Per the Washington Post, the Navy is still concerned that UFOs are still scouting our nuclear weapons stockpiles.
This thread started when the conspiracy theorists lived on obscure forums and it was all good fun about aliens but now they run the US government :(
I wonder if sightings are down now UFO/Alien conspiracies arent trending?
I think UFO conspiracies are down due to everyone having high-resolution video recorders in their pocket. If a UFO does fly over some populated location, there will be a lot of video to dissect. No more grainy VHS-style recordings from the 80’s and 90’s where you couldn’t tell what the hell you were looking at, so just let your imagination run wild.
Oh and talking about good old UFO conspiracies the patent for the black triangle anti-grav vehicles used in the X-Files turned up the other day.
What a silly patent. It’s plainly antiscientific and thus could not normally be granted except with the connivance of the PTO. Moreover, since it’s so absurdly groundbreaking and novel, no government agency would ever patent something that should be rated as a compartmentalized top secret. So it’s either someone’s obnoxious joke fomented at the public expense, or else it’s a rather feeble attempt to confuse some credulous foreign spies.
With the sun going to keep burning for a couple billion more years, this seems nice to say now. On the “last perfect day on Earth” (per Sagan) whatever sentient life forms inhabit the planet might not feel so great about the situation.
As for humanity (I would rather use the term “sentience,” as it’s hard to imagine a single species persisting over these timescales) lasting “awhile” longer, it might be the difference between a billion years and a trillion years. So it’s quite a while. In the end the universe is gonna end anyway, but it’s a bit like the difference between saying “hey, we all gotta go sometime” and saying “your house is on fire, why bother to try to get out?”
But the simpler answer is that living things generally don’t want to die. I don’t think fatalism is baked into us, and to be honest I like that about us.
Eh. Don’t know about your timescales but my worry only extends out about 100 or 200 years. Note this is much longer than the current political climate where we (collectively) seem to elect those that promise a tax cut funded by debt, and growth of coal-fired electricity jobs. But, hopefully, education and quality of life can meet my intent of long-term sustainability here on earth (see Japan, or Canada / USA without immigration). There’s nothing on Mars / Europa / Alpha Centauri for us anyways, despite the absolute certainty in which we hold onto that narrative. As for ‘protect the sentience!’, I can only think of Bender from Futurama. Sure, I guess?
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
Yeah! Dark Side of Your Face rules. And Wondrin’.
I’m sure they would be very content to know that somebody somewhere in the universe is still alive as they roast, though.
In fact they might take comfort in knowing all intelligent life wasn’t about to be snuffed out. But ideally they wouldn’t be there anymore, because there is some kind of infrastructure in place to relocate them in the preceding 10 million years or so. But in either case, the ones who aren’t roasting because their forebears already settled somewhere else, will be happy not to be roasting.
If sentient life doesn’t throw up its hands and accept the finite lifespan of Sol, it’s got potentially another trillion years by parking in front of red dwarfs and such. Think of all the videogames that could be played in that time!
I remember in what was in reality not the very distant past (but in internet time was eons ago) seeing an analysis (with math!) that barring advances that at present seem physically impossible, “resettlement” at planetary population scales simply can’t happen, so if I believed that humanity would survive that long (I do not), there would be a planetful of people here, and I suspect their comfort at knowing that somewhere intelligent life was to continue would be about on par with your comfort at knowing that other people are still out there in the world while you burn to death in your house.
People always say this but have you tried to film anything in the sky with your phone? Take it out and try to make a video of the moon. Try to pick out the stars. It doesn’t work. Even in the daytime it’s tough to get a clear video of an airplane.
We have 2 DOD videos of UFOs released in late 2017, and now the Navy revising their policy on UFOs due to frustration from personnel because they’re seeing things that aren’t being taken seriously. And, more importantly, the Navy considers them a security threat.
Here’s 2 videos of advanced aircraft that we can’t explain. Please follow these rules to report future sightings. If this isn’t an admission that UFOs are real I don’t know what more you need. Note I’m not saying alien space ships, just that there are real UFOs. The U means we don’t know what they are.
Yeah this is a pretty interesting development. It’s not JUST the videos they are going on either, as it is a combination of video/radar data/eye witness testimony/ATC observations about the same events. Getting SP00ky.
I found this to be a good summary as the mainstream news is starting to dig into it.
Maybe so. Nonetheless, my larger point is that Sagan’s Last Perfect Day will come. It will either mean the extinguishing of all human (or human-derived) sentience (if there be any left, obviously), or it will mean the extinguishing of whatever portion of human (or human-derived) sentience remains on Earth. Given those two scenarios, I personally would prefer the latter, and would advocate for future efforts to bring it about. I will obviously not be alive to see either come to fruition.
A Last Perfect Day in the Universe will also come, much later than the one on Earth. So in the end, all is futile. But still we strive on as long as we can, because IMO that is in life’s nature.
What do we say to the god of death?
“Not today!”
That’s the general idea.
I mean, that’s an individualist mantra. We say no to dying right now. But in this scenario, you actually do die. It is today. And all of that sort of talk seems to me to stem from an inability to really conceive of oneself as dead, projecting a possible future and layering feelings over it, because you actually are still alive to have those feelings, etc.
Anyway, this is very tangential and I don’t think we need to continue it further, as I’m sure neither of us will convince the other.