UFOs spotted by Mexican airforce

[connoisseur series500]

yah, that's what they all say...

[neveronfriday]

Or could it be that the Earth is just a big science experiment undertaken by a superior exterrestial race and that we are supposed to believe we are the centre of the world?

they are starting to suspect something!

bIjatlh 'e' yImev

I guess there are no trekkies on here?

[couw]

I can see deus in a Klingon uniform just now...

[neveronfriday]

Is that a guy on the left?

[J Larsen]

Knowledge like the universe is vast and there is a lot we don't know.Even with physics as it is known (and I admit I don't know doodley about it) I cant help but believe that interstellar travel is indeed possible. Just because we haven't mastered it doesn't mean it hasn't been mastered.

I thought that before I started studying to be a physicist, too. But now I know that the closest main sequence star to the sun is Barnard's star, a star very close to the end of its life. (Barnard is a red star, which does not render it a particularly promising candidate for life, but I'll let that go for now). It takes light six years to travel from Barnard's star to the Earth, and light can only travel that fast because it is massless. It is strecthing things a LOT to say that maybe objects as massive as spaceships can, in principle, travel 1% of the speed of light. That would make the journey to Barnard's star and its associated planets (at least one of which has been observed) 600 years. Then you have to assume that your orginal astronauts did not die from exposure to radiation and other energetic particles (which we on Earth are protected from by the ozone layer and the geomagnetic field), and that the DNA of seven or eight generations' worth of astronauts was kept intact well enough against these hazards that they were all able to reproduce successfully.

Another possibility that peope bring up is wormholes. These are believed to exist by many, if not most, cosmologists. But there are a couple of facts about wormholes that science fiction writers always ignore: 1) if they exist, wormholes only stay open for about 10^(-36) seconds (that's one billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second), and 2) any information sent through a wormhole is irretrievable. What 2) means is that if you send an ordered assembly of atoms through a wormhole (such as, say, an astronaut), what comes out on the other side is a jumbled mess of particles. If the later argument is wrong, so is the third law of thermodynamics. The third law of thermo is one of the handful of things just about every physicist will insist we absolutely have right.

Could I be wrong? Sure, I never said otherwise. But I'd bet it all that I'm not.

BTW, here's an interesting and slightly relevant addendum. When, in the news, people speak of "the universe", they normally mean the observable universe. But just about every cosmologist believes that the observable universe is a tiny fraction of the total universe. What is the distinction? Well, I think we all know that the universe is expanding, and that the data overwhelmingly suggest that it has always been expanding (this is another one of those handful of things that just about every physicist will say we absolutely have right). However, stars didn't start forming until 1 million years after the big bang, at the very earliest. When the most distant stars from the present-day Milky Way formed, they were thus extremely far away - so far, in fact, that their light *still* has never reached us. Who knows what's going on in the "unobservable universe"?

Edited May 15, 2004 by J Larsen

[Joe G]

Also, if we are visited so often, why don't they actually land their craft and try to make contact? 

 

Um...because we are a fearful and ignorant race that can't even get past the differences of skin tone and culture among our co-inhabitants on this planet? Because they would likely either encounter the barrel of a shotgun, or the scalpel of a scientist?

Perhaps they have landed, quietly, in remote locations, to make contact with those few spriritually advanced individuals among us who would be able to accept their reality.

Just a thought.

[Jazzmoose]

Also, if we are visited so often, why don't they actually land their craft and try to make contact? 

 

Um...because we are a fearful and ignorant race that can't even get past the differences of skin tone and culture among our co-inhabitants on this planet? Because they would likely either encounter the barrel of a shotgun, or the scalpel of a scientist?

Perhaps they have landed, quietly, in remote locations, to make contact with those few spriritually advanced individuals among us who would be able to accept their reality.

Just a thought.

Which just goes to show you: UFOs are about religion, not science. These are things you either "believe in" or don't, not things to be scientifically proven.

[Jazzmoose]

Besides, we'll see if Conn is so damned smart after I contact the mother ship and arrange for a nice little gang probe...

[couw]

TMCM & CLIX (the happy computer!)

[AfricaBrass]

[Joe G]

Also, if we are visited so often, why don't they actually land their craft and try to make contact? 

 

Um...because we are a fearful and ignorant race that can't even get past the differences of skin tone and culture among our co-inhabitants on this planet? Because they would likely either encounter the barrel of a shotgun, or the scalpel of a scientist?

Perhaps they have landed, quietly, in remote locations, to make contact with those few spriritually advanced individuals among us who would be able to accept their reality.

Just a thought.

Which just goes to show you: UFOs are about religion, not science. These are things you either "believe in" or don't, not things to be scientifically proven.

Well, UFOs are simply Unidentified Flying Objects. I have seen things in the night sky that were flying or hovering, which for the life of me I could not identify. So as far as that goes, UFOs absolutely exist.

Scientific history consists of things being discovered that were previously not known to exist. Hypothoses, theories, and hunches were tested, and proven or disproven. Uncharted regions of the earth were explored, new species found. Before DNA, or germs, or the Western Hemisphere was proven to exist, did these things have no reality of their own? Was it a matter for religion and for fools to believe in or not?

BTW, religion and spirituality are two separate things. The first is imposed from without, the second is generated from within.

[Joe G]

Besides, we'll see if Conn is so damned smart after I contact the mother ship and arrange for a nice little gang probe...

Jazzmoose, Jazzmoose.

[DTMX]

Mexico has an Air Force?

[chris olivarez]

J Larsen when I say what I say it's the unobserveable universe that I have in mind.I can accept the possibility that you may be right but with space being so vast I have to maintain a reasonable doubt in my mind.

[J Larsen]

Maybe we've crossed up signals a bit. I absolutely believe that the universe is teaming with life. The evidence for microbal life on Mars is encouraging. I strongly suspect that we will find life in the oceans of Europa or Callisto (why we've chosen to go to Titan first is well beyond my capacity for understanding - nothing NASA ever does makes sense to me, but I won't start that rant again). I would guess that most main sequence stars give energy to some simple form of life on orbiting satellites. If I *had* to make a bet, I'd say that as many as 1/100,000 stars, at some point in their history, played host to some level of intelligent life. All of our observations demonsterate that atomic building blocks are uniformly distributed in space (via supernovae), and we find amino acids in meteorites all the time, so I very strongly suspect that aminos form quite readily, which strongly suggests that life should be unformly distributed among main sequence stars. On the other hand, I really think that the 1/100,000 guess is really quite generous. For one thing, Venus and Earth are, in many ways, extremely similar planets (compare their sizes and orbit radii), but one plays host to a rich array of intellegent and semi-intellegent life, whereas the other has a surface pressure of 100 atm and is subject to frequent sulpheric acid rainstorms. This tells me that you need a very special, hence rare, combination of variables for a rich array of life to develop (and it's only from a rich array of life that intellegent life can develop). Furthermore, we got really lucky here on earth when the asteroid killed of the dinosaurs. If that hadn't happened, mammals never would have had the chance to evolve much. Who knows how many civilizations didn't develop because they *didn't* get their asteroid?

I continue to maintain that the best we can ever hope for is to pick up radio signals from advanced civilizations (and we can be pretty sure that they use radio or microwave frequencies for their communications devices - other bands are subject to too much ambient noise or are harmful to DNA). The distances we're talking about are simply too vast for direct contact to be feasible. If 1/100,000 stars at some point played host to life, and the average civilization survives a million years (being really generous), that means that 1/100,000*1000000*(1/13,700,000,000) stars *currently* host intellegent life, which means about 1 in a billion. This doesn't sound like a promising figure, but actually it means that there are trillions of intellegent civilizations in the universe. (Again, I think I've been overly generous in all of my estimates.) But this estimate also says that the nearest civilization to us is probably at least 1,000 light years away. And even if you insist on believing that speed-of-light travel is possible, I can guarantee you that faster-than-speed-of-light travel isn't - and even if you don't want to believe that, I can at least guarantee you that you would not like the consequences of a universe in which it was possible.

As for life forms in the unobservable universe - we'll never know about them. If we could learn about them, even in principle, it wouldn't be unobservable anymore! That's not just a linguistic trick I pulled. The point is that nothing can travel faster than light, and if it could, we would have been able to detect the unobservable regions.

Edited May 18, 2004 by J Larsen

[Noj]

One thing I've heard that gives some perspective to the size of the universe--some of the stars we see in the night sky no longer exist, but the light these now-dead stars emitted at light speed ages ago is still arriving to earth.

[Guest ariceffron]

MEXICO HAS AN AIR FORCE???????

[J Larsen]

One thing I've heard that gives some perspective to the size of the universe--some of the stars we see in the night sky no longer exist, but the light these now-dead stars emitted at light speed ages ago is still arriving to earth.

You can change that "some" to "most", depending on how good of a telescope you have.

[Noj]

I didn't know it was MOST, JLarsen.

I haven't actually studied this much, but I'm a regular Cliff Clavin when it comes to little bits of trivia like that (from loads of Discovery Channel).

Thanks for sharing your intricate knowledge on this topic, JLarsen.

[J Larsen]

I should be more clear, just so you don't get yourself in trouble one day. Most of the stars you can see with the naked eye, especially near an urban area, are nearby enough that they are still alive. In particular, essentially everything you can see in the Milky Way is still alive, as the MW is "only" about 100,000 ly across (at least the main disc - the football-shaped outer region, known as the "halo" is much, much larger but also much less densely populated, and mostly consists of relatively small, hard-to-see stars). Pretty much the same goes for Andromeda and the Meglianic Clouds, the later of which are two nearby "baby" galaxies. But the majority of galaxies that you can see with a good telescope are far enough away that they could be completely dead by now.

Edited May 19, 2004 by J Larsen