• communism_liker_69 [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • Nakoichi [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Claiming one of your designated enemies has a top secret superweapon is a great excuse to justify infinite military budgets.

    • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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

      • yellowparenti5 [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        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.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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

    • VILenin [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

    • makotech222 [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.

        • cosecantphi [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          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.

          • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            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.

        • VILenin [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          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.

          • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            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.

            • VILenin [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              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.

              • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Comrade, there's debate nerd shit and then there's ignoring the thesis and argument to pick at an example out of context.

                • VILenin [he/him]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  3 years ago

                  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.

                  • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    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.

        • makotech222 [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          yeah but 1896 is pre-theory of relativity, which pretty much makes near light-speed travel absolutely impossible.

          • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            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.

            • makotech222 [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              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.

              • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                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.

      • newmou [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Said the scientist about illness before germ theory was discovered

    • VILenin [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

    • Phish [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Well now I'm terrified of the US government's hypersonic tic-tacs.

    • StellarTabi [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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

    • yellowparenti5 [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      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?

      • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.