Post: #76

Speakeasy's posts are seriously convincing me of the veracity of this L.A. UFO incident.

But if that is the case, then why are beings capable of travelling at the speed of light flying completely visible and slow-moving saucers, and on top of it are so incompetent that they can be shot by our primitive missiles?

Post: #77

maybe there is a planet with only woman .

Post: #78

(02-05-2015 08:35 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  Speakeasy's posts are seriously convincing me of the veracity of this L.A. UFO incident.

But if that is the case, then why are beings capable of travelling at the speed of light flying completely visible and slow-moving saucers, and on top of it are so incompetent that they can be shot by our primitive missiles?

There was nothing in the story that said that object whatever it was got shot down.

There were a lot of UFO sitings around WWII. Which isn't surprising. If there are aliens watching, that would be an interesting time to visit and see a bunch of hairless apes flying around in propeller tin cans and blowing stuff up. If I was an alien I'd have been like:

Post: #79

Quote:There was nothing in the story that said that object whatever it was got shot down.

I'm talking about Roswell and similar alleged "UFO secretly downed/recovered" events.

Post: #80

(02-05-2015 02:39 PM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

Quote:There was nothing in the story that said that object whatever it was got shot down.

I'm talking about Roswell and similar alleged "UFO secretly downed/recovered" events.

Ah. Yeah, I'm not sure about those incidents. I don't have any strong opinion on those one way or the other but I keep an open mind. You never know.

Have you ever heard of the Phoenix lights incident? That one was witnessed by a huge amount amount of people. I tend to more convinced by the incidents that are seen by many simultaneously. I definitely do NOT believe the government's explanation of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights

Post: #81

I'm personally open to the hypothesis that some UFO's could be aliens, but in my opinion it's only a theoretical possibility without a single shred of credible evidence. Battle of LA, Roswell, etc were WWII and cold war hysteria-fueled mythic stories, nothing more unfortunately. No one would like it more than me if there was some advanced civilization out there (see my avatar?) but I don't see any evidence of it.

Hypothetical question for the guys that believe some UFOs might be aliens (this gets to evidence/plausibility of an amazing claim):

Say you had a best friend Joe, an average guy like you living in an average country doing the average job. You've known him for 10+ years, he's a stand up guy, intelligent like you, etc. One day over beers Joe confesses to being a time traveller from the future on a secret mission. You say bullshit, prove it. He says if I tell you the names of the teams that will play in the Superbowl next year, and the exact score, would you believe me?

Question is: He tells you the teams and score, a year goes by, and Joe is exactly right, do you believe he's a time traveller?

My answer: No. It's amazing and very very improbable but he simply guessed right. Far more likely he's a sports nut who knows the odds, and he didn't show any behavior that can only be explained by time travel.

The UFO stories have far more likely and boring explanations.

Post: #82

(02-05-2015 04:52 PM)Engineer Wrote:  without a single shred of credible evidence.

WE are the evidence.

The fact that we exist is evidence that "life" can form in the universe.

Or, do you believe that we were created by a "God".

If you believe that we were created by a "God", remember that there is no evidence to support that idea either.

Personally, I don't know where the fuck we come from.

But, in terms of evidence.. There is no evidence of any "God" and there is also no evidence of any alien life form.

So, basically, we don't know shit!

Post: #83

(02-05-2015 04:52 PM)Engineer Wrote:  I'm personally open to the hypothesis that some UFO's could be aliens, but in my opinion it's only a theoretical possibility without a single shred of credible evidence. Battle of LA, Roswell, etc were WWII and cold war hysteria-fueled mythic stories, nothing more unfortunately.

Not seeing how the battle of L.A. story was hysteria. It was witnessed by thousands. If it wasn't the Japanese, and it wasn't us, what the hell was our military trying to shoot down? And if you really believe that was a "weather balloon" then I have some beachfront property in Nevada to sell you.

Post: #84

I believe there could easily be life elsewhere in the universe.

But I am pretty sure their purpose is not to come here across the stars to just mess with us.

If they're actually here, abducting people, doing experiments, flying around our cities at night, and nothing else, that would be hilarious. I think if they came here really, we'd all end up dead. How do they have technology sufficient to come here, but wouldn't just conquer us and treat us like insects?

Imagine if they really are here messing with us and nothing else.

"We totally scared the shit out of this human! We stuck shit up her butt and no one will believe her hahaha! Sick abduction bro!"

Post: #85

(02-05-2015 09:20 AM)Amsterdamned Wrote:  maybe there is a planet with only woman .

Yeah it's called earth.

Post: #86

Im excited to see New Horizons pump out detailed photos of Pluto and it's largest moon.

http://io9.com/our-first-grainy-glimpse-...1683929152

Post: #87

(02-05-2015 05:42 PM)Giovonny Wrote:  

(02-05-2015 04:52 PM)Engineer Wrote:  without a single shred of credible evidence.

WE are the evidence.

The fact that we exist is evidence that "life" can form in the universe.

Or, do you believe that we were created by a "God".

If you believe that we were created by a "God", remember that there is no evidence to support that idea either.

Personally, I don't know where the fuck we come from.

But, in terms of evidence.. There is no evidence of any "God" and there is also no evidence of any alien life form.

So, basically, we don't know shit!

I agree 100% with everything you said here, Gio. I was speaking of the "some UFOs must be aliens" evidence, the blurry pictures, the "everyone saw something at 3am" testimony, and the puzzling (to me) belief that our bumbling government could cover up something so massive for so long a time.

Post: #88

(02-05-2015 06:21 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

(02-05-2015 04:52 PM)Engineer Wrote:  I'm personally open to the hypothesis that some UFO's could be aliens, but in my opinion it's only a theoretical possibility without a single shred of credible evidence. Battle of LA, Roswell, etc were WWII and cold war hysteria-fueled mythic stories, nothing more unfortunately.

Not seeing how the battle of L.A. story was hysteria. It was witnessed by thousands. If it wasn't the Japanese, and it wasn't us, what the hell was our military trying to shoot down? And if you really believe that was a "weather balloon" then I have some beachfront property in Nevada to sell you.

Imagine living in fear of actual invasion by a country full of strange people that crippled your fleet in the Pacific with a surprise attack, actually invaded your territory with boots on the ground in Alaska, that sent incendiary bombs via long duration balloons over your northern forests, that makes your society black out windows and lights at night for fear of bombing, and where you send some of your own citizens to remote detention camps because of their ancestry, and tell me those people weren't vulnerable to hysterics.

I have no idea what they were shooting at. All we know is a lot of people saw something strange, and people are notoriously poor eyewitnesses, especially with things flying in the air, and at 3 am as well. Come on. A few years back, I read in a local Alaskan paper how passengers of a puddle jumper were convinced they saw a pterodactyl, as in the flying dinosaur. It was "huge, 25 foot wing span" because it seemed so far away, flying just like they thought a dinosaur would. Turned out to be a Stellar's Sea Eagle, magnificent large bird, blown hundreds of miles out of its usual habitat in Siberia. Their minds couldn't process the relative distance/size/speed correctly so they came up with that incredible story.

Funny now that we have radar covering urban skies and everyone has a camera on their cell phone the flying saucer pictures have gone out of fashion.

Post: #89

(02-05-2015 07:30 PM)Engineer Wrote:  Imagine living in fear of actual invasion by a country full of strange people that crippled your fleet in the Pacific with a surprise attack, actually invaded your territory with boots on the ground in Alaska, that sent incendiary bombs via long duration balloons over your northern forests, that makes your society black out windows and lights at night for fear of bombing, and where you send some of your own citizens to remote detention camps because of their ancestry, and tell me those people weren't vulnerable to hysterics.

Jesus, man, what more do you need?? There's a damn picture right on the cover of L.A. Times. Did that look like an airplane to you? Thousands of people can say they saw a saucer shaped craft in the sky and I'm to believe they are all just crazy? What would it take for you to believe it?

Quote:I have no idea what they were shooting at. All we know is a lot of people saw something strange, and people are notoriously poor eyewitnesses, especially with things flying in the air, and at 3 am as well.

It was night time, but the thing was lit up by multiple spot lights on a clear night as you can see in the photo. 14,000 rounds of anti-aircraft fire couldn't bring down this "weather balloon". People actually died during this incident. Yes. Died. It wasn't the Japanese. It wasn't a zepellin and it damn sure wasn't a balloon. Either of which could be destroyed by a single shot.

Quote:Funny now that we have radar covering urban skies and everyone has a camera on their cell phone the flying saucer pictures have gone out of fashion.

That's not true at all. People still report them every day: http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ . This organization claims to get 500 to 1000 reports a month from around the world: http://www.mufon.com/report-a-ufo.html

http://www.nuforc.org/

I'm not saying every report on these sites is legit. I know nothing about their veracity as I don't follow them. I'm just responding to your claim that UFO reporting has gone out of fashion.

Post: #90

One thing on the whole notion of belief.

Belief can mean at least three things:

1) You believe in something with no probability of an alternative. This can also be considered *knowledge*. An example would be I believe in the fact that the world is round.

2) You believe in something based on Occam's razor. That of all the likely explanations, x is the most probable explanation. You don't necessarily slam dunk tangible proof, just probability. An example would be, I believe there is life outside of earth in the universe. I can't 100% prove it, but the probability of there being life outside earth is higher than the probability of there not being life outside earth because of the sheer number of stars and the age of the universe, so I believe that life exists somewhere else in the universe.

3) You believe in something that is neither factual knowledge or the most probably explanation, i.e. a kid believing that Santa Claus left those toys under the tree.

My belief about what happened in the skies over LA I feel falls under number 2. Nobody can has given any probable alternative explanation of what it was. There were certainly enough credible witnesses both civilian and military as well as photographic evidence. So it definitely doesn't fall under 3.

Post: #91

(02-05-2015 09:24 AM)speakeasy Wrote:  

(02-05-2015 08:35 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  Speakeasy's posts are seriously convincing me of the veracity of this L.A. UFO incident.

But if that is the case, then why are beings capable of travelling at the speed of light flying completely visible and slow-moving saucers, and on top of it are so incompetent that they can be shot by our primitive missiles?

There was nothing in the story that said that object whatever it was got shot down.

There were a lot of UFO sitings around WWII. Which isn't surprising. If there are aliens watching, that would be an interesting time to visit and see a bunch of hairless apes flying around in propeller tin cans and blowing stuff up. If I was an alien I'd have been like:

Well, WW 2 was the conflict in which our technology (if not technology generally) took a big leap forward: nuclear weapons were first deployed in 1945.

Post: #92

Travelling in the solar system at light speed:

Quote:In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.
I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

Post: #93

This new quantum model about the big bang is quite interesting, specifically that it didnt happen.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...nergy.html

Post: #94

Well apparently there had to be a beginning, because scientists are hammering on it constantly. I believe however that the universe has always existed and will always remain to exist. I also think it's infinite, in terms of size. Even though we have a word for infinity (being: infinity) not even the brightest of our minds dare to walk that path. Or do they?

(02-11-2015 07:41 AM)bojangles Wrote:  This new quantum model about the big bang is quite interesting, specifically that it didnt happen.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...nergy.html

Post: #95

(02-11-2015 08:13 AM)lowside Wrote:  Well apparently there had to be a beginning, because scientists are hammering on it constantly. I believe however that the universe has always existed and will always remain to exist. I also think it's infinite, in terms of size. Even though we have a word for infinity (being: infinity) not even the brightest of our minds dare to walk that path. Or do they?

(02-11-2015 07:41 AM)bojangles Wrote:  This new quantum model about the big bang is quite interesting, specifically that it didnt happen.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...nergy.html

If that paper is right, that is a deeply profound change in how we view the universe. It sounds like a sort-of variant to Steady State theory, which was ditched about forty years ago. Having said that, I see from the phys.org article that the authors don't necessarily rule out a creation of the universe - just at a much, much earlier date.

Paper's only been out a few days I see. Might be worth waiting to see whether Hawking et. al.'s heads explode before we see whether this is right or not.

EDIT: Incidentally, the article also indicates their starting point was the work of David Bohm, who when you wander through his Wikipedia article seems to be one of those theoretical physicists who chooses deliberately to straddle the line between physics and philosophy. In particular, he was a believer in the idea that the mind itself utilises aspects of quantum physics in arriving at thought that do not conform to how we understand the universe, something I've always liked since first coming across the rough idea in Roger Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind. Might be worth a look.

Post: #96

(02-05-2015 08:35 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  Speakeasy's posts are seriously convincing me of the veracity of this L.A. UFO incident.

But if that is the case, then why are beings capable of travelling at the speed of light flying completely visible and slow-moving saucers, and on top of it are so incompetent that they can be shot by our primitive missiles?

To be fair.. the military has the resources and logistical still to put a man on a complex airplane, fly him to the other side of the world and get him on the ground safely with 100 pounds of gear to keep him a live.
and in a split second a guy that has herded sheep all his life and doesn't even know such technology exist...can kill that man with a weapon that might be older than he is.
Iraqis and Afghanis thought American soldiers were part robot for the amount of armor they wore.

In Vietnam, some Vietnamese thought that American soldiers were blind because they had blue eyes and always wore sunglasses.

So many people have a cell phone with the powere to take them to the moon.. But how many off us could survive a night on the Serengeti

If there is a case for aliens existing or not.. I don't think its a huge jump to think that they can have a lot of technology but have a flaw that allows them to be shot down

Post: #97

The latest photos of Pluto from the New Horizon spacecraft

Post: #98

Since this thread was sort of moving towards an all-purpose space thread (which I would welcome), bumping it with an interesting piece of news today: some enormous object, or objects, is blocking the light from a distant star, and it's too big to be a planet (Archive Today'd because while Phil Plait knows his shit, Slate generally doesn't):

Quote:Straight away, we know we’re not dealing with a planet here. Even a Jupiter-sized planet only blocks roughly 1 percent of this kind of star’s light, and that’s about as big as a planet gets. It can’t be due to a star, either; we’d see it if it were. And the lack of a regular, repeating signal belies both of these as well. Whatever is blocking the star is big, though, up to half the width of the star itself!

[...]

Wondering if there might be more to this, Tabetha Boyajian, the lead author on the paper, showed the results to Jason Wright, an astronomer who studies exoplanets and, not coincidentally, has researched how to look for signatures of advanced alien civilizations in Kepler data.

Yes, seriously.

Get this:

Look at our own civilization. We consume ever-increasing amounts of power, and are always looking for bigger sources. Fossil, nuclear, solar, wind … Decades ago, physicist Freeman Dyson popularized an interesting idea: What if we built thousands of gigantic solar panels, kilometers across, and put them in orbit around the Sun? They’d capture sunlight, convert it to energy, and that could be beamed to Earth for our use. Need more power? Build more panels! An advanced civilization could eventually build millions, billions of them.

This idea evolved into what’s called a Dyson Sphere, a gigantic sphere that completely encloses a star. It was popular back in the 1970s and 80s; there was even an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation about one. Dyson never really meant that we’d build an actual sphere; just lots of little panels that might mimic one.

But it raises an interesting possibility for detecting alien life. Such a sphere would be dark in visible light but emit a lot of infrared. People have looked for them, but we’ve never seen one (obviously).

Which brings us back to KIC 8462852. What if we caught an advanced alien civilization in the process of building such an artifact? Huge panels (or clusters of them) hundreds of thousands of kilometers across, and oddly-shaped, could produce the dips we see in that star’s light.

Plait obviously argues that a natural explanation is more likely, but it's interesting and uplifting to see "alien life" not being laughed out of the room when things like this come up. The Dyson Sphere is a hell of an idea, too.

Post: #99

Pretty good video here illustrating the vastness of our solar system (a little less boring than Teedub's above)

Post: #100

ESO’s VST Telescope Takes Stunning Image of Fornax Galaxy Cluster:

Quote:The Fornax Cluster, also known as ACO S 373 or MCL 52, is located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Fornax.

Galaxy clusters do not come in neatly defined shapes so it is difficult to determine exactly where they begin and end. However, astronomers have estimated that the center of the Fornax Cluster is in the region of 65 million light-years from Earth. It is one of the closest of such clusters beyond our Local Group of galaxies.

The Fornax Cluster contains about 60 large galaxies, and a similar number of dwarf galaxies. Galaxy clusters like this one are commonplace in the Universe and illustrate the powerful influence of gravity over large distances as it draws together the enormous masses of individual galaxies into one region.

At the center of this particular cluster, in the middle of the three bright fuzzy blobs on the left side of the image, is NGC 1399, a so-called cD galaxy.

cD galaxies like NGC 1399 look similar to elliptical galaxies but are bigger and have extended, faint envelopes. This is because they have grown by swallowing smaller galaxies drawn by gravity towards the center of the cluster.

There is evidence that this process is happening before our eyes. Recent study has revealed a very faint bridge of light between NGC 1399 and the smaller galaxy NGC 1387 to its right.

This bridge, which is too faint to show up in this picture, is somewhat bluer than either galaxy, indicating that it consists of stars created in gas that was drawn away from NGC 1387 by the gravitational pull of NGC 1399. Despite there being little evidence for ongoing interactions in the Fornax Cluster overall, it seems that NGC 1399 at least is still feeding on its neighbors.

This is a striking example of its type, the prominent bar passing through the central core of the galaxy, and the spiral arms emerging from the ends of the bar.

In keeping with the nature of cluster galaxies, there is more to NGC 1365 than meets the eye. It is classified as a Seyfert galaxy, with a bright active galactic nucleus also containing a supermassive black hole at its center.