It would have to involve a shortcut or bypass around the existing insurmountable FTL prohibition and it would have to involve a low energy solution. By ‘low’ I mean something not so high as to be effectively unattainable.
I don’t believe that aliens are visiting this planet, though I think if it were possible it would be really mind-blowing to meet creatures who were smart in a whole different way from us. Hopefully, we’d be able to work out how to understand each other.
My closest encounter with a UFO was in my kitchen about 10-12 years ago. Unfortunately, I quickly identified it as a jar of peanut butter when it hit me in the back of the head.
I really, really want UFOs to be extraterrestrials or time travelers or something, but I just don’t believe it.
I almost wish the aliens would just show up and say “hi” and start shooting, just so I can tell myself “I told you so!”
Why? Stuff travels through the universe at significantly less than light speed all the time. Shove something off of your planet, give it a few billion years, and it’s bound to run into SOMETHING interesting eventually.
Ack! Ack! Ack!
I strongly believe (say 99.9999%) that there is life elsewhere in the universe (heck, I’d be willing to put money down on there being life elsewhere in our solar system), and I believe pretty strongly that there is (or has been) intelligent somewhere.
I don’t believe, however, that any other civilizations have visited Earth.
As others have indicated, it’s likely that there is life elsewhere in the universe, and that aliens that we’d consider intelligent thinking beings exist (or have existed, or will exist – there’s a good chance we won’t overlap in time weith everyone). But the huge interstellar distances make actual visits between such civilizations a helluva lot harder than most people realize. I don’t say it’s impossible, but the effort required (unless there are conceptual breakthroughs to make Star Trek-like travel possible) is phenomenal. It’s more likely that we’ll communicate via radio or some other long-range effect.
As for UFOs, it’s worthwhile to trecall that it stands for with “Unidentified Flying Objects”, and isn’t synonymous with “extraterrestrial spacecraft”. (Or intradimensional craft or Manifestation of Otherworldly Forces, or whatever the latest buzz is). The late Donald Menzel, onetime director of the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory and the first important UFO debunker* once proposed taking the word “Flying” out of the name, because it prejudiced people into thinking that there really was some physical object there, when many “UFOs” were actually intangible things like optical effects (parhelia or “moch suns”, halos, arcs, subsuns, or entoptic phenomena, or mirages, or many other such effects). It’s a really educational experience to read Menzel’s books on the top, or the works by such debunkers as the also-late Philip Klass (“UFOs Explained”, “UFO Abductions”, etc.) or Robert Shaeffer’s books on UFOs** where they critically examine individual cases and point out their shortcomings. One that really impressed me was a plot Shaeffer gives in his book The UFO Verdict that shows the time the UFOs reported in the book “Incident at Exeter” appeared vs. the date. They correspond so clearly with the risee of Jupiter and Saturn (shifting the same amount every day as the risings of those planets do) that it’s hard to credit the reports as mistaken observations of those unexopectedly-bright planets seen by folks not used to observing.
- He also edited the two-volume “Fundamental Formulas of Physics” sitting on my bookshelf right now.
** Although I’m impressed by Shaeffer’s work on UFOs, I’m not sure I follow him on other topics. His website is interesting but quirky. “The Domain of Patriarchy”, indeed.
ET UFOs- No. Interdimensional UFOs/entities- Hell, yes. Been here as long as humans have & don’t come from anywhere else than the Shadowlands.
, tho I seriously believe this.
Since there is life on one planet and there are a huge number of planets, I am confident there is life elsewhere.
According to our understanding of the laws of physics, it would take a long time for anyone from another star to visit us.
Given the quality of the evidence that aliens are here now (I saw something! A scientist told me it was secret! An alien probed me!), I have no reason to believe any aliens have reached Earth.
My most convincing point about Roswell is that it happened 60 years ago and in all that time nobody has come forward with evidence.
Are all the US Presidents in on the conspiracy?
Are all the scientists happy about keeping all the data secret?
Did nobody who knew need money?
Did nobody who knew think it mattered to tell the World about this earth-shattering discovery?
There’s nothing alien at Roswell.
No, it wouldn’t. As I said, there’s no reason to assume that FTL travel is necessary for interstellar travel.
Not necessarily. For example, consider the scenario of a species that develops fusion power and space habitats. Over time, the habitats build more of themselves, and move farther away from the home star, since with fusion they don’t need the star. Eventually moving from comet to comet or other interstellar objects, like nomads from oasis to oasis. Over time such a culture could permeate the galaxy, without ever needing the kinds of near light speed travel that poses such problems. It would take them millennia to travel interstellar distances, but they wouldn’t care since they aren’t going anywhere in particular.
Or, there’s the classic idea of a ship that keeps it’s crew in storage by cryogenics, or otherwise in stasis. Time doesn’t matter much then, if they have no intention of a round trip.
Or you could send a small, fast probe; something tiny that could be sent much faster for less effort. If it’s sophisticated enough, it then digs into an asteroid and builds a larger set of machines, eventually including a receiver. At some point when it’s expected to be done, a signal arrives ( probably a laser ) containing the data necessary to download the mind of an alien into a manufactured body. Well beyond what we can do, but it violates no physical laws and allows for lightspeed travel, of a sort. It would depend as much on the philosophy of the users, if they consider such copying travel or not.
We live on planet with many people who are directly involved in the manufacture of flying vehicles. The planet is also long known to have natural phenomena that is frequently mistaken for flying vehicles. Plus, humans are also long known to think they see things that are not there, or misinterpret what they see.
Probability wise, when one sees something in the air one does not recognize, it’s awfully silly to avoid the far, far, far more likely probability it’s simply something from Earth or a perception error.
It’s like you live on a large island densely populated with a wide variety of coconut trees. One day in the middle of the island you come across a coconut that is unlike any other you had seen before, perhaps oddly shaped or a strange color. Instead of simply thinking it came from a tree you hadn’t seen before, or being a “mutant” from a known tree, would you think it must of came from another island on the other side of the planet?
I can’t say that’s an impossible scenario but it doesn’t apply to any erstwhile visitors we may have had here. If they have no intention of a round trip, why didn’t they land, get off the ship, and introduce themselves to world leaders or something? Further, if they established some sort of outpost within more reasonable traveling distance of here it is more likely we would have detected it.
“Let’s bring all of our superior advanced technology to bear to send a crew to Earth, and then we’ll buzz some of their aircraft and then leave. Let people take a couple of fuzzy pictures, maybe, but we won’t actually meet anyone.”
No, the alien abduction stories don’t count; those have been clearly linked to psychological phenomena.
I read plenty of SF, and have been over Robert Forward’s “Starwisp” program for sendinf laser-propelled probes to the stars. I stand by my statement – it takes a helluva lot of effort to send things over astronomical distances in “reasonable” amounts of time. You can think of all sorts of scenarios, but practically implementing them takes a lot more effort than you think at first. Even if you build your lightsail craft to efficiently use light fro m your sun to travel to another star likely to harbor life, it takes an immense time to get there, and then it’s still like a bottle tossed into the ocean. Your laser-propelled craft, manned or unmanned, demands an immense effort to build and run and point those lasers, and keep them going. your fusion-powered craft has all sorts of problems with its propellant ejection/acceleration/whatever mechanism. We aren’t within hailing distance of cryostasis. Generation starships have to be practically recycling and have minimal leaks. Can we live in a closed environment now? Can we even make a moderate-sized dwelling in the Antarctic, say, feasible (where we have the advantages of available air and raw materials and, yes, gravity)?
I’m not putting down speculation and science fiction, of which I’m a big fan. Not by a long shot. But propositions for travelling to other worlds, or even sending a practical probe to them in a “reasonable” time (by the lifetime of a culture) are significantly difficult propositions.
That’s one of the major reasons I said earlier that I consider it highly unlikely that UFOs have anything to do with aliens. I was speaking more of the possibility of interstellar travel in general, rather than the likelihood of aliens crashing and probing and what not.
Perhaps this is a nitpick, but I think it adds something. Several folks have mentioned the vast distances involved making contact unlikely. Another relevant factor is time. The universe is billions of years old. Stars, galaxies, and lifeforms have come into being and passed during that time. Modern man has only existed for a million years or so, and kept records for less than 10,000. We have been sending TV/radio waves out - potentially communicating our existence - for less than 100.
So, for there to have been extraterrestrial visitors perceived by modern men, they would not only have had to attain the ability to traverse vast distances, and not only would they have had to have some reason to visit earth - an utterly unspectacular rock in an unspectacular neighborhood of an unspectacular galaxy - but they would have had to attain that ability during this precise couple of thousand year window that man has been able to perceive them.
I think that decreases the already slender odds considerably.
And on top of what everyone else has stated, why in the hell would they enter our atmosphere in their “space” ships? Why would their “space” ships even be able to fly in our atmosphere? When we go to Mars we’re certainly not going to enter the atmosphere and fly around for a while before landing, or fly around for a while and then just leave, are we?
I’ve been interested in the phenomenon for decades, was a very active member of Compuserve’s old UFO forum, and have a small library of books on the subject, most of which, truthfully, present less than reliable data (Timothy Good’s highly entertaining but equally highly fanciful compilations of stories being a prime example). Although I think the prospect of intelligent visitors, whether from another solar system or other time/dimension, is fascinating, in all honesty hard evidence is unfortunately lacking.
A few random comments:
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there is no reason to expect that the UFO phenomenon is all one thing or another; I’m absolutely certain that the vast majority of UFO reports are misidentified terrestrial or celestial objects. Of the few that are not, it’s likely that most of these may be misunderstood effects of weather or the physical processes of the earth. This leaves, since the advent of the ‘modern’ UFO era around 1948, with anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred incidents that could only have been extraterrestrial or other visitations.
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While there may in fact be a small number of sightings of true alien/ interdimensional/whatever visitors, if they are actively trying to avoid being identified, as seems the case, it’s going to be hard to pin down who and what they are.
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OTOH, it seems absurd to think that if there is extensive visitation, that not a single discarded, manufactured object ever seems to get left behind. I call this the ‘beer can problem’, and just think about all the crap we have left (had to leave, really) on the moon and Mars to consider how difficult this one is to explain if we are in fact being visited.
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Another frequently-cited problem is that if one civilization can exist in a galaxy containing millions of stars with potentially inhabitable planets, then others can too; and if one of those civilizations could determine a way to economically travel from one solar system to another, others could too. Therefore, seems to me, we should have dozens if not hundreds of other civilizations visiting us, and if that’s the case, it seems unlikely indeed that every single one would manage to successfully getting caught up in interactions with our planet’s inhabitants. It likewise seems impossible to successfully time-travel, because if it weren’t , onewould think we’d be seeing huge numbers of visitors from the future.
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I do not at this time believe that the Roswell incident had anything to do with an alien spacecraft, nor do I currently believe that some element of the US military or government has a collection of alien artifacts (other than moon rocks and fragments of meteors, that is). I’ll be happy to change my position if and when reliable, contrary evidence turns up.
Sampiro, is this thread supposed to be a poll, or a debate?
Everybody be real quiet— he’s trying to do forced bussing again like they did with the ghost thread…
I think there’s a high probability that life has developed elsewhere (elsewhen) in the universe. I don’t think there’s any reason to suppose they’ve visited us.
The distances between stars are HUGE and traveling between them is not trivial. Assuming that some life form did master interstellar travel though, why are they so bad at keeping out of sight once they get here? Don’t they know to turn off the lights if they’re going to go cruising around military bases in the middle of the night? If they’re not interested in hiding, why not announce themselves?