global tetrahedron posted:

as someone pretty versed in this stuff, what jacques vallee book should i start with? trying to decide between dimensions and confrontations

e: one review of dimensions basically said it’s just a recounting of people’s stories/experiences, i’m fully in and dont need much more of that. more interested in his analysis

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

In Zeta Reticuli born and raised
buzzin' 'round earth was hanging out with the greys
Chillin' out probin' lights strobin' all cool
And all projecting good feelings at some kids in a school
When a couple of greys tried to make a big show
flying too wild out in New Mexico
they got in one little crash and my mom got scared
She said 'You're movin' with Sandia to a secret mountain lair'

munce posted:

Ancient egypt video time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KUDu40BC5o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGtDAHRK8s0

The channel has loads and they're all pretty well done. v interesting.

Dominique Lestel, philosopher, posted:

It is likely that the contact with extraterrestrials will lead to a very deep existential crisis for humans. Humans could be confronted with their inability to answer questions of enormous importance to them. First, to become aware of such cognitive and epistemic limits, and second, to accept these limits may seriously test humans. Indeed, up to now, every epistemological crisis humans have faced has led them to alter their conception of the world. The next epistemological crisis, a crisis precipitated by contact with extraterrestrials, could be very different. Humans may come to understand that there exists in the universe a set of phenomena that they will never be able to know because they are not clever enough.

toggle posted:

Harassment Of Navy Destroyers By Mysterious Drone Swarms Off California Went On For Weeks: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43561/mysterious-drone-swarms-over-navy-destroyers-off-california-went-on-for-weeks

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

Well, Lue is cancelled I guess
https://twitter.com/blackvaultcom/status/1472944489853374464?s=20

quote:

many things go wrong 15 may because door opens with portal to dark matters not undestanding earth beings
sharon will dimise be4 15 may
mandela will dimise be4 15 may
thatcher will stroke be4 15 may
japan warring thing will commenceing before 15 may secretly
oil gets very big sicknes no use anymore after 15 may
old bush will very sick be4 15 may
cheney will dimise be4 15 june
obama accident before 27 aperil
big sicknes be4 15 may
very moving earth on 17 aperils
oceon not sleeping when heaven things beware many waters to come drown
brown cheat be4 15 may
putin missing after 15 may many worry people do crazy things

me cee crash plane on deck of us war ship 55 dimise
me cee us bomer crash sea
me cee many dolfin and whale go suicide
me cee 250 plus more demise acident and crash of plane europe people
me cee very moving earth again people of same shape eye japan
me cee sicknes go people of india and people of korea
me cee very oil sicknes people of america grow biger not aford buy oil anymores
me cee america people very angry go damage monument there capitol ok
me cee very big and final earth war this line time but u can stop stil
please forget oil yor oil become enemy after september yor line time
oil get radiation as me tel u be4 why u not belive me
me cry 4 u

Lake Jucas posted:

If we are talking good alien movies throw on Vast of Night. It came out last year and is a gem that flew under the Radar.

Tekne posted:

Shark expert R. Aidan Martin posted:

Somewhere in the distance, an odd, rhythmic grumble imposed itself on the shark's consciousness. Although the Great White had no word for 'boat', it recognized the mechanical throbbing as a surface phenomenon that had rarely proven worthy of attention. But this time there was something familiar mixed in with the acrid, alien machine smells: the alluring scent of tuna oil. The great predator banked gracefully to investigate. As the shark continued its approach to the source of the piscine perfume, the mechanical throb ceased suddenly and was replaced by an unnatural clanging and chattering. Strange. Its curiosity aroused, Great White coursed toward this new disturbance. As the shark closed on the source of these strange sensations, a row of vibration-sensitive pits along its flanks added their collective voice to the sensory chorus. These signals intensified and re-enforced one another, compelling the Great White to accelerate in anticipation. Resolving specter-like from the underwater haze loomed a dark shadow, resembling a short, fat floating whale. The diffuse tuna scent was now everywhere and nowhere. As the shark ascended, its dorsal fin broke the surface momentarily. In response came an explosion of whoops and hollers from somewhere above the undulating liquid ceiling. The shark's large, sensitive eyes caught a silvery glint from a strange object. The Great White had never seen a shark cage before. It was half as tall as the shark itself was long, but much wider. The cage's surface was not curved and its volume seemed defined by empty spaces between vertical structural elements. As it swam past, the shark saw that there was something dark and moving inside, as though following it. Odd - and more than a little frightening. Yet all around it, the delicious tuna scent beckoned. Periodically a great flurry of bubbles spewed from the dark shape, as though it were drowning over and over again. As it neared the strange structure, the Great White's electrosensors tugged at it, inviting an exploratory nip. As the great predator's jaws clamped noisily onto the unyielding metal bars, several of its teeth broke free, spiralling gracefully as they sank...

Tekne posted:

while less distant than sharks, humans have formed actual partnerships with orcas who in different cases have helped us hunt fish and whales

globally they are revered by tribes who have contact with them and even the pods that feed exclusively on mammals treat us a partners or friends/curiosities rather than food

both of us are sapient mammals, but their environment and way of perceiving and talking is different enough to suggest that meaningful contact and cooperation can occur even without common language

Jazerus posted:

that just isn't how dna works lol

sequences aren't conserved unless they have functional value, they just randomly mutate in that case. if you tried to store information inside a species, yes it might last millions of years, with potentially high corruption rates even in the best case scenario, or maybe twenty years after you left the species goes through a bottleneck event where the only survivors are the ones who (randomly) had those biologically useless sequences snipped off and therefore required less food for their cells to replicate.

you could, maybe, engineer your data structure such that your data under biological circumstances encodes useful proteins or serves a structural purpose that will be conserved, while under technological circumstances it could be read as a galactic encyclopedia or peanutty goatse jpg or whatever. but even then evolution will smear away bits and pieces over time as slight variations on the protein prove to be more useful in certain circumstances, and the tension between "this has to be useful to remain" and "this corresponds to an artificial encoding" would make designing a consistent data structure so incredibly difficult as to make the whole project a bit silly. you'd be better off just chemically preserving your dna copy of the info and burying it in a vault than engineering a species for storage. if you were to be inserting this species into an existing ecosystem with established motifs for how life accomplishes particular tasks, and you didn't want the species to be blindingly obviously a transplant, the task would be even more orders of magnitude harder.

dna computers for artificial purposes do make a lot of sense as a technology for a highly advanced civilization. making those dna computers also be fully functional living organisms might even make sense as long as they are still under your control and you can just make backups of the info. but sticking your info into bacteria, or trees, or apes, and then dumping them in the wild? it's a fun sci fi idea but it would not work

Jazerus posted:

i would be interested to read about that because everything i know about biology leads me to conclude it wouldn't work. or, rather, the expected integrity of the information at any given time is essentially unpredictable because DNA is under pressures from its environment. we used to think that there was a lot of "junk DNA" that just hangs around without being useful in any way, which would imply that you could use biologically useless DNA as a storage medium, but there's more evidence every year that "junk DNA" is simply useful in different ways from traditionally useful coding DNA and, if biologically useless, would most likely be lost over time to chromosome repair errors both large and small.

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

If you're smart enough to store your blu ray rips on DNA you're probably smart enough to engineer better data integrity and error correction mechanisms than nature has, or at least beef them up

Jazerus posted:

both articles are old, but they're pretty good.

the first one however is referring exclusively to the "chemically preserve and stick it in a vault" storage method when talking about the stability of DNA as a long-term storage method.

the second article is interesting in a 2022 context because a lot of the technical challenges they refer to aren't quite so insurmountable anymore; you could just extract a message from a whole genome in a lab, for example. it's definitely a cool experiment and they chose a good bacterium to hold information in, one that has very robust error correction; but even then they concede that they only let the bacteria go through a few generations before extracting their message back out. my intuition is that with even the best natural error correction (and if you want your organism to blend into a natural ecosystem and survive long term it must have natural error correction rates, not perfect stability) you are looking more at thousands of years until the data is irretrievable, on average, rather than millions; in bacteria, anyway. an especially long-lived tree might work for a lot longer, and potentially store much more information, but is less likely to survive as a species compared to bacteria although perhaps you also engineer it to be unusually hard to kill...yeah, ok, tree hard drives sound kind of doable if you're not necessarily aiming at permanent storage but just very long-term storage with some corruption being acceptable.

overall, i find the "dna microchip" idea of the first article more compelling than the living hard drive idea. natural living systems could be made into amazing computers, because they already are amazing computers, but permanent storage of data needs a different solution.

Mola Yam posted:

am i too late for tattoo chat

get the 1561 celestial phenomenon

Sleekly posted:

does anyone have a good understanding of the Wow signal and can break down why it was so stunning to astonomers? or a good link to a wrap up of it?

it gets thrown around a lot in discussions and its assumed that the reader already knows all about it. the wiki is a bit dry.

Seth Shostak from SETI posted:

The Ohio State telescope actually used two beams, situated side-by-side on the sky. Any cosmic source would therefore be seen first in one (for 72 seconds) and then - roughly 3 minutes later - in the other (also 72 seconds.) The Wow signal failed this simple test. It came on gangbusters in one beam, but was a no-show in the other: suspicious and disheartening.

pandy fackler posted:

My partner and I saw a UFO last week on 2/9 from about 12:10 AM to 1 AM PST. Through binoculars there was a circle of many lights blinking in different patterns. I've been googling drones to see if I can find what we saw as an explanation but haven't been able to find anything like it. The craziest part was the speed it was moving - it would stay still in the sky and fade out to resemble a star then the light would expand into a gently caress ton of lights and it would dart across the sky at a huge distance, kind of moving like a water bug. I can't really find any UFO sightings that match it either but I'm not an expert. It was insane, really glad another person was there to see it too. Tried to get some video but none of it came out.

Fly Molo posted:

remember when that one solar observatory got raided by the fbi lol

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/650134651/shutdown-of-new-mexico-observatory-was-part-of-investigation-into-child-pornogra

gently caress i didn’t realize it had epstein thread crossover too

WEH posted:

startin off the 60s

burning debris fall from a disk

cigar emitting a white "laser"

the next two cigar reports occurred very close together chronologically and describe strikingly similar movements

ufo makes a right angle over AZ

ufo pulls multiple right angle turns over TX. the paper bit at the end is kinda but I like the sign off