But not all heat is detectable by various instruments. If I'm designing an instrument to find human beings, I'm only going to be interested in temperatures between 98 and 100 degrees F. Sure, humans can give off heat above and below those ranges, but if they do, they're not going to be of interest of me, since they're unlikely to pose a threat. If I'm trying to find the exhaust temps of a fighter plane, I'm not going to worry about the temps produced by something which aren't in the range I expect a fighter to produce. Let me point you to a book by a former NASA scientist who saw a number of UFOs. He decided that rather than simply claiming something was "swamp gas" that he'd try and figure out the physics involved if it was an actual alien craft. It's got a shitload of math in it, and it erased all doubts that I might have had that the UFOs I saw (yes, I have seen more than one) weren't occupied by human beings. Yet, it is entirely possible for drone aircraft at the time (August 1986) to have done what I saw. So, I'm left with two choices: Aliens or remote-controlled drones. The drones make far more sense, even though I'm not aware of any operating at that time or in that particular location. Why? Because I know of people who could operate off-the-shelf gear with almost as much skill. If you assume that classified military tech is just a few years ahead of what civilians have access to, then it doesn't seem at all remarkable as to what I witnessed. Sure, it could have been aliens. Certainly what I saw was odd, no matter if it was a human-controlled drone or an alien spaceship, but without proof that it wasn't a drone, I can't rule that possibility out. And given that I know for a fact that the US military was using drones well before 1986, using Occam's Razor, a drone is the most likely solution. I mean, if a living creature had been inside the UFOs I saw, either the ship had to have all kinds of inertial dampeners, or they would have been a thin goo splattered all over the interior.
The gimble video is not just from radar or other sensors on the craft, it’s visual. It’s what the pilots saw. It’s an actual camera and it’s actually what they saw with their own two eyes. Not instruments.
Even if those pilots had heat vision, which they do not, you cannot say the craft does not produce heat from visuals outside. Even a camera that senses heat can be fooled. Watch the mythbusters episodes on beating heat sensing cameras and you will see the failings of cameras. To actually say that it does not produce heat you need to measure the heat of the machinery directly. That would mean having direct access to engine inside the craft which they did not do from their own claims. This is part of evaluating these claims for proof.
so drones can stop on a dime, change altitude and direction with incredible quickness etc? In other words even if the drones don't have pilot safety to consider can the drones still do things currently known aircraft cannot physically do? If so, then are there top secret drones already flying that can do amazing things? I'd like to know what aviation/space physics experts think about the videos.
Yes, they can. The cheap ones can do all of that. I would imagine the expensive ones can do much more amazing things. You know what is even more interesting is you can program waypoints and targets and they can react faster than a human pilot because computers are pretty fucking quick. They can even coordinate with each other better than we can. You have no idea.
Okay now I read The Night Funky's post about the physics experts. I guess the objects didn't do anything to extraordinary after all. And it makes sense that the pilots hadn't seen anything like this before if it's a secret program.
And Edgar Mitchel, another former NASA scientist who's actually been into space and the moon, said they were following them and monitoring them the whole time.
Until Have Blue no ‘currently known aircraft’ could defy the physics of radar (although even then it wasn’t known by many).
Har har. I didn't realise that @Federal Farmer was a UFO conspiracy loon. 15 year old me agrees with you!
So? Astronaut Gordon Cooper claimed to be in contact with aliens who were going to give us technology to help save the planet, but he never produced any of it. People lie all the time.
Olfella had an affair with Marina Sirtis actess that played Deanna troi in next generation. He was her costume designer.
Oh, and now that I think about it (and we've had this discussion before, but I'm not going to bother trying to find the thread), I'm not entirely certain that aliens would consider a trip from the Earth to the Moon to be all that big of a deal (like worth burying a monolith on the Moon for us to find). (The same is also true of the discovery of nuclear weapons.) Look at it this way, some 15K years ago, traveling from Asia to the Americas was a pretty fucking big deal. Regardless of if people walked across a landbridge or paddled their way over, it was a huge effort for them to do so. Now? It's a daily occurrence that people travel from Asia to the Americas (though none of them do it by walking). How much interest would a commercial cargo ship take in a group of Sentinelese (for example) paddling from one island to another? (Essentially what we did when we went to the Moon.) Anthropologists would no doubt be interested, but they'd also want to make sure they stayed a considerable distance away from the Sentinelese, and, ideally, they'd like to be able to make their observations without the Sentinelese knowing they were there. You know, so they didn't influence their society. Given that our best spysats have an image resolution of about 1 foot per pixel at a distance of 161 miles, I'd say that aliens would be able to do a lot better from much farther away. Unless, we're dealing with a The Road Not Taken type situation. In which case, they're basically fucked. Now, of course, I realize because of the Backfire Effect none of what I've posted will have changed your mind. (Oh, and everyone should definitely check out the You Are Not So Smart podcast before they start feeling too smug.) Let me just leave you with these thoughts: The hardest part of developing a radically new technology (like heavier than air craft, nuclear weapons, and the like) is just trying to figure out if it's possible. If you know something can be done, then it's simply a matter of figuring out how to go about it. (Which means trying lots of different ways of doing a thing until you hit upon something that works.) Officially, we have zero proof that aliens have visited this planet (and this comic makes a pretty good case for why that's right), which means the best we can say is that interstellar travel might be possible "someday." (There could be a whole host of reasons why it isn't that we just don't know about right now.) However, if the government has proof that there's interstellar travel (either because we've captured aliens or have definitively spotted them), then it simply becomes a matter of playing whack-a-mole with different technologies until we hit upon one which enables us to do this. The rational assumption in such a situation is that if we have proof, other nations will as well. Either because they've also captured aliens or someone in our operation has leaked the information to them. Whichever nation figures out how to accomplish interstellar travel will have a massive (probably immeasurable) technological advantage over other countries. At this point, it becomes imperative to throw as much money into figuring out interstellar travel as you can scrape up. That means lots of research into things like nuclear power, space telescopes (so we can find out where the aliens come from), and any number of potential propulsion methods for spacecraft. NASA's total budget is around $20 billion/yr, the US is putting about $6 billion into fusion research, and is not talking about building the Superconducting Super Collider, which would be more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. Does that sound like a government which knows there's aliens out there?
I've said this before on Wordforge, but I'll repeat myself: the longer we go without finding aliens, the more it looks like we're the most advanced civilization in our part of the galaxy. And that's kind of terrifying for a whole different set of reasons.
Just imagine a universe where we were literally the smartest thing in existence. That would be disappointing.
the thought that humans (or even life) might truly be unique to our planet - in the entire universe - is unsettling to me, but not terrifying. It's kind of comforting to know that nobody is spying on us, nobody is pulling any strings, nobody is judging us. There are no greater motivations or purposes or reasons for our existence. This life is not just a "warm up" or testing period for an eternal existence. Life is truly making it up as it goes along because nothing like life existed before, and nothing like life will exist when it's gone. Thus every living thing is either: 1) extremely precious and miraculous or 2) none of us are important because we have no influence on the rest of the universe whatsoever and our story will never be told or heard except among one species So IMHO life should not be taken for granted because we beat long, long odds just by our mere existence, there are no "do overs", and the default state is non-existence whether for living things or even non-living things. Nothingness will return when the universe ends. Life is (in the grand scheme of things or rather the lack of a grand scheme) short, hard and brutal and over before you know it. But it's the only game in town and we are all (from microbes to Albert fucking Einstein) fellow travelers on this rocky planet sharing this incredible ride.
I don't like that theory because it would mean that @Dayton Kitchens is more intelligent than 99% of life in the galaxy.
I had an idea hit me the other day which could (were it to be true) solve both the Fermi Paradox and the "missing mass of the universe" problem. Imagine, if you will, a highly advanced civilization which has the kind of technological ability to do anything they want (provided the laws of physics allow it). Such a civilization is probably going to find living in a solar system (or even several) cramp's their style. There are all kinds of things that you have to worry about: errant asteroids, the sun exploding, or just "burping" out annoying levels of radiation that scramble your electronics, etc.) What you'd want it some kind of controlled environment that not only was as large as you needed it to be, but you also didn't have to worry about things like asteroids or exploding stars ruining your day. So, think of it as something like a Dyson sphere on steroids. (And even if you were a race of beings like the Kaylon, you'd still want this.) As a consequence of building these structures (since they're using super-advanced materials that we can't even imagine, along with energy sources we've not conceived of) they're almost completely invisible to our instruments. We can detect the influence that they have on other things, but we can't detect them at all. These would be the dark matter "halos" surrounding the various galaxies. Presently, physics assumes that all galaxies start out with a ratio of dark matter to normal matter of 5:1 (and suddenly, I have an idea for Jim Morrison teaching astrophysics) and that if a galaxy is below a certain size, it will gradually lose its normal matter and become mostly dark matter. But what if that's not how it works? What if the amount of dark matter a galaxy has is actually an indication of how many hyper-advanced civilizations it has, and how long they've been there? Now, to get really mind-bendy for a second, imagine, if you will, that dark matter and normal matter don't come together to make galaxies, but that galaxies are merely a side-effect of the creation of dark matter civilizations. We would, effectively, be little more than cockroaches living in the trash heap of an advanced society. Gotta admit it does explain a whole lotta of things. I mean, super-advanced aliens aren't going to want to go poking around in their garbage dump to try and talk to roaches. We should all be glad they haven't decided to hit us with a cosmic can of Raid.
Good god, and I thought my theories that stars were actually conscious and communicating with each other on time scales we could not possibly perceive because we could never see enough to discern a language was a bit space dreamy. Of course, I was also figuring given their abilities to warp space time and longevity they might have a process for instantanious communication across large distances via mass emmissions of quantum particles and links they can generate due to their high energy output. But anyway. The only problems I come up with on this are that you are talking about a spherical structure that would use up the matter of a galaxy or solar system even in a very thin structure when we talk about it. Large portions of the space are simply just space even if you consider dark matter. When you consider energy sources on a nuclear level are often compressed matter you would run into a problem of what would power such a structure across it's entire areas when your star matter would most likely need to be used for manufacturing the surface area. Of course, it might be that the vast distances of nothing between galaxies could have once had more matter that was used up for such a venture, but to that extent what is the real purpose? When you consider the size of a population that would make use of such a thing it would be somewhat insane. Unless, of course, the population was stars themselves which would be so massive that they would rip the shell apart it would really be a lot of superfluous construction. Why do such a thing? Especially when you consider the idea that the condensed matter and energy that creates thought would actually slow down on such a massless scale. I am talking about relativity where outside of the gravity well created by globs of matter time travels much slower. My thought would be that as you dealt with energy manufacture and existence for a race of matter based beings you would start to go towards more density as it seems advancements in communications, power, and existence seem to get more advanced as you have more matter in contact with each other. Which goes back to my idea on stars and large planets having conscious thoughts present in their systems. That is considering thoughts as organized patterns of impulses rather than that just present in carbon based neurons. But on a more grand universal scale it might be that when you consider sub atomic patterns things like you hypothesize may actually exist if you consider a sort of conscious thought as existing within stars. In these cases the stars may communicate via forces we do not quite see clearly which may encompass a large space. For instance a solar system may be ormed by the will of a star and it's control of gravitation and radiational forces. So there might be some form of boundary of that existence that may be formed on the solar system and even galaxy based existence. This may be the reason why matter had congregated into these systems, and things like spin and gravity may be the operational forces of these thoughts.
Drones still have to follow the laws of physics. They can certainly pull off maneuvers that can not be done with a pilot on board but if we are to listen again to what the pilots on the Navy planes were saying about how the UFO's were moving we know that there is no drone made by a human that can do those maneuvers.
Are you listening to what you are saying. Alien technology is not magical It would be based on the same physics we have to deal with. So if an alien craft can pull off those moves in our atmosphere it is within our abilities to develop a craft in secret that can do those moves in our atmosphere. Navy pilots are not all privy to the technological limits of our commercial and military developments. It would also make sense if some secret project were to be testing itself it would go near our advanced modern military craft. That would be the craft it would be competing against in the world, and that would also be the best way to secure and look at data regarding the contact. We don't know there is no drone made by man that can do those maneuvers.
Again, unless we're talking about a The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove situation, what I'm saying isn't even a remote stretch. If you haven't watched the series Connections, which is how one scientific discovery leads to others in very unexpected areas, you should check it out. How unexpected? As one of the first episodes demonstrates, if it weren't for the development of a particular type of plow in ancient Egypt, we'd never have developed nuclear weapons. If you can build something which can survive crossing even 4 lightyears, you can figure out how to ensure that a society such as ours won't be able to find it. Heck, even if something as simple as the Voyager probes showed up in our system, we'd have trouble spotting them.
Are you listening? No you're not. You're shooting off your mouth like an idiot as usual. Obviously an alien craft powered by an alien engine that can cross interstellar space to come to our little planet probably has the power to do whatever the fuck it wants. We humans on the other hand do not have that ability to build drones like that. We have neither the technology nor the material science to make drones that can maneuver like the pilots were talking about. As a perfect example: While we can mask heat from engines what we can't do is mask heat from outside the craft. Get that craft traveling at very high mach speeds and it's going to get very hot. We are going to be able to see that. These UFO's on the other hand traveled at those super high mach speeds and we still had trouble keeping track of them.
