211–220 of 289 posts
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Technically every hypothesis that fits our data should get a little weight, plus our best available models of the universe show there should be billions of planets as habitable as ours. That is evidence in the abstract sense and we currently lack the technology to observe these candidate planets in enough detail to test the models further. We're like a person sitting in the desert at night with nothing but a candle c…
I don't think I've ever been in a desert where just by waiting a short time, visual evidence of an advanced civilization wasn't available (or in most cases, immediately). If there's type II civilizations in our galaxy, we don't need to observe things in any more detail than we are now. If type III civilizations exist in other galaxies, we should be able to detect them as well.
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I know meteors seems to be a common theory, but do they normally travel that fast?
They enter at orbital velocity or higher, so yes. Mach 20 or 30 would be on the low end. Of course depending on their shape and mass they lose a lot of it on the way down...
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The transcript above refers to the object banking and climbing. That sounds a lot more like a secret military vehicle than falling space debris.
Could be outgassing.
Since we don't usually get UFO threads on Hacker News, I may as well brush the dust off my tinfoil hat... What's always puzzled me about UFO sightings is the preponderance of "bright lights" being what people report seeing. If some extraterrestrial being came to visit, why make itself known? And in such an obviously unnatural way, too? One immediate counterargument I can think of is that it's good camouflage. Who nee…
Do you try to hide your existence from ants? Or flowers?
A lot of people typically have a "Where's the proof?" wrt UFOs. However, there is Dr Steven Greer who in 2001 fronted a 'Disclosure Project' in which many people from positions of authority (eg FAA chiefs, Tower operators, Military pilots, etc) stated quite clearly on National Press Club in Washington their testimony on UFO's. [0] Since then, he's been often quoted as saying that there's such an abundance of proof th…
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What I want to know is, do they tend to "bank and climb away"
Do meteors ever dip into the atmosphere, light up, and skip away? Like a skipping stone?
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> one would assume some species capable of this technology would also have cultural norms about not interfering with less developed groups I would assume nothing of the sort. It's not as if humans even really conform to that norm. It's a pretty recent trend, at best. With aliens of unknown evolution/history, all bets are off.
Very faint point which I predicted the keen HN audience would be quick to contend. My reasoning to assume so is a wholly intuitive instinct that all ultra-high technology societies converge in their moral and ethical norms to a common limit. That to have survived the gamble of existence long enough to reach such a point, this civilization almost certainly needed to adopt a set of values wherein the "Prime Directive"…
We don't know that. We also don't know if the prime directive of aliens is the same as ours. By that I mean that whatever aliens may be visiting us may not be competitive whatsoever. Maybe their planet didn't have the same explosion with life that ours did so it's relatively empty of competition. In this case cooperating with others to expand as an instinct would be much more beneficial than competing. There is also no tangible evidence of the cosmos swarming with life, on planets or traveling so it might also be that -given how long it takes for planets to form stable orbits and how long it took on Earth for humans to appear and develop instruments to observe the universe- the universe is for the time being relatively empty of life. Some people revisited the drake equation and approached it as a coin flip: Sure there is a 50/50 chance but it's either/or, so based on their calculations the most likely scenario is for 0-2 times life forming on our galaxy. And FTL is still science fiction so it might be that the only species that can visit us are coming from other galaxies and have evolved to survive for billions of years. At the same time thanks to kepler we now know that planets with the characterists of earth are rather rare as are solar systems like ours. But there are a myriad of other planets with conditions too hard for humans but good enough for life found on Earth. In this case it might have been that some sort of life exists in the cosmos but it evolves much more slowly compared to us and thus needs a few extra billion years to reach space travel. So maybe the universe is experiencing it's first explosion of life and we are one of the first multi-cell organisms or step out of the water. Who knows.
Also we don't know how technology would have evolved should it be that Earth had a different composition. Like for example metals are fairly rare on the crust but yet they are fundamental to our function. Maybe a planet that has a 10% metal crust would have evolved towards electricity much faster than us. Or a planet with lower gravity and lower or no magnetosphere could mean that whatever species developed there could have achieved space travel much faster and easier thus increasing the incentive( in human terms) of developing ftl. Right now ftl is sci-fi for us but remember that yes, it was the military who developed the internet but all the applications and the development of the science behind it came once more people could toy with it.
Transcribing the interesting bits from 18:15 Man A (ATC?): There's nothing showing on either primary or secondary Woman A: Ok, it was moving so fast. [Inaudible] Man A: Alongside you? Woman A: Yes, it was rapidly [inaudible] bright light and then it just disappeared at a very high speed. I am still wondering. Didn't think it was likely collision course. Wondering what sort it could be. Man B: Meteor or another object…
I know meteors seems to be a common theory, but do they normally travel that fast?
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Even if we assume that "UFO" means "space alien", it doesn't seem puzzling to me. Answer 1: selection bias. Obviously the only ones that people see at night are those which have lights. We aren't going to hear about the ones that people don't see because they're dark. Answer 2: alien apathy. You've flown a million light years to spy on some great apes who aren't even sure you exist. Who cares if a few of them get fla…
And 3: the light is a unavoidable side effect of their propulsion system.
Sorry. Couldn't resist adding one more speculative cherry to the top of this very tall tale.