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

PhillB said:

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 .

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grantoury said:

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

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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.

bagpuss said:

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.

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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!

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.

bikeworkshop said:

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.

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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.

LondonClassic said:

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.

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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.

CassidyAce said:

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

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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?

93hero said:

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?

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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.

We live in an age where even us mere mortals can build agile robots and combined with artificial intelligence we could fire a bunch of them off into space on a really long mission. Going out into space is about collecting information and studying things and we don't need humans for that.
We could send robots and not worry about feeding them, or any mental and physical health problems and robots don't need the toilet, or menstrate, which means the vehicle can be lighter through not having food stores, toilet systems, gym equipment, etc
We don't though, for things like ISS and new moon landings, because human endeavour and heroism sells and keeps the people interested and space programs get to exist if the people support them. It is they who pay the bills and have kids who might dream of being astronaughts without queationing the costs, too much, until something goes wrong again!
We can't send people out into space, on a trip that may never end ,because, even if those people agree to do so, it will never be acceptable for them to have complicated medical probelms, with zero help, then die and to just keep on floating along without funerals and burials. It will never pass the ethical and religious test and you only have to look at the assisted dying debate to see how far the idea of sending humans out to die in space would get.
An alien species may have a completely different take on things and they will send robots, like the things Boston Dynamics make, on missions and they will spend a very long time on charge, between maintenance tasks, waiting to land somewhere to do science stuff, or maybe meet another species and say hello.
The problem i could see, that could prevent travel over hundreds/thousands of years , is batteries degrading unless they have that nailed. With our current tech even if you took a truck load of boxes of batteries, to use over the years, they will be useless once you get around to using them because they have gradually been dying in storage. They aren't light either!

Assuming aliens would send flesh and blood is a very Hollywood way of looking at the possibility of aliens doing space stuff.

Yeah it would take fast spaceships thousands of years to fly between stars, and you can’t accelerate mass to the sort of speeds needed to do it quickly. And even if travelling lifeforms were very stable and patient with craft and robots immune to breaking down, the rest of the universe wouldn’t be - by the time your mission had reached its objective, the objective (and probably you or your agents) would have evolved.

A smarter way to ‘travel’ might be to spray tiny packets of info (eg dna wrapped in nano spore) out onto the cosmos at close to the speed of light, and let it build a version of you somewhere else. I find this Rick n Morty option plausible and scary - imagine a zillion worlds peopled by randomly evolved versions of Elon Musk We must not let this happen, but it is the logical end of all this “humans will need to find a new planet” bullshit that is becoming mainstream accepted.

Undoubtedly much UFO experience is psychological one way or another (mad, misguided, or mischief); but that doesn’t stop it being something else - more likely than Aliens travelling, is versions of us from the future - messing around or pulling strings: using science we know that quantum entanglement is a thing (“spooky action at a distance”) where stuff is instantly linked across space/time. If you could manipulate that, you could ‘send’ a version of you through time/space to freak out mid westerners, build pyramids, or have a nuclear brawl that becomes the basis of scripture ….

For all we actually know, the universe could be an experiment in a tank on the corner of some higher beings desk. God is a research scientist called Pete and our 14 billion years started a week last Tuesday in his world. At some point he'll notice that something's gone wrong with one of the planets. Some sort of virus has taken over, near on killed it and is trying it's hardest to spread. Time to stop it, just in case.
Everything is based on theories that we, humanity, has made up. Proven with techniques that we have made up, is it really right? Who really knows? Accepted knowledge and explanations get debunked all the time, just look at the James Webb telescope.
Why, in reality, are humans obsessed with knowing how everything works to the minutest detail? Can't we just accept it is what it is?
Right, now I sound like a complete crackpot, I shall take my foil bowler and leave you to it.