Djornson wrote:So i got a question on the UFO thing. Let's say there are lots of UFOs, let's say they are piloted by aliens, let's say the government(s) know about them and hide the truth from the general public. Like.. so what? Why is that so upsetting? What benefit does the government(s) telling us about it bring? What am i missing?
Well I think if for example the US government knows about UFOs then it's only a handful of people that really know. The rest are probably in the dark. But I think a government would deny UFOs because that acknowledges there is something in the air that they can't control or defend against.Djornson wrote:So i got a question on the UFO thing. Let's say there are lots of UFOs, let's say they are piloted by aliens, let's say the government(s) know about them and hide the truth from the general public. Like.. so what? Why is that so upsetting? What benefit does the government(s) telling us about it bring? What am i missing?
(I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here. I'd like to know but i dont really know why. And for the record, i'm pretty on the fence about the whole thing, i don't think people are insane for believing that UFOs are piloted by aliens etc.)
bad_hair_day wrote:Djorn, as it’s a worldwide phenomenon the US wouldn’t (necessarily) be the only military to have first hand knowledge of what they are - as mentioned in the New Yorker article I linked a few posts ago.
There’s a ‘60 Minutes’ documentary airing tonight centring around pilot encounters. I’ll put it up in here if possible.
I get why people are mad. Whether advanced extraterrestrial life exists is one of the fundamental questions. To think that some government officials may know the answer and be actively covering it up is hugely frustrating.Djornson wrote:Maybe i'm making incorrect assumptions. Maybe you just find it interesting and want to know about it? That's cool. I got the impression from some youtube videos that people are really angry the cover up. I dont really get the anger about UFOs in particular. Lots of things are classified. As i wrote i just thought of something.. i guess aliens might be controversial for religious people? I'm not religious so it hadn't occurred to me before.
Djornson wrote:As i wrote i just thought of something.. i guess aliens might be controversial for religious people? I'm not religious so it hadn't occurred to me before.
superflyninja wrote:I get why people are mad. Whether advanced extraterrestrial life exists is one of the fundamental questions. To think that some government officials may know the answer and be actively covering it up is hugely frustrating.
Djornson wrote:superflyninja wrote:I get why people are mad. Whether advanced extraterrestrial life exists is one of the fundamental questions. To think that some government officials may know the answer and be actively covering it up is hugely frustrating.
I choose to believe that the answer to the question is self evident. If everything we know about the universe is correct, then there must be or least has been extraterrestrial life more advanced than us. The idea that we are the pinaccle of life is so terrifying i refuse to entertain it.
Yossarian wrote:There’s a theory that humans evolved incredibly early in the existence of the universe, the universe is about 13.8bn years old and is expected to last around 10 trillion years, so right now we aren’t even 0.14% into the lifetime of the universe. Could be that we’re early to the party.Djornson wrote:I choose to believe that the answer to the question is self evident. If everything we know about the universe is correct, then there must be or least has been extraterrestrial life more advanced than us. The idea that we are the pinaccle of life is so terrifying i refuse to entertain it.superflyninja wrote:I get why people are mad. Whether advanced extraterrestrial life exists is one of the fundamental questions. To think that some government officials may know the answer and be actively covering it up is hugely frustrating.
Sourcey paperHowever, perhaps more importantly for now, even order-of-magnitude estimates of the SETI space searched to date are valuable because they rebut the pervasive misconception that SETI work to date has significantly “sharpened” the Fermi Paradox or proven so dispositive that SETI can be said to have “failed” to find what it seeks.
We should be careful, however, not to let this result swing the pendulum of public perceptions of SETI too far or the other way by suggesting that the SETI haystack is so large that wecan never hope to find a needle. The whole haystack need only be searched if one needs to prove that there are zero needles—because technological life might spread through the Galaxy, and/or technological species might arise independently in many places, we might expect there to be agreat number of needles to be found. Also, our haystack definition included vast swaths of interstellar space where we have no particular reason to expect to find transmitters; humanity’s completeness to subsets of this haystack—for instance, for continuous, permanent transmissions from nearby stars—is many orders of magnitude higher.
Maybe, then, there is no such thing as an ‘eerie silence,’ or at least not one whose existence has been shown to be plausible. The matter seems theoretical until you realize it impacts practical concerns like SETI funding. If we assume that extraterrestrial civilizations do not exist because they have not visited us, then SETI is a wasteful exercise, its money better spent elsewhere.
By the same token, some argue that because we have not yet had a SETI detection of an alien culture, we can rule out their existence, at least anywhere near us in the galaxy. What Wright wants to do is show that the conclusion is false, because given the size of the search space, SETI has barely begun. We need, then, to examine just how much of a search we have actually been able to mount. What interstellar beacons, for example, might we have missed because we lacked the resources to keep a constant eye on the same patch of sky?
Yossarian wrote:Djornson wrote:superflyninja wrote:I get why people are mad. Whether advanced extraterrestrial life exists is one of the fundamental questions. To think that some government officials may know the answer and be actively covering it up is hugely frustrating.
I choose to believe that the answer to the question is self evident. If everything we know about the universe is correct, then there must be or least has been extraterrestrial life more advanced than us. The idea that we are the pinaccle of life is so terrifying i refuse to entertain it.
There’s a theory that humans evolved incredibly early in the existence of the universe, the universe is about 13.8bn years old and is expected to last around 10 trillion years, so right now we aren’t even 0.14% into the lifetime of the universe. Could be that we’re early to the party.
Elmlea wrote:Yossarian wrote:There’s a theory that humans evolved incredibly early in the existence of the universe, the universe is about 13.8bn years old and is expected to last around 10 trillion years, so right now we aren’t even 0.14% into the lifetime of the universe. Could be that we’re early to the party.Djornson wrote:I choose to believe that the answer to the question is self evident. If everything we know about the universe is correct, then there must be or least has been extraterrestrial life more advanced than us. The idea that we are the pinaccle of life is so terrifying i refuse to entertain it.superflyninja wrote:I get why people are mad. Whether advanced extraterrestrial life exists is one of the fundamental questions. To think that some government officials may know the answer and be actively covering it up is hugely frustrating.
This is a hugely interesting area of cosmology mixed with metaphysics, encapsulated in the Fermi Paradox. Empirically, there should be other races out there, so why don't we see them? The best response is the idea of the 'great filter,' which stops races evolving far enough to become truly interplanetary or intergalactic.
There's then a theory that we're either before that, or after it; and if we're after it, no-one else is yet like Yoss says. If we're before it, we'll kill ourselves off before we reach another galaxy.
Take the proficiency of fungi at problem-solving. Fungi are used to searching out food by exploring complex three-dimensional environments such as soil, so maybe it’s no surprise that fungal mycelium solves maze puzzles so accurately. It is also very good at finding the most economical route between points of interest. The mycologist Lynne Boddy once made a scale model of Britain out of soil, placing blocks of fungus-colonised wood at the points of the major cities; the blocks were sized proportionately to the places they represented. Mycelial networks quickly grew between the blocks: the web they created reproduced the pattern of the UK’s motorways (‘You could see the M5, M4, M1, M6’). Other researchers have set slime mould loose on tiny scale-models of Tokyo with food placed at the major hubs (in a single day they reproduced the form of the subway system) and on maps of Ikea (they found the exit, more efficiently than the scientists who set the task). Slime moulds are so good at this kind of puzzle that researchers are now using them to plan urban transport networks and fire-escape routes for large buildings.
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