiracies" that have occured that we don't know about as we do.
"ET's are here" is a problematic story for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is lack of useful evidence. But that there are verified unexplained phenomena (across many spheres) should be well acknowledged by every human, and we should study those phenomena, in whatever field, because at a minimum, the explanation will advance our understanding of ourselves and our universe.
For anyone who is interested, please fund my pamphlet, or, alternatively, explore the life and times of Charles Fort.
....
Sounds like he's a crank.
Apparently r/UFO reversed their decision to blackout because of situations around this.
In one of the articles it mentions that all of this will be in a book he wrote. 100% a con job. More distractions, is Trump going to get arrested again by the end of the week?
There it is. I've been following the discussion on /r/UFO and I was expecting a book, or a convention, or some other money-making scheme that this was all just marketing hype for. It's always either some dork trying to make a quick buck, someone misinterpreting natural phenomenon, or misconstruing "We don't know what that is yet" for "omg aliens confirmed".
I'd love to wake up and find out aliens were among us (Assuming they have good intentions), but there's just nothing tangible to prove it at all.
I would say the math even proves it to be intangible. Habitable planets are rare, those with life are rarer still, and those with intelligent life are even more rare.
Intelligence evolving on Earth before the sun swallows it is a bit like winning the lottery 4 times in a row. Insanely improbable.
"The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life Is Rare"
I agree with you completely, but because you said it, I had to look it up... ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_R._Ginther
:O cool af lol.
So Grusch is in cahoots with the reddit admins! 😑
I assume you’re being funny, but sadly, there is a very real chance this is actually true.
Damn. Because yeah, I was making a joke!
Would the Guardian, one of the top newspapers of all time, publish a crank? 🤔🤔🤔
This is a good opportunity to keep track of news outlets and journalists who reveal their stupidity or sloppiness over this.
A friend of mine who very much wants to believe that aliens are real sent me interviews by two supposedly renowned journalists who asked soft-ball questions and nothing incisive or skeptical, taking everything for face value.
So... like this Guardian article? :)
There are no alien spacecraft. Ask me how I know.
Because Donald Trump was President of the United States. I simply refuse to believe that Donald J Trump had unlimited access to the classified intelligence surrounding US national security, learned that aliens are real and that they represent a threat or asset to US national security as assessed by the Pentagon, and did not just immediately post that shit on Twitter.
Moreover, it has been some years since he left office. Dude is credibly accused of having, showing off, bragging about, and possibly selling access to classified materials since he left office. There is absolutely no way that, if there were documents detailing US assessments of the Iranian nuclear program and US assessments of the capabilities of an alien civilization, that Trump would have taken the Iranian documents. None whatsoever.
I dunno. Maybe they just didn't tell him? ;)
I feel immediately reminded of that scene in Independence Day where the heroes are sitting in Air Force One, and someone brings up Area 51. The president immediately and plausibly denies that there is such a base, only for the General-guy to go "Well, actually..."
Obviously neither of us really know how the national security complex would deal with alien technology. What Independence Day does is suggest that such information would be treated the same way that the DOE and the Pentagon treat nuclear weapons design.
So, for example, what is the specific metallurgy of the B61 Mod-12's fissile pit? The President doesn't know and can't even find out. US nuclear weapon design information is very-much on a need-to-know basis and there are very few plausible situations in which the President would need to know that. So he's just not told.
Independence Day riffs on that, suggesting that much of the technology the US military built and deployed is a result of experimentation on captured alien spacecraft and that the President wouldn't need to know that. But.... there's a pretty big difference.
The President does need to know about security threats, diplomatic contact, etc. Indeed, that's the President's most singular job. He's involved in other stuff, sure, but the Presidency stands almost entirely alone when it comes to diplomatic contact with other countries and the deployment of US armed forces. That is to say, when it comes to the issue of National Security.
And there could be no graver threat to US national security than a space-faring alien race. Why? Well because, having self-evidently solved the problem of interstellar travel, they would be capable of dropping a number of heavy rocks on us. Without any means of retaliation the United States (and the world, but that's less the President's problem) would be helpless to deter or resist such an attack.
So diplomacy is really the only choice we'd have and that is the sole responsibility of the President.
So, if there's an alien civilization out there and the President doesn't know about it, he is being kept from his constitutionally enumerated power by someone or something within his administration.
Also if govts knew aliens existed the world would be dumping all our money into establishing a defensive position and resource gathering in space. Like a lunar bases and factories, outposts/sensors further out, mining asteroids, etc. Rather we collectively have a we'll get to it when we get to it attitude right now.
I, too, urge the US to come clean about this stuff. At this point, I think we're beyond the mass panic everyone expects.
A colleague at work sent me this article earlier today and I felt like I was reading some kind of X-Files-esque pilot script. The head science writer for that site is apparently an SF/F author, which wasn’t really a surprise once I’d read through the article.
Oh of course it is David Grusch again. It is really shocking that the Guardian has jumped on his wild unsubstantiated claims. His story is wildly inconsistent, and the people he claims back him up have come out and said he is talking crap.
I know that people love the idea that "The Truth Is Out There". That doesn't mean we should should drop any pretence of critical thinking.
What do you mean again? AFAIK he only went public with these claims ~ 2 weeks ago?
Some very heavy doses of mainstream reductionist “humans so smart” koolaid chugged in this thread.
There is an incomprehensibly large universe out there and we humans are still just barely past the Stone Age. Our most advanced, powerful energy tech (nuclear) is still just a fancy fire to boil water and spin steam turbines. Trump was president, and we still care who total strangers get in bed with.
Doesn’t it seem rather self-centered to presume a single thing about the possibilities of nonhuman intelligences?
If you take a serious look at UFOs, you’ll find a very rich and compelling history, one that stretches back for thousands of years and has been purposefully muddled time and time again by various nation states.
But most people just claim to be open minded skeptics and don’t bother to explore what is probably the most fascinating topic ever. They grow up hearing pop culture memes and assume that memes are all the phenomenon is, then ridicule those who actually have something of worth on the topic. It’s incredibly frustrating.
I’m happy to make some suggestions for serious reading material if that’s of interest.
It's less about presuming anything about nonhuman intelligence (which certainly exists somewhere in the universe), and more about having experience with human intelligence, and its bad habits and blind spots.
People see things they can't explain. They automatically fill in the gaps. They instinctively gather together to invent answers. They build extensive narratives, and stubbornly cling to them once established.
Whether it's ghosts, aliens, flat earth, or bigfoot, the process of woo and the process of good science are very different. Woo tends to repel the scientific community, and attracts a certain kind of conspiracy minded individual.
And after this 80 year investigation into extraterrestrial life on Earth, it's easy to tell which of those is filling the ranks. Compared to other scientific developments during the same period, that should be an enormous red flag to anyone.
My skepticism is incredibly high that this has anything to do with aliens (although I admit it'd be great to have proof that there is other intelligent life out there).
My pet conspiracy theory about these UAPs (particularly the ones that seem to move absurdly quickly and without obeying known physical laws), is that they're proof we're in a simulation, and they're simply the camera being operated by whoever is running the sim.
Somehow this made me think of my favorite quote from Science of Discworld (RIP Terry Pratchett):
Does anyone think it might be a Rick-and-Morty (ie a hyper intelligent regular person/group of people) or Wakanda-esque situation? (Assuming these claims are credible)
Intelligent life evolving on earth is super incredibly lucky to begin with, so it's more likely a Rick and Morty sitch, if it's anything at all. imo this whole thing is just some guy suffering from schizophrenia and not getting the help he needs, or, at best, trying to build up hype to sell something.
Not at all, if we're being honest. I think it's far more likely to be aliens (and I'm fairly skeptical there's anything here, much less aliens).
The main source for this now is NewsNation.
We are not alone: The UFO whistleblower speaks, Andy Gipson, Miguel Sancho, Zoë Lake, Dana Leavitt, Ross Coulthart
Personally I don't buy it -- but then again, my hot take is that there are no aliens anywhere in outer space, that it's just us by some freak accident. I would love to be wrong!
I'm with you on not buying it. How is it that the aliens are only crashing in the USA? Are we to believe either that none of these "quite a number" of craft have ever crashed in North Korea? China? Russia? Or instead should be we believe that every country that has retrieved this technology has both the ambition and means to keep it completely secret? It's kind of absurd.
As to your hot take, I swing the other way. I think life is probably somewhat abundant out there but the physical laws and magnitude of the universe we live in are such that the vast majority of it probably goes about its entire existence from inception to extinction in complete isolation from the rest.