I think older galaxies/solar systems/planets add even more uncertainty. On Earth, half the people live in poverty, and with population growth, depletion of natural resources, climate change factors, natural disasters, etc. a huge question is how long can any civilization last? We can't accommodate 7 billion people today so what happens if we get to 8-9-15 billion? What happens as we deplete ocean foods and have less arable lands and more drought conditions? As of today mankind has no place else but Earth! Yet we are sucking the life-force out of Earth so what happens as these issues become untenable? IMO these are not doom & gloom issues...they are the reality facing us in our near future. And with all of this in our future, sucking most of our money and resources to exist, I can guess our space exploration won't advance much. If ET's go through these same issues, it's no surprise to me why we can't find
I agree 100%...but we can view it optimistically maybe alien species are more astute/practical then we are and avoided those issues...we make the mistake of believing they think just like us, they may be dumbfounded by our stupidity and lack of foresight...
We can only hope they're not as stupid as we are...but, of those challenges I mention, it's not clear no matter what our IQ might be, if solutions exist? As much as we believe we can solve most things, I'll guess the masses are much more fragile than we believe. For example, if humans need to migrate in mass, we can guess off the top that a large portion of them can't do it...too young, too old, unhealthy, disabled, arrogant, etc. I'm trying to be a realist...
The presence and concentrations of certain gases would be evidence for life, as well as the presence of pollutants from industrial activity. And it goes without saying that aliens would not have to travel here to investigate this planet.
Interesting idea! I do believe the speed of light offers some protection. Plus, humans have been around for such a short period of time - there could have been super long lived civilizations in other galaxies that simply receded before they overlapped with our existence. BTW, may I be so rude as to ask if your id pic is a gerbil 3-way?
Yeah, anything beyond a certain distance would have to be extremely irrational to care about us. The speed of light seems to be absolute, although we've thought that about certain things before. If I was an extremely paranoid alien civ within, say, a hundred light years of a star system with a planet in the "goldilocks zone", I would accelerate a comet or asteroid fast enough to wipe out all life on that planet, even if I wasn't sure there even was life. What am I out? An insignificant chunk of rock and the trivial amount of solar energy I used to accelerate it. No big deal. And I've eliminated a potential threat. My id pic is the Hindenberg version of the infamous Baby Trump balloon.
Look, here's and alien. 'I am otherworldly' Jareth decided to refer to themselves as an agender alien, and now sports a totally new alien-like look In order to appear 'less human', Jareth has had their nipples removed, and sports a number of facial piercings and wears alien-like makeup looks https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/...n-nipples-removed-believes-agender-alien.html
To conclude that nothing is important unless it can be tested, would eliminate many of the finer aspects of our daily lives. I live in an unusually beautiful (scenic) part of our planet, and that's important to me. But if its importance depended on being able to measure or test its beauty somehow before it could be regarded as important in my life, I'd be screwed. Being beyond scientific ability to test or measure something doesn't make it unimportant or unwelcome, or less real in our lives.
I don't have any problem with that at all. We all experience beauty, love, amazement, joy, etc., etc., and that's an absolutely wonderful part of being human. If you want to believe in the supernatural, I'm completely OK with that. I'm sure it has value to those who hold whatever belief you have. There do exist instances where science, religion, public decision making, etc., can collide and when that crops up we just need to work through that.
The problem is that many claim direct knowledge of the supernatural - ghosts, ESP, precognition, etc, etc, and maybe I should say abnormal events, like seeing a UFO first hand at close range. So in that case it isn't a matter of wanting to believe. It is knowing. And this could be true whether science can address the claim or not.
Speaking as one who loves science, and who doubted the reality of UFOs for years, I finally experienced seeing one (actually 4) in one single night. I was with three other adults, who all saw the same thing I saw. One UFO was starlike, but stationary in a starfield when looking thru binoculars. It didn't move for about 20 minutes, but did return lazer light flashes to us when we flashed it in three evenly spaced dots. This happened several times in that 20 minutes before it slowly faded from sight. Later that night two moving starlike lights converged over our heads from different directions in the sky. They came very close to one another & at the closest point, one light dropped a second light from itself. That new light moved beneath the mother ship a short distance for a few seconds, then from a frozen still, stopped position, suddenly whisked from over our heads toward & past the distant horizon within about 1 second. All four of us saw it happen. All of us let out loud exclamations when it occurred. That event convinced me of the reality of UFOs & knowing we humans have no craft capable of such maneuvers, forced me to concede the reality that ETs are here, now.
There is still the possibility of some unknown plasma phenomenon, say akin to ball lightning. Another idea that has been suggested by Col Halt, of the Rendlesham Forest event, is that there is a form of life that that appears to be like a plasma, that we don't recognize as life. So I would put it firmly in the UFO category, but not definitively ET. The pilot who intercepted the UFOs over the White House, back in 1952, reportedly saw them at fairly close range. And even then, all he could make out was balls of light. But they acted intelligently. So you have to wonder if Halt may have been onto something. Then again, in many cases, if the reports are accurate, if even ONE is accurate, then there can be no doubt that ET is here.
Yes. There are many ways in which our abilities of perception fail us. Eyesight, lack of knowledge of drone and military activity, imperfect understanding of weather phenomena, images our brains form within milliseconds due to various stimuli including senses and emotions, what is produced when we're in a dream state or when organs start failing (like near death), purposefully faked "evidence", etc., etc. Our senses are imperfect to the point where courts must consider human perception as undoubtedly deprecated. Our memories are not good, as it has been shown that every time we remember something our brains rewrite the memory. We don't use logic well when it comes to ruling out possibilities of what we just perceived. I suspect we're motivated by human events to act on our perceptions - to take them seriously, immediately. One can't wait for perfect knowledge - we have millions of years of experience in knowing we have to react. After the event? Nobody really cares. Why lobby for a federal grant to investigate your brother's story? It's more likely that you will repeat it! It's probably a good story. If you want to believe, that's OK. We have to take care in cases that matter, like courts. But, for the most part - no problem.
First, let me reiterate, the first craft I saw that night returned laser light signals to us several times from a static position in the sky overhead. Plazmas don't do that. Second, the first two security guards to encounter the Rendlesham triangular craft actually walked up to it & touched it. This was before the later encounter by Colonel Halt & the craft that seemed to drop liquid plasma onto the ground. I would offer the idea that "life" isn't necessarily a physical entity, but a form of consciousness. That consciousness can take many forms or shapes in different dimensions. Some are capable of inter-dimensional travel. But consciousness is the key. I understand the skepticism. I was a skeptic myself until I saw what I described above. But that was pretty convincing. Even then, I would have retained some doubt & questioned myself afterward if three other people hadn't seen them at the same time. That told me I wasn't crazy.
And a vast majority of the time, we can trust our senses. And many cases leave no doubt. If the claim is accurate, then it was ET, or a ghost, or whatever the claim. Take for example Travis Walton. Five people passed lie-detector tests administered during a murder investigation, in addition to Walton himself after the fact. They said Walton was taken by a giant UFO. Walton said he was abducted by aliens. Either five loggers faked a lie detector test while being investigated for murder, or they were telling the truth. The official polygraph examiner for the State did the test and concluded that they were being honest. There is no middle ground. Either they saw an alien spacecraft or they were lying. And this is true in many cases. It is often simply reported observations. While this is anecdotal and doesn't count scientifically, it certainly can count logically. Science is a limited approach to discovering facts. Not everything can be tested or reproduced by their very nature. So those things cannot be addressed by science. In those cases we have to apply logic. Do we find a long history of disparate but consistent reports? Have they been investigated and prosaic explanations ruled out? We can logically assemble anecdotal evidence. The trouble is, there is usually no clear-cut smoking gun. It comes down to being logically consistent for a period of time such that we gain confidence in the explanation. Consider this: If the standards for science were the standards for murder trials, no one could ever be convicted. They would never repeat the crime.
I wonder what aircraft of today are doing to locate those who shine laser light at airplanes? I could imagine equipment that could be used to point at a ground source and log a location.
Flashing a laser light at or toward an airplane is illegal. We are very careful about never doing that. The object we flashed was stationary for about 20 minutes, looked like a star, and had no colored lights visible thru binoculars. It wasn't an airplane.
I don't have any question that people have been mostly honest about what they have reported. When someone finds a bigfoot footprint, they actually found they believed was of that source. If someone sees a drone and thinks it's a UFO, they actually saw that and believe it is a UFO. If someone has dying sensory organs and thinks they see heaven, I don't doubt their honesty. If murder trials weren't simply contests of government dollars and massive lab capability against overworked defense councils they would be way different, too. More importantly, scientific method isn't appropriate for use in a murder trial - besides the issue of repeatability, science has no method of positive proof - only of falsification. Murder trials are about single events, not about how our universe works.
A passenger jet can take longer than that to descend and it will look stationary if descending or if it's at significant distance. At night, I do not believe it would be possible to see more than the lights. And, not all lights are visible at all angles. Plus, marker lights aren't made to illuminate at a significant distance like landing lights are. I'm OK with you interpreting that as a UFO. I'm not convinced, but there is no reason for you to accept my doubts on this. As a pilot, I'd ask that you not flash flying objects with lasers.
I'm not a pilot, but I soloed several times many years ago, & I love both flying & pilots (as a group). I'll heed your request with respect. The object I saw start from stationary & zipping to our horizon in about 1 second definitely wasn't an airplane. Airplanes don't accelerate like that. And three other people shared that sighting. So, yeah, it was an ET craft.
Murder trials are about determining what happened in an alleged event that can't be reproduced. Like UFO reports, this means science cannot be used as the absolute standard. Science can only be held as the standard where it can be applied. Transient, seemingly random events cannot be properly studied. Instead, they require logic. And you are ignoring the facts. You cannot explain a wealth of well-supported UFO reports as failures of the senses. This is simply not a rational explanation.
How do you know that? As Halt suggested, perhaps there is some form of earthly intelligence that we don't understand. Yes, I didn't say otherwise. I asked him to give his best guess as to what HE SAW. I didn't ask him to interpret the stories of Penniston et al. My point is that you did not see a structured craft perform impossible maneuvers, blink out of existence, or land and have ETs get out. So it leaves the door open for alternative explanations. But you do seem to have witnessed something seemingly inexplicable. The threshold for logical certainty of ET, assuming any story is true, requires direct observations of indisputable evidence for a hyper-advanced technology - well beyond the envelope of human technological capabilities.
1. My interpretation of the "craft" I saw in the sky at night was based on the fact that it hovered for 20 minutes without moving & returned our laser signals. The second craft dropped from a slowly moving object, hovered for a few brief seconds, then shot off from a stationary position to the horizon in between 1 & 2 seconds. I know no human vehicle is capable of these extreme motions, & they were highly controlled movements, requiring intelligence. So, I assumed they were ETs. If you have a better explanation, I'm open to listening. 2. I'm open to alternative explanations--perhaps trans-dimensional travelers, or time-travelers? Since I've encountered considerable evidence that Extra-Terrestrials are here, & have been for millennia, that option came to my mind first.
