- 04 Aug 2023 10:23
#15282056
Carbon seems to be the only valid basis for life. While silicone and other elements still have some of the amazing chemical flexibility of carbon, ultimately they are probably not actually able to be a basis for life. That is why, as far as we can tell, carbon based lifeforms are the only ones that can exist. That means life probably need compareable conditions to our planet to develop. Conditions such as the presence of liquid water.
Recently science has found out that a planet like ours is actually very unlikely to exist. We have a rare type of star, our star is most unusually silent and stable, we have the rarest subtype of planet distribution (big gassy planets on the outside, small rocky planets on the inside), our planetary orbits are also very stable (safe for Mercury and Venus who are a bit too close to each other for completely stable orbits and could theoretically over time collide or throw another out of orbit, which however wont turn into a problem before our sun turns into a red giants and will swallow them both anyway), and are very round with little excentricity (safe for Pluto and other outer dwarf planets), our satelite the moon is also very important to life (it stabilizes our rotation axis), as is our magnetosphere, which save for a gap around 500 million years ago has always protected our atmosphere and allowed gases like nitrogen and oxgen to exist in the first place (while for example Venus was stripped of everything but carbon dioxide). Using various methods we have found thousands of extrasolar planets by now, but none of them is like our Earth.
But the size of the visible universe is immense, and while the average distribution of matter is amazingly thin, it has accumulated in places, we call them galaxies, to very high densities. Roughly a hundred billion of these galaxies are in the visible universe, and roughly a hundred billion of star systems are on average in a galaxy. Thats why, no matter how unlikely sentient life in the end is, we are very likely not alone.
So extra-terrestials, despite the fact we have no evidence for them, are very likely to exist. The real question is therefore does FTL (Faster Than Lightspeed) travel exist ?
Because the only way that extra-terrestials can realistically reach us without FTL is if they would reside in the same galaxy and would have been spreading over this galaxy in automated probes, generation ships, and compareable concepts. Would any civilization actually put in the enormous effort to explore their own galaxy this way ? Will WE ever undergo this enormous effort ? Important is also that without FTL, extra-terrestials wouldnt have visited us so quickly after we started using the nuclear bomb. Which seems to have been the trigger point of reports of UFOs being sighted.
Modern scientists mostly think FTL is probably not possible. However there are constructs such as the Einstein-Rosen-Bridge (more commonly known as Wormhole, or White Hole) or the Alcubierre drive (sort of popularized by Star Trek as Warpdrive, though technically the idea of the Alcubierre drive actually was introduced in the 19960s while Star Trek was already around in the 1960s).
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It is therefore excessively hard to determine what is to make of recent claims that mankind has had contact with extraterrestial life. Namely the US administration is accused of having collected spaceships and bodies of extraterrestial origin and keeping them from the public.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/11903903 ... ogics-uaps
Personally I think this story is clearly a hoax. Why would the US government allow officials running around spreading state secrets in the open ? Look no further than Edward Snowden, Juliane Assange and Chelsea Manning to find out how the USA treats people who publically report wha the US elites dont want to be publically known. Spoiler alert: they dont get to testify in front of a US federal parliament.
Another very clear sign is that the people who say the USA did this - provide no evidence whatsoever for their claim. Instead they stated they will provide evidence to the authorities in private, but most people know what that means by now. It means they have most likely simply diddly squat to show and are just fake whistle blowers, with the real goal to distract the public from the recent political events, such as the increasingly alarming findings about the sitting presidents family and his ever more likely involvement in corruption.
So the most likely scenario seems to me that we dont actually have contact with extraterrestials. Either extraterrestials are so extremely far away that even with FTL we are too hard to reach, or much more likely FTL is really impossible.
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Recently science has found out that a planet like ours is actually very unlikely to exist. We have a rare type of star, our star is most unusually silent and stable, we have the rarest subtype of planet distribution (big gassy planets on the outside, small rocky planets on the inside), our planetary orbits are also very stable (safe for Mercury and Venus who are a bit too close to each other for completely stable orbits and could theoretically over time collide or throw another out of orbit, which however wont turn into a problem before our sun turns into a red giants and will swallow them both anyway), and are very round with little excentricity (safe for Pluto and other outer dwarf planets), our satelite the moon is also very important to life (it stabilizes our rotation axis), as is our magnetosphere, which save for a gap around 500 million years ago has always protected our atmosphere and allowed gases like nitrogen and oxgen to exist in the first place (while for example Venus was stripped of everything but carbon dioxide). Using various methods we have found thousands of extrasolar planets by now, but none of them is like our Earth.
But the size of the visible universe is immense, and while the average distribution of matter is amazingly thin, it has accumulated in places, we call them galaxies, to very high densities. Roughly a hundred billion of these galaxies are in the visible universe, and roughly a hundred billion of star systems are on average in a galaxy. Thats why, no matter how unlikely sentient life in the end is, we are very likely not alone.
So extra-terrestials, despite the fact we have no evidence for them, are very likely to exist. The real question is therefore does FTL (Faster Than Lightspeed) travel exist ?
Because the only way that extra-terrestials can realistically reach us without FTL is if they would reside in the same galaxy and would have been spreading over this galaxy in automated probes, generation ships, and compareable concepts. Would any civilization actually put in the enormous effort to explore their own galaxy this way ? Will WE ever undergo this enormous effort ? Important is also that without FTL, extra-terrestials wouldnt have visited us so quickly after we started using the nuclear bomb. Which seems to have been the trigger point of reports of UFOs being sighted.
Modern scientists mostly think FTL is probably not possible. However there are constructs such as the Einstein-Rosen-Bridge (more commonly known as Wormhole, or White Hole) or the Alcubierre drive (sort of popularized by Star Trek as Warpdrive, though technically the idea of the Alcubierre drive actually was introduced in the 19960s while Star Trek was already around in the 1960s).
---
It is therefore excessively hard to determine what is to make of recent claims that mankind has had contact with extraterrestial life. Namely the US administration is accused of having collected spaceships and bodies of extraterrestial origin and keeping them from the public.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/11903903 ... ogics-uaps
Personally I think this story is clearly a hoax. Why would the US government allow officials running around spreading state secrets in the open ? Look no further than Edward Snowden, Juliane Assange and Chelsea Manning to find out how the USA treats people who publically report wha the US elites dont want to be publically known. Spoiler alert: they dont get to testify in front of a US federal parliament.
Another very clear sign is that the people who say the USA did this - provide no evidence whatsoever for their claim. Instead they stated they will provide evidence to the authorities in private, but most people know what that means by now. It means they have most likely simply diddly squat to show and are just fake whistle blowers, with the real goal to distract the public from the recent political events, such as the increasingly alarming findings about the sitting presidents family and his ever more likely involvement in corruption.
So the most likely scenario seems to me that we dont actually have contact with extraterrestials. Either extraterrestials are so extremely far away that even with FTL we are too hard to reach, or much more likely FTL is really impossible.
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