The Atlantic - How Many Astronauts Believe Aliens Exist? Answer - ALL of them.

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People
This was b4 lovell
if im not mistaken, it was schmidt or schirra calling
Houston I have a santa claus

Angelic Resurrection
From my experience, most on ats are blind to visible proof

So what proof do you have? Please present it...

JimOberg


Do a little deeper investigation before 'believing' too much of this stuff, is what I recommend.

when I need your advice, I shall ask for it.

A word of advice from personal experience... don't POST WHEN DRUNK!

MarsIsRed

Angelic Resurrection
From my experience, most on ats are blind to visible proof

So what proof do you have? Please present it...

Proof of what exactly?

reply to post by Angelic Resurrection


Proof that life is, or is not, unique to planet Earth.

MarsIsRed
A word of advice from personal experience... don't POST WHEN DRUNK!

It's unclear who you were directing this post to.

I guess we should just consider it to be the "note to self:" category.

JimOberg

JadeStar

JimOberg

People are still puzzled why we don't seem to notice -- or recognize -- manifestly non-natural energy flows out in the galaxy and beyond. A wide range of civilizations with a wide range of motivations ought to include at least a small few conducting engineering, gardening, aesthetic remodeling, or wars that really ought to be producing detectable signals. Fermi's Paradox lives.

As to why putative visitors hereabouts aren't unambiguously present, that depends entirely on their motives for such visits, and is beyond the control or understanding of the visitees.

It's the apparent silence OUT THERE that remains the challenge to explain, but there are suggestions. The question fascinates.

The only people puzzled by the Fermi Paradox are those who believe we've dredged the entire ocean for fish when in reality all we've done is go to the beach and dip a bucket in the water. Then we ask "why is it that in an ocean this size, we've seen no sign of fish in this here bucket?"

That is a very weak attempt at an analogy. False analogies are even more dangerous than false evidence. If the oceans were mostly transparent, as space is, and if sound carried as efficiently as electromagnetic radiation does through space, and if organic material which permeates sea water weren't there, maybe it's a mostly meaningless stretch. Otherwise, a schoolboy major FAIL, in my humble opinion.

I believe what JadeStar was delivering a parable on was the fact that only a very very very tiny of this one galaxy has been exposed to any signal from Earth, possibly the same percentage as one bucket of seawater as compared to the entire ocean. Sound reasonable?

reply to post by Riffrafter


Not really. But whatever floats your boat.

My post was obviously aimed at Angelic Resurrection. It was a bebate.

MarsIsRed
reply to post by Riffrafter

 

Not really. But whatever floats your boat.

Just teasing ya...

And I can clearly see that this reply was to me.

Something most people seem to ignore is the fact that even if there are a huge amount of amateur astronomers looking at the sky at any moment, not many have the capacity of observing through the lens of Hubble-like telescope.
There are clearly things big corporations like NASA see and just do not disclose or share.

It's very hard for me to believe if they would find human-like form of life somewhere else in the universe that they would disclose it right away, or even disclose it at all for that matter. What would they get from giving this information, you have to wonder?

Doesn't surprise me much that ex-astronauts (like Edgar Mitchel) talk so openly about extraterrestrial life because there is just no more reasons for them to keep the secret.

St0rD
...Doesn't surprise me much that ex-astronauts (like Edgar Mitchel) talk so openly about extraterrestrial life because there is just no more reasons for them to keep the secret.

Don't forget though, in Edgar Mitchell's case, he has repeatedly said that his belief in alien visitation is NOT based on any secret information he learned as an astronaut. He says that his beliefs are personal beliefs, and they are based on the same publicly-available evidence that we all can know about.

Edgar Mitchell is simply a person who believes in ET visitation (just like a lot of people) who happens to have been an astronaut. Perhaps the same personality traits that leads him to believe in ET visitation are also the same things that made him want to become an astronaut.

St0rD


It's very hard for me to believe if they would find human-like form of life somewhere else in the universe that they would disclose it right away, or even disclose it at all for that matter. What would they get from giving this information, you have to wonder?

Funding.

reply to post by FlyersFan

As well, if we must consider the idea that amoeba are reproducing somewhere "out there", then we must also consider that, by the process of evolution, there are lifeforms that have already evolved to point of space travel.

If it happened here,(Earth), when it did, then why not on another planet at a time well before "us".

Entire civilizations have come and gone here at Earth, so there's no reason to think that has not happened on another planet.

Just by the very "knowledge" that we exist here on this plane, within this time, and within the sometimes decaying bonds of reality, it's only truth that tells us that "we" exist somewhere out there on another world with the same question on the mind. . ."Are we alone?"

S&F, excellent thread.

Angelic Resurrection

JimOberg


Do a little deeper investigation before 'believing' too much of this stuff, is what I recommend.

when I need your advice, I shall ask for it.

Well, WE need your evidence to back up those claims of astronauts and 'Santa Claus'. We're asking.

JimOberg

That is a very weak attempt at an analogy. False analogies are even more dangerous than false evidence.

Then take it up with Frank Drake, Jill Tarter, Seth Shostak and Sara Seager. All of whom have made it. All of whom are fairly logical, rational people.

I just borrowed the analogy because despite what you say, it is a pretty good one that illustrates to laypeople we haven't really been looking for long or extensively.

SETI search space has been 'shallow' compared to other areas of astronomy.

If the oceans were mostly transparent, as space is,

Really now, you should know better. Space is NOT transparent. There are various things like planetary atmospheres, interstellar dust clouds and other things which make the ocean analogy a good one.

and if sound carried as efficiently as electromagnetic radiation does through space,

"And if... and if... and if the moon was your car..."

and if organic material which permeates sea water weren't there, maybe it's a mostly meaningless stretch. Otherwise, a schoolboy major FAIL, in my humble opinion.

Well, I'm a girl so it would be a 'schoolgirl fail" but that's beside the point.

This is a weak attempt to refute the fact that:

1) We've not been looking that long nor have we looked for sustained stretches. SETI projects have been mostly journeys to the beach. They are not the long continuous, deep searches perhaps you (and many laypeople) believe them to be.

Doubt me? Look at the amount of telescope time that's been devoted to it.... If you put all of the time together it would amount to at BEST about 9-10 years out of the 53 years we've been "searching". - observations.seti.org...

2) Our atmosphere as you well know, Mr. Oberg is -not- transparent to all electromagnetic radiation.

Up until the 80s most SETI was done in or near that little slice called the "waterhole":



The above chart just shows the Microwave/radio window. (Which is a small fraction of the much larger EM spectrum as you well know.)

Here is a graphic of our atmospheric absorption across the full EM spectrum:



So no, we've not looked for ETI in a full spectrum/full sky sort of way. We've not exactly had extremely useful (for ETI detection) IR, UV, Gamma and X-Ray space telescopes.

It's all just been journeys to the beach focused on that narrow part of an already narrow microwave window.

3) Even if our atmosphere WAS transparent to all wavelengths of electromagnetic emissions, we've never done a full scan of the entire sky at all wavelengths to amount to anything close to your transparent ocean analogy.

Just to illustrate that fact...

Here is a chart of most of the major radio SETI searches done to date:



What that shows is that we've examined only a hundred-trillionth of the radio 'search space' on TINY fraction of the sky. (Guillermo Lemarchand et. al)

Consider those bars on the graph our beach bucket.

Here's another chart which represents the areas that intelligence MAY be detectable in.. Note how few of them we actual spend time looking for ETI in:



4) You assume we'd know and understand what an alien signal would look like. SETI has received plenty of "WOW!" type signals but they aren't persistent so they can not be examined further. See this article: "Life at the SETI Institute: WOW! Signals Happen Every Day at the SETI Institute" - www.huffingtonpost.com...

Perhaps alien technology does not give off persistent radio signals? Perhaps these "WOW!" type signals are not for communication at all but the interstellar equivalent of the noise your car's spark plugs give off on the radio.

And lastly...

5) You assume that our existing instruments which have searched are significantly sensitive enough to detect the nearest civilization (again at all wavelengths).

#5 is the greatest folly in your attempt to refute mine. Here's why, since about 1960 (around the same time modern SETI began) there have been many attempts to find extrasolar planets.

Like SETI these were met with intense skepticism and not much telescope time was devoted to such searchers.

Only in the 1980s and early-1990s did our searches become a) sensitive enough and b) sustained enough to find them - given the success of finding planet forming regions first (ie around Vega and Beta Pictoris in the 80s) and then the first exoplanets around a pulsar in 1993.

Only after those criteria were met did we began finding tons of exoplanets.

I suspect it -may- play out similarly with extraterrestrial intelligence.

All it will take is one detection before the resources are put into -seriously- finding other aliens which might be out there.

Perhaps our instruments are not sensitive enough. Or the extraterrestrial intelligences are giving their presence away in another area of the spectrum, ie: the near or far IR, or nanosecond laser pulses in visible, IR or UV.

Regardless, you could have applied the Fermi Paradox to exoplanets up until 1993. ie: "If the universe is full of star forming regions and circumstellar dust disks, why haven't we found even one planet around another star?"

FACT: Most of the work to find exoplanets pre-1990s was done using a technique called astrometry. People like Peter van de Kamp and George Gatewood from the 60s-80s thought they found planets around stars like Barnard's Star and Lalande 21185 respectively. They published papers. Those papers were refuted...

They worked their whole life trying to find planets around two nearby red dwarf stars using astrometry never to find one planet that way.

Planet hunting went back to the drawing board for decades. Others tried looking for planets with astrometry, convinced they would find them. To no avail.

And so was the tragedy of searching for the unknown when you don't know what the best way to search for it is.

The first extrasolar planets were found by accident. Pulsar researchers noticed a variation in the timing of the pulsars they were observing that could only be explained by planets. Radial velocity then found the first one around a Sunlike star in 1995.

It just so happened that astrometry is perhaps the 2nd most difficult technique to use to find exoplanets (next to directly imaging them).

OBVIOUS QUESTION: Why did we waste decades looking for planets with astrometry rather than using radial velocity or transit observations?

ANSWER: Because our technology was not at the level that instruments sensitive enough to find a planet through radial velocity or transit observations existed. When those searches were possible we made them and found them.

SO: It could very well be that radio SETI is the astrometry of finding ETI and that another technique, ie: detecting nanosecond laser pulses or looking for city lights or waste heat on an exoplanet is the better way to conduct the search.

If so then we have -barely- just begun to seriously look with any chance of success.

I look forward to your response Mr. Oberg.
PS: Please don't take this personally. I am a big fan of your skeptical work in general with regards to UFOs and myths regarding space history, but on this subject, you are perhaps out of your depth.

reply to post by JadeStar


Mr. Oberg can't respond, he's busy chewing on his hat.

Very good post, just like a thread in itself, and very educational. thanks.

Aleister

JimOberg

JadeStar

JimOberg

People are still puzzled why we don't seem to notice -- or recognize -- manifestly non-natural energy flows out in the galaxy and beyond. A wide range of civilizations with a wide range of motivations ought to include at least a small few conducting engineering, gardening, aesthetic remodeling, or wars that really ought to be producing detectable signals. Fermi's Paradox lives.

As to why putative visitors hereabouts aren't unambiguously present, that depends entirely on their motives for such visits, and is beyond the control or understanding of the visitees.

It's the apparent silence OUT THERE that remains the challenge to explain, but there are suggestions. The question fascinates.

The only people puzzled by the Fermi Paradox are those who believe we've dredged the entire ocean for fish when in reality all we've done is go to the beach and dip a bucket in the water. Then we ask "why is it that in an ocean this size, we've seen no sign of fish in this here bucket?"

That is a very weak attempt at an analogy. False analogies are even more dangerous than false evidence. If the oceans were mostly transparent, as space is, and if sound carried as efficiently as electromagnetic radiation does through space, and if organic material which permeates sea water weren't there, maybe it's a mostly meaningless stretch. Otherwise, a schoolboy major FAIL, in my humble opinion.

I believe what JadeStar was delivering a parable on was the fact that only a very very very tiny of this one galaxy has been exposed to any signal from Earth, possibly the same percentage as one bucket of seawater as compared to the entire ocean. Sound reasonable?

edit on 11-11-2013 by Aleister because: (no reason given)

Correct. And the inverse is also true. Our attempts to find them, scientifically have been shallow and intermittent.

Aleister
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Mr. Oberg can't respond, he's busy chewing on his hat.

Very good post, just like a thread in itself, and very educational. thanks.

Thanks. Do you think I should post a thread like "The Fallacy of Fermi's Paradox?"