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This has been on here a number of times. Given how skeptical people are on here, I'm deeply curious what sort of mental gymnastics will be wheeled out to explai

This has been on here a number of times. Given how skeptical people are on here, I'm deeply curious what sort of mental gymnastics will be wheeled out to explain this. My bet is 100% on ET space probe. Anyone care to explain how these things move, what is powering them, or who built them?

api 6y ago
It is one logical solution to the Fermi paradox: there is no Fermi paradox. The problem with UFOs is that there is so much cultural and folklore baloney surrounding the topic. But ignore all that and look at actually reliable case data like this. This is not enough to prove anything but it's enough to suggest that we might want to look. Personally I would not mind seeing an ultra-wide-field (fish eye?) infrared space telescope watching the solar system. Unless ET found a way around the second law of thermodynamics, anything using non-trivial amounts of energy is going to light up like a beacon in the sky in the infrared spectrum far beyond what can be accounted for by normal solar albedo. For example a large nuclear fusion reactor in space would require enormous heat sinks to not melt itself and the entire spacecraft, and any propulsion system capable of fast movement around the solar system or especially interstellar flight is going to be blindingly bright in the infrared when it executes a burn. Call it near field SETI.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Yeah, not much you can do about that of you want to have any signifficant systems running and do any manuevering: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect....
- greesil 6y ago
  A rocket launch from a planet, sure. But something using electric propulsion might not. The exhaust plasma is not super hot, and there's just not that much of it coming out.
  - api 6y ago
    Nope. If you are doing anything you are doing work and thus converting energy. The second law is inescapable, and it's one of the most solidly established of all physical laws. If we assume the same laws exist everywhere (quite reasonable) then ET must follow those same laws too. First, you have to be generating the energy. No reactor or conversion process can be 100% efficient (second law), so you must reject some heat. If it's solar, you have big-ass solar panels that get hot because they are not 100% efficient. The ISS looks like an orbiting Christmas tree in the infrared. Second, the "rocket" exhaust might be a directed particle beam but whatever is accelerating that exhaust cannot be 100% efficient (second law again). More rejected heat. Then you have all the other stuff going on. If the inhabitants are biological, life support for a long-duration large scale space flight is going to be pretty energetically expensive. Think of growing crops, bulk biosynthesis of nutrients, and a whole lot of recycling which usually involves a lot of endothermic reactions to break down waste products. If the inhabitants are post-biological (IMHO more likely for star travelers) then you have a whole lot of computronium of some kind. That's a big flying data center in space, and everyone knows how much heat those put off. ... I could keep going forever. You can reclaim a bit of heat like we do here on Earth with combined-cycle power plants, but there are absolute, hard, inescapable limits to how much. You also hit diminishing returns pretty fast, and keep in mind that a spacecraft has mass constraints it must work within due to delta-V budget and all that. At some point the graphs are gonna cross where it makes more sense just to reject heat, and any rational engineer will pick that point. You're gonna need a radiator, and there is no way to make that not visible. If you want to hide from the crazy-ass monkeys on the third planet you could try flying with a reflector in the way to block your heat from the Earth-Moon system and reflect it elsewhere, but the problem is that now your reflector will reflect a bunch of incident solar radiation! Last but not least: we are in theory talking about interstellar visitors here. Anything capable of interstellar travel is by definition capable of generating absolutely vast mind-boggling amounts of energy. The only physical power planets we know of that could theoretically propel you to the stars (at a reasonable enough speed) are some mix of fusion and matter-antimatter annihilation. Even turning that monster of a power plant on to "idle mode" is going to say "here I am!" in the infrared... if someone is actually looking. AFAIK we are not currently looking.
- lukifer 6y ago
  Hypothetically, if an alien civilization powered itself through a mesh of evenly-distributed orbiting solar power stations (a Dyson sphere with one-billionth coverage would still produce in an insane amount of power), would we have any way of noticing? My hunch on the Fermi paradox is that the space-faring phase of a civilization requires transitioning into immortal software, dodging around the speed limit of c by becoming very old, and very patient. I suspect such life forms ("Space Ents") wouldn't bother trying to communicate with such rapidly churning species as ourselves, other than perhaps collecting data via probes to be perused hundreds of millennia later.
  - api 6y ago
    This expands into an infinite tree of maybes. My point is that its worth looking because a satellite with a fish eye IR camera wouldn't be that expensive and the benefit would be huge. We know for a fact that such a satellite would have a good chance of spotting any star farers that are remotely like us, even if they are significantly more advanced but still "fast" in terms of their energy use and general way of doing things. Space Ents belong to a long tail of other possibilities, but they also must obey the second law...
- catalogia 6y ago
  I think the 'logical solution' to the fermi paradox is we actually have no clue how common the emergence of life is since we only have a single instance of it to study. It could well be so wildly improbable that the other terms in the equation (e.g. earth-like planets being very common in the universe) become irrelevant. Another solution I think plausible is the "Rendezvous with Rama" scenario. We assume that we are very important so naturally the aliens must be interested in us, but what if they aren't? What if they don't give a shit about us and have better things to do than play with some bald monkeys?
gfodor 6y ago
I wrote a long thread on twitter about my own pet theory, which I've held for a while but which has been recently relevant: these are an autonomous system built by a past civilization to prevent cross-civilization existential threats from emerging and causing harm to others. https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1250796830704562176 https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1250796830704562176
DethNinja 6y ago
I don’t see any need for mental gymnastics, government doesn’t exactly have the stellar track record of not lying to public or not conducting physiological warfare on them. I believe universe must be full of intelligent life, and keep in mind that I got some considerable astrophysics knowledge, but governmental claims mean nothing to me.
- erdos4d 6y ago
  I mean, that's fine. I think the government's take on the video is that they don't know what it is. I'll assume you don't buy that. What's your take? They got the pilots to go on lots of news interviews after they got out of the service and say they got their asses handed to them by a tic-tac craft they couldn't identify? What's the interest in that for them? Just curious, cause I don't get far taking the ultra skeptic position in this. I don't get many answers and most of the things I come up with don't seem to make much sense for the government to want people to think. Like, what would be the point of making people believe there is something buzzing around that they couldn't handle? In my experience, they want you to believe they can handle absolutely anything, no matter what, even when you know deep down they couldn't.
  - DethNinja 6y ago
    There are too many possibilities to list why government might’ve decided to share this information, but couple of them that I can think of: 1. They want to create misinformation for other countries and waste their time. Perhaps to capture some high-up spy. 2. They want public to be open for existence of aliens. With new TESS and JWST satellites, there is good chance we will find proof of intelligent life very soon. 3. Perhaps they already captured some scout craft and want people not to panic when they release such information.
DSingularity 6y ago
Apparently, no real gymnastics needed — just some domain knowledge. I was also freaked out by these videos until I saw this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus
- erdos4d 6y ago
  My friend, I'm sorry, but you really think this explains anything? As others have pointed out in this thread, this is for people who want this to be an understood phenomenon and are willing to turn their brain off to get there. Navy pilots can recognize planes and balloons, they aren't wowed and mystified by such objects. This video is just weak.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    > Navy pilots can recognize planes and balloons, they aren't wowed and mystified by such objects. I think you should consider the possibility that they are deliberately deceiving you. That certainly seems to be the case with the 'go fast' video. Public information on the gimbal camera equipment is lacking, but if the USN is willing to lie about the go fast video, they'd be willing to mislead people about the others as well.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - erdos4d 6y ago
      I just answered another post in a similar manner, but you bring it up, so I will reply to you as well. Why would the US navy want anyone to believe there is something buzzing about that they couldn't identify, and according to the pilots account, could literally smoke their ass? Have you noticed them saying such things in the past? I have not. Also, I am 100% sure they DO NOT want you to believe such a thing exists. In my experience, they want you to believe they could handle absolutely anything, that they are the baddest dudes who ever walked the earth, and you are 100% safe with them protecting you. Or something to that effect. Seriously, why would they lie about this? Does this position square up with any of their interests? Skepticism is fine, but not when it literally runs afoul of basic common sense.

api 6y ago

It is one logical solution to the Fermi paradox: there is no Fermi paradox. The problem with UFOs is that there is so much cultural and folklore baloney surrounding the topic. But ignore all that and look at actually reliable case data like this. This is not enough to prove anything but it's enough to suggest that we might want to look. Personally I would not mind seeing an ultra-wide-field (fish eye?) infrared space telescope watching the solar system. Unless ET found a way around the second law of thermodynamics, anything using non-trivial amounts of energy is going to light up like a beacon in the sky in the infrared spectrum far beyond what can be accounted for by normal solar albedo. For example a large nuclear fusion reactor in space would require enormous heat sinks to not melt itself and the entire spacecraft, and any propulsion system capable of fast movement around the solar system or especially interstellar flight is going to be blindingly bright in the infrared when it executes a burn. Call it near field SETI.

m4rtink 6y ago
Yeah, not much you can do about that of you want to have any signifficant systems running and do any manuevering: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect....
greesil 6y ago
A rocket launch from a planet, sure. But something using electric propulsion might not. The exhaust plasma is not super hot, and there's just not that much of it coming out.
- api 6y ago
  Nope. If you are doing anything you are doing work and thus converting energy. The second law is inescapable, and it's one of the most solidly established of all physical laws. If we assume the same laws exist everywhere (quite reasonable) then ET must follow those same laws too. First, you have to be generating the energy. No reactor or conversion process can be 100% efficient (second law), so you must reject some heat. If it's solar, you have big-ass solar panels that get hot because they are not 100% efficient. The ISS looks like an orbiting Christmas tree in the infrared. Second, the "rocket" exhaust might be a directed particle beam but whatever is accelerating that exhaust cannot be 100% efficient (second law again). More rejected heat. Then you have all the other stuff going on. If the inhabitants are biological, life support for a long-duration large scale space flight is going to be pretty energetically expensive. Think of growing crops, bulk biosynthesis of nutrients, and a whole lot of recycling which usually involves a lot of endothermic reactions to break down waste products. If the inhabitants are post-biological (IMHO more likely for star travelers) then you have a whole lot of computronium of some kind. That's a big flying data center in space, and everyone knows how much heat those put off. ... I could keep going forever. You can reclaim a bit of heat like we do here on Earth with combined-cycle power plants, but there are absolute, hard, inescapable limits to how much. You also hit diminishing returns pretty fast, and keep in mind that a spacecraft has mass constraints it must work within due to delta-V budget and all that. At some point the graphs are gonna cross where it makes more sense just to reject heat, and any rational engineer will pick that point. You're gonna need a radiator, and there is no way to make that not visible. If you want to hide from the crazy-ass monkeys on the third planet you could try flying with a reflector in the way to block your heat from the Earth-Moon system and reflect it elsewhere, but the problem is that now your reflector will reflect a bunch of incident solar radiation! Last but not least: we are in theory talking about interstellar visitors here. Anything capable of interstellar travel is by definition capable of generating absolutely vast mind-boggling amounts of energy. The only physical power planets we know of that could theoretically propel you to the stars (at a reasonable enough speed) are some mix of fusion and matter-antimatter annihilation. Even turning that monster of a power plant on to "idle mode" is going to say "here I am!" in the infrared... if someone is actually looking. AFAIK we are not currently looking.
lukifer 6y ago
Hypothetically, if an alien civilization powered itself through a mesh of evenly-distributed orbiting solar power stations (a Dyson sphere with one-billionth coverage would still produce in an insane amount of power), would we have any way of noticing? My hunch on the Fermi paradox is that the space-faring phase of a civilization requires transitioning into immortal software, dodging around the speed limit of c by becoming very old, and very patient. I suspect such life forms ("Space Ents") wouldn't bother trying to communicate with such rapidly churning species as ourselves, other than perhaps collecting data via probes to be perused hundreds of millennia later.
- api 6y ago
  This expands into an infinite tree of maybes. My point is that its worth looking because a satellite with a fish eye IR camera wouldn't be that expensive and the benefit would be huge. We know for a fact that such a satellite would have a good chance of spotting any star farers that are remotely like us, even if they are significantly more advanced but still "fast" in terms of their energy use and general way of doing things. Space Ents belong to a long tail of other possibilities, but they also must obey the second law...
catalogia 6y ago
I think the 'logical solution' to the fermi paradox is we actually have no clue how common the emergence of life is since we only have a single instance of it to study. It could well be so wildly improbable that the other terms in the equation (e.g. earth-like planets being very common in the universe) become irrelevant. Another solution I think plausible is the "Rendezvous with Rama" scenario. We assume that we are very important so naturally the aliens must be interested in us, but what if they aren't? What if they don't give a shit about us and have better things to do than play with some bald monkeys?

gfodor 6y ago

I wrote a long thread on twitter about my own pet theory, which I've held for a while but which has been recently relevant: these are an autonomous system built by a past civilization to prevent cross-civilization existential threats from emerging and causing harm to others. https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1250796830704562176 https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1250796830704562176

DethNinja 6y ago

I don’t see any need for mental gymnastics, government doesn’t exactly have the stellar track record of not lying to public or not conducting physiological warfare on them. I believe universe must be full of intelligent life, and keep in mind that I got some considerable astrophysics knowledge, but governmental claims mean nothing to me.

erdos4d 6y ago
I mean, that's fine. I think the government's take on the video is that they don't know what it is. I'll assume you don't buy that. What's your take? They got the pilots to go on lots of news interviews after they got out of the service and say they got their asses handed to them by a tic-tac craft they couldn't identify? What's the interest in that for them? Just curious, cause I don't get far taking the ultra skeptic position in this. I don't get many answers and most of the things I come up with don't seem to make much sense for the government to want people to think. Like, what would be the point of making people believe there is something buzzing around that they couldn't handle? In my experience, they want you to believe they can handle absolutely anything, no matter what, even when you know deep down they couldn't.
- DethNinja 6y ago
  There are too many possibilities to list why government might’ve decided to share this information, but couple of them that I can think of: 1. They want to create misinformation for other countries and waste their time. Perhaps to capture some high-up spy. 2. They want public to be open for existence of aliens. With new TESS and JWST satellites, there is good chance we will find proof of intelligent life very soon. 3. Perhaps they already captured some scout craft and want people not to panic when they release such information.

DSingularity 6y ago

Apparently, no real gymnastics needed — just some domain knowledge. I was also freaked out by these videos until I saw this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus

erdos4d 6y ago
My friend, I'm sorry, but you really think this explains anything? As others have pointed out in this thread, this is for people who want this to be an understood phenomenon and are willing to turn their brain off to get there. Navy pilots can recognize planes and balloons, they aren't wowed and mystified by such objects. This video is just weak.
- catalogia 6y ago
  > Navy pilots can recognize planes and balloons, they aren't wowed and mystified by such objects. I think you should consider the possibility that they are deliberately deceiving you. That certainly seems to be the case with the 'go fast' video. Public information on the gimbal camera equipment is lacking, but if the USN is willing to lie about the go fast video, they'd be willing to mislead people about the others as well.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - erdos4d 6y ago
    I just answered another post in a similar manner, but you bring it up, so I will reply to you as well. Why would the US navy want anyone to believe there is something buzzing about that they couldn't identify, and according to the pilots account, could literally smoke their ass? Have you noticed them saying such things in the past? I have not. Also, I am 100% sure they DO NOT want you to believe such a thing exists. In my experience, they want you to believe they could handle absolutely anything, that they are the baddest dudes who ever walked the earth, and you are 100% safe with them protecting you. Or something to that effect. Seriously, why would they lie about this? Does this position square up with any of their interests? Skepticism is fine, but not when it literally runs afoul of basic common sense.