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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

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by John-B »

Virtually all life on Earth exists by fighting and destroying or eating other life, even at the smallest level, and vegetarians destroy plants and trees which are living things. Could there be an alien life form that doesn't exist by destroying other living life forms, getting energy in some other form?

Would alien visitors have advanced to the level that they don't fight and destroy each other? They would have enough knowledge to do considerable damage to any other being. If they are visiting us, then perhaps they have found a way to coexist with others.

Another thought - would alien visitors be almost certainly robots with instructions that could not be changed? Would they have any concept of pain experienced by our Earthly life forms? If we went to Mars and lay in front of one of our robots it would just run over us, so would aliens be any different? I wouldn't like to meet an alien if it had no concept of empathy, or morals or peaceable coexistence.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

Firstly we ought to distinguish between aliens as in the title of the thread who may be already visiting our planet, and aliens as in advanced intelligent lifeforms who have evolved elsewhere but have not as yet reached our part of the galaxy.

For the former, I don't believe any of the claims made and put it all down to either illusions or delusions.

For the latter, I do believe that we are not the only advanced intelligent lifeform in the milky Way, reason being that estimates suggest that there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way on the low-end and 400 billion on the high end referenced from here

There is a problem with the estimated mass of the visible stars, which is that there aren't enough to explain the rotational speed of the Milky Way. Based on a rotational period of about 240 million years at the radius of the Sun, the mass of the Milky Way should be equivalent to 1.5 trillion solar masses (otherwise the Milky way would fly apart). But there are only about 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and the supermassive black hole at the galactic centre, accounts for another 4 million solar masses. So there's another 90% unaccounted for, unless we include "dark matter" referenced from here

Secondly, when we consider how much further other extraterrestrial lifeforms could get, well if they are biological the same as we are, then they're going to find it as difficult as we will to venture further than our own solar system. If we jump forward 1000 years, it's almost certain (without some catastrophe) that humans will have established base stations on the earth's moon, on Mars, and on a few other moons, and will also have launched many fast probes towards neighbouring stars. In order to get further than that there would have to be a radical discovery in high powered propulsion for minimum energy input which would approach say a tenth of the speed of light. But even that isn't fast enough to get very far. So --- for any other intelligent lifeform that has advanced 1000 years ahead of us, they won't have travelled far from their solar system either.

Thirdly, does it matter whether we are the only advanced intelligent lifeform in the Milky Way, or even in the whole universe ? For me it's a basic question of "what's it all for" - if we are alone in an entire limitless universe then we might as well chuck it all in now. If there are other advanced lifeforms in existence, then we need to press on and hope that some day we will meet up somewhere, hopefully on equal terms, or if not, where either party is not going to take the attitudes taken by the Europeans in the Americas, in Africa, and in Australia. I'd hazard a guess that those attitudes disappear as the group intelligence advances, a truism for any advanced intelligent civilisation.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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Brian and John

I think that we three are the main, perhaps only, contributors to this thread now, so I'll just address this to you both.

I've no wish to offend, and I agree that the question of Aliens visiting this world is almost certainly irrelevant, but I would classify those who believe in it as being similar in nature to those who believe anti-vaxers (one x or two?) who claim that Bill Gates is placing electronic bugs in vaccines and other such complete rubbish, but I still find the sort of material that they post extraordinary, and wonder how they get any pleasure from making it up and doing it.

But never mind all that nonsense. Assuming that They, the Aliens who are elsewhere but haven't visited us yet, do exist, the question isn't simply how many stars are there in this galaxy, or dark matter, which I don't understand any more than I do blockchain, but how many of those stars are of the most likely type to repeat what has happened in this solar system over the past 4.5 billion years. Remember that Lucie Greene suggested on the Infinite Monkey Cage that there might be only one or two such stable Type G stars as ours in the galaxy, in other words only one more than ours tops. I'm assuming that she means in the Milky Way's habitable zone, far enough from the core to avoid regular sterilisation of planets by extreme events involving supernovae, magnetars, GRBs and so forth, and not so far out from the core for the quantities of all elements, other than H and He, stardust from past supernovae, to be too scarce.

Then you progress to the unlikeliness of the formation of a solar system just like ours, the unlikliness of the evolution of a rocky planet just like Earth, factoring in all the chance events such as the collision with Theia, formation of the moon, stable rotational obliquity and extra-large iron core with enough isotope decay heat, a good protective magnetic field and just the right amount of water to lead eventually to tectonic activity and the carbon cycle, tides even, plus all those extraordinary perhaps once-only chances in the evolution of carbon based life such as multicellular organisms, mitochondria, photosynthesis, all occurring over an extraordinarily long period of time, the necessary stable conditions existing for fully a third of the entire lifetime of the universe. Impossible! you might say.

Meanwhile unicellular life will be busy developing in many oxygen free places on a few rocky planets with a little water, although many of those will evolve in ways more like Venus and Mars. So you can start to imagine that carbon based organic intelligent 'life' may indeed be rare, and in our case so rare that nowhere has it evolved further than in this place in the Milky Way. And don't forget just the right number of mass extinctions at the right time, the risk of which continues to exist until all life on the Earth is finally extinguished by increasing solar temperatures sometime well before the red giant end of the sun's existence.

I don't agree that the possibility that we might be alone is such an apalling thought that we should just give up, rather we should take endless pleasure as long as we can from existing on the surface of the tiny body that has given birth to us, creatures that have been graced with insight and self-awareness plus the ability to understand the full mechanism of their evolution and existence, to look out at the galaxy and universe in all its lethal glory, and look down at the astonishing mechanism of a world that is quite extraordinary, via the sciences that have given us the power to understand it. And hopefully in due course avoid perhaps the otherwise inevitable end of the current interglacial period, long and stable enough for human civilisation to have evolved, when ice will once again extend over much of the northern hemisphere, and also avoid complicating the way the atmosphere functions to a dangerous degree, and perhaps eventually venture forth to explore our solar system and immediate neighbourhood. I've no wish to comment on the possibity that we will eventually become semi-artificial inorganic organisms by merging our life and consciousness with nanocomputers. How could we programme a computer with our individual consciousness?

I aologise for the quasi-religious feel of that last paragraph, I'd like to put it much more briefly and succinctly but I lack the power to do so, sigh.

So my thoughts now turn from great things to the care of a few inorganic organisms that somehow give "pleasure" by creating motion and enjoyable sounds, the more so because we continue on our journey around the sun (I've just started my 74th such journey) to the portion where we expect to be warmer for a short time, and not forgetting our 250 million year journey around the galaxy.

In addition there are a few other forms of life outside to be cared for during their brief annual growing season. Wonderful!

Who cares whether Aliens exist or not?

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

I've read through the link you gave Geoff, twice, and I don't see it as bleak as your own interpretation seems to suggest.
Here is the link again for anyone else https://nautil.us/issue/97/wonder/if-al ... -find-them My interpretation is that nobody knows, because we don't have the information required to say, and that link is a positive "spin" based on current ideas.

If I go over my paragraph There is a problem with the estimated mass of the visible stars, which is that there aren't enough to explain the rotational speed of the Milky Way. Based on a rotational period of about 240 million years at the radius of the Sun, the mass of the Milky Way should be equivalent to 1.5 trillion solar masses (otherwise the Milky way would fly apart). But there are only about 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and the supermassive black hole at the galactic centre, accounts for another 4 million solar masses. So there's another 90% unaccounted for, unless we include "dark matter" - I can explain what I meant.

The problem is that we only know about our own solar system, we have no idea how many other solar systems actually exist. Assuming that the rotational speed of the Milky Way is correctly known (which it may not, because it relies on checking our position relative to other galaxies) - then that means that the mass of the Milky Way is 1.5 trillion solar masses (solar mass being the mass of our solar system, basically the mass of our sun). Dark Matter is an "invention" (that may or may not be right) to account for there not being enough mass in the Milky Way, or the entire Universe, to account for (basically) Newtonian Physics. To me it's like Phlogiston - an "invention" to explain something that doesn't fit with current theory at the time. I'd also say the same about The Big Bang.

Put another way, money for research follows mainstream thought at the time, so academic institutions mostly follow the same research, a truism regarding any matter/subject. It's only when a radical breakthrough occurs, that science will switch and follow a different theory. So what we have, is The Big Bang (a mathematical "story") with Dark Matter (another mathematical "story") to make the mathematical models all work. All we can say is that Newtonian Physics works to explain our solar system - i.e. the orbits of the planets and asteroids round our sun and the trajectories of probes etc.

The other problem is that we can't see much of the Milky Way anyway. We have absolutely no idea what other solar systems look like on the other side, or in most places in the Milky Way. Also, nobody knows what light is - the wave-particle duality is used to explain phenomena from infrared to x-rays (going in the direction of shorter and shorter wavelengths), but if you start to go to longer wavelengths, down through microwave to short wave, medium wave, long wave - where are the particles to emit those wavelengths ? It's the same stuff, it's all electro-magnetic (i.e. a 3-D wave consisting of an electric field coupled to a magnetic field) but how does it get here from stars in the Milky Way, let alone from other galaxies.

Basically it's all cobblers, so anybody who says that this is the only place in the Milky Way, or even in the Universe, where advanced civilisations stood a chance of evolving, they're just adhering to the current models which are most probably flawed - and they're also failing to think outside the box even on current models e.g. binary star solar systems.


EDIT - have a read of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light
"A variable speed of light (VSL) is a feature of a family of hypotheses stating that the speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, may in some way not be constant, e.g. varying in space or time, or depending on frequency. A variable speed of light occurs in some situations of classical physics as equivalent formulations of accepted theories, but also in various alternative theories of gravitation and cosmology, many of them non-mainstream." - the problem is that, once you start to include a VSL formula in any of the mathematical models, it all becomes faaaaar too complicated for any mathematicians. It's just too convenient and too simplistic to use The Big Bang and Newtonian Physics to model the Universe and the Milky Way.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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Fossil wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 3:50 pm Who cares whether Aliens exist or not?
I've said several times that I like the stories. It's unlikely that aliens and UFOs exist now, but they might, they may have done in the past or may do in the future.

It's like the stories about gods, who really believes that they existed on earth? Nevertheless they formed the basis of stories in every culture. The Greek myths and stories about gods everywhere make exciting reading. Humans are capable of imagination and dreaming and we do that about gods, so why not about aliens and UFOs too?

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Fossil »

Brian, John

Oh dear. I've just spent some time writing a further draft post, which I had to leave temporarily so I saved it; but alas, when I opened my user control panel to return to it I found the message 'no saved drafts'. I cannot recall exactly what I'd written, and I can't spend any more time on this today, so it will have to wait for now.

But before I do, may I ask if either of you have come across 'Earth Story', the BBC natural history series fronted by Professor Aubrey Manning? If not may I suggest that you buy it, it is a superb summary of the state of earth sciences in the late 90s. I watch it from time to time when I'm bored. He seeks out key figures and places for each topic that he's considering, whether geology, the origin and evolution of life, the discovery of continental drift, the carbon cycle, glaciations, the influence of life - the oxygenation of the atmosphere - on geology, oceanography, mountains, mass extinctions, visits the Burgess Shales, holds a piece of meteor 4.56 billion years old and so on.

Re climate he covers the relationship between ice ages and atmospheric CO2, and more recently the influence of Milankovich cycles in addition to that, in relation to the warming and cooling of the northern hemisphere and the advance and retreat of ice sheets, partly from a scientific station on the top of the Greenland ice sheet where they're drilling a very deep ice core- fascinating stuff.

I may return, I'm not sure, if I don't don't send out search parties.

Cheers

G

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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John, Brian,

Found It!!!

This is how I think of it: human civilisation is not very old, just a few thousand years, and so stories of Gods have come down to us from the relatively recent past, whether from the Greeks and Romans or from tribal peoples in more remote parts of the current world. These I think, although I'm no anthropologist, derive from the thinking of times when early man was unable to explain the phenomena he witnessed all around him, whether of the earth - the land, sea, mountains, rivers, climate, seasons, plants and animals - or the sky - the sun, moon, stars and planets, and the regular variations that he could predict, and those he couldn't; so gods and religions developed in his mind to help him explain what he couldn't really understand. This part of human thought and imagination may still be working as you suggest to give us theories of aliens, but I don't personally feel the need to pursue those or get any particular pleasure from it, although it is good to see some of the legendary early Sci-Fi films of the 50s appearing on the box occasionally. Just within the very recent past, say 200 years, based on the discoveries of the preceding 200 years, our knowledge of our planet, the solar system, the galaxy and the universe have accelerated hugely. And when you're over three score + 10 years, 100 years doesn't seem to be such a long time, and it's only 100 years roughly since we started to realise what the universe really is. So the rate of advancement of knowledge is currently 'ramming speed' if you forgive a reference to a biblical epic.

I grew up in Aberdeen where the clear winter skies were astonishing night after night, the Milky Way just glowed almost as bright as it does at 6000 feet up in the Rockies, and for most of my childhood I wanted to be an astronomer. Through secondary school it occurred to me that I wasn't as bright as some of my friends, and especially that my maths and physics were not adequate to fulfil those ambitions, and so my interest in biology rose to the surface and I went to medical school in Aberdeen (at around the time that MRI was being developed and endorphins discovered there), medicine being a discipline in which high intellect is not essential to being a good practitioner; only in academia do you find the planet sized brains! But I've retained an interest in all the natural sciences and these separated me from religion leading me loosely to being an atheist of sorts. I go outside and look up most nights, although it is much more cloudy in the west of Scotland than the north-east, and I've seen the occasional brief fireball and comet, together with the astonishing auroral event of March 13th 1989, caused by a coronal mass ejection on March 9th, the most astonishing display I'm ever likely to witness. I'm hoping for a supernova sometime, so very disappointed that Betelgeuse is probably not going to step up there. On various family travels across the pond one of the most pleasant surprises was to hear Patrick Moore giving the recorded introduction to visitors to the 200" telescope on Mount Palomar, still fully employed and so important to our voyages beyond the Milky Way.

While I accept the need to generate income in university departments I'm a trusting sort of person and I don't generally reject the foundations of whatever the current state of knowledge is in any individual science. I tend to respect the collective opinion of those many of high intellect in any individual science, for example the view that Einstein's theories have generally been proven in practice, and that other mathematical constructs such as the Big Bang or dark matter are open to major question but becoming gospel, while I accept that there are weaknesses such as the nature of light, the period of inflation after the Bang, which seems too conveniently contrived to me, the nature of dark energy and dark matter and so on. But it's a while since a major accepted theory was blown out of the water like HMS Hood, in fact I can't recall the last example of that sort of thing. The most depressing thing about those theories is that the universe will uiltimately expand until all light goes out and matter and heat dissipate.

So my beliefs are based on currently accepted science, while I accept that there are large blank areas in our knowledge, and some extremely large assumptions, for example that the same foundations of physics and other sciences that seem to apply in our part of the universe will apply in other parts of the universe. However, what difference does it make to us if such primary laws are different elsewhere, we're not likely to see proof of what the actual situation is on the other side of the galaxy for a very long time, although the knowledge of exoplanets seems to be advancing at a surprising speed - a surprising number of 'hot Jupiters' seem to be the norm for example - given that such knowledge was considered unlikely to be coming around the corner soon just a few decades ago.

All that I can conclude is that if you multiply one set of extremely unlikely events, such as factors in the evolution of life on earth, by others such as factors in the evolution of the solar system, then factors in the evolution of the sun in this part of the galaxy, and factors in the evolution of the Milky Way in this part of the universe, you get a cumulative outcome of increasingly minute probabilities. You don't necessarily get increasingly large probabilities of life elsewhere as some interpretations of the Drake equation are taken to imply; that doesn't seem to be considered very important by many. Yes, this just derives for the laws that appear to apply in what we can see and research. But we know of no other laws, so why just throw away the picture that 'our' laws seem to paint? If creatures originating from elsewhere in the galaxy or universe where different laws exist appear here, how likely are they to survive where the laws are totally different from their own? A simple example of this could be taken from H G Wells, whose invaders from Mars started decomposing as soon as they opened the door of their spacecraft because they hadn't encountered our micro-organisms before. But Wells doesn't tell us what the Martian micro-organisms did here after that; perhaps they were overwhelmed too, unless they behaved like a certain virus.

But it's basically the question of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, the mysterious coincidences between the numerical values of the fundamental constants of nature which appear to be necessary to allow the evolution of carbon-based organisms. But is this not just a further tier of improbabilities? Should the next stage of thinking be to examine those individual fundamental constants to contmplate what might be the situation ion other parts of the universe, or other universes where different values might exist. Unfortunately I cannot pursue that line of thought very far, as far as I know different constants can neither be understood nor contemplated.

If you are unwilling to accept the limitations of current science then time, all matter and fundamental theory is open to doubt surely?

'Nuff said?

Huge sigh of relief.

Geoff

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

Lots to reply to there Goeff. Before I reply to your 2nd post above - firstly I'm sure I've not heard of nor seen 'Earth Story' (I looked it up to check, doesn't look familiar to me, and 1998/99 was a period when I didn't have much time to watch TV) - secondly, the only search parties I could find were already pursuing some bloke who turns green, grows a bit bigger, and starts chucking stuff around.


Right, I've split the following up with several headings.

Gods

Before the advent of Christianity, the only monotheistic religion was Judaism, all others were polytheisms. The aboriginal natives of North America (aka N American Indians) were polytheistic, mostly nomadic. The aboriginal natives of Central and South America were polytheistic, mostly non-nomadic. The aboriginal natives of Australia were polytheistic, mix of nomadic and non-nomadic. The "Beaker people", the Norse, the Celts, the Goths, the Francs, the Minoans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, etc etc - all were Polytheistic with names of Gods that we recognise. Hinduism is about the only remaining polytheistic religion.

The Norse, the Celts, the Goths, the Francs, and the Romans all fought extensively, and their Gods helped them to victory to some extent (a bit like a football team's supporters can help their team to victory). Their Gods were VERY real to them and they truly believed in life after death - otherwise, how else would you run into a vast melee with spikes and blades.

Then in 312 AD Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. There were numerous reasons - he was amazed at how Christians would willingly die, and possibly, he thought that monotheism was a good way to bind the declining Roman Empire (he couldn't adopt Judaism as Jews were anathema to the Romans). I'm not sure of how Greek and Russian Orthodox came about, but Roman Catholicism was a direct result of Constantine.

The rest is history - other than Hinduism, all polytheistic religions in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australia were replaced by Christianity either by conquest or by missionaries. Of note is also, of course, Islam, which was directly started by Muhammad about 350 years after Constantine adopted Christianity. Muslims have affirmed to me that one of the reasons why Muhammad started Islam was to stop the Arabian tribes from fighting.

However, ironically, the problem with all religions, whether polytheistic or monotheistic, is the division by sects. To name 2 key pairs of sects that have fought bitterly - Protestants and Catholics - Sunni and Shia.

Theism means that one believes in a God who knows you and cares about you. Atheism rejects this notion, but, atheists can believe in some infinite "consciousness" that, whilst not directly knowing or caring about you, does indirectly influence the long-term course of the universe. Note that Buddhism is not a theistic religion, so it is quasi-atheistic.

In relation to our present discussion, some of the Mormon stuff is interesting. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, included a number of details concerning the nature of light, elements, matter, "spirit matter", and intelligence. According to Mormon scripture, "the elements are eternal" meaning that the elements are co-existent with God, and "they may be organized and reorganized, but not destroyed. They had not beginning, and can have no end." This principle was elaborated on by Brigham Young, who said, "God never made something out of nothing; it is not in the economy or law of which the worlds were, are, or will exist." Mormons believe that God created or "organized" the universe out of pre-existing elements. Along with physical matter, Mormons believe that spirit "intelligences" have existed co-eternally with God and believe in a universe and a God governed by physical law, in which all miracles, including acts of God, have a natural explanation, though science does not yet have the tools or means necessary to explain them. --- When you consider that Joseph Smith died in 1844, some of this had and still has some traction. However, I remember having a lot of discussions with a Muslim some years ago, and he said that the Koran contains similar stuff (I stand to be corrected ?). Note that I am not a Mormon, if I were forced to choose a religion, it would probably be Buddhism.

Finally, it's worth looking at Ancient astronaut/UFO "religions". Of big note is Scientology, described as both a dangerous cult and a manipulative profit-making business. Germany classifies Scientology groups as an "anti-constitutional sect", while in France the government classify the group as a dangerous cult. From what I've read, it's a bizarre mixture of "memes" from psychotherapy, several polytheistic religions, and reincarnation beliefs, with a weird starting point where the ruler of the 'Galactic Confederacy' is said to have brought billions of frozen 'people' to Earth 75 million years ago, placed them near a number of volcanoes, and dropped hydrogen bombs into them, thus killing the entire population in an effort to solve overpopulation. The spirits of these 'people' were then captured by Xenu and mass implanted with numerous suggestions and then "packaged" into clusters of spirits which can adhere to humans. Each human has a thetan (the Scientology term for a soul) and when the body dies the thetan goes to a "landing station" on the planet Venus, where they are re-implanted and are programmed to forget their previous lifetimes. The Venusians then "capsule" each thetan and send them back to Earth to the Gulf of California where the thetan searches for a new body to inhabit. An even more dodgy cult is Tempelhofgesellschaft in Austria. They claim hat the Aryan race originally came to Atlantis from the star Aldebaran and that since the Aryan race is of extraterrestrial origin it has a divine mission to dominate all the other races. An enormous space fleet is on its way to Earth from Aldebaran which, when it arrives, will join forces with the "Nazi Flying Saucers from Antarctica" to establish the Western Imperium. IMO a fair bit of the stuff in the UFO TV programmes is initially derived from dodgy sources like these.

Note that, apart from Buddhism (not sure ?) all of the above involve Creation Myths. Quoting from wikipedia All cultures have creation myths; they are our primary myths, the first stage in what might be called the psychic life of the species. As cultures, we identify ourselves through the collective dreams we call creation myths, or cosmogonies. … Creation myths explain in metaphorical terms our sense of who we are in the context of the world, and in so doing they reveal our real priorities, as well as our real prejudices. Our images of creation say a great deal about who we are


Scientific Theories of the Cosmos

I have to say Geoff that, when science gets extended from the planet earth, it's just more creation mythology but in disguise.

Sir Fred Hoyle (I bought and read one of his books on Astronomy in the 70s), right up until he died in 2001, believed in his "steady state theory" and fiercely rejected the Big Bang theory. Quoting from wikipedia Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang" on BBC radio's Third Programme broadcast on 28 March 1949. It was popularly reported by George Gamov and other opponents of Hoyle, that Hoyle intended to be pejorative, and the script from which he read aloud was interpreted by his opponents to be "vain, one-sided, insulting, not worthy of the BBC". Hoyle explicitly denied that he was being insulting and said it was just a striking image meant to emphasize the difference between the two theories for the radio audience. In another BBC interview he said "The reason why scientists like the 'big bang' is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis. It is deep within the psyche of most scientists to believe in the first page of Genesis"

The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) in the 1960s, and the distribution of "young galaxies" and quasars throughout the Universe in the 1980s indicate an age estimate of the universe more consistent with the Big Bang, but in 1994 Hoyle said
"How, in the big-bang cosmology, is the microwave background explained? Despite what supporters of big-bang cosmology claim, it is not explained. The supposed explanation is nothing but an entry in the gardener's catalogue of hypothesis that constitutes the theory. Had observation given 27 Kelvins instead of 2.7 Kelvins for the temperature, then 27 kelvins would have been entered in the catalogue. Or 0.27 Kelvins. Or anything at all."

It was actually the CMBR which blew up Hoyle's HMS Hood, but I'd contend that the Bismark is as yet only a few hundred miles away from where Hood went down, and the Bismark Big Bang will one day also go down - because there's a Fairey Swordfish waiting somewhere, destined to jam BBB's rudder.

Hoyle's "problem" was that he was a maverick, with few collaborators. His "steady state theory" was one of several at the time, IIRC there was the expansion-contraction theory, as well as Big Bang and eternal expansion. I don't know which is correct, maybe there's another theory waiting for when Bismark has hit the bottom. Note that some astrophysicists, intrigued by certain observations which do not fit some dark matter theories, argue for various modifications of the standard laws of general relativity, such as modified Newtonian dynamics, tensor–vector–scalar gravity, or entropic gravity. These ideas could eventually sink the Bismark, including the Battlecruisers Einstein and Newton.

Going back to what I meant when I said "All we can say is that Newtonian Physics works to explain our solar system " - what I meant was that we know it's definitely ok for calculating orbits and trajectories within our solar system, but, I wasn't inferring that the Gravitational Constant G aka the Newtonian constant of gravitation, wouldn't do a similar job in most other solar systems. However, the problem is that most (if not all) solar systems are dominated by the solar mass, but once you move away from a dominant mass (either in a glaxy between solar systems, or further out between galaxies) it may no longer work. So I'm saying that the laws of physics that have been defined and proved and used within our solar system are probably fine for any solar system, but it's a stretch (no pun intended) to infer that they apply far outside dominant mass (hence dark matter, or alternatively, a modified theory of Gravity).

As an aside, the search for other planets in our solar system did come about because it doesn't all add up - see search for Planet Nine

Rare Earth hypothesis

Quoting from wikipedia
In the 1970s and 1980s, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, among others, argued that Earth is a typical rocky planet in a typical planetary system, located in a non-exceptional region of a common barred-spiral galaxy. From the principle of mediocrity (extended from the Copernican principle), they argued that we are typical, and the universe teems with complex life. However, Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee argue that planets, planetary systems, and galactic regions that are as friendly to complex life as the Earth, the Solar System, and our galactic region are rare.

So yet again, we have another Hood and Bismark out there dicing with each other - both basically arguing about types of creation myths. One side says that there's others out there just like us, the other side says that we're the only ones (hmmm Genesis methinks).

However, Hoyle was onto something else, Panspermia.
I'll leave you with this long quote.


Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe were influential proponents of panspermia. In 1974 they proposed the hypothesis that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic (containing carbon), which Wickramasinghe later proved to be correct. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe further contended that life forms continue to enter the Earth's atmosphere, and may be responsible for epidemic outbreaks, new diseases, and the genetic novelty necessary for macroevolution.

In an Origins Symposium presentation on April 7, 2009, physicist Stephen Hawking stated his opinion about what humans may find when venturing into space, such as the possibility of alien life through the theory of panspermia: "Life could spread from planet to planet or from stellar system to stellar system, carried on meteors."

Three series of astrobiology experiments have been conducted outside the International Space Station (ISS) between 2008 and 2015 where a wide variety of biomolecules, microorganisms, and their spores were exposed to the solar flux and vacuum of space for about 1.5 years. Some organisms survived in an inactive state for considerable lengths of time, and those samples sheltered by simulated meteorite material provide experimental evidence for the likelihood of the hypothetical scenario of lithopanspermia.

Several simulations in laboratories and in low Earth orbit suggest that ejection, entry and impact is survivable for some simple organisms. In 2015, remains of biotic material were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia, when the young Earth was about 400 million years old. According to one researcher, "If life arose relatively quickly on Earth … then it could be common in the universe."

In April 2018, a Russian team published a paper which disclosed that they found DNA on the exterior of the ISS from land and marine bacteria similar to those previously observed in superficial micro layers at the Barents and Kara seas' coastal zones. They conclude "The presence of the wild land and marine bacteria DNA on the ISS suggests their possible transfer from the stratosphere into the ionosphere with the ascending branch of the global atmospheric electrical circuit. Alternatively, the wild land and marine bacteria as well as the ISS bacteria may all have an ultimate space origin."

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John-B
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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by John-B »

Brian-H wrote: if I were forced to choose a religion, it would probably be Buddhism.
Ditto

Judging by the length of recent posts, I would say that expansion of our (forum) universe is evident but I hope it won't continue expanding for ever or our database will explode. :D

Brian-H
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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

If the gravity of the situation becomes too much it might require some divine intervention

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