Midnight In The Desert

[GravitySucks]

Thanks you guys! It's been a nice fun thread tonight!

I've got to go downstairs to start a nice pork roast in the slow cooker. See y'all in a bit over in Hoaxland! 

Cya

[Element 115]

I couldn't keep up, I mean I might be an alcoholic and all but this is rediculous.

Hahaha she had to say it again at the end wow

[TigerLily]

Night everyone. Enjoyed the show and enjoyed your company

[Element 115]

Night all! Great thread, great show.

[swordpoint9]

Night everyone. Enjoyed the show and enjoyed your company

Night Tier Lily !

[akwilly]

Ya that last "interesting" really was uncalled for. Burp.

[TigerLily]

Night Tier Lily !

Night, sweetie

[Element 115]

Ya that last "interesting" really was uncalled for. Burp.

lol, have a good night

[Jackstar]

Wrong guest but still in the ballpark 

The penalty for accuracy is death.

thats the one thing i hate what she and RCH..even Art did..try to rush in one last call

I love putting a caller on the time pressure, and more voices to drown out Crystal Gale are welcomed at this point.

[Chronaut]

That could be true. If they wanted to show us what's possible, they should donate a craft. Maybe they already have donated a craft. Is your sighting documented online for me to read? Did you submit it to Peter?

Donating the technology would make them responsible for the outcome, and since we use literally -every- technological advancement to slaughter people more efficiently, that would give anyone pause.  So I'm doubtful of donations, but crash retrievals may be a different matter.

I was only 7 when I had my daylight group sighting, so I'm not even sure which month it was.  I've considered writing a report, but it was only a pair of lights zig-zagging at high velocity, so I don't know if it would be useful to anyone.  I chatted with a school teacher who clearly saw a metal disc with running lights drop straight down from the sky and hover for an hour over some woods, before rapidly zig-zagging across the landscape out of sight.  She was about 20 at the time, and watched with a crowd of at least a dozen people, and a cop who came to the scene.  It was in the paper too.  Now that was a hell of a sighting.

[Dr. MD MD]

Panspermia? Or what's the word when we try to make sense of something alien by making it into something we are familiar with?

It's either anthropomorphize or fractal geometry 

[TigerLily]

Ya that last "interesting" really was uncalled for. Burp.

lol

[SciFiAuthor]

Panspermia? Or what's the word when we try to make sense of something alien by making it into something we are familiar with?

Anthropomorphization is the word for it. People actually fear things that look liked screwed up humans more than they do things that look like cute house cats or graceful jellyfish. But in reality evolution adheres to certain conditions present on a planet, plus a lot of chance, so they could look like anything so long as they have the physical ability to create technology. Yet they're almost always magically configured like humans one way or another presumably to play on the maximum fear value.

[TigerLily]

It's either anthropomorphize or fractal geometry 

Yeah. Like that

[Jackstar]

Anthropomorphization is the word for it. People actually fear things that look liked screwed up humans more than they do things that look like cute house cats or graceful jellyfish. But in reality evolution adheres to certain conditions present on a planet, plus a lot of chance, so they could look like anything so long as they have the physical ability to create technology. Yet they're always configured just like humans one way or another to play on the maximum fear value.

Are you aware that you're conflating reality with literary technique?

[Element 115]

Donating the technology would make them responsible for the outcome, and since we use literally -every- technological advancement to slaughter people more efficiently, that would give anyone pause.  So I'm doubtful of donations, but crash retrievals may be a different matter.

I was only 7 when I had my daylight group sighting, so I'm not even sure which month it was.  I've considered writing a report, but it was only a pair of lights zig-zagging at high velocity, so I don't know if it would be useful to anyone.  I chatted with a school teacher who clearly saw a metal disc with running lights drop straight down from the sky and hover for an hour over some woods, before rapidly zig-zagging across the landscape out of sight.  She was about 20 at the time, and watched with a crowd of at least a dozen people, and a cop who came to the scene.  It was in the paper too.  Now that was a hell of a sighting.

Wow, nice. And yes I agree, we're the last species they'd want to share their technology with.

[SciFiAuthor]

Are you aware that you're conflating reality with literary technique?

Aliens visiting this planet is almost certainly not reality Jack. Possible yes, but it's also possible to win the lottery by buying a quick pick ticket. It's even less likely that they would look anything like us.

[ge30542]

I'm sick and tired of hearing people say, "like I say/said..." It's like they're announcing their intention to be redundant.

It should be "as I said/was saying". Like is used in a simile, comparing different things, "this pork smells LIKE my ex-wife".

[Chronaut]

They're probably ready to move on to simply strangling us in our sleep.

Haha - I'm not saying that they're evil, necessarily, but the secrecy surrounding advanced research is waay the hell out of control.

Finishing point: Karen Silkwood.

You're often so cryptic that I only understand about 1/3 of your posts.  This isn't one of them :/

[GravitySucks]

It's either anthropomorphize or fractal geometry 

Pareidolia

[Chronaut]

Aliens visiting this planet is almost certainly not reality Jack. Possible yes, but it's also possible to win the lottery by buying a quick pick ticket. It's even less likely that they would look anything like us.

Calculating the likelihood of visitations of alien technology to Earth is highly subjective business - one can't speak authoritatively about it.  But the more we learn about our galaxy, the more likely it becomes that the Milky Way is rife with life, so the odds keep going up that intelligent life is fairly common, perhaps even intelligent life with far superior capabilities than ours.

Add that to the best sightings and radar cases, and arguing against alien visitation is gradually becoming an indefensible position.

[SciFiAuthor]

Calculating the likelihood of visitations of alien technology to Earth is highly subjective business - one can't speak authoritatively about it.  But the more we learn about our galaxy, the more likely it becomes that the Milky Way is rife with life, so the odds keep going up that intelligent life is fairly common, perhaps even intelligent life with far superior capabilities than ours.

Add that to the best sightings and radar cases, and arguing against alien visitation is gradually becoming an indefensible position.

It's probably rife with life, but to buy into the UFO stuff one must do two things: 1. Conclude that relativity is wrong and can be defeated and faster-than-light travel is possible. That doesn't seem possible, but if it is no matter how you cut it, it's going to be really expensive as far as energy is concerned and you'd need a compelling reason to attempt it. 2. There's some reason why advanced alien civilizations would care about lower civilizations. We don't, when was the last time you cared about looking at an ant hill? How much money are you willing to spend to do it? The main argument has been that they need our DNA for reproduction, but why would an advanced civilization need to screw around with harvesting DNA when they should be able to chemically manufacture it? We already are in the early stages of that. I just don't see why they would care.

[Chronaut]

It's probably rife with life, but to buy into the UFO stuff one must do two things: 1. Conclude that relativity is wrong and can be defeated and faster-than-light travel is possible. That doesn't seem possible, but if it is no matter how you cut it, it's going to be really expensive as far as energy is concerned and you'd need a compelling reason to attempt it. 2. There's some reason why advanced alien civilizations would care about lower civilizations. We don't, when was the last time you cared about looking at an ant hill? How much money are you willing to spend to do it? The main argument has been that they need our DNA for reproduction, but why would an advanced civilization need to screw around with harvesting DNA when they should be able to chemically manufacture it? We already are in the early stages of that. I just don't see why they would care.

Those are both interesting points, I’ll respond to each separately:

1.)  Operating within the context of special relativity, interstellar transport is still perfectly practical â€" in fact, time dilation can be a real asset.  For example, imagine that we had an accelerator in space and we could launch small probes to stars in our general galactic vicinity at some substantial percentage of the speed of light.  Let’s pick Alpha/Beta Centauri as an obvious example.  Such a probe could arrive at that system with an arbitrarily short flight time due to time dilation, we’ll say one year by the probe’s clock.  It would only need a power source with a one-year life span or better, so it could send data back to us (using a laser perhaps) when it arrived.  That means we could have data and photos of that system in less than a decade.  Similarly, if we could accelerate at a constant rate of 1G, time dilation would permit a human being to circumnavigate the visible universe within one human lifetime.  Getting the details of our trip back to Earth within the lifespan of the Sun would be impossible, but if your craft were a large and comfortable home for you and your friends and family, then returning to your planet of origin might not be a priority â€" after all, you’d get to explore the universe up close and personal before you died; not a bad life.

But it’s quite clear from the observations of craft by radar and eyewitnesses that they’re using a field propulsion technology to warp the spacetime surrounding the craft.  This explains the dearth of emissions, the high-speed acute angle trajectories, the silent hovering, and also eliminates any time dilation complications.  As initially described in Miguel Alcubierre’s seminal paper on warp field propulsion, a craft propelled via a polarized gravitational field falls along a null geodesic, so with sufficient field intensity, it could travel from the Andromeda galaxy to the Earth in, say, one hour, by both the on-board clock, and the clock at its origin.  So it could make the round trip in two hours, and never feel any acceleration whatsoever.  This is permissible within the context of general relativity.  There are still questions about the hypothetical positive energy condition theorem, but the discovery of dark energy illustrates that negative spacetime curvature can be produced with positive energy density, which renders that objection moot.  We don’t yet understand dark energy well enough to produce it technologically, but that’s most likely just a matter of time for our physical science to evolve.

Interestingly, neither of these examples require a prohibitive quantity of energy.  With the “relativistic probe” approach, the probe can be quite small, given recent advancements in our technology, which can drastically reduce the requisite energy to achieve a substantial fraction of C.  And all of that motive energy is imparted to the probe before it’s jettisoned toward the destination star.  Solar energy could power the accelerator, or perhaps we could harvest the positron field around the earth.

Warping spacetime in both directions requires a great deal of energy â€" initially Alcubierre estimated that a mass equivalent to the planet Jupiter would be required (!).  However, he hadn’t attempted to optimize the energy requirements to produce the field.  Using computer simulations, Dr. Harold “Sonny” White at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has found that a diffuse warp shell requires far less energy â€" he’s reduced it down to the mass of a Volkswagen bug.  And Dr. Eric Davis has proposed a novel concept of oscillating the field intensity to “soften” spacetime to make it more malleable.  It that proves to be valid, additional substantial energy reductions may be on the horizon.  The Eagleworks team is currently attempting the first experimental warp field detection using a small bench-top device.  I wish them luck.

But there’s an even more fascinating theoretical twist pertaining to warp field energy.  In addition to the fact that the energy only needs to be introduced once, and from that point forward only requires the replacement of containment leakage, the truth is that, at least theoretically, no energy is actually required to produce the field at all:  a substantial positive energy is required to produce a positive gravitational field gradient ahead of the craft, and an equal quantity of negative energy is required to produce a negative curvature aft of the craft:  these sum to zero.  Perhaps one day we’ll figure out how to produce equal quantities of positive and negative energy, and we’ll be able to create fields as large and as intense as we wish.

2.)  Why would they bother to visit or send automated probes here?  Why not?  Our anthropologists enjoy studying primitive societies, why wouldn’t theirs?  In fact we’d be quite interested in studying alien life, even unintelligent alien life.  Learning about emerging new forms of intelligent life like we have here on Earth seems like it would be quite intriguing and educational.  We even study ant colonies, so why wouldn’t they study us?  Especially since we’re already a space faring civilization on the fast track to becoming an interstellar space faring civilization soon â€" and one with an intensely violent nature at that.  Keeping an eye on us may be a matter of grave planetary security to them, as Stanton Friedman suggests.  In any case, life is always interesting, and it’s our own primary interest in reaching out into the universe; we’d be foolish to think they’d feel differently about it.  And perhaps every planetary evolutionary system offers new systems of biology and genetics that may be useful to their science â€" I’m sure that most exobiologists here on Earth would give their right arm for a leaf from some alien planet to study.  Just imagine what our medicine might learn from an intelligent specimen â€" what kinds of immune systems might be out there that we could devise new treatments from; or tissue repair mechanisms, etc?  It’s difficult to imagine that even an advanced civilization couldn’t learn something from a complete ecosphere like ours…we’re still learning a great deal about it ourselves.

[Ciardelo]

Those are both interesting points, I’ll respond to each separately: ...

Sry buddy TL:DR.

Can't you boil that thing down to an "elevator" talk?  You know what I mean right?

[Chronaut]

Sry buddy TL:DR.

Can't you boil that thing down to an "elevator" talk?  You know what I mean right?

Sorry about that; just trying to be thorough.

1.)  Relativity doesn't prohibit interstellar spaceflight - in fact it provides powerful tools to achieve it.  It's only a matter of time before we can romp around the stars with ease, so other intelligent life is probably already doing it, and dropping by the Earth as casually as we walk down to the corner store.  And

2.)  The Earth is a reasonably interesting place, especially since it's the home to a rapidly technologically evolving primate species that likes to kill things, and may soon pose a danger to other intelligent life forms in the stellar neighborhood.  Advanced alien species would be remiss if they didn't keep a close eye on our progress.

The rest is pretty much just details =)

[Ciardelo]

Sorry about that; just trying to be thorough.

1.)  Relativity doesn't prohibit interstellar spaceflight - in fact it provides powerful tools to achieve it.  It's only a matter of time before we can romp around the stars with ease, so other intelligent life is probably already doing it, and dropping by the Earth as casually as we walk down to the corner store.  And

2.)  The Earth is a reasonably interesting place, especially since it's the home to a rapidly technologically evolving primate species that likes to kill things, and may soon pose a danger to other intelligent life forms in the stellar neighborhood.  Advanced alien species would be remiss if they didn't keep a close eye on our progress.

The rest is pretty much just details =)

thx. Shiney! 

[Chronaut]

thx. Shiney! 

No problemo amigo - relativity and advanced propulsion concepts are central passions in my life, so I get a little carried away when they come up.  Most people aren't familiar with the theoretical advancements of the last 20 years, so you still see a lot of people citing light speed and energy requirements as fundamental obstacles to ufo visitation.  But we'll see gravitational field propulsion technology within the next century or two, if not within our lifetimes, and that's going to turn everything on its head - distance will become largely irrelevant at that point.  In fact a paper just come out proposing a technique for producing gravitational waves in the lab, so that might be the next big step after the Large Hadron Collider.  It's an exciting time for physics =)

[21st Century Man]

Oh great, tonight's guest is associated with Benjamin Creme.

[Auslandia]

I don't care for Crystal Gayle.

[Lilith]

I don't care for Crystal Gayle.

Sad to say, same here. lol's