Absent any incontrovertable physical evidence, yeah, that’s pretty much it for me.
We’re in agreement on that. I’d love to do more than just ignore these reports. But what is there for me to study? We can’t just decide one day “I’m going to study eyewitness reports of UFOs”, and then have more information magically come out of the decision to study them. We have to have something we can study, something which will allow us to make experiments, or measurements. If you have any suggestions for measurements we can make from these reports, I’d love to hear them. Give me something to do, and I’m willing to do it. But until then…
north --there is no particular evidence to show that Faster-Tan-Light (FTL) travel is possible.
Lightspeed seem to be the limit.
Any ship that came to Earth would, reasonably, be a Slowship.
This means a multigenerationaol ship, or suspended animation.
In either case, such a ship would require large amounts of reaction mass, & fuel. All of which mandates, from an equipment standpoint, a big ship.
Multi-generational ships would need large hydroponic facilities, to grow plant both for food & oxygen.All of which requires even more power. Hence–a bigger ship.
Stasis vessels would need extensive robotic systems, & self-repair capacity, to care for the sleeping passengers. All of which requires even more power. Hence–a bigger ship.
For even a short intersteller voyage, you’d need something at least 1/2 kilometer long.
Anybody who plowed the time, resources & know-how into building that seems unlikely to want to beat around the bush. White House lawn landing, minimum.
We ain’t detected the huge energy output a sublight drive would create on deceleration. It would be at least as obvious as a comet tail.
Sorry, no Visitors. 
But I wish there were.
I figure us trying to figure out a viable way of FTL travel is like a caveman trying to figure out the spaceshuttle (actually worse…an amobea trying to figure it out); but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been or can’t be.
North
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which
cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-- that principle is
contempt prior to investigation." - Herbert Spencer
Hmmm a most excellent attitude Chronos…ok, lets start with the sightings themselves. How about trying to see if there are long term or short term patterns to credible sightings? Maybe there are physical patterns or…psychological ones…maybe even stellar ones…lets take a hard look at the data to see if there is any noticable sequence or grouping. That would be a start. We’d have to take the whole thing seriously enough to collect the data first though. (Other people are attempting to do that already so maybe all one has to do is study the data once it’s available).
I mean it’s possible that UFO sightings correspond with volcanic activity and we wouldn’t know about it because we haven’t looked or collected any data.
North
"Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the
immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses."
-Martin Gardner
You might want to learn some physics. But the improbability of FTL drive is not the reason I don’t believe aliens are visiting. It’s their supposed behavior. Look, either they show themselves, or they don’t. After 55 years I think they know plenty about us, if they were here. They’d either leave, or they’d say hello. They wouldn’t buzz small downs and abduct yokels (or bad horror writers.) If UFOs are evidence of life off the earth, then that life sure isn’t intelligent.
Kinda sorta but not quite. If you say intelligent life “might possibly be visiting,” that’s a nonfalsifiable statement, so it doesn’t invite much more than an interested glance in your direction. (Because, as we keep saying, we who are arguing with you are very interested in this possibility. I personally think the survival of humanity absolutely depends on getting all of us off this tiny rock, and anything that makes that more likely would be a positive development. I’d love it if ET came calling. We’re not arguing with you because we disbelieve; we’re arguing with you, or at least I am, because the question is so important that it must be investigated responsibly and with a clear and unbiased mind.)
However, what your “might possibly” statement does is invite further scrutiny, begging the question (in the colloquial sense). “So they might be visiting,” we say. “We agree. It might be possible. However, we cannot say for certain whether they are or not, in the absence of further evidence. They might be, but with equal likelihood they might not be. The empirical jury is still out.” That’s been my whole point this entire time: We don’t know, and thus we reserve judgment.
No, what puts you in fairyland is your insistence that this so-called evidence measures up, and proves (or goes a long way toward proving) the aliens are among us. As I said several days ago, science is very good at evaluating evidence when it is available; it is, in fact, not just its strength, but the whole basis for the intellectual method, to consider the evidence and weigh its merits in terms of supporting or refuting various propositions. If concrete evidence materializes, science will acknowledge it, and adjust, because that’s what science does. As I explained at length in a previous message, all scientifically derived knowlege is provisional, our “best guess” at the moment given the evidence. In most disciplines, our “best guess” is pretty damn good indeed, which is why we can launch a rocket and land its payload on another planet, a feat that is so staggeringly complicated and difficult that it beggars the imagination. In my view, the dearth of serious scientific belief in the visitation in aliens is as solid a basis as there is for the proposition that the evidence is lacking, and in fact, as Busta Chee Chee (sorry, that just cracks me up) indicates, there’s a lot of reason to think that interstellar travel is as close to impossible as anything we know.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we shouldn’t study the idea, or that we shouldn’t go looking for the evidence that will prove that aliens (1) exist and (2) are here. I am a huge proponent of the SETI program, and one of my top ten favorite movie sequences of all time is the five minutes of Contact wherein Ellie Arroway first hears the radio signal from space and rushes back to the lab to verify it. As I said above, I believe in my very cells that there’s intelligent life in the universe, but I cannot responsibly say that I know it. Likewise, I want NASA and other agencies and experts to keep working on whether or not it’s possible to exceed the speed of light and thus cross the interstellar gulfs in less than several human lifetimes, because I desperately want this technology to exist, but until it does, until there’s even the vague hint of a hypothesis about how this might be reasonably accomplished, to my enormous disappointment I must accept that it does not exist and cannot be done.
And that, I think, is the extremely subtle difference between the position I’m arguing for and the position you seem to be arguing for. I want to study the evidence and pursue the hypothesis because something interesting, even earth-shaking, might — emphasize might — be found, even while I concede that it might not. By contrast, you, apparently, based on your comments in this thread, want to study the evidence and pursue the evidence because you already believe there’s something to find.
The distinction is fairly subtle, but it is massively, indeed entirely, critical.
Please: read the books I suggested.
Ah, I can understand that. Here, allow me to lend you this antique razor. Once owned by a William of Occam. Careful, it is mighty sharp. After a couple sahves with it- you might see things differently.
I don’t know.
But I can speculate. The available information is that they were visible on the medium and high zoom settings of the IR device. But the field of view on the medium setting was only 3.4 x 2.6 degrees (i.e. less than the size of your fist at arms length). The maximum zoom’s field of view, in which the “objects” could be seen as a group, was tiny. This device was a pretty narrow window on the world around them. Given we know virtually nothing about how the detector was normally used, it seems quite possible that the operator had just never looked at that little patch of the earth and sky before in those conditions.
After all, virtually nothing seems to be known about the crew and their prior experience with this sort of thing. But, as others have been emphasising, having either to rely on eyewitness testimony or to speculate about how those eyewitnesses may have been confused is just what most UFO cases get bogged down in.
What is unusual about this case is that much (though far from all) of the data that one doesn’t normally have in those sightings was here automatically recorded. In particular, we do have a relatively good idea of where the sensor was pointed and hence an unusually reliable estimate of the direction the “objects” were in. The direction of the oil flares.
Of course.
You do not understand; our entire understanding of the universe yields the conclusion that FTL travel is a contradiction in terms, like asking for an angle more perpendicular than 90 degrees.
Just curious, where did I say that I knew that what I saw was absolutely alien or an alien spacecraft? I haven’t. By the way, what’s a couple of asahves?
North
DrDeth said that you can get a couple shaves from Occam’s razor. He mistyped. You messed the word up even further in your post. Do you not know the term “Occam’s razor”? Buy a dictionary.
First I’d say it’s safe to say our understanding of the universe and all its laws is nowhere near absolute, it’s probably more akin to a bacteria on an amoeba understanding the space shuttle (nah, worse). We simply don’t have enough brain cells in our heads to figure everything out. We have limits to our intellect just like a dog has limits.
We don’t seem to entirely understand quantum physics either (have a look at the EPR paradox for example). Look, theoretical scientists are studying the FTL problem as if it were a problem to be solved. That’s why they come up with theories and observations like quantum tunneling, the Cerenkov effect, that shadows and photon laser beams move faster than light, or that we could use a wormhole to travel further than we could on a regular light route (a light short-cut), and oh yes, those pesky non-existent tachyons and warp drives. Sure E=mc2, but theoretical physics as we presently understand it seems to have left the door open to the possibility of faster than light travel or maybe a possible away around it (Theoretical physicists such as Miguel Alcubierre, Andrei Sakharov, Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda, and Hal Puthoff have put forth an interesting theory coined the SHARP drive, so who knows where we’ll be in a hundred or a thousand years?). We are babes in the woods (less even). If there are other more advanced civilizations out there somewhere, maybe they have a exponential jump on us in understanding. Maybe they made their own door.
North.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something
is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
- Arthur C. Clarke
He was being funny, or cute, or clever, whatever you want to call it. I didn’t mind and was taking it a little further (You obviously didn’t get the joke). By the way, I didn’t need a dictionary for the term, I know what it means…read my answer. Why do you have to be so caustic anyway?
North.
If that were true, you would, by your own argument, have no way of knowing it.
Nonsense.
precisely
Slogans bad! Thinking good! Slogans bad! Thinking good!
Ok then, answer me this:
So you believe humans will never be able to travel vast distances in space?
So you believe that interstellar travel will never be achieved because of the theory of special relativity?
Yes or no.
We’ve done that already, and we’ve found a lot of patterns. UFO sightings tend to increase when Venus is prominent in the sky. They tend to increase when the Goodyear Blimp is in an area. They tend to increase shortly after popular movies are released featuring aliens. They tend to increase when a couple of teenagers rig up a hoax UFO with a dry-cleaning bag and some candles. This obviously indicates that the aliens are from Venus, like to watch football games from above, are Spielberg fans, and don’t have any good dry-cleaning places on their homeworld.
As for FTL, the problem appears to be completely different than bacteria understanding the Space Shuttle. Problems of engineering are inherently different from problems of physics. Any problem of engineering will be solved if sufficient time, money, and effort are thrown at it. Not may be, will be. It might be the case that “sufficient time, money and effort” is beyond the capacity of the human race, and it might even be the case that it’s beyond the capacity that the human race will ever have before we go extinct. But it’s possible, and if we did scrounge up the resources somewhere (alien help, perhaps), we would do it.
Problems of physics are different. A problem of physics is either solvable (in which case it becomes an engineering problem), or it’s not. If it’s not solvable, then no amount of time, money, or effort will ever make it solvable. We can’t solve unsolvable problems, bacteria can’t solve them, aliens can’t solve them. And current indications seem to be that FTL is just such an example of an unsolvable problem. Mind you, we can’t be sure that FTL is a physics problem, and not just an engineering problem. One can never be sure that something is a physics problem. There are, as you point out and every scientist will agree, gaps in our knowledge, so it’s quite conceivable that we’re wrong. But if, as seems most likely, we’re right, that’s not an indication that we’re not smart enough to make an FTL drive. It’s an indication that nobody and nothing in the Universe can ever conceivably make an FTL drive.
"I won’t believe in flying saucers until I see a Mars license plate. Arthur C. Clarke.
You should read his chapter on UFOs in Challenge of the Spaceship. Most science fiction writers hate saucerians, since the mundanes assume they are UFO believers.
Cervaise, I assume you meant to say that FTL interstellar travel is close to impossible. There are lots of ways of doing interstellar travel that don’t involve violating the laws of physics, but just solving a set of engineering problems. Considering that we just learned to fly a century ago, there is no reason to think these can’t be solved. However it is highly unlikely that if we did visit another world, we’d act like the saucer people!
BTW, it is an interesting exercise to come up with an FTL drive that doesn’t violate the laws of physics (or not obviously). This has to involve inventing new universes or branes to travel in. The one I cam up with for my sf book has the nice property that relativity is not violated if you stay in one brane, and you never go faster than the speed of light in the brane you’re traveling in. Of course it assumes all sorts of things about the universe we don’t know and which probably aren’t true, but I can almost see how you’d do the math for this system.
Yes, Voyager, your clarification is correct. Sorry for the imprecision.
It’s not a yes-or-no question. Knowledge changes all the time. It would be foolish to say that something will “never” happen, because we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s conceivable that some unforeseen breakthrough will make faster-than-light interstellar travel not just possible but practical.
However, everything we know right now points to its impossibility. And we know a hell of a lot more than you think we do; your amoeba-on-a-space-shuttle analogy speaks volumes about your ignorance of the sheer magnitude of our scientific understanding of the physical universe. Pick up a survey of cosmology, something written for the layman, something like Tim Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way or Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, and learn just how much we’ve managed to figure out despite being pinned to this small rock at the bottom of a gravity well.
Look: The fact that we cannot yet exploit our knowledge to the fullest does not devalue that knowledge, and it does not provide permission to dismiss the basis by which we arrived at that knowledge. We know the universe is vast; we also know that we can’t go there and look at it, and as far as we can tell we won’t be able to any time soon. We are only just now starting to get a handle on what it’ll take to put humans on the surface of Mars, and the more you know about that effort, the more you know about how ridiculously difficult just putting boots in the red dust of our very nearest planetary neighbor will be, the more you know how far out of reach the stars really are. Our imagination has far outstripped our available technology, and we’re frustrated by the enormous gulf between what seems possible and what appears to be probable.
“Will we never visit the stars, yes or no,” is not an answerable question. “Do we have any idea how to visit the stars in our lifetimes given our current understanding, yes or no,” is answerable, and the answer, I say with great sadness, is no.
Again: You seem to be proceeding with the assumption that we must study the possibility of faster-than-light travel or other advanced concepts and technologies because it is inevitable that we will solve the problem and colonize the galaxy. That is an invalid assumption, because it is not inevitable. It is quite possible, based on our deep (and yes, it is deep, your ignorant assertions to the contrary) knowledge of the physical universe, that the speed of light is a completely insurmountable barrier, and that we will never travel to the next star in a vessel that takes less than a hundred years to make the voyage. Yes, it’s possible the opposite will be true, that a stroke of luck and genius this afternoon will have us living in the land of Star Trek next week. It’s just not likely.
Or, in short, what I said before: You apparently want to investigate because you know there is an indistinguishable-from-magic technology just waiting to be found that will open the biggest frontier of all. I want to investigate because that technology might be found, but I also know it might not. Like I said before, the distinction may seem subtle, but it is absolutely critical.
Really? You’re sure that’s all there is to be learned from the patterns of the entire UFO phenomenon? Are these the only conclusions we can come to from closely studying every credible UFO case with an unbiased and open mind?
North