'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by krapp » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 3:41 PM UTC

comicjk wrote: post #92

krapp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>even "made of atoms" is not guaranteed. Probable, but not guaranteed. How is that not guaranteed?

It is possible that there are other stable particles besides the ones we know now (like protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, neutrinos, etc). And maybe they can form stable arrangements which are not atoms, but which can still interact with ordinary matter. In that case you could have a material that was not made of atoms. I don't think a lump of such material is in a warehouse in Nevada, but maybe it exists somewh…

I would think those would just be made of different kinds of atoms but OK.

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

#142

Post by beamatronic » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 3:43 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #134

xenophonf wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It did leak. Everybody "knows" the government has been experimenting on Aliens and alien technology since at least Roswell. There are even articles in the New York Times about warehouses storing alien artifacts!

That is a good point. If you were in possession of world-changing, society-breaking, panic-inducing information, how else would you prepare society for eventually hearing the full truth?

You would do it as a laughable joke over a long period of time.

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

#143

Post by QAPereo » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 3:44 PM UTC

joering2 wrote: post #99

QAPereo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the issue, which really comes down to the word “Alloy” in this case. If you believe there’s a chance that the word alloy was used instead of a more accurate and technical term, then your points definitely stand. If they really meant alloy though? I’d tend to side it’s the article. I mean you can imagine some strange and exotic materials maintained by some kind of alien power source, but lose the power and the…

Thats a great story, thanks. Edit: /s for clarity

Trolling on HN? Good luck with that.

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

#144

Post by geon » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 3:50 PM UTC

mncolinlee wrote: post #140

Given that we discover new elements[1] from time to time, it's not impossible that we'd discover a new alloy. However, something about this story is fishy and is likely being blown out of proportion. It's a common trope that there exists a "God of the gaps" where we fill in our lack of understanding with God, ghosts, or aliens. If a door slams in your house, it's seen as a ghost, rather than pressure equalizing betwe…

> Given that we discover new elements[1] from time to time, it's not impossible that we'd discover a new alloy.

It should still be relatively simple to identify each of the elements in it by it's atomic number. Our periodic table is complete to the 7:th row, and any unknown (un-named) element with a higher atomic number would be very likely to have a very short half life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table

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

#145

Post by syshum » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

xenophonf wrote: post #127

adrianN wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is why they stopped trying to outright hide projects like that, and instead mix the truth in tsunami of disinformation, sensationalize, crack pot theories, conspiracy, and the like so even if legitimate "Top Secret" info was leaked it could be safely dismissed as conspiracy, lies, or the newest term "fake news"

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

#146

Post by throwanem » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 4:02 PM UTC

totalZero wrote: post #119

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…

While I agree that journalists are often wrong (sometimes intentionally and sensationally so), it's 100% fair to say that the top metallurgists among us almost certainly cannot identify every extant pure metal and alloy in the entire universe. There are other thermal, gravitational, and energetic environments in the universe that we probably haven't even begun to understand. We are still learning how the universe app…

The nice thing about atomic theory is that it doesn't really have that kind of hole in it. If you find, say, a sample of an island-of-stability metal you've never seen before and didn't even think was all that likely to be able to exist, you can still study and characterize it in terms of those materials we are more familiar with. You're right that we don't understand everything about the universe. But what we do understand generalizes well enough to cover the "alien alloys" case.

The alternative possibility is that there are places in the universe where fundamental physics works totally differently from here, yet materials formed there can exist here in an apparently stable state - an entire second physical system, never so much as hinted at in any of our own investigations. That would be considerably more surprising than a reporter through ignorance and haste having mischaracterized the content of a story! Reporters do that all the time.

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

#147

Post by a3n » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 4:25 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #56

reaperducer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how A lot stranger things have been found hidden in Vegas buildings than alien artifacts. Just a few weeks ago it started raining cheerleader uniforms in downtown Las Vegas because a demolition crew pulling down a hotel hit a sealed-off room filled with thousands of them.

It sounds like you're joking, but you aren't! It'd kind of beautiful, actually. https://vitalvegas.com/excavators-hit-mother-lode-wtf-las-ve... It makes me wonder what it will look like when they tear down the building storing old Star Trek: The Experience junk. The UFO conspiracy theorists are going to have a great time with those photo.

If they survive any significant decline of civilization, then the next civilization's archaeologists may suspect "alien astronauts."

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

#148

Post by electrograv » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

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.

If alien visitation were real (a huge IF), this wouldn’t have been the first project started to investigate it. Most likely there would be deeply secret and entrenched organizations around this in the government, which would also explain why this program was shut down without explanation despite “much progress”.

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

#149

Post by electrograv » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 4:41 PM UTC

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.

I did not realize we fully understood the physics of the universe in a grand unified theory, and furthermore are capable of understanding ALL configuration of physical phenomena that are capable of interacting with solid natural matter.

That is awesome; I did not realize we were so perfect, so smart, to have it all figured out, and that science is done learning more.

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

#150

Post by GioM » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 4:49 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #129

legulere wrote: post #128

One such "alien alloy" we still haven't been fully able to analyze or even reproduce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel

Or for a more modern thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Hurtubise#Firepaste

There seems to be an easily-composable fire retardant substance that can be made from household materials and that's been discovered several times by tinkerers over the years.