Pentagon study finds no sign of alien life

[Ryan O'Dine]

To add, has the thought occurred to you that an advanced alien species who has developed ftl tech to visit and observe earth, could probably do so without anyone seeing them? Or, if they wanted it known they were here, they'd have the tech to let us know through incontrivertible means.

True. But now we're speculating on the motivation of a species we have no knowledge of. Who knows how they think, or what they want us to believe.

Note: I'm not personally arguing aliens have visited us. Just playing devil's advocate.

 

[Roboramma]

True. But now we're speculating on the motivation of a species we have no knowledge of. Who knows how they think, or what they want us to believe.

Note: I'm not personally arguing aliens have visited us. Just playing devil's advocate.

There's a fun idea that if we assume for a moment that UFOs are aliens, they must be allowing themselves to be seen on purpose, but only in those situations where no one will be able to fully confirm what they actually saw, and that since the aliens take into account the powers of observation of the people they expose themselves to, this will remain true regardless of improvements in our observation abilities (for example, as cell phone cameras become better and more ubiquitous, the aliens expose themselves less and in less obvious ways, at greater distance, etc...). Why would they do this? To create exactly the sort of mystique around alien visitors that has developed in our culture.

(No, I don't buy it, but it is a fun idea).

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

There's a fun idea that if we assume for a moment that UFOs are aliens, they must be allowing themselves to be seen on purpose, but only in those situations where no one will be able to fully confirm what they actually saw, and that since the aliens take into account the powers of observation of the people they expose themselves to, this will remain true regardless of improvements in our observation abilities (for example, as cell phone cameras become better and more ubiquitous, the aliens expose themselves less and in less obvious ways, at greater distance, etc...). Why would they do this? To create exactly the sort of mystique around alien visitors that has developed in our culture.

(No, I don't buy it, but it is a fun idea).

Just don't dig up that black monolith on the Moon.

 

[Puppycow]

It's a weak argument, but like Asimov(?) said, any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic. That's the straw the observer might (just) plausibly cling to here.

I would like to propose that no matter how advanced a technology is, it still must obey the laws of physics. There will never be a technology that can actually change the laws of physics to allow, e.g., time travel (into the past) or faster than light travel, teleportation, or anti-gravity. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I think there are really some hard limits in that sense.

That's why there will never be a Millennium Falcon, warp drive, or beaming people down to a planet and back like in Star Trek.

 

[Ryan O'Dine]

I would like to propose that no matter how advanced a technology is, it still must obey the laws of physics. There will never be a technology that can actually change the laws of physics to allow, e.g., time travel (into the past) or faster than light travel, teleportation, or anti-gravity. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I think there are really some hard limits in that sense.

That's why there will never be a Millennium Falcon, warp drive, or beaming people down to a planet and back like in Star Trek.

That's one of the beauties of physics, it's an unresolved science. Is there enough room for some of these seemingly impossible phenomena in the gaps? I think your position is, "No, pretty much not," and I respect that. I'm more of a romantic and like to think entire revolutions in our understanding are still possible. Those possibilities shrink every day, but your hard limits are my "let's wait and see."

Note: still not arguing for aliens

 

[theprestige]

Right, the "loophole" would only apply to personal observation.



That's a great example of a faulty interpretation of a prosaic observation, but see my clarification below...



That's true, my loophole is something of an "alien of the gaps."

----------------------

Just to belabor my point, and be a little clearer. I'm picturing an observer seeing a craft do impossible maneuvers and concluding aliens. We tell them, "That's physically impossible, it can't happen." The observer's loophole is, "Then my brain was filling in gaps for something it's never seen before and couldn't interpret, therefore aliens."

It's a weak argument, but like Asimov(?) said, any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic. That's the straw the observer might (just) plausibly cling to here.

My bad. I thought you were saying you believed there might be gaps in our understanding of physics that would allow for "unphysical" UFO behavior. If you're saying you think UFO believers will always find excuses to keep believing, I agree with that.

 

[theprestige]

I would like to propose that no matter how advanced a technology is, it still must obey the laws of physics. There will never be a technology that can actually change the laws of physics to allow, e.g., time travel (into the past) or faster than light travel, teleportation, or anti-gravity. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I think there are really some hard limits in that sense.

That's why there will never be a Millennium Falcon, warp drive, or beaming people down to a planet and back like in Star Trek.

That's one of the beauties of physics, it's an unresolved science. Is there enough room for some of these seemingly impossible phenomena in the gaps? I think your position is, "No, pretty much not," and I respect that. I'm more of a romantic and like to think entire revolutions in our understanding are still possible. Those possibilities shrink every day, but your hard limits are my "let's wait and see."

Note: still not arguing for aliens

I'm somewhere in between. I'm open to the possibility that things like telepoters and warp drives are possible in theory. But I think our understanding of the laws of physics is complete enough that we can be sure such things would require ridiculous mass-energy budgets. If there were aliens doing these things, we'd see the signs across the sky, on the order of millions of galaxies exploding every time they made a warp jump. If they were active in our arm of the Milky Way, **** would be popping off left and right, for the few seconds that "left" and "right" were still a thing in this corner of spacetime.

 

[Ryan O'Dine]

I'm somewhere in between. I'm open to the possibility that things like telepoters and warp drives are possible in theory. But I think our understanding of the laws of physics is complete enough that we can be sure such things would require ridiculous mass-energy budgets. If there were aliens doing these things, we'd see the signs across the sky, on the order of millions of galaxies exploding every time they made a warp jump. If they were active in our arm of the Milky Way, **** would be popping off left and right, for the few seconds that "left" and "right" were still a thing in this corner of spacetime.

It's hard to argue against that. Relativity may have replaced Newton, but if you violate Newton at low energies, you're still violating physics. Regardless of any future revolution, if you violate Einstein anywhere but at the heart of a singularity or the first milliseconds of the big bang, you're likewise still violating physics. All I can say is it's tough being a romantic.

 

[JayUtah]

The cautionary tale is the oft-repeated story of physics in the 19th century. As we commonly tell the tale to beginning students, the brightest minds of the era thought there was little more to discover in physics, and that but for a few loose ends we could write the last physics textbooks we would ever need. Newton laid the proper foundation, and the rest just followed as day the night.

We often tap-dance around the question of whether this should be considered hubristic. The observations possible at the time largely backed up the notion that there was little left to be discovered. If your theories cover all the observations you think it's possible to make, you should leave your theories alone. They are correct and complete and should not be idly questioned.

But then along came observations that led to new ideas in quantum electrodynamics and relativity. Modern theoretical physics would be unrecognizable to many luminaries of the 19th century. Indeed, many of them understandably resisted the need to open up these entirely new frontiers in physics.

The takeaway is that if physicists tell you there's no room for your pet theory, they're overstating their case. This simplified tale cautions us here because when we say we know enough about the laws of nature to preclude some of the claims attached to UFOs, we need to prepare for the criticism, "Yeah, you guys said this before and you were proven wrong." We need to take that criticism at face value and be prepared to explain why our objection makes more evidentiary sense this time than it did 200 years ago.

An important part of that explanation is the repeatability and control of the observation. We challenged the Newtonian model of the universe by observing things that violated it. These were scientific observations, made under controlled circumstances. Empirical controls allow us to preclude various interpretational pitfalls. UFO observations don't qualify because they are not properly controlled and remain too open to interpretation. What we interpret as a UFO violation of our current knowledge of the laws of physics can also be answered by observational uncertainty or anomaly. In fact, many ultimately are.

So it's quite all right to say we remain open to foundational changes in our understanding of physics. But we have to stick to the guns of saying only proper observation provides the impetus to consider one.

 

[JayUtah]

It's hard to argue against that. Relativity may have replaced Newton, but if you violate Newton at low energies, you're still violating physics.

Einstein changed how we think about objects moving through gravity fields, but he had nothing to say about objects moving through fluids. Not only is general relatively not even on the same page as fluid dynamics, it's not even in the same room—or staying at the same hotel. "Physics" encompasses the truly profound and the routinely observable.

Nor did Dirac and Fermi say much about objects moving through fluids on the macro scale. None of their reformulation of the nature of matter and energy at particle scale affected the reasoning behind how large herds of molecules computably react as fluids.

So you can't point to fundamental reformulations in one or two branches of physics and say that it's reasonable therefore to expect a fundamental rewrite in any or all the other branches. It's especially wishful to imagine that a fundamental rewrite will depart from the Newton-Einstein progression you describe above. Newton still holds well enough for gravity and geometry for small velocities and energies. There's no reason to suppose Newton and Euler will suddenly stop being valid at velocities and compositions we see today.

"The UFO streaked off at what must have been 10,000 miles per hour!" Physical objects moving through fluids at 10,000 mph is already within our ken. We call it "re-entry." We know what the effects are when that happens. To say there must be some new regime of physics that lets us omit only some of those predictable and observable effects, and coincidentally in a way that just happens to match what we think we see and want to attribute to aliens, is extremely wishful.

 

[Spektator]

"The UFO streaked off at what must have been 10,000 miles per hour!" Physical objects moving through fluids at 10,000 mph is already within our ken. We call it "re-entry." We know what the effects are when that happens. To say there must be some new regime of physics that lets us omit only some of those predictable and observable effects, and coincidentally in a way that just happens to match what we think we see and want to attribute to aliens, is extremely wishful.

<Martian voice>"Where's the sonic ka-boom? There should have been an ear-shattering sonic ka-boom."</Martian voice>

Once I heard former President Carter re-tell his UFO sighting, which took place in South Georgia in, if I recall correctly, 1969. He said he saw it one evening just as twilight ended and full night fell. It was a bright light that appeared about 30 degrees above the horizon. It brightened and changed colors, and (he thought) sizes. He said it seemed to zoom toward him and a few other observers, then immediately reverse course and zoom away. He estimated it stayed in sight for 15-30 minutes before it finally faded as it sank downward. Just as I thought "Venus!" someone in the audience asked him if it could have been Venus, but he said he knew what Venus looked like. Yet the time, the elevation, and the description all matched with what I had seen sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s on a cold, clear evening when an excited group of students on our campus were describing how a UFO was swinging like a pendulum and shooting beams of light.

It was Venus. Most likely what Mr. Carter saw was Venus, too.

 

[Axxman300]

I've seen two UFOs, one in 1985, and the other in 1998. Both at night with clear skies. One was probably a UH-60, which was a new aircraft at the time for Fort Ord replacing the Hueys. The other was a huge delta shape flying above commercial traffic, which where we were on the coast we could see aircraft on approach to San Jose Airport, and others coming in from the Pacific. My guess these days it was something like a lighter-than-air vehicle being tested in Nevada based on the direction change it made when it was directly over us.

I love airplanes, especially military aircraft of any kind. It's my experience that normal people (and I'm not normal, just weirdo) rarely look up, and if they know anything about fighters it's because they watched Top Gun. Some go to airshows, but understand that the aerobatics on display look 100% different at night with just running lights. Few people understand how far light can travel, and how light can distort over distance, and distort with atmospheric conditions. And most people have never seen modern jet fighters flying, and dogfighting at their combat speeds. They have no idea how fast fighters can move, and turn, and whip back and forth.

Here on the coast on most days you can still spot 747s coming in from Japan by counting the engines, and the wing shape. Harder to tell the newer jumbo jets these days without magnification. Some days the planes are crystal clear while others they're blurry. Their contrails come and go as they pass through air masses with varying temperatures,and moisture content, and altitude changes. From here it is impossible to tell if these jumbo jets are descending for airports in Las Vegas, or Denver due to the curvature of the earth. At night you can follow them from twenty miles out over the Pacific until they pop out of view over Nevada, maybe even further away.

So that light in the sky is probably ten miles away or more, moving slower, or faster than you think it is. Those 747s and other jumbo jets are cruising at over 550 mpk, but it's hard to tell this from just casually watching them from the ground. And those lights moving silently at great speed are probably far enough away to hide the sonic boom, and the engine noises.

Before I was kicked out of the local UFO discussion group for asking prickly questions a few of us brainstormed who the hell would even come to visit earth. We all agreed they would have to have ridiculous technology beyond anything within our understanding of physics, OR they're drones/ROVs similar to the ones we use to explore the solar system. These would be launched, and recovered from a mothership, also automated. Considering where we are in our galaxy, anyone coming here isn't A-list. We're probably getting the alien version of college undergrads. They don't interact with us for the same reason we don't interact with tadpoles.

And while our thought experiment was fun, it didn't answer important questions:

1. Why do they keep coming back? Are we really that interesting?
2. Why are the craft all different?
3.If we're getting visitors from different civilizations, why have none directly reached out to us? Where are the alien missionaries? Why not make contact us to gain favor over competing interests?

4. Why did the phenomenon change from the 1950s, 60s, & 70s where the UFO's "landed" leaving scorch marks, and landing gear impressions to the 80s onward where the UFOs/UAPs now hover silently. Why did the old craft have doors, and ramps, but the current model just "beam" people aboard?

The answer to all of these questions is simple: People think they're seeing something they're not, and then attach current science fiction tropes to the things they've seen. It's the difference between When the Earth Stood Still and Star Trek. This has been the situation since the end of WWII.

 

[Steve]

There's a fun idea that if we assume for a moment that UFOs are aliens, they must be allowing themselves to be seen on purpose, but only in those situations where no one will be able to fully confirm what they actually saw, and that since the aliens take into account the powers of observation of the people they expose themselves to, this will remain true regardless of improvements in our observation abilities (for example, as cell phone cameras become better and more ubiquitous, the aliens expose themselves less and in less obvious ways, at greater distance, etc...). Why would they do this? To create exactly the sort of mystique around alien visitors that has developed in our culture.

(No, I don't buy it, but it is a fun idea).

One Mr. Douglas Adams thought of essentially this in a novel he wrote some years ago:



“A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.”

“Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.

“Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really.” Ford leaned back on the mattress with his hands behind his head and looked infuriatingly pleased with himself.

 

[JayUtah]

Why do they keep coming back? Are we really that interesting?

When I was in high school I drew a cartoon showing two aliens in a flying saucer whizzing past Earth. One says to the other, "Ooh, let's stop here. I hear they have the best cow lips."

 

[Darat]

One Mr. Douglas Adams thought of essentially this in a novel he wrote some years ago:



“A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.”

“Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.

“Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really.” Ford leaned back on the mattress with his hands behind his head and looked infuriatingly pleased with himself.

I was going to paste that, it’s a reasonable explanation.

 

[Darat]

I remember this story : https://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=341328

Shows how even with today's ubiquitous high quality cameras people still want a mystery, lights in the sky are always good for a fireside story.

 

[arthwollipot]

I would like to propose that no matter how advanced a technology is, it still must obey the laws of physics. There will never be a technology that can actually change the laws of physics to allow, e.g., time travel (into the past) or faster than light travel, teleportation, or anti-gravity. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I think there are really some hard limits in that sense.

That's why there will never be a Millennium Falcon, warp drive, or beaming people down to a planet and back like in Star Trek.

I agree. We may not understand everything about physics but the gaps in our understanding are not big enough to fit FTL travel or teleportation. There's just no available gross mechanism that we haven't already thought of and ruled out.

By "we" of course I mean professional physicists.

 

[Roboramma]

I agree. We may not understand everything about physics but the gaps in our understanding are not big enough to fit FTL travel or teleportation. There's just no available gross mechanism that we haven't already thought of and ruled out.

By "we" of course I mean professional physicists.

I don't think that's actually quite true. There are some exotic possibilities for FTL that aren't actually completely ruled out, just unlikely to be possible in our universe. Wormholes, for instance, even "humanly traversable wormholes" seem very unlikely to be possible, not least because they'd require some sort of negative energy particle, and a lot of it, but we can't demonstrate their impossibility. And of course a wormhole is also an FTL device.

I remember Hawking had something he called the "chronology protection conjecture" or something. Basically, the conjecture that backward time travel is impossible. But it's a conjecture, not a theorem, because it's not actually proven.

In every case where we try to show a way to actually make things like FTL or time travel work, it turns out you can't get it to work in the universe as we know it, you need to add some ingredient. My prior that those things are actually possible is very low. But it's not quite right to say they're completely ruled out by modern physics.

Still, I'd be willing to bet quite a bit that it will turn out that they are ruled out by the actual laws of physics.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

<Martian voice>"Where's the sonic ka-boom? There should have been an ear-shattering sonic ka-boom."</Martian voice>

Once I heard former President Carter re-tell his UFO sighting, which took place in South Georgia in, if I recall correctly, 1969. He said he saw it one evening just as twilight ended and full night fell. It was a bright light that appeared about 30 degrees above the horizon. It brightened and changed colors, and (he thought) sizes. He said it seemed to zoom toward him and a few other observers, then immediately reverse course and zoom away. He estimated it stayed in sight for 15-30 minutes before it finally faded as it sank downward. Just as I thought "Venus!" someone in the audience asked him if it could have been Venus, but he said he knew what Venus looked like. Yet the time, the elevation, and the description all matched with what I had seen sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s on a cold, clear evening when an excited group of students on our campus were describing how a UFO was swinging like a pendulum and shooting beams of light.

It was Venus. Most likely what Mr. Carter saw was Venus, too.

Arnold saw pelicans. Roswell was MOGUL balloon. Brentwood was a lighthouse. The Phoenix lights were flares. Bob Lazar is a liar.

And on and on.

Just present one iota of physical evidence and I'll become a believer overnight.

 

[arthwollipot]

Still, I'd be willing to bet quite a bit that it will turn out that they are ruled out by the actual laws of physics.

Indeed. The Tipler Cylinder needs to be implausibly large. The Alcubierre drive requires a type of exotic matter that almost certainly can't exist. Not all solutions to General Relativity are actually realisable in this universe.