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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Okay what has happened to the price point and availability of cameras capable of capturing this? What has happened to the number and quality of professional grade telescopes worldwide? What has happened to military radar systems in countries around the world? What has happened to the instruments and tools available to pilots and air traffic controllers worldwide? That doesn't make much sense. It's not like in the the 1980's thousands of people were claiming to see ufos at the same time but dang it no one had a camera. For the average person and not a UFO nutter who sees one every time a helicopter flies overhead, actually seeing something you think is a UFO is still a vanishingly rare phenomenon. And the most interesting accounts are always from people who aren't constantly looking for UFO's but where just going about their business.
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Jul 31, 2020 05:33
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Illuminti posted:That doesn't make much sense. It's not like in the the 1980's thousands of people were claiming to see ufos at the same time but dang it no one had a camera. For the average person and not a UFO nutter who sees one every time a helicopter flies overhead, actually seeing something you think is a UFO is still a vanishingly rare phenomenon. And the most interesting accounts are always from people who aren't constantly looking for UFO's but where just going about their business. In the 1980s no one was carrying a camera on an average day, now no one isn’t.
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Jul 31, 2020 05:54
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D-Pad posted:Sure, put words in my mouth. And as I noted in the earlier post about the book at no point does she claim it is aliens, or anything else. It's just eyewitness accounts and supporting documents. Yes, NDE poo poo is quack, that doesn't invalidate her book or the fact she is reporting for the New York Times who tends to vet their reporters at least somewhat. If she was making claims about what it all was then yes, you should take her quack book into account. She isn't. It's just reports and interviews. Eye witness accounts are poo poo evidence. We tend to recall the last time we told the story, not the actual event, and our perceptions are influenced by state of mind and subjective interpretation. No doubt there's thousands of big foot sightings too. What are the supporting documents?
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Jul 31, 2020 06:36
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No-one's seen anything and also the people that have seen something including like a dozen fighter pilots at close range don't count because some random guy from England said it was probably just a plane. Not to say Nimitz was definitely aliens, but, the idea that other intelligent life exists in our galaxy capable of sending probes out seems perfectly reasonable. Ratios and Tendency fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Jul 31, 2020 |
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Jul 31, 2020 08:53
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:In the 1980s no one was carrying a camera on an average day, now no one isn’t. In the 1980s virtually no one saw a UFO and today virtually no one see's a ufo. let alone clear enough to actually capture it. My point is everyone could be carrying around $20000 4k cameras and it doesn't mean they're going to start seeing UFOs all of a sudden. It's not like there were loads of UFOs that could have been filmed in the past, but no one had a camera handy Illuminti fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Jul 31, 2020 |
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Jul 31, 2020 09:30
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imo its loving embarassing that there are cpsam posters who dont know about the aliens yet
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Jul 31, 2020 10:22
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Aliens aren’t visiting earth, and no one here has any proof to the contrary. I don’t really know what there is to debate or discuss beyond that.
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Jul 31, 2020 14:45
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It's kind of depressing to think that there are likely technological civilizations all across the universe but that we're not in range of their transmissions and that in all likelihood if we ever hear those transmissions, it will be at a time when they will have already been extinct for thousands or millions of years. Even if we can watch a technosignature through a telescope from 47,000 light years away, we can never know very much about the species we're watching. It's stuff like that which makes me wonder if the eventual detection of another civilization will have much of a cultural effect on the people of Earth. Wouldn't it be a bit like knowing about dinosaurs, in that it's knowledge that is cool in the abstract, but extremely limited and which has almost no effect on our experience or future possibilities?
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Jul 31, 2020 15:11
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:It's kind of depressing to think that there are likely technological civilizations all across the universe but that we're not in range of their transmissions and that in all likelihood if we ever hear those transmissions, it will be at a time when they will have already been extinct for thousands or millions of years. Even if we can watch a technosignature through a telescope from 47,000 light years away, we can never know very much about the species we're watching. It really depends on how we find out. If we get to watch their equivalent of I love Lucy it would probably be a positive thing. If it's "hey we sent this big rock hurtling at your planet " it won't be taken so well.
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Jul 31, 2020 15:31
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:It's kind of depressing to think that there are likely technological civilizations all across the universe but that we're not in range of their transmissions and that in all likelihood if we ever hear those transmissions, it will be at a time when they will have already been extinct for thousands or millions of years. Even if we can watch a technosignature through a telescope from 47,000 light years away, we can never know very much about the species we're watching. It depends on what we receive. If it’s just a quick blip I think people will freak out but it will be forgotten. I think it will hold more attention if it’s either a steady stream of information or different bursts sent intermittently, as that brings the prospect of new knowledge. My understanding is that we’ve searched a comically small number of stars and frequencies in depth, so we might be getting bathed in signals filled with the secrets of the universe and have no idea.
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Jul 31, 2020 15:34
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My admittedly poor understanding of radio signals is that they degrade too badly to be decoded by a receiver after a few light years and that the best we can hope to find with SETI are deliberate signals sent between star systems (or less likely, a deliberate attempt to signal the Earth directly), which would be much more powerful and may not contain any information to be decoded by a receiver, like a navigation beacon or radar or something. I admit that it would be pretty exciting of Proxima B had tv and we could watch their shows or even just hear their radio programs, because you're right that we could probably figure out at least some of the language and maybe culture if they had any kind of spoken language.
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Jul 31, 2020 15:47
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I guess I am imagining a civilization much more advanced than ours who is sending out targeted signals to other star systems. Our current understanding of physics does not allow for FTL travel, but it does allow a civilization to capture most of the energy output by their star and to use some of that immense energy to build giant gently caress off transmitters and send targeted signals around the galaxy as a vanity project. Having even a basic understanding of how a civilization a million years ahead of ours functions would shed some massive light on technological paths filled with ripe and unpicked fruit, not to mention the societal impact of seeing a more advanced future and knowing we can achieve that too through research.
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Jul 31, 2020 16:18
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I guess I'm imagining the detection of cfcs or something else that would have to be artificial in a planet's atmosphere, where the planet is 30,000 light years away or something. We'd know there would almost have to be a civilization there, but couldn't ever know anything else about them. That almost seems more likely to me than seeing radio signals because the planet is always there waiting to be seen and can be watched over time, while we'd have to catch a radio transmission while we were looking, and we have no idea if civilizations would have a reason to send powerful signals across star systems while we know civilizations can live on planets and release novel gasses to detect. Yet that knowledge wouldn't really get us much beyond what we strongly suspect right now. Maybe if they had other weird gasses we could infer some stuff about what life there would have to be like or what heavy industry there would be like.
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Jul 31, 2020 16:28
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Would the detection of cfcs or really anything else in an atmosphere be a slam dunk for intelligent life? Or would it just launch a century long discussion on if those molecules could be created naturally?
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Jul 31, 2020 20:44
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Would the detection of cfcs or really anything else in an atmosphere be a slam dunk for intelligent life? Or would it just launch a century long discussion on if those molecules could be created naturally? This. Even with the dinosaur example above, you can find folks who categorically deny they're real. Any compelling-but-unspecific evidence like probable detection of CFCs would also be easy to ignore for most people.
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Jul 31, 2020 20:55
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Would the detection of cfcs or really anything else in an atmosphere be a slam dunk for intelligent life? Or would it just launch a century long discussion on if those molecules could be created naturally? I don’t know if anything could really be a slam dunk, unless it was a deliberate attempt at communication with us where we could find an encoded signal with knowledge that nobody on Earth had beforehand. There have certainly been multiple radio signals from space that looked like communication but were produced by natural processes. I guess the never completely knowing for sure would be part of what would be so frustrating for me. Absent some kind of all-purpose greeting that tells us how to get around causality by unforeseen means, or a planet that’s only a few hundred light years away at most, I can’t imagine total confirmation of anything. And the process by which a candidate signal or planet moves from a possible technosignature to probably a technosignature would probably take many years as people figured out falsifiable methods for making sense of the evidence. If Tabby’s Star wasn’t reasonably confirmed to be enshrouded in weird dust, we’d still be nowhere near declaring that it was probably inside a Dyson sphere.
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Jul 31, 2020 22:31
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I don't really see what it matters either way, if we somehow detected life on some planet thousands of light years away it doesn't really affect us in any way if there's no way to ever communicate or get there.
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Jul 31, 2020 22:51
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Our current understanding of physics does not allow for FTL travel, but it does allow a civilization to capture most of the energy output by their star and to use some of that immense energy to build giant gently caress off transmitters and send targeted signals around the galaxy as a vanity project. Our current understanding of physics is that large scale space construction projects would be bound by the rocket equation. Capturing most of the energy output of a star is on the same realm as cheating FTL by way of closed time-like curves.
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Jul 31, 2020 23:00
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Doesn't have to be one construction though, could be a swarm of independent satellite structures of whatever size. Built one by one.
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Aug 1, 2020 00:15
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That... doesn't change anything...
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Aug 1, 2020 00:54
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Conspiratiorist posted:Our current understanding of physics is that large scale space construction projects would be bound by the rocket equation. I haven't heard of this, where are you getting this? My impression was that in general physicists were in agreement that it'd be theoretically possible to surround a sun in satellites orbiting at a distance where the light pressure would keep them in a stable stationary orbit.
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Aug 1, 2020 01:23
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I mean if you have infinite fuel and raw materials you can theoretically put whatever you want wherever in your solar system that is correct.
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Aug 1, 2020 01:36
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I’ve been watching a lot of The Bumble Nums and today they went to the moon to get some moon cheese for their out-of-this-world moon cakes, and when they had to get back to Earth(?) they jumped from the moon back onto the planet and landed safely in a lake. I figured this was the appropriate thread to discuss whether this is possible. Thanks.
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Aug 1, 2020 01:48
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Conspiratiorist posted:I mean if you have infinite fuel and raw materials you can theoretically put whatever you want wherever in your solar system that is correct. Seems like once you had a few satellites and some receivers you would have functionally infinite fuel/energy for putting up more.
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Aug 1, 2020 01:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Seems like once you had a few satellites and some receivers you would have functionally infinite fuel/energy for putting up more. I could see raw material being a problem. Sure you can use the asteroid belt and the oort cloud and maybe the moons of Mars, but if you need more material after that you're dealing with gravity wells and the equation may turn net energy negative.
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Aug 1, 2020 02:01
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:I could see raw material being a problem. Sure you can use the asteroid belt and the oort cloud and maybe the moons of Mars, but if you need more material after that you're dealing with gravity wells and the equation may turn net energy negative. Seems like it’d be break even, it would cost a lot to put up one solar satellite and a receiver, but at some point you’d be launching the 500th one using the power you get from the first 499, then the rest are all functionally free
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Aug 1, 2020 02:06
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Seems like it’d be break even, it would cost a lot to put up one solar satellite and a receiver, but at some point you’d be launching the 500th one using the power you get from the first 499, then the rest are all functionally free Thinking a bit more theoretically they could just turn the matter directly into energy in the gravity well using one of those fancy black hole reactors or something else we can barely comprehend. The basic physics of E=MC^2 make converting matter to energy at least theoretically possible, so it's above FTL travel on the list of things we can dream about.
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Aug 1, 2020 02:15
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Conspiratiorist posted:I mean if you have infinite fuel and raw materials you can theoretically put whatever you want wherever in your solar system that is correct. Why would it take an infinite amount of fuel and raw materials? It seems like someone who could take apart Mercury might have enough to put a swarm of satellites in orbit. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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Aug 1, 2020 02:57
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So you use fuel to transport fuel to Mercury so you can use that fuel to take chunks out of Mercury's gravity well. Horribly inefficient, but theoretically possible, yes.
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Aug 1, 2020 03:08
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So what is this thread's opinion of starlink? Hot or Not?
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Aug 1, 2020 03:21
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Conspiratiorist posted:So you use fuel to transport fuel to Mercury so you can use that fuel to take chunks out of Mercury's gravity well. Right, so you're admitting that it's not in the same class as FTL, then.
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Aug 1, 2020 03:24
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Squalid posted:So what is this thread's opinion of starlink? Hot or Not? My parents live in the middle of nowhere and have never had good internet. Seriously, they had 28k dialup until 2012! They can still only get dialup or satellite internet, and their satellite internet loving blows. I've got them signed up for the beta and am really hoping they get chosen to test it out. If they do I will definitely be posting a review for the forums.
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Aug 1, 2020 03:50
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Classon Ave. Robot posted:I don't really see what it matters either way, if we somehow detected life on some planet thousands of light years away it doesn't really affect us in any way if there's no way to ever communicate or get there. Tilting at windmills here, but: There's no way (that we know of) to get there, but it would be possible to communicate once we knew exactly where they were. It would be hilariously expensive to build the kind of, I dunno, laser system perhaps? to do it with, but theoretically you could beam something at them. Of course there's no guarantee they'd respond, and since the potential back-and-forth would take centuries or more, it wouldn't be much more than saying 'hello, we exist, how are you people doing?'. But it's the same logic as with those gold plates on the Voyagers, just taken to an extreme. And this way there'd be more of a chance of a response, at least.
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Aug 1, 2020 03:59
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Rappaport posted:Tilting at windmills here, but: There's no way (that we know of) to get there, but it would be possible to communicate once we knew exactly where they were. It would be hilariously expensive to build the kind of, I dunno, laser system perhaps? to do it with, but theoretically you could beam something at them. Of course there's no guarantee they'd respond, and since the potential back-and-forth would take centuries or more, it wouldn't be much more than saying 'hello, we exist, how are you people doing?'. But it's the same logic as with those gold plates on the Voyagers, just taken to an extreme. And this way there'd be more of a chance of a response, at least. If it was like 200 light years it would be worth doing. If it was like 28,000 light years, I would find it pretty hopeless.
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Aug 1, 2020 04:02
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Rappaport posted:Tilting at windmills here, but: There's no way (that we know of) to get there, but it would be possible to communicate once we knew exactly where they were. It would be hilariously expensive to build the kind of, I dunno, laser system perhaps? to do it with, but theoretically you could beam something at them. Of course there's no guarantee they'd respond, and since the potential back-and-forth would take centuries or more, it wouldn't be much more than saying 'hello, we exist, how are you people doing?'. But it's the same logic as with those gold plates on the Voyagers, just taken to an extreme. And this way there'd be more of a chance of a response, at least. We could send 200 year blinks at each other, until one of the two blinks stopped.
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Aug 1, 2020 04:06
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:If it was like 200 light years it would be worth doing. If it was like 28,000 light years, I would find it pretty hopeless. Yeah, in that latter scenario it wouldn't really differ from the Voyager idea and you'd be hard-pressed to find any government willing to spend that kind of buck for what would in their eyes be a vanity project. Just saying that the possibility is there. This thread has a bad rap for this already, but it's somewhat hard to envision a technical human civilization lasting tens of thousands of years, to ever even potentially hear any response.
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Aug 1, 2020 04:06
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Rappaport posted:Yeah, in that latter scenario it wouldn't really differ from the Voyager idea and you'd be hard-pressed to find any government willing to spend that kind of buck for what would in their eyes be a vanity project. Just saying that the possibility is there. This thread has a bad rap for this already, but it's somewhat hard to envision a technical human civilization lasting tens of thousands of years, to ever even potentially hear any response. I can't imagine humans lasting very long given how badly and how quickly we've disrupted our own environment. That's not the mark of a long-lived genus. We're already the last human species by like 40,000 years. I really doubt we have another 40,000 left in us.
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Aug 1, 2020 04:16
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Well I don't think anybody seriously believes that industrial global human civilization is going to be around a hundred years from now, this thread is more about things that could theoretically be possible I think.
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Aug 1, 2020 04:19
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Slowpoke! posted:I’ve been watching a lot of The Bumble Nums and today they went to the moon to get some moon cheese for their out-of-this-world moon cakes, and when they had to get back to Earth(?) they jumped from the moon back onto the planet and landed safely in a lake. I figured this was the appropriate thread to discuss whether this is possible. Thanks. What kind of cheese was the moon made of? According to the documentary A Grand Day Out, it's Wensleydale.
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Aug 1, 2020 08:52
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:It really depends on how we find out. If we get to watch their equivalent of I love Lucy it would probably be a positive thing. If it's "hey we sent this big rock hurtling at your planet " it won't be taken so well. This is a 15 year old memory or so, but I remember reading a Halo book in high school and they did a bit about, "We met another civilization for the first time. They sent us a threat." "How did we translate it?" "We didn't. They sent it in English."
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Aug 1, 2020 09:43
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