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UFOs & Aliens

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Do aliens and UFOs exist? (Two choices which you can change.)

Aliens do exist (over 70% sure). (UFOs are manned and are not just robotic drones.)
3
18%
Aliens don't exist.
4
24%
I'm not sure about aliens.
1
6%
UFOs are alien-made (over 90% sure).
4
24%
UFOs are man-made.
3
18%
I'm not sure about UFOs.
2
12%
 
Total votes: 17

Brian-H
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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

Possibly a small step in the right direction to one day being able to come up with a coherent model of the universe https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56643677

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

I'm not a big fan of Brian Cox the Physicist, some of the series he's had on BBC have been dull IMO, but there's a new 4 part series just started earlier this evening, which I watched.

Brian Cox's Adventures in Space and Time https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wn ... odes/guide
9pm on Sundays (repeated the following Saturday, or available on iPlayer)


Part 1 Space: How Far Can We Go?

Part 2 Aliens: Are We Alone? -- next Sunday

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

Part 3 What is Gravity? -- last Sunday, nothing new there

Part 4 What is Time? -- Sunday yesterday, quite good, but not much new there either, including the notion that in "ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years" the universe will have entirely cooled to nothing but photons which will also disappear - but I'd have loads of questions to ask Prof Brian Cox including "why do you assume that all the laws of physics, including Einstein's theories, apply uniformly throughout space-time itself i.e. space-time itself may not be constant, in which case, the current ideas about the entire cosmos are just interesting updated creationist fairy stories".


------------------------------------------------------

Back to aliens, this coming Wednesday morning the US Government's UFO Report will be released. According to Scientific American there's not much to be revealed, other than the fact that the military has been looking at their own reports and concluded that there's no evidence of aliens in our skies.

Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomer at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco, echoes the widely held sentiment among scientists that, for decades, the media has lavished too much attention on sensational claims that vague lights in the sky are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. “Recently, there has been a flurry of misleading publicity about UFOs [based on military reports]. A sober examination of these claims reveals that there is a lot less to them than first meets the eye,” Fraknoi says. Given sufficient evidence (which, arguably, many of the recent reports fail to provide), UFO sightings can essentially always be tied to terrestrial or celestial phenomena, such as lights from human-made vehicles and reentering space junk, he adds.


https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... fo-report/

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

They now call them UAP - Unidentified Aerial Phenomena - which is far better than Unidentified Flying Objects because UAP suggests that what has been seen is related to some kind of "phenomenon" or what I'd say is an illusion.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57619755
UAP "probably lack a single explanation", the report said. Some could be technologies from another nation like China or Russia [utter nonsense] others could be natural atmospheric phenomena like ice crystals that could register on radar systems [definitely] while the report also suggested some could be "attributable to developments and classified programs by US entities" [latter is more nonsense]

The one case they could identify "with high confidence" was identified as "a large, deflating balloon", the report said.

It added that the UAP pose "a clear safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to US national security".

The taskforce is now "looking for novel ways to increase collection" of reports and gather more information, adding that "additional funding" could "further study of the topics laid out in this report".



For me, the main issue is that pilots (military or civilian) don't understand the way that light and RF can be ducted, distorted, mirrored, etc in so many natural ways. Everything I've seen or heard reported is down to either some kind of illusion, or, some kind of delusion. A bit like the way magicians perform all kinds of spectacular illusions, only these phenomena are accidentally created.

Fossil
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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Fossil »

Hi Everyone

My visits to the Forum, and to this thread, have been rare for several years, for many reasons that aren't relevant, but I've discovered a book that I recommend to anyone interested in the topic of Extra-terrestrial Civilisations, or ETCs, or Aliens in a general sense. Details below:

"If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens, Where is Everybody?", subtitle "Seventy-five Soluions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life", Second Edition, by Stephen Webb of the University of Portsmouth, UK. Foreword by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal. Pub Springer, 2015. pp434.

My apologies if this has already been mentioned and I've not noticed.

It's very thorough, with six chapters which I'll list out of interest:

1. Introduction.

2. Of Fermi and Paradox.

3. They Are (or Were) Here: discusses 10 'solutions' the paradox.

4. They Exist, But We Have Yet to See or Hear from Them: solutions 11 to 50.

5. They Don't Exist: solutions 51 to 74.

6. Conclusion: solution 75.

There are extensive notes and references and an index.

Highly recommended, well argued; I may have to change my personal solution that we are the first intelligent species to have evolved anywhere!

Form a queue.

Geoff

Brian-H
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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

👍
I managed to find the ISBN (search using ISBN 978-3319132358 , or ISBN 9783319132358 , or just ISBN 3319132358 )
Available on Amazon and ebay.
Sounds a very interesting read, I've ordered one.

Also, I don't know if ayone else noticed, but Prof Brian Cox was recently talking about panspermia
There's a quick 5-minute video on the BBC iPlayer from Nov 2022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0d5wwnp/

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Fossil »

I've just finished reasding the 60 pages of notes at the end of 'Where is Everybody?'

There are mentions therein of other titles mostly relating to the evolution of the Earth, with regard to those aspects that are relevant to the evolution of life and intelligence, including:

"Rare Earth - Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe" by Peter D Ward and Donald Brownlee; ISBN 0-387-95289-6 Pub Copernicus Books, 2000 pp335, which I've read and recommend.
and:
"Lucky Planet - Why Earth is Exceptional - and What That Means for Life in the Universe" by David Waltham; ISBN 978-184831-656-0 Pub Icon Books, 2014 pp 225, not read yet.

Not mentioned but another book on the same theme with a more thorough examination of the evolution of the earth and life upon it as may be relevant to such issues elsewhere in the universe:
"How to Build a Habitable Planet - the Story of Earth From the Big Bang to Humankind" by Charles H Langmuir and Wally Broecker; ISBN 978-0-691-14006-3 Pub Princeton Univ Press 2012 pp 718. I've read this and highly recommend it.

Another book by Ward & Brownlee that I plan to read soon, is:
"The Life and Death of Planet Earth - How the New science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World": ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7512-0 Pub Owl Books, 2002 pp 240.
This presumably is less concerned with the possibility of the evolution of intelligent life elsewhere in the Galaxy, or Universe.

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee are based at the University of Washington in Seattle. If I permit myself a comment on their choice of location, I can imagine safer places to work on the planet than next to a subduction zone at the boundary of two tectonic plates.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

That's a long reading list you've got there.

I'm still waiting for my copy of 'Where is Everybody?' to arrive :roll:

I didn't realise that there's a potentially big problem down the NW coast of the USA, I had to look it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone
Image

Mount St Helens is only ~100 miles South of Seattle, and there's also the Yellowstone Caldera ~580 miles to the SE of Seattle (same distance as London to Berlin) - it's reckoned that Yellotone is a supervolcano due to go off sometime in the next 200 years.

So inded, NW USA isn't the best place to be safe.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Fossil »

Yes, the Rocky Mountains of Western Canada and the US are there for a reason. Much closer to Seattle is Mount Rainier, a beautiful snow covered peak to see in the distance beyond the city, and I'm sure the US Geological Survey will know if magma starts to rise below it, but when to tell the population to leave before the mudflows from the melting ice start pouring towards the sea? That's not the only risk in the Paciific Northwest, near the coast there are blue 'Tsunami Evacuation Route' signs on most of the roads, because the land there is being lifted up by the subduction taking place a few miles away under the ocean. If the rock fractures and the coast collapses it will create a tsunami similar to that in the Indian Ocean some years ago, or Japan likewise. I don't know when the last such episode was, I imagine the USGS know, but the western north American coast has been stable for what seems to have been a very long time. Perhaps they reckon the risk is not high at present. I wonder what they'll do if things start to change. Altogether enough to make many "Sleepless in Seattle" perhaps?

As for Yellowstone, I don't think it's directly linked to the coastal issues, it's further east. There's a huge magma chamber below, when that shows signs of filling is the time to leave the USA. It has apparently exploded every 600,000 years from geological evidence, and the last one was over 600,000 years ago, so it's now overdue. We should all hope that that dosen't happen again any time soon, it's likely something that will affect the entire globe.

May I mention something else for anyone interested in any of the foregoing, and a little more easy to absorb than hundreds of pages of science. It's a BBC DVD of a series made a few years ago called "Earth Story". It covers much of the way Planet Earth works in a very friendly fashion. The presenter is the late Professor Aubrey Manning of the University of Edinburgh, who seeks out the leading lights of each topic to tell their stories, he having been one himself; truly absorbing and highly recommended (by me!).

Forgive me for the following if you're bored stiff, but one of my favourite moments is in Hawaii, The Prof is with local members of the USGS on top of an old lava flow looking down into a lava tube with vast amounts of molten rock pouring along it, very hot. They then throw a steel hammer securely attached to steel rope down into the lava, leave it to bounce along the surface for a bit and then pull it back up, and drop it into a bucket of water to quench it, cool and solidify. When cool enough to hold one of the senior geologists holds it up and says something like, 'this contains significant amounts of Helium 3 (the usual type is Helium 2), Helium 3 is mostly found at the earth's core / mantle boundary, so this has come from way down there" (my emphasis).

Well it's 24 C outside at the moment, so I'm off to the garden again.

Geoff

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Fossil »

Sorry, I omitted to mention the key difference between Yellowstone and the Cascadia range of volcanoes nearer the Pacific coast. Yellowstone sits atop a mantle plume, as does Hawaii. These are convection streams of very hot rock rising from near the bottom of the mantle, next to the core. Hence the very fluid lava rich in Helium3 in Hawaii. The plumes tend to be static under the tectonic plates, which drift across them slowly, giving rise for example to the line of Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific. There are also geological features west of Yellowstone, for example the Snake River Plain in Idaho, that formed as the North American plate drifted southwestwards, I think.

New plumes can be extremely dangerous, they can disgorge vast quantities of lava over long periods of time and cause climate problems. For example the Deccan plateau in India; there are similar features in S|iberia and in part of Washingtom State, USA. All of this separate from the usual earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis caused by plate tectonics.

What a happy world we live in; but all these issues may have had a part to play in the evolution of life over many millions of years. I hope they don't lead to an own goal mass extinction any time soon.

Cheers again!

Fossil

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