During a remarkable congressional hearing, former American intelligence official David Grusch revealed that the US government conducted a "multi-decade" programme aimed at collecting and reverse-engineering crashed unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
Grusch, who was in charge of investigating unexplained anomalous phenomena within a US Department of Defence agency until 2023, spoke before the House oversight committee in Washington, shedding light on the issue of alien life and technology, as reported by the Guardian.
I believe aliens exist, somewhere in the universe. Statistically it seems inevitable, I just don’t believe they’ve visited earth or even know we exist, just like we don’t know they exist. You can sit on something like that, there would be much better evidence than grainy fake looking videos and second hand accounts.
Earth is a very early stable planet, I’m sure there will be lots more species in the coming billions of years. We might even be the most advanced civilization in the galaxy. But we’ll probably never contact anyone else, best we do is notice signs of life on a distant planet.
I know this sounds kinda kooky but personally my (completely no basis) guess is that UFOs (in the most convincing video evidence) are some kind of natural phenomenon that exists partially outside of our understanding of physics. If they have some sort of intelligence and they aren’t just random noise, I think they would be so different from us as to be utterly unparsable. If all that is true and they interact with us, their motivations would be similarly unknowable.
I’m depressingly not convinced faster than light travel will ever be possible, especially for humans or human-like organisms…
I’m very interested in them though. I’m very hopeful that studying them seriously might lead to some incredible insights about physics.
Corridor Crew has debunked the Pentagon videos as camera artifacts and optical illusions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHDlfIaBEqw
These guys are filmmakers and really know cameras, optics and VFX so I have confidence in their explanations.
Not what I would call debunked. They pointed out the nothingburger of the lot as a nothingburger, and then for the hard to explain ones they just had possible guesses, and only commented on the videos themselves and accounted for none of the reported contexts of the videos. They basically contributed by talking about lenses and then saying they don’t know what is in the videos.
Exactly this. There’s no serious doubt about what those videos show: image processing and sensor artifacts.
And those fake voiceovers made by UFO conspiracy theorists, lol.
Gonna be real dude I have a lot more confidence in the Navy than I have in “these guys from YouTube”
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I think you’re right, the only chance we’ll ever have at reaching another habitual world (if we ever even detect one well enough) is with cryogenics and/or colony ships. It’ll take hundreds, possibly thousands of years till we’re at that point thought. Especially when our civilization puts so little into space travel. We should really have a moon base at this point.
The NHIs being discussed by Grusch and others have not been stated to be ETs, but rather the current thought is interdimensional.
That wasn’t the current thought in the hearing, he expressly stated that that was one interesting possibility that was discussed in a purely theoretical context
Sure, but several people have brought this up as “an interesting possibility”, and all of them have shyd away from saying ET. So they didn’t confidently or unambiguously state it, but that’s kinda the implication and where their head is at.
IIRC the proper answer is “we don’t know the origin, but we haven’t had any reason to think they came from space”.
This seems like a very weird view considering the amount of people who have been saying that they communicate telepathically with us.
Could be future humans for all we know.
I take peoples claims of telepathic communications with aliens with the biggest grain of salt I can find.
I can’t assume there are none that are real, but I can and will assume all day that some people just have alien themed mental quirks. And I don’t think poorly of people with less believable stories, I’m just interested in the evidence that is more difficult to explain away.
Oh OK. Well that explains why you see things the way you do I guess. :)
Funny how no one bats an eye when a german shepherd sniffs out a missing person based on almost undetectable particles or a bird knows exactly which direction is north, but we scoff at the idea that there may be ways to communicate with your brain alone. Why? Because that’s the stuff of TV and movies – fiction. Culturally, I think we’ve been so disheartened by our inability to realize our most extravagant dreams of the future (hovercars and etc) that we have basically fallen into thinking that the mere existence of a topic in science fiction discounts its credibility as a real-world subject. This is why we get articles like “Scientists say they are closer to Star Trek Warp Drive”, where everything must be tempered just in case. We don’t want to look like we actually believe in Science Fiction, now do we?
The difference is the dog sniffing and bird knowing what way is north is testable and verifiable while claims of telepathy are not lmao
So you think we’ve always known how that works then? There was never a time when that was simply magic?
Your question is pointless because knowing how something works doesnt matter at all in the context of determining if something exists or not. People didnt know how it worked but they could still watch a dog sniff something and find where it went and watch a bird fly north and say, “yup thats happening right now. Dogs sniff things and can follow the scent and birds always know how to fly north.” Its literally impossible to do so with telepathy. I don’t know how you can’t see that you are operating off of logic that severely misundertands the fundamentals of science. Not being a hater. Telepathy would be sick as fuck if it were real and so would aliens. Im just not gonna act as if they are or operate under the assumption they are until its verifiable. You know?
Ironic that you believe my logic to be flawed when you are making bold-faces assertions without any evidence.
I think you have assumed I’ve taken a stronger stance against this than I meant to.
The reason I’m less interested in that as evidence is simply because we don’t have a way to seperate true from untrue, and if we accept all as true there are obvious contradictions. I’m just focusing on stuff that could be disproven but hasn’t, rather than the stuff that can’t be disproven yet. Keyword, yet.
I’m of the opinion that it is likely many things people would describe as supernatural exist in some form as something science has not yet understood. IMO “the supernatural” doesn’t “exist” simply because its a word we use for the natural that we don’t understand.
But that doesn’t mean all of everything is true. Mental illness is definitely also a thing, and probably more common than the unexplained.
I try to look at it all with my own proprietary blend of kindness, cynicism, optimism, and skepticism.
I didn’t mean to go for your throat, you just brought up a topic I wanted to address. However, I will say that the problem is not that people refuse to believe that telepathy exists. Obviously we have no proof of that. The issue is that people deny that it exists, with no evidence. These people, many of whom would claim to believe in science, are completely ignoring the scientific method. We must accept that either possibility could be true until one is proven. Instead, they take a hard stance that everything is bullshit unless they personally see proof. “I’ll believe it when I see it” et al.
Some food for thought. We have already proven that it is possible to read minds, using a simple MRI machine and electro-magnetic fields. We now have neural networks that can describe what you are seeing just by observing the patterns in your brain. Who’s to say definitively that telepathy is impossible?
you should get your possible mental health condition checked mate
I’m quite sane, but thank you for your valuable contribution. I’m sure you feel good dismissing people you disagree with as mentally unwell.
You mean one of the most complex devices humanity has ever made? lmao
Just so you know, faster-than-light travel is not necessary to explore the stars. With enough constant acceleration (which seems to be achievable with the tech that these craft have demonstrated) you could go pretty much anywhere in the galaxy in your lifetime. The obvious downside is that the further you go, the more time-dilation becomes an issue for everyone else. For example, you may travel ~9 light years to Sirius in a matter of months from your perspective, but 10 years pass for everyone else. Still, if your goal is to explore, I find this to be quite a decent trade-off, and given that we are already making strides in life-extension that time may become a non-issue very quickly.
You have massively misunderstood physics if you think that people could travel faster than light and cross a galaxy in a single lifetime
There’s some wiggle-room there. A species that is naturally biologically immortal (or had biology that supported long periods of inactivity) might not find that spending hundreds of years to travel to a nearby star system was a deal-breaker for interstellar travel. They might be more motivated to execute such a project than we are since they could not just wait for their ancestors to die of old age as a way for younger members of the species to have control.
Also there is a possibility that a species might develop the technology to create a partly or fully artificial version of themselves that makes long interstellar trips less of an obstacle (synthetic biology, a combination of biology and machine, pure machine, etc).
Natural humans are certainly poorly suited for interstellar travel, but it may be that other kinds of life are more tolerant of it, or have redesigned some members of their species to handle it.
And you clearly did not read my post?
I don’t want to be rude but this isn’t correct as far as my understanding. I’m no expert, so I’m not confident in my ability to describe exactly how… But the phrase “you may travel ~9 light years to Sirius in a matter of months from your perspective, but 10 years pass for everyone else.” I don’t think that is correct exactly.
Again not trying to be rude and I am very happy to be corrected but I want to understand it.
The time dilation effect is pretty well known and comes naturally from the equations of the General Relativity Theory.
It’s also been proven experimentally in particle accelerators (like CERN) when particles with at rest very short and well known half-lives (i.e. they natural break down into other particles some time after being created) lasted a lot longer (from our point of view) when travelling at near light speed.
However that effect only really starts getting noticeable without special equipment when the speed something is travelling at is getting near the speed of light (something like 90% or more of light speed).
This works correctly for the example of the previous poster because the distance to Sirius is given in light-years, which is literally the number of years that takes light (which by definition travels at the speed of light) to travel that distance.
(By the way, from the same equations from were you get time dilation comes that from the point of view light the trip is instantaneous)
So yeah, travelling a distance of that takes light 9 years to travel would be theoretically possible to do so fast (near light speed) that it would seem for those doing the trip to only take a few months (even though for those outside it would still seem to take longer than 9 years - as it takes light 9 years to get there so something at sublight speeds would take longer than the 9 years that takes for light).
Yeah, this is highly counter intutive so it “feels” wrong. If fact, the whole General Theory Of Relativity is highly counter intuitive. Yet, quite independently of what intuition (which is just a destilation of our personal experience) tells us, all that we’ve been able to observe so far in applicable situations is things happenning as predicted by that theory, not “intuition”.
I’ll put it another way then: any information you intended to send back after you arrive in Sirius would take ~9 years to arrive back home. Due to causality, this means that you cannot interact with Earth in any way for – at minimum – 9 years. However, from your perspective, you accelerated at let’s say 10 Gs (speed increased by 98 meters per second every second), until you were half-way to Sirius, which will take about 5 months. Then you decelerated at -10 Gs to arrive with 0 speed, another 5 months. You perceive only 10 months of travel, but you are now 9 light-years from home.
The math is not the part which is difficult, and requires only a basic understanding of relativistic physics. The issue is maintaining 10 Gs of constant acceleration for 10 months.
Yeesh I’m just not good at that kind of stuff. Time dialation is what is making this hard for me to wrap my head around, but basically the big issue with this method of travel is you need infinite energy (which might be something these ships somehow do) and its like fast forwarding into the future, so even if you go back immediately it will be like you were gone ~18 years but only experience less than 2.
It is certainly an interesting thing to think about, but sounds depressing in practice. If this is the practical way that some beings have traveled here, I feel like we are missing a piece of the puzzle for long distance space travel. Maybe they have a way to do something about time dilation. Or maybe they just don’t ever die…
The energy necessary to accelerate a bit more increases as the speed that object is travelling gets closer to the speed of light and indeed mathematically as the speed of the object gets closer to the actual speed of light the energy necessary to accelerate it gets closer to infinity.
If I remember it correctly it’s because in the General Relativity Theory in the acceleration equation (not sure anymore if it was the one that relates Force to Acceleration or the Acceleration and Velocity one) the mass of the object isn’t actually a constant amount but depends on its current velocity (it’s as if the mass became larger with velocity). Just like for the whole time dilation stuff, this effect comes from the main equations and only really becomes noticeable closer to lightspeed (i.e. at relativistic speeds, called that because that’s when you notice the effects of the Theory of Relativity, such as time dilation).
So the energy necessary to get to speeds below lightspeed yet close enough to have relatistic effects is not at all infinite, hence it is possible to reach relativistic speeds with the whole time dilation, redshift of light and other such effects, maybe even with current technology (I think we already have the tech to accelerate a ship to near lightspeed by having ground-based lasers pointed at a mirror on the back of it (so the light gets reflected - though that stuff has incredibly low acceleration as you’re literally pushing that ship with photons plus ground-based lasers inside the Earth’s athmosphere would was tons of energy due to the athmosphere).
In fact the very same experiments with subatomic particles that showed time dilation effects in their decay (which I mentioned in another comment) also showed it is possible to accelerate something to the point of having time dilation effects without infinite energy (if it happenned then it was possible to make it happen :))
Those effects only occur from the perspective of, for example, Earth. If you could exert force upon a space ship traveling away from you, it would require more energy to continue to accelerate it as its speed increases relative to you. But from the reference frame of the ship, this does not hold. Now, of course it will still require an insane amount of energy to maintain a constant acceleration, but from the spaceship’s perspective energy expenditure is constant (assuming the mass of the ship isn’t changing due to fuel loss).
If I remember it correctly from the point of view of the ship it looks like the propulsion becomes less effective, tough I confess my recolection of what I learned about the General Theory Of Relativity in my Physics degree almost 3 decades ago (which I never completed, by the way, so I’m an EE not a Physicist) breaks at around this point so I might be completelly off on this.
@Stoneykins @DaughterOfMars Some don’t. Some use manufactured bodies.
You don’t need infinite energy, to be clear. Mathematically, you would need infinite energy to cross the light-speed barrier, which is why we don’t believe that it is possible. You would simply need a LOT of energy. How much would depend on the mass of the craft. Actually the bigger problem may be negating the internal G forces, as humans cannot survive 10 Gs for long (or at all), but again it seems that these UAPs are capable of that.
Ah, I misread a wiki page. Not infinite, since we aren’t traveling lightspeed, but approaching infinite as we approach lightspeed? Which is to say, not infinite but dang thats a lot of energy?
Again, I’m not great at understanding this stuff, so thanks for being patient
Sure, I don’t mind explaining. No, we would not need near-infinite energy. We are quite capable of accelerating at 10 Gs in space right now, but eventually you will run out of fuel. So, let’s say you add more fuel, well now you have more mass to accelerate so it costs more fuel per second. This becomes a balancing act which we can not overcome for long, and it’s the reason space shuttles are so complicated and have multiple stages which break away to reduce mass.
This is primarily an issue because we use quite simple propulsion techniques, which rely on Newton’s third law – that forcing mass out from behind a ship will propel it in the opposite direction. It may be possible to accelerate using an Electro-Magnetic field, which would not involve burning fuel but instead some kind of depleting battery storage, or perhaps a nuclear reactor. In this case, accelerating at 10 Gs is simply a matter of matching the energy requirements to the mass of the ship, and for some perspective on the energy capabilities of nuclear fission, the Little Boy bomb reacted less than a gram of nuclear material to create the explosion in Hiroshima.
So, obviously we aren’t capable of converting that energy into a useful method of propulsion yet, but have some heart, because the pieces are all there – we just need to put them together.
Or the universe is a dark forest, where civilizations that reveal themselves get snuffed out by more advanced civilizations so they can’t pose a threat in the future.
I read to much sci-fi.
I’ve always liked the theory, well more interested as it’s a pretty terrifying concept. I just don’t believe interstellar and lightspeed travel is common/easy enough for aliens to devote so much effort into seeking out life, travelling for hundreds/thousands of years just to destroy any other lifeforms it detects. There’s no benefit to either party really, any resource you could get on a habited planet you could find on a number of uninhabited ones without the massive expense of an intergalactic “war”.
Plus we’ve been sending out signals for years, we should already be dead - unless the aliens are going to take 1000 years to get here. And I don’t see how it’s worth it.
There’s a short story by Harry Turtledove titled “The Road not Taken.”
You should read it.
Basic synopsis: The secret to faster-than-light travel is trivial. It’s incredibly easy. So easy, in fact, that most species become spacefaring pretty early in their technological development. But, for one reason or another, we just never noticed it, and never developed the technology. So where other species’ development stagnated as they put all their resources into interstellar conquest, we just… kept developing. So when aliens find us and launch their invasion, we kick the complete and total ever-loving dogshit out of them and steal their technology. Look at me. I am the captain now.
It’s relatively short, available online, and you could probably read it in 20 minutes. It’s definitely worth a read.
Yeah it’s just a theory and one that’s not likely true, but I recently read the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy and the dark forest theory plays a central role in those books so it was fresh in my mind. Fascinating and terrifying to think about.