No, he wasn’t.
You said:
^^This statement is absolutely ridiculous. Hatch rightfully pointed it out to you. If you meant ‘manned spaceflight’, then you’re gonna have to admit you forgot to mention that ‘‘little detail’’ in your line of reasoning.
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I don’t know what you and @Glenduil are smoking today, but maybe let it wear off. Go take a walk, get laid. And then come back and read the thread again. @Glenduil expressed a completely absurd statement:
Hatch pointed it out to him, then Glenduil backtracked by saying he actualluy meant ‘‘manned spaceflight’’ and based all his further arguments on that. Which is pointedly a different thing than saying ‘‘no material on Earth can withstand hazards of space’’. When you’re arguing with someone you should get your terms right and express yourself specifically. Jumping on the other guy because he saw through your nonsense is a lame behavior.
Hatch was right. Glenduil was wrong. On a number of things. Among them insinuating that this thread is about interstellar travel. UFOs and ETs might pertain to the topic of interstellar travel in special cases, but they certainly don’t equate with it. These are two different topis altogether. UFOs are mainly a cultural-psychological phenomenon of human mind/experience. ETs are hypothetical at best.
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Apparently some people here don’t understand the topic at hand and they think I care about their lunatic rants.
Back on topic. It would be extremely rare for an alien race from another solar system to find life on Earth to be compatible. Contrary to what Star Trek would like us to believe, gravity is not a constant and neither is temperature or atmosphere. Some planets, like Venus, have such a thick hot atmosphere that it would destroy beings like humans. It has a 97% CO2 level and rains sulfuric acid. The pressure alone from the atmosphere would destroy us instantly.
Gravity is a consequence of mass. It’s not a force- it’s more like an effect. And in case someone takes issue with that, it’s a quote from an astrophysicist. If you have less mass, you get less gravity. Our bodies not only need gravity in order to be healthy, but it needs consistent gravity. An Earth like planet the size of Jupiter would kill us while an Earth like planet the size of Mars would diminish us. In addition, space travel alone from one star to another would weaken us quite a bit since that would be a life in zero gravity. So there would have to be a mode of travel that’s unfathomably fast to limit time spent in zero G or there would have to be a spinning centrifuge which may or may not be a suitable form of artificial gravity (scientists are still divided on that issue).
And if a ship did spend a few months traveling to this planet and found our planet to be compatible, the aliens would have to take some time recovering after landing before they were ready to move around in our gravity. Astronauts experience this after returning to Earth from orbit. But then, they’d also have to be immunized against our viruses and bacteria- and us from anything they brought with them.
It’s just as likely though that they’d be compatible with Europa’s deep cold oceans or Titan’s extremely cold and dense atmosphere. Scientists have hypothesized that a silicon life form instead of carbon could survive on Titan.
So even if the technology and construction material existed for travel from a distant solar system to our own were possible, it’s more likely that they would not land on Earth, but if they were compatible, they’d have to stay for a while, interact with us, and spend a recovery period here as it would be a long way to the next Earth like planet that would also have similar gravtiy.
There are just too many factors making it an impossiblity.
UFOs are clearly not Alien in origin (as they would long ago stopped visiting us if they were) for a simple reason:
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If you see an interstellar craft and you know that it’s an interstellar craft, is it still a UFO?
They’re not hypothetical. Life has been proven to be able to survive in space (microorganisms like the tardigrade) which means that it can travel from planet to planet. We’ve found rocks on Earth that came from Mars. We’ve traced around 400 such rocks to Mars. In addition, there are several species of life on this planet that are intelligent and have their own language and social structure. It’s not just humans- we’re just the most dominant and most intelligent. Dolphins, squid, whales, gorillas and elephants are prime examples. Even crows can count and not only use tools, but MAKE them on the spot.
If life can happen sporadically many times over as it’s done on this planet and since it can cross through space from planet to planet, and since intelligent is not a unique phenomena, then ETs are not hypothetical- they’re a mathematical certainty.
Doesn’t change what I said about my stance on interstellar travel though. I still maintain that it’s impossible. And even if it isn’t, the odds of our planet being a safe refuge for extra-terrestrials is statistically impossible.
If you seen an interstellar craft, how would you know it’s an interstellar craft and not the latest terrestrial project from a military skunkworks? Do we look for the “Earth or Bust!” sticker on the hull?
Oh because in my example, I’ve learned the alien’s language and gotten a tour of the alien craft. I’ve also studied the navigational logs and know the journey it took to get to Earth.
Is it still a UFO?
And that’s not what the bumper sticker reads. They don’t call it Earth. They call it Theta 8.
I would have, if you had made any. Seriously.
Thank you for the cogent thought. I don’t think your conclusions necessarily follow, but regardless, that side tangent has nothing to do with the conversation you jumped into, which was about the statement:
“There just isnt a material on planet Earth that could be used to manufacture a spaceship capable of withstanding the hazards of spaceflight.”
Which, on its face, is false.
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I find you draw those conclusions a bit too easily. Say I too have read about the drake equation and fermi paradox, what makes you conclude that using radio or other EM radiation is a foolish method of communicating?
Are you referring to the dark forest theory?
And what is it that lets you conclude that interstellar travel is practically impossible?
I won’t deny that interstellar is currently practically impossible for us, but we humans have only been sending things to space for the tiniest fraction of Earth’s lifetime so I have no doubt we’ll improve on that point if given enough time without massive disasters.
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Yes, but there was no need to take it on face value.
It was clear from context that the poster meant interstellar travel at speeds compatible with our tiny lifespans, in which case it’s largely correct.
We’ve surveyed the sky pretty well, and done processing on all the signals to see if we can find any signals we think are artificial, particularly in the radio spectrum, i.e. SETI. We haven’t found any. The Drake equation seems to point to there being life, and intelligent life out there, but they don’t seem to communicate with EM/radio. So either we’re the most advanced civilisation there has ever been, which seems unlikely, or there’s a better method of long distance communication we haven’t found yet.
When it comes to interstellar travel the distances are too great to imagine any creatures like us traversing. You either need to spend multiple generations in the lightless void between stars, or travel at speeds where encountering a peanut spells disaster. I think the fact that we do not see any evidence of physical craft or beings visiting our solar system from other star systems is further evidence that it is practically impossible. Given the size of the galaxy, if it was possible then some species would be doing it and we would have met them.
Our fastest communication only travels at the speed of light and has a very limited range (when compared to the scale of a galaxy). Any ship traveling through interstellar space would not be able to communicate with either the destination or the origin of the journey.
In addition, you would have no way to scan ahead. That’s the part about FTL that no one talks about. It’s like pointing your ship at a tiny pinpoint of light, hitting the big green button and hoping that nothing is in your way. Your windows would be blank and your scanners would be useless until you smash into the space rock or rogue planet you didn’t know was in your path. That’s not a safe method of travel.
One tiny rock and you’re dead. You need a method of communications that is faster than light not only for voice, but also for data (e.g. scanners).
If it was clear, I wouldn’t have asked him to clarify. Making a statement such as he did, I wouldn’t assume anything. For all I knew, he could have been a flat earther who doesn’t believe in space travel at all, and that the whole NASA program is a hoax. So I didn’t assume. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked for clarification.
Not really. The most ambitious survey and analysis ever done was probably SETI@home, which analyzed data from Arecibo. It looked at roughly 33% of the sky.
Over 21 years, SETI@home turned up 12 billion signals of interest. Follow-up analysis narrowed that down to 100 that are worth another look. 100 is pretty impressive, given the nature of these things. Arecibo has since been decommissioned, but projects like Breakthrough Listen are presently doing more targeted searches.
We have to keep in mind, though, that these projects only looked at certain bands of the spectrum (ones we think are likely to be used for communication), so there’s also some bias to the data. We also have to remember that right here on Earth, our radio footprint has changed significantly in the 130 years since Marconi, shifting from predominantly long-wave frequencies to microwave, and from over-the-air to closed systems like cable TV.
We have more radios around us then ever before, but wifi, bluetooth, and cellphone signals don’t produce the kind of far-reaching radio noise as HF (shortwave), MF (AM), or even VHF (FM). Those longer-wave signals are discernable much farther into space, whereas the gigahertz-range stuff quickly fades into the background. In another 100 years, Earth may have a radio footprint that’s extremely hard to detect at interstellar distances.
That’s all to say that the jury may still be out on SETI. In science, absence of proof is not proof of absence, and to quote a movie (I think it was it Armageddon?), “It’s a big ass sky.”
Only if we limit our imagination to conventional modes of propulsion. As of today, the distances are indeed too great for human travel. However, we’re always one scientific discovery away from the next leap forward.
Take warp travel, for example. Theoretically, it could work if we could ever solve the energy problem. You isolate a bubble of spacetime, and then slide it at tremendous speeds. From inside the bubble, it would seem nothing is happening. You are standing still while your frame of reference is being propelled FTL. You avoid the limit of C, you avoid relativistic effects, and you avoid collision risk with objects in your path. You basically skirt the laws of physics.
Will we ever make that work? I don’t know. There are reports of UFOs moving in ways that would liquify any human occupants. If those objects are real (and have mass, which is another subject), I’ll at least entertain the idea that spacetime manipulation is possible.
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No, that’s fantasy.
All the technoology we have today in 2026 was fantasy in 1926.
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No it wasn’t
If warping spacetime was possible, it requires a device that can project a huge gravitational field in front of the ship in order to compress spacetime. This device would essentially throw a black hole in front of the ship that we’d move into as the field stayed ahead of us.
Thus the ship would pass quickly through space without breaking the speed limit law.
Except that gravity itself moves at the speed of light and moves in all directions. Generating such a field in front of the ship strong enough to warp spacetime would also destroy the ship itself. Flying towards a black hole isn’t a good idea.
Then add teleportation to the list of things to discuss in this thread because there is no other possible way for ETs to get to Earth without interstellar travel. So how did ET design a teleporter capable of traveling all the way to this planet just to fly in a SpaceX rocket?
You keep insisting that i discuss rockets and probes when talking about beings from other planets arriving to this planet so let’s talk about it. How did the ETs arrive and why did they come all the way here to pilot rockets?
There will be always unidentified flying objects, even after Aliens land in their spaceship near the White House and we play them a welcoming tune, with president of USA shaking their appendages or something.