Poll & discussion: UFOs / UAPs / Other Intelligent Life in Universe

[StevenEleven]

Linked below is an example of very recent experimental evidence that is not consistent with the Standard Model. There is also data that fits the Holographic Principle but not the Standard Model, as I understand it. The Wikipedia page on the holographic principle discusses this. Then again, there is known data that does not fit the holographic principle. So, I would propose, we have not nailed the laws of physics yet?

I pulled the most recent occurrence I could find—of a finding of new data that did not seem fit the standard model, to the tune of 4.2 standard deviations between experiment and theory, and with strong agreement from prior experimental findings—from a physics Journal, so as not to sensationalize it or speculate on it outside of our discussion. It’s from April 2021. It is one of many examples, I believe.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.141801

You can also find it discussed in many places in the popular mainstream press.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that we have only achieved air flight for the last 118 years or so, and it took us about 200,000 years (plus or minus) to get to this point. What I would think of as modern physics only began about 115 years ago, with Einstein, and again, it took homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) 200,000 years to get to that point. If you respect Stephen Hawking’s opinion, there could very plausibly be intelligent life that has a billion year jump on us. This seems to play out in terms of the age of the earth (~4.5 billion years?) and the Universe (~13.8 billion years?) and the evolutionary process on earth (having begun 3 or 4 billion years ago?) having gone through a few false starts due to mass extinction events, it seems to me.

Still, healthy skepticism plays a useful role, IMHO, or we wind up with some rather fanciful or sensationalistic or even conspiratorial ideas. The intellectual tension can be healthy. It’s perhaps reasonable to be very skeptical, IMHO, but perhaps it is not the only reasonable way of looking at this?

 

[dwkdnvr]

I think it’s important to keep in mind that we have only achieved air flight for the last 118 years or so, and it took us about 200,000 years to get to this point. If you respect Stephen Hawking’s opinion, there could very plausibly be intelligent life that has a billion year jump on us. This seems to play out in terms of the age of the earth (~4.5 billion years?) and the Universe (~14 billion years?) and our evolutionary process (having begun 3 or 4 billion years ago?) having gone through a few false starts due to mass extinction events, it seems to me.

Well, this is basically just the Fermi Paradox, isn't it? If there are civilizations that have a billion year head start on us, then even if FTL or other exotic physics-defying technologies aren't possible - where are they? A billion years is more than enough time to spread across the galaxy even if just using chemical rockets or ion thrusters. The observation seems to be that there isn't any evidence that they have, so why not?
Now, IMHO the Fermi Paradox gets more play than it deserves, but it's a valid line of inquiry. The fundamental options are
a) we're first
b) there are reasons (i.e filters) that civilizations die out before they get advanced enough for interstallar travel (or at least spread far enough)
c) they're out there, but hiding
d) variant on B, but there's no magic and interstellar travel means conventional reaction-mass rockets and so just isn't viable at galaxy-spanning distances and so nobody bothers to go past the local group of systems

IMHO the Fermi Paradox gets too much play since people use it to throw out wild theories as to why the galaxy is teeming with hyper-advanced civilizations that we just can't detect (generally because we're too primitive and stupid). I think the obvious answer is simple - 'FTL travel isn't possible, and without that it just doesn't provide enough ROI to bother with at any kind of scale'

Still, healthy skepticism plays a useful role, IMHO, or we wind up with some rather fanciful or sensationalistic or even conspiratorial ideas. The intellectual tension can be healthy. It’s reasonable to be very skeptical, IMHO, but perhaps it is not the only reasonable way of looking at this?

I agree we need to be open to the data. However, there's a difference between technology and science - I think there is too much tendency to think that the former can override the latter by sheer force of effort. While we don't know all there is to know, some of the fundamental laws seem to be pretty solid and where there are gaps they're at the extremes. Newtonian physics isn't 'wrong', it's just limited. Similarly, conservation of energy and momentum, entropy, relativity seem to all hold at macroscopic scales. Speculating that we don't fully understand the large-scale structure of the universe (e.g. dark matter) is valid; I just think it's less valid to suggest that we'll discover something at galactic scales or at quantum scales that suddenly enables violation of COE as a general condition for example. And even the results you reference are regarding discrepancies of parts-per-billion between theory and measurement at a quantum scale- certainly significant in terms of theoretical correctness, but not things that are obviously going to rewrite our fundamental understanding at a macroscopic scale.

But - who knows? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic and we'll discover that there really are advanced alien technologies beyond our understanding. Not something I'm going to bet on, though.

 

[StevenEleven]

Well, this is basically just the Fermi Paradox, isn't it? If there are civilizations that have a billion year head start on us, then even if FTL or other exotic physics-defying technologies aren't possible - where are they? A billion years is more than enough time to spread across the galaxy even if just using chemical rockets or ion thrusters. The observation seems to be that there isn't any evidence that they have, so why not?
Now, IMHO the Fermi Paradox gets more play than it deserves, but it's a valid line of inquiry. The fundamental options are
a) we're first
b) there are reasons (i.e filters) that civilizations die out before they get advanced enough for interstallar travel (or at least spread far enough)
c) they're out there, but hiding
d) variant on B, but there's no magic and interstellar travel means conventional reaction-mass rockets and so just isn't viable at galaxy-spanning distances and so nobody bothers to go past the local group of systems

IMHO the Fermi Paradox gets too much play since people use it to throw out wild theories as to why the galaxy is teeming with hyper-advanced civilizations that we just can't detect (generally because we're too primitive and stupid). I think the obvious answer is simple - 'FTL travel isn't possible, and without that it just doesn't provide enough ROI to bother with at any kind of scale'


I agree we need to be open to the data. However, there's a difference between technology and science - I think there is too much tendency to think that the former can override the latter by sheer force of effort. While we don't know all there is to know, some of the fundamental laws seem to be pretty solid and where there are gaps they're at the extremes. Newtonian physics isn't 'wrong', it's just limited. Similarly, conservation of energy and momentum, entropy, relativity seem to all hold at macroscopic scales. Speculating that we don't fully understand the large-scale structure of the universe (e.g. dark matter) is valid; I just think it's less valid to suggest that we'll discover something at galactic scales or at quantum scales that suddenly enables violation of COE as a general condition for example. And even the results you reference are regarding discrepancies of parts-per-billion between theory and measurement at a quantum scale- certainly significant in terms of theoretical correctness, but not things that are obviously going to rewrite our fundamental understanding at a macroscopic scale.

But - who knows? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic and we'll discover that there really are advanced alien technologies beyond our understanding. Not something I'm going to bet on, though.

Very well said, and thanks for joining us!

Just to throw a couple of factoids out there, building on what you said, since you gave me the opening, to perhaps cast come doubt on how much we do know after our initial 115 years of modern (relativistic and quantum) physics:

From CERN:

Dark matter seems to outweigh visible matter roughly six to one, making up about 27% of the universe. Here's a sobering fact: The matter we know and that makes up all stars and galaxies only accounts for 5% of the content of the universe!

https://home.cern/science/physics/dark-matter

From NASA:

It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.

https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy


So then how far along are we in our physics quest, really?

 

[JohnBooty]

It's not impossible for intelligent spacefaring life to exist but it seems highly unlikely.

Any such species will have discovered nuclear weapons, other means of mass destruction, and various ways of consuming their planet's resources at alarming rates.

Many... perhaps most... perhaps all... of these species (humans included) will achieve those milestones before they achieve the wisdom to use them wisely and will therefore wipe themselves out before they reach lofty goals such as hopping around the galaxy.

 

[MediumRare]

Well, this is basically just the Fermi Paradox, isn't it? If there are civilizations that have a billion year head start on us, then even if FTL or other exotic physics-defying technologies aren't possible - where are they? A billion years is more than enough time to spread across the galaxy even if just using chemical rockets or ion thrusters. The observation seems to be that there isn't any evidence that they have, so why not?

What makes us think "they" would make a bee-line to Earth? Assuming there are 36 billion inhabitable planets and "they" could send out 10,000 FTL probes simultaneously and each probe could visit one per year, how many years until "they" visit 1/2 of them? 1.8 million years - once. And if they visited ours 500,000 years ago? We missed the show, but there are no reruns for another 3.6 million years. The real Fermi paradox is why we would expect to see them no matter how many there are.

 

[JohnBooty]

Also, think about what it took for us to achieve some very small steps into space: basically, a mass extinction event or three.

You don't get the rise of mammals and eventually homo sapiens unless dinosaurs get wiped out by an asteroid.

So, we didn't just need Earth-like conditions in terms of water, atmosphere etc. We also needed a "fortuitous" asteroid strike that was calamitous... but not too calamitous. Think about what Earth would have been like if our solar system was too "safe" and we never got blasted by an asteroid of that magnitude. There's no indication whatsoever that dinosaurs were trending towards general intelligence, tool use, etc.

Intelligence and tool use are not some kind of inevitable endpoint goal of evolution. Lots of creatures on Earth rule their ecosystems just fine through specialized adaptation and not flexible, generalized intelligence.

So even if life is absolutely thriving on other many other planets (something that seems likely to me) I think only the tiniest fraction of these planets have tool-making and intelligent life, the sort that might eventually build spaceships and such.

 

[JohnBooty]

Last thing I'll say (edit: well, that was a lie) is that most of the UFO/UAP encounters ever reported... seem really scattershot? And "amateurish?" Just buzzing planes and things? Maybe they're testing our defenses. But, it's hard to imagine our weapons would even be a threat to a species with technology so advanced.

If there are really spacefaring civilizations, orders of magnitude more advanced than us, interested in visiting... it seems odd to think they'd allow themselves to be detected by us... but only sorta kinda... in ways that leave us deeply unsure if they exist at all. You'd think they'd either want to observe in an undetectable way, or make some kind of definitive contact.

I guess maybe we should just assume the motives of any aliens visiting us would be completely over our heads. Just like a toucan in the jungle can't begin to comprehend what a National Geographic photographer is doing with his camera. Or how my dog can't understand what's happening at the vet. The difference between us and the aliens would be at least that large.

 

[JohnBooty]

What makes us think "they" would make a bee-line to Earth? Assuming there are 36 billion inhabitable planets and "they" could send out 10,000 FTL probes simultaneously and each probe could visit one per year

This makes sense, but also, it's possible that such an advanced civilization would be able to be a lot more selective in terms of which planets it visits if their goal was to make contact with intelligent life.

There are potentially a lot of ways they could detect life at a great distance. Performing spectography on light that passes through our atmosphere, looking for phosphene and other markers. I mean, even us puny humans can do that today, but not at the required resolution. Or some kind of crazy high res radio astronomy that lets them see that we're transmitting all kinds of stuff through the air. Heck, might be as simple as looking at our CO2/temperature trends for the telltale signs of a fossil-fuel consumption frenzy.

Of course, maybe they'd also use such means to avoid visiting us. As countless scifi authors have theorized perhaps they have some kind of moral code that eschews interference with species that haven't made the leap to interstellar travel yet.

 

[JohnBooty]

But - who knows? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic and we'll discover that there really are advanced alien technologies beyond our understanding. Not something I'm going to bet on, though.

[Given our lack of understanding w.r.t. dark matter] how far along are we in our physics quest, really?

Yeah, hopefully we're just at the beginning. 2021's technology would have been unimaginable to somebody in 1921. If we're able to sustain this pace then 2121's technology will involve all kinds of things we can't even imagine. The dark matter mystery tells us that the gaps in our knowledge are massive. Which is good; means there's more to learn.

Still, we've never even seen hints that FTL travel is possible and that would be something of a requirement for some kind of true galaxy-hopping species.

Broadly speaking most of our advances have happened because we observed things happening in the natural world and eventually managed to harness them. We saw birds flying and imagined it might be possible for us. We saw lightning and eventually got really good at using electricity. Quantum phenomena were observed and eventually harnessed to some extent. etc etc etc.

FTL isn't merely something we haven't figured out yet, it's something we've never even observed. Now, admittedly, maybe it's happening all the time and we lack the ability to observe it. A few hundred years ago we weren't able to observe atoms and they were plenty real.

Now, IMHO the Fermi Paradox gets more play than it deserves, but it's a valid line of inquiry. The fundamental options are
a) we're first
b) there are reasons (i.e filters) that civilizations die out before they get advanced enough for interstallar travel (or at least spread far enough)
c) they're out there, but hiding
d) variant on B, but there's no magic and interstellar travel means conventional reaction-mass rockets and so just isn't viable at galaxy-spanning distances and so nobody bothers to go past the local group of systems

So I think (b) is most likely by far, and that even if (b) is overcome it's gonna run into (d).

 

[StevenEleven]

Well, hopefully we're just at the beginning. 2021's technology would have been unimaginable to somebody in 1921. If we're able to sustain this pace then 2121's technology will involve all kinds of things we can't even imagine. The dark matter mystery tells us that the gaps in our knowledge are massive. Which is good; means there's more to learn.

Still, we've never even seen hints that FTL travel is possible.

Broadly speaking most of our advances have happened because we observed things happening in the natural world and eventually managed to harness them. We saw birds flying and imagined it might be possible for us. We saw lightning and eventually got really good at using electricity. Quantum phenomena were observed and eventually harnessed to some extent. etc etc etc.

FTL isn't merely something we haven't figured out yet, it's something we've never even observed. Now, admittedly, maybe it's happening all the time and we lack the ability to observe it.

Very predictable really that at this point I might point out that though we have never observed FTL travel, it appears that the fabric of space-time is expanding faster than the speed of light. Random article with pretty pictures:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/starts...ster-than-the-speed-of-light/?sh=6af625083b5f

Whether that gets us anywhere, so to speak, is beyond me.

 

[raif71]

Is it just me or time seems to pass by quickly now compared to when we were younger ?

 

[PierreV]

I like to think that GRBs and FRBs bursts are the signatures of huge light-sail space ships leaving ports. Absolutely not scientific, but sooooo romantic.

 

[tomtoo]

With nearly 20% of Aliens on board, we should rename ASR to Alien Sound Review.

 

[Mart68]

good to see the forum is not just international but interplanetary.

 

[bboris77]

good to see the forum is not just international but interplanetary.

Sometimes I think it is intertemporal as well.

 

[Mart68]

It is, I'm posting from 1979.

 

[Pluto]

it's very unlikely that we're alone.

However, you should never neglect to consider the consequences of the final term of the Drake Equation, the one that factors the length of time throughout which a civilization remains contactable. Many mighty galactic empires may have risen and fallen since the universe began, but the chances of any of them being i) contemporaneous with ourselves and ii) sufficiently close for contact, make the odds seem long.

 

[abdo123]

However, you should never neglect to consider the consequences of the final term of the Drake Equation, the one that factors the length of time throughout which a civilization remains contactable. Many mighty galactic empires may have risen and fallen since the universe began, but the chances of any of them being i) contemporaneous with ourselves and ii) sufficiently close for contact, make the odds seem long.

I think these sort of simulations don't factor in the fact that these civilizations might be comprised of species (or Artificial intelligence) that is far more intelligent than us.

Humans have very poor comprehension of exponential growth, particularly exponential growth of intelligence.

We're only a bit smarter than chimps, but that one bit is exponential and allowed us complete and absolute dominance over our planet.

What makes humans so much more intellectually capable than chimps isn’t a difference in thinking speed—it’s that human brains contain a number of sophisticated cognitive modules that enable things like complex linguistic representations or longterm planning or abstract reasoning, that chimps’ brains do not. Speeding up a chimp’s brain by thousands of times wouldn’t bring him to our level—even with a decade’s time, he wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use a set of custom tools to assemble an intricate model, something a human could knock out in a few hours. There are worlds of human cognitive function a chimp will simply never be capable of, no matter how much time he spends trying.

But it’s not just that a chimp can’t do what we do, it’s that his brain is unable to grasp that those worlds even exist—a chimp can become familiar with what a human is and what a skyscraper is, but he’ll never be able to understand that the skyscraper was built by humans. In his world, anything that huge is part of nature, period, and not only is it beyond him to build a skyscraper, it’s beyond him to realize that anyone can build a skyscraper. That’s the result of a small difference in intelligence quality.

a machine or a species that is only slightly superintelligent, could display increased cognitive ability over us as vast as the chimp-human gap I just described. They could be traveling in worlds we know nothing about, functioning and evolving in ways we are unable to comprehend.

 

[Pluto]

the variables in the Drake equation were so uncertain that even under its very limiting assumptions it facilitated a huge range of plausible outcomes.

Sixty years after the Drake Equation, we haven't really managed to solidify many more of those variables, certainly not the most tricky ones like…
fi, fc & L

 

[vibess]

It's not impossible for intelligent spacefaring life to exist but it seems highly unlikely.

Any such species will have discovered nuclear weapons, other means of mass destruction, and various ways of consuming their planet's resources at alarming rates.

Many... perhaps most... perhaps all... of these species (humans included) will achieve those milestones before they achieve the wisdom to use them wisely and will therefore wipe themselves out before they reach lofty goals such as hopping around the galaxy.

Maybe they all live in symbiosis and therefor had no need to invent weapons of mass destruction. And insted using their time and resources to find ways to not destroy and drain the planet they live on. Just a thought