The article turns rather farcical towards the end... Erich Von Daeniken...
Have we already been visited by aliens?
261–270 of 366 posts
Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?
#262So what are the odds of us being able to fire something off to catch up with this thing? I feel like I haven't seen this discussed, but presumably if it's no longer accelerating, it should be relatively easy to locate right? We should at the very least start building out the capability to fire off something at the next mystery rock that floats by.
The odds are zero. It is moving far too fast at 5.5 au/year. Voyager 2 has a speed of 3 au/year and the object will have a 15-20 yr head start before we launch a new probe
Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most recent event that comes to my mind is the lead up to the discovery of H. pylori causing gastric ulcers.
Yeah that's a good one. Another is recommending trans-fat based margarine over butter. That was counter-productive health advice that took decades to reverse - even although the evidence it was based on was extremely flimsy. Once the group-think machine gets going in a direction, it has a tremendous amount of inertia.
>That was counter-productive health advice that took decades to reverse - even although the evidence it was based on was extremely flimsy.
I think this was more a case of lobbying by certain agricultural producers than ignorance. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14823257_Food_Lobbi...
Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be. Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career. As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect o…
Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.
Happens all the time. People's ideas get ignored even when they have evidence backing them up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
> Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community.
> He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it.
Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this is that mechanics is not scale invariant. This puts bounds on creatures. Unless there's some crazy different way to compute I wouldn't expect a being to be able to have strong cognitive functions and be the size of a fly. They would also have a difficult time building advanced machinery to get to galactic travel scales. Similarly I wouldn't expect a creature the size of a Brontosaurus to become…
I think this is a mistaken way of thinking in general, because you're omitting time. Your assuming that intelligent/thinking/conscious creatures would necessarily function on timelines that make sense to us. If that were true, then what you're saying makes sense - there are real bounds on how fast you can move chemical energy from A to B, for example. But I see nothing preventing intelligent life from operating on ma…
I think this is strange thinking because it breaks our laws of physics. The clock ticks at the same rate in internal reference frames, it is only different when looking at two different frames. But if you're talking about them acting at slower speeds or faster, then that brings along other problems similar to the mechanics ones we discussed (assuming we're not counting that they are in a slower reference frame). It really shifts the probabilities around. Even trees act relatively quickly because forces act fast. You'd have to be in a pretty extreme environment for other things to happen.
As to chemistry, if they are moving faster then that means that they have more thermal energy. That comes with radiative problems (why humans stand) and this is much more difficult the smaller you are because you have less surface area. Which then puts large energy requirements on intake. And then the inverse is true.
The thing is that aliens would still have to follow the laws of physics. There is no reason to expect that wouldn't be true and reasoning otherwise would take some pretty extraordinary evidence and probably win you several Nobel prizes.
Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?
#266I just started to watch the 1993 series Star Trek new generation. The show has some interesting ideas regarding advanced civilizations vs the primitive ones. One of which is called the prime directive prohibiting any star fleet from intervening with the evolution of primitive people. In one of the episodes “who watches the watcher” the USS enterprise travels to planet Minkita 2 for a rescue mission and encounters a p…
The most haunting for me was when Picard was stunned and spent 40 years in a few real minutes in a different culture. It's s5e25.
Don't read this wiki page if you don't want spoilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_Th...
Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out Iain M. Banks's "Culture" novels for a sci fi society that takes that approach to other civilizations. The Culture tries to raise up every lesser species of aliens to their own level of hedonist, post-scarcity wealth and technology. "The Player of Games" is both a good introduction to the series and an example of their cultural outreach at work.
>The Culture tries to raise up every lesser species of aliens to their own level of hedonist, post-scarcity wealth and technology. That's not strictly true throughout the series (I'll avoid any spoilers here), in many situations, civilizations are denied certain technologies by the Culture in the novels. I just finished reading the entire series and there's always quite a bit of skepticism from both members of the "C…
If I recall correctly, even the posthumans in the culture were gatekept by their servant/master AI.
Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every advancing civilization will eventually create an internet. Once they do that, interstellar travel is off the table. Advanced civilizations stay closely packed because they cannot tolerate latency once they get a taste for near instant communication.
Given that serious interstellar travel really requires FTL transport, I suspect that the two are rather closely connected.
I disagree, I think it probably would for humans.. but what about other advanced organisms? Maybe they have very long lives. Maybe their biology is more conducive to 'suspended animation' or some other form of hibernation. Maybe they've digitized their minds and can suspend execution of their thought processes for tens of thousands of years. Maybe their social traits (ant like hives perhaps?) make generation ships feasible while they would collapse into strive for humans.
Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?
#269If we have, it was unremarkable.
Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be. Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career. As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect o…
I thought the idea of searching for industrial pollution was actually a pretty bad one. We've been polluting at detectable levels for just ~100 years. And if we keep doing it we'll likely wipe us out in a few hundred more. Overall it seems very likely industrial pollution is a very short-lived phase of any civilizations, so chances of detecting this signature are tiny.
Pollution capable of completely killing the dominant species of a planet would last a long time after the creation of that pollution ended.
The pollution would vastly outlive the polluters, so it would be detectable for some time after their demise, especially if anything they automated also polluted. That stuff would continue to pollute after its creators all died, at least a bit.
Also, it seems that the chance of detecting pollution would increase linearly as we continue to discover more planets.