UFOs! Aliens! Do you believe?

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BillyL said:
Yes to all of the above from the original post of this thread. I'd bet money that the US government has proof that alien life does indeed exist, and that that life has visited our planet, and could possibly still be here. jmhho
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3-4 years ago I would’ve thought you were a loon for having that opinion. But after the NYT and 60 Minutes pieces on the Navy pilot encounters where the Govt/Military admitted there are thing’s flying around that are far more advanced than anything with known human capabilities and the congressional hearings with intelligence/military agent whistleblowers who testified under oath; I took a much deeper dive into the subject and I now think what you said is more likely than not. I’m admittedly fascinated by the topic. There really is a lot of evidence out there if you take a deeper look into things that in totality I find pretty compelling.

And I fully realize that sounds like a “Do YouR OWn rEseArCh” thing which pains me to say; as I’m far from a conspiracy theorist. Unfortunately in the whole UFO subculture there are a lot of other similarities to the MAGA movement; namely grifting but there’s a lot of conspiracy nonsense too. Trying to figure out what and who may be credible is no easy feat. But then again that may be by design. And this is not a US only “phenomenon” by any means.

And I understand the logic of the argument that we’re too far away for any intelligent life to get here or the logic of if they are that advanced why would they even have an interest on us.

But, I think that makes a lot of assumptions based on our current understanding of things. 2,500 years ago we thought the world was flat. 500 years ago we thought the sun revolved around the earth. Modern physics is less than 150
Years old. We don’t know what we don’t know.

Imagine what we may know 150, 500, and 2,500 years from now. Or 200,000 years from now. Or 2 million. And I understand there’s probably a better chance of an extinction level event occurring than reaching some if not most of those timelines which is one of the explanations for the Fermi paradox. But the point is maybe interstellar travel isn’t that complicated for some intelligent life forms. Maybe AI is visiting us from an already extinct species. Maybe we’re being visited by inter-dimensional beings? Do I think any of those are likely? Of course not. But I wouldn’t rule anything out. I also know it’s entirely possible I’m completely wrong in having this opinion.
 
finesse said:
You're not close, either. According to Quora, (don't know how reliable they are but this should be roughly in the ballpark),



According to the latest census data, there are about 7.9 billion people living on our planet as of 2023. That's 7.9 followed by 9 zeros: 7,900,000,000. So if we divide 200 sextillion by 7.9 billion, we get about 25 quintillion stars per human.Oct 2, 2023

Since there can easily be multiple planets per star as well as some without. The existence of extremophiles on earth proves that conditions that would support humans are not necessary for even terrestrial life so thinking a planet has to be earthlike for life to exist is a fallacy.
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There is a tremendous distinction between unicellular life and multicellular life, never mind intelligence. So I think we need to ringfence the discussion a bit.

I think there is also a pretty compelling argument (not only from "where are they" of the Fermi Paradox) that we are likely quite early in the cosmic scene. Estimates of our universe's age is about 13.8 billion years. That is very young in the future history of the Cosmos.

On our planet alone, it took nearly 1 billion years for abiogenesis to occur. And from there, another 3 billion years to create the first multi-cellular organisms. We obviously cannot know whether that is quick or slow on the cosmic time scale. What we do know, is on Earth, it took 4 billion years or between 1/4 and 1/3 of the life of our known universe to get the most basic multi-cellular organisms. And of course, star and planet formation is an on-going process (while many, many starts are older, there is a material number of them that are the same age as or younger than the Sun) so not all existing stars and planets may be old enough to anticipate they would support life (if it has any roughly similar time scale).

Now, if we start filtering as to what stars are likely to support life (and which are highly unlikely), how many planets exist in the habitable zone of their star, whether the solar system in question exists in the habitable zone of its galaxy (which is likely quite important to avoid catastrophic events), it begins to paint an interesting picture. Red dwarfs (which are estimated at near 75% of stars in the Milky Way) seem like very poor candidates to support intelligent life. Because of their relatively low output, planets in their habitable zone are tidally locked. This makes it extremely unlikely such planets would have a geodynamic active core (due to their slow rotation), which is critical to creating a magnetosphere. A strong magnetosphere is especially important for planets so closely orbiting a red dwarf as red dwarfs are known for the strength and frequency of their solar flares.

In any event, I could definitely drone on. But it's all actually quite fascinating.
 
Factor in that earth had five major extinction events and that we have no business trying to guess what exactly constitutes a livable planet. There are plenty off life forms on earth the live outside earthlike conditions to do that when there are some many chances of trying. You must not have read any of the Hal Clement books. He was a wonderful hard science fiction writer who rigidly constructed alien worlds with unique environments and what life might be like on them. Mission of Gravity was a wonderful book.

Did a bit of research. Note category 5 in particular.

Extremophiles: The alien-like creatures of Earth

The discovery of extremophiles - organisms that thrive in extreme environments - completely changed scientists’ perspectives on the conditions necessary for life. These evolutionary marvels provide context for the origins of life, evolution, and are maybe the best case for the possibility of the...
blogs.iu.edu blogs.iu.edu
 
finesse said:
Factor in that earth had five major extinction events and that we have no business trying to guess what exactly constitutes a livable planet. There are plenty off life forms on earth the live outside earthlike conditions to do that when there are some many chances of trying. You must not have read any of the Hal Clement books. He was a wonderful hard science fiction writer who rigidly constructed alien worlds with unique environments and what life might be like on them. Mission of Gravity was a wonderful book.

Did a bit of research. Note category 5 in particular.

Extremophiles: The alien-like creatures of Earth

The discovery of extremophiles - organisms that thrive in extreme environments - completely changed scientists’ perspectives on the conditions necessary for life. These evolutionary marvels provide context for the origins of life, evolution, and are maybe the best case for the possibility of the...
blogs.iu.edu blogs.iu.edu
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Have a reasonable familiarity with extremophiles from a wonderful Oceanography class I took back in high school. Almost seems cutting edge as we were talking about this in 1995!

But I also think the distinction isn't life. Which would likely be comically hard to believe does not exist. It's intelligent life. Something on the order of or beyond human intelligence. That said, I'll try a Hal Clement book.

But I would really recommend exploring folks take on the Rare Earth Hypothesis. I haven't become a convert. But I'm much more likely to think it is reasonably possible than I once was that we may be at the vanguard of intelligent life in the universe. And that intelligent life may either be so uncommon or even rare that its existence is extremely short-lived and temporally spaced within the life of the universe. Which is a rather neat solution to Fermi's Paradox.
 
farce© said:
What about the Chinese government? The Brazilian government? Why are space aliens so US-centric? Do they only visit the US or are all other world governments, friend and foe alike, in cahoots to keep visits from space aliens a global secret?

It seems unlikely to me that 1) space travelers limit their exploration of our planet to the US, and 2) only the US government would have evidence of such activity and manage to keep this evidence under wraps.

Throughout the course of human history there have been things we couldn’t explain. The default seemed to be to attribute these inexplicable events to a higher power, a “god.” Now that humans have come to understand the science that explains many of these godly “miracles” we have defaulted our explanation for things in the sky we don’t understand to “aliens.”
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There have been reports of them throughout the world and across different time periods though.
 
Probably not. But the Seventh Day Adventists who show up and hand out those pamphlets about The Rapture OTOH....
 
After this discussion about the size and age of the universe, I think we can rule out any religion who believes in either a close personal relationship with the maker, that man is the Maker's greatest creation or that what happens to a presumptive eternal soul in the firely flash in the time it's on earth matters to that Maker.

Perhaps someone understood that enough to come up with the "Judge not" thing.
 
Maybe the aliens are the creators of the simulation and dip in from time to time to keep tabs.
 
I’d recommend Cosmos by Carl Sagan to anyone who is intrigued by this topic. It’s well written but also accessible enough for people that don’t have a heavy scientific background.
 
Hey, UFO-curious types: there is a Congressional hearing on the topic today.

www.usatoday.com

US Congress hopes to 'pull back the curtain' on UFOs in latest hearing: How to watch

More than a year has passed since U.S. House members last heard testimony about UFOs and what the Department of Defense may be concealing about them.
www.usatoday.com www.usatoday.com

The upcoming hearing is being jointly held by Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) and Glenn Grothman (R-Wisconsin,) who was a sponsor behind a bipartisan billto allow commercial airline pilots to report UAP sightings to the government.

In a press release on the House Oversight Committee's website, the hearing is described as an "attempt to further pull back the curtain on secret UAP research programs conducted by the U.S. government, and undisclosed findings they have yielded."

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Nancy Mace seems like the sort of person who might have been abducted by aliens along the way.
 
Link: MSN

Alien debris discovered on MARS! Spoiler alert - the aliens in this case were from Earth.
 
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