So what do you think about this 3iAtlas comet behaving weirdly in our Solar System?

[bagpuss]

I would tend to agree. One question it seems no-one has asked about 3I/Atlas is, does it even exist? I mean I haven't seen it, have you? - all we are shown are animated gifs of a blob and told it is some weird comet or some giant alien SUV- no-one has questioned that bit.

I've said this to a few people I know and they've kinda laughed and said' why would they lie about it?'.... I'm like ' Have you learned nothing over the last 5 years???' anyway I have to chew it back as people look at you as if you are the odd one .

A picture from the International Gemini Observatory should hold some truth?

View attachment 1014464

Mean while in the a voice is heard saying " anyone got a lense cleaning cloth "

If there is life out there or we are alone in the universe, both are equally scary.

 

[bikeworkshop]

Mean while in the a voice is heard saying " anyone got a lense cleaning cloth "

If there is life out there or we are alone in the universe, both are equally scary.

What about infinite parallel universes?

That's reassuring, because if you can't find your keys in this world, there's another world where
they are exactly where you left them!

 

[MattiThundrrr]

I recently read Waterspider by Phillip K Dick, great premise, scientists from the future travel back in time to scoop up science fiction writers in the belief that they were actually precogs, their writings were actually prophecies.

 

[LondonClassic]

The point i was trying to make:

if its that unlikely,
We probably imagined it

But this depends on an understanding of probabilities.

Didn't someone calculate that to fake the moon landing with 250,000 scientists and engineers would have cost more than just going there?

H&S and Risk Assessment might have been easier though.

We probably imagined what?

We had 90 odd years of radio telescopes and with them we've intermittently surveyed less than 1% of the observable universe - and the amount of 'observable' is expanding.

Fermi didn't say 'we are alone', he asked 'where is everybody?'. 'We are alone' is one hypothesis but there are other were the great filter and dark forest hypotheses.

I understand its easier to take the piss than discuss this - reinforcing my point that if 3iAtlas shows any sign of representing intelligence we simply won't be told about it - because we're incapable of dealing with that news.

 

[CassidyAce]

We probably imagined what?

We had 90 odd years of radio telescopes and with them we've intermittently surveyed less than 1% of the observable universe - and the amount of 'observable' is expanding.

Fermi didn't say 'we are alone', he asked 'where is everybody?'. 'We are alone' is one hypothesis but there are other were the great filter and dark forest hypotheses.

I understand its easier to take the piss than discuss this - reinforcing my point that if 3iAtlas shows any sign of representing intelligence we simply won't be told about it - because we're incapable of dealing with that news.

Although it might sound dismissive, the idea that UFOs and supposed sightings of aliens are imaginings derived from the collective unconscious is just a psychological approach to these 'phenomena' stemming from the work of Carl Jung. They are the modern twist on unconscious archetypes that, in the past, resulted in supposed sightings of anthropomorphic deities and fantastical characters like leprechauns. In the past, if someone had a 'sighting' of little green men, they supposed they were elves, leprechauns, goblins or whatever, whereas now they assume that they're the aliens.

Personally, I find this quite an appealing theory. On the other hand, I don't believe that we are being, or have ever been, visited by life from other star systems. That's because of the difficulties implied by the distances involved and Einstein's theories: the distances involved are expressed in light years; no spacecraft can approach anything like the speed of light; therefore, the travelling times would be expressed in thousands of years and the journeys would be unviable for life forms. For these reasons, science fiction writers rely on wormholes, 'hyperdrives' and other hypothetical or fictional means to get around these difficulties for their storytelling.

In summary, interstellar travel for intelligent life forms seems implausible and, to me, the psychological account seems more believable. One day, we might discover evidence of life elsewhere, but I doubt if we'll meet it. Almost certainly, 3iAtlas has no more to do with intelligent life than the pebbles on the beach.

 

[93hero]

…the travelling times would be expressed in thousands of years and the journeys would be unviable for life forms.

Time is relative.

A fly’s lifespan is 28 days, a dog’s is 15 years, a human’s is 80 years, these are species that coexist on one planet.

What if human’s lifespan is 80 years to an aliens 28 days?

 

[CassidyAce]

Time is relative.

A fly’s lifespan is 28 days, a dog’s is 15 years, a human’s is 80 years, these are species that coexist on one planet.

What if human’s lifespan is 80 years to an aliens 28 days?

Fair point. However, lifeforms require sustenance to resist entropy and the production of sustenance requires inputs of energy. Earth and everything on it would be just a slowly dissipating blob if it did not receive energy from an external source: the Sun. It doesn't matter if it was just one generation or successive generations of aliens on the interstellar spacecraft, the spacecraft would need similar life-sustaining qualities and it would need them for a long time, possibly tens of thousands of years. The challenge of defying the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) successfully enough to sustain complex lifeforms for the duration of an interstellar flight is what makes me find psychological explanations of UFO and alien 'sightings' more believable.

I'm open to being persuaded otherwise but, at the moment, I'm not convinced by ideas of space-travelling aliens visiting us.