Ouija Board Experiences

[Wyldwraith]

@EvilNed: The 3% observation of the visible night sky figure has been established by the Royal Observatory in the U.K and the various observatories in the Americas charged with plotting the position of Near Earth Objects. (The guys trying to make sure we get sufficient time to do something about it after being warned of a probable or certain impact by a large asteroid, comet etc.) The History Channel homepage and Wikipedia will both provide you with citations of the "Less than 3% figure. Wikipedia will send you to a couple of cool (if long-winded) congressional reports on the dangers posed by Near Earth Objects, and the current deficits in our ability to track them, and why those deficits exist. As for the two sightings I referenced. One occurred in 1992 in the airspace above the English channel, in an area of shared jurisdiction. Visual sighting was by a U.K commercial pilot doing a maintenance hop, and the UFO was tracked by the nearby Air Traffic Control tower. U.K law requires a report be filed with the government concerning UFOs sighted in U.K airspace, but the U.K response was to say the object didn't pose any threat they were aware of, and while they would be concluding their investigation, perhaps French authorities would wish to continue. The French never released an official statement. The 2nd sighting I mentioned was by an Isreali military pilot scrambled to intercept the UFO 23-25 miles north of his base. Interesting fact here is that there is a damned MOUNTAIN of intelligence community chatter between Isreal and the U.S concerning the incident that are now available via Freedom of Information Act request after being declassified a couple of years ago. The apparent interest by the U.S was due to the confirmation of the UFO rapidly changing direction, coming to a near-instantaneous stop and then accelerating back to an equally absurd speed fast enough to literally liquefy a human being. I'm not a military analyst, but even I can understand why any sovereign nation would be troubled by the existence of intelligence-directed objects traveling 10-11x faster than anything we know of, and doing so with apparent Inertia-Cancellation capabilities.

[EvilNed]

Do you have sources for all those sightings? And does the evidence conclusively point towards it being of extra-terrestial origin? Or unexplainable?

[Wyldwraith]

Ok, EvilNed, you've commented more than once on a given statement of mine including "multiple improbabilities". So, in the interest of getting somewhere in the debate, I want to put a few single-topic questions to you, and the reason(s) I feel they're important enough to merit serious ongoing inquiry. Then I'd like to see what you have to say about the question(s) you find you wish to respond to. 1) We've established that excepting humanity, we have no certain confirmation of the existence of extraterrestrial life that is intelligent/self-aware, whose nature includes a penchant for scientific inquiry even vaguely similar to our own. The question 1: Given the potentially horrific possibilities if an advanced race that happens to discover us and has the means to reach us, do you consider the pursuit of answering the "Are we alone?" question to be important? My reason(s) why I consider the "Are we alone?" question to be an extremely serious one. Even if the overall possibility of our world being discovered by a race with the means to reach us and the desire to harm us for whatever reason (taking our planet comes to mind) is incredibly remote, given the absolute certainty of our complete extinction if we were to come into conflict with a interstellar-travel-capable species at our current level of development, I believe its worth exploring in the same way we're trying to develop means of monitoring potential sources of Short/Long Gamma Ray Bursts that may be pointed our way, or the same measures for the poles of a Magnetar. In simpler terms: Even if the chances of such an advanced race a) existing, b) being capable of interstellar travel, c) actually discover us, and d) wish to destroy us is .00000000001%, it's still something we should be considering for the obvious threat of extinction posed by such an eventuality. 2) The Question 2: Do you believe non-conventional means of "getting around" the light-barrier are or aren't achievable? My reasons: Given the very vastness of space that you've emphasized, without such means we will be forever confined to our own solar system...or at best may develop multi-generational colony ships, or cryogenic/other hibernation method "Sleeper Ships" that could/would take tens of thousands of years to get anywhere in an interstellar sense. I just find the idea of humanity being essentially imprisoned in our own solar system forever to be incredibly depressing.

[EvilNed]

I believe that for all intents and purposes, we are alone and will always be alone. I believe there's life out there, somewhere. But only because the universe is as large as it is. There may be several other civilizations out there, or there may be none. There may only be planets populated by microbes. I do not believe that any extra terrestial species have contact with any other extra terrestial species, for space is too big. Even for faster-than-light travel, space is simply to huge. In simpler terms: Even if the chances of such an advanced race a) existing, b) being capable of interstellar travel, c) actually discover us, and d) wish to destroy us is .00000000001%, it's still something we should be considering for the obvious threat of extinction posed by such an eventuality. I'd say it's still something you could, if you wanted to, indulge yourself in worrying about. As much as I indulge myself in believing I'll be winning the international lottery for "all the money in the world" each and every week for the rest of my life. I believe the odds are about the same. The main reason is simply: Space. It's incredibly huge. It's soooo incredibly huge. My reasons: Given the very vastness of space that you've emphasized, without such means we will be forever confined to our own solar system...or at best may develop multi-generational colony ships, or cryogenic/other hibernation method "Sleeper Ships" that could/would take tens of thousands of years to get anywhere in an interstellar sense. I agree, it is depressing. But I do not believe Humankind will never reach other solar systems, and I do not believe that mankind will ever popularize any other planets, apart from maybe Mars and the Moon. Beyond that, it's all gas and inhospitable to human life. There are a few moons, but their enviroments are extreme. The very sole exception is if mankind developed a way to transit their consciousness from one host to another, in which case my consciousness could essentially be transmitted into a space probe. Light years would still be impossible, but we'd be able to cover great distances by sending out hosts to our bodies, waiting a few years, and then transmitting that consciousness to said Probe which has no landed on Mars. Altough, if we ever reach that point in our evolution (or development more like it) we'd probably no longer be anything closely resembling humans as nature has shaped us.

[Publius]

They even speak Latin, a language they never studied, at 13 yrs of age. I'm only gonna get spooked if they said "liberate tutame ex inferis" before Event Horizon came out.

[Wyldwraith]

Allow me to reference something, We've been discussing the way that the lack of faster-than-light travel (or its practical equivalent, spatial folding, positive and negatively charged dark matter used to expand and contract space etc) would forever prevent humanity from reaching other stars, or setting foot on another earth-like planet. First, would like to turn your attention to the discovery of Gleesa-581. Solar system 20 light-years and change from us that has multiple rocky planets, with 1 Venus-like planet that's in a bit too close to the star Gleesa to be in the habitable range, but most interesting is the next planet out. Liquid water, appropriately placed to gain sufficient heat to keep water liquid, but not too much. Radiation levels similar to Earth, and (although they haven't pinned down the composition of this planet's atmosphere yet) there are HINTS that it could be Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide or Monoxide-based, something nearly as transparent as Earth's atmosphere, and slightly more dense. Most importantly, the planet rotates on a stable axis (so it isn't tidally locked like our Moon for example. Ie: One side constantly lit, one forever dark)...and its orbit is even more stable than ours. Now, I should also mention that Gleesa-581s most promising planet is 5-8x as massive as Earth, so it would never be suitable for us given the gravity, but nothing else that's been studied so far precludes the long-term sustainability of complex life. Gleesa's "super-Earth" as it's being called even seems to have stable magnetic poles as Earth does, indicating an extremely similar geology to our own. The reason I bring this up is that the "Planet Hunters" have only studied about 350 planet-bearing solar systems so far, but even in such a small sample we already have a planet that fits all the known criteria to allow for the rise of complex life. A "very close cousin" to Earth. This was before the launch of the Kepler Telescope, its mission being the discovery and study of Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars. Despite being currently limited to analyzing only those rocky/solid planets that are in close to the same plane as our own planet via the "Transit Method" of measuring the dip in the star's brightness as the planet in question moves visibly across the surface of its star, Kepler promises to allow the discovery of thousands of potentially Earth-like planets. http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/nasakepl...News&NewsID=16 If you're interested in checking it out... Moving on, I disagree that mankind will remain trapped in our own solar system. We're already studying a particle that appears to breach the light-barrier (the Tachyon), and have yet to devise viable experimental criteria to prove or disprove the wormhole theories, and not even close to figuring out how to prove/disprove the theory posed (The name of the scientist escapes me. It's something like Albucierre) about the viability of dynamically controlling the warping of space with a "Dark Matter engine" which uses positively and negatively charged Dark Matter to contract space in front of the theoretical vessel and then expand it behind the vessel. Effectively folding space to make the shortest distance between two points to bring those points together as one, then allowing space to "snap back" into its conventional shape, carrying the theorized vessel from Point A to B instantaneously. While I have no basis to offer an opinion on the validity of using either tachyons or dark matter to violate the light-barrier, I believe that the fact our current understanding is sufficient to begin developing potentially viable theories of Faster-than-Light travel is indicative of the potential to achieve this feat. Call it an article of faith for me if you wish. I staunchly believe mankind will solve the riddle and overcome the formidable obstacle posed by the vast distances separating star systems one day. The alternative would ultimately deny meaning in the final analysis to EVERYTHING ELSE that we have been, are, or ever will be.

[Mike70]

Moving on, I disagree that mankind will remain trapped in our own solar system. two words: laser sail. a ship powered by a laser sail would be able to accelerate to a large percentage of the speed of light. the technology to build one already exists. the problem is money. another thing to consider about high speed space travel is time dilation. a person on a such a ship would experience the passage of time far, far more slowly than an observer on earth. this is a proven rock solid fact. the faster you move, the more slowly you experience time. you might experience 4 years subjective time under those conditions while 40 years have passed on earth. you would, in effect and reality, wind up in earth's future. at really high speeds this effect can produce astronomical amounts of time dilation. so any sort of mission involving speeds approaching that of light would need some long, long term planning. because such craft could be returning to earth decades, even centuries, after they left. the people traveling on that ship would've only aged a few years. ain't the universe a fascinating place? what this has to do with ouija boards i have no idea. it is certainly a more interesting topic of conversation.

[Kaos]

You have a fan though! An interesting scientific explanation that sounds much more feasible than ghosts or goblins or whatever. He does prefer fans to friends.

[AcesandEights]

He does prefer fans to friends. For the right sort, Terran might be willing to make an exception, no?

[Terran]

two words: laser sail. a ship powered by a laser sail would be able to accelerate to a large percentage of the speed of light. the technology to build one already exists. the problem is money. What do you consider a large percentage of the speed of light?... 10%? 50%? 90%? 99.9%? I pretty much bowed out of this conversation in terms of responding...but this caught my eye... If one were to move a given mass (a space ship for example) by exposing it to some external force you can use Einsteins special relativity... This will demonstrate that its physically impossible to move an object with a mass at the speed of light... According to special relativity, the energy of an object with rest mass m and speed v is given by γmc^2, where γ is the Lorentz factor. When speed(v) is zero, γ is equal to one, giving rise to the famous E = mc2 formula for mass-energy equivalence. Since the γ factor approaches infinity as v approaches c, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light. The speed of light is the upper limit for the speeds of objects with positive rest mass So lets use a space ship as an example. The ship is traveling in space and accelerating with hopes of reaching the speed of light or close to this speed (be it with solar sails laser sails or any other propulsion method). Using Einstein's theory of special relativity one has to consider all the particles that exist in the ship in a relative fashion. As the speed of all these particles increase their mass actually increases. As the mass of these particles increase it takes more energy to accelerate all the particles. The amount of energy to accelerate a given depends on its mass....so as the mass of the ship increases the amount of energy to accelerate it increases. Consider a ship moving at 50% the speed of light. The most powerful rockets we have today spending its entire payload for acceleration would not increase the ships speed at all. So the first problem with moving a ship the speed of light is that you would need a near infinite amount of energy. Laser sails and solar sails wouldnt work because as the ship reaches reaches speed the relative tiny amount of energy would cease to accelerate the mass. But thats not the most significant problem.... As the ship increases in speed to any larger percentage of the speed of light the structural integrity of the ship would begin to fail....eventually catastrophic... so your left with a mass of wreckage. Lets say this mass of wreckage continued to accelerate As this wreckage continues to accelerate and the atoms within start become excited and generate heat as their relative mass increases... Eventually this atoms would generate so much heat that nuclear fission occurs breaking down the atoms into smaller particles and releasing light.... The lesson is ...the amount of energy to get a mass to the speed of light is the amount of energy required to turn a mass into heat and light. The speed of light is a property of energy and mass. By this definition mass cannot exist at that speed. So does that mean we can not travel to the far reaches of space? It does by means of typical propulsion, where an applied force pushes an object in a direction. However it is possible to warp space to change where an object is in space. I dont want to get into that here though to lengthy.... Im not talking about wormholes though, think cosmic surfing. Moving without moving. ---------- Post added at 12:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:30 PM ---------- He does prefer fans to friends. I think I have a certain personalty disorder the makes me for most practical purposes indifferent to either praise or criticism. For the right sort, Terran might be willing to make an exception, no?   Robot friends would be awesome!

[Wyldwraith]

Dynamic spatial warping is personally my hunch as to how we'll finally "breach" light-speed. (For practical travel purposes). Obviously conventional propulsion is absolutely worthless, so we should stop pissing away billions on solid-state rocket-based missions and put the cash into better optics platforms to allow us to catch sight of some of the odder cosmic events that happen from time to time. The analogy there would be playing the lottery. Total crapshoot as to whether we'd learn anything useful from a Quantum Event, but gotta play to win. If we can't see it/study it, it might as well not exist. Beyond that we need more research grants for the really high-end physics experiments. (Think Large Hadron Collider)...there are better ways to trap those damned elusive Tachyons than we're using now, but the better ways cost TONS of cash. (Producing metric tons of 99.9999% pure Beryllium for one). My basic point is we need better math and physics, because the conventional stuff we have now is worthless in regards to a space program. For getting to another solar system, Einstein might as well not have been born, for he offers nothing useful on the subject. Feymann...perhaps. Can't imagine how it will be done, but my gut says it'll boil down to folding space, or "moving without moving" as Terran said. That's unless we luck out and wormholes are lots more useful than current theories predict. Edit: The inherent problems with interstellar travel are why I don't buy into conspiracy theories about crashed UFOs on Earth. At the very maximum, I MIGHT be able to buy a crashed ET probe, or conventionally propelled (albeit advanced) "shuttle" used for In-System travel. Why? Can you imagine an intelligent race with the capacity to cross light-years of space easily being so generous as to allow us to just luck into Interstellar Travel at no expense or effort of our own? If a vessel with Interstellar Travel-capabilities DID crash here, I find it MUCH more likely that the ETs would do ANYTHING to retrieve or destroy it. Up to and including "sanitizing" the Earth's surface. Think about it. Would YOU give another far less developed race with a penchant for slaughtering THEIR OWN KIND by the millions potential access to your home world? Thought not.

[EvilNed]

First, would like to turn your attention to the discovery of Gleesa-581. Solar system 20 light-years and change from us that has multiple rocky planets, with 1 Venus-like planet that's in a bit too close to the star Gleesa to be in the habitable range, but most interesting is the next planet out. Liquid water, appropriately placed to gain sufficient heat to keep water liquid, but not too much. Radiation levels similar to Earth, and (although they haven't pinned down the composition of this planet's atmosphere yet) there are HINTS that it could be Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide or Monoxide-based, something nearly as transparent as Earth's atmosphere, and slightly more dense. Very interesting, what's that really got to do with anything? We found a planet we think is like earth. I haven't made a single claim that there aren't planets like that out there. Truth be told, we don't even know what life (in general) requires to evolve. All we know is what it required on Earth. Gleesa-581 is probably a really nice planet. But it still answers nothing about life or the evolution thereof. Moving on, I disagree that mankind will remain trapped in our own solar system. We're already studying a particle that appears to breach the light-barrier (the Tachyon), and have yet to devise viable experimental criteria to prove or disprove the wormhole theories, and not even close to figuring out how to prove/disprove the theory posed (The name of the scientist escapes me. It's something like Albucierre) about the viability of dynamically controlling the warping of space with a "Dark Matter engine" which uses positively and negatively charged Dark Matter to contract space in front of the theoretical vessel and then expand it behind the vessel. Effectively folding space to make the shortest distance between two points to bring those points together as one, then allowing space to "snap back" into its conventional shape, carrying the theorized vessel from Point A to B instantaneously. I'll just say: Good luck with that. I hope they invent a way to traverse space. But I don't believe they will. For a number of different reasons. One of them being that space is fucking HUUUUUUGE. Imagine Columbus, in his day. The Atlantic was huge for him, right? In comparison, his atlantic would probably be the equivalent to a drop of water in relation to the distances we're talking about. I'm just gonn ago ahead and say it - one more time: You know space? That thing out there? Yeah, it's huge. It's incredibly huge. You can't begin to fathom how huge it is. Nobody can. It's just that huge. Space? It's huge. Way too huge for us. That's a distance we'll never cross. The amount of resources that would come into play if we ever tried conquering space would be more than we actually have on our own planet. Which kinda sucks, but hey, there you go. Another reason? We don't have the resources. The Earth is waning. We've used up most of it, and our population is growing. We can't even feed the number of people living here now, how do you expect it will look in another 25 or 50 years?

[Danny]

What do you consider a large percentage of the speed of light?... 10%? 50%? 90%? 99.9%? I pretty much bowed out of this conversation in terms of responding...but this caught my eye... -just cutting it off for page loadings sake. So whats your opinion on the basis of the stargate idea then? -assuming you could make a stargate type stable wormhole in the doorway in the show the ancient race that made the stargates didnt go around seeding planets with them becuase it was such a grand, time consuming job. Instead they took automated ships that, in the show, are still old junkers now but keep doing the job long after there creators are gone, adding stargates to more worlds, further building up the network. -i mean this aint exactly a here and now time saver but what about some automated system that takes....i dunno, lets say some form of teleportation or other form of fast transport across planets and it was an automated process. It would be an incredibly long job but isnt it more likely in terms of say... building a large network- like i think this idea first came to me when some guys on a show were talking about lacing a string of sattelites about our system between the orbits of earth and mars to increase communication speeds. -course pretty much any idea like this would require maintenance when space dust or a meteor cruises by- wallops booster gxf-2234 and now guys on mars lost there live superbowl feed

[Terran]

-just cutting it off for page loadings sake. So whats your opinion on the basis of the stargate idea then? massive gravity huge amounts of energy (+or-) I think when you get down to these extreme forces all sorts of different things appear plausible. So yeah I enjoy the stargate series but other than that im not sure why type of opinion you were looking for. I tend to think of any future with biological lifeforms traveling the stars as flawed....but a show featuring the offspring of the human race (sentient machines) would probably be boring.

[Wyldwraith]

EvilNed, Your arguments based on the acknowledged vastness of Interstellar Distances (Light-Years) continue to assume we'd be attempting to traverse Light-Years using conventional propulsion, which a recent post did an excellent job of explaining why Special Relativity makes conventional propulsion useless for this purpose. Side note: I brought up Gleesa-581 in reference to our discussion about the probability of life developing elsewhere. The core information I wanted you to take from it was that even in the presently TINY sample of studied Planets (a few dozen solar systems and 350 planets) we find an example of a planet that fulfills many of the criteria we know were required to create the long-term sustainability of the conditions necessary for life here on Earth. To answer your question even more directly: Gleesa-581's most promising planet is that it lends tangible data in support of the Drake Equation. (in a preliminary sense. The Kepler telescope will provide a more conclusive context regarding how abundant Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars are). Moving back to the Interstellar Travel topic. I fail to understand what the vast distances between star systems have to do with the possibility of developing a means of crossing those Light-Years. We've already rightly concluded that conventional propulsion is useless for this purpose. I don't understand why you seem dismissive of the many credible theories that if proven correct promise to open the door to non-conventional travel. Just a few of the theories considered credible, albeit most unproven due either to prohibitive cost or our current lack of experimental models to prove or disprove these theories: 1) The innumerable variety of wormhole-based theories. 2) What amounts to "Brane Skimming"...Ie: Pulling an object onto the edge of one of the dimensions that make up the Multiverse. 3) Albucierre's (mispelled) theories of controlled spatial warping. "Movement without moving" as previously mentioned. In addition to the gravity-related space-bending, and all the other theories for essentially making the shortest distance between Point A & B = zero, regardless of amount of conventional distance normally separating Point A & B. 4) Tachyon-based theories related to taking advantage of the (so far) unique faster-than-light properties of this particle. The major experiment at the moment being to get two Tachyons very close together to see if the value of constant-change increases. The prototypical hypothetical construct here being to surround an object in an unbroken field of tachyons and creating a "bubble" within the field where natural laws respond differently. 5) Feyemann's Quantum "Path values" theory (won him the Nobel prize)...the basic example of which is when you resolve to attempt to walk to the other side of the room there are a variety of potential outcomes besides going from Point A to B, each "Path" (some of which cross many light-years or even cross time) having its own assessed probability. (Incidentally, this is where Douglas Adams got the idea for the Probability Drive featured in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)... I can go on, and on, and on, but I've made my point. No one is laughing at these theories, and each one promises to allow for the crossing of Interstellar Space via technology which takes advantage of their operating principle at some point after we confirm which theory (or theories) are actually correct. It's a body of evidence indicative at least of the potential for Faster-Than-Light travel. No law demands that the value of space-time remain constant, and unless or until such a natural law is discovered, there's no basis on which to assess the probability of Non-Conventional Travel turning out to be impossible. Finally, we KNOW of at least one set of conditions that allowed for Faster-Than-Light acceleration of objects of great mass. Inflation. The scientifically sound principle of space's expansion (which in itself proves that Space is NOT a fixed value). Not saying such a discovery will happen anytime soon, but I've found NOTHING in favor of the notion that such travel is impossible to develop, and quite a bit of preliminary indications that the potential exists.