I am usually one to treat EVERYTHING with a very healthy dose of skepticism, but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not? I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach.
The US Military released rather intriguing, yet unexplained videos of objects outmaneuvering our top jets. You should go check those out. I've yet to see an explanation that covers all the data those jets collected.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but instantly writing things off as 'tin foil hat' while the guy has an actual legit legal retaliation case going on seems a bit premature.
>but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not?
This is the tragic sentence which is letting the parade of carnival animals in through the back door. In some sense it's true that intellectual humility is necessary as we allow ourselves to be challenged by ideas we thought not possible. But it's true the way hallmark card quotes are true, as vague generalities.
It does no work as a specific response to a specific set of facts, which should be determined by all kinds of specific contextual examinations. In that setting, it's an open-ended, unrestricted invitation to completely suspend all disbelief without any restraint or distinctions.
If the problem is not outside the bounds of known physics, then it should be considered plausible.
Otherwise, it is certainly not impossible, but pointless to speculate.
If you enjoy speculating about such things, fill your boots, but realize that you are only doing it for your own amusement.
I think you mean possible rather than plausible? But otherwise I would say you're right, it's an exercise for personal amusement. But I think as you can see from elsewhere even in this thread, people slip into this mode of half-joking where they might as well be describing their ideas for Deus Ex fan missions, and the dividing line between serious engagement with evidence and make believe is breaking down.
I would argue that play is a highly valuable intellectual activity. Speculating for one’s amusement falls into that category and is therefore not worthless. A lot of great ideas come from playing around with strange ideas that aren’t obviously useful.
A thought experiment. The universe is extremely large and billions of years old. Let's imagine life has developed within a few of those billions of galaxies out there, then imagine this started 1 billion years before us. How advanced to you think we could get in another billion years (assuming we don't annihilate ourselves)? What's really impossible?
We have a pretty good idea about physics and can say with very high confidence that interstellar travel needs a lot of energy. That makes aliens visiting us with small crafts for fun an unlikely theory.
We think we have a pretty good idea about physics - just as cats have a pretty good idea about scratching posts and ants have a pretty good idea about scent trails.
Cats literally can't understand what the Internet is, and ants can't understand what a cat is.
It's astoundingly naive to assume we don't have equivalent cognitive limitations.
I don't think that article is really addressing the same argument. The argument Asimov is addressing seems to be whether human scientists will always disprove the previous century's human scientists.
The argument the poster above is making is that human scientists may be cognitively limited, and our species objectively stupid. You can't really definitively argue against this in an essay, because if you are a stupid person who is a member of a stupid species, your reasoning skills can't be trusted. You might argue it pragmatically makes sense to assume your species is smart enough to understand the universe, but that's a different argument than Asimov is making.
Asimov seems to assume humans are objectively an intelligent species so his reasoning skills can be trusted, which of course may not be wrong, but is pretty hard to prove.
If there were cognitive limitations you'd expect big holes in the theories we come up with unless you believe that for some reason we happen to be limited in a way that we observe a subset of the universe which is strangely internally consistent and shows essentially no signs of interaction with an bigger universe, yet alien species can somehow use the bigger universe to interact with our subset of the universe in a way that appears to be magic. I find that pretty far fetched.
There are big holes in the theories we come up with. The inability to reconcile QM and relativity is the most famous one. M-theory requires 11-dimensional spacetime, but no one has ever observed most of those dimensions. Recent astronomical measurements, if confirmed, may falsify parts of the standard model. The list is pretty long.
Well it pretty much goes without saying that we don't know what we don't know. But we could actually be getting close to learning everything there is to know about the laws of physics. Finishing them up in the next century or two doesn't seem like a big stretch.
I'm not a scientist, just a dumb dude watching Youtube. But there is a problem in physics with tests not being avaialble for stuff they're theorizing about. From my limited understanding, string theory currently has zero path to empirical research to prove or disprove. So it might take a bit longer than a century or two for that reason.
Maybe all you need to travel from one star to another is just a pair AA batteries, and a 5 min. journey. Hence, very small UFOs would be essentially drones managed from another star.
How could it be possible, well, you have to take a closer look to the probably underlying physics you can infer from the UFOs behavior. Probably the still secret videos from DoD have a lot more to offer than most of the currently available videos.
But for now we have these phenomena reported:
- UFOs can go to full stop instantaneously, even if they are travelling at several times the speed of the sound
- UFOs can go from fully static to several times the speed of the sound, instantaneously.
- UFOs can remain fully stopped, seemingly unamovable, even under a hurricane.
- UFOs can submerge almost instantaneously, almost with no "splash", even if they do at extraordinary velocities.
- UFOs can travel underwater at the speed of the sound, or even more faster.
- UFOs have been reported to go "into mountain bases", decades ago.
- and the most important, UFOs have no apparent source of energy nor thrust, nor anything seeming usable as wings to remain in the air, or some rotors to move underwater.
Then, the physics? The UFOs are probably superdimensional entities / vehicles / vessels.
What we are seeing is maybe a fraction of the actual vessels, most of it located out of our three dimensional space, and you can see "here" is a small sphere of "metal". Maybe this spheres are just small arrays of sensors, from a way bigger unobservable vessel.
The evidence is empirical at most yet, maybe the still secret videos from DoD actually show clearly stuff or moves that reveal the superdimensional features, like a UFO "crashing" into solid rock, just to "re-emerge" from solid ground a couple of miles farther. Or maybe some time-related movements, like appearing / disappearing "from nothing".
If the UFOs are superdimensional capable vehicles, and our three dimensional universe actually has upper dimensions, maybe time itself is a physically traversable dimension, from a hypothetical 5th dimension. Hence, you could actually have FTL - Faster Than Light - travel, but without breaking any physics rules from the three dimensional space. You could be just "fastly walking" a couple of kilometers in maybe 15 minutes in the 5th dimensional space, and you could be displacing yourself several light years in the three dimensional space.
Then the energy required to do a multiple light year travel would be trivial, and the time required to displace yourself in the three dimensional space, too.
You could "jump" from star to star in maybe 5 minutes, using the energy from two AA batteries.
The consequences go far beyond that if the time is a physical dimension: you could go back and forward in time, just like you displace yourself in the three dimensional space. Hence the "time travel" thing remains impossible in three dimensions, but it is easily doable in 5 - or more - dimensions. Even closed loops are possible, because time as physical dimension would imply that "everything is happening at the same time", hence you could travel "backwards" in time and change something, and going back "forward" you'd find some things have changed.
What happens if you can also "travel" in time just as fastly, years in minutes, using just a pair of AA batteries? What if you can go back and change history? You could be changing stuff continously, improving at exponential pace. Maybe the aliens have done so, and they don't have "billions" of years of evolution, but have found a way to make the process faster.
Similarly, the implications of the existence of upper dimensions for the humans in its current level of technological evolution would be amazing. If you can displace solid matter like a plane, using an upper dimension, you could make traverse solid matter in the three dimensional space, maybe even not interacting at all with the solid matter: you could make vehicles capable of travelling throug solid rock mountains, or even traverse across the planet.
Some implications are just wow, if you can travel through solid matter in the three dimensional space or you can build vehicles capable of not interacting with mass in the three dimensional space, automagically most of the weapons and defense systems in the world became meaningless overnight. You could go inside any bank, any militar base, not worrying about missiles, bullets. You can't defend yourself by staying in three dimensional space, but in the upper dimensions you'd can't either: the enemy could travel in time and change its strategy to win this time, they'd just need some observer far away from the theather, assessing if the actions have had success or not, if not, go back, advise and repeat.
So, maybe the "first contact" isn't really the problem, but what happens if humanity suddenly realizes about new, radical advances in physics, available not only to super-powers and super-rich entities, but to anyone with a pair of AA batteries?
Almost no upper echelons of power in anywhere in the world would likely want the entire population know about as radically prone to sudden and profound changes in societies, as a discovery of the existence - and cheap accesibility - of upper dimensions, beyond the three dimensional space.
So you - maybe any super-power, nation states and private groups of powerful people - keep aliens out of sight from the general population, UFOs are psychological operations, not a thing like UFOs actually exist, whatever.
For that reason. You want nothing to change from what it is right now.
“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
haha, could be, after all our kids play with ants,
and the ants most probably think that we are highly advanced entities.
and it doesn't take the kids too much energy nor technological resources - for the human technological level - to play with ants, but ants probably would see the kid's resources as incredible advanced, well beyond its current technological capabilities.
So yeah it could be 5th dimensional kids playing with us (ants from their perspective).
As far as we know there is no extradimensional space where you can hide matter/energy. So I find it unlikely that UFOs are "superdimensional entities". How would these dimensions interact with the dimensions we know?
I'm suggesting the UFOs could be the first widely public evidence of upper dimensions beyond our three dimensional space.
I'm thrilled about UFOs happily breaking several laws of physics in front of us, and we should be thinking about what are we missing, what's out of sight, beyond our current understanding of physics that the UFOs obviously manage and exploit.
The upper dimensions is just a - pretty obvious - hypothesis.
"How would these dimensions interact with the dimensions we know?"
I don't know, but whoever has built the UFOs, certainly knows.
Some ideas: because you should not be able to impact the ocean surface at mach 4 without obvious physical consequences, and not submerging almost with minimal to absent "splash", maybe those UFOs are just leaking some photons into our three dimensional space,
hence "submerging" could not be precisely what they are doing, maybe they are just re-locating the "output" of the vessel out of sight of the humans.
Also those "metallic orbes" look amazingly similar to some kind of "black hole" or singularity, maybe those things are not vessels at all, but just a hole opened to our three dimensional space, to watch us, study us. That would make sense about the "orbes" doing nothing but keep running from us, appearing aparently everywhere with some interesting stuff to look at.
Yeah, it's very plausible that if another civilization exists some 10 light years away, the vehicle they use to travel 90,460,730,472,580 Km in order to get to Earth has the size of a compact car and copies the design of a 1950s experimental aircraft.
> I've yet to see an explanation that covers all the data those jets collected.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/c/mickwest. Mick has thoroughly investigated the most cited videos and shows them to be of entirely terrestrial origin - often atmospheric effects combined with optical lens, digital stabilization and thermal imaging artifacts. He even cites the technical documentation for the military camera equipment and often provides convincing demonstrations of the artifacts through recreations.
> So you're telling me, some random game developer was more competent than the US military guys who literally are hired for such analysis?
In the case of the most-cited "Gimbal" video, all the military has officially said is they can't determine for sure what the object the glare shown in the video is from. But everyone already agrees on that point. No one can tell from the video whether the glare shown is caused by an airplane many miles distant or some other object. No one representing the U.S. government has ever said the video could NOT be a magnified thermal glare from a distant airplane. Remember, the pilot never saw the object with his own eyes, it was far too distant to see visually even as a spec on the horizon. All the pilot ever saw was the same auto-tracking thermal video we've all seen.
> I suppose, having coded some "parallax effect" is sufficient in your book?
I don't know what you're referring to but it doesn't sound like Mick West's analysis video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs. Also, Mick only assembled the video. He acknowledges the evidence shown in the video is the work of many independent researchers working collaboratively over many months while iteratively sharing their data for peer review. There are links to all the source data shown as well as the entire open analysis discussion and review. The summary video is concise and only 20 minutes long. I challenge you to watch all of it and respond specifically. Which of the four points evidenced from the on-screen camera do you think is incorrect and why?
IMHO, it's inarguable the detailed analysis provides conclusive and verifiable evidence the object is precisely consistent with a glare from an extremely distant object with a thermal imaging 'halo' artifact around it. The apparent rotation and erratic movement of the thermal glare observed in the highly-magnified video is a combined artifact of a) the Raytheon multi-axis camera tracking gimbal system used on that jet, b) the optical stabilization system, and c) the digital de-rotation system.
If you respond, please at least give a clear "yes" or "no" as to whether you agree the apparent rotation is created by the rotating camera gimbal (which was then automatically digitally de-rotated) vs actual rotation of the distant object. If not, how do you explain all the obvious signs of gimbal rotation in the on-screen numeric data and the rest of the video frame around the center glare (eg the background clouds and sky)?
For example imagine I told you I own a pencil. Would you ask me to prove it or doubt me? Even you don't know or trust me, probably not. Why? Because pencils exist, it's easy to get one, and I have no reason to lie (in this scenario).
Now what if I told you I have an invisibility cloak. You'd call me a liar and want proof, hell probably an in person demonstration. Think about why.
--------------
"I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach."
Whether or not aliens exist is not the same as not reaching space. Say it's the year 1876-
1. Aliens may or may not exist, it's unknown
2. it's a true fact that humans haven't gone to space.
I get that you mean the amount of technological advancment in the last 300 years has been crazy.
The reason the burden of proof is on whether something occurred or exists is because the number of events that haven't occured and what doesn't exist is infinite.
Finally you also ask about who is to say and I assume you also mean "why not". There's always a downside to believing false things, maybe it's small for some people or maybe a crazy person adds aliens to the pile of "government lies" then decides to shoot up some government agency.
> I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach.
Tsiolkovsky developed his rocket equation in 1903 and in 1928 he published The Will of Universe dedicated to space colonisation. He clearly new it’s within reach of human mind.
Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon and given that his works are some early examples of science fiction and not a pure fantasy, one could say even Verne envisioned space travels as possible.
> The US Military released rather intriguing, yet unexplained videos of objects outmaneuvering our top jets.
Those videos show no such thing. All the stuff about outmanoeuvring is a fantastic narration.
Videos show only dots which can be (and were) explained as a bird from above, plane from behind and glitchy camera mount with a bit of optical artifacts on top. Which is infinitely more plausible than aliens from another star or another dimension.
> but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not?
I feel like learning physics increased my ability to tell possible from impossible things tremendously. Second factor is learning as much as you can about scams and liers.
With those two foundations you should have a solid capacity to appreciate reality
To me, if you watch videos of what amateurs can do with the maneuverability of a $300 racing FPV drone it is most likely those are military drones of some sort.
Even a $300 racing drone looks pretty alien if you have never seen one. A $3 million dollar one would absolutely look like it is from another planet.
The USAF and the Pentagon themselves released those videos, labeling those recording as "unexplainable".
Let me point them, and the fighter jet pilots, to "Scotty79-from-the-internet", so that they can all understand that what they all saw or recorded were in fact birds. :p
Just unexplained, which means noone there bothered to explain them seriously enough to create an official document. Which was correct (lack of) action to take because those observations were irrelevant for anyone except the most keen ufologists.
> Let me point them, and the fighter jet pilots
Jet pilots are good at flying jets. It's kinda hard so they don't have much capacity left to be good at anything else. Like explaining visual glitches and unusual outputs of highly complicated machinery.
> to "Scotty79-from-the-internet"
That weren't my explanations. I was merely citing the ones given by a guy with doctorate in physics and expeirience with IR cameras. There are others. All infinitely more plausible than "it's aliens".
Of course, it's possible. Almost anything is possible on some abstract level if we allow our imagination to roam freely. I'm all for asking the US government: "Do you hide alien UFOs?"
The question is how you react when the answer is "No." If you keep insisting the government is lying, then you're more and more getting into 'tin foil hat' territory, especially if you're a government employee and have no evidence other than alleged hearsay. It depends on your strength of belief in the contrarian opinion. Saying that it's possible is one thing, saying "they're doing it but I don't have proof" is another.
For almost hundreds of reasons, if any government, but specially super-power government would have UFO's tech hidden, and everybody else is almost certain UFOs are a myth, some wacko-level talk for internet forums
They would be strategically obligued to deny everything, so the answer would "No, no such a thing like UFOs here".
i.e. what happened with the NSA programs, most were almost fully known for the "conspiracy wackos" except by the name of the program, even decades before Snowden. But just were confirmed to be real maybe 30 years after the first mentions in the 70s,80s,90s.
Alternatively, if you had access to an immense and unassailable technological advantage over everyone, wouldn't you want to leverage that? Wouldn't it be nice to tell our enemies "we don't care how many nukes you have, we can do whatever we want with impunity or else we'll use our alien tech to protect ourselves and destroy our enemies" or to tell our allies "stick with us we're gonna be rolling out a stream of inventions that will each dramatically increase our prosperity for decades to come"? You only keep your strength hidden if it could potentially be negated - i.e. that they could develop the same technology or an effective counter without having access to alien spacecraft.
You're right mostly, there are also some special cases where it makes sense to hide the UFOs (or any radically new, advanced tech), some examples:
- the alien tech isn't really and/or fully available, they are half way in the reverse engineering efforts, and maybe other powers are in the race too
- the alien tech intrinsically reveals some currently hidden aspect of the universe/reality, if you present the technology publicly, it will be obvious that there's something new, and everybody will pursuit advances related to these new physics.
i.e. imagine discovering the eletricity in the XV century, it would have changed everything.
You're sure that in 1923, space was "something we would never reach"? That's about ten years before a German guy starts his work on liquid rocket fuel technology, work that will (via a Nazi terror weapon) go on to result in the US manned space programme.
If you said 1823 maybe I could sympathise, in 1823 they don't have everything together, they don't know about the Noble gases or dozens of other elements, they thought atoms were indivisible (hence the name), they don't have the First Network (the Universal Postal Union, yes, in 1823 you could not write a letter in say, Edinburgh, write an address in Berlin, and just post it, that idea hadn't been invented yet).
But by 1923 they're in a much better place. Their atomic model is still wrong but it's like the model you're probably picturing in your head, the one where electrons are little whizzy balls orbiting a nucleus. Wrong, but not wrong enough to cause big problems for everyday purposes. Kurt Gödel hasn't come up with his clever trick yet, but the problem is right there and people are thinking about it.
You say the videos are objects but I don't see evidence of objects. Just because you see a shape doesn't mean you saw an object. Did you know shadows can move faster than the speed of light? Because you see a shadow isn't a thing, it's just our mental model of events, and there are no limits on that model. We have plenty of ways to make a shape seem to move much faster than we can make an object move.
In 1783 the Montgolfier brothers flew through the skies for the first time ever in a hot air balloon. It wasn't even sure if humans could survive being in the air so the King wouldn't let them send humans aloft until test animals survived first.
Later that same year, the hydrogen balloon was invented and that one was flown to an altitude of 3 km high.
And yes, the idea that you could write in Edinburgh and have it delivered to Berlin had already been invented much further back than after 1823. The Roman Empire had the Cursus Publicus which handled mail delivery between the Provinces and Italy.
Do you mean someone of a high enough rank could have official communications and military dispatches delivered, or do you mean any person could have any letter delivered to any home? I think tialaramex was writing more about universal civilian letter delivery, and particularly about universal (well, global or near-global) addressing, rather than letter delivery between officials within an empire.
There would only be a need for that with ubiquitous literacy. The Roman system may well have been close enough to universally accessible and offer delivery throughout their territory for Roman citizens who were literate.
I don't think it realistically did - it included a system of authorisation that implied a demand that was intentionally denied, however there are multiple other old postal systems which definitely did (e.g. the Imperial Mail of the Holy Roman Empire [1] being one of the significant ones, but that itself built on older systems). A more defensible claim would be the strictly limited claim that the idea of attempting to create a global postal system with global addressability is a new idea. But even long before the UPU, a lot of countries had treaties to allow for forwarding of post, so I think it's unlikely that this idea was new as well, just previously impractical.
If something has been invented, the idea "the exact same thing but cheaper" has definitely already entered peoples' minds. They may not know a good method to do it, but they can imagine a world in which it exists.
For sure. Even if we can't explain how or why some phenomenon occurred, the conclusion "we don't know of anything on Earth that does this, so it must be aliens" is so much less likely than "it is something on Earth we haven't figured out yet".
I'm pretty convinced space aliens send the cosmic rays down that cause the bizarre runtime bugs in my software. I have never found a more amenable or rational explanation.
>I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach.
Far from it! From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne was written in 1865, and was a reasonable attempt at hard sci-fi. More scientifically, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published "Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices" in 1903, some 6 years after deriving his famous rocket equation; it advanced the basic concept of the space rocket, that we all take for granted today. In 1923, exactly a century ago, Hermann Julius Oberth published his book "The Rocket in Interplanetary Space", a thoroughly practical treatment in which he argues that human-rated rocket-powered space flight was not just theoretically possible but feasible and maybe even profitable.[0]
So century ago, not only was space firmly established as a place we could go, but also enough groundwork had been done that it was known how we would get there.
I don't know what you've seen, but the 3 video released a few years are mostly parallax, optical phenomenon (the "tic tac") and sensors trying and failing to track tiny objects (birds, balloons and similar) at distances of a few kilometres.
It’s incredibly hard for people to say “we dont have an explanation.” Either it’s unexplained therefore aliens or an equally speculative yet mundane dismissal.
What about Occam's razor? Think about the reports as well. It's not like some alien was seen walking around by hundreds then disappeared we are talking about unexplained visuals and mass moving in an unexplained way. Why even go right to aliens? Because people already believe it's true and are looking for anything that can be attributed to it.
I think you’re noticing the big five trait called “openness.”
Some people are very open, some not at all.
I’m happy I’m open to things. God, Love, Art. Some people tell you it’s all make believe, there’s no free will, just machines acting out biological imperatives in a world that’s so well understood by science that we’ve reached the end of history. No way!
The US Military released rather intriguing, yet unexplained videos of objects outmaneuvering our top jets. You should go check those out. I've yet to see an explanation that covers all the data those jets collected.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but instantly writing things off as 'tin foil hat' while the guy has an actual legit legal retaliation case going on seems a bit premature.