Public UFO Hearing

[Corvus]

Seems like we are getting way of track here...

Is it just me or is the US Military seemingly not very concerned about this? You take a boat to near to one of their ships and they will react, but being buzzed by these UFOs produced no response? If it was a hostile, you think they'd have at least tried to capture one, if not fire on one before now.

[Ripster42]

Is your argument that it is simply not possible to use thermal energy for any kind of work and that it can only accumulate or be radiated?
.

No. You can use thermal energy as long as there is a gradient to move it along (which you should have been able to glean from my comment about it not being the water in the steam engine, but the thermal energy being dissipated that does the work in your water recycling steam engine). That gradient, is an entropy gradient. To keep that gradient going (and your dyson sphere below temps that make everything plasma) you need to radiate as much energy as you're getting from the star.

If you stop radiating energy away from the sphere at the same rate as it's being emitted by the sun, you eventually build up thermal energy to the point of failure. Using one form of energy to do work doesn't get rid of that energy. Energy can't be destroyed. It only moves down the entropy ladder into higher entropy. In the context of your non-radiating dyson sphere, this means it heats up. Every time you use energy to do work in a closed system you're raising the temp of that closed system. This is true even without a star converting mass to energy, which is, if you can see a trend here, also releasing thermal energy, increasing entropy within your closed system/non-radiating dyson sphere.

I know you didn't develop these concepts. You clearly don't understand the concepts those concepts are based upon as well as you'd like to think. You don't have a firm grasp on how work uses energy to get done; you don't have a firm grasp on entropy.

[Forogil]

Seems like we are getting way of track here...

Well, or we see it as a new explanation for the "great filter". Alien civilizations eventually succumb to a loss of science, when tenaciously posting trumps facts, and build a really stupid Dyson sphere and tries to seal of all the energy from their star, and are then vaporized.

Is it just me or is the US Military seemingly not very concerned about this? You take a boat to near to one of their ships and they will react, but being buzzed by these UFOs produced no response? If it was a hostile, you think they'd have at least tried to capture one, if not fire on one before now.

Likely indicating that they just think it are various random things, like birds, inflated balloons, or lightning.
But possibly that they believe it is actually superior (aliens) beings and starting our first meeting by shooting would be stupid.

[Corvus]

Likely indicating that they just think it are various random things, like birds, inflated balloons, or lightning.
But possibly that they believe it is actually superior (aliens) beings and starting our first meeting by shooting would be stupid.

Or they know it is their own stuff.

[Ripster42]

Well, or we see it as a new explanation for the "great filter". Alien civilizations eventually succumb to a loss of science, when tenaciously posting trumps facts, and build a really stupid Dyson sphere and tries to seal of all the energy from their star, and are then vaporized.

We've seen analogous things happen on earth several times. About 600 years ago it happened in two different places almost simultaneously: China and persia. China became mired in tradition, after they got scared of the effects of trade and burned their ships; persia after theological determinism crushed natural determinism there, killing off their golden age (you can thank aquinas for the compromise between the two giving room within catholocism for science to eventually flourish). They both coasted along for a couple more centuries, but the watershed had shifted. Persia fell to the level of modern iran, china falling much further, to british and then japanese subjugation. Definitely something to be worried about in the US, as both regressive ideas and inflexible religion are gaining ground here.

[Forogil]

We've seen analogous things happen on earth several times. About 600 years ago it happened in two different places almost simultaneously: China and persia. China became mired in tradition, after they got scared of the effects of trade and burned their ships; persia after theological determinism crushed natural determinism there, killing off their golden age (you can thank aquinas for the compromise between the two giving room within catholocism for science to eventually flourish). They both coasted along for a couple more centuries, but the watershed had shifted. Persia fell to the level of modern iran, china falling much further, to british and then japanese subjugation. Definitely something to be worried about in the US, as both regressive ideas and inflexible religion are gaining ground here.

Now you are getting me really worried about the future.

BTW: I remembered Stefan-Boltzmann and how bad it would be to build a Dyson sphere that was just an undetectable sub-K above the background. SB gives that the radiation from a sphere is proportional to Temperature⁴radius²; and that should match the star output. So reducing the temperature by a factor of thousand (compared to Earth-distance) would increase the radius by a factor of one million (which would be far into the Oort cloud), and the area (and thus amount of material) for the sphere by a million million! All that to ensure that one would increase the ideal efficiency from 93% to almost 100%.

[Nilinor]

Now you are getting me really worried about the future.

BTW: I remembered Stefan-Boltzmann and how bad it would be to build a Dyson sphere that was just an undetectable sub-K above the background. SB gives that the radiation from a sphere is proportional to Temperature⁴radius²; and that should match the star output. So reducing the temperature by a factor of thousand (compared to Earth-distance) would increase the radius by a factor of one million (which would be far into the Oort cloud), and the area (and thus amount of material) for the sphere by a million million! All that to ensure that one would increase the ideal efficiency from 93% to almost 100%.

There is a reason Dyson Swarms are now the go to instead of spheres, because its SO much easier to do and still extremely efficient. Less resources, less technical hurdles (how do you keep it stable and not drift into the sun?) or the strength needed in the materials to stay cohesive at the strain the whole thing will be (currently we have no material real or theoretical that even comes remotely close to being strong enough to hold that size of a structure together)

[korijenkins]

One of the following must be true:

A) The craft belong to the US government and the footage is both a boast and a warning to other powers that they are technologically outmatched by an order of magnitude
B) The craft belong to the US government and the footage was never intended for release, and 'unidentified aerial phenomena' is just a cover
C) The craft belong to a foreign power that is trolling other militaries with their superior tech
D) The craft are alien in origin
E) The craft are unexplained natural phenomena

I would like to believe it's D, but it's probably A or B. It could be C and the US govt doesn't want to admit that another power has more advanced tech.

I just can't see China out-teching us militarily atm, and it's obviously not Russia given the current situation of their military, so I'm almost certain it's not C.

[dextersmith]

I wonder how transparent and honest they're going to be.

[Edge-]

I wonder how transparent and honest they're going to be.

I mean, how unreasonable is the, "Here's a bunch of shit we can't explain, and we still can't explain it. We have some theories that are largely pretty boring earth stuff for some, but for others we have none. That doesn't mean these are aliens or alien vehicles, it just means we don't know what it is." answer?

Because I feel like more often than not, it's simply that boring.

[Endus]

I mean, how unreasonable is the, "Here's a bunch of shit we can't explain, and we still can't explain it. We have some theories that are largely pretty boring earth stuff for some, but for others we have none. That doesn't mean these are aliens or alien vehicles, it just means we don't know what it is." answer?

Because I feel like more often than not, it's simply that boring.

For the most part, these releases aren't "things we can't explain" and are "things for which we do not currently have an explanation, but to be honest, we never really tried because it's pretty clearly a bird or swamp gas or something similar, it really doesn't stand out but you people will clutch at anything and it distracts you from the horrible things the US military does overseas so here ya go."

[Corvus]

I just can't see China out-teching us militarily atm, and it's obviously not Russia given the current situation of their military, so I'm almost certain it's not C.

Plus China and Russia tend to like to brag about their latest and greatest wunderwaffen which makes C even more unlikely.

[Unholyground]

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 can pretty much guarantee we are being observed but are not advanced enough to contact as a species.

[dextersmith]

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...

They sent that gold disc into space long ago. Since gold is so soft, wouldn't that disc be heavily damaged by space dust by now?

[Vegas82]

They sent that gold disc into space long ago. Since gold is so soft, wouldn't that disc be heavily damaged by space dust by now?

You think it was thrown or something instead of inside a protective cover(made from Uranium plated Aluminum)?

[Iain]

Any species advanced enough to trivialize it is also advanced enough to not give a shit about this run-down rock with a bunch of barely-sentient apes banging sticks together.

Suppose humans got advanced to that point. We'd be obsessed with finding other civilizations, even ones more primitive than ours. The opportunity to explore a species that documented their own history provides exactly the type of knowledge a highly advanced civilization would struggle to find through any other means.

We'd be able to explore their mythology, their inventions, what if they developed their technology in a different order? Their art, their religion.

An alien civilization provides us with a chance to contrast and compare the creations of a non-human intelligence. There's no way we'd ever get enough of that.

[Shadowferal]

Suppose humans got advanced to that point. We'd be obsessed with finding other civilizations, even ones more primitive than ours.

No. We wouldn't.
Most would be afraid. At the very least, cautious of another advanced civilization.

[Iain]

This isn't at all like civilizations from different continents meeting each other. They'll want the entire continent because they've saturated theirs.

You got to keep in mind the implications of what it means to be an advanced civilization capable of contacting or observing another civilization. Such a civilization has no scarcity in any resources. They're able to extract that all out of lifeless planets, moons, and meteorites. Even habitable planets that lack any intelligence will have been found long before other intelligence.

That means there's nothing to be gained by conquering another civilization on the planet. Can't extract any fortunes from them because all of that can be found elsewhere.

What civilizations are able to offer each other is creative content. To a civilization that has all the material wealth in existence, the insight into an alien mind is the most precious commodity in the galaxy.

[Ripster42]

Such a civilization has no scarcity in any resources.

Citation needed. If a thing grows it generally grows to the limit of its resources.

[Shadowferal]

You got to keep in mind the implications of what it means to be an advanced civilization capable of contacting or observing another civilization.

You're making assumptions based on nothing known.
Alien means alien thinking.