Moontanman

Thank you, I am just feeling a bit cranky of late.

Shouldn't it have it's own thread? (yeah I got the dig, not what I have been claiming)

So we've gone from CiA agent says aliens are here to aliens might be here because of UFO sightings to visiting being too hard to launching relativistic objects made of solid metal, relativistic kill missiles, the size of the Empire State building to destroy other suns just in case they might be hostile? Things that make you go "WHAT?"

You forgot about a Dyson Beam.

So how much mass would have to be accelerated to relativistic speeds to disrupt the Sun? Jupiter mass object?

Are these photos by people who weren't looking for those animals and only stumbled across them by accident? So we're actually considering launching a projectile massive enough and fast enough to disrupt a star? The sun could absorb an object as massive as Jupiter with no realistic problems.

You are out hiking, you have a camera with you but you are not actively taking photos, suddenly a UFO appears for a few seconds... take a clear picture! I'd be lucky manage to get my camera out much less take a clear picture.

My son works there!

I just made a large pot of purple cabbage and bratwurst... it was very good but made me fart.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this one or not. Reputed to be the clearest UFO picture ever taken. It was taken in 1990 by hikers in scotland.

IMHO the Von Neumann probes are the most likely source for UFOs, if they are not of this planet, but such technology can equally be speculated to create actual biological beings once they arrive, even beings that look like us instead of the original creators of the probes. Once you start speculating about magical technology anything is possible as long as it doesn't violate actual physical laws of the universe. Another "speculation" would be that aliens do not colonise planets or even have an interest in them other than scientific curiosity. Preferring instead to use the resources in orbit of a star like asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects and small moons to manufacture artificial habitats around stars vastly increasing their population density over what they could achieve with just habitable planets. It's quite possible under this scenario that many different species of aliens could exist in one solar system specializing in various ways akin to an ecosystem having varying species of animals all exploiting different niches even preying on each other or living commensally and never bothering with planets and their outrageously different habitats other than possibly studying a particularly interesting aspect of a particular planet... like a planet having an up and coming civilization of its own. The habitats of planets could and probably would not match the habitats of other planets making them problematical to colonise. Even small differences in trace elements could make a planet uninhabitable. A change in levels of something like mercury could make a planet uninhabitable to us but not prevent life from evolving there. Biological problems like virus' or bacteria or biological poisons could prevent colonization of a planet but many millions of artificial habitats could be made from small objects orbiting a star with their internal ecosystems exactly tailored to the needs of the life forms that created them.

The idea of "wokeness" has been distorted by conservative media to mean almost anything other than what it really means. This is understandable due to the conservative political agenda being mostly fear mongering and projection. Much like ANTIFA being labeled as some sort of organised terrorist group when all it really means is that a person is against Fascism. One more thing that conservative media has distorted into a bad thing but if you step back and think... How could being against fascism be a bad thing unless you were supportive of fascism? Sadly politics has degraded into you have to agree with me or you're anti american or or a groomer or some other bullshit that the media wants you to believe about the other side. Both sides use the idea of painting the other as extremists when in reality we all have far more in common than we think. Things like gay marriage or trans rights, or religion vs science are being used to divide and conquer us all. I often wonder what happened to minding our own business or defending those who are different. People need to remember that if something can happen to the other person it can also happen to you. Being smug because you aren't one of the others is a path to having your own rights trampled. Both sides seem to be engaged in a war of lies, deception, and fear against the "other" forgetting we are all the other to someone else.

Current thought would seem to favor the idea that radio leakage is constrained to less than 2 light years except for powerful sources like Arecibo or military radars accidentally sweeping over us as they probe objects nearby to them. Things like cosmic dust, gas, plasma, and magnetic fields would absorb any "EM Leakage" but we have seen sources that resembled military radar or radio telescopes being used to image objects that would be nearby to them. Then there is the problem of our own signals getting dimmer over time as the efficiency of the receivers becomes ever more effective requiring less power from the broadcast. We do this and there is no reason others wouldn't do it as well. But such em signals wouldn't repeat and so would not be considered candidates for intelligent signals. The WOW signal would be considered as such and other signals we have detected but never repeated. It is often said that Radio telescopes could detect a signal from across the universe or some such nonsense but that is assuming an intentional signal with very high power beamed directly at us. We have done that only twice that I am aware of and the signal was short and wasn't repeated and so if we had detected such a signal it would have been dismissed.

I agree, I think the "Dark Forest" hypothesis is nothing but paranoia unchained.

Without FTL the idea of invading another planet becomes a many thousands of years effort. Even the fastest STL speeds practical it would be many decades between the Earth and it's nearest neighbors. Seems a herculean effort to stop someone who has the same problems travel to you to cause you any harm. I honestly do not see the logic in it. It would be far easier to maintain a defense than to attack across light years.

Wouldn't FTL be necessary for the dark forest hypothesis to be valad?

Thank you, I apologize for posting it in an inappropriate place. I have been rolling this idea around in my head for quite some time and I want it to be debated appropriately. I know the Faint Young Sun Paradox is a real thing and atmospheres being stripped from smaller planets/moons by the solar wind is a real thing and lack of a magnetic field is thought to accelerate that. My own small contribution is that a planet closer to the sun than, for instance Jupiter's moons, would evolve in the direction of desiccated barron surface from a rocky core with and ice shell is just my speculation.

What exactly are you asking for? I have proposed that the faint young sun and the surface features we see today are explained by the ice world scenario I propose and the effect of the solar wind. Should I have posted this in speculations?

In the distant past our Sun was much dimmer than it is today, the science on this is pretty much confirmed, Faint sun paradox , during this time the Earth is thought to have had a large amounts of CO2 and Methane in its atmosphere to allow the Earth to have liquid water on its surface. On the other hand Mars is considered by many as too small to have had such an extensive atmosphere. I am proposing that Mars was an ice world similar to Jupiter's Moon Callisto but much larger. Being an ice encased world would allow for liquid water at the surface covered by a world wide ice sheet with a very thin atmosphere. As the magnetic field of Mars was lost the Solar Wind would have swept the atmosphere of Mars away and slowly stripped away the ice by photo desiccation of the ice shell of Mars. This would have resulted in the surface being eroded by water while the ice shell was intact and as the ice shell was eroded and swept away the surface of Mars would have become the dessicated surface we see but with evidence of water flowing as well. Much like water flowing beneath a glacier on earth but on a much larger scale. The would allow for the faint young sun and the evidence of liquid water on Mars.

I define "woke" as having empathy for others.

Yet pilots did report these objects, close up, and one pilot reported "they are all around me... what do I do?' This is true. I have no respect for Don Menzel, he was an arch debunker in the pay of the air force and always asserted there was no possibility of any sighting being anything but misidentification or hoaxes. Still the Radar operators were quite used to weather inversions and this doesn't explain the close up balls of fire that were reported by the the military. Read the reports closely in an neutral mindset. I am fond of Gary Larson as well. The Gov is currently in a big uproar over UFOs being seen from Navy ships and radar and gun camera footage has been released. An official investigation is currently underway. The dark forest assumes that aliens conquer each other but even with FTL the logistics of invading and taking over a planet is quite an undertaking. Personally I think it's highly likely that "aliens" ignore planets and colonize places like the Kuiper belt and or asteroids. The gravity wells of planets like Earth preclude any mining of resources when things like Asteroids or Kuiper Belt objects are much easier to obtain resources from. Then you have the potential problem of infectious organisms and rowdy natives. I have my doubts that aliens have any use for planets at all, preferring to build artificial habitats from the materials already in orbit of a sun and even between stars. Their interest in us would be academic, akin to us sending researchers to some far flung island to study a new culture. Then there is the Idea of alien missionaries... which is arguably the most disturbing.

I would suggest you ignore claims that come with no evidence or useless evidence and concentrate on the dozens if not hundreds of reports that come with an embarrassment of evidence. Such claims are not uncommon, one that I often cite is the Washington DC Merry Go Round in 1952 This event was distorted and obfusticated by the Gov that it remains the most debunked and believed report of all time, IMHO. Two things that stood out was that the gov attempted to write it off as nothing but a weather inversion that fooled radar operators yet the objects were seen by multiple independent observers, both military and civilian, multiple independent radars, the objects interacted with both civilian and military aircraft and the idea of a weather inversion, which was the official explanation was trivially falsified. I have my doubts that a weather inversion creates anomalous lights in the sky as seen by many independent ground observers much less the interaction between the objects and aircraft. Do I know what it was... no absolutely not, but I am quite sure the official explanation was pulled from someplace the sun doesn't shine. Not being able to say "I don't know" is one of the gov most profound flaws. I understand this but neither of us is qualified to really judge the accuracy of the photo. I have to give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who took the photos and not us armchair quarterbacks. If am correctly identifying what you are talking about it's far to fuzzy to make any kind of judgement call as to what it was if anything. One of the pictures I gave a link to and is often touted as one of the best ever ufo photos was taken in Scotland, a great many sightings are from England, France, Norway, Germany, Russia, and other places around Europe A little bit of UFO humor to break any hostility that has been building up... if any.

ROFLMAO!

Again, extraterrestrial origin is just one hypothesis, no one should make the claim they are alien spacecraft without some extraordinary evidence but we do not require evidence beyond what is probable to convict someone in court of a crime. I think testimony from someone like Astronaut Gordon Cooper where he describes what appears to be a saucer shaped craft landing at an airforce base and being filmed is quite compelling maybe not enough to be absolutely sure but since when does science require absolute proof? I agree. Do you really think that we are likely to obtain such evidence? Motivations of aliens is... alien. we cannot require or even guess what the motivations of extraterrestrials might be or how they go about satisfying these motivations. I would be willing to contest this idea with you. Ridicule serves no purpose other than deterring anyone from making these reports. So you would dismiss a real alien spacecraft that landed near you because you can't make it happen again? Somethings do not repeat but are still real. Once while night diving near shore here where i live I saw what appeared to be a giant shark swim past me. It was gigantic, two to three times as long as i was tall, maybe bigger. I reported it to people at the dive shop and a couple marine biologists I knew. I was ridiculed immediately, no such shark existed in these waters, no one had ever seen such a beast here ever, no one had any reason to think such a beast could even live around here. A couple decades later up in and around Maine where such sharks do exist they tagged a large female around 16 feet long with a radio transmitter. Low and behold this shark was shown to spend considerable time around the entrance to the inlet I was diving in here in NC... Never dismiss an eyewitness because they saw something you don't believe they could have. No that sort of quality evidence is being dismissed and ridiculed due to them always being blamed on hoaxers using photoshop. The web is covered by such photos and reports but redicule prevent them from being taken seriously. I showed reasonably clear photos from a time when photos were generally difficult to "photoshop" by the vast majority of people and you dismiss them because you still don't think they are clear enough? In that time period taking a clear photo of an unexpected moving object was challenge to say the least. Then you need to take another look, the ground effect appears to be directly under the object. Admittedly the distances are difficult to judge but throwing a truck mirror at just the ring time to appear above a dust cloud on the ground seems a bit of a stretch considering the person who took it had a clean background and his testimony in a court of law would have been enough to convict others of a crime. How can you just dismiss this person and the photo like they mean nothing?