Spacethread Episode 2: Attack of the UFO Guys

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Spacethread Episode 2: Attack of the UFO Guys

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Oh hey new space thread.

I can�t make heads or tails of the latest UAP stuff and it reads to me as more saying �it�s okay to report weird poo poo because it could be Chinese spy drones�.

If they are aliens let�s use our strategic store of arguments against space interference to shame them into giving up the cargo.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2023 16:41

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:24

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

DrSunshine posted:

What are the "sounds" that we're hearing in the video? Is it somehow translating the radio frequencies into noises?

I remember seeing a similar probe video about the rings of Saturn (or Jupiter?) but the 'sound' was a lot more intense. It kind of ruled.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2023 02:38

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

DrSunshine posted:

Man, is it just me, or did a lot of the original moon landing astronauts end up living to incredible age?

... I wonder... If there's something up with that.🤔

I imagine it was a mix of "selected for excellent health" and "having both access, and comfort in making use of, high quality health care." They were also all pretty disciplined and presumably willing to follow medical orders, and likely had a great baseline of fitness. So they already screened out most of the culprits for dying before 70-odd.

e: It would be incredibly funny if the answer was cosmic radiation though

# ¿ Nov 10, 2023 15:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I AM GRANDO posted:

If there were a precursor civilization on the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, we would be able to tell because they would have used up all the oil and already mined a bunch of things interesting to us, right?

They would have likely made use of deposits of oil readily available to them, but what if you could have stuck a well in the ground in a bunch of other places and found oil -- and what came down to us was the dregs, with maybe a little restoration from seepage from neighboring strata? The Cambridge article also points out that the Cretaceous and Jurassic fossil shifts they identify would have been long enough for new oil to generate. It seems to me that so would this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

Similarly, on a long enough time frame, geological turbulence would mix up their artifacts and produce ore-bearing strata where it didn't all wash into the sea.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2023 20:06

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I suspect the plaque as a detectable manufactured object would last significantly longer -- I am guessing that sans meteor strikes, the Apollo landers and the handful of other robots we've thrown on the moon would be observable for a very long time, even if they would become much less obvious once, for instance, the gold foil poo poo gets porous and dusty.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2023 20:30

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

nimby posted:

It's aliens, but the aliens are also conspiracy theories and they're here to prove humans are behind all their societal ills and unexplained phenomena.

Our missile radars are giving their encrustlings "H'bb'na Syndrome," and let's not even get started on them decrypting our horrible entertainment slop.

If we'd been listening in the 14th century the shoe would be on the other tentacle, but of course the aliens have moved to a fiber-optic telecommunications paradigm for the last five hundred Earth years.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 14:31

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Rappaport posted:

A puppeteer would say that

We're on quantum entanglement now, omnivore, your telescopes can't hear poo poo

# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 15:46

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Rappaport posted:

How would you know?

NASA knows the aliens are using hyperwarp once they get past the Neptune orbital limits.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 13:45

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Rappaport posted:

Doesn't the Alien, uh, no pun intended, franchise answer this? You have Burke trying to monetize it all, and it unsurprisingly turns into poop.

On a slightly more serious note, I would find it somewhat alarming if a Pierson's puppeteer walked out of a transfer booth. Or a Kzin, those guys are bad news all around. I would love to talk with an alien intelligence, because they'd have a fundamentally different perspective.

Yeah, it'd be crazy, really.

DrSunshine posted:

I think it's a false conflation to group "UFO Conspiracy" with "All other left-wing positions". You can support Palestine and oppose capitalism without believing that the government is suppressing evidence of alien visitations.

~~Sounds like you're denying Posadist Thought~~

I feel like APC's working from a thesis that SINCE alien existence would be hugely destabilizing, AND governments are all a pack of gangsters, that obviously they would suppress alien existence if they knew about it, AND ALSO (implicitly) they are doing so already.

I think this runs aground, not on governments being moral, but because it would require a lot of legwork to actually hide something like this, especially if the aliens were actually still showing up. If the aliens want to make contact with humans, the government can shoot at them with all those guns, but presumably the aliens are outside of the government's reach. To a certain extent this seems like the usual thing with aliens, where the idea of the alien lifeform just becomes a reflection of what you already think about humans.

e: like 'one craft crash in the pre-satellite era' or 'we found a really loving weird thing in the ground and the CIA or someone comparable seized it' is potentially plausible, but most of these stories definitely do not stop at that.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 18:30

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

DrSunshine posted:

Yeah, see this is where I get hung up. I still haven't seen anyone advance a credible sociological/economic/political theory as to why that would be the case.

To wit:

"Scientists prove that God exists."

"Well, fuckin-a, but I still have to pay the bills and work 3 part-time jobs or I'll starve to death."

I think it has kind of been a thesis that it would be a revolutionary upset, possibly undermining Religion, but it's like, why? This is usually more due to an ignorance of the actual underpinnings of government and religion, both in terms of their practical power relations and in terms of their narratives and ideology. Europe didn't ignite into a series of violent nihilistic revolutions when people found out about the existence of native nations and various animals and plants.

People would still, absolutely and 100%, project their dreams, hopes, and visions of humanity onto the aliens, and at most they would fact-check and integrate with what observable details there were.

mediaphage posted:

i�ve never seen any great evidence of guaranteed alien visitation but tbqh the government being able to lie about it for 80 yearsish is probably the least unbelievable part of any of it

The problem is, which government, lol

(Of course one of the unstated theses is that there's really only one, if you think about it.)

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 19:12

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I think the theory is that finding out there is intelligent life in the universe would totally destroy everyone's brains and they'd go insane in the streets. I don't think this would be the case. It would probably be a really exciting short-term topic and would likely get space programs funded heavily. If the aliens open diplomatic relations of some kind and start handing over the cargo or offering technical assistance on various things, perhaps a different story.

One thing that gets cited a lot is the example of Western colonists showing up, murdering, and displacing various native societies, but this wasn't done with their mere presence. (Other than the diseases, but we know, in general terms, how infectuous diseases work.) The assumption that alien contact would work like that is a projection of the vision of human beings onto the concept of the alien.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 19:39

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I was thinking about telescopes last night and this may have been considered, but I thought I would say it anyway in case there are problems I can't really infer.

Would it be possible to put, say, several JWST-grade telescopes in Earth's leading and trailing Lagrange points and use that distance as one of those virtual telescope, "it actually works like a telescope the size of the space between them" things whose proper name I misremember?

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 15:36

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Rappaport posted:

This may be what you are looking for. Apologies for the wiki dump.

INTERFEROMETRY! I kept trying to look up "interference telescope" but I knew that was wrong.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 15:40

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:24

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

dr_rat posted:

Also I think it would be more likely to be ALIENS!!! if it's just one or two stars showing something weird happening. When you have 60, I assume nowhere near each other, showing the same odd behaviour seems far more likely to just be some new weird astrophysics quirk that occasionally happens, we haven't quite figured out yet.

Another explanation would be that FTL isn�t possible and the best you can do is maybe milking nearby red dwarfs

# ¿ May 13, 2024 14:56

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Spacethread Episode 2: Attack of the UFO Guys