Do you believe in UFO's?

Do you believe in UFO's?

  • Yes

    Votes: 36 45.6%

  • No

    Votes: 13 16.5%

  • Are you asking me if I believe there are unidentified airborne objects?

    Votes: 24 30.4%

  • Are you asking me if I believe there are alien spacecraft?

    Votes: 16 20.3%

  • Duh, UFO's are alien spacecraft, just ask the History Channel

    Votes: 4 5.1%

  • How come no wimmin are out chasing UFO's?

    Votes: 2 2.5%

  • Who cares

    Votes: 6 7.6%

  • I saw one walking home from the bar. Two, actually

    Votes: 2 2.5%

  • I saw one from my airplane

    Votes: 3 3.8%

  • ATC called me a UFO and told me to get my transponder fixed

    Votes: 3 3.8%
  • Total voters
    79
Salty said:
The whole “the universe is so big and so old the odds are high that there are more species out there” thesis ignores the fact that there are also an infinite number of things that will never happen, therefore you can use the same logic that it’s highly unlikely for it to happen. Don’t think too much about that. You’ve been warned.
Click to expand...
Maybe. Maybe not.

:)
 
cessna182b said:
Good answer.

In my own case, nearly 50 years ago I was in Los Angeles attending some Computer training. A lab session extended into evening, after which I was driving across the city after dark to where I was staying.
A light in the sky caught my attention - but I assumed that it was a police helicopter with a spotlight (a common sight around there). But then the light started to move - and it accelerated at a fantastic
rate, crossed the sky and disappeared. I said "WOW" out loud - knowing that nothing man made could do that (without a trail of fire behind it - which there was none). What was it? I have no idea. However,
I was not the only person to see it. Lots of others did, too - and it was written up in the newspaper next day. No headlines, though - just a small blurb about it.

I have seen a few other startling events - but those had explanations (like a meteorite that lit up the landscape with green light - or a night missile launch that became obvious when the second stage fired).

Dave
Click to expand...

In my own case, nearly two years ago, I have witnessed a SpaceX launch which passed over my house, late night, and I saw the burning corona of the spaceship as it traversed across the sky.

It wasn't a UFO. I knew what it was. It was super cool to watch actually, but I had nightmares for months after about spacecraft launching and ditching in to earth, contaminating everything and well, it was unsettling.

But at least for the time being I can separate nightmares from reality, I suspect not everyone can.
 
steingar said:
All possible. But it is hard to accept that a galaxy-wide civilization wouldn't leave something behind that we could see in a telescope. We've seen to the farthest corners of the visible universe and seen naught.
Click to expand...

Remember we’re seeing and receiving radio signals from millions of years ago, so any recently developing intelligent life wont be detected.
 
Fast reader?
I found it was an interesting read and pertains to this topic. Object all you like, that’s ok.
 
Patrick said:
Fast reader?
I found it was an interesting read and pertains to this topic. Object all you like, that’s ok.
Click to expand...

I did read the article, but it makes HUGE assumptions, I feel that the 22% number is way, way, way too high. Rocky planets, sure I could buy 22%. Earth-like planets, not so much. Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all rocky, but none of them are Earth-like. Unless you consider not having an atmosphere, or having an atmosphere with a pressure 100 times greater than Earth's, "Earth-like." In which case, might as well say Jupiter is Earth-like, because it's round-ish.
 
Sac Arrow said:
Well?
Click to expand...
UFO's are certainly real. What they are and where they come from is a wide open subject.

The God I believe in most certainly could have created life on millions, or even billions of other planets but I can't imagine were interesting enough for any society more advanced than ours by milleniums to bother making contact.

Is it possible? I'm certainly open to the possibility but being a scientist by nature I have yet to see enough conclusive evidence.

The most likely answer is that there are advanced aero/space vehicles far more advanced than we're aware of produced by our own and other nations.

My military knowledge and experience tells me what we're seeing in the open is usually at least 20-30 years behind what's currently in development if not more and that leaves near endless possibilities.
 
steingar said:
The Universe is billions of years old.
Click to expand...
And societies that would them be millions or hundreds of millions years older than ours probably aren't communicating by radio anymore.

If we ever do confirm a signal from some place close to the center of the universe it will likely be many thousands or millions of years old if not older so that culture probably no longer exists or has moved on from communications tech we can even understand.
 
Evidently the inverse square law doesn't apply anymore. :D
 
O2 Birddog said:
UFO's are certainly real. What they are and where they come from is a wide open subject.

The God I believe in most certainly could have created life on millions, or even billions of other planets but I can't imagine were interesting enough for any society more advanced than ours by milleniums to bother making contact.

Is it possible? I'm certainly open to the possibility but being a scientist by nature I have yet to see enough conclusive evidence.

The most likely answer is that there are advanced aero/space vehicles far more advanced than we're aware of produced by our own and other nations.

My military knowledge and experience tells me what we're seeing in the open is usually at least 20-30 years behind what's currently in development if not more and that leaves near endless possibilities.
Click to expand...

You do get the point of the thread, right? It drives me nuts when UFO's are equated as synonymous with alien spacecraft. Just because it's a UFO does not mean it is an alien spacecraft. It could be. I tend to doubt it but certainly the subject is debatable. And, by definition, if you KNOW it is an alien spacecraft, it is then not a UFO anymore.
 
steingar said:
You're actually getting at the Fermi Paradox. Our solar system is quite young, as things go. Logic would suggest that life started on some distant world long, long ago. Presumably a sentient species like ours would develop space travel, and would set up some galaxy wide civilization that would leave something visible thus on Earth. That has never happened.

This gives rise to theories of why not. It is possible that there is some "great barrier" that prevent sentients from establishing space-faring civilizations, the speed of light comes quickly to mind. It could be that the great barrier is something we'll encounter in the future, something that every sentient ever evolved encounters. Not a pleasant thought.

Could be we've passed the great barrier already, and we're the first to do so. Multicellularity, sentience, language, it could be that we're the first species to do any or all of these.
Click to expand...
The barrier could simply be time, resources and the HUGE distances involved.
Like most "paradoxes" this one is based on a number of assumptions. The big one being that some technology will appear at some time that is going to make travel to multiple star systems economically feasible and attractive to advanced civilizations. At a minimum, this would mean some source of HUGE quantities of nearly free, portable, energy exists and can be discovered. That's an assumption. A big assumption.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
The barrier could simply be time, resources and the HUGE distances involved.
Like most "paradoxes" this one is based on a number of assumptions. The big one being that some technology will appear at some time that is going to make travel to multiple star systems economically feasible and attractive to advanced civilizations. At a minimum, this would mean some source of HUGE quantities of nearly free, portable, energy exists and can be discovered. That's an assumption. A big assumption.
Click to expand...

Dark matter harvesters to use as fuel, duh!
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
The barrier could simply be time, resources and the HUGE distances involved.
Like most "paradoxes" this one is based on a number of assumptions. The big one being that some technology will appear at some time that is going to make travel to multiple star systems economically feasible and attractive to advanced civilizations. At a minimum, this would mean some source of HUGE quantities of nearly free, portable, energy exists and can be discovered. That's an assumption. A big assumption.
Click to expand...
Indeed, it may be that faster-than-light travel (or wormholes, or "folding space", or whatever mechanism you prefer) never has been, never will be, and cannot be achieved... and there are (or are not) some number of civilizations that will never interact simply due to the distances involved.
 
DaleB said:
Indeed, it may be that faster-than-light travel (or wormholes, or "folding space", or whatever mechanism you prefer) never has been, never will be, and cannot be achieved... and there are (or are not) some number of civilizations that will never interact simply due to the distances involved.
Click to expand...
My dad, a graduate of MIT with a Triple BS in Math, Physics, and Chemistry who worked with Von Braun for three years had a saying.

"When it comes to physics never say never because we don't know yet what we don't know."

He was a pretty smart guy.

Physics was fairly static as a science for a long time but the information age is now expanding our knowledge and technology at exponential rates. We'll probably learn more in the next hundred years than was learned in the 100,000 previous. It's in fact almost a certainty.
 
O2 Birddog said:
My dad, a graduate of MIT with a Triple BS in Math, Physics, and Chemistry who worked with Von Braun for three years had a saying.

"When it comes to physics never say never because we don't know yet what we don't know."

He was a pretty smart guy.

Physics was fairly static as a science for a long time but the information age is now expanding our knowledge and technology at exponential rates. We'll probably learn more in the next hundred years than was learned in the 100,000 previous. It's in fact almost a certainty.
Click to expand...

We're gonna have to go outside the knowns if we want to go anywhere distant. Space isn't a vacuum and even if we pushed to 0.9c I can only imagine the damage some dust or debris would do to a hull.
 
EdFred said:
We're gonna have to go outside the knowns if we want to go anywhere distant. Space isn't a vacuum and even if we pushed to 0.9c I can only imagine the damage some dust or debris would do to a hull.
Click to expand...

We had to go beyond the knowns for the first manned flight and have been going beyond the knowns frequently ever since.

That problem would seem to be solved traveling through a wormhole, folded space or inside of a warp bubble which as far as we know at this point but at sub light speeds some sort of shielding would have to be devised.

It's an almost unlimited list of what seem today like impossible challenges but we humans have a knack for surmounting same.
 
O2 Birddog said:
We had to go beyond the knowns for the first manned flight and have been going beyond the knowns frequently ever since.

That problem would seem to be solved traveling through a wormhole, folded space or inside of a warp bubble which as far as we know at this point but at sub light speeds some sort of shielding would have to be devised.

It's an almost unlimited list of what seem today like impossible challenges but we humans have a knack for surmounting same.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but manned flight is and always was squarely within the laws of classical physics. We didn't break any laws of known physics to get off the ground, or orbit the earth, send men to the Moon, or rovers to Mars. It was a matter of developing adequate power. Traversing the galaxy requires a re-write of what we know.
 
EdFred said:
Yeah, but manned flight is and always was squarely within the laws of classical physics. We didn't break any laws of known physics to get off the ground, or orbit the earth, send men to the Moon, or rovers to Mars. It was a matter of developing adequate power. Traversing the galaxy requires a re-write of what we know.
Click to expand...

There wasn't much really known about physics when the first manned flight in a plane took place in 1853.

Certainly early theories existed but the physics of heavier than air flight was almost completely theoretical.

Thanks to computers I expect the next hundred years is going to change a great deal about what we "know" as far as physics go.
 
O2 Birddog said:
There wasn't much really known about physics when the first manned flight in a plane took place in 1853.

Certainly early theories existed but the physics of heavier than air flight was almost completely theoretical.

Thanks to computers I expect the next hundred years is going to change a great deal about what we "know" as far as physics go.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I guess 166 years of physics knowledge isn't very much. JFC.
 
EdFred said:
Yeah, I guess 166 years of physics knowledge isn't very much. JFC.
Click to expand...

We didn't have 166yrs of Physics knowledge in 1853, particularly related to the physics of flight.

A 166 years from how physicists will look back on us like we look back on Stone age Man.
 
O2 Birddog said:
We didn't have 166yrs of Physics knowledge in 1853, particularly related to the physics of flight.

A 166 years from how physicists will look back on us like we look back on Stone age Man.
Click to expand...

Newton published Principia in 1687. Learning is fun!
 
Half Fast said:
And this is why anyone serious about studying physics should learn Latin.
Click to expand...
There are translations, promise. The fun thing is easier in the 20th century to get a PhD you had to be able to speak German, because of all the great science done in Germany. Nowadays American PhDs don't have to know any other language and German PhD candidates have to speak English.
 
steingar said:
There are translations, promise. The fun thing is easier in the 20th century to get a PhD you had to be able to speak German, because of all the great science done in Germany. Nowadays American PhDs don't have to know any other language and German PhD candidates have to speak English.
Click to expand...


Sadly, we never read the Principia when I took Latin. Portions of Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum were about as far as I got.
 
I get to veni, veni, veni, and I'm done.......with Latin
 
EdFred said:
And also must have missed the ability to know what you are trying to say.



Do you practice this?
Click to expand...
We're discussing the physics of flight and space travel. It helps to follow the conversation.
 
O2 Birddog said:
We're discussing the physics of flight and space travel.
Click to expand...
Newton does an excellent job w.r.t. atmospheric flight, but falls short if you want to discuss near speed of light travel through space. Or, if you are running atomic clocks in satellites.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top