Extraterrestrial Life

[Magnus]

Hey Goffredo,

I didn't want to say they were the same...I know they are vastly different, I was more referring to the mindset and attitude toward finding a way around it, and thus eventually breaking that barrier. I am hoping that the same mentality will allow us to find a way either through, or around going faster than lightspeed. Given how quickly technology is evolving I'm interested in seeing where our theories and attempts are in the coming decades and generations. it's hard to say what's possible right now when you aren't able to do something...but the future; always in motion it is

I truly think that FTL travel is a possibility, if we want it or need it bad enough. Remember when they used to think the world was flat? 8)

[Praefectusclassis]

Prolly more useful to put our scientists to getting stable and useful nuclear fusion or some such renewable energy resource.

[Tarbicus]

Prolly more useful to put our scientists to getting stable and useful nuclear fusion or some such renewable energy resource.

Nah, we're like the axolotl - we don't really try to improve our situation and grow up into mature salamanders until things get really bad and we have no choice :wink:

[url:dbj0vvvl]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny[/url]

[Goffredo]

Hi
well I tend to be consevative.

I do feel that changing mind sets is fine but one still has to stick to the rules. In other words you can have your mind set to something and yet that something be impossible. I am skeptical of minds. People have not only good ideas but mostly bad ideas and some even mad ones. The notion that new ideas or a new mind-sets are automatically good because they are refreshing and get things moving after stagnation is a myth.

I've used the following example before: people, some very intelligent and very creative, used to try, and some still try, to invent perpetual motion machines. One can have all the creative and innovative mind-sets he wants but pertual motion machines just don't work! The same goes for other natural phenomena and laws. They are called laws but do not think they are similar to human laws (legislation). The latter do evolve as society does evolve and mind-sets change. But natural laws are different. For example energy is conserved! And if one finds an instance where it seems not to be then it is actually more useful and, if you think about it more courageous, to insist to consider it conserved and look for a reason rather than dismiss the law as simply being wrong in your particular instance.

This actually happened in the thirties. Very intelligent people really did for a moment think that maybe energy was not conserved in nuclear reactions of a particular type ("weak" decays). Everytime they measured the energy at the end of the reaction they found that it was less than the energy at the beginning. A few, including Fermi, thought that the missing energy was taken away my a special as of yet un-observed particle called the neutrino. It was a brave hypothesis. Fermi believed it enough to set to work to deduce the properties of this mysterious particle. It was a great work of theoretical physics. Twenty years later in the fifties the particle was "observed" and just a couple of months ago a whole beam of these neutrinos were shot straight from Geneva into the Earth aimed at Italy and successfully detected! The neutrino was found and is used because the idea that energy was conserved was USED and not prematurely abandoned. The mind-set of Fermi was more creative and brave than the mind-sets of those that too soon were willing to give in and allow the law of conservation of energy to have an exception. So it is not at all obvious when to give up an idea or change mind-sets. The worst thing you can do is assume an idea or mind-set is good just because it is new.

A law of science is a tool for looking at nature in a powerful way and not a castrating straight-jacket for hindering people in arbitrary ways. Human laws do that.

[john m roberts]

One of the most perplexing puzzles of astronomy and physics is the phenomena of "dark matter" and "dark energy." Somehow, there's a lot of stuff out there, the great bulk of the universe, in fact, that we can sort of detect but can't see or analyze. Maybe that's all advanced extraterrestrial civilizations masking themselves from us. Maybe they consider us undesirable vermin and want nothing to do with us.

[Magnus]

I totally agree with you Goffredo. But my idea is that in 100 years from now, who is to say what new laws or changes in how we apply said laws will allow us to do what we couldn't before. I mean, that's the whole point and purpose of expanding technology and learning right?

Oh and Jasper, we already have the technology to do what you ask...what certain countries lack is the political will to execute those ideas.

[stevesarak]

Here’s a few things I though I’d throw out there

The theory that you can’t go faster then light, is based on the theory that the faster you go, the more energy you would need to achieve it. Achieving light speed would require infinite power (Theory).

Particles in reactors have gone faster then the speed of light, therefore in some case it as already been proved that there are exception.

With the curvature of space, taking the long route from point A to point B might be the old outdated way of travel. Getting to A from B, bypassing the route would be the way to go. Some new theories suggest, stepping away from standards space (Sub light as they like to call it on TV) would negate idea of distance.

In M theory, which is replacing String theory, they are developing new laws of physics, to apply to new states that we didn’t know existed before. Who knows what may be possible if we’re not bound by the old laws

And remember, we’re looking at the nature of physics through the limited understanding of the 21 century. Who’s to say what can be achieved in a 1000 years. Look at the technological difference between 1000 years ago and now. Then consider the last 100 years, how technological advances have been accelerating, then consider, not just the same amount of progress forwards, but the advancement curve. In 1000 years, who know how many fold, we might advance.

Relative speed of light.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/199 ... light.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 072301.htm

[Robert Vermaat]

Anyone here been abducted yet? :twisted:

[stevesarak]

Anyone here been abducted yet? :twisted:

My wife abducted me once. I’d rather not talk about the experiments.

[Robert Vermaat]

Anyone here been abducted yet? :twisted:

My wife abducted me once. I’d rather not talk about the experiments.

Your wife is an alien?
A little green woman perhaps? :lol:

[stevesarak]

Anyone here been abducted yet? :twisted:

My wife abducted me once. I’d rather not talk about the experiments.

Your wife is an alien?
A little green woman perhaps? :lol:

The stuff she did was out of this world. hock:

[Tarbicus]

Anyone here been abducted yet? :twisted:

Ah well, we're into a whole different ball game here Sleep paralysis, that's all it is. It became alien abduction after the 1950's, it was the tickling ghost in IIRC Polynesian, the Old Hag in oldie times of Western Europe, etc, etc.

I get it very frequently when absolutely knackered and stressed out, and I've seen and felt and heard 'em all shock: But when you know that's what's happening you can launch yourself into a lucid dream, provided the evil horrible witch gives up on trying to tear my sides apart :wink:

The trick is not to open your eyes - you're dead meat if you do.

[url:17567jhm]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis[/url]

[Goffredo]

1) Particles produced at reactors or at accelerators have NOT been made to go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
2) The speed of light in a material medium (gas, liquid, solid) IS SLOWER than the speed of light in a vacuum. Going faster than the speed of light in a medium is not the issue.
3) We are not free to think that in 100 or 1000 years people will conclude that the laws we cherish now are false. That is a logical error based on an incorrect evaluation and comprehension of what happened in history and happens in modern science.

Present ideas rest on a huge and exponentially increasing base of evidence. It is simply not fair to refer to past revolutions in science and by some form of analogy conclude that what we now know will similarly be "brushed" aside. Apart from the fact that in science knowledge may be substitutional, but more frequently it is integratational. It expands and grows into new terrritory rather than demolish old views of over-chewed and never digested issues. In addition old evidence that is good (reproducible by anyone and not subjective or ancedotal, robust and not marginal) remains good. Indeed to be able to account or re-contextualize old and familiar obervations is an important test of any new theory. Once that is done then, and only then, may a wise person dedicate himself to a new theory and see if it accounts for unaccountable observations or predicts new ones.

I do feel that to pretend to reason by analogy when in reality the analogies are not seriously evaluated, as the differences outweigh the similairties, then the hopes for future breakthroughs is unwisely placed. I remain soldily of the idea that the notion that all ideas change sooner or later is a mastodontic myth. My idea on this might change but reading and hearing certain things make me believe that I am doing this community a service by being conservative and very VERY skeptical.

[stevesarak]

I agree that proven and accepted laws are constant and won’t chance. But, with the new theories of reactions of exotic matter at the quantum level, and the way that they react to ordinary matter, in ways that are still only theories and still haven’t been observed yet, some theories say that these reactions can cause affects that go outside the standard laws.

The laws are still the laws, but it may turn out they react differently, at the quantum level, under these still unproven theories. Which them, in themselves, would still make a law, a law, but now with an additional law that says that these laws, will react this way to these new conditions, and thereby say, that who knows what may be possible in a thousand years.

[MARCvSVIBIvSMAvRINvS]

We are not free to think that in 100 or 1000 years people will conclude that the laws we cherish now are false

Provided there are any people left on this earth which then highly likely will either be destroyed by the human race itself, an asteroid, or nature fighting back.

M.VIB.M.