mrtrench
Well-Known Member
There was an article in the Telegraph a week or so ago reporting on comments from a former head of a US government programme. Google shows me that it was also reported in other broadsheets.
Existence of extra-terrestrial craft 'proved beyond reasonable doubt', says former Pentagon X-Files chief
This of course could be fake news. The same guy also said that SISU had accepted his offer to buy the Sky Blues. However, let's imagine, for the purposes of this thread, that it is real.
I'm generally sceptical of most things (both supernatural and bizarre claims on the internet), however I am willing to entertain the possibility that intelligent life exists elsewhere and that it may have cracked the problems of travelling huge distances. So after I read this I thought about the scenario for a while.
If aliens have visited Earth without deliberately making contact then first of all I think that's good news: they do not have malicious intent. And then I started thinking about why they would hold back.
We have been stuck in the mechanical age for travel for about 100 years. In recent years we have invented computers and that technology is growing quickly - but it's no more than a stepping stone towards inter-stellar travel. And we still don't understand the Universe.
I think that if inter-stellar travel is possible then it will come from leveraging the structure of the Universe: taking advantage of quantum behaviour and/or dark energy or dark matter (which may turn out to be all related). I didn't study physics and so apologise in advance to anyone here who did and thinks that my thoughts are naive... and would love to learn from you.
It strikes me that humans need to make that leap from mechanical to 'universe-structural' travel before aliens would have any interest in making contact. That could be many thousands of years away. Or equally, a breakthrough with current theories could mean it is only a hundred years away. I like the idea of super-symmetry and also other dimensions - but that's possibly my maths background (liking elegant solutions).
Anyone else thinking about this issue? Thoughts?
Existence of extra-terrestrial craft 'proved beyond reasonable doubt', says former Pentagon X-Files chief
This of course could be fake news. The same guy also said that SISU had accepted his offer to buy the Sky Blues. However, let's imagine, for the purposes of this thread, that it is real.
I'm generally sceptical of most things (both supernatural and bizarre claims on the internet), however I am willing to entertain the possibility that intelligent life exists elsewhere and that it may have cracked the problems of travelling huge distances. So after I read this I thought about the scenario for a while.
If aliens have visited Earth without deliberately making contact then first of all I think that's good news: they do not have malicious intent. And then I started thinking about why they would hold back.
We have been stuck in the mechanical age for travel for about 100 years. In recent years we have invented computers and that technology is growing quickly - but it's no more than a stepping stone towards inter-stellar travel. And we still don't understand the Universe.
I think that if inter-stellar travel is possible then it will come from leveraging the structure of the Universe: taking advantage of quantum behaviour and/or dark energy or dark matter (which may turn out to be all related). I didn't study physics and so apologise in advance to anyone here who did and thinks that my thoughts are naive... and would love to learn from you.
It strikes me that humans need to make that leap from mechanical to 'universe-structural' travel before aliens would have any interest in making contact. That could be many thousands of years away. Or equally, a breakthrough with current theories could mean it is only a hundred years away. I like the idea of super-symmetry and also other dimensions - but that's possibly my maths background (liking elegant solutions).
Anyone else thinking about this issue? Thoughts?