Wacky UFO conspiracy time: If govt. has ET tech., what's it waiting for?

[Inoshiro]

*Originally posted by if6was9 *
**
*PROVABLE physics says you can’t exceed the speed of light. In practical application you can’t even approach it. So it’s too far! You can’t get to another civilization before you would be dead. There may be aliens out there, but they ain’t comin here! **

It’s not quite as simple as that though. Nuclear powered (fission or fusion) craft could conceivably reach maybe 0.1c - 0.2c. Various schemes have been proposed (see Daedalus and Orion projects in particular), also Bussard nuclear ramjets. At that speed you can get somewhere interesting in a few decades. It’s not far fetched to think that even humans with some kind of hibernation technology could pull this off. Of course we don’t know how long aliens live also. Maybe their lifespans are like those of the the Sequoia, maybe they have perfected nano-medicine and live far longer than they used to and a journey of a few hundred years is not such a big deal. Maybe they send sophisticated AIs that are immortal for all practical purposes.

Now, that said, I don’t believe in the saucer people, the Mars face or the probe-me-harder-baby aliens at all. My guess is the aliens aren’t here not because they can’t get here but because they don’t exist nearby. My bet would be that the nearest ET civililization is extra-galactic and you get maybe one per galaxy extant at a time. Otherwise Fermi’s paradox kicks in and you wonder where all the alien probes are.

One more bit of Devil’s advocate on behalf of the conspiracy nutters - Assume that I’m wrong and there ARE lots of technically advanced ET civilizations in the galaxy and that they DO come here. Also assume that the typical one lasts, say, 100,000 years, then a random sampling of any old ETs that visit puts 99,900* out of 100,000 of them ahead of us in tech and the vast majority would be at least millenia beyond us. This is just the old Drake equation at work. So it may be that the govies have the saucers after all but the tech is so far beyond us that we don’t know how to start on it. Of course that blows away the idea that we got everything from Spam to Microsoft Word from the aliens too.

• I got this by assuming that we have been “technically advanced” for 100 years. Mostly, I just took the “radio age” to be my guide here.

[The_Peyote_Coyote]

Wacky UFO conspiracy time: If govt. has ET tech., what’s it waiting for?
Not your usual, serious GD (i.e., abortion, Iraq, God, gay marriage, and Bush), so bear with me for this hypothetical conspiracy discussion. Or go read another thread.

Let’s presume for a moment that the UFO conspiracy folks are right, and that the U.S. govt. recovered a crashed alien spacecraft outside of Roswell, N.M., in July 1947 and possibly on several other occasions in other locations since. Perhaps they even developed relations with the beings who created/piloted them. Whatever the case, the U.S. govt. now has in its possession alien technology. They have mastered enough of it to create our own craft which can defy gravity and the laws of inertia and c as a universal speed limit. Perhaps they even have the capacity for some form of time travel, or access to limitless, pollution-free zero-point energy generation. Not to mention, probably some wicked cool weapons.

So what are they waiting for? Why not use this technology to (a) conquer the world swiftly or (b) bring humanity into an age of prosperity and peace (free energy, etc.)? Seems we could have done better than the clumsy job we’ve done in Iraq and Afghanistan, with all the crude flying machines and explosives

toadspittle, you forget that the U.S. government is controlled by the Illuminati.
The Illuminati do not need to use the technology to conquer the world because we already own it. We’re just fighting over the spoils amongst ourselves (your hair would turn white if you knew the REAL reason for the Iraqi invasion).
Use it to bring peace & prosperity? We have no interest in that.
Yours
The Peyote Coyote
Supreme Military Commander
The Servants of Cthulhu

[Master_Wang-Ka]

I was thinking more along the lines of “It’s feasible, but we need to convince the politicians to fund us while we explore the ramifications, and we need to do it in a manner even a pointy-headed wardheeler from Louisiana could understand.”

I mean, look at it this way: Imagine Dilbert found an alien artifact of immense power and potential. Now he has to convince the Pointy Haired Boss to pay him a paycheck for the next decade or so while he tinkers with it.

Do you begin to see the problem?

[Tars_Tarkas]

*Originally posted by if6was9 *
**
*PROVABLE physics says you can’t exceed the speed of light. In practical application you can’t even approach it. So it’s too far! You can’t get to another civilization before you would be dead. There may be aliens out there, but they ain’t comin here! **

They could be robots and thus never die, they could be frozen and thaw out after they stop, they could circumvent the laws of the universe via some yet unknown mechanichism, they could have ridiculusly long life spans, they could live in colony ships, they could trade their consiousnesses between bodies and thus live forever that way,…and these are just off the top of my head.

Or…they could already be here…next time you are at the mall, check out the guy with the maroon shirt…he’s really an alien! So is every guy wearing a maroon shirt! It’s code!

[D.E.S.K.Top668]

The government has the alien technology. They’re just trying to figure how out to bypass tinfoil beanies. Tinfoil, of course, was the shielding agent on the ship. They learned their lesson about prematurely releasing alien tech after that foul up.

Peace-DESK

[if6was9]

*Originally posted by Whack-a-Mole *
**It is true that you cannot travel at light speed. However there is nothing stopping you from getting arbitrarily close. We already accelerate particles to very near light speed in particle accelerators. Granted pushing a human and his spaceship that fast is a lot more problematical but there is no fundamental reason why you can’t do it.

As to travelling the universe realize that as you approach lightspeed time slows down for you. So, theoretically, if you could go better than 99.999999% light speed you could make a trip of thousands of light years in a matter of seconds as far as you’re concerned (e.g. galactic center at around 32,000 light years away could be reached in less than a minute…the Andromeda galaxy at 2+ million light years in several minutes). Of course, those tens of thousands or millions of years will have passed on your home planet which might be worrisome for you but you would easily live long enough to pop around the Universe. Of course, you have to consider acceleration and decelerration times (unless you have an inertialess insta-acceleration superdrive) which add to your travel time but not so significantly that it is a problem (at the outside a few months for that). **

…and with all defference if you are a Physicist, I am only an amatuer. Doesn’t, also, the energy that is required to move a mass at a speed of “99.999999% light speed” become exponential? Toward Infinity?

Sooooo…if you can get “arbitrarily close” to the speed of light, that means we could get anywhere in the Milky Way Galaxy (eventually,) but NEVER outside of it (to ANOTHER galaxy.)

So this is a possible explanation of samboy’s quote, “I think another reason against the Roswell style theory is that the aliens are way too similar to us. I think the conspiracy nuts really need to be more inventive with the whole concept. We are being lazy assuming that the aliens will be quite similar looking to us.” Unless it was a gargantuan expedition spanning generations upon generations, We basically can only hope to traverse our own galaxy (eventually.)

i.e. … the aliens MIGHT look like us.

There are only a small band of circumstanes in which life can form (that WE know of…) Astrophysicists find new solar systems every year (every day? I AM only an amatuer!) I do not know if we have yet discovered an Earth-Like planet. But [that guy’s] Theorem says that there are MILLIONS of possible E-L systems in our galaxy alone.

Soooooooooo… I’ll retract my original *, …MAYBE they could have some cool shit out at Area 51. IF (still a BIG if…) they have some “mobile death ray,” I’ll STILL defer to my original post!

"IF the Govt. had these technologies (and they DON’T) they wouldn’t use them except in dire circumstances. Since 1947, the U.S. military has been well equal to the task (Vietnam indifference notwithstanding) everytime.

Now, if WWII happened today, and Hitler was a MUCH better tactician than he really was, and we were REALLY backed up against a wall, then they might risk scaring and confusing the population, nullifiing many religions etc. etc. But not for Iraq. Not for Grenada. Not for Libya."*

…and WAY BTW, as per **Whack-a-Mole’s[\i] OP, “e.g. galactic center at around 32,000 light years away” I think 32,000 light years is a RIDICULOUS guesstimate! More like 4 or 5 BILLION light years away (on average…) Maybe 8, maybe 2, but definitely G!

[laigle]

Well to play devil’s advocate, who says they aren’t using UFO tech, at least the bits they can figure out? I mean, I don’t believe that ETs have crashed here, but let’s pretend they did. Why should we think that the ship that crashed into the large, slow-moving planet had the cure for all diseases and the universal translator prototype onboard? Maybe they just had a funky coherent light source and this weird thing the Air Force guys decided to dub a “transistor.” I’m guessing it isn’t the top flight alien pilots on command carriers that are plowing into Nevada, it’s the drunken delivery drivers and taxi cabs. Maybe we just couldn’t figure out the FTL engine because we don’t understand the underlying science yet.

Or maybe the aliens weren’t all that much more advanced than us to begin with. Maybe they figured out FTL travel much earlier than us in their technological evolution, and the useful and decipherable bits of the ship weren’t that great. Maybe the ETs are peaceful telepaths, so the only thing they had was a kick-ass transportation system and advanced information storage. Maybe that’s why they never picked up a phone, they buzzed our planet, saw nuclear bombs and cruise missiles, and thought “Jeebus, we better not tick these guys off.”

I see no reason to buy into the scifi idea that all aliens, even the ones that could travel here, have to be super-godlike intelligent. I imagine that if alien civilizations exist, it’s more or less a Bell curve affair, and in all likelihood we’re somwhere in the middle. So I’d expect that if aliens came here, their technology would be comparable to ours at the point we develop interstellar travel, maybe a couple hundred years more advanced than now.

[Tuckerfan]

More importantly, if aliens have crashed on our backwards planet, why haven’t the aliens shown up to retreive their technology? As Wang-Ka points out, they’d have to have some pretty powerful stuff to get here, and that’s not something you’d want us to have.

If handing money and power to politicians is like handing whiskey and car keys to teenage boys, then handing ubertechnology to the military is like handing a fully loaded M-60 to a Postal worker on a killing spree. (No offense to either our Postal working or Military Dopers meant. It’s just that being handed something like alien technology would cause anyone to go, “Cool! I wonder what this button does?” Press the button, and a death ray shoots out, vaporizing everything in it’s path.)

[Whack-a-Mole]

*Originally posted by if6was9 *
…and with all defference if you are a Physicist, I am only an amatuer. Doesn’t, also, the energy that is required to move a mass at a speed of “99.999999% light speed” become exponential? Toward Infinity?

Sooooo…if you can get “arbitrarily close” to the speed of light, that means we could get anywhere in the Milky Way Galaxy (eventually,) but NEVER outside of it (to ANOTHER galaxy.)

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be hard as hell from an energy standpoint to reach 99.9999% light speed…just that if you could time would slow for you to such an extent that anywhere in the universe would be reachable in a matter of a few weeks tops from your perspective. If we had a LOT of antimatter* available you could probably design a ship that’d do the trick. Of course you run into other problems…for one thing travelling at a significant fraction of light speed would mean objects the size of a grain of sand would have sufficient energy to annihilate your ship if you hit them (which you almost certainly would eventually) so you need to invent a deflector dish ala Star Trek to keep them away. Your containment pod for all that antimatter would likewise be a beast of a thing.

Summed-up…you can do the things I’m talking about but they are amazingly hard in a practical sense to achieve. By today’s standards they are essentially impossible but who knows what might change in the future or with Alien tech sitting in Area-51?

You only reach an infinite power requirement to hit light speed which is of course one reason why you can’t reach light speed.

…and WAY BTW, as per **Whack-a-Mole’s[\i] OP, “e.g. galactic center at around 32,000 light years away” I think 32,000 light years is a RIDICULOUS guesstimate! More like 4 or 5 BILLION light years away (on average…) Maybe 8, maybe 2, but definitely G!

Not sure what you’re saying here. The center of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live is around 32,000 light years from earth. It’s not a guesstimate at all. If you mean the center of the Universe then the answer is a lot closer…we are at the center of the universe already (or more usually put there is no center but in a manner of speaking you can say any point is the center). The universe itself should be around 12-15 billion light years in radius unless you account for Inflation Theory in the very early universe in which case I have no idea how big it is but in a very real sense it is 12-15 billion light years anyway as far as we are concerned (anything beyind that essentially doesn’t exist for us even if something is actually there).

[sub]*We do already manufacture antimatter on earth and a few physics labs probably have some lying about even as we speak. I once heard that an ounce of antimatter would be sufficient to orbit the Space Shuttle. Unfortunately they calculated that if you increased our current lab’s production a thousand fold and built a thousand more labs at the same capacity it’d take us about a thousand years to get that ounce of antimatter. Remember you don’t get something for noting…you are essentially packing energy into a different form so if our hypothetical near-light speed spaceship took the equivalent total power plant output of the earth running for a hundred years (just an example) then you will need to do just that to fuel the spaceship (and probably more because you undoubtedly lose some energy in the conversion/storage process). It’d be nice to find an antimatter asteroid or something we could glom onto but I wouldn’t hold your breath for that.[/sub]

[eburacum45]

There are lots of theoretical interstellar drives- these are the ones we use-
Antimatter Drive
Total conversion Drive
Bussard Ramjet Particle Beamriders
Drive Sail Diametric Drive Pitch Drive
Bias Drive
None of them allow you to go faster than light…

[if6was9]

*Originally posted by Whack-a-Mole *
**Not sure what you’re saying here. The center of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live is around 32,000 light years from earth. It’s not a guesstimate at all. If you mean the center of the Universe then the answer is a lot closer…we are at the center of the universe already (or more usually put there is no center but in a manner of speaking you can say any point is the center). The universe itself should be around 12-15 billion light years in radius unless you account for Inflation Theory in the very early universe in which case I have no idea how big it is but in a very real sense it is 12-15 billion light years anyway as far as we are concerned (anything beyind that essentially doesn’t exist for us even if something is actually there).

Sorry, I thought you meant the whole universe.

Good thread!!!

[toadspittle]

*Originally posted by Wang-Ka *
**I was thinking more along the lines of “It’s feasible, but we need to convince the politicians to fund us while we explore the ramifications, and we need to do it in a manner even a pointy-headed wardheeler from Louisiana could understand.”

I mean, look at it this way: Imagine Dilbert found an alien artifact of immense power and potential. Now he has to convince the Pointy Haired Boss to pay him a paycheck for the next decade or so while he tinkers with it.

Do you begin to see the problem? **

That’s a great notion. They need to get the research far enough along to justify a trillion+ dollar expenditure to all the nimrods. After all, look at what continually happens to the funding for high-energy particle physics and NASA.

[kingpengvin]

So Aliens hop in their souped up ships and fly several (Million?) light years to here.

Why? Who knows they saw our TV or thehave a super duper lifometre that registers life on planets by some means that goes beyond mere light.

After a long trip that takes up a lot of resources they decide to pick up a few locals hanging out in the middle of nowhere and gang probe them. But one human is not enough so they have to probe over and over again picking up hundreds of these creatures and probing them. They’d step over their own mother beings just to probe another human, the perverts. A few lucky humans get tagged with alien trackers (no two are alike) and a few cattle get mutilated for kicks.

These aliens are sure a weird bunch. In fact when one of their ships crash not one mission is sent to recover the missing items or rescue their missing comrades.
I guess there is no time what with all the secretive probing still left to do.

I mean what the hell are these guys here for??

My guess is that they are a rogue group of space perverts who are really into the whole beastality (I mean we would be another species) thing. Their own culture denies their existence hence no formal contact.

The only technology on their ships that is salvagable has already been released into the adult market. That’s right your government is maqking its money from the kink out there.

Prove me wrong!

Gee it really is easy to invent a paranormal theory when you don’t have to follow the rules of evidence.

[laigle]

Don’t overlook the possibility it could be one of those lost superadvanced civilizations from right here on Earth. You know, Atlantis never was destroyed, they’ve been living on a magical invisible floating island for the last couple millenia, and every once in a while their teenagers get bored. Sort of like cow-tipping, only with drunk middle school dropouts from Mississippi.

Sort of makes sense too, they’d be analog of the semi-intelligent kid in some godforsaken farming town who spends his teenage years blowing things up.

[Inoshiro]

*Originally posted by laigle *
**Don’t overlook the possibility it could be one of those lost superadvanced civilizations from right here on Earth. You know, Atlantis never was destroyed, they’ve been living on a magical invisible floating island for the last couple millenia, and every once in a while their teenagers get bored. Sort of like cow-tipping, only with drunk middle school dropouts from Mississippi. **

Nonsense! Everyone knows the earth is hollow and the saucers come from holes the govt. made during early A-bomb tests. If only we hadn’t played around with atom the saucer people would still be trapped inside the earth.

[Whack-a-Mole]

*Originally posted by laigle *
**Don’t overlook the possibility it could be one of those lost superadvanced civilizations from right here on Earth. You know, Atlantis never was destroyed, they’ve been living on a magical invisible floating island for the last couple millenia, and every once in a while their teenagers get bored. Sort of like cow-tipping, only with drunk middle school dropouts from Mississippi.

Sort of makes sense too, they’d be analog of the semi-intelligent kid in some godforsaken farming town who spends his teenage years blowing things up. **

This reminds me of a bit from Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. One of the characters (an alien but he looks human) gets stranded on earth and his friend (who is human) asks him how he got to earth in the first place. He replies that he got a lift from ‘Teasers’. When asked what Teasers are he responds that they are rich kids who cruise the galaxy looking for planets that no one has made interstellar contact with. They then land next to some poor, unsuspecting fellow that no one will ever believe and strut up and down in front of him making ‘Beep Beep’ noises.

C’mon…you know you’d do the same thing if you could!

[Tuckerfan]

*Originally posted by Whack-a-Mole *
**This reminds me of a bit from Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. One of the characters (an alien but he looks human) gets stranded on earth and his friend (who is human) asks him how he got to earth in the first place. He replies that he got a lift from ‘Teasers’. When asked what Teasers are he responds that they are rich kids who cruise the galaxy looking for planets that no one has made interstellar contact with. They then land next to some poor, unsuspecting fellow that no one will ever believe and strut up and down in front of him making ‘Beep Beep’ noises.

C’mon…you know you’d do the same thing if you could! **

Yeah, which is why I find the whole “Prime Directive” business in Star Trek a bit silly.

[GodlessSkeptic]

As an aside, I do not buy the argument that there must be other intelligent life in the universe.Let’s say we do encounter an extra-terrestrial species…won’t we(humans and these aliens) then conclude that tehre MUST be other intelligent life forms out there…and so on and so on ad infinitum?Regardless of how many life forms there are in the univer, logic would suggest that ONE of these species is THE most advanced & intelligent species in the universe.So why can’t THAT species be humans?
By what rational does one conclude that intelligent aliens MUST exist somewhere?

[msmith537]

*Originally posted by GodlessSkeptic *
As an aside, I do not buy the argument that there must be other intelligent life in the universe.Let’s say we do encounter an extra-terrestrial species…won’t we(humans and these aliens) then conclude that tehre MUST be other intelligent life forms out there…and so on and so on ad infinitum?Regardless of how many life forms there are in the univer, logic would suggest that ONE of these species is THE most advanced & intelligent species in the universe.So why can’t THAT species be humans?
By what rational does one conclude that intelligent aliens MUST exist somewhere?

Because given the size and age of the universe, odds are we are not the only ones in it. Odds are that we aren’t even the most advanced. It’s all probability.
Not that I believe the gov’t has a secret alien spaceship or anything, but what makes people think we could reverse engineer an interstellar ship any more than scientists from 200 years ago could reverse engineer a stealth bomber? The materials, manufacturing techniques and components are just too far beyond anything a scientist back then could cook up in his lab.

[GodlessSkeptic]

*Originally posted by msmith537 *
**Because given the size and age of the universe, odds are we are not the only ones in it. Odds are that we aren’t even the most advanced. It’s all probability.
Not that I believe the gov’t has a secret alien spaceship or anything, but what makes people think we could reverse engineer an interstellar ship any more than scientists from 200 years ago could reverse engineer a stealth bomber? The materials, manufacturing techniques and components are just too far beyond anything a scientist back then could cook up in his lab. **

This is wrong, I think.By this reasoning then God and the tooth fairy must also exist.The universe is simply too vast for these things not to exist somewhere!

I will grant that the probability of extra-terrestrials is greater than that of gods or fairies because the existance of aliens would not, in itself be an extraordinary claim(that is their existence would not force us to throw out 2,000 years of study and observation) but I still fail to see how it is more likely that there is another “more advanced” species in the universe than it is that WE are that species!