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VanderGraafKommandöh 
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Joined: July 04 2005
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 Posted: April 15 2008 at 00:17 |
I thought time didn't exist, Tuxon? 
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tuxon
Forum Senior Member
Joined: September 21 2004
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 00:27 |
 James wrote:
I thought time didn't exist, Tuxon? |
That's why I don't think there's a limit to speed 
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I'm always almost unlucky _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Id5ZcnjXSZaSMFMC Id5LM2q2jfqz3YxT
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mystic fred
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 03:01 |
UFO's do exist - but they are not made by aliens but by the US military who managed to build and fly one of many such machines during the 80's. Many witnesses were shocked, especially when a Policeman saw two white suited figures emerge from such a craft that had landed in the desert - they were government test pilots who i bet had a good laugh about it, especially after they chased the Police car for a few miles! Obviously the experiments and prototype craft were top secret and remain so - the UFO myth is a good cover up.
Subsequently from these tests the US super plane "Blackbird" was developed, we have all seen it but had it been seen before it was unveiled would have been another unexplained UFO sighting! 
Edited by mystic fred - April 15 2008 at 03:06
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 Prog Archives Tour Van 
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darkshade
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 03:02 |
i mean time travel is probably one way. but that's a whole 'nother discussion
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paolo.beenees
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Points: 1136
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 13:48 |
I DO believe in UFO! They made some good hard rock albums back in the 1970s (take this as one of the worst jokes in PA).
Honestly, like many others in this thread I believe people see UFOs, but I'd never say anything about their origin. From this point of view, I think most scientists show a really UNscientific approach (giving for granted their alien origin, they keep swearing UFOs don't exist...).
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StyLaZyn
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Joined: November 22 2005
Location: United States
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Points: 4079
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 14:43 |
I thought I saw one once but it was very early in the morning (not coming home from a drunk either). It was one of those slow moving triangle ones and it did not make a sound.
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rileydog22
Forum Senior Member
Joined: August 24 2005
Location: New Jersey
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Points: 8844
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 15:35 |
darqDean wrote:
I expect there to be quite a lot of life in the Universe, as has been pointed out, the shear weight of numbers of stars in our galaxy and galaxies in the Universe means that by all probability if life exists on one measly planet on the outer rim of quite an unremarkable spiral galaxy then life must exist on countless others.
Some of it will be more advanced than us, some of it less so, most of it could be equally as advanced as we are, but never invented Tippex™ so they have never been able to correct the errors in their theories of semiconductor physics and therefore never entered the silicon age, not discovered radio-waves, split the atom or built the Toyota Prius, yet alone a space craft of any description. I say "most" for one simple reason - the only example we have suggests it takes life 4.5 billion years to "evolve" to our current level - and it took the Universe 9 billion years to create stars that were stable enough to support the creation of life, therefore all the Sun-like stars in the Universe that could start the life-cycle started at the same time ours did, so the majority of life in the Universe is at our level of evolution (give or take a few million years ).
The distance to the nearest stellar neighbour is 4 light-years away (24 trillion miles or 40 trillion km). The fastest vehicle we have is the Space Shuttle, which can travel at 18,000 mph (28,000kph). It would take the space shuttle 157,222 years to get there - this is long before we start worrying about how many Texaco service stations there are along the way to re-fuel it or how we would maintain and service a mechanical system to survive such a journey when bits fall off even the most reliable of systems at alarming regularity.
Even if the extraterrestrial life forms have invented a different propulsion system, Newtons laws still apply even if their civilisation doesn't possess apples and thus never had a Newton - energy is required to move a mass and to move it over a vast distance, a vast amount of energy is required.
Faster than light travel is simply impossible. Not improbable, impossible. This is not bad maths or selfish physics on our part, it's not the result of our scientists inventing "rules" that stop this from happening or them not thinking "outside the box" or simply "getting it wrong" - it is an absolute limit of the Universe and even extraterrestrial are governed by those same rules and laws, even if their maths is base-3, their physics is written in iambic-pentameter and their Einstein was a hotel clerk. Not believing in this limit is simply not enough to make it go away. (Neither would reading Science Fiction - the keyword there is the second one )
Also, there is no magic system of trapdoors and wormholes that would enable matter to travel through them and arrive intact. Entering a singularity would convert all mass into energy, this energy could travel through a wormhole (if such things exist) and be expelled out of another singularity lightyears distant, where it may be converted back to mass - but without the coding-imprint of what that mass looked like when it first entered: you re-enter the Universe as radiation, then sub-atomic particles and then hydrogen - 4.5 billion years later you may have coalesced into a recognisable life-form, but you wouldn't be you anymore and 4.5 billion years hardly qualifies as "faster-than-light".
So in answer to the original question: No I don't believe in UFOs - where UFOs are vehicles for extraterrestrial lifeforms. A non-belief that is supported by the observation that the only reasons that these extraterrestrials appear to traverse the trillions of miles of empty space at enormous cost in energy and time is to abduct simpletons, goose cattle and make pretty patterns in wheat-fields.  |
I was going to say the same thing, only it was going to be half the length and one fourth the quality.
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StyLaZyn
Forum Senior Member
Joined: November 22 2005
Location: United States
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Points: 4079
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 16:19 |
rileydog22 wrote:
I was going to say the same thing, only it was going to be half the length and one fourth the quality.
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I couldn't even attempt it.
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StyLaZyn
Forum Senior Member
Joined: November 22 2005
Location: United States
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Points: 4079
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 16:23 |
darkshade wrote:
i knew id get responses like that. im talking more about alien UFOs. i basically mean do you believe there's life out there, and that they've been coming to earth?
obviously people mistake things for airline craft, or weather balloons, or the military testing new aircraft. Hell, i remember someone freaking out in NJ because they saw a UFO, when it was just a kid playing with a toy airplane.
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I've often wondered if some are in fact NOT alien, in the sense that they inhabit the Earth already. Like the movie The Abyss.
It's a stretch I know, but wasn't Atlantis supposed to be quite advanced around the time of it's disappearance?
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Dean
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Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout
Joined: May 13 2007
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 16:43 |
StyLaZyn wrote:
I've often wondered if some are in fact NOT alien, in the sense that they inhabit the Earth already. Like the movie The Abyss.
It's a stretch I know, but wasn't Atlantis supposed to be quite advanced around the time of it's disappearance?
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Yay! Atlantis theories - that's more like it  a 12,000 year old civilisation from the end of the last Ice Age lost in some cataclysmic event... possibly explaining many mythological events from all manner of different cultures, such as the Deluge or Mount Olympus or the secret builders of the Pyramids.
However no need for Extraterrestrials, the beings that may have lived there had the same level of intelligence as us, and since our brain capacity and intelligence hasn't changed much in the past 300,000 years and our civilisation went from neolithic to iron-age in 8,000 years and iron to atomic in 2,000; it is perfectly possible that 30 civilisations have come and gone in the 300,000 year timescale that we know nothing about; and they were equally as advanced as we are - they were just a lot 'greener' than us and re-cycled everything, including themselves, hence left no trace.
(I think the clue to its whereabouts is in the name )
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darkshade
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 17:00 |
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yea this is probably the first time civilization has come up with the gadgets we have today.
but then again, if you ever watched that "Life After People" special, it would have only take a few hundred years for all our wonderful gizmos to be swallowed up by Mother Nature.
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BaldJean
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Joined: May 28 2005
Location: Germany
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Points: 10387
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 18:07 |
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to our current knowledge traveling faster than light is impossible; it is contrary to the theory of relativity. however, as Einstein himself pointed out, his theory of relativity did not invalidate Newtonian physics at all; for speeds which are small compared to the speed of light it still works well. so it may be possible (though I have no idea how) that the theory of relativity, however sound it is, may have some as yet undiscovered loophole which would allow massive things to move faster than light.
physicists invented the concept of so-called "tachyons" once which could ONLY move faster than light. they had an imaginary mass (whatever that would mean) and moved backwards through time (again whatever that means). I have no idea how one would discover such a tachyon, if it existed, but maybe future physicists will be able to and even find out how to make use of them.
we can NOT be sure at all that traveling faster than light is impossible; all we can say is that it is impossible to our current knowledge. any technology that is significantly higher advanced than the technology an observer is used to appears as magic to that observer
Edited by BaldJean - April 15 2008 at 18:42
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 A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta
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Dean
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Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout
Joined: May 13 2007
Location: Europe
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 21:45 |
tuxon wrote:
and the speed of light is not the limit, we just haven't find a way to go faster yet, but maybe in time we will.
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The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant (as I inderstand it - but I admit my understanding is not that great, any corrections are greatly appreciated) which means that electromagnetic radiation (for example radio-waves and light) travels at this speed in a vacuum, as does anything that has zero rest mass. Add something into that vacuum and light travels slower - what you cannot do is add (or subtract) anything to make it go faster.
An object with mass requires energy to make it move - the heavier the mass, or the faster you want it to move, the more energy is needed. To make this mass go as fast as an object with zero mass (eg light) you would need enough energy as to make the mass appear insignifcant by comparison. So to make the mass tend to zero, the energy would tend to infinity.
BaldJean wrote:
to our current knowledge traveling faster than light is impossible; it is contrary to the theory of relativity. however, as Einstein himself pointed out, his theory of relativity did not invalidate Newtonian physics at all; for speeds which are small compared to the speed of light it still works well. so it may be possible (though I have no idea how) that the theory of relativity, however sound it is, may have some as yet undiscovered loophole which would allow massive things to move faster than light.
physicists invented the concept of so-called "tachyons" once which could ONLY move faster than light. they had an imaginary mass (whatever that would mean) and moved backwards through time (again whatever that means). I have no idea how one would discover such a tachyon, if it existed, but maybe future physicists will be able to and even find out how to make use of them.
we can NOT be sure at all that traveling faster than light is impossible; all we can say it is impossible to our current knowledge. any technology that is significantly higher advanced than the technology an observer is used to appears as magic to that observer
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The real problem with tachyons is that they cannot transfer 'information', (by which I mean energy, momentum or mass), which makes them nextdoor to useless for any practical application such as FTL travel.
The first reason is because you cannot slow them down - as they lose energy they get faster, so it takes an infinite amount of energy to get them to go slower than the speed of light for us to detect them. We do not "see" light, we can only detect it when its energy interacts with something else and its energy is converted and the same would be true of tachyons.
Secondly, because they travel backwards in time if you could detect them, then you would not know the event that emitted them. This make whatever information they were transmitting completely meaningless to us until the event actually happened...
(That last one is a bit of a brain-fryer because you would asume that if tachyons travel backwards in time then you could use them to "see" into the future, but it doesn't quite work like that: a tachyon detector would detect tachyons emitted from any point in the future, (ie an infinite number) so unless you track each tachyon forward to their points of origin you wouldn't know which ones contained the information you were looking for and by the time you had done that it would be irrelevant because you'd already be there.)
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VanderGraafKommandöh
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Joined: July 04 2005
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 21:48 |
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Dean, have you thought of teaching Science in schools? I actually understand a lot of your points... I never understood all the Science I was taught at school.
Now you have to teach me more basic stuff, because that's the stuff I'm lacking in.
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Padraic
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Points: 31169
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Posted: April 15 2008 at 21:58 |
darqDean wrote:
tuxon wrote:
and the speed of light is not the limit, we just haven't find a way to go faster yet, but maybe in time we will.
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The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant (as I inderstand it - but I admit my understanding is not that great, any corrections are greatly appreciated)
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This is indeed the case and is at the heart of special relativity - when Einstein realized that time is not absolute - but the speed of light is. You are also correct that propagation of electromagnetic waves in various media may be give rise to different propagation velocities which are less than or equal to c.
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BroSpence
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Joined: March 05 2007
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Points: 2614
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Posted: April 16 2008 at 01:16 |
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Other life in the universe yes, UFOs I don't know. But its possible I guess.
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The-Bullet
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Joined: January 23 2005
Location: United Kingdom
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Points: 401
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Posted: April 16 2008 at 06:18 |
On the face of it I certainly agree that there should be a vast amount of life out there.And if there is, then you would think that advanced life is very probable also. Now with regards to the constraints of travel distances and maximum speed etc. - remember that we sent robots to Mars and so any advanced civilization who were so inclined could build self replicating robot "explorers" to completely explore the Milky Way galaxy within a few tens/hundreds of thousands of years. Yet we have not seen any evidence oy these yet . Maybe we are alone after all, or at least our "alleged" intelligence is unique  .
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"Why say it cannot be done.....they'd be better doing pop songs?"
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BaldJean
Prog Reviewer
Joined: May 28 2005
Location: Germany
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Points: 10387
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Posted: April 16 2008 at 06:30 |
The-Bullet wrote:
On the face of it I certainly agree that there should be a vast amount of life out there.And if there is, then you would think that advanced life is very probable also. Now with regards to the constraints of travel distances and maximum speed etc. - remember that we sent robots to Mars and so any advanced civilization who were so inclined could build self replicating robot "explorers" to completely explore the Milky Way galaxy within a few tens/hundreds of thousands of years. Yet we have not seen any evidence oy these yet . Maybe we are alone after all, or at least our "alleged" intelligence is unique . |
wouldn't it be a big irony if we ourselves were this advanced civilization? instead of sending robots we sent genetic material. not that I really believe it though
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A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta
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Dean
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Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout
Joined: May 13 2007
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Points: 37575
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Posted: April 16 2008 at 06:52 |
BaldJean wrote:
The-Bullet wrote:
On the face of it I certainly agree that there should be a vast amount of life out there.And if there is, then you would think that advanced life is very probable also. Now with regards to the constraints of travel distances and maximum speed etc. - remember that we sent robots to Mars and so any advanced civilization who were so inclined could build self replicating robot "explorers" to completely explore the Milky Way galaxy within a few tens/hundreds of thousands of years. Yet we have not seen any evidence oy these yet . Maybe we are alone after all, or at least our "alleged" intelligence is unique . |
wouldn't it be a big irony if we ourselves were this advanced civilization? instead of sending robots we sent genetic material. not that I really believe it though
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Of course there is no reason why we cannot be the most advanced civilisation, after all, someone has to be. Which is probably not the most comforting thought in the Universe given how uncivilised we can be at times. The other sobering thought is that the genetic material we are currently seeding the solar system with is not our own, but bacteriological and/or viral - we haven't spread our DNA, but we have given the Universe a nasty cold.
The Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 lightyears in diameter and about 1,000 lightyears thick at the core, so it would take millions of years to cross it at sub-light speed, and billions of years to completely explore it. Since the self-replicating robot idea is effectively Brownian motion, these timescales can be increased by several magnitudes, (ie 10s or 100s of millions to cross it and 10s or 100s of billions to explore it)
Given that the Milky Way is probably only 6 billion years old, any advanced civilisation that possess interstellar travel has not been around long enough to explore anything other than their immediate neighbourhood, which makes them finding our Solar System out here in the cul-de-sac of the inner rim of the Orion Arm highly unlikely.
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Jim Garten
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin & Razor Guru
Joined: February 02 2004
Location: South England
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Points: 14693
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Posted: April 16 2008 at 07:43 |
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...I now feel very small & insignificant...
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Jon Lord 1941 - 2012
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UFO's. Do you believe?
