Tag Archives: aliens

UFOs

Fact: pilots and astronauts see weird, unexplained flying objects in the sky from time to time. The U.S. military has released some unclassified videos of real footage from real airplanes, it says because these same videos are already floating around on the web and people aren’t sure they are real. Of course, there are plenty of fake videos on the web, but now as long as you accept the U.S. military as a source of factual information, you can accept these as facts. And how many classified videos exist for each unclassified one?

I find these facts inconvenient. I don’t really want to take this seriously, but I feel like I have to at least give it some thought. These things aren’t necessarily aliens. They are simply what they are called – unidentified. But it seems clear that somebody is testing something. Or playing with something. Or intentionally messing with our minds. Who and why? Well, at least some serious people (see May 17, 2011 Fresh Air: “Area 51 ‘Uncensored’: Was It UFOs Or The USSR?”) have claimed that the Soviet Union used UFO rumors and possibly even actual UFO-like aircraft to sew confusion. So maybe some government or mad billionaire is testing a drone, either to sew confusion or just for fun.

If it is super-technologically advanced aliens playing with toys, with the technology to hide in plain site and the technology to crush us like bugs anytime they want, I guess we should just say thank you for not doing that so far.

January 2019 in Review

After blogging pretty consistently daily for years, I’ve finally slowed this blog down to every other day due to the realities of work and family. Maybe I’ll get back to daily in a couple years. In the meantime, I’m going to pare my “month in review” posts to highlight three items, because it wouldn’t really make sense to do a Top 9 out of 15.

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.

Most hopeful story:

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.

 

Harry Reid believes in UFOs

The truth is out there. Or at least, a lot of pilots have seen some weird things and militaries around the world have serious UFO research programs, according to this 2017 New York Times article. Here are just a few eye-popping quotes:

“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain…

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

November 2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • Coral reefs are expected to decline 70-90% by mid-century.
  • The U.S. stock market is overvalued by about 40% by historic measures, and some economists think a major recession may be looming.
  • About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: People in Sweden are barely using cash at all, and some are paying with microchips embedded in their fingers. New technology may allow screening of multiple airport passengers from 25 feet away with minimal disruption. This is great for airline passengers who are already expecting to be screened intrusively, but of course raises some concerns about potential uses elsewhere in the public realm. Amazon is hiring about 100,000 seasonal workers this year, compared to about 120,000 in past years, and the difference may be explained by automation. There is a new ISO standard for toilets not connected to sewers systems (and not just your grandfather’s septic tank.)
  • A unidentified flying object has been spotted in our solar system, and serious scientists say there is at least a plausible, if very unlikely, chance that it is an alien spacecraft.
  • People are taking micro doses of LSD on a daily basis, believing it boosts creativity, and there is some evidence for this although the science is not rigorous.

Oumuamua

I tracked down the Harvard astrophysics paper that suggests this object could be an alien spacecraft or probe. They never say that it is one, only that its behavior would be consistent with one. Sadly, it seems like we missed the boat and it is too late to train our telescopes or send probes of our own in time to get a good look at the thing, so the best we can do is be on the lookout for others like it in the future.

how would people react to alien life?

Here’s an interesting study from Frontiers in Psychology about how people might react to the discovery of real extraterrestrial life.

How will humanity react to the discovery of extraterrestrial life? Speculation on this topic abounds, but empirical research is practically non-existent. We report the results of three empirical studies assessing psychological reactions to the discovery of extraterrestrial life using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software. We examined language use in media coverage of past discovery announcements of this nature, with a focus on extraterrestrial microbial life (Pilot Study). A large online sample (N = 501) was asked to write about their own and humanity’s reaction to a hypothetical announcement of such a discovery (Study 1), and an independent, large online sample (N = 256) was asked to read and respond to a newspaper story about the claim that fossilized extraterrestrial microbial life had been found in a meteorite of Martian origin (Study 2). Across these studies, we found that reactions were significantly more positive than negative, and more reward vs. risk oriented. A mini-meta-analysis revealed large overall effect sizes (positive vs. negative affect language: g = 0.98; reward vs. risk language: g = 0.81). We also found that people’s forecasts of their own reactions showed a greater positivity bias than their forecasts of humanity’s reactions (Study 1), and that responses to reading an actual announcement of the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life showed a greater positivity bias than responses to reading an actual announcement of the creation of man-made synthetic life (Study 2). Taken together, this work suggests that our reactions to a future confirmed discovery of microbial extraterrestrial life are likely to be fairly positive.

the new exoplanets

This long NASA article first gets you excited about the possibility of life on eight new planets it has just discovered, and then throws cold water (actually, make that lethal X-rays) all over your excitement. Still, the possibility of some kind of “slime” exists, which I guess is something.

Scientists are pondering the possibilities after this week’s announcement: the discovery of seven worlds orbiting a small, cool star some 40 light-years away, all of them in the ballpark of our home planet in terms of their heft (mass) and size (diameter). Three of the planets reside in the “habitable zone” around their star, TRAPPIST-1, where calculations suggest that conditions might be right for liquid water to exist on their surfaces—though follow-up observations are needed to be sure…

Recent findings suggest life would have an uphill battle on a planet close to a red dwarf, largely because such stars are extremely active in their early years—shooting off potentially lethal flares and bursts of radiation…

But so little is known about how life gets its start, and how common or rare it might be in the cosmos, that tenacious life on M-dwarf planets remains a distinct possibility.

However rare life might be, it would make all the difference to find it in just one more place besides Earth. Because if we find it in one more place, and are sure it arose independently of Earth, that would mean it is probably present in many more places. If we never find life anywhere else, we could consider the possibility of seeding other planets with some kind of life from Earth. This way, even if we don’t last forever, intelligent life would have a chance to arise again after a few billion years.

silicon-based life

Scientists can now synthesize proteins that could be incorporated in silicon-based life forms.

Directed evolution of cytochrome c for carbon–silicon bond formation: Bringing silicon to life

Enzymes that catalyze carbon–silicon bond formation are unknown in nature, despite the natural abundance of both elements. Such enzymes would expand the catalytic repertoire of biology, enabling living systems to access chemical space previously only open to synthetic chemistry. We have discovered that heme proteins catalyze the formation of organosilicon compounds under physiological conditions via carbene insertion into silicon–hydrogen bonds. The reaction proceeds both in vitro and in vivo, accommodating a broad range of substrates with high chemo- and enantioselectivity. Using directed evolution, we enhanced the catalytic function of cytochrome c from Rhodothermus marinus to achieve more than 15-fold higher turnover than state-of-the-art synthetic catalysts. This carbon–silicon bond-forming biocatalyst offers an environmentally friendly and highly efficient route to producing enantiopure organosilicon molecules.

possible alien signal

from KurzweilAI:

On May 15, 2015, Russian astronomers picked up a radio signal on the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Russia “in the direction of HD164595,” an international group of astronomers stated in a document* now being circulated through contact person Alexander Panov, according to Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams, who blogged about the data on Saturday, August 27, 2016…

Power required for such a signal would be astronomical, he explains. If broadcast in all directions, the required power is 1020 watts (100 billion billion watts) — hundreds of times more energy than all the sunlight falling on Earth. If aimed at us, assuming an antenna the size of the 1000-foot Arecibo instrument, they would still need to transmit more than a trillion watts.

In addition, the signal was received at 11Ghz (2.7 cm wavelength), in a part of the radio spectrum used by the military, so the signal may be due to terrestrial radio-frequency interference, or to gravitational lensing from a more distant source.