To dismiss all evidence of UAP's out of hand as "illogical" is just as unscientific as to accept them as being proof of ET visitation.
It may be that all these claimed observations are the product of some sort of collective psychosis, as this article appears to assume, but that's just one hypothesis among many others. Empirical questions require empirical investigation, not ignoring the question.
I did used to entertain the idea of aliens visiting this solar system.
And then I better understood the stupendous energy requirements for a two-way trip to even the very closest neighboring solar system. And it is just not practical, even for a civilization at the end of the technology development tree.
We might see one-way probes, but they are as likely to be a part of hegemonizing swarm, looking to convert all usable matter in the solar system into computronium. Certainly they're not going to just faff around, kidnap a few people and then leave quietly.
When aliens visit, everyone will know. Luckily, we haven't seen any evidence of Kardashev type-2 civilizations nearby, so we may be good for a while. Though that's also sort of depressing, as it is weak evidence that life is not too common across the galaxy.
> even for a civilization at the end of the technology development tree.
How do we know what the end of the technology development tree looks like? There are just so many mysteries that remain within our current understanding of science, we can’t say for sure that it’s not easy (for example) to bend space time or some other possibility that makes faster than light travel possible. Quantum entanglement, for example, breaks many of our assumptions about the impossibility of FTL travel.
> When aliens visit, everyone will know.
Maybe, but perhaps a civilisation that has survived the great filter would look differently at civilisations they stumble upon. Maybe, like we do when searching for microbes on Mars, they would try not to disturb the life they discover.
This is all just speculation of course, but I think when looking at this topic it’s all too easy to apply a human centric view on what’s possible and what’s not, and the truth is we just know so very little. Or, we know a lot, but there are so many more mysteries than solved problems.
While I would also not presume to know how different our understanding of the universe may look in hundreds (or thousands!) of years, I do draw some exception to the following comment:
>Quantum entanglement, for example, breaks many of our assumptions about the impossibility of FTL travel.
Quantum entanglement can produce correlated measurements between systems, even when the entangled systems are separated by large distances. In a sense, this can be used to measure the state of an entangled system at great displacement "faster" than it would take light to travel from that distant system to the observer. However, the state of the entangled systems is prepared before the systems are separated from one another (at much less than the speed of light.) Any attempt to change the state of one of the entangled systems (at a distance) breaks the entanglement. Entanglement cannot be used to communicate information from one point to another faster than the speed of light. It certainly doesn't allow FTL transfer of matter/energy.
> However, the state of the entangled systems is prepared before the systems are separated from one another
Isn’t the state still a probabilistic one at that point though? As in it’s not until it’s observed later that both particles instantaneously collapse into a correlated state. But the precise outcome of the observation isn’t determined before they’re separated.
My understanding of quantum mechanics is far too limited to really dive into this, but my point isn’t that it enables FTL communication or travel directly.
Rather my understanding is that it appears to break our previous assumptions - physicists haven’t yet settled on a way to unify relativity and quantum physics [1] which leaves many possibilities open. We still just don’t know enough to say it’s definitely impossible.
>Isn’t the state still a probabilistic one at that point though? As in it’s not until it’s observed later that both particles instantaneously collapse into a correlated state. But the precise outcome of the observation isn’t determined before they’re separated.
This is correct.
I’ve never looked too deeply into this, but why can’t someone use something like Morse Code to communicate? Say you had 50 buckets of entangled entities, that would get you 50 dots and dashes.
Because if you attempt to influence the state of the entangled bits--say, to set a bit to up/down (dot/dash or zero/one) state to form your message--you will break the entanglement. You can measure the states of the unperturbed entangled bits, and therefore know about the states of their distant entangled partners, but the message will be random. You could also influence the states of the bits while you create the entangled pairs, but then you have to carry them far away from one another (at less than the speed of light), so you won't be able to communicate FTL; you would just have a pair of messages in a bottle, so to speak.
There’s no way breaking one entanglement breaks all others across the universe, right? So what I was saying is, just have 50 different pairs of entangled bits. You could only send a 50 bit message once, but bam, you have FTL communication.
>And then I better understood the stupendous energy requirements for a two-way trip to even the very closest neighboring solar system. And it is just not practical, even for a civilization at the end of the technology development tree.
You're still looking at hundreds of years or more for a nearby two-way trip.
It is far more practical to send out probes one-way (which is quite slow), and then build the infrastructure at the destination to receive transmitted mind-states.
The initial probes take a long time to reach their destinations, because they have to have means to deaccelerate. The faster you accelerate, the more mass you have to carry with you to deaccelerate.
It's our current understanding of physics. Those limitations might be impassable. Or it might be possible that there is a higher physics where things like the speed of light are bypassed. Like discovering that quantum entanglement is based on some mechanism that can be manipulated to communicate faster than light, or one can skip over distances through higher dimensions, or we decode the source code of the automata that creates the universe and it's immediately replaced by one even more bizarre. There are some theories that this has already happened :)
The point is it's arrogant to say what's impossible for all time, because nearly everything we do today was impossible a short thousand years ago.
I think it's important to break the conversation clearly into two parts: Here's what could be true about aliens if we're largely correct about physics, and here's what could be true ignoring that constraint.
The problem is people want to have really muddled conversations about that. The people having the second kind of conversation yelling at the people having the first kind of conversation is probably the most frustrating element of all, especially when they strike a morally superior pose which is, IMHO, entirely unjustified.
If you want to ignore all current science and astrophysics when you discuss aliens... fine. Be my guest. No sarcasm. I have some beliefs on that front myself. BUT... you need to be aware that you're basically engaging in groundless speculation, and in particular, you have no grounds to be yelling at people about their groundless speculation.
We can have a much more grounded discussion about what aliens could look like if we are largely correct about science. And there's no need to accuse people about being "arrogant" if they choose to have that discussion, because frankly, of the two, it's the more interesting one. The "well, what if we're wrong about everything?" may seem like fun for a moment, but there's no there there, really. What if we're wrong about everything? Well, what if we are? What if we're all just in an ancestor simulation... but the descendants running it are super-advanced honey bees running their ancestors and we just happen to be around? Well... what if? There's nowhere to go, or if you prefer, there's nowhere you can't go, which is actually the exact same thing.
On the other hand, if we stick to biology and cosmology and relativity and science in general, we can have all sorts of interesting discussions. What about that result on Venus? That's a question rich enough to build a concrete career on. What would aliens look like in our real universe? How much more advanced could they be? Would they, in fact, build rather human-sized spaceships that are apparently capable of crossing the interstellar void, but not flying around in our atmosphere without crashing into things? Would they in fact need to keep kidnapping humans over and over for decades on end? Sensible discussions can be had on these matters if we start from a concrete base. The whole "But what if we're, like, wrong about everything and we're, like, actually soap bubbles floating in the wind?" discussion has nowhere interesting to go, because it creates just one big undifferentiated and indistiguishable mismash of what ifs.
You're probably not addressing me specifically, but there is no yelling in my comment.
I do think we have to ground any interesting discussion by what is possible within the limits of science. Otherwise we're just talking fantasy.
For the most part, I do not think we should discuss the limits of engineering, that is what's practical or not, because we're nobody to say what is practical to a type II or type III civilization.
My dad's astronomy professor told the class it's impossible by the laws of physics to create a telescope that can see exoplanets. He went through the equations to show you could never build a telescope mirror to accomplish that. What he didn't think of is we found other ways to create bigger telescopes and we used gravitational lensing to zoom in on a distant star. Nothing in our understanding of physics changed to allow that, merely a change in how we looked at the problem. That's why it's so arrogant. We don't know everything about what is possible or not, and one day we might just see a way around limitations that seem absolute today. Our short history is filled with us doing that again and again.
"You're probably not addressing me specifically, but there is no yelling in my comment."
Yes, my apologies for the implication. I deliberately wanted to pick a more sensible comment to post under.
"For the most part, I do not think we should discuss the limits of engineering, that is what's practical or not, because we're nobody to say what is practical to a type II or type III civilization."
There's two aspects to engineering we can talk about; fundamental limits, and whether we can attain those fundamental limits.
If you look up the concept of computronium, you'll find a discussion of the fundamental limits of data storage in our universe, for instance. Proposing an alien civilization that exceeds those is stepping into fantasy. We can sensibly discuss what just isn't possible.
On the other hand, given that the "fundamental limit" is "the number of bits you can encode on the event horizon of a black hole", it's at least plausible to consider that no possible engineering project could ever create such a storage device. It's hard to talk about the "what is possible" side.
Yes, I agree. We're probably not going to exceed fundamental limits.
However, some number of fundamental limits might turn out not to be fundamental or there might be a way around rather than through them. We can't be 100% sure of what's impossible, but it is stepping into the realm of the extremely unlikely, at least from our current understanding of the universe.
> The point is it's arrogant to say what's impossible for all time, because nearly everything we do today was impossible a short thousand years ago.
I never said impossible, I said impractical.
If you are content with really long travel times (thousands or tens of thousands of years one-way), then of course you can travel to other stars.
By the time such means are available, I doubt that entities will bother with shipping matter two ways over such distances.
Also, if you're talking about an uploaded or otherwise synthetic consciousness, that entity may be experiencing time a 100x or more faster than a baseline human does now. So a then thousand year trip would seem like a million years. That's a long time to stay away.
That seems likely from our perspective, but it's pretty arrogant to think we understand the limitations and desires of civilizations millions or even billions of years ahead of us.
Certainly we would have failed at that task of predicting our own limits and desires just hundreds of years ago, nevermind an alien race.
> It's arrogance because you think that your current system of science is relevant. Civilization has been around for only 5000 years.
So, if magic exists, there also might be aliens. Got it.
> How do you know other planets do not have elements that have anti-matter properties?
Well, we haven't observed anything that gives even a hint that something like that exists.
The matter / antimatter disparity is still quite a mystery. But we don't see any evidence of antimatter out there in any significant quantities. So if aliens want to use it, they have to make it the hard way, just like we do.
Beyond current state-of-the-art technology would make manufacturing and containment of antimatter easier, but even then it is a long way from practical.
> I did used to entertain the idea of communicating near instantly over great distances.
> And then I better understood the stupendous energy requirements to shout/yell/make noise for a two-way round trip of sound waves from one county to the very closest neighboring county. And it is just not practical, even for a civilization at he end of the technology development tree (as known to us 1k years ago).
If we were to look at communicating via radio waves with the technology of the ancient Greeks, they might wonder how we could possibly shout loud enough to be heard so far away.
And why, if visits from another world were possible, would everyone know? If I found myself in ancient Greece and talked over a walkie talkie, it would be the same as something with crazy advanced travel technology just stopping by on their safari trip through our solar system.
I like to think that advanced alien life may already be established in our solar system, and we just haven't detected it yet. Unlikely as that is, the solar system is a big place and we are still just scratching the surface in terms of exploring it.
Perhaps we have a highly advanced neighbor that values their privacy and has the technology to remain concealed from our "primitive" observation capabilities? Again, not likely but it's fun to think about.
> To dismiss all evidence of UAP's out of hand as "illogical" is just as unscientific as to accept them as being proof of ET visitation.
I think it's pretty disingenuous to present those two takes as being equally bad. Yes we don't know everything and leaving room for extraordinary things to happen is healthy, but I have yet to see evidences that aliens have cause a UAP. On the other hand we have good empirical evidence that sighting of unusal phenomenas with perfectly mundane explanations can, and do, create testimonies of so called "alien visitations". We even have pretty good psycho-sociological explanations for why this happens.
So without even looking at the specific details of a particular UAP sighting, coming at it from the angle of "people probably saw weird stuff and their brains filled the gap" is the right approach in my opinion. That doesn't mean we have to stop here of course, but it is a sensible default position.
> I have yet to see evidences that aliens have cause a UAP
Neither have I but the title of this article is "why look at flying saucers", not "why believe in ET visitation".
> We even have pretty good psycho-sociological explanations for why this happens.
What well accepted psychological explanation is there for 4 naval aviators reporting an encounter with an object that appeared to defy our knowledge of aerodynamics in clear weather and broad daylight in the exact location they were vectored to by an Aegis radar system ?
Sure. Let's assume that there are top secret research programs. What this tells us is that the research had yeilded such results as
* Super High Density energy storage mechanism, that when being used actually cools down instead of heating up
* An energy source that isn't based around burning fossil fuels for propulsion, that is highly efficient.
* A device that could atleast in theory be using some kind of an inertial cancellation mechanism.
Any of this could be a solution to climate change. Why would our own governments lie and put the future of this planet in jeapordy?. Just so they can win the next war but lose a Future?.
The idea that this is some kind of a secret research project doesn't add up.
> What this tells us is that the research had yeilded such results as
Personally, if I was tasked with making sure everyone respected the American Army I'd make sure to hire a magician and keep that hire very very secret.
I'm not saying there aren't any serious technical breakthroughs.
But I'd still hire the best reliable magician I could get.
After all, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and my bet is that it goes the other way too. (Some replace "magic" with "rigged demo" and that too is true - and possibly relevant.)
Also, I think it is Penn or Teller who says something along the lines of: there's one thing people constantly underestimate when it comes to magic and that is how incredibly far magicians are willing to go to conceal their tricks.
If I'm understanding your hypothetical correctly, this would require the American Army to publicly take credit for the "magic", not publicly announce that the "magic" is unidentified.
Actually not, if you fake it you don't want to do that because then people (including high
ranking people) will start asking you for demos and it will become impossible to keep the secret.
If this is the case it is way better do like they do today and selectively leak stuff and then let everyone, friends and enemys, fill out the blanks :-)
It's pretty much the same as with other pop-sci stuff that is being shoveled down the throat of people who still watch regular TV; sensationalized bullshit in most cases.
We know there's something out there; it's occasionally seen by people who report it, and who who often somehow fail to bring proper cameras with them. It could be aliens, foreign governments, or more mundane explanations like weather phenomena. We just don't know what it is yet.
It may be that all these claimed observations are the product of some sort of collective psychosis, as this article appears to assume, but that's just one hypothesis among many others. Empirical questions require empirical investigation, not ignoring the question.