Not THE Pope... Nick Pope. Nick used to man the UK government's UFO desk. Since then he's been a UFO investigator for many years.

Nick is debating with Lawrence Krauss.

 

 

So far I've watched about half of this and Krauss is basically just exposing this guy Pope as not only being clueless but really not particularly bright. Two or three things that Krauss said I'd disagree with but he's basically got the utter absurdity of the whole UFO thing wrapped up already halfway through. The one thing I have noticed about Krauss over the years in debates is that he does like soft targets. I really do think he's a sadist and draws great pleasure from humiliating his opponent on the debate stage. Christopher Hitchen however left him in halfpenny place in that regard!🤣

Edited December 13, 20232 yr by FBW737

🤣"Distress Signal!" Krauss is definitely pissing himself laughing on the inside and thinking beam me up, Scotty!

8 hours ago, FBW737 said:

So far I've watched about half of this and Krauss is basically just exposing this guy Pope as not only being clueless but really not particularly bright.

 

That might be somewhat unfair and to be honest. You probably have that opinion because it aligns with what you want to believe. You don't want to believe that there might be any lifeforms out there whatsoever, not now, not ever, so you are bound to suffer a a degree of confirmation bias and latch on to points that Krauss raises that confirm your beliefs, while dismissing Pope and being less than complimentary about his intelligence. 

Pope spent many years investigating UFO's for the Ministry of Defence and no doubt investigated some fascinating and baffling cases. So he's bound to have a different perspective than a skeptical scientist, that hasn't studied the phenomenon, as a result of his personnel experience. 

Personally, my position on UFO's remains the same as it always has done,  that primitive live evolved seemingly easily and rapidly on this planet, so might well indicate that its relatively easy. Whilst complex technological life took one third of the age of the universe to arise on this planet, so might suggest it's very hard and thus that technological life is non-existent or rare in our galaxy. So the aforementioned fact, plus what we currently know about the nature of reality that suggests that FTL travel (Alcubierre wrap drive) is extremely hard to achieve or impractical, might render the notion of numerous visiting alien craft, dead alien bodies and crash retrievals as highly unlikely.  However there's a non-zero possibility its true. 

Krauss, hasn't really investigated this subject of course and did make a few comments that were questionable. He claimed that if anyone had definitive evidence of alien visitation then there would be millions to make from selling books so they would immediately announce it to the world. This notion is very naïve of course, when we know that military personnel sign NDA's and can spend decades locked up in a cell for revealing sensitive information. Not to mention (as Grusch claimed) threats to life and limb.

Krauss also raised the point that science learns more but we don't throw out what we know to be true, what has been experimentally proven, and he used the example of inertia and the G Force experienced by claimed flying saucers doing 90 degree turns at high velocity, that would turn the occupants to salsa. He then mentioned that we might be able to design structures that could withstand that G force, but didn't cotton on to the fact that any alien visitation might be in the form of unmanned probes. He seemed to be insisting that inertia couldn't be circumvented and that our poor alien visitors would be mush if they tried to turn at high velocity, but when a physicist guy at the end challenged him, and I'm paraphrasing, Krauss replied that its not an engineering problem its fundamental physics, at the edge of theoretical physics,  so its not like we will put engineers together and create a propulsion system involving physics we don't yet understand... but of course that contradicts his original premise regarding inertia and opens the door to an advanced species, 100, 1000 10,000 years more advanced than us that did understand the physics we currently don't, to indeed create some manner of advanced propulsion that could enable travel over huge distances in a practical manner. 

1:02:53 The questioner in the white labcoat is Mark Sokol, the founder and CEO of Falcon Space in New Jersey, whose main purpose in being there seems to be to promote his company.

1:07:05  Krauss: At this point trying to understand things like warp drive, which I can argue is impractical anyway                and won't work. 

              Sokol: It's already been achieved in Omaha, Nebraska: they got, like, 5 lbs 

referring to David Pares who claimed, in 2015, that "by running a couple of hundred watts through an array of custom-built, fractally patterned, V-shaped warp circuits, has consistently documented the physical displacement of a 3 ½ pound weight in a Faraday cage". Obviously, that didn't work out and there is a video of him trying unsuccessfully to demonstrate the effect.

Edited December 13, 20232 yr by dmwalker

7 hours ago, martin-w said:

so you are bound to suffer a a degree of confirmation bias

I'll laugh at that all day given that it is coming from you.

I'm not interested in having this debate again. Believe whatever gives you that nice fuzzy feeling inside.

18 hours ago, FBW737 said:

Two or three things that Krauss said I'd disagree with

Such as....

2 hours ago, FBW737 said:

I'll laugh at that all day given that it is coming from you.

 

Example please...

My opinions are pretty balanced and in line with what most scientists think.

Close to Brian Cox's opinion actually, and many other scientists. Primitive life could be common, technological life could be rare. And us being visited having a non-zero but low probability.