How the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Are they doing either? They literally say they are investigating "unidentified" phenomena, as in ones they haven't identified yet. Everyone seems very careful to not involve alien life.
There is a question i would like to ask those from HN who think there is some kind of "alien" technology involved.
Let's, for the sake of the argument, just assume there is a more intelligent species present on earth (no matter if extraterrestrial or - dimensional). And let's assume "they" have been watching us for centuries (as suggested in some stories).
So, even if this were true (which i don't believe for a second), why should we (as in mere mortals and scientific community) care in the first place? Because, obviously, there seems to be no way we could understand the technology (it seems our physics fundamentally disagrees with the alleged observed properties of the objects. So if the smartest persons from the physics community say they have would have no clue as to how those could work on a theoretical level, then our brains our probably far too primitive).
Furthermore, this would mean there is a highly advanced species present on earth for ages, watching "monkeys" for centuries. Seems hard to make sense from.
I can definitively see why the government would/should care (i.e. avoid conflict or accidents), but mere mortals like myself?
Enlighten me :-).
"imposed by known physics"
Is that really true or just short sighted hubris? If we don't go extinct and keep progressing for 500,000 (or 50,000,000) more years, are we confident that we aren't going to get FTL travel?
The answer to this question seems to bear a lot on the probability of alien visitation.
If FTL is possible, it's possible in a universe that has all of the properties of one in which it is impossible, where the math which most accurately describes it says it's impossible, where all of our experiments validate it to be impossible, and all of our technology that depends on those models (such as GPS satellites, which have to take relativistic time dilation into account to remain synchronized) still works. That doesn't seem likely.
Also, there's the matter of the Fermi Paradox. The lack of any evidence of widespread interstellar colonization suggests that FTL isn't possible.
What about warp drive tech, are we reasonably confident that that won't be possible in 50 million years?
Also, what about travel through wormholes. If an advanced civilization sent probes out 2 billion years ago that travelled at 0.5*c and created wormholes, couldn't they feasibly now travel FTL in a 1 billion light year radius?
> Also, there's the matter of the Fermi Paradox.
Right, but we're talking about whether some UFOs are actually alien visitations. For the people that think that, they believe the Fermi Paradox isn't really a paradox because aliens are already here.
If you want to stick to we can actually prove, wormholes don't exist, and neither does negative mass or exotic matter, and we have absolutely no idea how to actually create a "warp bubble," like none. Otherwise you could just as well invoke divine intervention or simulation theory.
Although that would make for an interesting sci-fi story. It turns out the secret to FTL travel is discovering the universe is a simulation and hacking it, and the solution to the Fermi Paradox is being caught by the universe's AV software.
It isn't hubris to doubt when all of the available evidence points in that direction, it's hubris to dismiss all evidence to the contrary and assume that all scientists and skeptics are simply short-sighted when all you have to contradict them is a low-resolution, blurry photo or video of some dots in the sky.
It seems that you place the subjective probability of either the wormhole/warpdrive ideas working out, or some as-yet undiscovered alternative coming about in the distant future, at sub-1%. To me that seems quite low.
This seems distinct to me to saying that a specific math proof will be true eternally, since that's a deductive pursuit.
Also FTL doesn't seem to be necessary. An alien civilization could feasibly have sent out Von Neumann probes at sub-light speed and have populated an extremely large radius over the span of a few billion years.
> low-resolution, blurry photo
This is a common refrain, but there exists high quality UFO footage. It could all be CGI or ball lightning, and the burden of proof is higher than mere video, but not all footage is low-quality.
Actually, no. That's a common misconception, but what tends to happen is that we observe that the models we use to describe the universe almost but don't quite work, as we advance enough to make more and more accurate observations, so we create updated models based on observation and experimentation.
What doesn't usually happen is that we discover that everything we knew was entirely wrong and we need to scrap it all and start over. Rather, we refine an understanding of the universe that builds upon what was already known.
Einstein didn't render Newton obsolete, we still use Newtonian physics, but now we understand that Newton isn't always accurate. Whatever we discover after Einstein isn't going to render him obsolete - that model has been tested so thoroughly that it obviously describes something very accurately. Whatever comes after relativity and QM still has to correlate with their observations.
We can fly a helicopter on Mars and stream it over the web. We can genetically engineer organisms. We can build pyramids out of atoms and photograph black holes. We detected the background radiation of the Big Bang a hundred years ago, and then made a heatmap of the entire visible universe. We've detected gravitational waves and the Higgs boson. We're really not that stupid.
>Also FTL doesn't seem to be necessary. An alien civilization could feasibly have sent out Von Neumann probes at sub-light speed and have populated an extremely large radius over the span of a few billion years.
Except what people claim to observe are craft that appear to violate the laws of physics, which doesn't seem like something a probe designed to drift aimlessly in space until it hits matter, consumes and replicates would do.
Also, the Fermi Paradox suggests that if a significant amount of our local space was colonized by Von Neumann machines, we'd know it. So either it isn't feasible, or it hasn't happened anywhere near us. If it hasn't happened anywhere near us, how did they even get here? Von Neumann machines replicate and launch from star to star. Why did they apparently bypass so many stars between whatever their last spawn point was, and us? And if they're here, why aren't they colonizing our planet or sun?
>It could all be CGI or ball lightning, and the burden of proof is higher than mere video, but not all footage is low-quality.
Fair enough, but most of it is.
What I'm trying to say is that whatever the next paradigm is, e.g QM/Einstein to Newton, is going to be beyond our capability to even imagine, and it'll unlock rather incredible possibilities that will seem magical by today's standards, all the while subsuming our current theories.
We haven't been doing physics that long, and you're right that we're not stupid but we evolved under pretty significant calorie constraints so we have no reason to think we're at the upper bound of intelligence in terms of potential. It would surprise me if there isn't much more to discover in this domain by beings much smarter than us with a million years of research time.
Our theories say that FTL travel is impossible by travelling through space, but why is it unlikely that the next physics paradigm will be able to figure out a way to manipulate space to achieve de facto FTL travel, for example? Is there something in our current theories that tells us this is unlikely to happen (not merely that it's currently unknown and theoretical, which is a statement that I agree with)?
"we'd know it"
"Why should we care?"
"Seems hard to make sense from."
And do you really think, that we wouldn't put a LOT of effort into researching another inhabited planet if we had the opportunity to do so completely undetected?
I used to work as a developer in the point of sale industry. We needed to print small 1/2 inch labels from an Epson impact printer. At first I didn't think it was possible but then saw one of our competitors were already printing them. Seeing it happen not only told me it was possible but gave me clues how to do it.
Even the knowledge that any other life exists in the universe would be worth very deeply caring about. And then orders of magnitude more for intelligent life. Intelligent life that visited us??? It'd be all I'd think about every hour of every day for the next few decades.
I'd go so far as to say there may be nothing worth caring about more than this. I don't know how someone couldn't care about it. That's why there's been so much interest and discussion around it since the 40s.
Probably for at least a century. (If I lived that long.) I imagine when, for example, people living on small islands or other isolated places first encountered people from other places, they remained excited (and/or anxious) about that fact for the rest of their lives. And this would be greatly multiplied because the differences and advances would be much more stark.
>But how would it change your life?
Depends. Do they leave us any of their technology? Then probably all of our lives would drastically change forever. Do they consider us a threat and imprison us or blow up the planet? That'd probably also be a bit of a shake-up.
Otherwise, I'd probably consider switching careers to "non-human intelligent life communication studies" or other ET research or something like that. And I'd probably spend all day every day talking about it with friends and strangers, and maybe some of the ETs as well if they want to and can talk to people like me. I'd probably also start thinking about programming projects, or anything else I could offer, that could somehow help bridge the gap between our civilizations and increase the chance of a mutually beneficial and peaceful relationship.
I mean, I could ramble on about this for hours. But it's basically like asking me "why would you care if you found out some omnipotent deity exists? how would your life change? how long would you be excited for?" Same for "why would you care if you found out you live in a simulation?"
For one, there are way too many unknown unknowns there, so it's hard to imagine exactly how I might react. There are a lot of different ways those scenarios could play out.
Secondly, it's likely impossible or nearly impossible to ever know the truth about any of these things. And thirdly, it's just such a crazy hypothetical because I personally think the odds are extremely low that there are deities or that we live in a simulation or that ETs have visited or will ever visit us. So it's a bit moot to think too much about.
I think a better question to ask of the UFO researchers/ET visitation believers is why they seem to care so much when it seems very likely it's all so futile and just simply a big nothingburger. (I suppose most of them would just respond by saying they don't think it's futile or even that they're completely certain it's real.)
I get not caring given the status quo. But not caring if you and every other human on Earth hypothetically is shown undeniable proof and now knows with 100% confidence that there are ETs/deities/a simulation? That sounds pretty crazy to me. How could you not care? It'd be by far the most important and interesting thing in all of human history. And then if you consider what new things might be enabled for us with that contact or knowledge, it'd quite possibly be the most important thing to ever happen for all of future human history; even millions of years into the future.
If they're very similar to us (probably not, but let's just assume they have the same vocal and auditory capabilities) then everyone would want to learn their language. We'd want to know EVERYTHING about their history and that of any species they'd visited. Not to mention the technology, philosophy, literature, art, science, math, music (maybe)...etc.
A dozen new academic fields in the blink of an eye. Possibly interstellar commerce. More international co-operation than ever before (hopefully). What if they're religious and have similar or contradictory religions to us, or what if they're not. How do earth folk react?
It's one thing if in a million years we manage to discover some non-intelligent or intelligent life somewhere.
If they come to us out of the blue in the next few years, that's a very different thing, since it implies not just intelligence but an intelligence far, far beyond our own.
It would likely imply they found a way to relatively cheaply attain faster-than-light travel, for example, perhaps by some kind of spacetime-manipulating mechanism like wormholes or Alcubierre/warp drives. (Which some scientists believe could maybe be theoretically plausible one day, given enough scarce resources.) And if they can do that, then they could probably teach and give us more than we could ever dream of, if they wanted to.
Not necessarily though. It could be a generational ship with mundane propulsion technology.
And it'd also probably have to be immortal autonomous machines rather than anything biological, which wouldn't necessarily be as useful, unless they fully merged with them or created ones that were much smarter than they are. (Which I suppose is pretty possible, given we might do the same within a century or two.)
My guess is we may unfortunately possibly be the only intelligent life throughout all of reality up until now (extremely speculative, I know), or that the few civilizations that do exist or have existed are so spaced apart from each other that it's very unlikely any will ever run into or observe any of the others without some kind of major FTL breakthrough.
We already rightfully put research money into all kinds of interesting areas simply because they are interesting. You can thank exactly this kind of work for making development of the covid vaccine possible. In fact i would assert that essentially all major tech developments in the last century benefeitted from or required input from basic research.
It's worth investigating these things because we don't understand them, full stop.
Being able to observe and study phenomenon that defies known physics would completely energize the field of physics.
I didn't talk about things we don't understand at first, but about never ever. Simply because we might not be capable of that. You seem to think we humans are so smart, that we can understand everything given enough time. I think we maybe aren't THAT smart.
Furthermore, I think the thought that new technology makes the life of mere mortals better, is just that. A thought. We have so much technology today, yet most people on earth are poor, sick and just miserable. Without any hope for the better. I think your viewpoint is from a privileged point. The life of mere mortals (see my initial post) might not change at all. So why bother?
Deriving the proof of that impossibility (1) would be a very worthwhile pursuit in and of itself. Even if found, we can always adapt ourselves to exceed the observed bounds of pur intellectual capacity. Computers are one good example of how we've already started to adapt.
Technology has undoubtably made the world a much better place, your statement does not reflect reality. Rates of extreme poverty are at the lowest ever and dropping, hunger is decreasing across most of the world, life expectancy is rising, child mortality is dropping, homicide rates are massively down, education time is increasing and literacy rates are quickly approaching 100%. I know it's really popular to fetishize every little thing that is bad about the world, but to say technology increasing the quality of life is anything other than fact is ridiculous. Go tell all the scientists who predicted massive starvation due to food shortages that the Haber Method doesn't make peoples lives better.