Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress The US government has recovered alien spacecraft and bodies from crash landings on Earth, and is keeping the whole thing covered up, Congress was told on Wednesday. Ryan Graves, a former F-18 pilot who served in the US Navy for over a decade, retired US Navy commander David Fravor, and David Grusch, an intelligence officer who …
Perhaps that title should also apply to finding that the video provides evidence of intelligence within Mr Grusch's head[1]:
> A democratic process must be adhered to when evaluating the data
Run a poll to decide if this misshapen lump is made of a metal not of this Earth?
[1] waiting for proper morning, with coffee, before playing a video. But will it live up to expectations or has El Reg put all of the exciting bits into the trailer?!
“I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth. “ Stephen Hawking.
“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.” Bill Watterson
"Four reasons that I can think of:"
5) Slave labor
Everything else isn't hard to find and often easier to harvest from smaller moons/asteroids over getting down and up through Earth's gravity well.
Perhaps some aliens might stop to use Earth as a resource services base, but the curious monkeys would tear down anything they built if it wasn't guarded. Radioactives would be the high value target unless it turns out that a big rock like Ceres can supply them.
I think that any species that could crack travel over interstellar distances might also be able to produce robotic labour.
In the absence of (relativity and causality breaking) faster than light travel, it's a hell of a journey just to visit the closest star. The energies involved in acceleration and deceleration increase exponentially as you approach the speed of light, so practically anything is unlikely to be travelling faster than something like 0.1c.
The closet star to Sol is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.25 ly away. That journey alone at 0.1c would take 42.5 years, and that doesn't factor in time to accelerate and decelerate. If you kidnapped a bunch oif humans at birth and transported them there, they'd be in their mid-forties, and hardly great material for slave labour.
"The closet star to Sol is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.25 ly away. That journey alone at 0.1c would take 42.5 years, and that doesn't factor in time to accelerate and decelerate. If you kidnapped a bunch oif humans at birth and transported them there, they'd be in their mid-forties, and hardly great material for slave labour."
.1c isn't the fastest you can reasonably travel, and time dilation starts to kick in as you accelerate decently.
You just need to figure out a mechanism of acceleration that doesn't require (relatively) slowly throwing mass out of one end of a ship - radiation pressure / photon momentum are more likely, even if we can't yet make sensible use of them.
You do need to go considerably above 0.1c as the time dilation at that speed doesn't help that much. At 0.1c the relative journey time only drops from 42.5 years to 42.3 years. You need to get up to 0.866c to get a 2 to one dilation hence a relative time of 21.2 years. To be really impressive you might prefer something like LHC particle velocity which is 99.999999% of the speed of light. This gets a very "workable" relative journey time of 2 days though scaling from a machine with a 27km long track capable of accelerating sub atomic particles to something capable of transporting "slaves" would be a tough engineering challenge.
"Everything else isn't hard to find and often easier to harvest from smaller moons/asteroids over getting down and up through Earth's gravity well."
Not a lot of liquid water[0] or free oxygen[1] on the smaller moons & asteroids. Nor salt[2].
[0] Melting ice for transport is prohibitively expensive. As is cutting it into blocks and physically placing them in the hold. Water is used in almost every industrial plant in existence here on Earth, I see no reason why aliens would not find it as useful as we do. And ours is free for the pumping, thanks to the fluke of our location with respect to the Sun.
[1] Oxygen is a fairly dangerous chemical in it's free state, binding explosively with many other chemicals. For that reason, it's a very important industrial chemical. Our atmosphere is probably a rarity in the Universe, making it a treasure trove for visiting aliens. Probably.
[2] You don't need to be told how important a chemical salt is ... Again, I'm sure aliens will find it equally useful, even if it's not required for their metabolism.
"You are assuming a very earth-like biology for these aliens which requires oxygen, water, salt and animals as food."
Nope. The first three are important chemicals for industrial purposes. A creature's base metabolism does not alter their chemical properties.
I added the last one mostly for shock value (for small values of "shock", at least in this forum), but then again you never know until you know, and we just plain don't know.
"A democratic process must be adhered to when evaluating the data and it is our collective responsibility to ensure that public involvement is encouraged and respected."
Like the way UK politicians represented BREXIT?
Like US politicians kowtow to lobbists with fists of cash for their reelection funds?
Democracy, if not dead, is certainly in its death throes.
I remember reading a statement by someone, who said that if "They" have the technology for interstellar travel, and they choose to visit us, it's not to make friends, it's to conquer us. So perhaps we should stop trying to communicate with them.
// only reasonable icon
This I very much doubt. If you can travel through space that sort of distance what do you get from Earth? There are limitless sources of resources open to that level of tech. Which leaves religious or ideological idiocy. I rather hope that was something we had monopolised.
It depends what the aliens concerned already have, but there are two general options that science fiction provides:
1. Slaves with sufficient intelligence to do things they haven't automated, but not enough intelligence to design our own spacecraft after they smash up our basic ones.
2. Lunch, assuming that our protein is of use to them, although in that case I think they're better off removing humans and eating the animals we already farm.
There is an alternative: they might just not like the idea of having to deal with us later and figure that destroying us now would be an easier cleanup job than trying to remove us from multiple planets, the way that if there is one sample of Ebola in a lab that doesn't need it, it's usually time to completely wipe out that before it finds its way into any humans. Maybe the aliens will be nice enough to assume we won't be that harmful if we spread, but no guarantees.
3. Research? Human researchers travel all over the world to all sorts of piss holes to study nature. To a super advanced civilization we probably would look like insane little ants, pretending to be 'people'. There is no reason to assume other advanced civilizations would not engage in similar studies. That's a primary method to learn new things, you know?
It is, but if they're doing it, outside a relatively low-chance situation, they have no reason to choose here. If there is a lot of life, they will have seen a lot of it and had a chance to research many different versions, so why this one? If there is not a lot of life, then they'd have to get very lucky to end up in one of the few places that there is something to research. That's no guarantee that they wouldn't, because there's always a chance that we're relatively close to wherever they are so we're the first research-worthy place they've found, but if we're the 52nd planet with life, we might not prove to be an interesting research project.
Also, research might not end well for us. A lot of the organisms we've researched didn't enjoy the experience, and some of those were other humans. I've already covered what could happen if the result of the research is that they conclude that we're a problem and they don't want the pollution to spread.
3. Research? Human researchers travel all over the world ...
Or more likely: entertainment. Visiting Earth could be AKA a safari trip, something to do in a vacation. However for that to be attractive they would need to have FTL travel, a trip of centuries to a safari would be boring.
We're already struggling to find tasks that people are intelligent enough to do, but that can't be automated. This hypothetical advanced civilisation will presumably have progressed their own AI further. Hard to see how they could still have a viable niche for human slaves.
As for food, there have to be hundreds of planets they could terraform to support their own native nutrients, without the hassle of dealing with an organised indigenous species. Nope, not buying that either.
Research seems more likely, they'd want to study us for the same reason we study - well, everything: because we're here.
Evangelism is another possible motivation. And partnership is another - maybe they're feeling pretty lonely out there, and they'd like the support of another intelligent civilisation. Or, if they're "organised" on a similar basis to us, then their explorers will be motivated by profit, and we can look forward to multiple competing factions with mutually antagonistic plans for us.
"We're already struggling to find tasks that people are intelligent enough to do, but that can't be automated."
No, we're not. Haven't you seen all the people saying that they can't find workers for basically every job? Yes, they could probably do something to get them, but they're admitting that they could not automate that job yet and find it more efficient or better to have a human do it. We've been building robots for decades and we still don't have one that is as reliable at figuring out how to reproduce tasks that one human can do quickly. Of course, when a machine is needed to do one specialized set of things, we're quite good at building that, but humans still work pretty well for tasks where quickly interpreting a situation in a non-static way and responding quickly to unusual situations is a frequent situation.
Aliens might have improved on this. There's a reason to believe that they will prioritize it before interplanetary travel. However, that is not a guarantee of that. Different countries here haven't pursued every piece of technology in the same order because some of them had preferences on what was most important. For all we know, aliens could have preferred transportation technology to mechanization and AI, either for pragmatic reasons, for instance if they inhabit somewhere small and need transportation for sufficient space, or ideological ones, such as a belief that AI is unreliable or dangerous.
"As for food, there have to be hundreds of planets they could terraform to support their own native nutrients, without the hassle of dealing with an organised indigenous species. Nope, not buying that either."
And we could easily eat whatever can be grown outside our houses, but we often import things from elsewhere because we think it tastes better. I suggest that, if our nutrients are the same as theirs and they appreciate it, they either destroy us and try automated farming of our crops and livestock, or that they have the humans do that after eliminating threatening technology and organizations. This also assumes that they have terraforming abilities, which is not guaranteed. Possibly our planet is also livable for them and they find it easier to live here than to turn a place like Mars into a pleasant environment.
Thats a pretty flawed argument. Any Aliens with the technology to visit Earth, must by definition be at least 50 years ahead of us minimum, if not hundreds or thousands.
The level of automation AND more importantly the cost of that automation would be buttons to them.
Therefore is no technological reason they would need human slaves, they would WANT to keep slaves for a reason other than the cost of technology - ideological or religious AND be culturally blind enough to accept the risk of a slave uprising using their technology against them. they'd have to be 100% sure that their technology was unusable in any shape or form by us.
Not just the technology, but mastery of the amount of energy needed to travel such vast distances (assuming they're not exploiting some physics loophole we've not discovered yet). Would make our largest nuclear reactors seem like firecrackers.
When you have that much energy at your disposal, there's no need for conflict with less advanced species. Just go somewhere without any natives. There's nothing on Earth, or even in the Solar System, that cannot not be found on countless other planets, moons, asteroids and comets throughout the galaxy, or synthesized from base materials.
That leaves scientific curiosity, tourism (Earth as an interstellar safari), ideology (religious zeal, master race etc.). Sure, there are sci-fi tropes where humans are a food source that cannot be found, grown or synthesised anywhere else (e.g. Wraith in Stargate Atlantis) but those are just plot vehicles. Any race that's mastered interstellar travel can surely synthesize any nutrients they need.
Iain Banks (bafflingly no M in this one) had a good idea in "Transition": tourism. Specifically this: it is ludicrously unlikely that a planet has life. It is more unlikely that it has complex life. It is more unlikely that it has intelligent life. We tick all those boxes. But we tick another box: our planet, possibly uniquely in the entire galaxy, has a sun and moon that, temporarily but right now, subtend precisely the same angle when viewed from the surface. Thus, total solar eclipses are possible. This very well may be the only planet in the entire Milky Way where this is so. Thus: if you want to find visiting aliens, don't look in remote woodlands, don't look in secretive airbases... look on chartered yachts floating in the path of total eclipses, yachts whose charterers's cars have suspiciously darkened windows...
I wrote a couple of chapters before realising I'm not a particularly good writer but my story idea was while Earth has nothing offer in the way of technology or resources it does have art, specifically music for the sake of my story.
A better writer may be able to run with this - the idea that aliens are more interested in what we can create rather than anything tangible.
Human minds perceive art.
But outside the bias of that human mindset, it's just stuff arranged to physical parameters may or may not have utility if processed for resources.
Sure we have artifacts.
But art is a psychological experience dependent upon human neurology to invent within the mind and thus perceive
So perhaps for your story it turns out that these aliens and humans share an ancestor that allows them to glitch similarly and thus perceive art
Harmonics are universal, the relationship between notes of different multiples of the same frequency should always work. As for would an alien prefer Bach, AC/DC or Stravinsky is possibly where the fun starts.
With the visual arts unless there is some kind of pan-human form populating the galaxy (as in the Culture series) then I doubt if a Rembrandt picture would appeal to an alien, Picasso might and various abstract artists but even still that's a pretty remote chance.
The same for the written word, it's bad enough translating between different Earth languages where there are common concepts and experiences to draw on, translating something like Shakespeare into an alien tongue where there is unlikely to be much commonality is unlikely to do the bard any credit at all.
That's why I went for music
As a musician, I like the idea, but there are lots of ways it might not work. They might hear differently than we do; a piece written for human instruments and transposed into ultrasound might prove to be unpleasant due to differences in propagation and absorption in those higher frequencies. Or, a simpler thing, they have music themselves and find ours to be too different for their general liking. A lot of traditional music from one part of the world isn't very popular with those who have lived elsewhere and is interpreted quite differently.
Not to mention that there are differences between societies with the use of the standard musical components and, in some cases, those components themselves. For example, a lot of music is based on a 12-tone scale between notes that are octaves apart, but not every musical tradition on Earth uses this. There are some instruments that are designed for more than twelve notes between octaves, which sound kind of weird if you're not familiar with them. I think that an alien civilization that has music is likely to have more similarities between theirs and ours than in any other type of art, but that's no guarantee.
Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus all get total solar eclipses because the sun is relatively small when seen from them and they have big moons in the right orbits. For Jupiter, 5 of its moons (Amalthea, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) are big and close enough to cause total eclipses. Whilst these are total solar eclipses they do last longer that the fleeting ones on earth, but with an estimated 100 billion planets in our galaxy it is statistically very unlikely that ours is the only one where "instantaneous" total solar eclipses can occur.
I see some flaws in your argument as well. The ideas that, if one kind of technology is better, then all of them must be at the same level. This is not guaranteed here, so why should it be guaranteed elsewhere? Our technology is a function of our biology and our environment, and the common threads in that technology are common because all humans are roughly the same shape and live in roughly similar places. Even with that, some countries have specialized in certain technologies and not others. North Korea, for example, has spent a lot of time and money on pretty good weapons systems and can't make any computers; they import all the hardware from China and they run Linux on them. Some countries have had nuclear power for sixty years, and others have none and don't intend to build them, either because they have energy from other sources and don't see a need to build one or because they have fears about safety or something else that mean they refuse to build them.
Aliens could not only have these kind of beliefs or priorities that change what they choose to build, but they almost certainly have different forms and environments. Something that we consider normal because everyone finds it useful and it quickly spread could be almost entirely useless to a certain alien species. They might visit us and decide to adopt our version, or they might visit us and decide that they don't need ours either.
I did just post, but I had one more idea I want to wedge in. Another part of this problem is our assumption on what we'll have in the future. We do not have terraforming technology now. We have been talking about it in the past. A few people were stupid enough to suggest that nuclear weapons could be used as a terraforming tool, for example. We assume that we'll get that stuff at some point, but it might turn out to be more difficult than we thought, and there's no guarantee that we'd get it by the time we have transportation that can easily deliver it to another planet. For that matter, we don't have a guarantee that we'll be able to make interplanetary transport cheap enough for some uses; there's a possibility that it will eventually get cheap enough for more serious work, but that fast travel will take a very long time to be efficient enough for us to use it. We can only guess about which of those will come first and by how far, and it's likely that our ideas of what 2073's technology will look like are very different from what we'll actually have by then.
This also has a parallel in human technology. Five centuries ago, we had the transportation technology to go to almost anywhere on Earth. Some places hadn't been visited, and some would be dangerous to try, but it was not prohibitive to travel to the opposite side of the planet. What technology did the people have for doing things? Very little. They didn't have the power of communication with home, they didn't have the power to prevent themselves being infected by diseases, they didn't have safety equipment to survive or avoid storms, they didn't have the power to drift down and observe without notice, and they didn't have a lot of information about themselves or their world either. While space travel is a lot more complex than sea travel, and many technologies will be needed before anyone can have space ships, this is an indication of how disconnected some advances can be. Nothing intrinsically requires people to build navigation technology before they make advances in medicine; it could go in any order people want.
Terraforming in principle shouldn't be tremendously tricky, the problem is "how much of a hurry are you in?" If you can afford thousands of years then OK, if you want it done in a lifetime, forget it.
You need to build an atmosphere, stabilise the temperature, sort out a way to start or emulate a magnetosphere, get megatonnes of water from somewhere (Saturn's rings?) then kick-start a biosphere so the atmosphere is self regulating. All doable given unlimited time and resources. Shame that both time and resources are seriously limited (at the moment).
Haven't you seen all the people saying that they can't find workers for basically every job?
I think this is more a basic failure of capitalism. There are plenty of capable people out there who are prepared to do all sorts of jobs, they just require decent payment for it, whilst "free-market" capitalism demands ever-increasing profits (infinite growth with finite resources is the biggest piece of idiocy anyone has ever come up with IMHO). If resources are limited, and growth is deemed essential, the only way to achieve it is to pay the workers less, and the natural response to this from the workers is to go elsewhere.
I did acknowledge that there are things that could be done to find the workers, but that wasn't my point. Whether or not they can find the workers, they are preferring to use those workers over automation, even when they can't find them for the price they want to pay. This indicates that, for those jobs, automation is either infeasible or prohibitively expensive. This will improve as we get better robotic technology and if AI ever gets to a state that's more reliable than the recent fad, but there will be limitations on it that we aren't aware of.
Our discussions on the viability of certain automation demonstrates this point. Will we get self-driving cars that can be used and trusted? Some people say that we will within a year, but admittedly they said we'd get that seven years ago so we can discount them. Some people say it's impossible and will never happen. Some people say it will take decades, but will eventually exist. Some people are far more optimistic. Some people say that it will be technically possible quickly, but not socially accepted for much longer. I don't even know which one you think, but only one of those groups can be right and I don't know for certain which it will be. You can get even wider differences if you talk about AGI, as there are some people who have become convinced that large language models already demonstrate it (at least I can be sure that they're wrong) and some people who are entirely certain that a machine that executes deterministic logical operations can never demonstrate consciousness or understand and replicate the actions we do that require consciousness from us. We also have arguments about how wise it would be to attempt to create or use AGI if we could do it. That question is critical to understanding whether human labor could be made obsolete.
IIRC, the premise there was that there are planets in unstable orbits that meant that other planets were unsafe, so they were sent ahead to blow up the unstable ones, so the others could be settled.
Of course, scientifically speaking, it's nonsense; the mass in those planets would have to go somewhere, and if converted somehow to energy, would be like a supernova going off, which would be far worse for anything in the cosmic vicinity. In terms of impact, there's very little difference between being hit by one large object or a trillion smaller pieces of it, the energy involved is the same.
Dyson Sphere? If I recall correctly, the amount of metal/stuff that you would need to construct a full dyson sphere would likely exceed the available matter from planets/asteroids/etc. in a single "typical" (if there is such a thing) solar system. So to do it properly you might need to mine some other nearby ones.
Of course, in that situation, you are likely to be uninterested in whether those nearby ones actually contain life of any kind - excepting that it may attempt to resist your efforts!
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