Anyone who thinks UFOs don't exist read this!!!

ZetaRediculian
reply to post by uncommitted

 

I came across project Palladium which is interesting.
I have no idea what to make of this yet.

What happened in 1952 over Washington, D.C.?

The first incident took place early one morning in July. It was reported extensively in the newspapers that a number of unknown objects appeared on radar screens around Washington. Now, it looks very plausible to me that the Washington incident was a demonstration of a technology from the Defense Department, known as Project Palladium, which allowed the operator to project radar blips onto other radar screens. Later on, the technology became very sophisticated to the point where you could change the shape of the blip and its speed and so forth. We go on in the book at length about the evidence that suggests that the Washington radar incident was a planned operation.

www.usnews.com...

Hi there,

That is interesting, a bit different to the 'thousands of witnesses' mentioned in another post by someone on this thread though isn't it?

reply to post by uncommitted


Project Palladium? I'm not sure technology existed then or even today to achieve such a result.
That is a good point and creating fake radar returns doesn't explain alleged witnesses, both on the ground and pilots in the air, and fighter jets attempting to chase aerial objects. There seems to be a lot more to the story than just blips on a radar screen. Here is the USAF press conference attempting to put the public at ease after the Washington '52 sightings. Light aberrations and temperature inversions are the USAF explanation. I'm not sure I'm completely convinced by that.

www.youtube.com...

Check out the first comment. That might be more accurate.

Something else I found interesting about the press conference is that way back in 1952 he even admits there is a certain percentage of cases that cannot be adequately explained. I don't think they say that now do they? All they say is there is no national security risk.

This appears to be the real Project Palladium, a top secret radar system for testing detectable radar cross sections, though I am somewhat skeptical about that as I've read this capability is problematic and unviable to transmit to moving targets such as aircraft and it appears to have nothing to do with the Washington '52 incident.

aviationtrivia.blogspot.com.au...

Has anyone ever thought about the probability of alien species visiting us, outside of the 'evidence' of witness accounts, etc?

For example, how many planets in our galaxy are able to support life vs the likelihood that they do vs the advanced development of that life vs overcoming the MASSIVE technical effort of achieving inter-stella travel.

I've been thinking of this for years and I just can't make the books balance in favour of alien species visitation. It's so mathmatically low that it's closer to impossible than possible.

I'll give you a heads up to start your own calculations. New research suggests that there are 60 billions planets in our galaxy inside the Goldilocks Zone – that is, planets 'capable' of supporting liquid water, which is vital for complex organisms to develop.

reply to post by TerraLiga


I think I'll leave those types of calculations to other smarter people. According to this the chances of detecting another civilization with SETI is very low.

If you take the most plausible guess for the number of detectable civilisations in our galaxy, the answer you get is about 10,000. That’s a big number,” he says. “And it requires civilisations to stay detectable for 10,000 years or so.

“Nevertheless, that means in our galaxy, with its 100 billion or so stars, only 1 in 10 million stars will have a detectable civilisation.

www.cosmosmagazine.com...

And remember that's just our galaxy there are billions and billions more.

Some may argue that advanced alien civilizations would see us as little dumb critters, rather than a civilization.

Maybe ha ha.

According to those calculations there could be trillions of other intelligent civilizations in the universe. What?

JimTSpock
reply to post by TerraLiga

 

I think I'll leave those types of calculations to other smarter people. According to this the chances of detecting another civilization with SETI is very low.

If you take the most plausible guess for the number of detectable civilisations in our galaxy, the answer you get is about 10,000. That’s a big number,” he says. “And it requires civilisations to stay detectable for 10,000 years or so.

“Nevertheless, that means in our galaxy, with its 100 billion or so stars, only 1 in 10 million stars will have a detectable civilisation.

www.cosmosmagazine.com...

And remember that's just our galaxy there are billions and billions more.

Some may argue that advanced alien civilizations would see us as little dumb critters, rather than a civilization.

Maybe ha ha.

According to those calculations there could be trillions of other intelligent civilizations in the universe. What?

edit on 18-9-2013 by JimTSpock because: (no reason given)

How many species of animal life on Earth do you think there are? They measure in their millions. How many have developed what we consider (rightly or wrongly) to have developed civilisations? One. According to those figures, there may be many, there may be few, there may be one, there may be none out there. Of course that questions our concept of civilisation, but it should also question if any others would have evolved technology wise, then decided to launch off planet craft or even have an interest in doing so. That is in the realms of 'what if' rather than fact though isn't it.

Drakes equation has a huge flaw. It is working with a sample dataset of one (Earth, but not only Earth, the human race) and using that as a factor to assume there must be many other planets with similar beings - of enough capability to look at the stars and be able to design the capability to travel to them. Of course it's logical to assume there are plenty, maybe millions of planets to host life - that is not the same as saying it's a given they have ever visited Earth. That is based on bias, assumption, interpretation of objects with a 21st century perspective rather than one based on the culture of the time...... but it makes for interesting conversation doesn't it.

Excellent points, Uncommitted, and I was going to get to Drake's Equation to eliminate some of those 60 billion planets, but as you've correctly pointed out it has a flaw – several actually.

It appears we live in an elementary-rich system here, and in our general area of the galaxy, so much so it almost seemed destined that life was going to develop and take hold here. The conditions are perfect for life, as we know it.

But there other areas of our galaxy which are very poor, and large parts too, mostly dominated by unsavoury elements that don't help to foster life. There was a planet discovery recently that was pure carbon – a massive planet-sized diamond! There are others where the dominant elements are equally unconducive to the generation of life.

Also, just because a planet is 'able' to support liquid water, it doesn't necessarily mean that it does, simply because the elements that make up water may not be available in that system. Our original 60 billion potential planets are quickly whittled down by anywhere from 25% to 50% – the exact figure, obviously, is unknown.

But let's be optimistic and opt for a 25% reduction. We now have 45 billion planets that can support microbial life...

uncommitted

ZetaRediculian
reply to post by uncommitted

 

I came across project Palladium which is interesting.
I have no idea what to make of this yet.

What happened in 1952 over Washington, D.C.?

The first incident took place early one morning in July. It was reported extensively in the newspapers that a number of unknown objects appeared on radar screens around Washington. Now, it looks very plausible to me that the Washington incident was a demonstration of a technology from the Defense Department, known as Project Palladium, which allowed the operator to project radar blips onto other radar screens. Later on, the technology became very sophisticated to the point where you could change the shape of the blip and its speed and so forth. We go on in the book at length about the evidence that suggests that the Washington radar incident was a planned operation.

www.usnews.com...

Hi there,

That is interesting, a bit different to the 'thousands of witnesses' mentioned in another post by someone on this thread though isn't it?

Yes it would be. I have no idea if this would explain it in part or even at all.

Beavers
Since joining ATS i've stopped believing in aliens.

Odds are, given the immenseness of the Universe, there is intelligent Life elsewhere in the Universe.

Now, that multiple races of aliens would come to visit a planet inhabited primitive apes in a small Galaxy orbiting a Yellow Dwarf Star that to me is the more improbable of the two.

How is reading something about UFO's going to make me a believer?
Touch, and sight are the two senses which will lead me to any sort of belief
that Aliens which fly spacecraft are real.

may as well be the bible that tells me of aliens and unknown objects

So now we reach one of the most crucial points of multi-cellular development of life – the conditions on the planets, or to be more specific, the tectonic activity.

Without any activity at all it would be, for all intents and purposes, a dead planet. Too much and any complex life wouldn't be able to develop. It has to be just right within a margin of error, and added to that it must have a molten core of preferably iron, like our own, although some other heavy metals can be substituted.

Unfortunately, even being optimistic, that's going to cut our base in half. But let's be even more optimistic and say our base is now 25 billion planets on which complex, multi-cellular life can prosper given the opportunity.

I'm using the word 'opportunity' very carefully here.

As a side note, apologies for writing in instalments but I'm trying to fit this in with other tasks. Like I've mentioned previously, I've been thinking about and studying this topic for several years and what I'm writing now are summaries of each massive step in the development of complex life – and therefore the possibility of alien civilisations and their ability to travel here. It's taken research of several entirely different science fields to reach my conclusion, which explains why it's take so long to come to fruition.

From a reasonably safe source of science-based speculation, we now reach the point of wild and untamed guesstimation. We have to make the massive evolutionary jump from single-celled microbial life into ordered, multi-cellular lifeforms. This is a biggy.

Using our solar system as a model – this is itself a flawed method, but it is all we have – a form of multi-cellular life started fairly early on; certainly within a billion years of Earth's formation. It took the form of community structures, mostly prokaryotes, but included slime-like organic matter, and continued in this way until about 2.5 billion years ago. Strictly speaking these were a collective of individuals working for a common purpose.

Exactly what happened 2.5 billion years ago is unknown, but at that time real multi-cellular lifeforms began to appear. It is thought that the development of the oxygenated atmosphere, among several other variables, allowed the conditions for this to happen. Unfortunately the diversity of life was pretty small for another 2 billion years.

So our next major event for our planets is to follow this path – including all the meteorite and comet bombardments we have had to provide the chemicals and minerals we didn't have as a natural resource.

I am painfully aware this is an obscenely concise explanation for the origin of species on our planet but I'm trying to be ultra-concise for the benefit of understanding.

Time for another reduction of our base. There are many ways in which life cannot make the jump from single to multi cellular life; not developing an atmosphere, not having the correct ingredients, not being able provide the ideal environment e.g. liquid water that is the right temperature, is not too unstable, having land masses or shallow waters, not being continually bombarded with extra-terrestrial objects, etc. These conditions will reduce anywhere from between 20% to 50% of our planet base. But again, let's be optimistic.

Our base has now reached only 20 billion planets. We are down to a third of our original and we haven't yet reached anything with eyes, let alone intelligence.

reply to post by TerraLiga


Really enjoying the rationale there TerraLiga, good posts. I would add for good measure the probability of an extinction event which must be worth a few percentage points in the grand scheme of things.

Interesting Terra. I always like to see people who come up with their own theories. Also uncommitted a good add there which I hadn't thought of before. We might not even be here if the dinosaur extinction event hadn't happened so it's possible it can work both ways.

Terra something which may add to your theory is that I recently read in New Scientist that the jump from simple single cell organisms to more complex multi-cell organisms appears to be a very very rare event and possibly only happened once on this planet in billions of years. But here we sit.

I think I know you'll end up saying the probability is so low it might as well be zero. Surprise me. The article in my post above from Cosmo magazine says 10,000 which I think is quite a large number and that is only for our own galaxy. The universe is so big and old almost all probabilities can occur.

One idea you may not have thought of is if evolutionary biology continues for a very long time, billions of years, and seems to increase in complexity, are multi-cellular reproducing intelligent biological organisms almost inevitable? It seems a possibility which I have considered. Survival of the fittest. Are the smartest inevitably the fittest?

JimTSpock

One idea you may not have thought of is if evolutionary biology continues for a very long time, billions of years, and seems to increase in complexity, are multi-cellular reproducing intelligent biological organisms almost inevitable? It seems a possibility which I have considered. Survival of the fittest. Are the smartest inevitably the fittest?

edit on 19-9-2013 by JimTSpock because: add

Well, alligators have been on this earth longer than man, as have dragonflies. The thinking is that if there was an extinction event on Earth, cockroaches are most likely to survive. Not sure if they are the smartest, but maybe they all know something we don't. I can't imagine any of them popping over to another solar system (by choice) anytime soon though......

reply to post by uncommitted


I've thought of that. We humans are the dominant lifeform on this planet and we are the smartest. We are destroying other species at an alarming rate when we don't even mean to, just from our civilization and thirst for resources. We are the fittest from our intelligence which has led to our technology and no other species can challenge us for domination of this planet. It is difficult to see how we could ever lose this complete domination over other species unless we destroy ourselves.

We now have the technology to possibly avoid an extinction event thus survive. It is not possible to prove or disprove other intelligent lifeforms have evolved and reached a level of technology enabling them to travel to other stars, galaxies or even universes. We have only what we have observed at home on our Earth.

Thanks very much both, I appreciate it.

Yes, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial extinction events and massive climate and condition fluctuations are all major factors on life on our planet, and there is little doubt they would have played a major part on others too. All these events are not extraordinary, they are a normal part of a developing solar system and being part of a dynamic galaxy.

Spock, the evidence of the emergence of single-celled life to more complex life is indeed a once-only event on this planet. This has been proven (almost) beyond a doubt by the common sequence in all DNA structure that has been found so far. It is possible that other strains of life could have evolved on this planet but we haven't found it yet – or it died out long ago.

I read that article in Cosmo but couldn't work out how they had come to the figures they have. For example, the number of stars they have used is incorrect (100 billion). There maybe 100 billion large stars, but there are at least another 100 billion stars of our's size, and another 50 billion stars that are small but able to provide enough radiation to any closely orbiting planet.

They may also be using data acquired from Kepler to estimate the total habitable planets in our galaxy (approx 30 billion) but that has been updated by the greater resolution of 3D simulation modelling and the introduction of clouds into the model used by Chicago/Northwestern study. Their model doubles Kepler's predicted model.

Like I said, I really want to be optimistic and have used all 60 billion of those possible planets. When I first started this study a few years ago I was only using 1 billion. After Kepler's results I upped it to 30 billion. I've now doubled that.

10,000 advanced civilisations is certainly within my range but there's at least two major hurdles to overcome before they get here – both have proved beyond us so far, and maybe always will.

As far as I'm concerned, SETI's efforts are being wasted on wide area radio data. This will only work if we can direct it to a planet within 20 LY as the signal decays into background radiation after that time. Plus we have to rely on civilisations using radio powerful enough – or at all – to communicate.

This, of course, is all speculation. There may be more life out there than we can possibly imagine or it may be as dead as a Dodo. We won't know until we find it beyond any doubt at all.

reply to post by TerraLiga


You certainly know about this stuff. So what's your best guess on how many intelligent civilizations may exist in our Milky Way? Even if it were only 10 or 100 I think that is still quite a few for one galaxy. If us humans survive for another 100 or 1,000 years we may be the ones venturing out to the stars. We've gone from hot air balloons to going to the moon and back in a very short space of time so I can only guess what we might do in the next few centuries. If physics will allow it may be inevitable that we ourselves explore the universe with faster than light technology. Of course some will say that is impossible but they said that about Mach 1 and now we have a space station. Now I speculate that it must be possible because we have observed ET craft doing it. ha ha.

One final thought. We have at least 1 intelligent civilization in this galaxy, us. So let's say 1 per galaxy which is a fairly low number. There are maybe 100 to 500 billion other galaxies which means about 100 to 500 billion other intelligent civilizations in the universe. That seems like quite a large number. I think it seems highly probable they are out there.

Aha! You're trying to get in early! I don't blame you, but I want to tell the whole story so everything is in context. Tomorrow I'll write about the things we touched on earlier – major extinction events and dramatic climate change, and how this affects the development of life. I'm afraid we're going to have to make a drastic cut in our base...

Oh, I'll also update a point I made earlier about DNA. As soon as I posted it and read it back I realised I forgot to add an strange anomaly to our DNA that nobody, so far, has explained. It's very very interesting.

reply to post by Beavers


Anything can be faked given the right tools and materials to create it. Just because something can be faked or duplicated doesn't mean the real thing doesn't exist. There's a lot of silk flowers out there, it doesn't mean there's no real ones? Fakes imitate reality.

reply to post by TerraLiga


Good stuff Terra. As long as your estimate is at least 1 for our galaxy that would be good.