New Yorker Radio Hour piece on UFOs.

[danez_yoda]

Time travel is even less likely than going faster than the speed of light. Some basically have you going back in time if you exceed the speed of light. I think Stephen Hawking had a party for time travelers once. He advertised the time and location after the party was over. He said no one showed up. Just way overused in the entertainment world. Leads to good stories but no way to actually do it. How do you really rewind time for the 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe? Dark energy causes the expansion of the universe, do you somehow rewind it? What about your location relative to the universe, earth rotates around the sun, sun rotates around the galaxy, galaxy wanders through the universe, how do you fix it to a previous time? Going back in time also implies that the universe has a memory of what the previous state was. Where is that recorded? Anyway I could go on and on, but I really hate time travel as a possible concept, pretty much all legit science says it can't happen. You mind as well change the value of pi or the planck constant.

you worry about the practical too much. all you need is the right phone booth or hot tub and its all take care of. .

All fun stuff to think of but in reality today is today. in order for anyone to visit us, a very similar set of technical hurdles need to be conquered.

However just imagine of we were as we are now during the age of the dinosaurs. BBQs would be awsome and we would have millions of years of technological evolution under our belt. looking at cellphones and tvs today look like the jetsons cartoon from the 70s. all we need is flying cars the fold into a briefcase, . Fun topic.

We cant even capture Bigfoot. what is the likelyhood of capturing a UFO?

 

[Wolf359]

you worry about the practical too much. all you need is the right phone booth or hot tub and its all take care of. .

All fun stuff to think of but in reality today is today. in order for anyone to visit us, a very similar set of technical hurdles need to be conquered.

Here's the basic time travel paradox, not even the grandfather paradox.

You just go back in time 15 seconds and you shoot yourself before you activate the time machine. What happened?

 

[danez_yoda]

Here's the basic time travel paradox, not even the grandfather paradox.

You just go back in time 15 seconds and you shoot yourself before you activate the time machine. What happened?

you collect on your own 10million dollar life insurance policy and dont do it a second time. .

 

[Heywood_6078]

In and immense and maybe unending universe, anything is possible. We can only see what can be seen with our most powerful telescopes. We may never even be able to leave our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. Estimates put it at 70,000 light years across, with billions of stars and who knows how many planets circling these stars. Possibly many like our own. Or, life sustaining in one form or another. Many we can't even possibly conceive.
Our human minds aren't capable of really calculating such vast distances, and what may lie in the unknown. My
problem with other visitors is, how could they ever get here traveling hundreds or thousands, or millions of light years, and still be alive?
It is mind boggling indeed, imho. (But, may be possible in ways we cannot even comprehend)

 

[Wolf359]

In and immense and maybe unending universe, anything is possible. We can only see what can be seen with our most powerful telescopes. We may never even be able to leave our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. Estimates put it at 70,000 light years across, with billions of stars and who knows how many planets circling these stars. Possibly many like our own. Or, life sustaining in one form or another. Many we can't even possibly conceive.
Our human minds aren't capable of really calculating such vast distances, and what may lie in the unknown. My
problem with other visitors is, how could they ever get here traveling hundreds or thousands, or millions of light years, and still be alive?
It is mind boggling indeed, imho. (But, may be possible in ways we cannot even comprehend)

Here's a good article that talks about the size of the observable and unobservable universe.

How Much Of The Unobservable Universe Will We Someday Be Able To See?

As more time passes since the Big Bang, more of the Universe comes into view. But how much?

www.forbes.com

As for aliens traveling here, you might have to do it with machines. Von Neumann machines that build other machines that eventually can put together life forms. You already have the human genome mapped, just some engineering to eventually build humans from scratch from a big database. And yeah, at about 100k light years across, even if you can only do 5-10% light speed, you can explore the galaxy in a million to two million years. But will anyone be here in a couple million years?

Breakthrough Starshot has up to 15-20% light speed, only problem is that you can't stop and the payload is very limited.

Breakthrough Starshot - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[BMWTurboDzl]

An astrophysist opined that in relation to the age of the universe the lifespan of civilizations were like fireflys. The odds of having two develop within the same time frame and make contact before they collapsed were astronomically low.

Time makes it so difficult to find other civilizations because the pictures we see today are events which occurred ten's or hundreds of millions of years ago.

 

[BMWTurboDzl]

This is one of those issues I find has so many different claims that I don’t even bother to read “news” about it anymore. However I highly value the intelligent discussion herein.

I know I’ve seen two very unusual aerial objects that were manmade military craft.

I am fairly certain that I’d know by now if the government was hiding knowledge of any extraterrestrial craft or beings. I climbed the ranks of various army special operations units. I ended my service in a very unique unit whose mission was counterterrorism and we often traveled, trained, and socialized with foreign units. I’ve traveled the world and socialized with soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. I went on to have a civilian career in one of the three letter agencies where I rose up a couple of levels before retirement. I’ve been in mixed company where large amounts of alcohol were consumed and lips loosened and things were said that shouldn’t have been. Yet never, not once, have I ever heard any rumor or fact that related to government knowledge of extraterrestrial anything. Of all of the wild stories I’ve heard and the actual secret assignments I was involved in, not once was there any mention of what I’d consider UFOs, beings from other planets, beings from other solar systems, recovered wreckage, etc.

It just strikes me as nearly impossible for any of that to exist if I didn’t encounter it at some point in my career, especially considering all of the “characters” I’ve met and socialized with.

Ya, it requires a certain psychological profile where on faith alone one will believe that only they "know the truth" about XYZ which thousands of people across decades are able to keep hidden from the public.

 

[measureman]

An astrophysist opined that in relation to the age of the universe the lifespan of civilizations were like fireflys. The odds of having two develop within the same time frame and make contact before they collapsed were astronomically low.

Time makes it so difficult to find other civilizations because the pictures we see today are events which occurred ten's or hundreds of millions of years ago.

In the grand scheme of the universe maybe the vast distances and time frames were designed to keep civilization's apart.
Look what we have done to each other in a relatively short amount of time.

 

[Wolf359]

In the grand scheme of the universe maybe the vast distances and time frames were designed to keep civilization's apart.
Look what we have done to each other in a relatively short amount of time.

You're just assuming there was a design. Maybe if we were closer to the galactic center and there were other ones close by, they would have wiped each other out. Although I believe if you're closer to the galactic center, there may be more radiation so less likely for life to form.

If you understood quantum entanglement, the nature of the universe seems to be random.

 

[Wolf359]

Well as expected they didn't find aliens or rule them out. Still unidentified.

Watershed U.S. UFO report does not rule out extraterrestrial origin

A U.S. government report on UFOs issued on Friday said defense and intelligence analysts lack sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects observed by American military pilots including whether they are advanced earthly technologies, atmospherics or of an extraterrestrial...

www.reuters.com