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Truth about Trekkin'
18 years ago
General
When I was growing up, I believed in UFOs. I even saw one once--it was just a dot of light way up in the night sky that seemed to be traveling faster than something that high up should have been, and then it changed directions instantly...and then seemed to stop or vanish.
I spent a terrified evening once thinking that I was seeing "Men in Black" on the edges of my peripheral vision after reading an article about them in a cheesy UFO magazine. (This was in the late 70s--long before MIB became the pop duo of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.)
But now I know a bit more about these things. I understand more about the true distances involved and the limitations physical laws impose on our universe.
I DO believe there is life on other worlds, lots of it, probably all through the universe. (I mean, the universe is so incredibly vast, how could there not be?) I even believe that there are civilizations out there much further advanced than we are. But I think the odds of one of them being close enough to us to make visiting our planet logistically plausible is remote in the extreme. So while I do believe in life, and even "intelligent" life on other worlds, I honestly do not believe this planet has ever been visited by sentient aliens in advanced spacecraft.
But I love Star Trek and Star Wars anyway!!!
I spent a terrified evening once thinking that I was seeing "Men in Black" on the edges of my peripheral vision after reading an article about them in a cheesy UFO magazine. (This was in the late 70s--long before MIB became the pop duo of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.)
But now I know a bit more about these things. I understand more about the true distances involved and the limitations physical laws impose on our universe.
I DO believe there is life on other worlds, lots of it, probably all through the universe. (I mean, the universe is so incredibly vast, how could there not be?) I even believe that there are civilizations out there much further advanced than we are. But I think the odds of one of them being close enough to us to make visiting our planet logistically plausible is remote in the extreme. So while I do believe in life, and even "intelligent" life on other worlds, I honestly do not believe this planet has ever been visited by sentient aliens in advanced spacecraft.
But I love Star Trek and Star Wars anyway!!!
and yes i do beleive in aliens :P sorta just not close x3 not that close x3
I do think it might be just as likely that the 'visitors' we may have had could be from alternate timelines/parallel universes or Earths, or are even just us noticing things from different planes of existance. Seems almost as likely to me as someone travelling from thousands of lightyears away.
It's a very interesting topic of discussion though. I always get a grin though when I think about Star Trek and the whole "We don't communicate until you're capable of warp drive" idea. =D
Anyway...
I agree that the theoretical sciences can be very interesting - the amount of useless, but very interesting trivia I've got floating around in my mind... ;)
Also, there's been a theory making the rounds, the Rare Earth hypothesis, basically claiming that various extremely rare conditions allowed the development of life on this planet. Read the link, or better yet, the book. If that postulate is correct, it would add several more conditions to the Drake equation, making it much more likely we're alone in this sea of stars... :(
-the universe is actually really quite small...
-remember, we are definitely the Alabama of the universe...
-soon as any intelligent species sees monkey's flinging poop, they're turning straight home.
-NASA's budget is really quite small compared to other departments, so waaaa waaa to the people who say we need to spend money on more important things... ;p psshhyahh uh-huh, like building a 4 ft Mexican border fence with watering stations.
They're "out there", they've never been here.
What we see as "UFOs" are probably "secret military experimental craft", (like the SR-71, the F-117, U2, etc, etc....) what we see today (or tonight) will be revealed by the USAF in 15-20 years....
Oh...I also love Star Trek & [s]Star Wars[/b]
I think the "problem" is that people want to believe so badly in ETs that whenever they themselves can't explain what they've seen, it's automatically aliens.
I believe they're "out there", and I wouldn't mind seeing proof, but the odds are, quite literally, astronomical that they'll never "visit" us here.
"If it is just us, seems like an awful waste of space"
Star Wars rocked... well at least before it became 'Episode 4'. And although I enjoy the Trak movies, I am sorry but 5 just never happened.
But I've always loved sci-fi...I'm just more cynical about it in my old age.
The sets looked worse than the TV series (Shat's '60s series), and the whole "god" ending was a cop-out that went nowhere.
I blame Paramount for rushing it and underfunding it more than anything. It just shows that corporate greed can fuck up any idea. They didn't realize the reason the films did well was because of the loyal, intelligent, and eager fans, and then Paramount went and rushed 5, thereby taking a steaming three-coiler on us loyal fans.
Same idea.....
All it got me was an Arab kid who wanted to beat me up. He said, what if someone did that with Reagan...to which my reply was: I intended to use Reagan but couldn't find his photo in the paper that day...but I found Yassir...
However, I somehow doubt that aliens went to the trouble of creating advanced hypertechnology, to split the infinity of space, at speeds beyond the limits of science, just to draw goofy shapes in cornfields.
You'd think after a non-stop trip like they must have done, they'd be more in need of a toilet, a shower and a nice comfy bed.
Life seems to be full of rules and universal constraints that impose limits, such as the # of transistors that can physically be packed together within a finite distance (length) before time delay makes even the electrical signals to slow to reach from one end of a microchip to the other within the span of a single clock cycle. We as a race never solved that constraint, we simple got around it be first shrinking the transistors so more would fit in the same limited distance. Now that we hit another constraint in how far we can shrink them, we switched from 2D to 3D microchip design so now transistors can begrouped in a more centralized fashion than ever before to pack more of them in there.
Long story short... I fully agree the speed of light is as you said far to slow to travel the universe at. But it is only another constraint that while it cannot be solved, there are probably work arounds, a-la star trek's warp drive or something else. I feel it is just a matter of someone figuring it out first. :)
I always find it funny. So many people have begun to understand the problem with the distances in the galaxy and even more so in the universe.
Rarely someone thinks about time.
We have about 7000 Years behind us since the our technical develpoment began (depending on how you rate it it could be 10000). At our current rate and if it is possible at all and humanity survives that long, we will have efficient galaxy wide travel in side the next 500-1000 years. Intergalaxy travel might take the same time again.
The universe is about 13 billion years old. A species could have evolved, explored the galaxy and vanished, missing us by a few million years.
"If there is a God, Richelieu will have much to answer for. If there is not, he has done very well."
According to "Caesarius of Heisterbach: Medieval Heresies," one of the pope's own uttered in Latin, "Neca eos omnes. Dues suos agnoset," or "Kill them all. God will know His own."
They did and killed every man, woman and child in the city.
Please note, that those were the popes rewrote the bible when it was neccessary to change their politics.
Though I wouldn't mind if the people would listen to some good things in the bible.
But for some reason so many forget stuff like
love your next...
thou shall not kill...
and so on.
But instead it is more like
Love everyone that believes like you do and hate, supress or kill everyone else.
Thou shall not kill except in my name.
Please excuse me if I am getting sarcastic about this, but if people insist on interpreting a book that should teach you how to live a good live and to love god's creation to preach hate and murder I tend to get irritated and sarcastic these days.
My advise to every christian and moslem alike?
Don't listen to preachers. Read the bible and the q'ran yourself and draw your own conclusions. Because that is why these good books are there for.
I apologize if I have offended anyone, but this is what we hear on the news every day. We also can read how many people this has killed in history and is still killing people every day.
We should know better by now.
I was however, making the point that sometimes it's silly, which was not, in any way, promoting it or suggesting it should be taken literally.
element 116 is nescesarry to create element 118 the 'fuel' for antigraviton interstellar engines.
and it is closer to 24,000 years Dreamfox, we've just had a few misunderstandings to blow ourselves back to the stone age twice. as well as forgetting whence we came to settle this planet ie Serius B's sun became a pulsar.
'cause they are. :)
I wonder if that would work as a TV show. :)
I too believe their is life out there, call me a dreamer, but I also believe that a race may have, or might yet find a way to create Warp like travel, making the Galaxy a little smaller.
Star Trek gives us hope and a vision into the What might be, and what could already be. Gene had a mind for this, and he, as well as other great writers and visionaries have shaped much of what is too come, even if some don't know it. Popular example, Cell phones, and laser technology. Maybe cloaking and matter transportation too.
Space isn't the Final Frountier, just the next one we see now.
"Beyond the rim of the star light, my love is wondering in star flight"
Like you, I'm probably more into the "rare earth" camp (Sorry Carl Sagan Fans). Even traveling at the speed of light, it takes a very long time to go from here to even the closest neighboring star. But if it were ever possible to harness the massive quantity of energy in the universe to created things like like worm holes and devices that can alter the metrics of space, what makes us so special that a race of beings hundreds of millions of light years away would bother with us? We really aren't advanced enough to warrant cultural exchange and we don't have the resource potential to warrant an invasion type scenario or even mutual trade.
My conclusion about strange things in the sky is that they are either some sort of advanced military research craft, an as-yet unknown natural phenomena, or a type of light projection in the sky.
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/308905/
These were not UFOs - that is, mere unidentified flying objects. In both cases, their appearance in front of a mountain whose distance was known and their subsequent timed disappearance behind another mountain whose distance was known rules out any terrestial propulsion system. These were not dim points of light in the sky; they were brightly glowing disks or spheroids that I observed for minutes under perfect conditions.
As far as FTL travel is concerned, there are lots of reasonable hypotheses: E.E. Smith (the chemical engineer who wrote the Lensman series) pointed out that if one can cancel inertial mass, C is no longer a limiting velocity. (And right angle turns at 2 miles per second cease to be problematic.)
A physicist, Christopher Gregory, wrote some very interesting papers about 40 years ago. He took the standard Einstein-Infield-Hoffman equations of motion, and rewrote them assuming the existence of a fourth spatial dimension. Infinite velocities are still impossible, but the new limiting velocity is about 1021C. That is seriously fast. All string theories involve more than 7 dimensions (though the extra ones are not necessarily macroscopic), and most use 11 or more dimensions. (Of course, string theory, while mathematically elegant, has never predicted anything observable - a big drawback to this experimental physicist.)
Note too, that the equations governing quantum entanglement do not involve distance. The existence of quantum entanglement over very macroscopic distances has been demonstrated: IBM's research lab in Switzerland has transmitted photons over 30 kilometers via quantum teleportation. They actually used quantum teleportation to conduct an encrypted bank transaction over that distance.
I know a great deal about advanced military aircraft, and have seen them perform in the skies over usually deserted Nevada valleys and mountains. These two weren't ours.
I mean, half the population is scared of anything that they dont know, and fear goes to violence...
and the violence is rampant in a lot of stuff, from racism, to anti gays.. etc..
I think we need to evolve a lot more to go past these, to finally receive a true contact with other civilizations
and if we remember, the greed of the big country's leaders is insane. I wouldnt be surprised it it happened like in the star trek enterprise's episode of "IN A MIRROR, DARKLY"
that once they set the "PHOENIX".. and the first vulcans gets in the human planet, the humans kills them and steal their technology :|
Plus, we're bound by the laws of our world, and the resources we have in it. Look at all the unnatural things we've made by using natural products on the Earth. Another planet that had completely different resources could possibly make even more advanced unnatural things to help further their glatical quest :P
Just some thoughts to consider ^-^
I still remember how far afield and how bad The X Files got when they decided to go down that path.
ST and SW are fantasy. Space Opera/Saturday Morning Serials -- both writ large on the mass consiousness.
They don't have anything to do with physics, or reality. They are about emotion and adventure. They are dreams of impossible futures/pasts. The reason we get hooked is they invite us in.
UFO=ST/SW? Nope.
I'll throw my one bit of knowledge into the ring.
Anybody else out there remember something called a gravitational telescope? A very large array or receptors would be set up in space facing the sun, but blotting out the disc itself, instead it would use the gravitation of the sun to warp and magnify the images on the opposite side of the sun at that time. This would allow us to see planetary surfaces light years away.
That was the theory. Obviously it has problems (like making a very large array of receptors in space) but it could be a way to 'travel' without going anywhere.