5 ms·

> It can't simply be short sighted hubris What about warp drive tech, are we reasonably confident that that won't be possible in 50 million years? Also, what

> It can't simply be short sighted hubris What about warp drive tech, are we reasonably confident that that won't be possible in 50 million years? Also, what about travel through wormholes. If an advanced civilization sent probes out 2 billion years ago that travelled at 0.5*c and created wormholes, couldn't they feasibly now travel FTL in a 1 billion light year radius? > Also, there's the matter of the Fermi Paradox. Right, but we're talking about whether some UFOs are actually alien visitations. For the people that think that, they believe the Fermi Paradox isn't really a paradox because aliens are already here.

krapp 5y ago
The problem with warp drives and wormholes is that so far they only exist on paper and require things like negative mass and exotic matter or an entire Jupiter's worth of mass energy to even theoretically be feasible. Even then, there are some models which suggest neither would actually work for FTL travel anyway. If you want to stick to we can actually prove, wormholes don't exist, and neither does negative mass or exotic matter, and we have absolutely no idea how to actually create a "warp bubble," like none. Otherwise you could just as well invoke divine intervention or simulation theory. Although that would make for an interesting sci-fi story. It turns out the secret to FTL travel is discovering the universe is a simulation and hacking it, and the solution to the Fermi Paradox is being caught by the universe's AV software. It isn't hubris to doubt when all of the available evidence points in that direction, it's hubris to dismiss all evidence to the contrary and assume that all scientists and skeptics are simply short-sighted when all you have to contradict them is a low-resolution, blurry photo or video of some dots in the sky.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Even if these particular theoretical approaches to FTL are later shown to be impossible, couldn't there be other ideas later on that we can't foresee (in terms of manipulating space, not necessarily travelling through space at > c)? Isn't human history littered with such examples? How long have we been doing physics for, and how stupid are we as a species? It seems that you place the subjective probability of either the wormhole/warpdrive ideas working out, or some as-yet undiscovered alternative coming about in the distant future, at sub-1%. To me that seems quite low. This seems distinct to me to saying that a specific math proof will be true eternally, since that's a deductive pursuit. Also FTL doesn't seem to be necessary. An alien civilization could feasibly have sent out Von Neumann probes at sub-light speed and have populated an extremely large radius over the span of a few billion years. > low-resolution, blurry photo This is a common refrain, but there exists high quality UFO footage. It could all be CGI or ball lightning, and the burden of proof is higher than mere video, but not all footage is low-quality.
  - krapp 5y ago
    >Isn't human history littered with such examples? How long have we been doing physics for, and how stupid are we as a species? Actually, no. That's a common misconception, but what tends to happen is that we observe that the models we use to describe the universe almost but don't quite work, as we advance enough to make more and more accurate observations, so we create updated models based on observation and experimentation. What doesn't usually happen is that we discover that everything we knew was entirely wrong and we need to scrap it all and start over. Rather, we refine an understanding of the universe that builds upon what was already known. Einstein didn't render Newton obsolete, we still use Newtonian physics, but now we understand that Newton isn't always accurate. Whatever we discover after Einstein isn't going to render him obsolete - that model has been tested so thoroughly that it obviously describes something very accurately. Whatever comes after relativity and QM still has to correlate with their observations. We can fly a helicopter on Mars and stream it over the web. We can genetically engineer organisms. We can build pyramids out of atoms and photograph black holes. We detected the background radiation of the Big Bang a hundred years ago, and then made a heatmap of the entire visible universe. We've detected gravitational waves and the Higgs boson. We're really not that stupid. >Also FTL doesn't seem to be necessary. An alien civilization could feasibly have sent out Von Neumann probes at sub-light speed and have populated an extremely large radius over the span of a few billion years. Except what people claim to observe are craft that appear to violate the laws of physics, which doesn't seem like something a probe designed to drift aimlessly in space until it hits matter, consumes and replicates would do. Also, the Fermi Paradox suggests that if a significant amount of our local space was colonized by Von Neumann machines, we'd know it. So either it isn't feasible, or it hasn't happened anywhere near us. If it hasn't happened anywhere near us, how did they even get here? Von Neumann machines replicate and launch from star to star. Why did they apparently bypass so many stars between whatever their last spawn point was, and us? And if they're here, why aren't they colonizing our planet or sun? >It could all be CGI or ball lightning, and the burden of proof is higher than mere video, but not all footage is low-quality. Fair enough, but most of it is.
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      Regarding your comments about scientific advances not rendering previous theories obsolete, I agree with this, but that's not what I'm saying is likely to happen and it's not what I think has happened in the past. What I'm trying to say is that whatever the next paradigm is, e.g QM/Einstein to Newton, is going to be beyond our capability to even imagine, and it'll unlock rather incredible possibilities that will seem magical by today's standards, all the while subsuming our current theories. We haven't been doing physics that long, and you're right that we're not stupid but we evolved under pretty significant calorie constraints so we have no reason to think we're at the upper bound of intelligence in terms of potential. It would surprise me if there isn't much more to discover in this domain by beings much smarter than us with a million years of research time. Our theories say that FTL travel is impossible by travelling through space, but why is it unlikely that the next physics paradigm will be able to figure out a way to manipulate space to achieve de facto FTL travel, for example? Is there something in our current theories that tells us this is unlikely to happen (not merely that it's currently unknown and theoretical, which is a statement that I agree with)? "we'd know it" Would we? I feel like this assumes that these probes would build Dyson Spheres. Is that the only way these probes could work? Why couldn't they bring or build their own fusion reactor.

krapp 5y ago

The problem with warp drives and wormholes is that so far they only exist on paper and require things like negative mass and exotic matter or an entire Jupiter's worth of mass energy to even theoretically be feasible. Even then, there are some models which suggest neither would actually work for FTL travel anyway. If you want to stick to we can actually prove, wormholes don't exist, and neither does negative mass or exotic matter, and we have absolutely no idea how to actually create a "warp bubble," like none. Otherwise you could just as well invoke divine intervention or simulation theory. Although that would make for an interesting sci-fi story. It turns out the secret to FTL travel is discovering the universe is a simulation and hacking it, and the solution to the Fermi Paradox is being caught by the universe's AV software. It isn't hubris to doubt when all of the available evidence points in that direction, it's hubris to dismiss all evidence to the contrary and assume that all scientists and skeptics are simply short-sighted when all you have to contradict them is a low-resolution, blurry photo or video of some dots in the sky.

fighterpilot 5y ago
Even if these particular theoretical approaches to FTL are later shown to be impossible, couldn't there be other ideas later on that we can't foresee (in terms of manipulating space, not necessarily travelling through space at > c)? Isn't human history littered with such examples? How long have we been doing physics for, and how stupid are we as a species? It seems that you place the subjective probability of either the wormhole/warpdrive ideas working out, or some as-yet undiscovered alternative coming about in the distant future, at sub-1%. To me that seems quite low. This seems distinct to me to saying that a specific math proof will be true eternally, since that's a deductive pursuit. Also FTL doesn't seem to be necessary. An alien civilization could feasibly have sent out Von Neumann probes at sub-light speed and have populated an extremely large radius over the span of a few billion years. > low-resolution, blurry photo This is a common refrain, but there exists high quality UFO footage. It could all be CGI or ball lightning, and the burden of proof is higher than mere video, but not all footage is low-quality.
- krapp 5y ago
  >Isn't human history littered with such examples? How long have we been doing physics for, and how stupid are we as a species? Actually, no. That's a common misconception, but what tends to happen is that we observe that the models we use to describe the universe almost but don't quite work, as we advance enough to make more and more accurate observations, so we create updated models based on observation and experimentation. What doesn't usually happen is that we discover that everything we knew was entirely wrong and we need to scrap it all and start over. Rather, we refine an understanding of the universe that builds upon what was already known. Einstein didn't render Newton obsolete, we still use Newtonian physics, but now we understand that Newton isn't always accurate. Whatever we discover after Einstein isn't going to render him obsolete - that model has been tested so thoroughly that it obviously describes something very accurately. Whatever comes after relativity and QM still has to correlate with their observations. We can fly a helicopter on Mars and stream it over the web. We can genetically engineer organisms. We can build pyramids out of atoms and photograph black holes. We detected the background radiation of the Big Bang a hundred years ago, and then made a heatmap of the entire visible universe. We've detected gravitational waves and the Higgs boson. We're really not that stupid. >Also FTL doesn't seem to be necessary. An alien civilization could feasibly have sent out Von Neumann probes at sub-light speed and have populated an extremely large radius over the span of a few billion years. Except what people claim to observe are craft that appear to violate the laws of physics, which doesn't seem like something a probe designed to drift aimlessly in space until it hits matter, consumes and replicates would do. Also, the Fermi Paradox suggests that if a significant amount of our local space was colonized by Von Neumann machines, we'd know it. So either it isn't feasible, or it hasn't happened anywhere near us. If it hasn't happened anywhere near us, how did they even get here? Von Neumann machines replicate and launch from star to star. Why did they apparently bypass so many stars between whatever their last spawn point was, and us? And if they're here, why aren't they colonizing our planet or sun? >It could all be CGI or ball lightning, and the burden of proof is higher than mere video, but not all footage is low-quality. Fair enough, but most of it is.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    Regarding your comments about scientific advances not rendering previous theories obsolete, I agree with this, but that's not what I'm saying is likely to happen and it's not what I think has happened in the past. What I'm trying to say is that whatever the next paradigm is, e.g QM/Einstein to Newton, is going to be beyond our capability to even imagine, and it'll unlock rather incredible possibilities that will seem magical by today's standards, all the while subsuming our current theories. We haven't been doing physics that long, and you're right that we're not stupid but we evolved under pretty significant calorie constraints so we have no reason to think we're at the upper bound of intelligence in terms of potential. It would surprise me if there isn't much more to discover in this domain by beings much smarter than us with a million years of research time. Our theories say that FTL travel is impossible by travelling through space, but why is it unlikely that the next physics paradigm will be able to figure out a way to manipulate space to achieve de facto FTL travel, for example? Is there something in our current theories that tells us this is unlikely to happen (not merely that it's currently unknown and theoretical, which is a statement that I agree with)? "we'd know it" Would we? I feel like this assumes that these probes would build Dyson Spheres. Is that the only way these probes could work? Why couldn't they bring or build their own fusion reactor.