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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

#91

Post by krapp »

andrewflnr wrote: post #90
yk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are other techniques for anything that is not a crystal, and they are similarly developed as x-ray diffraction, if nothing else, take an atomic force microscope and identify each individual atom directly. > that doesn't necessarily tell you how it was made or how it works. Absolutely, there may be materials were we don't have the slightest idea how they are made or how some property arises. But my point i…

"Identify each atom individually" won't scale very far for complex materials. In short, I think it's unwarrantedly optimistic to assume that our current lab techniques, optimized for natural and human-fabricated materials, will immediately figure out (hypothetically) alien technology. No assumption is completely safe; even "made of atoms" is not guaranteed. Probable, but not guaranteed.

>even "made of atoms" is not guaranteed. Probable, but not guaranteed.

How is that not guaranteed?

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

#92

Post by comicjk »

krapp wrote: post #91
andrewflnr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Identify each atom individually" won't scale very far for complex materials. In short, I think it's unwarrantedly optimistic to assume that our current lab techniques, optimized for natural and human-fabricated materials, will immediately figure out (hypothetically) alien technology. No assumption is completely safe; even "made of atoms" is not guaranteed. Probable, but not guaranteed.

>even "made of atoms" is not guaranteed. Probable, but not guaranteed. How is that not guaranteed?

It is possible that there are other stable particles besides the ones we know now (like protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, neutrinos, etc). And maybe they can form stable arrangements which are not atoms, but which can still interact with ordinary matter. In that case you could have a material that was not made of atoms.

I don't think a lump of such material is in a warehouse in Nevada, but maybe it exists somewhere in the universe.

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

#93

Post by patmcc »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #73
yk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Assume for a second this is real alien tech. No atoms, programmable matter, literal magic, whatever.

Why would this be in a warehouse of a $22 million (i.e. super small potatoes) government project? It would be the biggest budget and highest secrecy project on the books.

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

#94

Post by sitkack »

greggarious wrote: post #89
DonHopkins wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but they do tend to win a lot of jackpots in the slot machines.

>>Are honorary board members paid? > No, but they do tend to win a lot of jackpots in the slot machines. Slot machines are highly regulated in Nevada, I seriously doubt that's a realistic scenario.

Please. Hand someone a bag of money and say, "this came from a slot machine". Done.

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

#95

Post by colanderman »

DonHopkins wrote: post #56
reaperducer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how A lot stranger things have been found hidden in Vegas buildings than alien artifacts. Just a few weeks ago it started raining cheerleader uniforms in downtown Las Vegas because a demolition crew pulling down a hotel hit a sealed-off room filled with thousands of them.

It sounds like you're joking, but you aren't! It'd kind of beautiful, actually. https://vitalvegas.com/excavators-hit-mother-lode-wtf-las-ve... It makes me wonder what it will look like when they tear down the building storing old Star Trek: The Experience junk. The UFO conspiracy theorists are going to have a great time with those photo.

You know, I saw something like this in Boston just yesterday. They are tearing down a condemned parking garage near my office; I saw a room they had started demolishing that was packed chock-full with what looks like winter clothes. Like, they had been stuffed in it as insulation or something. Some had fallen out onto the rubble below. Very strange.

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

#96

Post by sitkack »

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…

So many quotables in this thread. I thank experience and brown liquor.

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

#97

Post by joering2 »

coldtea wrote: post #88
joering2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

22M thats roughly 10% of 220M. So you telling me if your Net worth is $1MM, you wont bother with $100k deal? No wonder you are poor.

> So you telling me if your Net worth is $1MM, you wont bother with $100k deal? You seem to have a keen eye for missing the substance, since you've missed the gist of the argument twice. And, no, even with $1MM net worth, I wouldn't bother with a $100k deal if it was risky, illegal, and sure to get attention, including of the press. And the tendency to risk everything for such 0,1*X more falls as one's X net worth ri…

risky and illegal? I don't see them in jail.. or in any sort of legal trouble.

As of getting attention, I'm sure if they got all this attention and no legal recourse, I bet any businessman in town would love to do business with both of them!

You are poor.

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

#98

Post by blackflame7000 »

This biggest qualm I have about this article is that it attempts to disprove alien tech using human tech. Any sufficiently advanced beings would appear to us to be magical of sorts since they would have mastered elements of the universe we don't even know exists. You cant simply say well since we've seen these combinations of letters in the atomic alphabet we can therefore deduce the meaning of all combinations. What if they discovered a noble gas in the compound? (kryptonium perhaps) It would completely change the way we view chemistry.

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

#99

Post by joering2 »

QAPereo wrote: post #44
byebyetech wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s the issue, which really comes down to the word “Alloy” in this case. If you believe there’s a chance that the word alloy was used instead of a more accurate and technical term, then your points definitely stand. If they really meant alloy though? I’d tend to side it’s the article. I mean you can imagine some strange and exotic materials maintained by some kind of alien power source, but lose the power and the…

Thats a great story, thanks.

Edit: /s for clarity

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

#100

Post by ajross »

reaperducer wrote: post #24
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…

While I don't doubt that Harry Reid is as corrupt a politician and as expert at funneling money to his cronies as, say, the late Robert Byrd was; there are A LOT easier and quieter ways of making it happen. Especially for a sum as small as $22 million. Even county-level politicians can make that amount of money disappear without a trace and without leaving behind a warehouse and a paper trail. To play the other side:…

> I'd believe the skeptics more if they'd at least seen the objects.

So your standard for proof is that someone said A but provided no proof, yet those who are skeptical about A's truth aren't to be trusted because they... Weren't provided proof to refute?!

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