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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
 Posted - 10/06/2009 : 20:27:27 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
I really haven't had as much fun here since the UAP thread in '08. I have to spend the next week or so in Seattle and I'm going to be too busy to stay involved while gone, but I really hope that this thread keeps going and I can pick up next week. |
The thread will still be here.| It seems to me that artifacts with apparently "magic" qualities would attract attention and make the search easier. Why, then, have none been found? I don't know that that is the case! |
No, artifacts made by people who have "ultrascience" (new term for the alleged science that will be around in a few hundred or thousand years that might allow us to do things that we consider to be impossible by today's science standards) could look like anything, and be anywhere. What would a massively futuristic fusion reactor look like, bngbuck, and where should we look for one? I suggested that one might look like a mustard seed (given that the aliens can do "impossible" things), and you somehow, without any evidence whatsoever, think that that is "unlikely." I really don't know how you assign these sorts of probability values to things for which we have zero prior background and zero forward-looking theory.
What it boils down to is that you want human-like aliens to have visited us, so that when we find their artifacts, we can say, "oh, this is a death ray, and this is an Orgasmatron, and this is..." But by giving the aliens god-like powers (the ultrascience), you lose the ability to constrain them to behave in any particular manner.
Unless, of course, they want to send us a message, in which case they will dumb it down for us and make it easy to find. You say you want me to defend that idea, but what's to defend? If they want to communicate, why would they make it difficult? I've got no idea if any theoretical alien visitors to Earth have ever wanted to send us a message, but if they did, then hiding the message seems like a dumb plan.| Perhaps to direct our search toward the "impossible?" |
Okay, so you start looking deep inside active volcanoes for anything that looks like it might be an alien artifact. Let me know what you find.| I don't suggest that the aliens get around anything, only that they might manipulate matter and energy using enhanced "laws of time and space". |
Yes, the ultrascience which you cannot constrain, but obviously want to in order to save your hypothesis.And it might be easier for them just not to leave any artifacts rather than purposely leaving artifacts that were countefeits of earth-natural objects.
Again, your post assumes intent to conceal. Chance replication of mustard seeds or geodes would be unlikely. Because your premise is one of alien "magic", some of their artifacts would probably be "magical". If they wished to conceal (the diametric opposite of send a message) we very likely would not find artifacts. We certainly would not find messages. I feel it is unlikely that aliens would either want to message us or hide evidence of their visit us and I would not take either in consideration in any search I would direct. |
I'm not saying that they are counterfeited on purpose. What if the easiest way to make a spaceship for a race of 1-mm high aliens is to build what looks to us just like a geode? You say, "unlikely," and I say, "show me your probability calculations that allow you to come to such a conclusion."| Inadverdent evidence is what I would expect. |
So would I, but how does that give us a starting point for a search? We have no idea what to look for, and no idea where to look for it, because we're looking for an accident.
Say I vanish for six months, and then show up on your doorstep bloody and bruised, and in a classic dying-man scene, my last words are, "This is important... I left something behind in Russia..." Searching my corpse, you find nothing other than the ratty, torn mishmash of clothes that could be found at any Goodwill, or swiped from anyone's laundry basket. If you felt compelled to search for whatever it was that I obviously needed to tell you about, where and how would you start?
Obviously in Russia, but would you assume that I used my real name or failed to disguise my looks? If every border guard tells you that nobody who looks like me or used my name has entered or left the country in the last year, would you stop searching for this "important" thing? If you kept looking, where would you look and why? Whatever it is - and it could be a private 747 with gold-plated everything and automatic butt-wipers on the toilets, or a dead mouse in the forest - it's important, and I thought it would be important for you to know about it. How would you start looking, and what would you look for?| When Dude ends his remarks with "how is it reasonable to leave any space for that possibility? charitability considerabily constricts and your biased perception becomes obvious! |
Ugh. Dude's conclusion was based on his premise. When his premise becomes false (due to new evidence), you're suggesting that he would refuse to change his conclusion.That's fine, we have been talking about two different threads. I was referring to the 2008 thread when speaking of being misjudged; in the 2009 thread I spoke to what I (and others) perceive as Étroit d'esprit, basically narrow-mindedness,
| That has everything to do with people shooting down ET explanations, and nothing to do with the fact that you weren't presenting one. |
Agreed, and it was in a different post addressing a different issue! |
Color me confused. It was this thread, and I was addressing the issue you were addressing.| It's not the math I question, it's the whole of the argument. No offense, but I don't necessarily accept you as an authority. Perhaps you are, if so, credentials are in order. If someone with the approximate status of Sagan offered the identical argument and calculations supporting it, it would be of more persuasion to me, and the conclusion I gave would follow. |
So it's the authority that's important, and not the argument itself. That attitude is antithetical to science and to skepticism.
Despite hundreds of years of trying, nobody has been able to violate the classical laws of energy and momentum for classical (supra-atomic sized) objects. I'm not using any math or argument that Newton or Kepler might not instantly know and understand, were their zombified corpses available for comment in this thread (I specifically ignored modern, relativistic equations for three reasons: they just make things worse for the aliens, they make the equations more difficult and they're unnecessary for the "warp drive" theory). But you, for some reason, require an authority figure to bless my argument before you'll agree with it.
I mean, I understand that you want to disagree with my argument because you want to attribute evidence-free ultrascience to the aliens, but having an authority figure agree with my assessment does nothing to prevent you from doing so. Hell, that's what got Mozina so jazzed in the old surface-of-the-Sun threads: bucking the establishment science - even being able to say things like, "I emailed astrophysicist Dr. So-and-so, and he just fed me the standard physics nonsense" - and idealistically running with the underdog. So why would your conclusion change if I went an found a Sagan-level authority saying the same things?| I would add "speculation" to "dogma" and take it back to Aristotle. |
Actually, it was Plato who began the whole speculation-as-science bit, with his "Forms" which never worked out. Aristotle was the guy who put evidence before theory and began (so far as we can tell) the sort of inquiry that we know today as "scientific."| Your analysis is true enough, but I was only talking about 60-odd years and your remarks encompass many hundreds. |
In the last 60, there has been a massive increase in what we can do with our scientific knowledge (technology), and much detail-finding within science itself, but the broad strokes of science have remained largely unchanged. Probably the most-influential innovations in that time were the invention of the transistor and the understanding of DNA, but the former was a technology leap based upon older science, and the latter supplied limits rather than taking them away.Dave| Then the door is wide open, and all fictions must be considered equally, and science cannot progress. |
Rubbish! In the first place, by your own specification we are considering science fiction here, not science, It might be that science could emerge from SF speculation, but "cannot progress" is silly. |
So, given an infinite number of possible future sciences and technologies, all of which must be considered equally likely, which ones get research funding this year?| Selection from "all fictions" is essential, and a far better speculation is that ET development is not identical to our's. |
But that's exactly what opens the door to magic. We cannot possibly know what "not identical to ours" means, and so cannot go looking for it.| As to "all fictions must be considered equally," why? |
Because there's no way to know which lines of research will be most fruitful to bring about the ultrascience.| It may not make sense to you, but our own knowledge is the only standard by which we can judge anything. |
I answered this in my earlier post:| Of course it is all we have to go on. And so, in proper speculation, it should be a launching pad for sensible conjecture like the late, great Arthur C. Clarke did so well! But certainly that launch should take us to speculative realms higher and greater than the present where we start our imaginings! |
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Yes, and I addressed that, too.| Sensible conjecture by whose standards? By our current understanding of physics, nearly undetectable alien ships making three-hour fly-bys of our planet is completely insensible.] |
Yes, by our current understanding of physics your statement is true. But your speculation is that our current understanding of physics defines the aliens current understanding of physics, and that is not necessarily true in sensible conjecture! |
No, in sensible conjecture, that's the only "truth" we have to go on. In wild speculation, the aliens have this ultrascience which allows them to do things that we currently think are impossible. If you can define the ultrascience, in terms that are the least bit plausible, then you can call it "sensible." But you can't, because you don't know what it will be, either, and defining it that way strips it of all its smoke-filled dorm-room romance.| I certainly don't maintain that an interstellar ship is possible/practical today I would raise the possibility to medium in another hundred years. Google up some of your favorite futurists and see what they anticipate. They maintain that their profession is logical extrapolation. But my flights of fancy in my post to you were much more focussed on the reverse trip -- the another-galaxy inhabitants visiting us now, or in the past. We havent yet speculated on the future ET visit, which is an entirely different paradigm. Your laundry list of clumsy eventualities attendant to a journey to another star system is fair enough as a description of Earth-dwelling intelligent aliens in the year 2009! The natives of a planet in Andromeda may well be past the point of caring about such expansive endeavors! |
If they don't care, then you shouldn't be looking at them as even remotely possible explanations for UAPs. That's what we've been talking about, bng, the merest possibility that some alien, somewhere and somewhen, has visited Earth and either died here or left, and how we look for evidence of that. As soon as you posit the existence of ultrascience as a savior of sci-fi hypotheses, our ability to judge anything as doable or plausible or unlikely or impossible is thrown out the window, because it's one huge argument from ignorance and we cannot assign truth values to what we don't know. Ultrascience is really indistinguishable from the magic that fundamentalists claim for their God, has no evidenciary basis and so has precisely zero compelling qualities.| BTW, why devote valuable speculation time to EMR communication between imaginary ships and their imaginary home planet? A fully automated, self-programmable robot would be the way to make for more fuel space and you might get that speed up to c/2. And what's few thousand years between computers? |
It's just more ultrascience. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 10/07/2009 : 01:37:21 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
Dave.....
| Oh, you want to go looking for such evidence? Then I've got no help for you. Any speculation on the motives of the aliens would have to be just that: speculation. But only understanding the motives can create predictive power for a search for evidence. |
Then how do archaeologists understand the motives of ancient civilizations when they search for evidence of such civilizations? Answer, the archaeologists are looking for artifacts, not messages. Conclusion, perhaps in searching for ancient evidence of aliens we should look for alien artifacts as well as "time capsules"? | Durability and conspicuousness would be the ET's watchwords, and it seems to me that we should have already found it. |
Why? How long have we been looking for it? |
When I read this, I get them impression that you're saying that archaeologists would ignore something like a titanium plaque with wird symbols on them if they found it among the pottery shards at a Mesopotamian dig-site. (because it obviously didn't belong there in the first place?)
Please say it isn't so! Your clarification would be appreciated.
What is your evidence that it has not been found other than you don't know about it? |
That would suggest a cover-up on some level. Evidence of extra-terrestial life if form of an artifact is world-shaking news I can't imagine any archaeologist would hide. It would guarantee his name becoming immortal among scholars as well as laymen.
Besides, it looks like you're asking for evidence of non-existence of a find. That would be a logical fail: proving a negative.
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Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 10/07/2009 : 02:43:33 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
Dave.....
| Archeologists understand the motives of ancient humans because they were human. An "alien artifact" from a species with technologies that are indistinguishable from magic by us could be anything, and so doesn't help the search. |
It seems to me that artifacts with apparently "magic" qualities would attract attention and make the search easier. Why, then, have none been found? I don't know that that is the case! |
Neither do we. But such a scenario would require some kind of cover-up since we don't know of any such artifacts. If such an artifact were found, where is it now? Stored in a warehouse somewhere like the Ark?
| So you would accept an argument from authority instead of doing the math yourself? It's not like I did anything more than look up some numbers and then add, subtract, multiply and divide with them. No calculus, trig or even geometry was involved. If you can balance your checkbook, you can verify the math all by your lonesome. |
It's not the math I question, it's the whole of the argument. No offense, but I don't necessarily accept you as an authority. |
You don't have to. The argument was made by the referenced article. Dave only crunched the numbers to show you the consequence of them. He only put the numbers in their proper perspective for our discussion.
| Perhaps you are, if so, credentials are in order. If someone with the approximate status of Sagan offered the identical argument and calculations supporting it, it would be of more persuasion to me, and the conclusion I gave would follow. |
How about my credentials? I've studied astronomy at the University of Örebro, Sweden. While I haven't crunched the numbers myself, I didn't see any obvious flaws in Dave's calculations.
But that's beside the point. Dave only showed that what the article suggested was impossible to realize on a large scale. As such, he didn't make an argument on his own as much as he showed that jakesteele's provided evidence (the article) didn't support jake's argument. If you go as far as deciding that Dave actually made an argument, consider this: His entire argument was based on facts as stated by the warp-drive article. Since his argument consisted only of number-crunching and putting the result in perspective, I must conclude that Dave's argument is sound. If Dave's conclusion is wrong, then it's because the article itself was wrong.
More troubling is Dave's observation that you'd rather buy one authority's argument over checking the facts for yourself, when those facts are readily available.
| BTW, why devote valuable speculation time to EMR communication between imaginary ships and their imaginary home planet? A fully automated, self-programmable robot would be the way to make for more fuel space and you might get that speed up to c/2. And what's few thousand years between computers? |
Electronics don't last indefinitely. Have you not had any electrical failures in your home appliances?
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Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 10/07/2009 : 04:48:54 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dr. Mabuse
If Dave's conclusion is wrong, then it's because the article itself was wrong. |
In fairness, I made two math-based arguments. The other one was about how much fuel it'd take to get something as small as the Apollo Lunar Module up to 0.1c, given certain efficiencies.| Electronics don't last indefinitely. |
Maybe once we get the Ultrascience™, they will.  |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 10/07/2009 : 19:44:31 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
Valiant Dancer......
| It links to no definition on its own. Appears to have been made up recently |
I've got a Benjamin that says I can prove origin before 1974 and also can give you a definition link. We'll need a third party to hold the money!
trychoschistism!
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I'll settle for the definition link.
I have tried four and all I got was "page not found" from the respective definition servers. In all cases, the word was spelled with an "i" not a "y".
If you have evidence, by all means, please present it. |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
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Phoenix Lights flare debris
