04-18-2006, 05:48 AM | #41 (permalink) |
Rail Baron
Location: Tallyfla
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Anyone see that show on the history channel on USOs (Unidentified submerged object)? I only watched about 10 min of it, but it was pretty facinating. Apparently the Navy was hunting subs during the WW2 and the cold war and several times tracked something 20,000 ft under water moving at speeds no man made sub had ever moved at. One time they had it blockaded in and within a few days could not find it. It apparantly just took off out of the ocean back to outer space. Interesting to say the least.
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"If I am such a genius why am I drunk, lost in the desert, with a bullet in my ass?" -Otto Mannkusser |
04-18-2006, 06:56 AM | #44 (permalink) | |
C'mon, just blow it.
Location: Perth, Australia
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Source
Quote:
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"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex." -- From an IGN game review. |
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04-18-2006, 07:52 AM | #45 (permalink) |
Rail Baron
Location: Tallyfla
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If I was in an intergalactic spacecraft I would bypass earth and head straight to that cloud of beer.
What not fit for human consuption. well then if I was an alien that could get drunk off methanol and I was in an intergalactic spacecraft I would bypass earth and head straight to that cloud of beer.
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"If I am such a genius why am I drunk, lost in the desert, with a bullet in my ass?" -Otto Mannkusser |
04-18-2006, 05:16 PM | #47 (permalink) | |
Young Crumudgeon
Location: Canada
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Quote:
As I said above, Einstein's famous equation (E=MC<sup>2</sup>) is a function that describes energy as related to mass. The speed of light is a constant; it never changes. That makes our two variables energy (E) and mass (M). In order for the equation to remain true, as an object gains energy to accelerate, something on the other side has to change in order to balance the equation out. Yet we also know that the speed of light never changes; therefore, we can deduce that as an object accelerates it gains mass. So why does that mean we can't go faster than the speed of light? Basically, because the speed of light is a constant, as energy increases mass must increase also. The calculations get a bit complicated, but essentially we can say that in order to increase an object's velocity we must apply an amount of energy (also known as a force) dependent on the object's mass; or, in other words, it takes more work to move heavy stuff. We know this, because we know that it's harder to lift a cinderblock than it is an empty cardboard box of the same size. The two objects have the same volume, but very different mass. And now, the breakthrough. Since we know that it takes more energy to increase an object's velocity if the object has more mass and we know that an object's mass increases as it's energy increases, we know that causing an object to accelerate will by default make the object harder to accelerate further. The practical limit based on that oh-so-famous equation turns out to be the speed of light; we can get infinitely close to it, but we can never actually get there. This is true in every part of the universe, as the thoery of relativity states that the laws of physics are the same for everyone. So no, there are no aliens flying around at faster than light speeds. They can't break the rules anymore than we can. The general science fiction answer to this is to try to find a way around the rules; that's where discussion of things like wormholes, space-time bending, alternate dimensions and the like comes into play.
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I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said - Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame |
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04-19-2006, 08:18 AM | #48 (permalink) |
Psycho
Location: new york
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Has anyone seen this blogsite http://fpiarticle.blogspot.com/2005/...velations.html ? They have pictures which allegedly come from aerial survelliance of Area 51.
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04-19-2006, 09:03 PM | #49 (permalink) |
Young Crumudgeon
Location: Canada
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Those pictures are from Google Earth. I suppose one could argue that's aerial surveillance, but it's certainly not what I'd deem covert.
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I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said - Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame |
05-12-2006, 04:07 PM | #51 (permalink) | |
Shodan
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Quote:
true we have not yet acheived faster than light travel, but perhaps another civilization has, or they warp space, or they fold space, perhaps they do something completely different since they are a alien civilization.
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If you think you can or you can't, you are right! |
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06-05-2006, 02:24 PM | #52 (permalink) |
Psycho
Location: Right here, right now.
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I'm not sure that the comparison between the difficulty of breaking the sound barrier and the difficulty of breaking light speed works all that well.
In the case of the sound barrier, it was probably pretty obvious that it could be broken - after all, every time anyone fires a gun, the bullet pops out and does that immediately. The German V2 - the first large rocket - also did that all the time. If you just want to fly faster than sound, no problem. You just shape your vehicle correctly (the front of the X-1, the first supersonic aircraft, was designed around the shape of a rifle bullet, just scaled up a bit) and stick in a power plant capable of overcoming the drag. The big problem was in controlling a manned aircraft. That's where people really had problems, especially with the controls effectively locking up at near-sonic speeds. The X-1 only succeeded when someone had the idea of the all-moving tailplane. Basically, until then virtually all aircraft used conventional elevators i.e. only a small part of the rear wing was used to control the aircraft's pitch (how high up the nose was). Making the whole rear wing move instead was the final piece of the puzzle for manned, controlled, supersonic flight. With faster-than-light travel, we do not even know how to fire something out of a gun in an essentially uncontrolled fashion at FTL speeds. It's a basic difficulty in physics, not in engineering. As others have noted in this thread, in its current state our physics tells us that it is in principle impossible. All the ways around it that I know of involve doing weird things to spacetime and still moving locally at less than light speed, such as using wormholes or a type of "bubble" spacetime (Alcubierre spacetime?) inspired by Star Trek warp-drives - and there are still basic theoretical difficulties with even those ideas that would need to be solved before we can even begin to think how to actually turn them into an engineering problem. Another thing to keep in mind in any UFO discussion is even undoubtedly experienced observers can make errors. For instance, there are occasions on which experienced airline pilots have swerved violently to avoid a collision with a bright meteor over 100 miles from their position. And my favourite identification error is from Richard Rhodes' "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb", in which he relates an incident that occurred just weeks before the testing of the first atomic bomb. Early one morning the anti-aircraft gun crews at Los Alamos saw a bright unidentified object in the dawn sky and opened fire when it would not identify itself. The base commander, who was also an amateur astronomer, sent out a request for the gun crews to stop trying to shoot down the planet Venus. Still, there certainly are odd things that it would be interesting to know the explanation for.
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06-06-2006, 10:04 AM | #53 (permalink) |
<3 TFP
Location: 17TLH2445607250
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Martian-
There ARE times when light moves at a different rate or particles move faster than c. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...Light/FTL.html http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2796 http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/que...php?number=387 http://www.space.com/scienceastronom..._c_000719.html (oddly the two directly above contradict each other slightly, the former saying that data as a pulse of light cannot exceed c and the latter saying that pulses of data had exceeded the speed of light) Basically, just do a Google search for "faster than the speed of light". The problem, Martian, is that science has far too much speculation. To believe that ANY current "fact" is, in fact, "fact" at all means you do not have the open-mindedness needed to be a breakthrough scientist. You MUST alsways question everything and assume there can be no assumptions. Last edited by xepherys; 06-06-2006 at 10:05 AM.. Reason: typo |
06-08-2006, 07:38 AM | #54 (permalink) |
Mistress of Mayhem
Location: Canton, Ohio
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I should think that if there were to be such an advanced civilization they would laugh at us and how we are self destructing as a society. Better yet I kinda like south parks version of aliens... us as a soap opera for alien TV. Hehehe. I dont doubt that the possibility exists, but i'm just not convinced that it does for certain.
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06-08-2006, 10:01 AM | #55 (permalink) |
<3 TFP
Location: 17TLH2445607250
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I agree... but then maybe such a race has gone through long periods of destruction just like us. If they ARE humanoid(ish) carbon-based critters, who's to say that's where the similarities end. If they are not, who knows what they might think of us, if they do at all...
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10-09-2006, 06:17 AM | #56 (permalink) |
Psycho
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Only mildly topical, but in regards to the "light speed" travel debate going on here, apparently we can now send macroscopic atomic matter *at* the speed of light (See: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science...eut/index.html). This would have been fantastic conjecture to anyone just few years ago, and I think, despite it's reality, remains fantastic conjecture to most people today. I can't help but feel that greater than light speed travel is technically possible, but it wouldn't really be traveling in the traditional sense and more like translocating. Wormholes or other methods of bending space time to travel seems like it has potential.
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"The courts that first rode the warhorse of virtual representation into battle on the res judicata front invested their steed with near-magical properties." ~27 F.3d 751 |
10-15-2006, 06:31 PM | #58 (permalink) |
Soylent Green is people.
Location: Northern California
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Why do we always assume that advanced space alien species have their shit together? Maybe they're more fucked up than we are! We're so down on our own species we usually assume that space aliens will be more enlightened than we are.
When the European settlers first came to the Americas the Native Americans might have assumed the technologically-advanced palefaces were honest, enlightened people - and they'd be wrong, right? If I wanted to employ the tree-hugger paradigm I could argue that technology, in fact, is inversely related to moral rectitude. By that count "War of the Worlds" and "Independence Day" are safer bets than "Close Encounters" or "E.T." That's why I own a gun (kidding).
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"I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence." - Mahatma Ghandi |
10-17-2006, 08:21 AM | #59 (permalink) |
Tilted
Location: Washington
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I believe in UFOs for one reason and one reason only. On three different occasions I've seen them. Only one of those times was I intoxicated. I've never seen bigfoot a ghost or any of that other crap but I have seen little blue and red dots that looked like stars moving back and forth touching each other then splitting apart at what must have been thousands of miles an hour and with G-forces that were OMG. All three times I had a friend with me seeing the same thing so I know what I was seeing is real. My mom and my girlfriend think I'm nuts or kinda look at me with a smile like "uh huh."
So yes I do believe in UFOs but as far what was in those things flying around; who knows. One theory I've always had was that humans in the future found a way to travel through time and that is them traveling back or something. I only think that because interstellar travel just seems so far fetched. As if time travel isn't far fetched haha. |
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aliens, coming, earth, space |
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