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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

#121

Post by totalZero »

patmcc wrote: post #93
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you're saying that if the number were, say, $220 billion, you would believe that it's a real alien tech, but you don't believe it at $22 million? I don't understand.

If so, you're logically entangling an arbitrary funding number reported in the article, with the idea that perhaps some new material (or alternative particle physics) could exist.

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

#122

Post by totalZero »

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…

Damn, Shenzhen is getting good.

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

#123

Post by adrianN »

sgt101 wrote: post #114
marshray wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It really isn't. What the material scientists are saying is that there are techniques which would allow them to identify any physical material given that our understanding of the way that they universe works is approximately correct. If a material was discovered that was unidentifiable the government would not be putting it in a warehouse, anywhere, it would be in a massive secret lab. All the people who SA interview…

Or the government would keep it hidden somewhere where nobody believes it's the real thing to avoid trouble in the UN and threats of violence...

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

#124

Post by armitron »

sgt101 wrote: post #114
marshray wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It really isn't. What the material scientists are saying is that there are techniques which would allow them to identify any physical material given that our understanding of the way that they universe works is approximately correct. If a material was discovered that was unidentifiable the government would not be putting it in a warehouse, anywhere, it would be in a massive secret lab. All the people who SA interview…

Obviously the narrative you put down makes no sense whatsoever, game theoretic and otherwise. For a better, much more realistic understanding of how intelligence agencies may react to something like this, I suggest you read Richard Heuer's psychology of intelligence analysis [1].

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

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

#125

Post by fastball »

mindcrime wrote: post #115
fastball wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We already know for a fact that there are units of matter smaller than protons/neutrons/electrons. Yes, and everything we know about them suggests that they either: Decay almost immediately when encountered in the wild Immediately clump together with other particles to form larger units Do not interact with normal matter Etc. IOW, there's little or no reason to think that any kind of stable material, anything that yo…

Of course it's unlikely. Being visited by an alien race is, in fact, highly unlikely.

That's not the point, though, is it? This article said "experts say that creating materials we don't understand is impossible." Not unlikely - impossible.

An alien race with the capability to visit earth would have a grasp of physics that we obviously do not, otherwise we would be visiting habitable planets right now. That's the whole point. The argument this article puts forth is just as silly as the young-earth creationist argument that "abiogenesis is incredibly unlikely, so it must be God". Or in this case "we don't understand it, so it must be impossible".

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

#126

Post by mratzloff »

fastball wrote: post #109
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 mater…

> 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?

Quarks combine via the strong force into baryons, the most common of which are particles that form the nucleus of atoms and anti-atoms, and mesons, which are unstable and immediately decay into electrons, photons, neutrinos, etc.

Of the baryons, protons are stable, neutrons less-so, and the rest decay immediately. Perhaps there is a configuration of non-nucleon quarks that bond together into a kind of stable matter that we have yet to discover, but it seems more likely to me that if (and that's a big "if") there were exotic matter in a warehouse in Las Vegas, it would consist of novel alloys or other such materials.

Disclaimer: I'm not a nuclear physicist.

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

#127

Post by xenophonf »

adrianN wrote: post #123
sgt101 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. What the material scientists are saying is that there are techniques which would allow them to identify any physical material given that our understanding of the way that they universe works is approximately correct. If a material was discovered that was unidentifiable the government would not be putting it in a warehouse, anywhere, it would be in a massive secret lab. All the people who SA interview…

Or the government would keep it hidden somewhere where nobody believes it's the real thing to avoid trouble in the UN and threats of violence...

The Bomb was a game changer, everyone working on the Manhattan Project knew it, and they _still_ had spies successfully infiltrating the project and exfiltrating above-top-secret data. Some supposedly alien material wouldn't change human nature. Something that big would leak.

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

#130

Post by stordoff »

mindcrime wrote: post #113
fastball wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mater…

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? This sounds like pure sci-fi to me. AFAIK, everything we know about physics suggests that there are no stable substances made up of sub-atomic particles in a way that "skips the atom part". If that were possible, it would be in the realm of "entirely new physics". No…

Close to but definitely non-zero IMO. The quark model has been around for less than 100 years; push that out to, say, 1000 year time-scale, and I could certainly see it developing entirely new physics compared to what we now know. The Standard Model is well-founded, but explaining the things it currently doesn't (gravity/dark energy/neutrino masses etc.) could well require it.
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