Have coal-eating cyborgs visited Earth?

ATS folk are good at debunking but seemingly less good at analysing the few cases that survive criticism.

An outstanding example is the multiply-witnessed 2008 Empire, Ohio UAP:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

www.americanchronicle.com...

Perhaps we should consider the possibility that this UAP was an example of what in his good-in-parts book The Eerie Silence SETI scientist Paul Davies has called an auto-teleological supersystem (an ATS).

Davies thinks that ET intelligence may be largely post-biological, and in some cases could take the form of self-designing ATS's - a bit like cyborgs - which might explore remote planets.

So could the Empire, Ohio UAP have been an ATS? The three eye-like structures might serve as brains/propulsion units/sensory devices. The three structures might be linked by organic material containing photosynthetic units and high strength carbon fibres. Much of the space dust and debris encountered by the speeding ATS would pass through the network's pores, while any damage to the supersystem could be self-repaired.

The ATS may have come from a carbon planet:

en.wikipedia.org...

It might depend on C or CO (carbon monoxide) for energy and growth, and be searching for other planets, with surface carbon, to colonise.

And so, after travelling perhaps a thousand light years from its home carbon planet, a coal-eating auto-teleological supersystem dined at a coal-fired power station near Empire, Ohio.

No wonder Jim Oberg was baffled.

Yes, they do! They come all the way from Alpha Centauri to steal our coal. I caught one of them at it only last week. When I challenged him he said he was simply taking up the slack

I remember having a discussion re artificial 'life' and technology and suggested living creatures are superior to ANY tech. consider the mouse, which can feed itself, heal, reproduce, etc. how difficult would it be to create an object that could do that?
we came up with a sort of excavator with a drill that could mine ore and drill for oil (for fuel / lube / hydraulic fluid).
imagine building such a device that could eventually replicate itself!
we have solar-powered stuff but nothing near that level of sophistication.

fuel/power/energy would definitely be a limiting factor in long-distance space exploration.

reply to post by Lowneck
For a guy who doesn't post much, what you do post tends to be interesting. In this case, the incident you linked to is new to me. Unfortunately, the Earthfiles article and linked images need a subscription and LMH isn't having any of my money.

As usual, it'd be easier if we could've had access to the raw images Without them, we're left with point lights and not a lot more besides the witness account. They look intriguing (based on the thread posts) and don't go further.

Regarding your speculation about 'post-biological' life-forms in search of carbon...it's seriously abundant in the universe. As the fourth most common element, it's hard to argue that carbon would be the motivation for coming here.

S&F because you've generated a few ideas and piqued some curiosity.

Coal eating cyborgs, that one is new to me.

Looking at it from a distance I would say that cyborgs are part organic and part machine, unless they already needed coal as their daily food supply I would say that they wouldn't eat it. Besides coal, there are better suited fuelsupplies to use.

It is actually possible to let cybornetic components run on regular body-energy without much problems. ofcourse I remember a research case back in the days when we reaced the limit. If you need 30% of the day stashing food just to use you cybernetic components for the remaining 70% then it becomes a problem (since you will be like a swarm of locust just to power it all)

Generally speaking, cyborgs derive their power from a few methodes;

1) Food. The process that you own body uses for generating anergy works as well for equipment to a certain procentage.
2) Kinect energie. All life spoils energy in their movement, intelligent programming can predict such spoiled energy and prevent it, the resulting energy will at cummalative up to the energysupply of the body itself.
3) Atmospheric recharge. This can be solar energy, heat or even fotosynthesislike charging. A effective passive chagemethode.
4) A seperate powersupply. A cyborg tends to be depend of his seperate powersupply as little as possible since these things generate lots of energy but its primary supplysource might not always be readily available. Generally speaking; a seperate powersupply is used when really needed and recharged by the other methodes when possible.

Consider this, if you could let your car run on solarpower till say 50 miles an hour without problem and the nearest fuelstation is nowhere near your fueltanks capability, would you risk driving 100 miles an hour and then getting nothing but really dark sunless days by chance? A cyborg considers the same issue on a daily basis; even when the supplysource for the seperate powersupply is close, he will tend to depend on it as little as possible.

And even if a cyborg would visit earth for a powersupply, he would chose something else then coal or oil.
ofcourse I should sidenote then almost 100% cyborgnised beings barely generate energy by moving and don't need to eat so they will be entirely depended on solarenergy and such or their alternate powersupply. But such cyborgs only do combat or high risc work like working in sapce or at radioactive locations.

Francis Crick who co-discovered the structure of DNA and Leslie Orgel proposed the theory of Directed Panspermia.

It now seems unlikely that extraterrestrial living organisms could have reached the earth either as spores driven by the radiation pressure from another star or as living organisms imbedded in a meteorite. As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms, we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet. We conclude that it is possible that life reached the earth in this way, but that the scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability. We draw attention to the kinds of evidence that might throw additional light on the topic.
Crick and Orgel: Directed Panspermia

Maybe life was directed in this way to Earth from a less oxygen rich planet, like the one mentioned by the OP. Mysteriously, oxygen is toxic to practically all life forms. That would hardly be surprising if it first arose where the element was less abundant.

In fact the earliest mass extinction is thought to have been caused by oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago. It has been dubbed the Oxygen Catastrophe.

The rising oxygen levels may have wiped out a huge portion of the Earth's anaerobic inhabitants at the time. From their perspective it was a catastrophe (hence the name)
en.wikipedia.org...

as I understand it much of what we eat is, or is converted to, sugar, which as i recall is carbon plus water (C6H22O11). so theoretically a life form could consume carbon and water and xform it into sugar.
vitamins, minerals, etc, complicate the formula, but a true cyborg might have a sort of external nutrition pack that drips in as needed, the coal/carbon/sugar providing the bulk of the calories/fuel.

reply to post by AncientShade

Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

I used the term 'cyborgs' in the thread title because few few people here would be familiar with Paul Davies's concept of auto-teleological supersystems.

You would have to read his book The Eerie Silence to see what I was trying to get at. Like his SETI friend Seth Shostak, Paul Davies, a former UFO enthusiast, now dismisses UFOs for career reasons, but he's very bright and all his books are worth reading.

I was really thinking of CO rather than C as an energy source. It can be both oxidised and reduced, and plays an important role in space chemistry, helping to form formaldehyde, HCOOH, for example.

reply to post by AncientShade


Sorry, formaldehyde is CH2O. Confused it with formic acid.

Cheers.