SETI - Why look for Alien life when the odds are they have found us


.The lights (...) continued in this formation all night (...) the formation would end and start again on a loop resetting all night (...) the constantly looping and resetting formation of the craft made me think of something that might have been automated somehow.This went on for literally hours and we went to bed at 6am and it was still continuing.I kid you not.

Sounds a lot like high power spotlights - like searchlights, but with a much narrower beam specifically to make attention grabbing displays at high alitude. From nearby the visible ground level beams (think 20th Century Fox logo) guide punters to whatever premises is running them. They are programmable to run in combinations of elliptical and figure 8 patterns.


When the (then) Point Depot (now O2 arena) started using one to signal events, lots of people started reporting sightings all over the suburbs many miles away. There are a number of companies in Ireland that rent these out to nightclubs and parties. With special permission Lasers can sometimes be used, some of the effects with the right atmospherics can be very 'convincing'.
Ive seen these searchlights used by nightclubs.Trust me it wasnt that. I guess its a 'you had to be there moment'.
 
I have seen a UFO.


About ten years ago, when having a smoke at the bathroom window in a clear summer night.


After a few minutes I noticed an unnaturally bright "star" with an uncommon yellowish tint. Thinking about where the polar star should be I found that this one couldn't be the culprit.


After glancing at the thing for about a minute, it started accelerating towards space at a rate I still can't imagine a human body could stand without special preperation.


From zero to warp speed, zoom and gone. Just like that.


Believe me or not, I couldn't care less. I know theyre out there, because I saw with my own eyes.
 
Ok, for the statisticians here are the numbers. There not mine, so don't shoot the messenger:


To put things into perspective, the theory for intelligent life is based on there being over 150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, this is an estimate based on the visible amount of stars, galaxies etc which seems to go up every year as we discover more with our telescopes etc. Granted that the conditions for life are small for each galaxy, however, when you multiply that very small number by such a vast number as 150,000 Blllion Billion, the number is vastly in favour of inteligent life existing in some numbers . I think the estimate is 50 intelligent races per galaxy (with each galaxy containing 300,000,000,000 stars , so 50 is a pretty small figure). There are 500,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. So the estimate for the universe is 25,000,000,000,000 intelligent races. But this is either nor here or there, my point was ( as per the title of the thread) , why are we looking for intelligent life when.


a) It exists in such numbers that they surely have discovered us, not necessarily traveled to us, but discovered us, and yet dont want to contact us . Think about how far advanced our science will be in 1000 years , we probably would have discovered every exo planet in the universe by then. I seriously doubt communication would still be using electromagnetic waves. Who knows what sort of quantum fluctuation crap they will be using by then, so these arguments about searching for light speed electomagnetic waves dont make any sense. Surely in a 1000 years we will be using something else. So why do we look for electromagnetic/radio waves when these are surely not likely to be the communication most advanced races would use. Its narrow minded based on what we know now .
You ignore distances between the stars completly. 25,000,000,000,000 is meaningless. Interessting are the ones in our range. Our galaxy has a diameter of 100,000ly. So sending a signal of any kind from one end to the other takes at least 100,000 years. Not even speaking about another galaxy. So if there is intelligent life at only a distance of 5,000ly they see our planet at 5,000 years in the past. At that time we didnt send out anything to find us, no radio, nothing. So how should they find us? They would need some crazy technology that is far beyond our current physics theories. May be possible but then we may be not intelligent in their eyes after all...

I have seen a UFO.


About ten years ago, when having a smoke at the bathroom window in a clear summer night.


After a few minutes I noticed an unnaturally bright "star" with an uncommon yellowish tint. Thinking about where the polar star should be I found that this one couldn't be the culprit.


After glancing at the thing for about a minute, it started accelerating towards space at a rate I still can't imagine a human body could stand without special preperation.


From zero to warp speed, zoom and gone. Just like that.
Funny, because you say you saw a _Unknown_ Flying Object. So you actualy dont know what you saw there. And i dont think you can know how fast or even how far away it was if it appiered as a yellow star to you.
 
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Funny, because you say you saw a _Unknown_ Flying Object. So you actualy dont know what you saw there. And i dont think you can know how fast or even how far away it was if it appiered as a yellow star to you.

That would be an "Unidentified" flying object, btw.


D.
 
I have seen a UFO.


About ten years ago, when having a smoke at the bathroom window in a clear summer night.


After a few minutes I noticed an unnaturally bright "star" with an uncommon yellowish tint. Thinking about where the polar star should be I found that this one couldn't be the culprit.


After glancing at the thing for about a minute, it started accelerating towards space at a rate I still can't imagine a human body could stand without special preperation.


From zero to warp speed, zoom and gone. Just like that.


Believe me or not, I couldn't care less. I know theyre out there, because I saw with my own eyes.
Yep me too and on more than one occassion.
 
@Thorium


You missed what I said in point a) in one of my previous posts. ie that radio and electromagnetic waves used for communication today are unlikely to be used for communication in 1000 years from now. Who knows they may have some kind of quantum entanglement instant comms happening. Assuming everything that we should search for boils down to light speed waves is narrow minded.


Anyway thats just comms, In terms of detecting us, I doubt they would be searching just for comms from others races , they would also be looking more generically for planets with life. That said , even if they were detecting this via telescopes, life has been on earth for a very long time . The earth's signature for life , ie oxygen rich atmosphere , oceans etc would have showed us up ages ago. And life is so rare that they would have had us on there radar ever since.
 
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@Thorium


You missed what I said in point a) in one of my previous posts. ie that radio and electromagnetic waves used for communication today are unlikely to be used for communication in 1000 years from now. Who knows they may have some kind of quantum entanglement instant comms happening. Assuming everything that we should search for boils down to light speed waves is narrow minded.


Anyway thats just comms, In terms of detecting us, I doubt they would be searching just for comms from others races , they would also be looking more generically for planets with life. That said , even if they were detecting this via telescopes, life has been on earth for a very long time . The earth's signature for life , ie oxygen rich atmosphere , oceans etc would have showed us up ages ago. And life is so rare that they would have had us on there radar ever since.

I can totally get behind this, It wasn't that long ago that we finally had telescopes sensitive enough to notice a wobble in a stars or a the minute changes in luminosity caused by planets orbiting them. Granted we can only really capture the big Jupiter size guys but the point is this is a new method. Vcoleiro has a good point that thinking EMI siginatures are going to be the way to "view" the universe in 1,000 years is probably a bit silly. It is hard to paint a solid scientific argument around the notion that "We will be so much smarter and have sharper tools in the future" because it is unknown but i would say it is likely technology is going to get better and with such a drive for Information Technology in particular on this planet the net which we cast into the cosmos to catch signs of life is likely going to be more broad then anything we have now. The bottom line is we are currently limited to the speed of light and inverse square laws for intensity. This seems unlikely to bear fruit.


However, it is my understanding that Jupiter moon Europa is a very good candidate for life as almost certainly has water underneath the ice. I forget the name of the new probe that was just sent out there but we should get some cool photos of Jupiter in the next few years!
 
I can say I've seen a 'UFO' - more than once - but the key word there is 'unidentified'. To make the leap and link any UFO sighting to aliens, spacecraft or interdimensional shape shifting lizards makes no sense.


Believe it or not, I've assisted in the research for a couple of books on the topic, met many of the most (in)famous people in 'Ufology' and because of my Video Projection obsession, been contracted to provide my services for a couple of UFO conventions. I've seen plenty of footage that never got a broad release, lots of 'photographic evidence' that wouldn't withstand scrutiny beyond the core clique, and lots of very troubled and often deeply unpleasant people involved in the UFO scene, for whom EVERY report is currency that they depend on.


There are, no doubt about it, frequently observed phenomena that fit with what people describe. That, however, is just about all that can be definitively said on the subject. Rational explanations are too quickly dismissed as possibilities because they puncture more romantic theories.


Ever seen space debris enter the atmosphere? Ever seen it head on? Much different. Appears as a bright dot for a few moments, then as it hits thicker atmosphere it appears to suddenly dart off. In no way am I saying this IS the explanation for all such sightings, but it ought to be borne in mind that there are plenty of mundane possibilities to consider. Even when those are ruled out, all that remains is 'unidentified'. Even 'flying' should be replaced with 'airborne' because it implies too much already.


It's very illuminating the way the UFO scene mushroomed in the 1990s, it was very big until the internet took off - then for a few years it was HUGE. Next to porn, the internet seemed to be made for conspiracy theorists and UFO "investigators". Then it turned round and bit them - unlike in the magazine, newsletter and Video release bonanza of the early 90s, the 2000s gave the curious not only the chance to find out about the latest reports, but also the counter arguments and the often unflattering backgrounds of many involved, alongside the critical analysis that was prevented when evidence was published only in "believer" circles.


If a site ran an exciting new report, another site woud do the legwork and point out the holes in the story. They'd never had such rapid and exhaustive counter arguments before. Debunked stories used to survive for years on "the circuit" because you'd never have your attention drawn to any plausible rebuttal.


Then 9/11 happened and there were lots in the scene who turned their hand to much darker stuff. Digital photography came of age and evidence became even less trustworthy. The scene shrank back to the diehards.
 
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@Thorium


You missed what I said in point a) in one of my previous posts. ie that radio and electromagnetic waves used for communication today are unlikely to be used for communication in 1000 years from now. Who knows they may have some kind of quantum entanglement instant comms happening. Assuming everything that we should search for boils down to light speed waves is narrow minded.


Anyway thats just comms, In terms of detecting us, I doubt they would be searching just for comms from others races , they would also be looking more generically for planets with life. That said , even if they were detecting this via telescopes, life has been on earth for a very long time . The earth's signature for life , ie oxygen rich atmosphere , oceans etc would have showed us up ages ago. And life is so rare that they would have had us on there radar ever since.
I dont missed it but quantum entanglement will not help you on finding anything. You are missing that you need to get one of the pair to your communication target and there you are limited to light speed by our current knowlege.


The same is for searching. All passive search methodes are limited to the speed of the signals you catch and analyse and thats light speed. For a active scan you would need to send something out faster then light or bypass the light barrier with a methode currently unknown to us.


Just saying in 1000 years tech will be advanced enough isnt exacly a scientific statement. There are limits, even for tech.
 
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@thorium


The point was as Halcyon mentioned that our level of technology is primitive, we have only just emerged from the days of the horse and cart just 100 years ago. What ever tech we use in the future for comms , who knows. But again as per my second point, life existed on earth a very long time ago, even at light speed scans they would have detected life on earth a long long time ago, which is the point I was making in this thread.


I really dont subscribe to the thought that scans/comms are limited to light speed, thats a view point based on our current scientific advancement which is only 100 years out of the horse and cart. If you look into Quantum mechanics as a whole , you begin to understand how very very little we do understand. Particles appearing out of nowhere, electrons not existing in the classical sense as an object but as a cloud of energy etc etc etc, Dark matter, so on and forurth. And lets not forget M-Theory with its 11 dimensions - who knows what the ramifications of this will be if its true.


We are only at the absolute infancy of technoloical advancement.
 
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@thorium


The point was as Halcyon mentioned that our level of technology is primitive, we have only just emerged from the days of the horse and cart just 100 years ago. What ever tech we use in the future for comms , who knows. But again as per my second point, life existed on earth a very long time ago, even at light speed scans they would have detected life on earth a long long time ago, which is the point I was making in this thread.


I really dont subscribe to the thought that scans/comms are limited to light speed, thats a view point based on our current scientific advancement which is only 100 years out of the horse and cart. If you look into Quantum mechanics as a whole , you begin to understand how very very little we do understand. Particles appearing out of nowhere, electrons not existing in the classical sense as an object but as a cloud of energy etc etc etc, Dark matter, so on and forurth. We are only at the absolute infancy of technoloical advancement.
100 years out of horse and cart?


The theory of quantum mechanics is allready 86 years old.


We can only discuss about what we currently know. Talking about anything else is pure speculation. It may be fun to speculate but there is no scintific value in it and you can't base statements on it like: "statistically they would have already found us".


I could speculate as well and just say: Statistcly based on our current self destruction rate there is no race out there that is far more advanced than us because they allready destroyed them selfs. While thats perfectly possible, it's pure speculation.
 
Funny, because you say you saw a _Unknown_ Flying Object. So you actualy dont know what you saw there. And i dont think you can know how fast or even how far away it was if it appiered as a yellow star to you.
I saw tremendous acceleration, not absolute speed. The sighting of that lasted for less than a second.


How can somthing stay in place visually for minutes and then suddenly dash off like I saw it did? If that's a common/known phenomena, where can I read about that/what do I search for?


http://view.samurajdata.se/psview.php?id=5268d0cd&page=1
 
Funny, because you say you saw a _Unknown_ Flying Object. So you actualy dont know what you saw there. And i dont think you can know how fast or even how far away it was if it appiered as a yellow star to you.
I saw tremendous acceleration, not absolute speed. The sighting of that lasted for less than a second.


How can somthing stay in place visually for minutes and then suddenly dash off like I saw it did? If that's a common/known phenomena, where can I read about that/what do I search for?


http://view.samurajd...5268d0cd&page=1

You must have been freaked out when you watched that. How long did it take to get that out of your head?.
 
Felt like a slap to the face of consciousness.


I had my fair share of sci-fi media consumed at the time, but never thought too much about the presence of other space-travelling species other than "there's unlimited room out there, it is highly unlikely we're alone."


After that I watched interesting footage on youtube, some meeting of alleged observers. People like military personnel and cops attending and giving speeches describing strikingly similar sightings. No coincidence for me.


See it here, it's fairly long but interesting:

 
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