The Navy does not see them as that. By their own accounts dozens of non classified encounters have been small objects at close range or large objects at extreme range, and even more that have been astronomical objects.
Pilots have extreme difficulty telling visually if an object is near or far, binocular vision doesn't work at those ranges and there is a lack of reference points. When they accurately know the size of an object accuracy is within 30-50% but tests have shown all it takes to destroy even that is to paint a plane to look like a different plane or to break up it's outline - with just a paint job pilots have been shown to misjudge distance by two to three orders of magnitude. With completely unknown objects by even more, distance estimates are dependent on key assumptions that can't be evaluated and are completely invalid if those assumptions are wrong.
The entire purpose of modern avionics is that pilots can't trust their eyes at the ranges and speeds they work in, and it has not escaped the military's note or pilots ridicule that these encounters consistently happen when pilots disregard avionics with no cause and trust their senses.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
The Navy does not see them as that. By their own accounts dozens of non classified encounters have been small objects at close range or large objects at extreme range, and even more that have been astronomical objects.
Pilots have extreme difficulty telling visually if an object is near or far, binocular vision doesn't work at those ranges and there is a lack of reference points. When they accurately know the size of an object accuracy is within 30-50% but tests have shown all it takes to destroy even that is to paint a plane to look like a different plane or to break up it's outline - with just a paint job pilots have been shown to misjudge distance by two to three orders of magnitude. With completely unknown objects by even more, distance estimates are dependent on key assumptions that can't be evaluated and are completely invalid if those assumptions are wrong.
The entire purpose of modern avionics is that pilots can't trust their eyes at the ranges and speeds they work in, and it has not escaped the military's note or pilots ridicule that these encounters consistently happen when pilots disregard avionics with no cause and trust their senses.
I'm not very experienced in boating, but on a trip once took a catamaran between two cities on the Mediterranean. I recall when we neared the destination I saw pale white ruins, like something out of Lord of the Rings. As we drew closer I realized my sense of scale was completely tripped up and what looked like blocks from Roman ruins near to us were normal city buildings much further away. It's easy to imagine all sorts of weird mental errors flying around at high altitude and speed.
Hell, pilots have crashed because they didn't realize they were flying upside-down.
I'm on the "swamp gas reflecting the light of Venus on the side of a weatherballoon" side on this one. (I.e., a mundane, terrestrial if possibly somewhat rare explanation.)
My problem with the whole "There are aliens flying around in the atmosphere" thing is that it makes no practical sense.
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
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MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
In 2045, a high resolution picture of an alien spacecraft is finally achieved, and what is revealed shocks the world:
A cardboard and sharpie note held up to the cockpit glass that reads "notice me, senpai".
My problem with the whole "There are aliens flying around in the atmosphere" thing is that it makes no practical sense.
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
Oh that's easy. They've decided to not contact us but use us as a training run for their new teams
My dad watches a ton of Air Disasters, which documents airplane crashes.
Lots of times it comes down to pilot error. Misread a warning, forgot which flaps are up or down, turn off the wrong engine.
Heck, sometimes they mistake what altitude they are at. One time a plane crashed because they misjudged the distance to the runway by about a mile. And these were all experienced pilots. People, even the best trained ones, make mistakes.
Edit: or look at the times a nations military downed a commercial airliner by accident.
My dad watches a ton of Air Disasters, which documents airplane crashes.
Lots of times it comes down to pilot error. Misread a warning, forgot which flaps are up or down, turn off the wrong engine.
Heck, sometimes they mistake what altitude they are at. One time a plane crashed because they misjudged the distance to the runway by about a mile. And these were all experienced pilots. People, even the best trained ones, make mistakes.
Edit: or look at the times a nations military downed a commercial airliner by accident.
That show drives me crazy because it's on the Smithsonian channel and I expect to see history stuff when I look there but get airplanes go brrr
My problem with the whole "There are aliens flying around in the atmosphere" thing is that it makes no practical sense.
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
That's only true if they were just looking. If you wanted to collect things from the surface, or put things down there, then you would need to go down from orbit or in from the outer system. And even people who think that UFOs could be alien craft, it doesn't mean they think all of them are. We're working from a case where a starting assumption of zero encounters leads to a lot of reported sightings, easy to see how one or two real ones would have a similar effect.
Then we've got two scenarios - there's not many probes/missions being run, at least at once (though over the last 60 years we've had over 50 missions to Mars so most years there has been at least something active there or going there, if not multiple things) and it's a big planet. Or the craft are usually hidden, and we just detect the 1% of instances where something has gone wrong - or possibly both combined. Clearly there is some element of 'interplanetary hygine' or 'prime directive' rule where interactions with humans is considered undesireable so other than a few mistakes, missions are planned in areas and at times were they would expect to avoid a large scale response, and equipment is not left where it would be encountered or retrieved by the inhabitants.
As for the time, space is big - so if a planet was found that was unexpectedly inhabited by complex life, possibly even something you recognise as being civilised, if you're communicating at lightspeed then there's a long delays as your probes communicate with the explorer/scout fleet and back to whatever home world you came from. Decade or century long observation doesn't seem unreasonable at all - or even a hang back and watch until you're contacted back approach. However that doesn't mean you might not have minimally invasive data collection, especially when conditions on the ground are changing very rapidly and you might even need to recover earlier probes to maintain secrecy as populations move and the ability to detect them improves.
If the situation was reversed, I think the decision of what to do with that planet would take at least a decade or two to sort out, then add on communication time, travel time and the time to build and design new probes for the undated mission.
My problem with the whole "There are aliens flying around in the atmosphere" thing is that it makes no practical sense.
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
That's only true if they were just looking. If you wanted to collect things from the surface, or put things down there, then you would need to go down from orbit or in from the outer system. And even people who think that UFOs could be alien craft, it doesn't mean they think all of them are. We're working from a case where a starting assumption of zero encounters leads to a lot of reported sightings, easy to see how one or two real ones would have a similar effect.
Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence, etc. If your position is that there are aliens visiting Earth and people have seen them then it seems counter to your purposes to say, "Well, 99% of the time when someone sees a UFO it's something totally explicable." If you've got 1 unexplained event and say, "It's aliens!" then sure, maybe. If you've got 100 unexplained events and say 99 are explicable but that last one is totally aliens... I'm going to say, "Okay, but isn't it a lot more likely it's one of the 99 other things?"
Then we've got two scenarios - there's not many probes/missions being run, at least at once (though over the last 60 years we've had over 50 missions to Mars so most years there has been at least something active there or going there, if not multiple things) and it's a big planet. Or the craft are usually hidden, and we just detect the 1% of instances where something has gone wrong - or possibly both combined. Clearly there is some element of 'interplanetary hygine' or 'prime directive' rule where interactions with humans is considered undesireable so other than a few mistakes, missions are planned in areas and at times were they would expect to avoid a large scale response, and equipment is not left where it would be encountered or retrieved by the inhabitants.
As for the time, space is big - so if a planet was found that was unexpectedly inhabited by complex life, possibly even something you recognise as being civilised, if you're communicating at lightspeed then there's a long delays as your probes communicate with the explorer/scout fleet and back to whatever home world you came from. Decade or century long observation doesn't seem unreasonable at all - or even a hang back and watch until you're contacted back approach. However that doesn't mean you might not have minimally invasive data collection, especially when conditions on the ground are changing very rapidly and you might even need to recover earlier probes to maintain secrecy as populations move and the ability to detect them improves.
If the situation was reversed, I think the decision of what to do with that planet would take at least a decade or two to sort out, then add on communication time, travel time and the time to build and design new probes for the undated mission.
Space is big. Entirely too big for someone to just stumble across us and then spend a century deciding what to do about it. You wouldn't come to Earth accidentally because there are way too many planets out there to randomly* pick this one. If we mounted an interstellar mission and decided "Let's go check out Kepler-442b" we'd decide what the mission should do if it encounters life of any kind, including intelligent life, before they even left. Aliens probably think differently than we do, though. Maybe they never even considered that there might be other intelligent life in the universe. Who knows.
Still: why would they keep visiting the surface during the decades they wait for word back from mission control? And if they keep visiting the surface... it's easy enough to miss a small craft blipping through the atmosphere. It's a lot harder to miss hundreds of alien away missions wandering around the surface, or at least evidence that such a visit happened.
Or, if you say, "Well, they're here but they don't actually visit that often" then you're right back to "And why is the 1 time you haven't explained not more likely the same terrestrial causes as the 99 times you have?"
* The far more likely scenario than either aliens coming to Earth entirely coincidentally, not expecting to find anything, or aliens coming here on purpose because they thought Earth was a likely candidate for life is that some alien ship shows up as part of their automated von Neumann probe fleet, in which case it would either cruise blithely around the system not trying to hide at all or would stop off long enough to eat a comet and then keep going; not chill for a few decades while wasting fuel going up and down the gravity well.
My problem with the whole "There are aliens flying around in the atmosphere" thing is that it makes no practical sense.
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
Perhaps they simply don't regard our species, or civilization, as something they should take an interest in; assuming they have noticed it at all, and assuming we would know what "taking an interest" looked like.
They could be passing void-creatures, idly breaching in our atmosphere on their way to somewhere more interesting.
At the same time, we could also be the subjects of intense scrutiny by alien researchers curious about the impact of this behavior, if any, on developing civilizations along the migratory paths of these creatures.
My problem with the whole "There are aliens flying around in the atmosphere" thing is that it makes no practical sense.
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
Perhaps they simply don't regard our species, or civilization, as something they should take an interest in; assuming they have noticed it at all, and assuming we would know what "taking an interest" looked like.
They could be passing void-creatures, idly breaching in our atmosphere on their way to somewhere more interesting.
At the same time, we could also be the subjects of intense scrutiny by alien researchers curious about the impact of this behavior, if any, on developing civilizations along the migratory paths of these creatures.
Neither of those explain why they'd be going up and down our gravity well all the time for decades.
If they don't give a shit about us or our planet, why are they still here slash why do they keep coming back?
If they don't give a shit about us but do care about the planet then they wouldn't bother to hide and their presence on, above, and around our planet for decades would be obvious.
If they give a shit and are studying us, why take the risk of flying down to the planet all the time instead of studying us from orbit?
If they're studying us from hiding and have some legit reason for coming down to the surface all the time but are so amazing at stealth that they can not only mount surface missions without ever being seen on the surface or having evidence of their visit found later and they're able to hide their orbiting ships then why are they so bad at atmospheric craft stealth that people keep seeing them on the way in between the two?
PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
It turns out that oxygenated atmospheres work like coffee on 99% of the races in the galaxy and you just would not believe what a few liters of pure, concentrated, hand-crafted Earth Air tastes like. Now your mornings can also enjoy the rich flavor of air recycled through ape lungs and infused with just the right amount of petrochemicals.
My problem with the whole "There are aliens flying around in the atmosphere" thing is that it makes no practical sense.
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
Perhaps they simply don't regard our species, or civilization, as something they should take an interest in; assuming they have noticed it at all, and assuming we would know what "taking an interest" looked like.
They could be passing void-creatures, idly breaching in our atmosphere on their way to somewhere more interesting.
At the same time, we could also be the subjects of intense scrutiny by alien researchers curious about the impact of this behavior, if any, on developing civilizations along the migratory paths of these creatures.
Neither of those explain why they'd be going up and down our gravity well all the time for decades.
If they don't give a shit about us or our planet, why are they still here slash why do they keep coming back?
If they don't give a shit about us but do care about the planet then they wouldn't bother to hide and their presence on, above, and around our planet for decades would be obvious.
If they give a shit and are studying us, why take the risk of flying down to the planet all the time instead of studying us from orbit?
If they're studying us from hiding and have some legit reason for coming down to the surface all the time but are so amazing at stealth that they can not only mount surface missions without ever being seen on the surface or having evidence of their visit found later and they're able to hide their orbiting ships then why are they so bad at atmospheric craft stealth that people keep seeing them on the way in between the two?
We're talking about things that, to exist at all, necessarily are able to interact with the physical topology of our dimension in a manner we cannot yet fathom.
What is substantial activity may be undetectable. Detectable activity may be incidental and trivial.
The researchers have never made their presence known, the multidimensional space critters they're studying pop in on rare occasions when they have the sort of itch our planet is good at scratching.
The activity that directly involves our civilization has gone completely without notice, but we notice the latter and try to attribute significance where there is none.
For all we know, they are far more fond of Jupiter and the billions of other stars where we aren't, and the idea that they're 'visiting' us is like thinking a Canadian goose stopped in to see you, personally, because you discovered that you had stepped in goose shit.
My problem with the whole "There are aliens flying around in the atmosphere" thing is that it makes no practical sense.
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
Perhaps they simply don't regard our species, or civilization, as something they should take an interest in; assuming they have noticed it at all, and assuming we would know what "taking an interest" looked like.
They could be passing void-creatures, idly breaching in our atmosphere on their way to somewhere more interesting.
At the same time, we could also be the subjects of intense scrutiny by alien researchers curious about the impact of this behavior, if any, on developing civilizations along the migratory paths of these creatures.
Neither of those explain why they'd be going up and down our gravity well all the time for decades.
If they don't give a shit about us or our planet, why are they still here slash why do they keep coming back?
If they don't give a shit about us but do care about the planet then they wouldn't bother to hide and their presence on, above, and around our planet for decades would be obvious.
If they give a shit and are studying us, why take the risk of flying down to the planet all the time instead of studying us from orbit?
If they're studying us from hiding and have some legit reason for coming down to the surface all the time but are so amazing at stealth that they can not only mount surface missions without ever being seen on the surface or having evidence of their visit found later and they're able to hide their orbiting ships then why are they so bad at atmospheric craft stealth that people keep seeing them on the way in between the two?
We're talking about things that, to exist at all, necessarily are able to interact with the physical topology of our dimension in a manner we cannot yet fathom.
What is substantial activity may be undetectable. Detectable activity may be incidental and trivial.
The researchers have never made their presence known, the multidimensional space critters they're studying pop in on rare occasions when they have the sort of itch our planet is good at scratching.
The activity that directly involves our civilization has gone completely without notice, but we notice the latter and try to attribute significance where there is none.
For all we know, they are far more fond of Jupiter and the billions of other stars where we aren't, and the idea that they're 'visiting' us is like thinking a Canadian goose stopped in to see you, personally, because you discovered that you had stepped in goose shit.
Claiming that UFO sightings are due to ubiquitous but normally-undetectable multi-dimensional entities seems like a stretch to me but okay. I'll just be chilling with the invisible, intangible dragon in my garage.
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Guys, they're ghosts
Aliens aren't real! But souls ascending to The Great Beyond sometimes bounce around in the atmosphere due to all the electronic messages flying about cluttering things up.
Incidentally that's also why the Gods don't get the vast majority of our prayers anymore
Aliens aren't real! But souls ascending to The Great Beyond sometimes bounce around in the atmosphere due to all the electronic messages flying about cluttering things up.
Incidentally that's also why the Gods don't get the vast majority of our prayers anymore
Firstly, we're assuming that there are or could be alien craft amongst the UFOs - I'm not claiming that they are, but if we're talking about whether the behaviour makes sense then we're assuming that at least some of the things are aliens. I was just pointing out that this doesn't mean everything is aliens.
As for repeat visits - you might not have gone to earth at random, but knowing that there is probably life there and knowing what the current situation is there now. If they have an FTL drive then the mission might have been planned for earth based off atomospheric readings from thousands of years ago.
For the sake of the arguement, lets say they can just reach lightspeed, and they're in the TRAPPIST system, so around 40 light years away. First reports of alien activity and 'mysterious airships' appear around the 1880s, so our aliens would have set off on their mission in the 1830s/40s. Which would have given them about 40-50 years to have started planning their mission and building the first generation of probes after detecting the early atmospheric changes from the start of the worldwide industrial revolution.
Turns out this planet is as exciting as we hoped! But you don't send scientists on a 40-year scouting mission, so if you wait for the probe's confirmation (whilst building your ships and continuing to monitor from your home planet) before launching the alien mothership around 1910/1920 to arrive with manned missions in the 50s/60s.
In the meantime, all the requests for new samples and information from the probes are going to be made 'blind' - just based on the 40 year out of date telescope data. Trying to anticipate what the response could be ahead of time in order to get a confirmation within your lifetime rather than wait for the 80 year response time.
Then far as contact goes, you've got 80 years from the manned ships arriving to them getting the go ahead to initiate contact - assuming they've managed to work out a way to communicate with the earthlings. Gorillas in the Mist came out 32 years ago, and yet we'll still trekking into the forest to study gorillas. Not everything is going to be able to be done from orbit, you're going to want atmospheric samples, ground samples - a few individuals for closer study and bits of technology in order to decode some of the signals that you're detecting being transmitted. There's a lot of work to do as you're building up to contact.
Should be 2030/ 2040 if we're liking the way that the industrial revolution lines up with Roswell...
My problem with the whole "There are aliens flying around in the atmosphere" thing is that it makes no practical sense.
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
Perhaps they simply don't regard our species, or civilization, as something they should take an interest in; assuming they have noticed it at all, and assuming we would know what "taking an interest" looked like.
They could be passing void-creatures, idly breaching in our atmosphere on their way to somewhere more interesting.
At the same time, we could also be the subjects of intense scrutiny by alien researchers curious about the impact of this behavior, if any, on developing civilizations along the migratory paths of these creatures.
Neither of those explain why they'd be going up and down our gravity well all the time for decades.
If they don't give a shit about us or our planet, why are they still here slash why do they keep coming back?
If they don't give a shit about us but do care about the planet then they wouldn't bother to hide and their presence on, above, and around our planet for decades would be obvious.
If they give a shit and are studying us, why take the risk of flying down to the planet all the time instead of studying us from orbit?
If they're studying us from hiding and have some legit reason for coming down to the surface all the time but are so amazing at stealth that they can not only mount surface missions without ever being seen on the surface or having evidence of their visit found later and they're able to hide their orbiting ships then why are they so bad at atmospheric craft stealth that people keep seeing them on the way in between the two?
We're talking about things that, to exist at all, necessarily are able to interact with the physical topology of our dimension in a manner we cannot yet fathom.
What is substantial activity may be undetectable. Detectable activity may be incidental and trivial.
The researchers have never made their presence known, the multidimensional space critters they're studying pop in on rare occasions when they have the sort of itch our planet is good at scratching.
The activity that directly involves our civilization has gone completely without notice, but we notice the latter and try to attribute significance where there is none.
For all we know, they are far more fond of Jupiter and the billions of other stars where we aren't, and the idea that they're 'visiting' us is like thinking a Canadian goose stopped in to see you, personally, because you discovered that you had stepped in goose shit.
Claiming that UFO sightings are due to ubiquitous but normally-undetectable multi-dimensional entities seems like a stretch to me but okay. I'll just be chilling with the invisible, intangible dragon in my garage.
I'm just saying that it's like assuming sightings of eye floaters were indications of extraplanetary intelligence before discovering their true nature.
I'm essentially agreeing with you that there's nothing to support it, just pointing out that your points of inquiry do little to address the range of possibilities created when allowing the premise of phenomena that violates our current understanding of physics.
"They probably aren't aliens because there's no evidence of aliens" vs "They probably aren't aliens because why would aliens do that?"
It turns out that oxygenated atmospheres work like coffee on 99% of the races in the galaxy and you just would not believe what a few liters of pure, concentrated, hand-crafted Earth Air tastes like. Now your mornings can also enjoy the rich flavor of air recycled through ape lungs and infused with just the right amount of petrochemicals.
The logical conclusion is that we are poisoning our atmosphere to make it deadly to those air stealing aliens. If you are pushing to reduce CO2 emissions your are really in favor of big alien. Think about.
Environmental Protection Agency? More like Earth Poaching Aliens!
It's sad that I can't fully enjoy the banter on this thread because the whole flat earth society evolution makes me worry that some of these posts will take a life of their own.
It turns out that oxygenated atmospheres work like coffee on 99% of the races in the galaxy and you just would not believe what a few liters of pure, concentrated, hand-crafted Earth Air tastes like. Now your mornings can also enjoy the rich flavor of air recycled through ape lungs and infused with just the right amount of petrochemicals.
It turns out that cow farts are the most valuable resource in the universe. I want to see THAT modeled into my next Stellaris mod.
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
A sophisticated AI meme generator has just created this meme:
I have no reason to doubt the veracity of humanity’s most powerful AI meme generation capabilities. You heard it here folks. The AI computers are predicting aliens are coming.
It turns out that oxygenated atmospheres work like coffee on 99% of the races in the galaxy and you just would not believe what a few liters of pure, concentrated, hand-crafted Earth Air tastes like. Now your mornings can also enjoy the rich flavor of air recycled through ape lungs and infused with just the right amount of petrochemicals.
yeah that honestly feels like the most reasonable explanation if you accept "aliens!" as a premise. we've got a unique chemical soup and demand is for organic, sky-to-siphon artisanal earth atmos, sustainably harvested from a living, breathing planet.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
It turns out that oxygenated atmospheres work like coffee on 99% of the races in the galaxy and you just would not believe what a few liters of pure, concentrated, hand-crafted Earth Air tastes like. Now your mornings can also enjoy the rich flavor of air recycled through ape lungs and infused with just the right amount of petrochemicals.
yeah that honestly feels like the most reasonable explanation if you accept "aliens!" as a premise. we've got a unique chemical soup and demand is for organic, sky-to-siphon artisanal earth atmos, sustainably harvested from a living, breathing planet.
So what you're saying is that Oblivion is our future?
It turns out that oxygenated atmospheres work like coffee on 99% of the races in the galaxy and you just would not believe what a few liters of pure, concentrated, hand-crafted Earth Air tastes like. Now your mornings can also enjoy the rich flavor of air recycled through ape lungs and infused with just the right amount of petrochemicals.
yeah that honestly feels like the most reasonable explanation if you accept "aliens!" as a premise. we've got a unique chemical soup and demand is for organic, sky-to-siphon artisanal earth atmos, sustainably harvested from a living, breathing planet.
So what you're saying is that Oblivion is our future?
It turns out that oxygenated atmospheres work like coffee on 99% of the races in the galaxy and you just would not believe what a few liters of pure, concentrated, hand-crafted Earth Air tastes like. Now your mornings can also enjoy the rich flavor of air recycled through ape lungs and infused with just the right amount of petrochemicals.
yeah that honestly feels like the most reasonable explanation if you accept "aliens!" as a premise. we've got a unique chemical soup and demand is for organic, sky-to-siphon artisanal earth atmos, sustainably harvested from a living, breathing planet.
They've tried suspending heavy elements in a gas, it's just not the same. We're a intergalactic jaguar pooping out coffee beans.
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
It's a little early, but I'm nominating that for the next thread title.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
It turns out that oxygenated atmospheres work like coffee on 99% of the races in the galaxy and you just would not believe what a few liters of pure, concentrated, hand-crafted Earth Air tastes like. Now your mornings can also enjoy the rich flavor of air recycled through ape lungs and infused with just the right amount of petrochemicals.
yeah that honestly feels like the most reasonable explanation if you accept "aliens!" as a premise. we've got a unique chemical soup and demand is for organic, sky-to-siphon artisanal earth atmos, sustainably harvested from a living, breathing planet.
So what you're saying is that Oblivion is our future?
It's sad that I can't fully enjoy the banter on this thread because the whole flat earth society evolution makes me worry that some of these posts will take a life of their own.
It turns out that oxygenated atmospheres work like coffee on 99% of the races in the galaxy and you just would not believe what a few liters of pure, concentrated, hand-crafted Earth Air tastes like. Now your mornings can also enjoy the rich flavor of air recycled through ape lungs and infused with just the right amount of petrochemicals.
yeah that honestly feels like the most reasonable explanation if you accept "aliens!" as a premise. we've got a unique chemical soup and demand is for organic, sky-to-siphon artisanal earth atmos, sustainably harvested from a living, breathing planet.
They've tried suspending heavy elements in a gas, it's just not the same. We're a intergalactic jaguar pooping out coffee beans.
That's why the oil companies won't stop causing climate change and killed the electric car for so long - they're getting technology secretly from the aliens to keep drilling and burning fossil fuels, and if we stop there won't be any more profit motive for the aliens to collect our atmosphere.
It's so obvious, I can't believe we never saw it before.
Didn't this whole thing start with people not believing that someone would order cauliflower as a pizza topping or something, hence CP as a code?
It's dumber than that, IIRC: at some point I guess 4chan et. al. went from saying "child pornography" to "CP" to "cheese pizza", presumably in an increased effort to dodge the cops. (I found an UrbanDictionary definition from 2010 which predates the stolen emails, and thus pizzagate, by six years.)
the big mistake is assuming that Hillary et. al. are Online enough to be aware of said slang and not just, well, be ordering cheese pizza (one of the most inoffensive types of pizza, agreeable to everyone except the lactose intolerant and vegans)
but also, no, it started with people being convinced that the Clintons were up to no good and using every opportunity to create conspiracy theories against them - every death becomes a murder, every word a horrific satanic baby-eating dogwhistle
I'm not sure if anyone else here listens to Knowledge Fight, but I was wondering if there are any thoughts on Alex Jones's descent into cannibalism advocacy.
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Pilots have extreme difficulty telling visually if an object is near or far, binocular vision doesn't work at those ranges and there is a lack of reference points. When they accurately know the size of an object accuracy is within 30-50% but tests have shown all it takes to destroy even that is to paint a plane to look like a different plane or to break up it's outline - with just a paint job pilots have been shown to misjudge distance by two to three orders of magnitude. With completely unknown objects by even more, distance estimates are dependent on key assumptions that can't be evaluated and are completely invalid if those assumptions are wrong.
The entire purpose of modern avionics is that pilots can't trust their eyes at the ranges and speeds they work in, and it has not escaped the military's note or pilots ridicule that these encounters consistently happen when pilots disregard avionics with no cause and trust their senses.
Died late November 2016. Supposedly there was some statement/prophesy Castro made before that he could not die until America was destroyed...
I guess he made it just in time then.
I'm not very experienced in boating, but on a trip once took a catamaran between two cities on the Mediterranean. I recall when we neared the destination I saw pale white ruins, like something out of Lord of the Rings. As we drew closer I realized my sense of scale was completely tripped up and what looked like blocks from Roman ruins near to us were normal city buildings much further away. It's easy to imagine all sorts of weird mental errors flying around at high altitude and speed.
I'm on the "swamp gas reflecting the light of Venus on the side of a weatherballoon" side on this one. (I.e., a mundane, terrestrial if possibly somewhat rare explanation.)
Taking as given that aliens are going to be alien and so we shouldn't ascribe them human motivations... why would they be flying around in our atmosphere teasing planes for decades?
They have interplanetary, manned flight capability. Sitting in orbit is unlikely to be a problem. We can resolve details on the ground from orbit at a scale of centimeters. If they're not on their way to or from the ground, why bother entering the atmosphere at all to do their covert surveilling? If they are landing or leaving during these sightings then where are all the aliens and alien machinery on the ground from decades and decades of landings and take-offs? And what is it they're studying that's taking them half a century plus to decide whether to contact us, ignore us, or wipe us out?
Even if they're staggeringly shy it just makes no sense they'd be bopping around in our atmosphere for 60 plus years while going otherwise entirely undetected.
A cardboard and sharpie note held up to the cockpit glass that reads "notice me, senpai".
Oh that's easy. They've decided to not contact us but use us as a training run for their new teams
Lots of times it comes down to pilot error. Misread a warning, forgot which flaps are up or down, turn off the wrong engine.
Heck, sometimes they mistake what altitude they are at. One time a plane crashed because they misjudged the distance to the runway by about a mile. And these were all experienced pilots. People, even the best trained ones, make mistakes.
Edit: or look at the times a nations military downed a commercial airliner by accident.
That show drives me crazy because it's on the Smithsonian channel and I expect to see history stuff when I look there but get airplanes go brrr
That's only true if they were just looking. If you wanted to collect things from the surface, or put things down there, then you would need to go down from orbit or in from the outer system. And even people who think that UFOs could be alien craft, it doesn't mean they think all of them are. We're working from a case where a starting assumption of zero encounters leads to a lot of reported sightings, easy to see how one or two real ones would have a similar effect.
Then we've got two scenarios - there's not many probes/missions being run, at least at once (though over the last 60 years we've had over 50 missions to Mars so most years there has been at least something active there or going there, if not multiple things) and it's a big planet. Or the craft are usually hidden, and we just detect the 1% of instances where something has gone wrong - or possibly both combined. Clearly there is some element of 'interplanetary hygine' or 'prime directive' rule where interactions with humans is considered undesireable so other than a few mistakes, missions are planned in areas and at times were they would expect to avoid a large scale response, and equipment is not left where it would be encountered or retrieved by the inhabitants.
As for the time, space is big - so if a planet was found that was unexpectedly inhabited by complex life, possibly even something you recognise as being civilised, if you're communicating at lightspeed then there's a long delays as your probes communicate with the explorer/scout fleet and back to whatever home world you came from. Decade or century long observation doesn't seem unreasonable at all - or even a hang back and watch until you're contacted back approach. However that doesn't mean you might not have minimally invasive data collection, especially when conditions on the ground are changing very rapidly and you might even need to recover earlier probes to maintain secrecy as populations move and the ability to detect them improves.
If the situation was reversed, I think the decision of what to do with that planet would take at least a decade or two to sort out, then add on communication time, travel time and the time to build and design new probes for the undated mission.
Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence, etc. If your position is that there are aliens visiting Earth and people have seen them then it seems counter to your purposes to say, "Well, 99% of the time when someone sees a UFO it's something totally explicable." If you've got 1 unexplained event and say, "It's aliens!" then sure, maybe. If you've got 100 unexplained events and say 99 are explicable but that last one is totally aliens... I'm going to say, "Okay, but isn't it a lot more likely it's one of the 99 other things?"
Space is big. Entirely too big for someone to just stumble across us and then spend a century deciding what to do about it. You wouldn't come to Earth accidentally because there are way too many planets out there to randomly* pick this one. If we mounted an interstellar mission and decided "Let's go check out Kepler-442b" we'd decide what the mission should do if it encounters life of any kind, including intelligent life, before they even left. Aliens probably think differently than we do, though. Maybe they never even considered that there might be other intelligent life in the universe. Who knows.
Still: why would they keep visiting the surface during the decades they wait for word back from mission control? And if they keep visiting the surface... it's easy enough to miss a small craft blipping through the atmosphere. It's a lot harder to miss hundreds of alien away missions wandering around the surface, or at least evidence that such a visit happened.
Or, if you say, "Well, they're here but they don't actually visit that often" then you're right back to "And why is the 1 time you haven't explained not more likely the same terrestrial causes as the 99 times you have?"
* The far more likely scenario than either aliens coming to Earth entirely coincidentally, not expecting to find anything, or aliens coming here on purpose because they thought Earth was a likely candidate for life is that some alien ship shows up as part of their automated von Neumann probe fleet, in which case it would either cruise blithely around the system not trying to hide at all or would stop off long enough to eat a comet and then keep going; not chill for a few decades while wasting fuel going up and down the gravity well.
Perhaps they simply don't regard our species, or civilization, as something they should take an interest in; assuming they have noticed it at all, and assuming we would know what "taking an interest" looked like.
They could be passing void-creatures, idly breaching in our atmosphere on their way to somewhere more interesting.
At the same time, we could also be the subjects of intense scrutiny by alien researchers curious about the impact of this behavior, if any, on developing civilizations along the migratory paths of these creatures.
Neither of those explain why they'd be going up and down our gravity well all the time for decades.
If they don't give a shit about us or our planet, why are they still here slash why do they keep coming back?
If they don't give a shit about us but do care about the planet then they wouldn't bother to hide and their presence on, above, and around our planet for decades would be obvious.
If they give a shit and are studying us, why take the risk of flying down to the planet all the time instead of studying us from orbit?
If they're studying us from hiding and have some legit reason for coming down to the surface all the time but are so amazing at stealth that they can not only mount surface missions without ever being seen on the surface or having evidence of their visit found later and they're able to hide their orbiting ships then why are they so bad at atmospheric craft stealth that people keep seeing them on the way in between the two?
What is substantial activity may be undetectable. Detectable activity may be incidental and trivial.
The researchers have never made their presence known, the multidimensional space critters they're studying pop in on rare occasions when they have the sort of itch our planet is good at scratching.
The activity that directly involves our civilization has gone completely without notice, but we notice the latter and try to attribute significance where there is none.
For all we know, they are far more fond of Jupiter and the billions of other stars where we aren't, and the idea that they're 'visiting' us is like thinking a Canadian goose stopped in to see you, personally, because you discovered that you had stepped in goose shit.
Claiming that UFO sightings are due to ubiquitous but normally-undetectable multi-dimensional entities seems like a stretch to me but okay. I'll just be chilling with the invisible, intangible dragon in my garage.
Aliens aren't real! But souls ascending to The Great Beyond sometimes bounce around in the atmosphere due to all the electronic messages flying about cluttering things up.
Incidentally that's also why the Gods don't get the vast majority of our prayers anymore
It was 5G all along!
As for repeat visits - you might not have gone to earth at random, but knowing that there is probably life there and knowing what the current situation is there now. If they have an FTL drive then the mission might have been planned for earth based off atomospheric readings from thousands of years ago.
For the sake of the arguement, lets say they can just reach lightspeed, and they're in the TRAPPIST system, so around 40 light years away. First reports of alien activity and 'mysterious airships' appear around the 1880s, so our aliens would have set off on their mission in the 1830s/40s. Which would have given them about 40-50 years to have started planning their mission and building the first generation of probes after detecting the early atmospheric changes from the start of the worldwide industrial revolution.
Turns out this planet is as exciting as we hoped! But you don't send scientists on a 40-year scouting mission, so if you wait for the probe's confirmation (whilst building your ships and continuing to monitor from your home planet) before launching the alien mothership around 1910/1920 to arrive with manned missions in the 50s/60s.
In the meantime, all the requests for new samples and information from the probes are going to be made 'blind' - just based on the 40 year out of date telescope data. Trying to anticipate what the response could be ahead of time in order to get a confirmation within your lifetime rather than wait for the 80 year response time.
Then far as contact goes, you've got 80 years from the manned ships arriving to them getting the go ahead to initiate contact - assuming they've managed to work out a way to communicate with the earthlings. Gorillas in the Mist came out 32 years ago, and yet we'll still trekking into the forest to study gorillas. Not everything is going to be able to be done from orbit, you're going to want atmospheric samples, ground samples - a few individuals for closer study and bits of technology in order to decode some of the signals that you're detecting being transmitted. There's a lot of work to do as you're building up to contact.
Should be 2030/ 2040 if we're liking the way that the industrial revolution lines up with Roswell...
I'm just saying that it's like assuming sightings of eye floaters were indications of extraplanetary intelligence before discovering their true nature.
I'm essentially agreeing with you that there's nothing to support it, just pointing out that your points of inquiry do little to address the range of possibilities created when allowing the premise of phenomena that violates our current understanding of physics.
"They probably aren't aliens because there's no evidence of aliens" vs "They probably aren't aliens because why would aliens do that?"
The logical conclusion is that we are poisoning our atmosphere to make it deadly to those air stealing aliens. If you are pushing to reduce CO2 emissions your are really in favor of big alien. Think about.
Environmental Protection Agency? More like Earth Poaching Aliens!
I have no reason to doubt the veracity of humanity’s most powerful AI meme generation capabilities. You heard it here folks. The AI computers are predicting aliens are coming.
yeah that honestly feels like the most reasonable explanation if you accept "aliens!" as a premise. we've got a unique chemical soup and demand is for organic, sky-to-siphon artisanal earth atmos, sustainably harvested from a living, breathing planet.
So what you're saying is that Oblivion is our future?
Well, at least it will be stylish.
I'd prefer it be Morrowind
They've tried suspending heavy elements in a gas, it's just not the same. We're a intergalactic jaguar pooping out coffee beans.
Sounds like mole men talk to me.
That's why the oil companies won't stop causing climate change and killed the electric car for so long - they're getting technology secretly from the aliens to keep drilling and burning fossil fuels, and if we stop there won't be any more profit motive for the aliens to collect our atmosphere.
It's so obvious, I can't believe we never saw it before.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I think asking where anything as nut-bars as QAnon 'started' is just asking for pain.
It's dumber than that, IIRC: at some point I guess 4chan et. al. went from saying "child pornography" to "CP" to "cheese pizza", presumably in an increased effort to dodge the cops. (I found an UrbanDictionary definition from 2010 which predates the stolen emails, and thus pizzagate, by six years.)
the big mistake is assuming that Hillary et. al. are Online enough to be aware of said slang and not just, well, be ordering cheese pizza (one of the most inoffensive types of pizza, agreeable to everyone except the lactose intolerant and vegans)
but also, no, it started with people being convinced that the Clintons were up to no good and using every opportunity to create conspiracy theories against them - every death becomes a murder, every word a horrific satanic baby-eating dogwhistle
Except he didn't actually step down, before those 17 days were up he announced he would be staying in his post through the current crisis.
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