I bring this up because it seems to once again be gaining traction in the zeitgeist: I cannot comprehend why UFO hunters put so much time and effort into trying to force governments to “reveal the truth about extraterrestrial contact”, but I also cannot fathom how they think aliens even have a chance of successfully contacting us in-person in the first place.
a) Why does anyone believe extraterrestrials would be able to track us down at all? Space is BIG.
b) If aliens knew we existed in the first place, please explain the math of how they’d get here. Even taking Star Trek logic into account and considering warp drive as a possibility, when considering relativity, Newton’s third law and the mathematics of achieving the right conditions of either for deep space travel, warp drive still seems implausible.
c) In the mathematically improbable situation where intelligent life did manage to get here, why would they be tiptoeing around in the background for seemingly 80 or so years when they are clearly technologically superior to us and nothing humanity has available to itself could remotely stop them? It seems silly to imagine these incredible lifeforms getting here and then having an “oops we crash landed” event.
d) Lastly, governments successfully covering up such an event(s) for decades is a fairy tale. Governments playing around with flight and stealth technology for the last 100 years? Yeah that seems likely.
Do I think intelligent life exists? Absolutely. Is there a chance those beings have contacted or reached us? 99.9999999% no. Is it fun to speculate about the possibilities and portray those possibilities in stories? Of course. Should people be spending time and money forming organizations to “force the government to tell the truth”, thereby wasting everyone else’s time and resources and ultimately being drains on society? Absolutely not. I don’t get it.
I cannot understand the people who do those annoying social media “pranks” that involve making a mess for some poor retail person/janitor/cashier to clean up. Especially because the most direct explanation is that the videos gain traction—to which I then ask, who are the people that watch those videos and go “heck yeah I love this”??
People who dislike these videos and comment on them to say that the perpetrators are morons also contribute to the tractiosn it gains because algorithms love engagement, corporatations love engament, so they’ll happily show the videos to more people in the vicious cycle of engagement.
This is why I hate the constant bombardment of trump/musk/reddit/etc posts. Or toxic-flavors-of-the-month like Andrew Tate.
People feeding the noise, and I bet you most of them are convinced that “It’s okay if I do it, because I’m being ironic, I’m above it all”.
No they’re not, they fixate on the most negative shit that floats across their field of perception. And there are always enough of these “I’m special, I get a pass” people to make the noise reach maximum level all the goddamned time.
Sometimes you also think that you’re the one who’s got it all figured and can provide something so insightful, so powerful, so eye-opening that you’re going to change someone’s life, and consequently, the world, for the better - we like to feel special and big, but we’re not.
A few years back there was a social media moron who came to Japan and pulled some stupid & offensive shit. I was actually living & working there at the time and, while I’m not a violent guy, I desperately wanted someone to go knock his teeth in. He had zero comprehension the shit he did for his pos channel meant more xenophobic discussions toward those of us who had/wanted nothing to do with him.
If this is the same person I’m thinking of, eventually a bystander did get angry enough to have a physical altercation with them at one point. They either overheard him or recognized him and shoved him, then told him off.
Religion and the belief in an invisible god, for which there is no good evidence.
I’m not religious myself but I do understand it sometimes. I feel like it can be a way to make sense of a world that doesn’t really make sense a lot of the time. It can be nice to have at least something to hold on to.
But people who use religion as an excuse to do bad? Hate them
That just makes it all the better. Doing it on purpose just sucks the air right out of the room.
I don’t understand why people hit their children. I grew up seeing my siblings get beaten in front of me and then I tried to be as obedient as possible so I wouldn’t get beaten as much. I feared my parents so much, I started having anxiety attacks from a younger age and not only acted neurotic about things that could possibly get me in trouble but would piss myself if I was sure I was going to get hit. I have told people this and they just say I was hit too much or I’m too sensitive, that’s all, it’s still fine to hit your kid. I’ve heard people defend being beaten with branches, shoes, belts, brooms, hangers, and cables. It made them “strong” and how else can a child understand right from wrong. I took a class on childhood development and the texts overwhelmingly say don’t hit your kids at all. I cried reading those textbooks, someone finally agreed with me. I have a friend who is expecting, they are religious and said they will be hitting their kid because essentially God wants them to. It was very hard to hear those words.
Child protection services will be happy to hear about this. And if you’re in a country where they actually do anything, even better.
has a basic, but easily understood explanation. basically, if both relativity and causality hold, true FTL travel is impossible, no matter how it is you acheive it. (in the OA universe, wormholes are accepted because the ship itself is not actually going FTL, and therefore not breaking causality)
my understanding of why an alcuibierre drive wouldn’t work is that space time itself has some energy(and therefore some mass,) all you’re really doing in that system is replacing the reaction mass from being matter to being… uh… space. But my understanding is that of a highly unscientific mind trying to understand…uh… sciencey shit.
In any case, some things to point out? the fastest man-made object is currently the Parker Solar Probe which is planned to reach a top speed of about 190 km/s at it’s fastest. (it’s basically falling into the sun, using Venus to loop around and gain speed.) That’s about .0006 c. At that speed, it would take about seven thousand years to reach proxima centauri (the nearest star at 4.2 light years.)
the energy necessary to accelerate even a few kilograms to a speed that could arrive at earth from another star (any other star), in a reasonable time frame is… appropriately described as astronomical. Any species technologically advanced to do so would be advanced enough to recognize that the only thing that’s really unique about our system is… well, us, and all the other life that evolved to be here. So there goes economic incentive. Cultural curiosity? sure maybe. but they’d be technologically advanced enough to understand that we nuked the shit out of our selves, and that we’re fucking psychotic. Which removes that.
Religious mandate? Oh. Great. Space-Mormons. (of course there’s space-mormons,) This is dubious as then, said proselytizers would definitely defy the world government to preach. (kind of like that idiot that got dead trying to proselytize the Sentinelese people.) Religious mandate to wipe us out of existence? we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Curiosity? is tempered by the whole ‘oh, they nuked themselves,’ thing. Any technology used to get here could be reverse engineered and used to get there- and we’re psychotic enough to nuke ourselves… there’s absolutely no telling how we’d actually respond to aliens. probably not how Star Trek portrays our First Contact… (well. except in the mirror universe. That might be more accurate.)
c) In the mathematically improbable situation where intelligent life did manage to get here, why would they be tiptoeing around in the background for seemingly 80 or so years when they are clearly technologically superior to us and nothing humanity has available to itself could remotely stop them? It seems silly to imagine these incredible lifeforms getting here and then having an “oops we crash landed” event.
alien abduction stories replaced vampiric…er… visitation?.. stories. it’s just pop culture intruding onto people’s imaginations.
But yeah. Any society capable of getting here has no need to tiptoe around- they can do what they want. The shinnanigans are… more likely us either misunderstanding things (ie military prototypes, whatever.) or straight up fraud (because, you know, that’s happened.)