Party pooper here to inform you that radio signals don't travel well through space at astronomical distances by getting washed out by all the other natural radio emitters like stars, so it's 100% not aliens.
The PRC stays winning on funding science though.
👽 : Party pooper here to inform you that radio signals don’t travel well through space at astronomical distances by getting washed out by all the other natural radio emitters like stars, so it’s 100% not aliens.
:amogus:
"DefinitelyNotAPhone" he's not even trying to hide he's an alien messenger.
:kim-drip-too-hard: : hello, we would love your assistance in developing our agriculture so we can more easily care for our citizens
:obama-drone: : Uhhhh let me be clear, if we like your planet, we can keep it
:maduro-coffee:: It would be wonderful if we can learn about your energy source so we can finally abandon our dirty fuel source
:guaido:: My first act as the rightfully elected Galactic Community chairman is to privatize all stellar bodies
If first contact happens in my lifetime, I hope it's with the Chinese. Americans would be so buttmad if the commies talked to the aliens before they did lol.
The psychic damage to liberalism and fascism around the world would be the sweetest thing ever experienced
Right wing then brands them as demons, manages to take out a single shuttle pod with an army of chuds, the aliens leave
I'm just saying there's a reason the federation waits a bit and scouts things out before first contact
inb4 its already happened thats why US made spaceforce and china is just talking to them cause posadas was right
The US tries to do imperialism on the aliens, get instantly vaporized.
You know how Plan 9 From Outer Space had that line "You people of Earth and your stupid minds! STUPID!!!"? The alien was saying that because he was demonstrating his spaceship's futuristic fuel source to some Earthlings, and the American in the group immediately asks if they could build a bomb with it.
Sir we've decoded the message
* sweating profusely *
It appears to be a space-pig with space-poop on its space-balls
Here's hoping :posadas: was right, aliens are communists, and are going to help China spread communism globally.
The pulse remains consistent for several years until suddenly it stops.
Shortly thereafter, an identical pattern is picked up except this time it is moving toward earth and estimated to be somewhere around Pluto.
The signal is traced to an object roughly the size of Europa in a perfectly cylindrical shape with a hollow space running through it.
The interior surface appears to be covered with moving parts and/or separate individual drones.
After months of observation the interior of the ship suddenly "turns on" through the body of the ship space telescopes observe an arrangement of stars as yet unseen.
The image shimmers, distorts., and something begins to emerge.
Posadism with chinese characteristics :posadas: :left-unity-2: :coming-to-xi-you:
Galactic Chairman K*qzh!*g-Thk my species yearns for sweet release, please send Relativistic Kill Vehicle.
ok, off topic but does anyone want to talk about how weird the UAP stuff is?
If you're kinda out of the loop here's a few things. The US government has basically acknowledged encountering (fairly regularly too) flying objects which preform maneuvers that known human aircraft cannot do. They claim it's not American.
It's just weird cause with that acknowledgment there's only a few outcomes: 1 - it's Russian or Chinese (lmao who would actually believe this outside of the most brainwormed nat-sec ghouls) 2 - it's American and they don't want to acknowledge this. But if the Americans could build hypersonic tic-tacs that can stop on a dime, why are they still fucking around with fixed wing drones? 3 - it's a psy-op. This doesn't make a ton of sense to me cause it's so outlandish. It'd be like saying we need to invade Iraq cause Saddam Hussein is holding Santa Claus hostage. 4 - The government is bad at their jobs and can't recognize mundane objects and misinterprets them as extraordinary. totally possible. 5 - its aliens.
Claiming one of your designated enemies has a top secret superweapon is a great excuse to justify infinite military budgets.
:citations-needed: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-117-the-always-lagging-us-war-machine
flying objects which preform maneuvers that known human aircraft cannot do
99% of the time this is people not understanding how cameras work and 1% of the time it's like the f-117
check out the Cmdr david fravor story. unless it is a complete OP (possible, I don't like how he went on Joe Rogan and Lex Freidman's podcasts, those 2 seem to be used to disseminate CIA propaganda), it's basically proof of aliens visiting earth.
Doesn't have to be an OP. Could be contradicting his past self completely just to get those sweet media bucks.
Now it's mostly drones. They can have basically any shape and move in really chaotic ways which can confuse people trying to figure out movement. Like looking through a screen and your eyes not adjusting to the depth
Wasn't one of them an out of focus plane ("""strange""" phenomenon easily replicated with a cheap lens), another a duck, and the tic tac story is filled with more contradictions than capitalism that it has just as much credibility as History channel docs on time traveling nazis at this point?
Dumbest part is about them "breaking the laws of physics". If they exist, no they didn't. It doesn't matter who built them, that's not how any of this works. Aliens don't have a special permit that exempts them from physics lmao.
There is no theoretical engine that could bring a living organism from another galaxy to ours, certainly not some kind of carrier ship that brings small craft that can operate in our atmosphere. Show me the engine that the aliens used, then I'll believe you.
I get wanting proof, but the theoretical basis for space rockets only (arguably) came into existence with Tsilokovsky's rocket equation in 1896. Before that, a modern rocket would have failed your "show me the engine" test.
And that's just the difference a century or so makes. An alien species could be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years older than us.
My understanding is that earlier science never exactly forbade any modern technology like space rockets at a fundamental level. There didn't exist any models that would give you a clear framework of how to build a space rocket, but generally it wouldn't be thought of as impossible. Rather it'd just be considered an extremely hard engineering problem.
But at this point prohibitions on going faster than light are exactly as fundamental as prohibitions on breaking causality, in fact general relativity has shown them to be identical. We know for a fact general relativity is an incomplete model of reality, but a more complete theory won't be changing any of those fundamental principles. For example, before Einstein came along scientists already knew Newtonian physics was an incomplete picture of reality, but they also knew a more complete theory wouldn't be changing fundamental principles like conservation of momentum. These more accurate theories typically give us a more detailed understanding of the limits of our universe rather than blowing up the limits we already know of.
Science will never be over of course, there will always be more to discover. But I don't think that necessarily means we're bound to invent more and more powerful technology forever as time goes on. There's really no reason to think that the rapid, exponential technological development of the past couple thousand years has to continue on forever.
I basically agree with everything you've said.
That said, my point basically boils down to how hard it is to predict the results of even 150 years of human advancement, so we can't really even begin to fathom what a hypothetical alien species with 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 years of additional advancement might understand that we don't.
I'm not saying that the UFOs are here and they're probing our cows. I'm really just saying that we fundamentally don't know what we don't know.
CW: debate nerd shit
You could have infinite time, you still can't break the laws of physics, which is the problem the magical tic tac faces.
I could just as well say that the clouds are disguised UFOs but we can't tell because it's magic alien technology. It's an unfalsifiable defense in the same vein as teacups floating in outer space.
The laws of physics as we understood them in 1896 were not the same as we understand them to be now. I imagine that in 2896 they'll be different to how we understand them to be now.
Believing that our current understanding of physical laws is correct and immutable is anti-materalistic. There are still many physical forces and phenomena that we don't understand, or are barely even aware of.
Inertia defying tic tacs sounds like bullshit space magic to us now, but if you showed streaming a video over wifi to a scientist from the 1800s they'd probably think it was bullshit aether magic too.
Edit: Just to be clear though, I don't necessarily think that UFOs have visited Earth, I just think that denying the possibility based on our understanding of science is wonky reasoning.
Ok? Defying inertia is nowhere near the same thing as streaming. The internet doesn't violate one of the most basic laws of physics. You could defend perpetual motion machines using the same logic.
Comrade, there's debate nerd shit and then there's ignoring the thesis and argument to pick at an example out of context.
It's not out of context, it fits perfectly. It's basically impossible to prove you wrong since you can always respond if "what if science is wrong tho".
"Science has been wrong before" is a thoroughly debunked line of reasoning, usually trotted out to defend homeopathy and the like. But maybe, just maybe, we'll find an apple that falls upwards onto the tree rather than the other way around, because geocentrism was a thing once.
My argument is not that science is wrong, it's that science scientific understanding from time to time is imperfect. That's why science keeps doing things that were previously thought impossible.
"Science has been wrong before" as used to disprove science is, of course, bullshit. However, the idea that any of our current understandings of science is absolutely true and immutable is also equally anti-scientific bullshit.
The theoretical physicists working on things like tachyons would like nothing more than to be the next people to rewrite the laws of physics. Equating them to homeopaths and luddites is laughable.
Equating physicists working on tachyons to denying inertia is laughable too.
Is it also anti-scientific to say perpetual motion is impossible because we might be wrong about thermodynamics?
Nothing can ever be disproven. You could use this argument to claim anything and everything on the basis that the counter-evidence might be wrong.
inertia is a weird one. mostly it just means the state something is in when there are no forces acting on it. but general relatively theorized that an object in a gravitational field with no other forces acting on it is also in an inertial frame. it implies gravity isn't a force in the same way as electromagnetism - gravity bends space and time such that you're moving on a straight (inertial) line in free-fall even though you, for example, appear to be in a circular orbit.
so there's definitely room for our understanding of inertia to evolve, especially as we work out how to put gravity in the same framework as the other fundamental forces. I don't think it'll lead to faster than light travel but I'm speculating now on work thousands of brilliant people have failed to crack. just pointing out that there's a giant gap in our knowledge here where we have two very well verified theories that straight up disagree.
Is it also anti-scientific to say perpetual motion is impossible because we might be wrong about thermodynamics?
It is not anti-scientific to say that perpetual motion or faster than light travel or inertialess propulsion are impossible given our current understanding of physical laws. It is anti-scientific to say that our understanding of physical laws is perfect and not subject to change.
Nothing can ever be disproven. You could use this argument to claim anything and everything on the basis that the counter-evidence might be wrong.
My argument is not that inertialess propulsion exists and that we have observed it. I am not trying to prove that UFOs exist.
The only thing I am asserting is that scientific understanding is always imperfect and prone to to being expanded upon and corrected. Unless you really disagree with this statement, we really are just arguing around in circles.
I don't believe that scientific understanding is immutable, I just strongly believe that our conception of inertia, with its metric ton of evidence is correct, therefore discrediting the idea that this was an alien spacecraft capable of defying our conception of Inertia.
This does not rule out the possibility of UFOs with aliens in them, it just means that popular descriptions of what this particular event was are almost certainly wrong.
I understand that geocentrism was once the scientific consensus. This was obviously wrong. Arguments for geocentrism mainly centered on the lack of evidence of parallex, which wasn't found until the 1800s. But the main arguments weren't that it was physically impossible for a heliocentric system to exist, just that our world wasn't that way.
Sorry for any hostility. I probably need to log off.
This does not rule out the possibility of UFOs with aliens in them, it just means that popular descriptions of what this particular event was are almost certainly wrong.
Oh I agree. Plus, even if the descriptions were right, there are a lot of other more plausible phenomena that one could point to before going to inertialess drive.
Even if one wants to think it was aliens, then a decoy system using a stealth coating and light projection is a million percent more plausible, and I just pulled that out of my ass.
Sorry for any hostility. I probably need to log off.
Nah all good comrade. Sometimes it's fun to debate nerd out.
yeah but 1896 is pre-theory of relativity, which pretty much makes near light-speed travel absolutely impossible.
Sure, but the fact that our understanding of these physical laws changes over time without the underlying laws changing at all leaves open the possibility that our understanding will change again in the future to allow some kind of practical space travel.
My honest opinion is we are pretty much at the end of our 'tech tree' and there is little else in the way of big advances that will allow us to travel beyond the stars. The only future tech that is theoretically possible at this point is fusion energy, which would be great, but would still not allow for reasonable space travel for any biologic.
Theory of relatively very cleanly disallows movement of mass at near light speed, so its extremely unlikely we will ever leave our solar system. There is no other known phenomenon that we could speculate that would make things any easier.
This reads to me like physics as presented by Francis Fukuyama. I don't think I've ever seen a scientist seriously propose this view.
Keep it down
The aliens won't reveal themselves to us if they hear we have an unbeliever in our midst
You can justify ratcheting up defense spending without pointing to your earthly neighbors so as to not also turn the tension dial to 11. Not that anyone could easily see through it, but somebody must think it's a good strategy.
But if the Americans could build hypersonic tic-tacs that can stop on a dime, why are they still fucking around with fixed wing drones
they're on sale
i dunno why people think aliens visiting earth is such an impossibility. if the universe is infinite, there must be plenty of other intelligent lifeforms out there. surely, humanity in 100,000 years from now can figure out FTL travel?
a) The Milky Way alone has billions of stars with an unknown number of planets. To call earth a needle in a haystack would be a ridiculous understatement.
b) Just faster than light doesn't cut it. Even if you were able to travel a hundred times the speed of light (which would completely break physics as we know it), traveling across the Milky Way in a straight line would still take you like a thousand years. Traveling to the Andromeda galaxy would take you 25,000 years.
c) There's still the very real possibility that FTL travel is straight up impossible (for every life form everywhere) because it would require literally infinite energy. If we could theoretically achieve 99% the speed of light we could travel to other solar systems, but our range would be very limited.
Didn't you already transform into an electric lizard, Lieutenant Commander?
I'm slogging through the first few chapters right now and I'm really looking forward to when the anticommunism stops and the sci-fi kicks in
It's not really anti-communist in the context of a Chinese audience. It can feel that way with all the anti-communist / china bullshit we're surrounded by every day, but the cultural revolution was definitely a very dark and sloppy time for a ton of people who lived through it. Anyway all of the cultural revolution stuff is contained to the exposition iirc so you won't have to deal with it much longer if you choose to keep going.
Remember that the Cultural Revolution was essentially a civil war between competing factions within both the communist party and society at large.. Mao, who by many accounts had one foot out the door of this world (or at least was perceived that way by many in the party, thus bringing up the questions of how the country would be run when he was no longer around) mobilized certain parts of society including students and workers against what he saw as the ossification and bureaucracy of the government. It played out as a struggle for control between the Gang of Four and other factions (which took power after Mao’s death and the overthrow of the Gang of Four) represented by people like Deng (who had been purged during the CR). Many other communist party members and revolutionaries were purged from the party during this time including I believe current president Xi’s own father. It was a time with a lot of suffering, death etc. The CPC since then has cast the era in a more or less negative light. Three Body problem is quite popular within China of course and includes all the same cultural revolution exposition that you’ll find in the English version. It’s meant to explain why somebody who lived through so much chaos might respond to the aliens the way she did.
Liu Cixin has a lot of great ideas, but occasionally (regularly?) cartoonish writing is def a fair critique of him
Yep. I've really liked the first two books after finishing them (will read the third after a detour through Blindsight [thanks to a Hexbear rec] and probably something else in a different genre), but my most cynical take is that the series is stitched together with recycled action movie tropes and forced, smarmy teaching scenes between characters in order to get across a technical point.
I remember when liberals were absolutely fawning over the book and saying it was an allegory for the China-US relations (so of course they claim the genocidal aliens looking to displace entire populations and leave them to die for their own benefit are a metaphor for China and not the US), Disney were even looking to buy the licensing rights to make films which I was pretty hyped.
Then Liu Cixin stated his support for the CPC and that there was no genocide of Uyghur muslims and all the libs immediately pretended he didn't exist.
Speed edit: it turns out it was Netflix looking to do the adaptation and that it was actually five republican senators who wrote an open letter to Netflix accusing them of supporting genocide - literal fucking top-down mcarthyism
Wait did they actually cancel it? I was looking forward to the adaptation, it was supposed to be done with the game of thrones show runners and I never watched GoT but every one talked like it was the best show on TV until towards the end, and that was because they departed significantly from the books, but this is a trilogy that’s already fully published and would have had cooperation of the author. I do remember some lawmakers throwing a fit because the author didn’t toe the American line on Xinjiang lol
it was supposed to be done with the game of thrones show runners
Please god no, David Benioff and Dan Weiss are failson morons who shouldn't be allowed to run any film project outside of a home movie.
Like I said I never actually watched any of GoT and I don’t really know their work
You can google how much the messed up the show if you're interested, there's countless videos and articles out there. But the short of it is that they had the full backing of HBO where pretty much everyone around the two showrunners and head writers were top notch, from costuming to acting to directors. And they were able to follow the first 3 books pretty close to the source material, mostly using book dialogue and with a lot of writing assistance from the novel series author, GRRM. The success went to their heads and they refused to listen to anyone's heads but their own, and GRRM never finished the last two books so they ran out of source material to adapt starting around s5. As they started deviating from source material even as early as s2 and 3, the show got proggressively worse. Generally scenes based closely to the source material was top tier, and scenes or plotlines that deviated or went ahead of the published material had mediocre or crappy writing. The last two seasons were some awful writing with terrible implications (i.e. a girl saying her sexual assaulters made her strong), and the final season is pretty universally hailed as awful, by the main actors as well. The effects were always pretty, but their decisions for plot and dialogue revealed them as hacks.
Wow that wasn't very short, sorry I did that to you.
I mean, when they were working off source material they kind of did a great job.
I just checked to make sure and it seems that they didn't actually cancel it.
FRBs are cool, but there's nothing suggestive of alien origins about them.
What if aliens are sending out radio messages that look like FRBs to throw you off their trail 😳
Huh, I'm surprised we didn't detect it with Arecibo firs- oh yeah, right.
