The truth is out there

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#2712070 24-May-2021 10:40

eracode:

Handsomedan:

... that explains why they keep coming here to violate our anuses.

To borrow from another thread, I hope they don't come here and charge a perineum for us to get their technology.

You just know it's gonna be 'software as a service.'

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Fred99

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#2712098 24-May-2021 11:13

JayADee:

eracode:

To borrow from another thread, I hope they don't come here and charge a perineum for us to get their technology.

You just know it's gonna be 'software as a service.'

If it's an auto-correct spell checker with a money-back guarantee and bonus payment for the dumbest funny mistakes, count me in.

frankv

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#2712150 24-May-2021 12:00

Eva888:

An aircraft banked 15 degrees that is facing directly away from or towards you will have its wingtip lights or landing lights at a 15 degree angle. Typically, as it turns the angle will move closer to the vertical as it turns at right angles to you.

I wonder how you knew they were going very fast? How do you know how far away they were?

It might be worth checking FlightRadar or FlightAware or similar to see if there were any aircraft in the area.

Many years up here watching planes you get to know the height and position visually. You can also recognise the speed as it’s pretty constant. These were moving way faster than any plane and were green. They were also very much lower in the sky than the usual flight paths. It’s difficult to describe distance and easiest way is to hold arm out and use fingers to measure by sight to explain.
There are always aircraft up here...we are looking out onto the flight paths as planes head to and from the airport. That was a one and only time.

I'm not doubting that they weren't behaving like the planes you usually see. But I'm saying that it's possible that they might be behaving like *unusual* planes. For example, perhaps the Air Force was doing a high-speed low-level exercise in your area, somewhat closer and a lot lower than what you're used to. With nothing but a dot of light, it's very difficult/impossible to distinguish between a small dot quite close and a large dot further away. You're assuming it's a fast-moving dot because you're assuming its distance away is similar to planes that you're used to seeing. The Air Force trainers cruise at 278kt, whereas a landing aircraft would be down in the 60-75kt region, so the Air Force (and many other aircraft) could actually be going 4 times the speed of your usual landing/taking off aircraft. If it was half the distance away, it would appear to be going eight times as fast.

frankv

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#2712158 24-May-2021 12:12

Fred99:

Eva888: Good point @Batman. There is reported phenomena of lights observed as connected to earthquakes.

I do wonder if that's real, or if it's similar to the reported phenomenon of animals having some ability to detect earthquakes "before they happen" - which could be rationally explained by animals reacting to low frequency and amplitude "P waves" that travel through the earth crust and arrive before the strong shaking from the slower moving "S waves".

Our mutt was sitting on my feet (usual resting place) and went ballistic when the 2009 M7.8 Dusky Sound quake happened.

Our dog is also very good at this. The last big earthquake struck in the middle of the night. The dog went ballistic, and there was enough time for me to yell at him a couple of times to shut up, then to get halfway down the hall to chuck him outside. At which point the S waves arrived.

Way way back, I worked for a company that made "earthquake triggers"... devices that detected the P waves and could then turn the power/gas/whatever off before the damaging S waves arrived.

Rikkitic

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#2712160 24-May-2021 12:14

The point here being, that the human brain operates on 'best effort' software and is extremely susceptible to all kinds of perceptual errors. A lot of them we know about. Some may be less apparent.

I like the idea of extraterrestrials. I hope they are here, or coming. Maybe they can teach us to live like civilised beings, or exterminate us if we are a lost cause. We could use the shake-up. But so far no solid evidence of them seems to have emerged, just sworn testimonies. Maybe government conspiracies are keeping it hidden, but it is surprising that governments have become so good at this, when they are so hopeless at everything else.

I want to believe. I hope there are aliens. I certainly believe there is something causing unexplained sightings. But we need better data before concluding that we really are not alone.

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frankv

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#2712283 24-May-2021 14:54

Rikkitic:

Maybe government conspiracies are keeping it hidden, but it is surprising that governments have become so good at this, when they are so hopeless at everything else.

Governments and the military are often very good at keeping secrets. I'm thinking of the Stealth fighter & bomber in the US, which were kept secret for a decade after they first flew. Also, during WW2 the Manhattan project (employed more than 130,000 people, consumed 1% of USA's electricity, cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $25 billion today), 30 sites in 3 countries, the world's largest building, the Trinity test), Bletchley Park, and proximity fuses.

Fred99

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#2712400 24-May-2021 15:45

Rikkitic:

The point here being, that the human brain operates on 'best effort' software and is extremely susceptible to all kinds of perceptual errors. A lot of them we know about. Some may be less apparent.

Yeah - we're pretty damn useless.

Here's a short video of some things changing colour, but NOT changing shape, moving closer, moving apart, moving in the same direction, moving in different directions.

Fred99

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#2712403 24-May-2021 15:53

frankv:

Way way back, I worked for a company that made "earthquake triggers"... devices that detected the P waves and could then turn the power/gas/whatever off before the damaging S waves arrived.

These are now widely used in Japan. In the wake of Tokyo quake in 1923, ~38,000 people burned to death.

neb

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#2712632 24-May-2021 21:01

Fred99:
I do wonder if that's real, or if it's similar to the reported phenomenon of animals having some ability to detect earthquakes "before they happen" - which could be rationally explained by animals reacting to low frequency and amplitude "P waves" that travel through the earth crust and arrive before the strong shaking from the slower moving "S waves".

Another hypothesis is piezoelectric effects in rocks displaced by ground movement before the big shake.

Like "spontaneous human combustion", at some point someone will come up with a perfectly straightforward explanation of it and we'll all slap our foreheads and go "ah, of course, why didn't anyone think of that before?".

Also in terms of cats as earthquake detectors, yer typical household kitty will randomly react to nothing half a dozen times a day, so all it has to do is get within an hour or two of a quake, fire, or whatever and hey presto, it's "predicted" it!

Eva888

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#2712764 25-May-2021 09:51

Am open to any suggestion and sure there’s an explanation that’s not necessarily other worldly, but so far none have made sense. I did try to rationalise low flying Air Force Jets because of the speed but, green lights that were close to basketball size and vertically aligned would mean they were flying wingtips up and down the entire distance. Also lights came up vertically from the horizon then changed direction still almost vertical. Two of us were watching and seeing the same thing. It’s not as if we are in Area 51, this is little ole NZ and I can’t imagine the defence forces trialing secret low flying supersonic craft over Cook Strait...but who knows.

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#2713080 26-May-2021 07:10

i'll give you one explanation of why it's not

1. nearest habitable solar system is 4 light yrs away - there's nothing there

2. nearest exoplanet is 10 light yrs away - it's too young to have anything there

3. the nearest places that may have advanced civilizations capable of travel at or close to speed of light of any means is likely at least hundreds or thousands of light years away. do you know what that means. it means 99% of the stuff you can see with your telescope are dead. they are no longer there. gone. history. these aliens that far away even if they pointed their radio directly at us would be looking at nothing (us in the distant past). so even if they had the technology to come here they won't know anything about our current situation.

4. these radio signals we've sent out ... well by the time it gets to anywhere useful it either becomes white noise or it's taken so long that we'd have been long gone. nothing lasts forever in this universe. and even if it did, apparently the universe is expanding at a rate of 74km per second per megaparsec, up from 67 about 100 years ago. by the time it gets your signal it might be able to get here anyway coz we are getting further away.

so i'm picking that if there are advance aliens either - they're dead, they don't know you're here, they are not advanced enough. the only beings that can visit you are those that can overcome the laws of physics. ie gods of some nature.

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#2713097 26-May-2021 09:17

Batman:

i'll give you one explanation of why it's not

1. nearest habitable solar system is 4 light yrs away - there's nothing there

2. nearest exoplanet is 10 light yrs away - it's too young to have anything there

3. the nearest places that may have advanced civilizations capable of travel at or close to speed of light of any means is likely at least hundreds or thousands of light years away. do you know what that means. it means 99% of the stuff you can see with your telescope are dead. they are no longer there. gone. history. these aliens that far away even if they pointed their radio directly at us would be looking at nothing (us in the distant past). so even if they had the technology to come here they won't know anything about our current situation.

4. these radio signals we've sent out ... well by the time it gets to anywhere useful it either becomes white noise or it's taken so long that we'd have been long gone. nothing lasts forever in this universe. and even if it did, apparently the universe is expanding at a rate of 74km per second per megaparsec, up from 67 about 100 years ago. by the time it gets your signal it might be able to get here anyway coz we are getting further away.

so i'm picking that if there are advance aliens either - they're dead, they don't know you're here, they are not advanced enough. the only beings that can visit you are those that can overcome the laws of physics. ie gods of some nature.

2. The nearest exoplanet is Proximi Centauri b, at 4.7 ly. So possibly there's an advanced civilisation there, and they've been seeing our radio signals for 100 years. But it's unlikely, since we don't see *their* radio transmissions.

3. Even if the planet is 100,000ly away, that's a drop in the ocean compared to Earth's age of 4.7 billion years. Unless you think life on Earth evolved in the fastest way possible, you have to accept that if life on some exoplanet evolved just slightly faster than us they could very well have got to our stage 100,000 years ago. Even if 99% of what you see is dead (and I'd say it's more like 99.9999999%), that means that there's an enormous amount of life out there. 99% of 100,000,000,000 means a billion life-forms in our galaxy alone.

4. Yes, only those within 100ly can detect radio waves created by human activity on Earth, i.e. about 76 stars. But if your 1% life were right, it would be better than 50/50 that there was life there. But, again, no radio signals so probably not. Assuming they follow the same technology tree as us at about the same rate of development, we might expect to detect radio waves from them about the same time that they detect radio waves from us. So both of us would know that 100 years ago the other developed radio. They (and we) would presumably want to investigate further and send a probe which would travel at C/2 (assuming speed of light travel is not possible) and take 200 years to get to its destination. So we could expect at least 200 years between us detecting them and them arriving here.

Even if Proxima Centauri b suddenly started emitting radio waves and therefore was believed to have an advanced civilisation, we might expect them to take another 100 years to get to our level of technology before they could send a probe here. In the meantime we could monitor their progress (by watching their "The Lucy Show" transmissions, for example). If we could detect their launch of a probe to come here, we would have a couple of years to prepare for its arrival.

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#2713102 26-May-2021 09:27

Batman:

i'll give you one explanation of why it's not

1. nearest habitable solar system is 4 light yrs away - there's nothing there

2. nearest exoplanet is 10 light yrs away - it's too young to have anything there

3. the nearest places that may have advanced civilizations capable of travel at or close to speed of light of any means is likely at least hundreds or thousands of light years away. do you know what that means. it means 99% of the stuff you can see with your telescope are dead. they are no longer there. gone. history. these aliens that far away even if they pointed their radio directly at us would be looking at nothing (us in the distant past). so even if they had the technology to come here they won't know anything about our current situation.

4. these radio signals we've sent out ... well by the time it gets to anywhere useful it either becomes white noise or it's taken so long that we'd have been long gone. nothing lasts forever in this universe. and even if it did, apparently the universe is expanding at a rate of 74km per second per megaparsec, up from 67 about 100 years ago. by the time it gets your signal it might be able to get here anyway coz we are getting further away.

so i'm picking that if there are advance aliens either - they're dead, they don't know you're here, they are not advanced enough. the only beings that can visit you are those that can overcome the laws of physics. ie gods of some nature.

All of this is assuming that our science is advanced enough to be correct.

100 years ago we would have called most of what we "know" impossible to know. 500 years ago it would have been heresy. 1000 years ago it would have been witchcraft.

Those uninhabitable planets are uninhabitable to us. Those "old, dead planets" are that, according to our meagre science. For all we know, the remainder of space could be a massive illusion, caused by our inability to grasp the reality of what it actually is and our insignificance in the greater scheme of things. In the same way we wouldn't expect ants to understand the concept of motorways, why do we assume that we know anything about interstellar travel or spacetime?

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Handsome Dan does not currently have a side hustle as the mascot for Yale

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Batman

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#2713131 26-May-2021 10:56

Exactly. While some people believe the science is perfect i prefer to think it's way off. But not sure on which direction and on which theory.

There's a higher chance that as these stars are just some weird simulation than the probability of us ever visiting one of them to know for sure.

But who knows in the next generation but not in my generation. Assuming we don't destroy each other or the planet before we get there.

Rikkitic

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#2713148 26-May-2021 12:13

What I think people always overlook is the timing of things. If life arose on the earth between three and four billion years ago, and modern humans came onto the scene about 200,000 years ago, and we developed radio 120 years ago, why should anyone think a separately-evolved life form would follow that identical timeline, even if it followed it in general? Who's to say all those other civilisations out there are not still working their way through our 16th century, or put aside radio as a child's toy 1,000 years ago? The fact we don't hear anyone doesn't mean a thing, except we don't hear anyone at this very narrow sliver of time.

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