Order of Kilopi
My theory is that aliens came thousands of years ago and took away some humans, the humans joined their civilisation and live among them as possibly equals. They then come back in flying saucers to watch over this planet and learn from its cultural and biological ecosystem. In this way mankind would be saved in the event of a catastrophe but the Earth would not. So if you see a real flying saucer it could well be piloted by 100% genetic humans.
Just a thought.
Established Member
Been reading James Hogan, eh?
Fred
"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684
Order of Kilopi
Theory based on what?Originally Posted by Frog march
Order of Kilopi
Based on the fact that he's never met an alien that DIDN'T seem human.
Established Member
I think they're human also. But from a bit closer to home. Spreading the idea that unknown flying machines, which abduct people for experiments, are extraterrestrial has suited the powers that be just fine.
Established Member
Well, as this seems to be the "completely baseless, silly speculation" thread:
UFOs are made of chocolate and come from Saskatchewan. Prove me wrong.
Order of Kilopi
UFOs are made of chocolate and come from Saskatchewan. Prove me wrong.
Ahuh! They don't make Chocolate in Saskatchewan!
Order of Kilopi
I don't think that there is anything wrong with having baseless speculation to come up with a theory. First you come up with a theory and then you look for evidence to corroborate it but you only know how to look once you have a theory. If you didn't have a theory about UFOs you might as well start by looking under your bed.
Perhaps you should email James Randi about this chocolate UFO idea, he could look for chocolate when he next visits a crop circle.
Established Member
Johnw wrote: <<Well, as this seems to be the "completely baseless, silly speculation" thread>>
JohnW, it's been widely reported there was a parallel military space shuttle. If that was going on, that we NOW know about, what else was going on that we don't ? And what's going on now that we aren't told about?
Established Member
Baseless speculation is fine. But when you've come up with a theory, you then need to find the evidence to support it.
Frogmarch, do you have any evidence for your human saucer pilots?
Kzb, do you have any evidence that the government are doing anything other than maintaining a normal level of secrecy?
Order of Kilopi
"In scientific usage, a theory does not mean an unsubstantiated guess or hunch, as it often does in other contexts. A theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a related set of natural or social phenomena." WikipediaI don't think that there is anything wrong with having baseless speculation to come up with a theory. First you come up with a theory and then you look for evidence to corroborate it but you only know how to look once you have a theory. If you didn't have a theory about UFOs you might as well start by looking under your bed.
Perhaps you should email James Randi about this chocolate UFO idea, he could look for chocolate when he next visits a crop circle.
Established Member
But what about the secret underground chocolate factories?
Established Member
Are you suggesting that because governments have secrets, all wild speculations are potentially valid, positive evidence not required? Then why not flying Canadian chocolate?
Established Member
I beleive that you shouldnt have to beleive something anybody esle says but you should listen at least to what they think. If you dont beleive them and they can say no more then so be it. You believe what you want and they belive what they want. If any of us saw a UFO (i mean it in its literal sense Unidentified flying object not an alien craft) then gaining more information on it would be a very hard thing to do as information is hard to come by in this field and most people dont have a camera or an instrument to measure the objects weight and mass and material it is made from to hand. There is a lot of bad press and a lot of people who take this much to far and claim aliens are flying about here and there carrying people off and goverment cover ups. But is a basic fact that people have reported (myself included once about a week or so ago) seeing things in the sky they really cannot explain and thus label them UFO's. No need to badger people more about it becuase they cannot explain what they see.
Order of Kilopi
it's been widely reported there was a parallel military space shuttle.
I think you have been watched Armagedon too many times.
Established Member
Sounds like urban myth to me : NASA's original plan for the space shuttle was quite small and efficient. Then along came the military and said "we want it to be able to launch satellites that mass this much" so they made it bigger. Then they found they could only build it if they put the fuel tank on the outside. And even then, it needed SRBs to get the right impulse to reach orbit. It is just one hideous great compromise.
Even if it were true, that doesn't make anything else more plausible.
[edited for poor typing]
Last edited by Dr Nigel; 2006-Jul-28 at 07:33 PM.
Established Member
I don't think any of us would badger someone who said: "I saw this weird thing in the sky and I have no idea what it was". But too many people follow this line: "it wasn't anything familiar to me, so it must be alien". This is extraordinarily weak reasoning, for which people rightly deserve to get badgered.
There are a great many things in our skies with which most people are unfamiliar. This in no way proves the existence of extraterrestrial life. In fact, ET life should be waaaay down the list of possibilities when someone reports seeing something unusual in the sky.
Established Member
Actually, there is a lot wrong with having baseless speculation come up with a theory. A theory needs to be plausible; it needs to be predictive; it needs to be falsifiable; it needs to explain several facts; it needs to be supported by at least some evidence (i.e. why should we favour this theory over its competitors?).
First, you come up with an hypothesis to explain a phenomenon. This must be consistent with everything you already know (or, if it is not, it must give you a sound reason to doubt what is already known). Then, you seek to test your hypothesis by trying to find evidence against it.
We don't need a new hypothesis about UFOs. We already have plenty:
They are misidentified cloud formations;
They are misidentified planets (especially Venus);
They are misidentified flocks of birds;
They are misidentified satellites (or the ISS);
They are misidentified aircraft;
They are misidentified will-o'-the-wisps (swamp gas);
They are misidentified ball lightning...
Are you starting to see a theme here? Just because something is unidentified, does not mean it is not a familiar thing seen in an unfamiliar way.
Interstellar travel is a big problem (even assuming the existence of other intelligent life in the galaxy). We cannot even imagine a technology that would permit it without taking many decades (or at least, no technology that is consistent with what we already know).
So, positing interstellar travellers to explain things we have failed to identify is really, really implausible.
[edited for spelling]
Member
I would call this more of a fantasy than a theory! But fantasies can be fun to speculate on can't they?
If aliens came thousands of years ago, and took away some (primitive) humans, who have since been happily inter-breeding on this alien planet, would they not have evolved quite a bit in the meantime? Like if the planet has a different gravity, or if earth viruses and diseases are not present on that planet. So they would not be human any more. Thus the aliens would fail in their mission to save the human race in the event of some cataclysm.
But anyway, why save just humans? Why not do the full Noah's ark thing, and take samples of all species? If we're talking about thousands of years ago, ok from an alien perspective, humans would appear to be the most sophisticated animals of the time. But so what - were they still really worth 'saving'?? And why would they need to come back to see the earth in order to learn about ecology? What's wrong with the alien planet's ecology? Or computer simulations?
Established Member
My personal thoughts are that it is quite plausible to have aliens that can observe us and maybe fly in Crafts which people cannot explain. If they did observe us their technology would be way in advance of ours anyway so we wouldnt detect them anyway. Hence there would be no proper evidence just "hear' say" evidence as opposed to anything else. Still realisticly if you wanted to get get proper evidence for the existence of Aliens which are visiting us you would never be able to obtain it if an advanced alien race didnt want you to. Getting facts about planets and the moon is far easier. They dont hide from you. Aliens would have a good reason to. Given mankinds appetite for destruction. This is all of course under speculation that an Alien Race "does" have us under observation. But that depends on your personal beliefs.
Established Member
I recognise that the potential exists for there to be technology way beyond anything we have. However, the same basic problems must still be solved - distance, speed, acceleration, time, energy.
Interstellar distances are vast. Unimaginably so. Mars is only half again as far from the Sun as the Earth is, but it would take us about 9 months to send a man there.
Pioneers 10 and 11, and Voyagers 1 and 2 are just now reaching the edge of the solar system (well, one of the Pioneers has passed through the heliopause, the other is no longer sending data, and the Voyagers are just approaching the heliopause), despite having been launched 30+ years ago.
Interstellar distances are so large, I do not think they will be regarded as trivial by any civilisation, no matter how advanced.
In order to minimise flight times, one would wish to travel as fast as is possible. This requires large accelerations for large periods of time, consuming large amounts of fuel. Plus there is a universal speed limit (c).
The large accelerations themselves pose a problem. A human being will black out when subjected to an acceleration of 4-5 g (more for specially-trained individuals using specialised equipment, so call it 9 g). Even if the advanced aliens can withstand 20 g comfortably, it will still take a long time to reach a non-trivial fraction of c.
Even travelling at 0.5c (nearly 150,000 km/s), it would take over 8 years to reach Alpha Centauri, and considerably longer to reach the nearest sun-like star. Travel times between the stars are quite definitely non-trivial. OK, you could postulate that your advanced aliens are also very long-lived, and that to them decades are a relatively short time. But there is no reason to do so, other than as an ad hoc fix.
Finally, the real killer, energy. These large speeds and large accelerations require the carrying of huge quantities of fuel (so you can slow down at the end of your journey, maneuvre while you are there, then turn around and come home afterwards). Assuming that our advanced aliens have fusion power, they will still need to carry a large amount of fuel - in space, you cannot accelerate unless you throw reaction mass the other way. Solar sails won't work for interstellar travel - once you are a few billion kilometres from a star, the force it can impart will be near zero.
And, yes, we can postulate warp drive technology, but that requires a huge concentration of energy (something like the entire output of a medium-sized star).
Technological advances may come along to help civilised beings somewhere overcome these problems, but I do not believe the problems will ever be considered trivial. Therefore, if you go and visit another inhabited planet, it would be for a very good reason, and you would not keep quiet about it.
As I said earlier, postulating the existence of visiting extraterrestrial life to explain some phenomena that cannot be readily identified is too implausible. We would need a stronger reason than any we currently have to seriously entertain this as an hypothesis.
Senior Member
Yet people are "seeing" them all the time. This is the "thing" that gets me about the idea of alien visitors. If they don't mind being observed, then why don't they just make contact...if they don't want to be observed (and they have the technology to travel to here) then they should also have the tech to never be observed.
The idea that aliens come all the way to Earth to simply play "cat and mouse" games makes NO sense whatsoever.
Order of Kilopi
How can you determine this?
I have seen enough witness(pilots etc) reports on UFO docs to think that there is a real phenomena and I really don't think that arguments about interstellar distances are that relevant. Given hibernation technology, for example, slow interstellar speeds become irrelevant.
I think the possibility for alien visitors is real and to me there doesn't seem to be any point in not discussing aliens or saucers just because there isn't much hard evidence.
Order of Kilopi
This Reminds me of a Kids in The Hall Skit:
Two Aliens Were Talking During an Abduction About How they Could Be Better Spending their Tiime, When One of them Notices ...
"The ONLY Thiing you Learn When you Probe People, Is That 1 in 10 Don't Mind it Very Muuch!!!"
Order of Kilopi
It has been? What are your references?
Edited to add:
This wouldn't be that discredited AV Week military spaceplane bit, would it?
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Senior Member
Well, people are certainly seeing "something"...but "something" is a long way from alien spacecraft.
You are making the gigantic assumption that "hibernation technology" will actually pan out given scientific advancement. It is quite possible that there is simply no way to hibernate and then successfully re-animate a humanoid....and I really don't think that arguments about interstellar distances are that relevant. Given hibernation technology, for example, slow interstellar speeds become irrelevant.
It's certainly "possible"...there is just no evidence that it is actually happening.I think the possibility for alien visitors is real...
"Much hard evidence"?? How about no convincing evidence whatsoever....and to me there doesn't seem to be any point in not discussing aliens or saucers just because there isn't much hard evidence.
Order of Kilopi
Exactly. And beyond that, imagine if aliens came to us and said "We'll take you to another solar system where we want you to observe a species with technology similar to your own. Do any research you wish, we only ask that you don't make them aware of your existence and that you inform us of your observations."
I have no doubt we could keep them from seeing us. All we would need to do is take some care - use telescopes from a few million miles from their planet, listen to their EM traffic, put a stealthed satellite or two in high orbit, drop a few atmospheric probes designed to move and look like meteors, ultimately burning up, and so on.
Given what we could do, an advanced species would have no trouble not being seen by us if they didn't want to. But if they didn't care, by this time there should be no doubt to their existence.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Order of Kilopi
well I only gave it as an example, there are other possibilities like cloning where aliens could be created once an automatic space craft got to its destination or maybe they had a sustainable life supporting craft where the aliens lived and died on their journey or maybe you don't need organic life forms at all just intelligent machines/robots.
What I was trying to say in my OP is that if you speculate enough then you might come up with some phenomena that you could look for you might even be able to lay a trap.
Order of Kilopi
Speculation in this area, seems to me, to have a lot in common with the Loch Ness monster myth. No hard evidence, some dubious fuzzy pictures, some testimonials (with no evidence), people making money out of it, still some diehard believers, theories of "plesiosaurs" having lived on....
Order of Kilopi
what about the tungsten filaments type things that were found in Russia?
In view of this, the finds made recently in Russia are all the more
astonishing. In the years 1991-1993, gold prospectors on the small river
Narada, on the eastern side of the Ural mountains, have found unusual,
mostly spiral-shaped objects. The size of these things ranges from a
maximum of 3 cm (1.2 in.) down to an incredible 0.003 mm, about 1/10,000th of an inch! To date, these inexplicable artifacts have been found in their thousands at various sites near the rivers Narada, Kozhim, and Balbanyu, and also by two smaller streams named Vtvisty and Lapkhevozh, mostly at depths between 3 and 12 meters (10 and 40 ft.)
fromAll tests carried out to date give an age for the objects of between 20,000 and
318,000 years, depending on the depth and the situation of the site.
http://www.qtm.net/~geibdan/a1999/oct/ice2.htm
has this been discussed on this forum(probably has) but if they haven't found an explanation for this, I would count that as possible evidence.
and here is another site http://www.mystae.com/streams/science/russcrew2.html
edit-I have started a thread about this here
Last edited by Frog march; 2006-Jul-30 at 07:45 AM.
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