Quote from: Toxic2040 on September 24, 2020, 10:58:12 PM

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Never mind the aliens, ... yet.

The most suprising event this year is not the assassination of the Iranian top general Qasem Soleimani, BLM, wildfires ore Covid-19 but the release of U.F.O footages from 2005/2015/2017 by the U.S goverment.

Aliens smell like farts. If they land they will stink the place out.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a29932234/what-would-aliens-smell-like/

Quote

...Which led my son to one inescapable conclusion: If aliens exist, they probably smell like farts.

I dont know enough about farts, Mars, or aliens to refute him, so I reached out to somebody who does: Clara Sousa-Silva, a molecular astrophysics postdoctoral associate at MIT.

Your son is absolutely correct in his inference, she told me. Most of my work in astrobiology looks at anaerobic environments, which have a lot in common with the environments that produce farts. So, yes, aliens are reasonably likely to smell like farts.

Now I know what Ripley was smelling...

Given the situation, I'd likely be smelling my own shit.

I have often wondered about alien life from other stars..if they have visited this solar system and this planet.
What possible reason would they have to invest significant resources traveling trillions and trillions of miles to visit a insignificant planet circling a unremarkable main sequence star on the outer edge of a galaxy basically in the middle of nowhere.
If they are still here observing for some reason and unwilling or unable to reveal their presence in full.

I think about the complexity of escaping a gravity well. The energy required just to get into orbit from Earth is immense and if the planet was just 50% larger in diameter standard physics would make that task impossible.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2017/07/06/if_earth_was_50_larger_we_might_be_stuck_here.html

How fortunate we that Earth has just the right atmospheric composition and density to make fire, thus being able to smelt ores into metals. Leading us into the technological age and the ability to construct machines capable of leaving our atmosphere.
It is some 11.186 km/s to escape earths gravity and a increase up to 16.6 km/s to leave the solar system. Thats leaving from Earth of course..the farther you fall into the Sun's gravity well the more delta v needed for escape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape_velocities

Thats just the solar system now...if you want to travel galactic you need somewhere at the minimum of 500-600 km/s of delta v to escape Sagittarius A*'s clutches.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-international-astronomical-union/article/rave-survey-constraining-the-local-galactic-escape-speed/8CEC76CD4DDE5F795640C2FEA0936F68#

All of the technology described above possible, but only on a limited scale with the energy densities humanity now achieves.
A civilisation perhaps only a few thousand years older than our own 'recorded' ten thousand years might be capable of such feats.
Let alone one that might have existed a million years before humans rose up from the plains. A trivial amount of time in the grand scheme of things and entirely possible.

Except for a few things...where are the signs? Besides a few grainy videos and a plethora of unsubstantiated testimony..nothing so far. And astronomically speaking..zip as well..no sub relativistic transients..or relativistic ones for that matter.
Ships traveling at any significant speed between stars in normal space would be extremely obvious in stellar photography. So would the energy signature used to achieve that speed.

So it again begs the question..why? If they have the technology to completely mask their presence and travel the stars unobserved..why the hell are they here watching us?

A clown act? A comedy or perhaps more like a tragedy? Some form of zoo run amuck? One could claim shoddy custodianship if that is the case.

On the other side of that...I have thought about what it might look like if I was an alien and encountered a human for the first time. What my impressions might be.

Intelligent bipedal/binocular hominid with non-cooperative societal constructs and homicidal tendencys.
Incredibly environmentally destructive while being adaptive to change and a prolific ability to reproduce given the right conditions.
Eats and converts matter internally into energy.
Must consumes daily liters of liquid hydrogen/oxygen and most actually enjoy bathing and swimming in the stuff.

So on to what I really was thinking and wanted to talk about. Tongue

Dark matter and dark beings. How the Universe appears to be made up of less than 5% baryonic matter..the other 25% being dark matter and 70% dark energy.
Humanity manipulating and consuming a substance perhaps the majority of the Universes inhabitants can't see and interact with. Being made out of this rare matter, living in and on the edge of immense crushing burning oblate spheroids of the stuff.

If there are dark beings, how violent and strange our baryonic Universe must seem with all these strange particles and waves bashing around.

It could be that humanity is more alien than one might think and might be worthy of study.

/rando thursday thoughts

also..in closing

juansnow

fuck ftfy

i am sure it has been suggested here before and I guess you did already read it since it covers exactly that topic: interaction with alien civilization. Liu Cixin´s trilogy "Remembrance of Earth's Past" (1.The Three-Body Problem, 2.The Dark Forest, 3.Death's End) is a fantastic read. all civilizations come to the point where they become aware of the possibility of other civilizations existing and they need to figure out if this is a general threat. most come to the conclusion it is best to hide and preemptively destroy everything that could resemble an alien civilization in order to not get annihilated themselves.

it is an interesting intellectual challenge to discuss the pros and contras of trying to contact alien civilizations given the threat of annihilation.

there is no doubt in my mind that life exists not only on earth. much less abundant, but in an universe of endless size that doesn't really matter, would be not just primitive life but technical advanced civilizations. imho the problem is the size of the universe. there could be millions of civilizations way too far away for any interaction. the other problem is time. given just the 14 billion years our universe is thought of being old, it is very unlikely to have another civilization synchronized to our technical progress.

and even if there was accidentally a near civilization in space and time, why would they want contact? what is there to gain?

on the other hand there is also the chance that such contact has happened in the past and was in fact the reason for life to get started on earth in the first place or was the reason for the evolution of humans from apes.

when smoking really good weed one could even wonder if bitcoin is an alien technology, sent to us by benevolent aliens who wanted to safe us from destroying ourselves because of an ill-designed (fiat)money system.