Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 158 posts

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

#101

Post by sho »

coldtea wrote: post #60
hyperbovine wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the difference between billionaires and you and me: the billionaire thinks $22m is a lot of money.

Considering billionaires who pay such money just for a year's worth of transportation or a single party or wedding reception, you'd be surprised... Or you're probably thinking of Scrooge McDuck

I can't speak for everyone, of course, but I know a few self-made HNWI's and you might be surprised just how stingy they can be. I've seen one of the richest guys I know send a bill back in a restaurant because using a different rewards card they could get 15% instead of 10% off their meal. And we're not talking a huge bill either, maybe $60.

Most of the guys I know could take first class everywhere and not even notice but nope - economy all the way, and UberX to the airport. Not all rich guys blow hundreds of thousands on private jets. I get the feeling that the more you struggled to earn it, the more you watch every penny.

And the richest guy I know (capital-B) is far more concerned with upholding and preserving his family legacy than with ostentatious displays of wealth. It really weighs on him. Sure, he's not hurting, and life is pretty good, but a baller he ain't. Shows up at the office at 9am just like all us other schmucks. Hell, he shares an office!

Those guys you see living large on instagram and what not aren't universal or, as far as I know, even typical.

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

#102

Post by marshray »

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…

It's as if somebody had been quoted saying "The UFO appeared to be surrounded by some type of brightly glowing plasma" and Scientific American were to go get the opinions of plasma physicists about whether or not this was possible with plasma.

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

#103

Post by marshray »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #54
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…

Just think about what you are saying. Even if you don't like Reid, you should know he didn't get to where he is by being an idiot. Does it make sense to make your most SHADY kickback deal based on Aliens??? Something that will get TONS of press coverage even with nothing fraudulent going on. If Reid was looking for a quid-pro-quo, he would be working with the Mega Resorts on the strip (MGM, Caesars, and even Republic…

> Does it make sense to make your most SHADY kickback deal based on Aliens?

Oh I can just see it now.

"Don't tell a soul, it's off the books. This is..." The Senator looked around nervously and began to whisper, "top secret alien technology we're dealing with here."

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

#104

Post by LoSboccacc »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #98

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…

> it attempts to disprove alien tech using human tech

Not even that, it just goes babbling “impossible! Impossible!” - no trch nor science involved, they basically asked two random scientists if they believed in aliens, the answer was as predictable as pointless

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

#105

Post by InclinedPlane »

andrewflnr wrote: post #50

For heaven's sake, we're not completely sure how Damascus steel was made, and that was done by humans hundreds of years ago, with thousands of samples lying around the world. And we're just supposed to assume that because we've tried all the combinations of alloys we can think of, there are no other possibilities? Have some imagination. Think about nano-layering and quasicrystals, to say nothing of stable-island heav…

This is different. Any example of "Damascus steel" that you can point to you can use an XRF device on to figure out the actual alloy composition. That doesn't tell you exactly how to make it, it just tells you what elements it's made out of.

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

#106

Post by InclinedPlane »

Let me break this down into a much simpler and more direct argument.

We have ways to very reliably identify the elemental composition of any material you can imagine. That doesn't tell us how to manufacture that material, but it does tell us what it's made out of. These are extremely robust techniques (x-ray diffraction and x-ray fluorescence) that work on anything made out of atoms.

The claim, any claim, of an "unidentifiable alloy" is simply not credible without presenting x-ray fluorescence and x-ray diffraction data to back that up.

It is infinitely more likely that no one examining these materials had such instruments available to them, so they just sort of shrugged and said "I dunno what it is" which then got telephone-gamed into "unidentifiable alloys!" along the way. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is an extraordinary claim with no evidence. So it is not a credible claim.

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

#107

Post by DanielBMarkham »

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…

Yes, agreed. I hate to say it, but this is a crap article. The point of the original NYT article was that they had something they could not identify, not that there was some new form of matter. All this consists of is a journalist (and hopefully editor) using the wrong phraseology and SA jumping on it like an eager five-year-old on the mechnical fire engine at WalMart.

SA used to have a series, I think it was called something like the "Citizen Scientist" or maybe the "Amateur Scientist". This article is a new type of journalism I've noticed taking off in the last decade or two that I'll call the "Asshole Scientist". It consists of self-righteous and assine authors taking pot-shots (some warranted, some not) at whatever cultural item is in the current zeitgeist.

It's great for gathering clicks. Nothing like a bunch of folks sitting in their living room with a smug smile on their face, scrolling through a short journalistic snack-food, feeling like they're in with the cool kids. But it doesn't do much in the way of showing people how to have reasonable public conversations. Or even how to read charitably.

Note that I'm not upset with the content of the article, just the tone. A bit of tweaking and it'd be fine. But that would defeat the purpose. This kind of article is all about tone.

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

#108

Post by nabla9 »

gfodor wrote: post #9

As usual, the claim that #2 could possibly be due to pilots misinterpreting visual evidence is tossed out as a hand wavy excuse despite the fact that the cases investigated by the Pentagon are (allegedly) corroborated by targeting systems, radar and satellite images, and possibly more evidence not disclosed. The entire point of the revelations was that after bringing to bear the entire analytical arsenal of the Penta…

Don't mix narrative provided with evidence provided.

Not pilots, a pilot. All that project came up with was one pilot (Fravor) describing unusual event and none of the other three pilots involved or ship crewmen backing his story up.

Single person can see almost anything even if the observer is trained and trustworthy. As long as no other pilots collaborate the same event, there is little credibility.

Three senators earmarked millions into UFO research. Pentagon had to spend that money but they never took it seriously. Person running the project for pentagon seems untrustworthy. Now the process continues with organization whose mission includes inspirational storytelling, telepathy and electrogravitic propulsion.

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

#109

Post by fastball »

donald_knuth wrote: post #59

As a former scientist well practiced in x-ray diffraction it has been really fun watching these blatant flasehoods spread. We have mastered identifying the atomic structure of materials. Sadly spreading these claims is how these programs self propegate. Luckily they don't do much real damage other than misleading the public and wasting government funding.

You don't think a civilization with sufficiently advanced nanotech could fabricate a material that would flummox x-ray diffraction? That seems a bit short-sighted to me. Our imaging and composition technologies are not sufficiently advanced to determine exact structures of anything - we still have to include many assumptions in order for the data to make sense.

For x-ray diffraction in particular, we assume all materials are made from atoms. However, we all know that quarks and more exist, so you don't think it's possible that an advanced race could make a material that skips that atom part?

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

#110

Post by fastball »

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…

We already know for a fact that there are units of matter smaller than protons/neutrons/electrons. As such, x-ray diffraction is obviously not sufficient to analyze all matter.
Post reply on HN