True or false, Avsim experts?

[martin-w 3,289]

10 hours ago, LHookins said:

Perhaps there is something in our airspace that interferes with the propulsion, navigation or flight control (or even alien pilot biology) of some of the craft. 

 

I think if they keep coming here, those super smart alien's, they'd be aware of that and have mitigated the issue in a flash, probably before the first trip. 😁

 

 

[robb13 22]

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

Its an entertainment show designed to make money. Don't take it seriously. 

What th'.... my world has just fallen apart.

But seriously, I just wish they would put a bit more effort into making their scenes a bit more believable as the staging of them is just too obvious.. same goes for all other similar TV shows. Mythbusters is the only one where staging an outcome is acceptable as at the end of the day we all just want to see something get blown up. It is shows like Skinwalker which detract from the overall "UFO industry". I'm kinda hoping aliens (of the vegetarian kind) will show up one day. 

Question.  When they do, will Avsim make them Honorary Members?

[LHookins 3,118]

2 hours ago, martin-w said:

I think if they keep coming here, those super smart alien's, they'd be aware of that and have mitigated the issue in a flash, probably before the first trip. 😁

The super smart aliens that developed the technology probably visited Earth long ago and declared it off-limits.  The current aliens are teenagers defying the ban on visiting and don't have the smarts/resources to fix the problems.  Teenagers would also explain the overly high number of crashes. 😄

Hook

[dmwalker 614]

1 hour ago, robb13 said:

Question.  When they do, will Avsim make them Honorary Members?

They could bring some interesting UFO simulations, like interstellar scenery with detailed planetary locations plus study level spacecraft sims, for example.

Edited June 22, 2023 by dmwalker

[martin-w 3,289]

56 minutes ago, LHookins said:

Teenager's would also explain the overly high number of crashes. 😄

 

That would make a LOT of sense. They should increase the alien teenager minimum driving age form its current 5621 to 6521. 

[robb13 22]

On 6/22/2023 at 10:13 PM, LHookins said:

Teenagers would also explain the overly high number of crashes

Any evidence of this ???    At purported crash / landing sites, is there evidence of donut shaped furrows in the ground.

[DaviiB 104]

Looks like Avsim lost my last post, so let's try this again:

On 6/22/2023 at 5:08 AM, martin-w said:

No point though, AI hardware could serve the same function. No point in cloning  loads of bodies and manipulating them in some way so they aren't sentient.

Our probes / rovers on Mars have tools, arms etc. for collecting samples and interacting with the environment. Fast-forward a couple thousand years...the logical endpoint for this would be something that could mimic a person's ability, dexterity etc. to perform tasks remotely.

My point is, a biological robot could serve a similar function. The idea of "sentience" is a big can of worms (perhaps worth discussing separately) and, IMO, not necessarily implied when talking about the creation of a "biological" robot. 

 

On 6/22/2023 at 5:08 AM, martin-w said:

Regardless of how far advanced than us they are, If you are a species that can do the things its claimed these alleged craft can, then by definition you aren't likely to frequently crash. Not crashing is the easy stuff.

I'm not so sure that's implied by their (apparent) capabilities. Two points here:

First, looking back at human technological progress, we tend to leave a lot of "debris" in the field as we develop new technologies, and even more after mass deployment on the way toward high-reliability. We've never achieved perfection though, and accidents and malfunctions can still happen under the right circumstances (to think otherwise would just be hubris).

Secondly, if the number of "advanced" technological (space-faring?) civilizations out there is > 1, then the actual number should be very high no matter which way you spin it. (Trillions of planets in our galaxy alone, etc. etc.). So if you plug-in a few variables:

 - Number of space faring civilizations
 - Age of planet Earth
 - Exactly how dangerous is space travel / exploration? (compared to in-atmosphere and low orbit operations)
 - Reason for visiting this planet (or a reason for increased interest....think nukes...) + frequency of visits
 - Range of technological achievement across spacefaring civilizations (from basic to almost Godlike?)
 - Non-zero risk of malfunction / accident  (lower toward the higher end of the range above)

That leaves room for some crashes over time. Of course there are enough unknowns that this is pure speculation.

I think the whistleblower said that the retrieval and reverse engineering efforts were ongoing....maybe he meant more of the latter. I agree that a high frequency of crashes seems a bit suspect (without invoking the idea that "we're shooting them down somehow")....so I guess we'll just have to see.

 

On 6/22/2023 at 5:08 AM, martin-w said:

Not logical. The physics that these craft allegedly defy is basic stuff, KNOWN laws. The stuff easily discovered FIRST. Exotic physics is the hard stuff, a way around the laws we currently know. The steps we require to get there aren't something you can just bypass. To climb a mountain begins with the first step, you don't jump to the top. Yes, serendipitous breakthroughs can happen, but not in terms of finding our way around hard to cheat fundamental laws. 

If you observe (and confirm) something that is violating what you think are KNOWN laws, you need to take a long hard look at your laws, because you've missed something (likely even more fundamental).

To think that a civilization MUST follow the same developmental path as we did (difficult, mountain to climb etc) is not realistic. It's very possible that we've missed something fundamental and are just doing many things "the hard way". There are holes, dead-ends, and exceptions in popular scientific theories that still underlie some of the technologies we use.

We consider ourselves to be fairly advanced, but basically, Engineers have just done a fantastic job of creating useful tools based on effects we don't fully understand. i.e., you don't need to "know" what fire is to be able to use it to cook.

As another example, we still don't fully understand the true nature of light. Doesn't stop us from using fiber optics in our systems, because we can observe effects and make use of them.

As for hard-to cheat fundamental laws. Take the example of sailing ships. 500 years ago, the task of crossing the ocean quickly would seem almost insurmountable, because of the friction of water, limited winds etc. One might have guessed that people of the future would find ways to make super efficient use of the wind, or develop extremely powerful propulsion to push big, heavy ships faster through the water. 

No. Instead, we used a completely different medium (air), with a completely different operating principle, to cover the same distances in hours vs months. We didn't try to "cheat" the viscosity of water.

I understand this is an imperfect analogy (materials and tech required to build an aircraft vs a boat), but my point is that the idea of flying through the air vs pushing through water is a simple one, and the basic math required is not much more difficult. Mostly, the extra effort comes from the fact that the stakes are much higher if your engine quits in an aircraft.

The same could possibly apply for interstellar (or interdimensional?) travel, meaning the leap would not be so significant.

[martin-w 3,289]

1 minute ago, DaviiB said:

Our probes / rovers on Mars have tools, arms etc. for collecting samples and interacting with the environment. Fast-forward a couple thousand years...the logical endpoint for this would be something that could mimic a person's ability, dexterity etc. to perform tasks remotely.

 

 

Which wouldn't need to be any kind of cloned organism. You don't need to mimic a persons/aliens dexterity in order to gather data. A swarm of nanites would be more likely I would have thought. 

 

6 minutes ago, DaviiB said:

My point is, a biological robot could serve a similar function. The idea of "sentience" is a big can of worms (perhaps worth discussing separately) and, IMO, not necessarily implied when talking about the creation of a "biological" robot. 

 

No, but you were referring to something more capable than a machine, something superior to the capabilities of an electromechanical device. If its not more capable than a sophisticated  electromechanical device then there's no point cloning an organism and somehow having to go to the trouble of limiting its brain power to make it dumb enough not to be sentient. Everything that's required is doable with an electromechanical device, including an electromechanical robot, with all the dexterity you like, you don't need an organism. 

 

 

[martin-w 3,289]

1 hour ago, DaviiB said:

First, looking back at human technological progress, we tend to leave a lot of "debris" in the field as we develop new technologies, and even more after mass deployment on the way toward high-reliability. We've never achieved perfection though, and accidents and malfunctions can still happen under the right circumstances (to think otherwise would just be hubris).

 

Of course, but reliability improves. The first jet engines were unreliable, but these days we fly across the Atlantic with just two engines and some pilots never see an engine failure in their entire careers. When a technology is perfected, or gains a semblance of perfection, its reliability obviously increases.  If you tell me that in the past few centuries a hyper advanced craft has crashed a couple of times, I'm all in, and accepting of the possibility, but 9 crashes according to Lazar, 12 according to a recent report, a Russian crash, an Italian crash... and on and on and on. The more the UFO community claims such things the less credibility they have. 

 

1 hour ago, DaviiB said:

(Trillions of planets in our galaxy alone, etc. etc.).

 

 

We know that primitive single celled life evolved on this planet as soon as it could, so seems easy. However... advanced multicellular life capable of making machines (us) took 1/3 of the age of the universe to arrive, which implies its hard. The Fermi Paradox should be considered. If just one species survived and avoided all of the no doubt many great filters, and didn't blow itself to bits, then even at the velocities we travel now the entire galaxy could be colonized remarkably quickly, and yet we see no evidence of such a thing. It is possible for us to be the only advanced technological cavillation in the galaxy, given the rare circumstances that must be in place for such a thing to be manifest. My own opinion is that advanced technological life probably does exist in out galaxy at the same time as us but is very rare. 

Note: I refer to our galaxy, not the potentially infinite universe, where infinity plays all kinds of bizarre games due to the limited number of ways atoms can be arranged.

 

Quote

"That leaves room for some crashes over time. "

 

Its more than some. The UFO believers are always claiming some kind of new crash. 

 

 

Edited June 23, 2023 by martin-w

[martin-w 3,289]

47 minutes ago, DaviiB said:

If you observe (and confirm) something that is violating what you think are KNOWN laws, you need to take a long hard look at your laws, because you've missed something (likely even more fundamental).

 

Indeed, but the things that are missed are hard to fathom, hard to discover, not something our alien friends can discover by bypassing the easy to discover fundamental laws. 

I see no easy, serendipitous route that enables our hypothetical aliens to bypass thousands of years of research and discovery, and leap to inertial dampeners and anti-gravity and warp drive and worm holes and interdimensional travel. We human beings have engaged in scientific research for greater than 3000 years, if there was some kind of serendipitous discovery that could be made that would propel us with great alacrity in the direction of Star Trek technology, worm holes and inertial dampening and time travel and intersessional travel, or any one of those things, we would most likely have found it over such a significant time period.,  

[martin-w 3,289]

At 3:00 Brian thinks that cavillations are very widely spaced in our galaxy and just one or two per galaxy. 

 

 

Edited June 23, 2023 by martin-w

[robb13 22]

13 hours ago, DaviiB said:

we tend to leave a lot of "debris"

I suspect any aliens may think we have mined Earth to keep unwanted intruders out, based on all the space junk already spinning around the planet. Has some-one leaked the master chart to them so they can navigate their way through.

[dmwalker 614]

22 hours ago, martin-w said:

Which wouldn't need to be any kind of cloned organism. You don't need to mimic a persons/aliens dexterity in order to gather data. A swarm of nanites would be more likely I would have thought. 

From the Brian Cox interview:

“Actually maybe the civilization just becomes a nano civilization, a tiny little nanobot because that's more efficient. It's a better way to do things. So it's possible, I suppose, that there are space probes all over the place but are so small and are so efficient and use so little energy that we just don't see them. I suppose that is possible.”

[martin-w 3,289]

1 hour ago, dmwalker said:

From the Brian Cox interview:

“Actually maybe the civilization just becomes a nano civilization, a tiny little nanobot because that's more efficient. It's a better way to do things. So it's possible, I suppose, that there are space probes all over the place but are so small and are so efficient and use so little energy that we just don't see them. I suppose that is possible.”

 

Which raises another question... I suspect there's more than one great filter. Add nanotechnology to the list of challenges a species may face before they develop the capability to colonize the galaxy. Are they wiped out by the so called "grey goo", swarms of self replicating nanites that quickly spread across the globe. Or maybe the newly hypothesized "green goo" new organic materials and artificial lifeforms. 

[DaviiB 104]

 

On 6/23/2023 at 11:17 AM, martin-w said:

If its not more capable than a sophisticated  electromechanical device then there's no point cloning an organism and somehow having to go to the trouble of limiting its brain power to make it dumb enough not to be sentient.

 

Too much to unpack here about sentience (and assumptions about it). Suffice to say, we can already "grow" meat in a lab, and I'm not doubting that will get much more sophisticated in time, but there is a huge assumption in thinking that something you "build" will become sentient (<<we don't understand enough about it). I stop at biological / robot hybrid.

 

On 6/23/2023 at 11:43 AM, martin-w said:

If you tell me that in the past few centuries a hyper advanced craft has crashed a couple of times, I'm all in, and accepting of the possibility, but 9 crashes according to Lazar, 12 according to a recent report, a Russian crash, an Italian crash... and on and on and on. The more the UFO community claims such things the less credibility they have. 

We are discussing David Grusch, and his claims, not the UFO community at-large. Grusch is not a member of the UFO community, and represents the highest credentialed whistleblower on this matter to come forward in recent history. So far, everything about him checks out, except his story, which the general public (and most of the government) is unable to verify....so let's wait for someone with the right clearances to call his bluff....which, as I understand, is already underway.

Here's a thought that's worth pursuing: If this is a psy-op.....let's poke at that theory.....Would it not have to be an extremely well coordinated, multi-organizational operation, spanning decades and multiple administrations? How difficult would that be to pull off?  <<Actual question.

Also, still illegal if it's a psy-op no?

 

On 6/23/2023 at 11:43 AM, martin-w said:

We know that primitive single celled life evolved on this planet as soon as it could, so seems easy. However... advanced multicellular life capable of making machines (us) took 1/3 of the age of the universe to arrive, which implies its hard. The Fermi Paradox should be considered. If just one species survived and avoided all of the no doubt many great filters, and didn't blow itself to bits, then even at the velocities we travel now the entire galaxy could be colonized remarkably quickly, and yet we see no evidence of such a thing. It is possible for us to be the only advanced technological cavillation in the galaxy, given the rare circumstances that must be in place for such a thing to be manifest. My own opinion is that advanced technological life probably does exist in out galaxy at the same time as us but is very rare. 

Note: I refer to our galaxy, not the potentially infinite universe, where infinity plays all kinds of bizarre games due to the limited number of ways atoms can be arranged.

There is a lot we don't know about our own history, and the history of this planet. I wouldn't be so convinced of those timelines. Especially, the time taken for advanced life to evolve on this planet. I'll leave that there because it's an even bigger can of worms.

Either way, we're using a sample size of one and extrapolating. It's the best we can do with "actual" data, but still an extremely flawed way of making estimates.

 

On 6/23/2023 at 11:56 AM, martin-w said:

Indeed, but the things that are missed are hard to fathom, hard to discover, not something our alien friends can discover by bypassing the easy to discover fundamental laws. 

I see no easy, serendipitous route that enables our hypothetical aliens to bypass thousands of years of research and discovery, and leap to inertial dampeners and anti-gravity and warp drive and worm holes and interdimensional travel. We human beings have engaged in scientific research for greater than 3000 years, if there was some kind of serendipitous discovery that could be made that would propel us with great alacrity in the direction of Star Trek technology, worm holes and inertial dampening and time travel and intersessional travel, or any one of those things, we would most likely have found it over such a significant time period.,  

That's a huge assumption. Also, rapid scientific advancement and discovery has really only been happening for about 500 years. 3000 years has seen many civilizations / empires rise and fall. Not a very conducive environment for scientific advancement.

When you're deep down the rabbit hole of a particular way of viewing things, it may be very, very hard to accept that one of the basic premises might be inaccurate.

Also, more toward your point, a fundamental law, or effect that enables "advanced" capability might be difficult to discover from a paradigm that doesn't allow for it, but that doesn't necessarily mean the law (or effect) isn't a simple one to understand, or use once you understand it.

 

Cheers,

DB