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Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 11:53 am
by AcesHigh
CaptainBeowulf wrote:What about large cat-like aliens with bat ears and rat tails? :twisted:

(Niven just put all his xenobiology effort into the Puppeteer and then went for a biological kitbash) :P
haha, you are right. The Kzin inspired (or more than it, were copycated (no pun intended)) the Kilrath from Wing Commander.

ANYWAY, for real alien species variety, the best books imho are the Uplift books by David Brin. Of course, in his universe, all the thousands of species that form the galactic civilization were uplifted by older species (apparently, except the humans, in over a billion years, although suggesting that humans became intelligent AND achieved interstellar flight without older species help is either laughed upon or considered heresy depending of the species)

if all aliens in the books were uplifted by other species, we can think that maybe they wouldnt achieve intelligence or higher intelligence on their own...

anyway, aliens like the Jophur are pure imagination brilliance.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 11:55 am
by Skipjack
Fifth is the idea, already jokingly proposed around here in recent days, that they're our own descendants from the future, coming back for whatever reasons (maybe to try to change history, maybe because the world is wrecked and they want to collect samples from the good old days to colonize another planet with, but they know that some sort of chronological protection mechanism will kick in if they try to do anything more).
The volcan science council has concluded that time travel is impossible ;)
It probably becomes difficult to remain a flying animal when you develop a heavy neural network.
There are some pretty intelligent birds out there, crows and ravens, e.g.
Certainly they are not as intelligent as primates here, but that may have many reasons. If there is not evlolutionary pressure that favors an increased brain size over something else, it never happens.
Or, perhaps we just get visited most often by grays because they're more interested in us since we're similar to them, whereas the bird-people think a bunch of monkeys are pretty boring.

There is no compelling evidence that the greys exist. All the so called evidence that I have seen, has been debunked.
I would say it's possible that life here could have been seeded, either deliberately or by natural "panspermia" via asteroids.
I have heard this before and the "seeded by asteroids" theory is proposed by serious scientists. I think that it is possible within the solar system, but I do not think that it is viable for outside the solar system. The distances are too big and IIRC most asteroids crossing the earths path are in an orbit arround our sun. They are not just some stray rocks coming from... somewhere out there.
Seeding by aliens would require me to believe that there are aliens interested in doing that and capable of doing it. I have no evidence for that.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 1:43 pm
by AcesHigh
even if Earth was seeded by aliens, we have evidence of very early stages of life from Earth... barely above the simple complex organic chemistry level...

lets suppose Earth was seeded with procaryotes. Already, we have the basic units of DNA, since they have RNA, complex proteyn production, etc. But from procaryotes to complex multicellular organisms is a looooong way where anything can happen and a multitude of shapes can exist.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 2:23 pm
by seedload
Captain,

I do have an understanding that of the volumes of UFO encounters that there are a small percentage that are hard to explain, mainly because of the integrity of the witnesses. However, this does not necessarily surprise me, because it is apparent to me that if you made a bell curve out of any large volume of reports of any unexplained thingies, that there would always be a small percentage at the right side of the bell that were exceedingly difficult to dismiss. I actually have been interested in UFOs for a long time, since my childhood TV days watching the Project Bluebook TV show. I watch a lot of documentaries on UFOs and while I find that some accounts confound my ability to understand what could have happened, nothing has convinced me that there must be alien spaceships shooting about. I have actually skimmed the Cameta Report which contained some interesting stories of hard to explain events.

Further, I understand a lot of theories of why we might have alien visitors but they are not compelling to me. For example, the idea that an intelligent alien race would consider us the equivelent of how we consider a great white shark (ie taking samples and putting tracking devices in us) is absurd, IMHO.

In the end I resort to my own logic for dismissing alien visitors. These are my issues.
1) Problem of motive.
2) Inconsistency of description. Where did all the saucers go?
3) Inconsistency of behavior. Normally hiding, but inexplicably sometimes openly tailing aircraft for example.
4) Lack of good photographic evidence in a new world of instant photography.
5) Inconsistency of radar. Sometimes appear on radar, sometimes don't. If they do, then the world is covered by radar so why not seen more.
6) etc.

Surprisingly, the grey form is not among my issues. Convergent evolution makes a lot of sense to me.

However, if not convergent, I would imagine that aliens would look like little elephants with remarkably nimble trunks and an inexplicably persistent urge to herd.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 3:47 pm
by AcesHigh
alien elephants? Hammerfall book by Larry Niven? Still need to read that one.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 3:54 pm
by seedload
AcesHigh wrote:alien elephants? Hammerfall book by Larry Niven? Still need to read that one.
Mixing books I think.

The one I was referencing is Footfall. The other book is called Lucifer's Hammer. Both by Niven and Pournelle. In Lucifer's Hammer a big rock just knocks into us on it's own. In Footfall, little elephants fling the rocks.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 4:14 pm
by DeltaV
CaptainBeowulf wrote:However, I find it difficult to believe that anyone would really be bothering to build things like fifth generation fighters (F-35s or the equivalent MIGs or Chinese things on the drawing board) if they had things like these at an operational capacity. Tens to hundreds of billions is a bit much to spend on a massive coverup program - to just build conventional jets as misinformation when you have something better.
Not if money is paper and you own the only printing press.
CaptainBeowulf wrote:Also, I don't believe that vast government conspiracies are workable over long periods of time - they fall apart and get exposed.
There are some new inventions to deal with that - non-disclosure forms, the IRS, prisons and bullets.
CaptainBeowulf wrote:So I don't really think any country is operating hyper-advanced craft.
So you pick the much more likely scenario: aliens. "Citizen, the aliens are coming! Let us 'protect' you...." Silly cattle.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 4:33 pm
by AcesHigh
seedload wrote:
AcesHigh wrote:alien elephants? Hammerfall book by Larry Niven? Still need to read that one.
Mixing books I think.

The one I was referencing is Footfall. The other book is called Lucifer's Hammer. Both by Niven and Pournelle. In Lucifer's Hammer a big rock just knocks into us on it's own. In Footfall, little elephants fling the rocks.
:lol: :lol:

that was quite the mixing. I not only confused the books as joined the titles in one.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 4:38 pm
by GIThruster
seedload wrote: 1) Problem of motive.
2) Inconsistency of description. Where did all the saucers go?
3) Inconsistency of behavior. Normally hiding, but inexplicably sometimes openly tailing aircraft for example.
4) Lack of good photographic evidence in a new world of instant photography.
5) Inconsistency of radar. Sometimes appear on radar, sometimes don't. If they do, then the world is covered by radar so why not seen more.
6) etc.
You'll pardon me that the only one of these I think deserves addressing is number 4. The rest seem silly to me, especially number 6. WTF is that?

On number 4, just how many photos would be sufficient? 100? 500? 1,000? 5,000?

Just how many photos of what we all agree is a rare phenomenon would you need to see before you no longer had this objection?

http://www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/photohome.asp

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 5:50 pm
by CaptainBeowulf
So you pick the much more likely scenario: aliens. "Citizen, the aliens are coming! Let us 'protect' you...." Silly cattle.
No, I never "picked" that one. I simply find it not impossible, for all the reasons I described on page 3.

I find the unknown types of complex, long-lived ball lightning to be quite a likely scenario for many of the remaining unknown cases. Possibly, such things could create a radar signature, would "follow" aircraft, and would appear to be spheres, saucers etc. generating bright light(s). They might even appear to have metallic bodies. However, there are a few other accounts which seem to indicate things that would be very unlikely for ball lightning to do.

Let's look at where we are here:

IF M-E effect, or something like it (Heim theory seems fully debunked now, but it's another example), works, THEN it might be possible to engineer a (sublight) gravinertial space drive.

IF you can manipulate gravity and inertia, MAYBE you can generate negative energy densities/negative mass.

IF you can generate negative energy density, MAYBE you can manipulate it to form something like a bubble, in which case you may be able to generate something like an Alcubierre metric (superluminal space drive).

If that's so, then interstellar flight, while still non-trivial, would not be as big a deal as we think it is. So, you might once every few years send a recon force to swing by a planet with an emerging civilization and conduct observations for a few weeks to see what direction they're headed in. Better to be prepared for a new player on the scene.

So, that's why I find UFOs not impossible. My reasoning isn't too far from GIThruster's, the main differences being:

1. He seems relatively convinced that M-E, negative energy, and Alcubierre metrics or wormholes CAN be generated

2. He seems to heavily favour the UFOs are aliens explanation

3. Given that he apparently strongly suspects that points 1 and 2 are real, he draws a causal connection between the two: UFOs are using M-E devices to create warp drives and so are routinely coming here.

4. He also seems to think that at least the U.S. government (maybe other governments) knows that this is what's happening and is deliberately covering it up, for which I not only find no evidence, but also find unbelievable based on what we know of bureaucratic politics/behavior.

Now, you may find it more believable that there is a fleet of secret U.S. government advanced science craft flying all over the earth, which is fine. Admittedly both aliens and a secret U.S. program which has successfully stayed hidden for decades while we waste money building jets and rockets both seem bizarre, but are both marginally within the realm of the possible. So, I suppose that, based on our own personalities, one or another of us might slightly favor one or another explanation over another. At this point, however, we don't really know.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 6:09 pm
by CaptainBeowulf
I have heard this before and the "seeded by asteroids" theory is proposed by serious scientists. I think that it is possible within the solar system, but I do not think that it is viable for outside the solar system. The distances are too big and IIRC most asteroids crossing the earths path are in an orbit arround our sun. They are not just some stray rocks coming from... somewhere out there.
I tend to agree with the in-solar-system approach, although there is a marginally possible option that you might call "quasi interstellar:"

1. It's been hypothesized that the sun may have formed inside a denser "stellar nursery" area of the galaxy;

2. The sun seems to be a second-generation star, born from the remnants of the explosion of an earlier star or stars (which might have created a stellar nursery)

3. It seems less likely that first generation stars would have had planets, or at least rocky planets, because there were presumably far fewer heavy elements early in the universe, and stuff like iron and carbon had to be "bred" in the fusion reactions of the first-gen stars. However, maybe there was enough stuff to create some planets, and maybe life did evolve the first time around. So, some of the remnants of first-gen solar systems may have been scooped up in the sun's gravity well and contributed to the creation of the second-gen planets in the current solar system. Some of these bits of rock might have had extremely hardy bacteria or viruses living dormant in them which would have managed to survive the destruction of a first-gen planet.

Unlikely, but vaguely possible.
Seeding by aliens would require me to believe that there are aliens interested in doing that and capable of doing it. I have no evidence for that.
No, there's no evidence for that at all. It's an unprovable/non-falsifiable hypothesis. The only way we could try to test it is to develop a space-drive that allows interstellar travel and go out to observe what's happened in the rest of the galaxy. If we find critters on lots of other planets which use DNA as their genetic material, use the same 4 DNA nucleotides that we do, arrange them into chromosomes between mitosis or mieosis like we do, and have recognizable "types" of genes for coding basic metabolic processes, we might reach that conclusion. On the other hand, we might find that the laws of physics/biology cause way more convergent evolution than we thought.

At any rate, I find the hypothesis that life arises where the conditions are correct and so arose here independently to satisfy Occam's Razor better than aliens seeding it.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 6:25 pm
by seedload
GIThruster wrote:
seedload wrote: 1) Problem of motive.
2) Inconsistency of description. Where did all the saucers go?
3) Inconsistency of behavior. Normally hiding, but inexplicably sometimes openly tailing aircraft for example.
4) Lack of good photographic evidence in a new world of instant photography.
5) Inconsistency of radar. Sometimes appear on radar, sometimes don't. If they do, then the world is covered by radar so why not seen more.
6) etc.
You'll pardon me that the only one of these I think deserves addressing is number 4. The rest seem silly to me, especially number 6. WTF is that?

On number 4, just how many photos would be sufficient? 100? 500? 1,000? 5,000?

Just how many photos of what we all agree is a rare phenomenon would you need to see before you no longer had this objection?

http://www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/photohome.asp
There is no number of photos like those you reference that would be sufficient. Most of those photos make me feel like someone yelled "pull" a second before the shot was taken.

What would be more convincing is multiple photos or preferably video independently taken by multiple unconnected observers from different angles/locations of the same object. Basically a Dome of the Rock UFO videos, only not faked and in daylight. Pictures of an unexplained light(s) don't count.

Everyone has cameras with them all day long these days. Lots of those supposed pictures from your referenced website were taken over highly populated areas in the daylight. If the UFOs are that active as to be seen over populated areas in the day, then it is hard to imagine multiple people NOT taking a shot of it.

My guess is that it would probably be more likely to get multiple independent videos of the same UFO today then it was to get a single picture of one back in the 50's simply based on the distribution of cameras - assuming there are really flying saucers that is.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 6:36 pm
by CaptainBeowulf
So, you might once every few years send a recon force to swing by a planet with an emerging civilization and conduct observations for a few weeks to see what direction they're headed in. Better to be prepared for a new player on the scene.
Thought I'd expand on my own reasoning here.

Let's postulate an alien civilization, or community of civilizations - which, as shorthand, we can just describe as a civilization. It may have any number of motivations, perhaps motivations we can't really understand. However, it's not terribly unlikely that it could (a) be primarily motivated by its own self-interest, as many of our civilizations have been; (b) at the same time not be xenocidal space-nazis. Then:

1. It might not particularly want a new player on the scene. So, it won't want to contact a primitive species directly and hand them technology that lets them make a space-drive, or even just prove to them that such a thing is possible, therefore making them research it intensively. The aliens may hope that the primitives will take a very long time to figure out a space-drive.

2. At the same time, the aliens think that if the primitive civilization doesn't destroy itself, eventually it will figure out a space-drive. They think that the only way to stop this is to exterminate the primitive civilization, or at least "bomb it back to the stone age" so that it takes another ten thousand years to get back to the point where it'll start figuring out a space drive. The aliens find either option morally unacceptable.

So, the result is to observe but not contact directly. A currently unprovable/non-falsifiable hypothesis, but one that is not impossible.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 7:03 pm
by seedload
CaptainBeowulf wrote:
So, you might once every few years send a recon force to swing by a planet with an emerging civilization and conduct observations for a few weeks to see what direction they're headed in. Better to be prepared for a new player on the scene.
Thought I'd expand on my own reasoning here.

Let's postulate an alien civilization, or community of civilizations - which, as shorthand, we can just describe as a civilization. It may have any number of motivations, perhaps motivations we can't really understand. However, it's not terribly unlikely that it could (a) be primarily motivated by its own self-interest, as many of our civilizations have been; (b) at the same time not be xenocidal space-nazis. Then:

1. It might not particularly want a new player on the scene. So, it won't want to contact a primitive species directly and hand them technology that lets them make a space-drive, or even just prove to them that such a thing is possible, therefore making them research it intensively. The aliens may hope that the primitives will take a very long time to figure out a space-drive.

2. At the same time, the aliens think that if the primitive civilization doesn't destroy itself, eventually it will figure out a space-drive. They think that the only way to stop this is to exterminate the primitive civilization, or at least "bomb it back to the stone age" so that it takes another ten thousand years to get back to the point where it'll start figuring out a space drive. The aliens find either option morally unacceptable.

So, the result is to observe but not contact directly. A currently unprovable/non-falsifiable hypothesis, but one that is not impossible.
If they are sublight travelers then you can assume them to be relatively close and easily capable of listening to our delayed communications rather than actually coming here to spy on us.

If the are FTL travelers, then there might be some reason for them to come here (ie, they can't intercept our communications and beam them faster than light but they can travel faster than light). Even so, I can't imagine why they would need to land anywhere. Come to the solar system, listen to our communications, leave. Easy cheesy. Landing in a field in Arkansas seems a little unnecessary for your speculated purpose.

I hear the theory. It just seems a bit of a reach in my opinion.

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 7:27 pm
by GIThruster
seedload wrote: There is no number of photos like those you reference that would be sufficient. Most of those photos make me feel like someone yelled "pull" a second before the shot was taken.
This is one of the reasons why you can't expect anyone to do your research for you. They spend the time and your response is a 20 second post. You couldn't possibly have looked at those 300 photos so your comments about them are obviously examples of ignorance. Worse is, for you to comment on what "most" of them look like when you did not look at most of them, is completely dishonest.

You see why we cannot have an intelligent dialog about the evidence? You're not interested in evidence. Why confuse you with the facts when your mind is made up?

You complained that there is no photographic evidence when in fact there are more than 10,000 photos available. I pointed you to the best 300 and your answer without looking at them is they're no good. There's no room for intelligent discussion in the face if this sort of thing.