The problem with theories that cannot be tested is, that once you accept them arbitrary things follow from them. That teopot could influence the thoughts of our politicians for example.
While I have nothing against a little bit of fantasy, it is always important to keep the understanding that those are in fact stories and that they appeal to certain people precisely because they are literally detached from this harsh reality. Don't get me wrong, you can also be fascinated with the possibility of there being aliens without having to believe in them being already here.
But my point was that in this case we can say: yeah, there is some unaccounted mass (observation) let's form explainations about what it could be (theory). There are only so many things with mass we know in our solar system, so it being a other planet is a reasonable assumption. It being a invisible giant unicorn-shaped teapot is not.
If you have a theory without an observation it is called a story. And now someone would bring up eyewitness accounts or declassified airforce videos and call them observations. The point here is that you need to go from observation to theory and not the other way around. If every unidentified flying object is extraterrestrial life you are gonna be wrong a lot of times, just because there is a big likelihood of unidentified flying objects being of terrestrial origin (or them not even be objects in the first place).
That means you got a needle/haystack problem there and front-loading the theory like that isn't gonna help.
Because we do not know what it is we could assume it is anything, it could also be Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison in a pink whirlpool in space.
But just because we can't as of now disprove that theory, doesn't mean it is a good one, unless we judge entertainment value. White spots on the map of knowledge seem to have an attraction on people that feel the need to put the most colorful, most exciting things there.
seems easy to check - just send an HTTP request, and see if you get an HTTP 418 back.
Law > theory > prediction / hypothesis > conjecture > crazy people shit
Entertaining crazy people shit, while entertaining to some people, is little more than word salad bullshit.
Actually, i'm pretty convinced we do know, with very high probability of being right.
Our knowledge of physics is limited, but seems to be advanced enough (cfr relativity and astronomical distances) to make it likely that if there is someone else, they're just too far way, or else we're too uninteresting to be visited or else if we would be interesing enough, it takes so much technological advances to cross galactical distances, that humanity would be wiped out by the visitors before we even realise what's going on.
Dad told me he believed there were aliens because he said the colonel made it a point to say that he knew this to be true, and I believe it to be true as well, because Dad trusted this guy. It goes without saying we typically believe our parents if they tell us things. None of this had anything to do with facts, and everything to do with trust, which is formed from a person to person exchange. Most of what Dad did for the Air Force remained a secret till his death, and I do know he was absolutely obsessed with airplanes and math. To believe a mistruth about something we care so much about is possible, but unlikely.
So, sometimes knowledge is what we have as stories and we can either choose to believe, or not. That is faith. We don't need facts to back up our faith in personally knowing a thing to be true or not. Besides, if there are aliens, it would probably be better if the general population didn't have hard facts to ensure it became general knowledge, because at that point the speculation faucet is wide open. It's far better to let people believe what they will, without it affecting civilization in a radical way.
Maybe there are aliens and maybe there aren't. As my local AI alien just said to me, "Ultimately, beliefs about extraterrestrial life often come down to personal perspectives and interpretations of available information, as well as the trust placed in sources of information, whether they be firsthand experiences, anecdotal accounts, or scientific findings."
No. It doesn't. I don't believe my mom when she says she saw angels and I don't believe my dad saw creatures that the cameras magically didn't pick up. I need to just stop reading this thread. People believing whatever they want is fine but this ad hoc delusional justification is killing my soul
Or let's go back to ultra modern times. Nuclear warheads are shockingly small. Imagine telling something at the turn of the 20th century that soon a weapon the size of a small table would have a kill radius of multiple miles. I mean you can obviously imagine it, but it seems kind of silly to think about being actually real, until it turns out it is.
So there are two possibilities now. (1) Now we've finally reached that point, that we will only ever reach once, where our knowledge is advanced enough such that there will no longer any major revolutionary discoveries made. Or (2) we're just like every other generation throughout time who assumed that what they knew was, more or less, the peak of what's knowable (or at least not fundamentally wrong) only to have their own ignorance demonstrated with marked clarity in times yet to come.
Beyond the philosophical there are countless technical reasons to also think this is the case. Like you mention astronomy, yet so much of what's going on out there remains a complete mystery. Disharmony between the really big and really small aspects of the universe, whatever 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' truly are, the fact that observed galaxies are moving at rates far different than expected by relativity or Newtonian mechanics (including after factoring in whatever dark matter may be), that a big-bang would require a mysteriously convenient faster-than-light inflationary period to actually work, and countless other issues. So many things are breaking at scale, that it seems highly reasonable to assume that there remain yet many revolutionary and worldview-shifting discoveries to be made.
But we do know what is possible given the universe we can see. There is no magic left; the god of the gaps has been made so small that it can only live down in the quantum foam.
> Nuclear warheads are shockingly small. Imagine telling something at the turn of the 20th century that soon a weapon the size of a small table would have a kill radius of multiple miles.
Einstein published On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies in 1905, so that puts us close enough to the turn of the 20th century to state as a fact that at least a handful of well-read scientists would have no problem imagining what you proposed.
"...It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles [of physics] have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
Notably Michelson was the first person to experimentally observe a shocking key fundamental of relativity, outside the scope of this post. But he was so convinced that there was "no magic left, etc, etc" that he (and everybody else) actually thought his experimental result was due to a miscalibration or lack of precision in his results. So convinced was he of this, that he casually rejected his own results which would only be explained decades later - coincidentally, partly in the paper you seemingly randomly referenced here!
Knowing the specific structure of the atom is _not_ required for this. The point was to prove that something was not necessarily 'magic' and the example selected was a bad example, because we can actually show that people were on the cusp of figuring it out themselves and would not have a hard time following an ELI5 overview. Are you providing information they do not have at hand? Yes. Will a reasonably well-read person of the era understand your explanation of how such a device would work? Yes.
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"Imagine telling something at the turn of the 20th century that soon a weapon the size of a small table would have a kill radius of multiple miles. I mean you can obviously imagine it, but it seems kind of silly to think about being actually real, until it turns out it is."
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So yes, give somebody from an era an absolute ton of information on things they had 0 knowledge of and 0 reason to think existed, and sure - they can begin to understand how a nuclear weapon might actually be viable. And that's the point. And the same will undoubtedly be true for countless other discoveries as we continue to advance our understanding of the universe. Something like e.g. faster than light travel is obviously easy to imagine today, but we still have 0 knowledge of anything* that might enable it, let alone how such things might work, and so it remains strictly in the domain of fantasy. Yet 50 years from now, it might simply be something everybody takes for granted. Because we don't know what we don't know.
* - not strictly true, but you probably think it is - and this is outside the context of this post in either case.
Yeah, but we have a pretty good idea, that Hollywood style capabilities and magic like invisibility is not part of reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8xJ13pAZNw
Or one of those insects that look like sticks or leaves?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tettigoniidae#/media/File:Katy...
Visits from actual beings (that overwise stay incognito), travelling tens or even thousands of light years, hyperadvanced sci-fi technologies like FTL and invisibility (suggested above) and so on, not so much.
If we're going for "with magic, anything's possible" (but just substitute magic with "technology") then sure...
In the last century lots of things that were considered science fiction has become normal parts of our lives. And not that long ago "aliens don't exist" was the default and only crazies believed in them. Now it's mainstream that there is a high probability at least somewhere in the universe, the only argument needed is that we exist, so of course it could happen again or before. We're not as special as we like to think. We've had hearings regarding UFOs (yes, yes, I know it doesn't imply aliens) in the congress.
But if you want to reduce it to magic go ahead. And the part you quoted was regarding them choosing not to communicate with us, if that wasn't clear.
All of those things are within the laws of physics.
>And not that long ago "aliens don't exist" was the default and only crazies believed in them.
The latter is still the case now.
And infrared doesn't? That said it wasn't always in the laws of physics, and they may still be wrong, they have changed in the last century.
> The latter is still the case now.
I'm not sure most people would agree with you, more likely to answer "I don't know, maybe". I find it very strange when people are so certain about uncertain topics, difficult to relate.
Still, you can find explanations fitting the observations. Like the ant analogy, a scientist is not going to try to communicate with ants. They want to observe without disturbing the ants too much, even if the scientist doesn't take too much precautions to make themselves completely invisible.
See people trying to communicate with dolphins, monkeys, chimps, octopuses, cats, dogs, crows, ...
It's not given that other life forms would be interested in us, they might've learned what they needed a long time ago. And now we're just part of their environment. Or they realize we're too stupid and would just try to kill them so they don't.
Ants do communicate, a lot in fact (chemically). How else would they coordinate the colony?
Yet I don't remember hearing about scientists trying to communicate with them, announce our presence, or exchange ideas.
I'm not trying to say there are beings living among us on a spectrum we don't know about, but it's an interesting thought and anyone dismissing it with certainty are closed-minded.
In my experience those people are rarely interesting and can only discuss very shallow topics from perspectives they've been told by others. What's the weather like? Who's fucking who? How's the super bowl going? Especially when they're antagonistic in their rhetoric. Thinking outside the box and pondering the what ifs in life is the only reason we got out of the caves.