Oumuamua

[Lean'n'mean]

You are right about one thing, though. Humanity has no imagination.

I didn't suggest humanity had no imagination just that it is limited in what it can conceive.....just as we created gods in our own image we also create aliens too that resemble us & travel in space ships that we can recognize as such because we can't imagine extraterrestrials acting any differently from what we would do.

I don't deny that there are probably other forms of life in the universe either, given the quantity of planets & suns out there, statistically there must be other planets that are propitious to creating & supporting biological life & no doubt other life or energy forms exist that we just can't begin to imagine.

What I am sceptical about though, is alien visitation on earth. Our conceit drives us to believe that any intelligent alien life would try to contact us because we too are intelligent & interesting enough to warrent such a visit.

If there is a civilization out there that is a couple of thousand years more advanced than us (no need to say millions of years), then maybe they’ve been able to tackle some of these seemingly “technical” problems.

Any aliens capable of long distance space travel wouldn't be a "couple of thousand years more advanced than us".....they would be more advanced than us ( & completely different from us) as a species, period. We also too readily presume that any 'intelligent' or advanced alien life forms would naturally be space explorers......yet another anthropomorphism.

 

[Benny Holiday]

Nah I don't buy it. The distance between stars is simply too great for any material civilization to traverse. No matter how clever or 'advanced' your technology, the laws of physics puts the kibosh on the idea.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Well, the first analysis of data collected from Oumuamua is in: no dice. No signs of any activity. The odds were very long to begin with and as one observer wrote “maybe that is actually good news.”

https://www.space.com/39100-interstellar-object-oumuamua-alien-life-search.html

But almost in the same news-cycle, reports have come out that the Pentagon and the CIA have recently been running a top secret investigation into anomalous aerial phenomena. This will send conspiracy theorists into a frenzy because, for year, we’ve been told that the government suspended study of the subject decades ago.

https://www.salon.com/2017/12/16/pentagon-buried-budget-details-of-ufo-investigation/

http://www.newsweek.com/aliens-ufos-pentagon-search-program-750494

The second article references an event in 2004 when F/A-18 fighters had an encounter with a UFO off the coast of San Diego...

https://hotair.com/archives/2017/12/16/video-navy-pilots-encountered-strange-object-faster-fa-18/

Yikes. If it turns out that this is Russian or Chinese technology, that is still a cause for concern.

And everyone seems to agree that the Pentagon study is on-going, although no longer funded. (Which, to me, says the funding and project have been moved/redesigned somewhere else in that huge shell game known as defense spending. But maybe I am now the one sounding like a conspiracy nut.)

Even if a person is not particularly conspiracy-minded, it is not out of line to wonder what is going on and why. That’s a lot of money to be spending on something that is usually dismissed as not worth serious study. Would senator Harry Reid really have the power to include such a line item, and create an entire project, based on a purely personal whim? I don’t know.

Where are Scully and Mulder when we need them?

 

[Tiki Tom]

Alloys?! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

https://hotair.com/archives/2017/12/19/lot-ny-times-ufo-story-last-week/

Quote from article:

But here’s the icing on the cake from the article. Now that you’re up to speed on Bigelow’s background, if you bothered to scroll all the way down to the end of that lengthy New York Times article, you may have noticed this small item. (Emphasis added)​

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.​

Excuse me, but… what? What sort of “metal alloys and other materials” did you recover from these unidentified aerial phenomena? And how was that not the biggest, screaming headline out of the article? It’s one thing to say that your agency has been reviewing films of strange lights in the sky and speedy blips on your radar. But you supposedly have recovered physical, material evidence from them?​

 

[Tiki Tom]

Hmmm. Another bizarre story in the same vein. Each of the explanations floated seem pretty "out there". Except for maybe the last one: I could maybe buy the "foreign powers trying to spy on White Sands" theory.

https://www.cnet.com/news/mysterious-observatory-evacuation-stirs-alien-conspiracy-theories/

P.S. -- Still not a peep in the press about the "metal alloys and other materials".

 

[Zombie_61]

 

[GHT]

Nah I don't buy it. The distance between stars is simply too great for any material civilization to traverse. No matter how clever or 'advanced' your technology, the laws of physics puts the kibosh on the idea.

Sir Isaac Newton first presented his three laws of motion in the "Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis" in 1686. His first law states that every object remains at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force. This is normally taken as the definition of inertia. The key point here is that if there is no net force resulting from unbalanced forces acting on an object (if all the external forces cancel each other out), then the object maintains a constant velocity. If that velocity is zero, then the object remains at rest. And if an additional external force is applied, the velocity changes because of the force.

Read the end of that last sentence again: "The velocity changes because of the force."
He doesn't define force, but now we know, he mean't police force.

 

[scottyrocks]

 

[Tiki Tom]

Gone but not forgotten.
I thought it had been decided that Oumuamua was just a space rock from a distant galaxy. However, it appears that the thing is still being studied and there continue to be unusual theories. I do like the ancient relic theory and the phantasmic creation of a new scientific field: space archaeology that looks for relics of long dead advanced civilizations. Cool!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...uamua-giant-solar-sail-sent-civilization.html

 

[MikeKardec]

theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre who theorized a way of traveling faster than the speed of light by conceptualizing an “engine” that can traverse distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it.

I've heard of an updated version of the Alcubierre theory that uses considerably less energy, as in not insane yet still rediculous, to pull off the same stunt. It kind of reminds me of those super fast Japanese WWII torpedoes that created a vortex ahead of the torpedo.

There's been a lot of discussion of space recently and projects that chemical rockets will never be any good at pulling off. It makes me wonder if 1) we are being prepared to be conned into spending a bunch of money for a low orbit arms race or 2) there are lots of technologies that are nearly ready to go that have been classified or too theoretical until just recently ... or 3) both.

 

[MikeKardec]

We really have to be careful about terms like "life" and "civilization" when thinking about aliens. Generally when we use those terms we are silently saying that we expect the life or civilization to be enough like us so that we could recognize and appreciate it as "like us" even if it looks pretty weird. Bacteria for instance. Prions on the other hand ... "life?"

One of the largest life forms on earth, a 2.5 mile diameter fungus patch in Oregon, wasn't identified until just a few years ago. I doubt it will take the prize for much longer. If we missed the scope of that is it possible that we have met alien life and not recognized it as such, met alien intelligence and not recognized it as such? If it's different enough how could we even start to figure it out. I always loved the movie Starman because it's alien was UTTERLY alien, not a shred of identifiable biology to it.

I actually think that the first "alien" life we may discover is something that evolved (not form earth) to live in space. We've already found the high atmosphere contains a vast array of microbes that did evolve on earth and they survive in conditions that a few years ago would have been deemed impossible. If I remember rightly waterbears can take a certain amount of hard vacuum and radiation ... if life that evolved on earth can do it (or nearly do it) one wonders about things from elsewhere, and all the elsewheres, and what they can do.

If it's intelligent we may never know because we can only consider intelligence similar to ours. It's a failure of ... intelligence.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Interesting story. On the one hand, he “outed” Area 51. On the other hand, it is a pretty incredible tale. On the third hand, why the attention from the Feds? Is he a fabulist? Or has he been systematically discredited by the feds? No idea. Common sense says he is delusional. And yet...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-did-the-fbi-raid-the-home-of-the-biggest-alien-truther

 

[Lean'n'mean]

I wonder why aliens invariably land in the U.S......must be the warm welcome.

 

[Tiki Tom]

First, note that this January 2019 article is in the newsletter of the Federation of American Scientists, a respected 501c organization that has been around since 1945. The list of government funded research projects that the story refers to was obtained through a FOIA request. The source FOIA document from the Defense Intelligence Agency is linked in the article. Research projects funded to the tune of $22million included:

• Invisibility cloaking,
• Antigravity for aerospace applications,
• Negative mass propulsion,
• Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy,

And many others.
The FOIA document itself is worth clicking on. (It’s cover letter notes that some additional material was “exempt from release.”)
One hardly knows what to make of this.
Just a case of a government agency with too much money for its own good? Or, based on the 16 December 2017 article that the NYTimes broke (also linked), is there a justifiable and on-going reason for this research? Crazy stuff.

https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2019/01/aatip-list/

 

[Tiki Tom]

And today the Washington Post has weighed-in. In any other news year, this would be a pretty remarkable headline. What are we to think?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...eeds-adjust-that-fact/?utm_term=.fa81b597c1cf

 

[Hurricane Jack]

On the third hand, why the attention from the Feds?

I've wondered why the Feds have worked so hard to erase Lazar's educational background & employment records obviously to discredit him, yet they allow John Lear to say & publish what he does? Is it because of Lear's CIA connections? Is he still serving a purpose to disseminate false info to discredit perhaps?

http://www.thelivingmoon.com/47john_lear/menu.html

I wonder why aliens invariably land in the U.S......must be the warm welcome.

It's hard to get factual information out of other gov'ts & countries but check out the history of events in South America, Mexico, & listen to what Paul Hellyer has to say about Canada. Most of our allies follow the US official position.

Invisibility cloaking,

It is believed Invisibility Cloaking has been used by our troops in Iraq & Afganistan.

What are we to think?

Leaked info thru various forms of the media in dribs & drabs?

 

[Tiki Tom]

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, please, in an orderly manner.

"The UFO footage was also never cleared for public release, Gradisher told The Black Vault — meaning these are three unidentified phenomena you were never supposed to know about."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/united...cts-videos-were-not-to-be-released-to-public/​

 

[Lean'n'mean]

It will be wonderful when the magnificence of human ingenuity eventually turns to developing cameras that can actually focus & then maybe we can see what the conspiracy theorists get so exited about.
I wonder when chimpanzees look at the moon they think it's made of mashed banana.
The truth is elsewhere.

 

[Hurricane Jack]

Second “Interstellar Visitor,” After Oumuamua, On Its Way To Our Sun.

September 13, 2019 Albuquerque, New Mexico – Three days ago on September 10, 2019, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on the Big Island was able to photograph a faint, fuzzy, white glow of what astronomers are calling the “second interstellar visitor.”

But the newly discovered “second interstellar visitor” was detected by Crimean astronomer Gennady Borisov and its path confirmed by the University of Hawaii as an extremely curved path headed toward our sun at very high speed. Coming in from near a 40-degree angle above the ecliptic plane in which the Earth and our solar system orbit around the sun, C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) is expected to pass through the ecliptic plane on October 26, 2019. It’s speed of some 20 miles per second is too fast for the sun’s gravity to keep the new icy visitor bound in an orbit.

That high velocity indicates not only that the object likely originated from outside our solar system, but also that it will leave and head back to interstellar space.”

By December 2019, this comet will be visible with moderate-sized telescopes until the spring.

By spring the new interstellar visitor will be so far away that only professional telescopes such as Hubble will be able to follow it as it leaves our solar system.

https://www.earthfiles.com/2019/09/...visitor-after-oumuamua-on-its-way-to-our-sun/

 

[Zombie_61]

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, please, in an orderly manner...

My brother was a radarman in the U.S. Navy during the mid- to late-1950s. He told me once that the number and quality/manner of some of the detections he saw led him to believe they were neither man-made nor natural to this planet, and the only conclusion he could make was that they came from somewhere else in the universe. And, having no further information to divulge, he left it at that and we never discussed it again.

Considering the size of the universe we live in I think it's reasonable to assume we humans aren't the only intelligent life in existence; in fact, I'm not even sure we qualify as intelligent life. And I don't know if other species' have visited our insignificant little spec of a planet, or why they would. But I think both are possible.