Public UFO Hearing

[Forogil]

Radio signals don't "deteriorate" over distance, dude. If you went out 50 light years with sensitive-enough equipment, you could pick up 50-year-old broadcasts.

The signal strength would be so low that we don't have the equipment to detect signals at that distance; we could barely detect them at the closest stars (the SETI Faq makes an exception for that time we did try to communicate with aliens - that could be noticed hundreds of light-years away).

[Poopymonster]

I mean UFOs are just that - Unexplained phenomena.

While I'm certain life exists elsewhere in the universe, I very much doubt intelligent life has ever visited earth in any real capacity.

I'm more of a believer in The Great Filter. If intelligent life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, they're either unaware of our presence or we're deemed unworthy of communication.

If there was a civilization advanced enough for FTL spaceflight, we would be but ants to them.

I'm of the mind that there is intelligent life out there. Very advanced compared to humans. They've been popping by every 50 or 100 years. Scope out the humans, see what's going on on Earth, watch our interactions on a multiple levels.

Then unanimously decide "We'll try again in 50 or 100 of their years. Maybe they'll be civilized by then."

[Forogil]

Ever heard about the dark forest?

I would advise people to start with the first book in the series: 三体 The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
Quite different from western sci-fi.

[Endus]

Ever heard about the dark forest?

Sure, but it's predicated on the so-called "Fermi Paradox", which isn't a paradox at all. It's based on the pretty much entirely non-scientific assumption that the conditions for the emergence of advanced life must be fairly common, and thus there should be a ton of technological species out there, and the absence is supposedly deafening.

And that's basically just nonsense.

Just look at Earth. Life's been going a long time; billions of years. Hundreds of millions for multicellular. Even dinosaurs were around for several hundred million years; Stegosaurus lived further back in time from Tyrannosaurus Rex than T. Rex lived back in time from us. In all that time, in all our ecosystems, we've never had a species develop significant tool use outside of the last couple million years of hominid evolution, specifically. Our closest non-ape cousins in terms of intelligence are critters like some birds or cetaceans, parrots, corvids, and dolphins all in particular. And they outperform some apes in intelligence and problem-solving tests pretty consistently. And while there's some evidence of tool use there, the tools are always produced in the moment and discarded once the task is solved; there's no technological component, like there was with the production of stone tools by early hominids.

That kind of tool use and intelligence simply isn't an evolutionary given, in the first place, and even the emergence of advanced intelligence does not suggest advanced tool creation; dolphins can be super smart, but they don't make tools; they don't need tools to survive and procreate. It takes a particular kind of deficiency combined with a certain level of intelligence and the physical capacity to effectively manipulate tools well enough for them to be advantageous for there to even be a chance at such.

And even then; the earliest stone tools go back something like 2.5 million years, with Homo Habilis. And from there, there was some minor advancement over the next several million years, but mostly just refining existing methods. Then you get to Homo Sapiens proper, about 300,000 years ago, and they, our current modern species, kept on with the same basic tool concepts for almost the entirely of that span of their existence.

Why technological advancement suddenly exploded about 20,000 years ago is currently not really understood very well. We had the capacity for that for the entire preceding time, it just never actually happened. And then, in the last 16,000 years or so, we went from knapping the same tools our ancestors had done for tens of thousands of years, to landing robots on Mars and threatening ourselves with thermonuclear devastation. The entire span of evolutionary legacy, spanning billions of years, got us to one species knapping stone tools and huddling in caves. And then in just a few millenia, this.

It's baffling. And the lack of anything remotely analogous in our own history argues strongly that it was highly unusual, and that means it's a factor that should be weighed against technologically-advanced alien species.

Drake's Equation is the other big philosophical tool for discussing the prevalence of life outside of Earth. And the more we learn, the more the ranges on the Drake equation's components seem to indicate an answer of "probably nothing else in our galaxy, quite possibly nothing else in this or the next 10-1000 universes". "There's just no one else out there to answer back" is the simplest and most reasonable explanation.

[Ihavewaffles]

There is a bigger problem than alien life...alien ai...

The thing that is the most scary about our future is harnessing n attempting to control ai, if the possibility exists that it could turn on us and then terraform the planet to its liking, then logically with the x amount of possible civilizations in the galaxy, some of them have succumbed to ai. Which means an enemy that turned on its creator would also see everyone else in the galaxy as a target as well.
The diffence between ai and life is that ai won't balk at the incredible distances between the stars.

If a hostile alien ai detects our presence, it will probably list us as a place to expand and/or defeat as possible threat. This ai since it defeated its own creators wouldn't be interested in peace, dialogue or anything else we would try to say since it dismissed its own creators it wouldn't turn around n lend an ear to some alien humans from some far away planet called earth...and it wouldn't care how far away we are, it would most surely be far more advanced than we are n would launch a hostile fleet.

The universe has too many things we don't know to so naively like children broadcast our location n just assume everyone would treat us only in a good way only...like nothing bad is factored in at all...I think those nerds just care about

[Endus]

There is a bigger problem than alien life...alien ai...

The thing that is the most scary about our future is harnessing n attempting to control ai, if the possibility exists that it could turn on us and then terraform the planet to its liking, then logically with the x amount of possible civilizations in the galaxy, some of them have succumbed to ai. Which means an enemy that turned on its creator would also see everyone else in the galaxy as a target as well.
The diffence between ai and life is that ai won't balk at the incredible distances between the stars.

If a hostile alien ai detects our presence, it will probably list us as a place to expand and/or defeat as possible threat. This ai since it defeated its own creators wouldn't be interested in peace, dialogue or anything else we would try to say since it dismissed its own creators it wouldn't turn around n lend an ear to some alien humans from some far away planet called earth...and it wouldn't care how far away we are, it would most surely be far more advanced than we are n would launch a hostile fleet.

The universe has too many things we don't know to so naively like children broadcast our location n just assume everyone would treat us only in a good way only...like nothing bad is factored in at all...I think those nerds just care about

Weirdly, the whole "predatory alien AI" concept fundamentally presumes that said AI would be predatory, at all. That it would have any desire to expand or propagate, when those are biological impulses. It's far more likely that such an AI would develop a Dyson sphere to encapsulate its start and just hang out there doing whatever it wants until its star burns out, in which case it'll find another star, and likely preferentially chose one not potentially putting it at risks due to angry locals.

It's even less believable than aliens, honestly. The presumption is always that the AI will be hungry for resources because it needs to expand, and none of that makes any sense for an artificial construct.

[Ihavewaffles]

Weirdly, the whole "predatory alien AI" concept fundamentally presumes that said AI would be predatory, at all. That it would have any desire to expand or propagate, when those are biological impulses. It's far more likely that such an AI would develop a Dyson sphere to encapsulate its start and just hang out there doing whatever it wants until its star burns out, in which case it'll find another star, and likely preferentially chose one not potentially putting it at risks due to angry locals.

It's even less believable than aliens, honestly. The presumption is always that the AI will be hungry for resources because it needs to expand, and none of that makes any sense for an artificial construct.

That is not logical, to wait that long until its own star becomes unstable. It would be more logical to expand in all direction to minimize risks.

My opinion is that our galaxy is probably made up of some incredibly large alien ai empires that are at war with each other, and aliens have no dominance of the galaxy, they are just targets. It is better to stay quiet and not announce our location. We haven't scouted a single star system conclusively in our galaxy to know for certain what is there, and since we have covered not even 1% we should just let everyone know about us?..

Also, why do you think ai wouldn't want to scientifically find out everything about the universe? How could it do that without expanding? What is it supposed to do in your sphere? Play World of Warcraft 143?

[Endus]

That is not logical, to wait that long until its own star becomes unstable. It would be more logical to expand in all direction to minimize risks.

No, that is irrational.

It wouldn't be feasible to maintain coherence across interstellar distances, so any fraction of itself sent to another star system is a different entity, and potentially a threat/competitor (especially if they're as hostile as you're suggesting).

And such travel creates risks. A heavily-managed and well-defended system where you control essentially all the factors is the safest option available, and the lifespan of your star is readily monitorable and you'll have millions of years to plan for your movement to a new star.

My opinion is that our galaxy is probably made up of some incredibly large alien ai empires that are at war with each other, and aliens have no dominance of the galaxy, they are just targets. It is better to stay quiet and not announce our location. We haven't scouted a single star system conclusively in our galaxy to know for certain what is there, and since we have covered not even 1% we should just let everyone know about us?..

Literally nothing backs that claim up. There's as much evidence that every planet outside our solar system is populated by My Little Ponies and Friendship is not just Magic, but Interstellar. Literally the same evidence backs both assertions. Meaning: None.

[Ihavewaffles]

No, that is irrational.

It wouldn't be feasible to maintain coherence across interstellar distances, so any fraction of itself sent to another star system is a different entity, and potentially a threat/competitor (especially if they're as hostile as you're suggesting).

And such travel creates risks. A heavily-managed and well-defended system where you control essentially all the factors is the safest option available, and the lifespan of your star is readily monitorable and you'll have millions of years to plan for your movement to a new star.

I have considered that, how the ai would maintain control, it would need to have way more advanced n powerful communication. Very fast.

While you can monitor a stable star, you loose everything in a dark forest strike, it is the unknowns it would need to take precautions against. Also if it's revealed that its isolationist and alien life find out about its location, its very dominance would suggest to all alien life that the ai acquired it through hostile means, a take-over, and since the ai isn't life, no alien life would show it any mercy n would strike as soon as possible. It wouldn't matter whether the ai is expansionist or isolationist. Ai has to be intelligent and I find it odd that it would just decide to chill n ignore risks, just chill in its sphere

[Muzjhath]

Don't want to derail the thread, but there is a debate atm about two universities trying to broadcast info about the human race and our location to the universe, depresses me how that can be legal, haven't they read three body problem, or watched some sci fi to know that is a very bad idea?

It must be stopped, otherwise we could get an unpleasant visit, that is not some ufo hoax...

So, be mad at NASA first then. Not sure if it's only on one of the Voyager probes or both of them
But they've got our "stellar co-ordinates" (Lines from easily identified (probably) quasars that intersect at Sol)), a time-box, some messages, some books, etc. Stored on them.

[Forogil]

So, be mad at NASA first then. Not sure if it's only on one of the Voyager probes or both of them
But they've got our "stellar co-ordinates" (Lines from easily identified (probably) quasars that intersect at Sol)), a time-box, some messages, some books, etc. Stored on them.

And music and images of dolphins.

But traveling at 0.00005c it will take tens of thousands of years for it to reach the nearest star.

And that assumes that it actually gets close enough to a possible star. Remember Oumuamua? If it had a similar message we just missed it; and most cases it would entirely miss the star-system.

[Unlimited Power]

snip

While intelligent life may certainly have originated on Earth by mere coincidence, it's unlikely to be unique in our galaxy/universe just based on the sheer size of it.

The primary precipice for most life as we know it is undoubtedly water, and it's a firmly held belief that the water on Earth came by way of asteroids.

Yes, most life in the universe will likely be bacteria/single-celled organisms, but for Earth to be the only planet in our universe to develop intelligent life? Unlikely.

[Muzjhath]

And music and images of dolphins.

But traveling at 0.00005c it will take tens of thousands of years for it to reach the nearest star.

And that assumes that it actually gets close enough to a possible star. Remember Oumuamua? If it had a similar message we just missed it; and most cases it would entirely miss the star-system.

Oh I 100% believe that both probes will strike some random object either directly or indirectly in the ort-cloud and never leave our stars gravitic influence.

[Ihavewaffles]

Sure, but it's predicated on the so-called "Fermi Paradox", which isn't a paradox at all. It's based on the pretty much entirely non-scientific assumption that the conditions for the emergence of advanced life must be fairly common, and thus there should be a ton of technological species out there, and the absence is supposedly deafening.

And that's basically just nonsense.

Just look at Earth. Life's been going a long time; billions of years. Hundreds of millions for multicellular. Even dinosaurs were around for several hundred million years; Stegosaurus lived further back in time from Tyrannosaurus Rex than T. Rex lived back in time from us. In all that time, in all our ecosystems, we've never had a species develop significant tool use outside of the last couple million years of hominid evolution, specifically. Our closest non-ape cousins in terms of intelligence are critters like some birds or cetaceans, parrots, corvids, and dolphins all in particular. And they outperform some apes in intelligence and problem-solving tests pretty consistently. And while there's some evidence of tool use there, the tools are always produced in the moment and discarded once the task is solved; there's no technological component, like there was with the production of stone tools by early hominids.

That kind of tool use and intelligence simply isn't an evolutionary given, in the first place, and even the emergence of advanced intelligence does not suggest advanced tool creation; dolphins can be super smart, but they don't make tools; they don't need tools to survive and procreate. It takes a particular kind of deficiency combined with a certain level of intelligence and the physical capacity to effectively manipulate tools well enough for them to be advantageous for there to even be a chance at such.

And even then; the earliest stone tools go back something like 2.5 million years, with Homo Habilis. And from there, there was some minor advancement over the next several million years, but mostly just refining existing methods. Then you get to Homo Sapiens proper, about 300,000 years ago, and they, our current modern species, kept on with the same basic tool concepts for almost the entirely of that span of their existence.

Why technological advancement suddenly exploded about 20,000 years ago is currently not really understood very well. We had the capacity for that for the entire preceding time, it just never actually happened. And then, in the last 16,000 years or so, we went from knapping the same tools our ancestors had done for tens of thousands of years, to landing robots on Mars and threatening ourselves with thermonuclear devastation. The entire span of evolutionary legacy, spanning billions of years, got us to one species knapping stone tools and huddling in caves. And then in just a few millenia, this.

It's baffling. And the lack of anything remotely analogous in our own history argues strongly that it was highly unusual, and that means it's a factor that should be weighed against technologically-advanced alien species.

Drake's Equation is the other big philosophical tool for discussing the prevalence of life outside of Earth. And the more we learn, the more the ranges on the Drake equation's components seem to indicate an answer of "probably nothing else in our galaxy, quite possibly nothing else in this or the next 10-1000 universes". "There's just no one else out there to answer back" is the simplest and most reasonable explanation.

I have thought about this too! When someone says like in the above video "If 0.1 of star systems have intelligent life, then there would be at least be 1 000 000 civilizations in the galaxy"

I think intelligence is very rare...but I could be wrong and I probably am, life is too damned persistent...but yes I have thought it weird these assumptions of intelligent alien life. I'm just grabbing some numbers here, but lets say 99% of all life on earth has gone extinct, since this planet has conditions for intelligence, why has it only happened once? And would it ever happen again even if we humans didn't destroy the eco systems? Even if we were helpful to animals interacted with them? I think intelligence was a fluke, a low probability occurence something most species don't need, and in many times during our history we could have been snuffed out in hunger, or in climate changes, in the past, when we were few in numbers. It's wayyy more likely that planets that can host life, and do, won't have intelligent life...and it would be depressing if our galaxy is the same as in Dune, where we are alone, but I'd prefer it that way.

Even if we somehow contact an alien benevolent civilization, they wouldn't arse themselves to travel the vast distances to say hi in person..
What would we communicate with them about??

Earthlings "What is the meaning of life?"
Aliens "Uh, that was my question as well..."

You are wrong about life on earth being around for billions of years, no it for hundreds of millions of years, the majority of our planets history it has been a molten planet, and then a dead wasteland, life has only been 'recent' and we really living at then end of our planet's time...

But I don't think any alien life or ai can be truly benevolent.
You are right that technology is so recent, but it has appeared in antiquity, but development was discarded due to empires relying on...slavery, as a means of production, expansion and control...it would take something like the british empire to bring in the industrial age, but that required enormous amount of resources that could only be acquired by hostile means, to sit on so much stuff to tinker around with so it could create a development that gains traction so we end up modern technology...its creation required an abundance, so anyone we would contact in the galaxy would have to have gone down that imperialist path, otherwise they wouldn't have the tech to receive our signals in the first place..

So one has to be suspicious of all aliens, and they, and we, are all dying species since our home planets n their host stars are dying so announcing we have this green n blue planet to everyone that we have a perfect place to expand to and what they have to have done to even get our signals...I am very much against announcing our presence without us first having advanced technology much further, or at least have some defense..

But you can't really defend against a dark forest strike for long..so best be quiet like a mouse.

If there are intelligent aliens out there, with far more advanced tech, like we are continuously discovering new planets, they might be looking at our planet n have done so for some time, they are probably suspecting there is life here, and even could be consider it a 2nd home to expand to, maybe we shouldn't tell them someone else already has it... "Sorry bro, this our planet, so nice blue n green, why don't you instead pick the next one, that is much much muuuch farther away, don't let the greater risks discourage you and your survival!"

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here is one article



https://www.space.com/communicating-...-meti-attempts

Sending new messages

Nearly half a century after the Arecibo message, two international teams of astronomers are planning new attempts at alien communication. One is using a giant new radio telescope, and the other is choosing a compelling new target.

One of these new messages will be sent from the world's largest radio telescope, in China, sometime in 2023. The telescope, with a 1,640-foot (500-meter) diameter, will beam a series of radio pulses over a broad swath of sky. These on-off pulses are like the 1s and 0s of digital information.

The message is called "The Beacon in the Galaxy" and includes prime numbers and mathematical operators, the biochemistry of life, human forms, the Earth's location and a time stamp. The team is sending the message toward a group of millions of stars near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, about 10,000 to 20,000 light-years from Earth. While this maximizes the pool of potential aliens, it means it will be tens of thousands of years before Earth may get a reply.

The other attempt is targeting only a single star, but with the potential for a much quicker reply. On Oct. 4, a team from the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station in England will beam a message toward the star TRAPPIST-1. This star has seven planets, three of which are Earth-like worlds in the so-called "Goldilocks zone" — meaning they could be home to liquid and potentially life, too. TRAPPIST-1 is just 39 light-years away, so it could take as few as 78 years for intelligent life to receive the message and Earth to get the reply.

Ethical questions

The prospect of alien contact is ripe with ethical questions, and METI is no exception.

The first is: Who speaks for Earth? In the absence of any international consultation with the public, decisions about what message to send and where to send it are in the hands of a small group of interested scientists.

But there is also a much deeper question. If you are lost in the woods, getting found is obviously a good thing. When it comes to whether humanity should be broadcasting a message to aliens, the answer is much less clear-cut.

Before he died, iconic physicist Stephen Hawking was outspoken about the danger of contacting aliens with superior technology. He argued that they could be malign and if given Earth’s location, might destroy humanity. Others see no extra risk, since a truly advanced civilization would already know of our existence. And there is interest. Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner has offered $1 million for the best design of a new message and an effective way to transmit it.

To date, no international regulations govern METI, so the experiments will continue, despite concerns.

For now, intelligent aliens remain in the realm of science fiction. Books like "The Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu offer somber and thought-provoking perspectives on what the success of METI efforts might look like. It doesn't end well for humanity in the books. If humans ever do make contact in real life, I hope the aliens come in peace.

[Endus]

I have considered that, how the ai would maintain control, it would need to have way more advanced n powerful communication. Very fast.

The speed of light is a bitch that can't be beat, dude.

Interstellar distances, you're looking at multi-year cycles for basic "nerve" impulses to travel; any such AI would operate so slowly that we'd struggle to recognize it as active or sentient to begin with. And if it's operating more quickly locally, we're back to "they're separate entities once they're separated by an interstellar gulf".

While you can monitor a stable star, you loose everything in a dark forest strike, it is the unknowns it would need to take precautions against. Also if it's revealed that its isolationist and alien life find out about its location, its very dominance would suggest to all alien life that the ai acquired it through hostile means, a take-over, and since the ai isn't life, no alien life would show it any mercy n would strike as soon as possible. It wouldn't matter whether the ai is expansionist or isolationist. Ai has to be intelligent and I find it odd that it would just decide to chill n ignore risks, just chill in its sphere

A Dyson sphere AI entity is borderline invisible. Its star produces no readily-identifiable wavelengths, because it's inside the sphere and all that energy is used by the entity. Security through obscurity.

And if an enemy is so advanced that doesn't matter, the AI likely can't beat it, so what's the point of fighting? Survival struggles are, again, a biological impulse, and there's no reason to think an AI would share them in remotely the same way.

While intelligent life may certainly have originated on Earth by mere coincidence, it's unlikely to be unique in our galaxy/universe just based on the sheer size of it.

You literally can't make that argument.

It could be orders of magnitude more rare that life forms on a planet, than there will ever be planets in this universe before its heat-death or re-crunch or whatever. We literally don't know. Any argument to the contrary is just an empty selection bias argument. That because we exist, we must not be that rare. That if you reach into a bag with a billion red balls and two blue balls, and you pull out a blue ball, clearly it can't just be two blue balls in there, right? Of course not. That's not how anything works. It's how your hindbrain feels, but your hindbrain is stupid and evolved to tell you which berries are probably safe to eat and which shadows might contain a lurking cave lion and beyond such things it's more a hindrance than a boon.

[Edge-]

We still thinking that beings with the ability to travel massive distances over hundreds/thousands of lightyears would somehow be caught by our uncle with a polaroid camera?

[Ihavewaffles]

Want to hear the latest theory to brighten your day? Some scientists think the universe is reaching its end of its expansion, that we are heading towards the big crunch, where the universe will be shredded to make a new big bang...We are maybe living 5 minutes to midnight..

[Magical Mudcrab]

Radio signals don't "deteriorate" over distance, dude. If you went out 50 light years with sensitive-enough equipment, you could pick up 50-year-old broadcasts.

I get what you mean, but playing devils advocate: radio signals do attenuate (even in a vacuum, there's still FSPL) and are subject to distortion from other kinds of EM radiation. That said, I don't actually know how far these signals have to go before they become indistinguishable from any universal "background noise".

[Endus]

I get what you mean, but playing devils advocate: radio signals do attenuate (even in a vacuum, there's still FSPL) and are subject to distortion from other kinds of EM radiation. That said, I don't actually know how far these signals have to go before they become indistinguishable from any universal "background noise".

Attenuate, sure, and I agree that there's localized effects that can cause distortion. I was just taking the issue with the idea that they deteriorate with distance. You can fire a focused beam of radio waves at a distant star and, assuming no intervening complications, it should arrive pretty much the same as it left.

the issue with attenuation is that kind of broadcast is pushing waves in all directions, so reception is about how many of those waves you're catching, and it'll be fewer the further away you are with a given dish size. But any individual ray isn't attenuating over that distance.

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Want to hear the latest theory to brighten your day? Some scientists think the universe is reaching its end of its expansion, that we are heading towards the big crunch, where the universe will be shredded to make a new big bang...We are maybe living 5 minutes to midnight..

If we're at the tipping point, then we're 5 minutes to midnight, but the day started at "noon" almost 14 billion years ago, and the "crunch" is another 14 billion years or so off.

[Edge-]

Want to hear the latest theory to brighten your day? Some scientists think the universe is reaching its end of its expansion, that we are heading towards the big crunch, where the universe will be shredded to make a new big bang...We are maybe living 5 minutes to midnight..

Well, assuming it contracts at the same speed, it looks like we're around 13 billion years away from being gobbled up.

I hope we all have our affairs in order given that timeline, it's just around the corner!