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'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

scientificamerican.com

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Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#71

Post by krapp »

DonHopkins wrote: post #51
sushisource wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if you are willing to buy that they have something stored they can't identify, this is the most logical explanation. That said, I would still buy that there are probably almost no materials that we couldn't at least get a handle on. If they were truly incomprehensible it would likely be because they were the result of manipulating properties that we don't even know exist yet (higher dimensionality, etc, whateve…

A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet. I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better…

>I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better understanding of science or a better term to describe it.

There's no mention of what properties these materials are supposed to have, much less that the materials seem so exotic as to be beyond comprehension or a more accurate description. The original New York Times article merely mentions the "storage of metal alloys and other materials..."

"Alloys" may literally just mean "alloys."

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#72

Post by godelski »

jonstokes wrote: post #15

I totally buy it that there is no such thing as an "unidentifiable alloy." I also buy it that journalists, not being materials scientists or indeed scientists of any sort, do not know the difference between an "alloy" and "a hunk of some hard material," so at some point they wrote down "alloy" because the word sounds exotic, like something you'd find at Area 51. This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get s…

Alloys, composites, raw materials, you can identify them. If they have atoms you can identify what is in them. Now there could be weird materials that are hard to more difficult to identify. But you need a more compelling argument.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#73

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

yk wrote: post #36
bugs_bunny wrote: post #23

This idea that we have a database that covers all possibilities for anything that would qualify as alien is delusional. It's like Neatherandals claiming that they have a complete database for hard things, and it contains exactly two entries: rock and stick. If they somehow stumbled across an iPhone, and ran a few tests, they would decide it is a rock (since it can skip across water - just like other flat rocks). In t…

Quite simply, x-ray diffraction tells you the distribution of electrons in the unit cell of the alloy. So you just put an sample into your spectrometer and it will print out the chemical elements and how they are assembled. And even if there is another island of stability of super heavy elements or something like that, it will still just tell you the charge of the nucleus. So this side of quite literally magic, as in…

What if there are no electrons, because there are no atoms?

The suggestion that all these alleged weird alien materials are “alloys” is just a placeholder for “looks and acts metallic, therefore made of metals.”

But if we happened to be dealing with real alien tech, that’s a naive and unscientific assumption. We already have people thinking about how to build programmable matter with variable properties, and it’s a fair bet we’ll have working examples within 50-100 years.

And there is no possibility that conventional x-ray diffraction will reveal how that kind of matter works.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#74

Post by jccooper »

valuearb wrote: post #19

There is a very simple explanation for why the alloys are so mysterious. Harry Reid was able to get the program funded, and directed most of the $22M in spending to one of his closest backers, Robert Bigelow so he could build a fancy warehouse. If that fancy warehouse wasn't storing super valuable alien artifacts it just looks like Reid filling the pockets of a close friend with government monies, and people might th…

Except Bigelow is a well known alien crank. Occam's Razor suggests that it's a politician throwing a rich guy a bone for his pet fantasy (with taxpayer money, of course, though it's really the recognition rather than the money that matters here), expecting more personal support later.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#75

Post by ridgeguy »

byebyetech wrote: post #41
titzer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I read the article and the "guy a thousand miles away" gave pretty damn good reasoning why it'd be short work to identify and categorize "alien alloys". Or do you have an actual argument as to why these materials couldn't be readily identified and studied by competent physicists using well known technology?

Would a material composed using highly advanced nanotechnology have strange properties purely due to its structure? Does it have to be an alloy?

Yes, and it doesn't have to be an alloy.

Structure is the basis for 'invisibility cloaks', materials with small-scale structures which confer optical properties not found in the same unstructured bulk materials. [1]

Another example of where structure confers strange properties on elements (not alloys) is light emission from indirect-gap materials like silicon. Make silicon particles small enough and you can get light emission that you can't from bulk silicon. See quantum dots [2] and other similar structures.

Structure can really change things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial_cloaking [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#76

Post by goombastic »

It's not an unknown alloy.

I dug around a bit and it's a 3d layer printed nano-composite of very high purity bismuth and magnesium doped with some other trace elements and a crystal structure that they think indicates it was grown in a zero-G environment. Apparently even the wiring is baked in. I mean if we didn't know how processors were made, they would look like magic under the microscope as well. But I guess they genuinely don't understand how the layering was achieved.

What they say they don't know is how to manufacture it.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#77

Post by ryanwaggoner »

goombastic wrote: post #76

It's not an unknown alloy. I dug around a bit and it's a 3d layer printed nano-composite of very high purity bismuth and magnesium doped with some other trace elements and a crystal structure that they think indicates it was grown in a zero-G environment. Apparently even the wiring is baked in. I mean if we didn't know how processors were made, they would look like magic under the microscope as well. But I guess they…

Umm, care to provide a link or source?

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#78

Post by chiefalchemist »

Could it be we're confusing what an alloy (or some composite) is made of vs _how_ it's made?

For example (and it's just an example for the sake of discussion), many here couple probably analyze the skin of a stealth bomber and identify what it's made of. But that still leaves how it was made.

It seems reasonable to think we have things - which could be non ET - that we can't quite figure out and don't want anyone else to know either.

Obviously not a popular idea for HN but certainly not impossible.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#79

Post by goombastic »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #77
goombastic wrote: post #76

It's not an unknown alloy. I dug around a bit and it's a 3d layer printed nano-composite of very high purity bismuth and magnesium doped with some other trace elements and a crystal structure that they think indicates it was grown in a zero-G environment. Apparently even the wiring is baked in. I mean if we didn't know how processors were made, they would look like magic under the microscope as well. But I guess they…

Umm, care to provide a link or source?

Problem is I didn't find anything reputable. Most of the sources I got was tinged with "woo woo" UFO lore. But a googling will show you. Also found a Joe Rogan video with the Delonge guy.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#80

Post by SimbaOnSteroids »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #77
goombastic wrote: post #76

It's not an unknown alloy. I dug around a bit and it's a 3d layer printed nano-composite of very high purity bismuth and magnesium doped with some other trace elements and a crystal structure that they think indicates it was grown in a zero-G environment. Apparently even the wiring is baked in. I mean if we didn't know how processors were made, they would look like magic under the microscope as well. But I guess they…

Umm, care to provide a link or source?

I would hazard a guess that someone with access to that info wouldn't provide a source were they to leak it, also that someone with access to a source wouldn't leak it in such a public way or on HN.

Regardless, this explanation is now head-canon, regardless of whatever facts or otherwise may present themselves.

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