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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   4008 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I’m suggesting something beyond the status quo. A continuation of more videos being released, more government officials making statements, perhaps a formal declaration by states.

That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

Do you expect "the Science crowd" (i.e. the majority of Westerners) to not believe aliens exist even if they literally Show Us The Aliens?

That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

A Russian family that had cut all contacts to civilization and lived in the woods as hermits figured out Sputnik from seeing a new "star" that moved very fast across the sky. There's a lot of very observable new things you can make happen if you want and have the technology for it.

I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

That sounds more like a failure of imagination than anything else. I can imagine several thousand different things that could convince me, or anyone with half a brain, to take the possibility of contact by aliens with interstellar capabilities seriously.

They could hijack terrestrial comms. Shoot lasers from the moon or Jupiter. Submit proofs of a dozen unsolved mathematical conjectures. Land a million drones in every major city. Detonate gigaton antimatter explosives in interplanetary space. Targeted surgical strikes on every nuclear silo. Drop a blue whale on the White House lawn. Overload our neutrino detectors and graviton wave observatories with waves encoding pi in base 10. Or just display the drive signatures of their ships slowing down from relativistic speeds, as would be obvious to any backyard astronomer unless they have a means of propulsion that doesn't emit visible radiation.

What leaves me entirely unconvinced is weird artifacts on sensors or even competent eye-witness footage. Interstellar aliens would need a very perverse and specific modus operandi for that to be their first way of making themselves known, let alone lack the competence to be so obvious.

IIRC- and take this with a grain of salt because my most advanced science class was geology for nonscience majors- every hypothesized FTL drive leaves some kind of telltale signature at the end, too. So even aliens that figured out how to make an alcubierre drive work give off a telltale signature that we should have picked up if they’re anywhere in the neighborhood.

An Alcubierre Drive has a nasty tendency to accumulate all the space dust/debris the vessel encounters along the way, which is eventually liberated eventually, as you need to smooth out the bubble of warped space-time at the end of your journey.

So the braking resembles the blast from a relativistic shotgun, I don't recall figures on the magnitude of the energy released, or carried by the projectiles, but it's probably not a good idea to point it at anything inhabited. Maybe dumping it into a star might work. Either way, I suspect we would notice if it happened anywhere important within the orbit of Pluto.

Yeah, that’s what I was referring to, but I think krasnikov tubes and the fringe-but-math-works hyperspace theories also suggest there’d be some weird anomalies at the exit- and wormholes are a weird and noticeable anomaly.

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