http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,484157,00.html

My question, how many folks out there think there is anything to uncover about UFO's?

Is the govt hiding things from us?

Are we alone????

(tongue in cheek of course, I have no real stance either way)

tongue in cheek of course, I have no real stance either way)
I'm inclined to be with ya there, But...the more they deny the more i'm willing to believe. history show the more staunchly a goverment denies something, the more likely it is truth!

The answer to all you questions is yes...please pass the shrooms. :p

I've always wondered (well, not always, but for a long time) if all the nukular testing we did at one point would increase the odds of us showing up on the "radar", were there a radar to show up on.

No, that energy release was random and effectively infrequent enough such that anything which did escape our atmosphere would be indistinguishable from other background radiation. Even Tsar Bomba, which was perhaps Earth's first outboard motor, didn't send as much energy out of the system as a sunspot.

We believe radio/tv et al to be detectable because it's constant and persistent.

i cant think there is not other life. It's a numbers game take how many stars there are, how many have orbiting bodies, and we're the only ones that the right stuff happened to create life? I think not.

Government IMO is NOT hiding anything, back to the numbers the chances of other life being close are VERY slim.

No, that energy release was random and effectively infrequent enough such that anything which did escape our atmosphere would be indistinguishable from other background radiation. Even Tsar Bomba, which was perhaps Earth's first outboard motor, didn't send as much energy out of the system as a sunspot.

We believe radio/tv et al to be detectable because it's constant and persistent.


Tsar Bomba was just freaking huge... Russians were not accurate with there bomb targeting technology like we are so they went to just forgetting about targeting altogether and went to shear volume..

i cant think there is not other life. It's a numbers game take how many stars there are, how many have orbiting bodies, and we're the only ones that the right stuff happened to create life? I think not.

Government IMO is NOT hiding anything, back to the numbers the chances of other life being close are VERY slim.


Sorry for double.. I beleive in aliens.. not like x-files type stuff but as stated I think before by shear size of the univers and number of systems there has to be something. I do think the gov't knows more then they lead on but it's still not like a hanger 18 thing.

I'm with everyone on the numbers thing. while life is probably very rare and special sorry Christain idealogists why would God create a such a vast universe just to pick one out of the way backwater planet to plant life on?

*tinfoil hat on*
I always said the cold war was nothing more than an excuse to justify the building up of a planetary wide arsenal to combat the alien aggresors.

I have always believed that life exists elsewhere, but I have no such illusions that it would be anything remotely similar to what has developed on this planet.

The sad truth of contact with an alien race is we would probably be so shit-pants scared at what we saw we would attack it out of fear, before ever finding out what we were dealing with; such is the tragedy of the human ego.

I think there is probably a lot of life in the universe. Probably even a lot of intelligent life. I also believe it's likely they have been to visit our planet. Yeah it's probably wacky but I don't see why its not possible.

Odds are intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.
Odds are it's too far away to make meaningful contact with us.
That's the way I see it, anyway.

My mother witnessed this one:

http://www.aliensthetruth.com/UFO_sightings_famous.php?ID=21&view=1

She was taking trash out from the kitchen and putting it in the outside trash can when she looked up towards the Wanaque reservoir and saw this huge light hovering in the sky, she ran in screaming for my Father to come look but when he got outside it was gone.

I know my oldest sister and her husband, who is a very prominent Dr, saw the huge triangular shaped UFO over the Hudson Valley. I think that was back in the '80s

Odds are intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.
Odds are it's too far away to make meaningful contact with us.
That's the way I see it, anyway.

Well compounding on that, wherever this alien is coming from will need to be far enough from their star to not incinerate the organism, yet close enough to be bathed in a healthy amount of radiation to have rapid mutations enough to evolve into something that can survive a trip from there to here.

Not to mention that our planet has only 1 organism capable of space travel out of billions of other organisms, if we do encounter something from another planet it will more likely be a single cellular organism than a walking, talking, spaceship flying green man.

If you're playing the odds, you must assume that there's at least one species in the universe capable of (much) faster than light travel. No different than we once thought it impossible to fly in the air, it is almost certain that there's some way to fly in space/time.

So, the distance thing is likely negligible if you're going down that road.

The Drake equation.



N= [r* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc] L where:

N= number of possible civilizations to communicate with

R* = is the rate at which stars capable of sustaining like are formed

fp = the fraction of these stars which have planets

ne = the number of planets similar to Earth in the planetary system

fl = the fraction of the Earth-like planets that hold life

fi = the fraction of life that becomes an intelligent civilization

fc = the fraction intelligent civilizations that attempt to communicate

L= the number of years the civilization remains able to communicate.

I believe

If you're playing the odds, you must assume that there's at least one species in the universe capable of (much) faster than light travel. No different than we once thought it impossible to fly in the air, it is almost certain that there's some way to fly in space/time.

So, the distance thing is likely negligible if you're going down that road.

Specially as we learn more and more about the shape of the universe. The more and more likely we learn it is to travel Faster Than Light (FTL).

Spool up the ftl... Prepare to jump!

I keep thinking the size of the Universe is so fantastically large, that it must somehow be a reflection of itself. Think of sailing on a globe, but not recognizing when you have gotten back to your starting point, because the frame of reference is so vastly different from when you started, you can't recognize it.
If that were the case, then the argument for for Drake's Equasion is vastly reduced. The observable Universe may be a house of mirrors, that we can't recognize because of the distortions of spacetime.

Ugh, much too heavy thoughts for my brain, so early.

Spool up the ftl... Prepare to jump!

$$

err does that mean they'll be cylons??

I keep thinking the size of the Universe is so fantastically large, that it must somehow be a reflection of itself. Think of sailing on a globe, but not recognizing when you have gotten back to your starting point, because the frame of reference is so vastly different from when you started, you can't recognize it.
If that were the case, then the argument for for Drake's Equasion is vastly reduced. The observable Universe may be a house of mirrors, that we can't recognize because of the distortions of spacetime.

Ugh, much too heavy thoughts for my brain, so early.


I see someone has dropped the brown acid...

Tsar Bomba was just freaking huge... Russians were not accurate with there bomb targeting technology like we are so they went to just forgetting about targeting altogether and went to shear volume..

Tsar Bomba wasn't likely ever seriously considered as a usable weapon, it was too large to fit on any existing rocket platform and too costly to risk on a bomber. Russian rocketry was nominally just as good as ours in terms of weapon effectiveness, although we never did get to run the field trial ...



If you're playing the odds, you must assume that there's at least one species in the universe capable of (much) faster than light travel. No different than we once thought it impossible to fly in the air, it is almost certain that there's some way to fly in space/time.


FTL is considered impossible for entirely different reasons that the Mach barrier. No one considered the Mach barrier to be unbreakable, they didn't think it was practical to build a manned aircraft that could break it in controlled flight. Dozens of existing technologies already accelerated objects to faster than Mach 1 in air.


Now, there are some theories floating around that gravity is faster than light, or that the speed of light can vary (greatly), or that the intersection of light's travel path at some unknown higher speed with our universe is mutable; however these are all theoretical problems, not engineering ones.

We may have to face a depressing reality that we share the universe with other intelligent life, but are still very much alone.

Breaking the sound barrier and being able to fly at all are apples and oranges.

Flight : Breaking the sound barrier :: Space flight : ???

How weird, I have no idea what else I was reading that I transposed into that.

We may have to face a depressing reality that we share the universe with other intelligent life, but are still very much alone.

One of my favorite 'guilty pleasure' science fiction books, "Songs from the Stars" (author escapes me atm) dealt with just that issue. Specifically, the protagonists (descendants of the humans who nearly bombed themselves back into the Stone Age, but that's another issue) finally managed to travel back up to a listening post that had been put in Earth's orbit some time ago. They were delighted to find messages from a coalition of races near the galactic core, and then realized that due to the distance the message had had to travel at the speed of light, millenia had passed and in fact this group of civilizations was long dead (and they did in fact get a last message of sorts).

One of the things we do have to consider, with the time/distance equation, is *where* a civilization (assuming spacefaring, or at least capable of telecommunications) might be in their technology with via what media they are sending/receiving messages - witness the changes in just the last century and a half on that score. There might be other intelligent civilizations within a not-insurmountable distance from us, but we might never know it due to technology that is unreadable, or incomprehensible, for one or the other species in question.

Late to catch a plane, but it's kind of fun to think about.

Regards,
Nydia

Considering how much earlier some civilizations might have started developing, its not that unlikely to be far more ahead of us.

Also isn't the most recent data we found show that the universe is likely shaped like a hologram? Which would make travel easier than we thought.