Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick had a few choice words for the public on his way out the door of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
Sean Kirkpatrick was once the man in charge of a D.C.-backed agency tasked with investigating claims into unidentified anomalous phenomena, the new term for what most people still call UFOs. He stepped down from the position in December, and has now published a excoriating farewell letter in Scientific American detailing some of the reasons why.
So why did he stop hunting for UFOs on behalf of the American government? In short: Because congressional leaders believe in conspiracy theories with absolutely no substantial proof. “Our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative,” Kirkpatrick said in Scientific American.
If you had the tech for FTL travel, you could destroy any planet with a single ship.
Just kamikaze it and your target literally couldn’t see it coming.
It makes a nuke look a balloon popping.
If they existed and knew about humans, and for some reason were scared of us… First contact would be Earth getting vaporized.
It would be the equivalent of a human putting down a rabid racoon to that species.
First, FTL travel cannot exist with our current understanding of physics. This is why you see most sci-fi going to either wormholes/jump drives - Orion’s arm, star gate, BSG; or by jumping into not-our-universe- Star Wars, also star gate, and andromeda. Maybe Star Trek, but Alcubierre drives themselves would not be able to go FTL. The short explanation is it would violate causality. (Wormholes don’t actually violate causality, but otherwise bridge two points in space-time)
Secondly, it should be noted that while technological advancement does impart military advantages… evaporating a space rock serves no real purpose; and doing so would represent a massive economic investment; further on this point, the sightings are insisting they’re visiting frequently.
Which given our instability (they have every season of the Jerry springer show, for example.)… the question isn’t would they decide to send us to oblivion, or not. But visit us.
And given the energies involved getting here, a species that hasn’t thought twice about nuking themselves isn’t going to think twice about reverse engineering their tech and doing exactly what you propose. And we are very likely to take their presence… the wrong way.
Final though: if aliens were to show up on earth? It’s either to harvest the only thing that makes earth special: life. (Aka they’re slavers or something.) alternatively, they’re space Mormons.
There would be a reason to destroy Earth if you were an alien species and the reason some scientists say we should silence our communications to the rest of the universe. Namely, to eliminate us as a potential threat/competitor. SETI has written about it themselves. The example given is from Greg Bear’s novel, The Forge of God:
In Bear’s story, the Earth is visited not by laser-wielding aliens but fully autonomous Von Neuman machines. These are self-replicating interstellar probes that spread out among star systems using the resources they find to generate more versions of themselves. The premise of Bear’s fictional Universe is that with the laws of physics keeping interstellar travel slow (it takes a long time to travel among the stars even at near light speed) all intelligent technological species will, essentially, be in the dark about what is out there.
Thus for some cultures the best defense will be a good offense.
The Von Neumann machines of Bear’s story are killer probes. Once our stray radio broadcasts are picked up, the probes arrive, try to build more versions of themselves and, essentially, disassemble our planet. No explanations. No monologue of evil intent. Just mindlessly eliminating potential competition and potential threats. Then it’s on to the next system.
This is an answer to the Fermi paradox. The idea that one species grows so xenophobic or territorial or whatever as to destroy all other life.
The good news is that such an end would be quick, so I tend to not worry about it.
The other answer is… they actively avoid us. Which seems more reasonable and optimistic.
until you manage to rewrite our understanding of how the universe around us works… yes.
it is possible for stuff to exist that is already going FTL. But it’s not possible to accelerate a massive particle to c. (this would require infinite energy, and definitely violates our understanding of physics,) and in any case, being able to transmit information (including, massive particles) faster than c; violates causality (by creating a closed timelike curve,)
The only way I see to get around it - is to literally go around it. That is to say, not travel through spacetime. ergo, either traveling in some other plane of existence (hyperspace, slipspace, whatever.) or simply connecting two distant physical points (wormholes.)
As for motivations of some proposed alien species…. There’s very little we can offer them that wouldn’t be easier to get elsewhere. They don’t need our physical resources, and they don’t need our help with science or knowledge.
As you suggest, if they wanted us gone, we’d be gone before we ever knew it.
That leaves either physical labor or culture. We certainly pump our “culture” out to the stars, so there’s really no need for them to actually come all the way here.
We have mathematically worked out near light speed travel, we just lack the energy requirements to test it currently. There are two methods proposed, one being riding a wave we create and the other riding under space(this one was way more confusing). The wave one would accumulate debris ahead of the wave so you aim at a planet then stop short propelling everything the wave has gathered at near light speed into the planet, instant obliteration. We are trying really hard to solve fission which is the only thing holding us up right now. Optimistically we might see a practical test in our life time albeit very late into our lives.
No we haven’t. There is no known mechanism to create an alcubierre drive.
At the risk of being dismissive, there’s no known way to mess with things in such a manner- nevermind enough understanding to say what happened to debris in the path.
What we have are hypothetical models that assume we have these things. But everyone acknowledges they’re purely speculative. (Fun, even possibly useful, but speculation all the same.)
