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NSA UFO Documents Index

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Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#111

Post by motohagiography »

deeeeplearning wrote: post #95
motohagiography wrote: post #35

Went through the CIA one as well, and it's almost designed to be opaque and vague. UFO's create interesting ethical questions and can be useful thought experiments for contemporary issues. A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arr…

>A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arrivers might find. The question is whether they're going to pose a threat to the regional galactic order, and if they haven't got their cultural act together, do you let them? Seems a stran…

You'd think, but we subvert and bomb Iran every time they get close to enriching uranium, so there are precedents, if perhaps not on the same relative scale.

The other question is why not just domesticate us and what kind of evolutionary impact does domestication have on a species? As someone who "educates," horses and dogs to live in an inescapable human dominion, in doing so, I shape them into something other than what they are. They have good lives and find joy, but there is a responsibility I have they will almost never see. The best I can personally do is evolve my own understanding and various virtues and to relieve their suffering where I comprehend it. I would hope an alien species would be a little further along than most of us on that front, but I'd say the analogies are useful.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#112

Post by ikrenji »

at_a_remove wrote: post #106
ikrenji wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1, without having a mechanism for FTL how can we say for certain that it implies CTCs? maybe relativity is an approximation of a more complete theory which allows FTLs without CTCs... 2, didn't the universe itself expand faster than light during inflation? what does relativity have to say about that? if we can't use relativity to explain inflation, why do we so comfortably use it to forbid FTL?

1) Oh, it turns out that the mechanism for getting CTCs out of FTL is completely irrelevant. Construct your light cones, see the results. Warp drive, wormholes, whatever, they all produce CTCs. You can look into it if you don't believe me. 2) None of the matter in the universe was expanding, the spacetime was. You're not the first person to think of this. Probably the first question that popped into anyone's mind whe…

sure for the mechanisms we have come up with so far. doesn't say anything about things we come up in the future. we don't know what we don't know.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#113

Post by at_a_remove »

ikrenji wrote: post #112
at_a_remove wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Oh, it turns out that the mechanism for getting CTCs out of FTL is completely irrelevant. Construct your light cones, see the results. Warp drive, wormholes, whatever, they all produce CTCs. You can look into it if you don't believe me. 2) None of the matter in the universe was expanding, the spacetime was. You're not the first person to think of this. Probably the first question that popped into anyone's mind whe…

sure for the mechanisms we have come up with so far. doesn't say anything about things we come up in the future. we don't know what we don't know.

My stock response to that is that we don't know that I can't make a time machine out of some chewing gum wrappers, a rubber band, three transistors, six pipe cleaners, a AAA battery, and it only works while I wear a red hat.

We also don't know that I can't use that device to go back in time to the start of the universe and change all of the physical laws so that the previous contraption cannot work.

But what are the odds? What would you bet on?

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#114

Post by infradig »

mr-wendel wrote: post #102
remir wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs them nothing to wipe us out and spare the universe the trouble, so what must they believe about life, the universe, and everything to not do so. Economics may be universal, etc. Perhaps the world is highly valued in terms of its bio-diversity and life-supporting resources. There's a possibility that native civilization like us are being monitored and on some level "protected" from conquests if they show they…

My pet theory is they're already here and don't care at all about environmental issues. Planets like this are a dime-a-dozen to them. However, nowhere else in the universe have they come across music like ours. They are madly obsessed with it and dare not intervene in our affairs, lest they taint the source. I have absolutely no evidence for this. I just like the idea that Freddie Mercury just might have been an inte…

Then Narabedla Ltd is the book for you then.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#115

Post by infradig »

jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote: post #98
cookiengineer wrote: post #8

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this [1] and this [2] and especially this [3]. Area 51 was a radar testing site due to the unique properties of the salt on the ground. And they just tested a "silver shiny UFO" which was the prototype for the SR-71. And yes, this was exactly the same date when people first called radio stations and the police for UFO sightings. The Skunkworks A-12 OXCART research project led to the f…

> Area 51 was a radar testing site due to the unique properties of the salt on the ground. And they just tested a "silver shiny UFO" which was the prototype for the SR-71. And yes, this was exactly the same date when people first called radio stations and the police for UFO sightings. Assuming Area 51 was just that, you can't disregard the whole UFO phenomenon (which has been taken place all over the globe for decade…

Hope you're not talking about gimbal/gofast etc, as they are poor examples... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#116

Post by scj »

fpgaminer wrote: post #108
joombaga wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors". What's feeding your intuition here? I wouldnt have thought they'd likely be _that_ advanced. But I'm not sure where tens of thousands of orders of magnitude puts them on e.g. the Kardashev scale, and I'm sure being a huge Star Trek fan has affected my own intuitions :)

I love Star Trek, and that being a possible future is nice to entertain, but doesn't take into account an AI singularity. The latter, to some approximation, seems more likely to me. And that puts a Moore's law on intelligence. Not just for us, but for any potential space faring race. And it doesn't have to be just "AI"; as soon as a race has the capability to recursively improve their own intelligence they'll hit tha…

A species on a planet with low gravity or the ability to hibernate might have a different tech tree than humanity.

That being said, my bet is on the side that most species send AI to different solar systems before biological ones arrive.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#117

Post by lolsal »

jerf wrote: post #78
stretchcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "and that's it" would be the weird part. Maybe it's just because I watched Contact, but I would expect the basic demonstration of intelligence/etc to precede a more interesting message. The basic math and science transmission could be used as a Rosetta stone of sorts, to bootstrap that more interesting message. Otherwise what's the point? Maybe the aliens just want somebody else to know they existed I suppose…

"I think "and that's it" would be the weird part." Yes, that's my point. You make the presumably-strenuous effort to broadcast to the stars, sacrificing any number of other priorities in the process, and you basically transmit the scientific equivalent of a throat clearing, and then stop? Silence is understandable, and a message like in the movie Contact is understandable, and a lot of other things are understandable…

Thank you - I totally missed your point.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#118

Post by cookiengineer »

stretchcat wrote: post #28
uhtred wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those planes look like UFOs and they wouldn't move in the same reported ways, either. I don't agree that it makes someone stupid to be open minded.

Those planes have very unusual forms by the standards the public was accustomed to decades ago. In the time since, those planes and ones even more exotic have appeared countless times in popular media, changing the public's perception of what airplanes might look like.

I linked the picture of the radar test especially because of its absurd dimensions. In the bottom left corner you can see a full size military jeep standing next to it.

This thing is _huge_ and honestly, it's very reasonable people thought it was an alien spaceship.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#119

Post by specialist »

INTPenis wrote: post #6
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #3

The redactions on some of these documents are absolutely ridiculous. What is the point for releasing documents in a state that leaves them completely useless.

Just a wild stab in the dark here but those redactions might have to do with SIGINT. Or in other words, how the UFO report came to be. Because when I saw this headline "NSA UFO Documents Index" hosted on nsa.gov, I realized why I don't care about UFO theories. Because even the NSA has given up. No sane person cares about this stuff. They will readily index it on their website to shut those lunatics up.

> ...to shut those lunatics up.

Does that work?

One of my brothers thinks the world is 6,000 years old and intelligent design and so forth. I still have no idea how to respond, because he feels I have to learn this truth too, if at all.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#120

Post by asdff »

motohagiography wrote: post #35

Went through the CIA one as well, and it's almost designed to be opaque and vague. UFO's create interesting ethical questions and can be useful thought experiments for contemporary issues. A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arr…

We don't stop the lion from eating the gazelle. Maybe exploiting our planet to the point of our extinction is the natural order of things. We could pollute all we want and while life as we know it will change, life on earth will continue as it has all these billions of years. This is a planet that gets shaken by asteroids and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions that make the entire industrial revolution look like a cigarette idling in an ash tray in comparison.

If anything, we live in a galactic nature preserve.

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