

Ghost Rockets – A crowd sourced UFO investigation - peterstark72
http://www.ghostrockets.se/

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ansible
I used to be fascinated by UFO stories and such when I was a kid. Part of my
interest in SF in general.

As I grew up, I started to appreciate just how vast space really is, and how
much energy it takes to hop over to even the nearest solar system for a ship
of even small mass, like 1kg.

And after I started studying molecular nanotechnology, it occurred to me that
it is very unlikely that aliens have ever visited us. The is nothing they need
from us that they couldn't get more cheaply closer to home.

And if they did visit us, they would be so far beyond our current technology
level that they could easily observe us without our knowledge.

We have nothing to worry about unless we encounter a self replicating plague,
and by then it will be too late.

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Houshalter
What if they don't care about being observed? They just don't usually get
close enough for us to interact with. And the craft don't need to be
extraterrestrial. They could send a pin sized probe, and with advanced enough
nanotech, build everything they need locally.

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ansible
_What if they don 't care about being observed? They just don't usually get
close enough for us to interact with. And the craft don't need to be
extraterrestrial. They could send a pin sized probe, and with advanced enough
nanotech, build everything they need locally._

If they wanted to observe us at all, it would be most useful to not mess with
the initial conditions, and just capture as much detail as possible. Then
construct simulations with variations as needed.

If they truly don't care about being observed, they have sent probes
interstellar distances to basically troll us. Which seems pretty juvenile.

Either way, they would then need to conduct a giant laser to report results
back. And wait decades to millena as well. For what? Were aren't that
interesting. And they could just simulate different starting conditions for
organic life, and get their laughs that way.

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Houshalter
You are making extremely strong assumptions about their motivations.
Simulations are cool, but it's not the same as observing the real thing. Maybe
they want to keep track of what's going on on our planet, and sending a few
probes would cost almost nothing for an advanced civilization.

Sending back messages isn't very difficult, especially if they only need to
travel a few light years, or at least to the nearest outpost they have.
Regardless, they could easily construct whatever equipment they need in our
solar system. Even if they did build a giant laser, we probably wouldn't even
be aware of it. We've only recently begun to track all the various asteroids
in our vicinity, let alone investigate them in detail. There are entire moons
and planets we haven't mapped in great resolution, if at all.

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ansible
_You are making extremely strong assumptions about their motivations._

Yes, though I believe my assumptions to be well-founded.

 _Simulations are cool, but it 's not the same as observing the real thing._

No, they're not of course. But they can achieve a sufficient level of accuracy
for entertainment purposes.

Again, what do we have that would possibly be useful? Science, art? Hah. With
the time and resources needed to launch interplanetary probes, they could run
a whole bunch of sims with all kinds of interesting starting conditions.
That's a lot more convenient.

The other factor in this just how fast / hot sufficiently advanced
civilizations will run at. Your meat brain operates at essentially the 10's of
Hz range. You can get anything done at all because it is massively parallel.

A fully optimized brain of similar architecture could instead be running in
the 10 GHz range. So it would be experience reality about a billion times
faster than you.

So now you want to send out probes to nearby star systems to look for
something fun. Let's say you get lucky, and something interesting has
developed 50 light-years away, so you send a tiny probe at nearly light-speed
there. You've got to wait about 100 years for the first results to come back.

But that is our meat-brain time scale.

In your optimized-brain time scale, you're waiting longer than the universe
has existed so far for the results to come back. That, my friends is boring!
Will you really care about the results 100 billion years from now? Eh,
probably not.

Sure, you could put yourself to sleep to await the results, but then you'd
miss out on everything that is happening locally. Who wants to do that?

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wturner
For anyone interested in this kind of thing (UFO stories that discount the
idea of aliens etc... ), take a read into the back story of Alexander Weygers.
He was a polymath who patented an invention called a 'disc copter' in 1945 (
about 5 years before the phrase "flying saucer became popular"). There is a
gentleman who has an art gallery down the street from my house who is probably
the premier "expert" on the back story of this guy. I was lucky enough to
apply for a web assistant gig there hence he told me the entire back story
over the course of an hour and gave me a tour of some of the original art he
has from Weygers. To make a long story short Weygers use to live in Carmel
California and was a builder, artist, inventor etc. He invented this "Disc
Copter" invention and his students said that "Men in black suits" would visit
him during the course of their mentoring sessions; and when they did Weygers
refused to talk much about it. Look him up. This documentary looks good btw.

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tjradcliffe
Given that the term "flying saucer" seems to be a misnomer from Kenneth
Arnold's report that described the _motion_ of the observed object as being
"like a saucer skipping on a pond" and his sketch of the object shows
something that looks a bit like a flying wing
([http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4376/798/1600/Kenneth%20A...](http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4376/798/1600/Kenneth%20Arnold%27s%20Drawing%20Top%20%26%20Side.jpg))
which notoriously have a bucking or skipping motion in the air, it would be
fairly weird if a disc-shaped object were involved. Edit: there's some
speculation it might have been the German Horten Ho 229:
[http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/159/e/d/horten_ho_229...](http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/159/e/d/horten_ho_229_by_tr4br-d3icg18.jpg)

It would be like you giving me an inaccurate description of something based on
someone else's report, and me mangling your description into something that
_just happened_ to be very much like the original. It's not impossible, but
you'd have to be pretty optimisic to call it remotely plausible.

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wturner
I didn't mean to insinuate the two things were related in that way.I was just
making a comment loosely related to the topic of the thread.

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vixen99
I read the synopsis in English but after a couple of minutes of mood music and
a succession of images which do not advance the story I conclude that although
for all I know this is BIG nevertheless I think I'll wait for the 'discovery
headline hitting the media' later this year (or not) rather than sit through
it.

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UserRights
It would be very interesting to read about how to get funding by EU for a
project like this! Is anybody willing to write about his experiences with the
EU funding procedures?

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dghughes
As with any UFO enthusiast it's not unidentified flying objects they are after
they've convinced themselves it's aliens.

I'm sure their minds are already made up and they searching for something they
think is there which isn't impartial or scientific.

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dblock
First, let me begin by saying that there's no doubt that UFOs are alien craft
visiting earth.

