241–250 of 289 posts
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…
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Can you time travel without being able to alter your location in space? I mean, the earth is moving pretty fast, if you popped back a few hours, wouldn’t you land in empty space?
that presumes something like 'time teleportation'. Time travel based on changing / reversing your 'speed of time' doesn't have that. Kind of like the difference between wormhole based FTL and warp drive based FTL. In one, you just teleport, in the other, you still travel in a continuous line.
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But wouldn't an intelligent species capable of inter-galactic travel have some of the Federation style rules to obey? Don't interfere with a less intelligent civilization for fear of disruption or whatever? I'm not sure they would consider "us" unimportant. There's clearly some sort of "intelligence" with all of the radio energy emanating from this rock. If they sat back and observed for quite a bit of time, they wou…
>But wouldn't an intelligent species capable of inter-galactic travel have some of the Federation style rules to obey? Don't interfere with a less intelligent civilization for fear of disruption or whatever? Even in the fictional universe of Star Trek, most intelligent civilizations couldn't care less about the prime directive, and even the Federation disregards it when it's convenient. There's no reason to assume th…
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Wouldn’t an FTL spacecraft appear to be traveling in reverse and exhibit extreme redshifting to an observer on Earth?
Probably not within the atmosphere.
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I like the Zoo hypothesis. We do that to North Sentinel Island[1]. It is populated by 50-400 stone age tribes people. India does not prosecute them for murdering anyone who happens to land on their island. Previous contacts with these people led to them rapidly dying of diseases they didn't have immunity to, so staying uncontacted is literally a life or death issue for them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Se…
Looking at the wiki page, it seems the population on the island is decreasing. Hopefully they will either all die, thus relieving us of the ethical dilemma, or India will come to its senses and stop the abuse of these poor people and actually help them. Its criminal that they are allowed to carry on without access to any of the modern world's technology or services. And of course the islanders that killed those fishe…
I completely disagree that it's wrong to not introduce them to modern technology. To do that it would require one of us to go visit them which would probably kill them because of our diseases. I would argue it's more wrong to kill them than to not give them access to modern technology.
Not to put a downer on speculation but probably military jets that lit the afterburners and zoomed away. My first thought was F-111s, but since it seems they were radar quiet, maybe stealth planes.
I think you mean F-117 nighthawk, which was decommissioned.
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Since we're all giving our UFO encounters I'll chip in with mine. About 25yrs ago as a teenager and utterly obsessed with the supernatural and the unexplained, my family were on a fly drive holiday on the west coast of the US. One night in a roadside motel in the Nevada desert, I was woken up by a strange, loud, rythmic, droning sound outside. Absolutely convinced that it was a UFO landing and terrified that if I mov…
Similar story here. As a kid I was laying in bed staring at a bright disk floating in the sky at night. Totally sure it was a UFO. Turned out to be a reflection of a street light in the window.
I was around 14 and also obsessed with aliens and the supernatural. I was living out in the boonies on a road that had just started to be developed (one long road with a smaller road splitting off down to a cul-de-sac with a few houses a mile or so off the main road).
I was walking the dog one evening, headed down the main road and turned off to walk down the side road to the cul-de-sac. It was dark and cold but as I turned down the side road, I could see a bright rectangular light floating above the ground down where the side road ended a mile away.
I was pretty freaked out and stood there squinting at it for a while, psyching myself up to go check it out. In the end, I decided that I would never forgive myself if I didn't go witness what was clearly an alien craft hovering over the road on my dark little street.
So, I walked down toward the end of the side road (with the dog to protect me of course) until about halfway down, I got one of those perspective shifts that made me laugh. In the dark (no street lights, only a few houses set a good way back from the road) I could only see the glowing light but as I got closer, I could clearly see that this was a small bus with the light from inside spilling out through the windshield.
It turns out, the local library had started a "Bookmobile" route out to our little country neighborhood so locals could check out books without driving into the city. The bus was so lit up inside and the surrounding area was so dark that from a mile away, all I could see was the bright glowing rectangle of the windshield.
Needless to say I stopped inside the bus and checked out a book or two. Probably some ridiculous fluff from Whitley Strieber or Stephen King ;)
Not to put a downer on speculation but probably military jets that lit the afterburners and zoomed away. My first thought was F-111s, but since it seems they were radar quiet, maybe stealth planes.
No more F-111s in service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-111_Aardvar...
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I remember in the 90s tuning into "space night" on a German satellite channel when I got home from the pub. Just continuous video feeds from low earth orbit with electronica/chillout playing over the top. Was really relaxing to have on in the background. I can imagine working from home with something like that on in the background and occasionally looking up to "see where we are now" - would give me some sense of tra…
that sounds awesome! I wonder if there's anything like that available now. Anybody have any links?
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> And in a universe where different systems could be billions of years different in age, the UFOs have always seemed closer to a few thousands of years off from current technology at best. I think this is something that doesn't get enough attention; in a universe like our's, almost all first contact events will consist of relativisticly expanding spheres of von Neumann machines impacting planets populated solely by n…
"in a universe like ours, almost all first contact events will consist of relativistically expanding spheres of von Neumann machines impacting planets populated solely by nonsapient life." You talk as if that's a certain fact. (Even estimating a probability) I'm no expert in the area, but why? Is that justified? What's that based on? (Not to mention the last sentence 'reminding me' of another odd 'fact'.)