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US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

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Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#491

Post by alephnerd »

vel0city wrote: post #483
kube-system wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spaceflight has an inherently different set of requirements from the types of applications people on here mostly build. NASA doesn't need to run 2GB of javascript dependencies on their rover. They have people who can write lean real-time code in a low level language. They need to be sure a bit flip doesn't turn a 3 billion dollar project into rubble. There is no 'fix it in the next sprint' in spaceflight; after you h…

I used to know a number of NASA programmers out of Houston. They did a lot of Java programming on some pretty hyper-optimized and specified JVMs. They liked it because it would be easier for them to run simulations on and could achieve good portability on higher level things. That was like 20 years ago though. Things could easily be different now.

I think Akuna Capital (or one of the other Chicago HFTs) is using a JVM based stack as well.

High Performance Java is definetly a thing - it just takes a lot of tuning.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#492

Post by throwaway743 »

tiahura wrote: post #417
kvetching wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it." He's got access to a lot more than us. This isn't just some congressman indulging it for the lulz. It's so funny to see the mental gymnastics people here make to discredit some of our most elite intelligence officials. Even Rubio is having trouble believing it but he's now admitting to have talked to people with direct access to the program. Grusch is as credible as it get…

The mental gymnastics is believing little green men, capable of sidesteping special relativity, travel X lightyears just to fly around San Diego and occasionally crash somewhere in the desert.

This is a very narrow perspective. We've only been around for ~200,000 years, only began to take flight 120 years ago, and flew to the moon around 60 years ago.

There are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone, a good percentage likely harbor intelligent life, and that life could have easily established civilizations that go back millions of years. Should they have developed tech, even at our pace, they are cycles and cycles ahead of us.

What would stop them from throwing "shit at the wall to see what sticks" to survey surrounding systems, given that their costs of and ability to mass manufacture cheap space traveling drones would take little resources? Would they even care that much if what they built wasnt to perfection, as long as it got the job done? What if there are still anomalies that they just put up with and could careless about accounting for because the losses are so minimal? What if the ones piloting are throwaway biological drones that they can just rebuild or grow? What if their ethics forbid them from interacting or interfering with developing civilizations? What if there's are agreements/laws among a collection of civilizations?

Additionally, there have been attempts by people to get this info out for decades, and what's being brought to congress' attention is that people have been murdered by governments and private organizations to keep this under wraps and to continue public disinfo to keep the ridicule going.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#493

Post by throwaway743 »

tptacek wrote: post #292

Ezra Klein just did a long interview with Leslie Kean (a popular author and Coast to Coast AM guest) about her article in "The Debrief" --- where it went, after the Washington Post wouldn't run it on her time schedule --- about David Grusch: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... It does not make Kean and Grusch's claims sound a lot more credible. Some of Kean's sources are proponents of thin…

Pretty sure she has mentioned that she's in touch with those with firsthand knowledge. For sure Ross Coulthart is.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#494

Post by throwaway743 »

dekhn wrote: post #395
RetpolineDrama wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine parts). Source? >At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". "Gimball" is not credibly discredited, calling it such highlights your bias and calls your other points into question. EDIT: HN is a terrible website for having actual di…

The stanford biologist- Garry Nolan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Nolan

Haven't some of the materials been found to be manufactured in a way that's not possible with our tech?

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#495

Post by NickC25 »

hindsightbias wrote: post #248
NickC25 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. Oftentimes, though, it's not the government who is ahead in tech, it's the quasi-private sector that is decades ahead but due to secrecy laws cannot come forward and talk about it under any and every circumstance. I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a similar questio…

In most classified arenas, there is no private sector competition. No one in SV is building subs, SOSUS arrays or stealth a/c. So it's completely reasonable they're way ahead of some niche innovator building a sub out of carbon fiber. But it's not sci-fi tech. People talk about the SR-71 as an example, but the A-12 predecessor was only a secret for about 18 months. The P&W jewels were out by ~1978 or so. LM, afaik, d…

>so there's no place to hide an anti-grav unit

Lockheed doesn't do materials research?

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#496

Post by revscat »

fsn4dN69ey wrote: post #179

Let's look at this as rationally as possible: People have been claiming to see UFOs for years, ever since the popularization in mass media with the start of "the war of the worlds". In nearly all cases, even (at the time) credible sightings were advanced weapons programs. Additionally, with the proliferation of everyone having access to relatively high quality cameras, the amount of "legitimate" sightings has dropped…

> Ok, maybe it's a secret weapons program we don't know about.

The problem with this is that there is no evidence to support it. No one has ever leaked anything about a secret propulsion mechanism that can do 1000+ Gs. On the other hand, there have been those who have leaked information about secret UAP programs. Congress seems to be if the opinion that the latter is the more likely of the two, which makes sense when you think about it.

Congress has been briefed about secret weapons programs before. There are procedures in place to protect national secrets when they need to be discussed by the Legislative branch. If it were a secret propulsion mechanism then Congress would already know about it, and all this energy would not be being spent on holding hearings re: AARO, whistleblowers, etc.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#497

Post by wizofaus »

throwaway743 wrote: post #494
dekhn wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stanford biologist- Garry Nolan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Nolan

Haven't some of the materials been found to be manufactured in a way that's not possible with our tech?

As opposed to somehow traveled here via a mechanism that's not possible by our current understanding of the laws of physics?

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#499

Post by TechBro8615 »

zeitgeistcowboy wrote: post #485
CommieBobDole wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible as well that the technology used in such a device would be entirely indecipherable to us due to not just being more advanced, but due to being on the other side of a technological 'leap' that we're nowhere near making ourselves. If you gave a broken iPad to the greatest minds of the mid-19th century and they expended all the resources at the world's disposal to study it, it's likely that they wouldn't l…

While people in the 1850s probably would not have been able to fix or turn the iPad on they would have been able to examine it. They could have taken it apart and looked at the various materials and perform physical and chemical tests on them. They could open up some of the electronics and look at them with a microscope. The understanding of electricity, circuits, and electrical devices in the 1850s was developed eno…

Quite generous of you to assume the aliens are only (the equivalent of) ~150 years ahead of us. Would the ancient Egyptians have had as much success reverse engineering an iPad as some Victorian-era scientists?

It seems the crucial element (pardon the pun) is that they wouldn't know what to look for. The Victorians knew enough about chemistry that they could figure out the material composition of various components. And we similarly know how to enumerate all sorts of chemical and physical properties of any exotic materials and objects we might come across. But it's all based on our own patchwork model of the physical universe, which has plenty of gaps we know about, nevermind those we can't even imagine. We don't know what we don't know.

If we assume aliens are visiting then it's almost certain that their technology is thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours. And if we assume that follows an exponential curve (which may not be a valid assumption - we really only have ~200 years of history upon which we could base such a supposition), then it follows that their technology would be indecipherably complex for us to understand.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#500

Post by nl »

ALittleLight wrote: post #440
heavyset_go wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, I've noticed a lot of the material that gets declassified, that is purported to be evidence of aliens/psychics/magic/etc, is in the form of field notes or case studies that either contain full quotations or summaries of what someone else claims is true, but are not actually experiments or demonstrations of what is claimed. For example, you might have a declassified CIA document that's being distribute…

When they first released the CIA psychic documents I clicked a few at random and my impressions were much different. The papers I read were very much "We're conducting this experiment on remote viewing. Here are our procedures and results."

This is a different thing. The CIA's experiments were done with at least an attempt at doing science (and didn't work).

The parent is talking about field reports, not an experimental program.

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