Posted on 09/23/2010 9:44:13 PM PDT by atc23
Ex Military men say unknown intruders have monitored and even tampered with American nuclear missiles
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
I have. The answer is faster-than-light propulsion technology.
A civilization with a thousand year head start on us will almost certainly have cracked the physics puzzle to achieve that.
Just look at the speed at which our own culture's technology is progressing. Try to imagine what sort of technologies will be commonplace in just the next 100 years. Now multiply that progress, times ten.
I'm pretty sure that most of us don't have the capacity to accurately predict what sort of developments will be ordinary 100 years from now, let alone, 1,000 years hence.
What we can do, is to use our own past and a bit of logic as a yardstick to predict the future of technology on this planet. It doesn't take a genius to see that the technologies of our distant future will be as magical to us, as the technologies of our time would be to humans of our distant past.
The universe is more vast than we can easily imagine. In all that vastness, there is every likelihood that cultures more advanced than ourselves have discovered the means to achieve realistic interstellar travel.
Are you on crack? ... or what ?
Erm, the closest *galaxy* is about 1.5 million light years away (Andromeda; I’m not counting the Magellanics or other satellites of our galaxy). The closest *solar system* is about 3.5 light years away, and that would be the Centauri system (and we don’t know for sure if that one even has planets yet).
You’ve got a point there somewhere, but I think your hat is hiding it.
I sometimes wonder about that. The sheer level of increase in knowledge and technology in the last 120 years has been prodigious ...so dazzingly fast that what we take for granted now (e.g. cellular communication, commercial flight, modern medicine, weaponry) would have been in the realm of telepathy, magical flying devices, alchemy, and infernal-sorcery to those born in prior centuries. Thus, we have progressed far.
However, I recall the Roman empire and what followed once it collapsed. The knowledge that was lost after the collapse of Rome, and the coming of the Dark Ages, was lost for over a thousand years. It had to be 're-discovered' many hundreds of years later - slowly. The world went from a time of technological progress (e.g. medical progress, piped and heated water, good standard of amenities) to a true retraction of knowledge and roll-back in a lot of areas.
Looking at current levels of technology, to the extent that it is so far-advanced, and so specialized (e.g. the engine used in the Eurofighter Typhoon is too advanced for a nation like China to make ...actually they only recently managed to make a reasonable copy of the Russian RD-93 engine, and even then the Chinese version is underpowered and not as good), that if something (some event) was to occur that hit modern civilization, so much knowledge (and especially know-how and the means of production) would be lost that they may have to be rediscovered.
For instance, let's say some global pandemic was to hit (e.g. the perenial fears of some super bug) and lay waste to a significant portion of the population ...that would lead to a new Dark Age (not as dark as the one before, but considering how far we have come, even going back to where the world was in 1945 would be a HUGE step backwards).
It is definitely VERY possible that a 100 years from now, Earth will be an amazingly advanced place with all sorts of marvels that we would now shelve under 'science fiction' (the 'magic' of today). Where disease is a (mostly) forgotten thing (at least if you have funds), where even death is questionable (there was a time flying to the moon was impossible, and when infant mortality a given), where the standard of living is so good that being 'poor' means a person lives for a hundred years rather than five, and where lack and want are mostly relegated to needs. On the other hand, it is very possible that a hundred years from now Mankind will not be 15 billion people (btw it is interesting the globe took a hundred years to go from 1 billion to 2 billion people, and then went from under 2 billion people in the 1910s to almost 7 billion now in a hundred years) ...instead the population of the world will be much less due to global pandemics, resource wars (not just for what we call resources now, but rather for water and arable land), and all sorts of other not-so-nice stuff. We could be a metropolitan Utopia that is analogous to Krypton, or we could be Krypton after the red sun exploded (apologies to all who do not like Superman).
Anyways, in a nutshell, it is very possible that 100 years from now people will be living like how guys lived in 1910.
The universe is isotropic in its properties in all directions as far as we can observe. If life is just a "disease of matter" (and so far, like it or not, the evidence indicates this), then where ever there are conditions like ours here in Earth, you will get the same result. It will be automatic.
And seeing how life tends to adapt to even the most extreme circumstances, the results will vary greatly.
In terms of encountering intelligent life, especially creatures far more advanced than ourselves, I immediately ask the question, "If they can take anything they want from us like candy from a baby, why don't they?" Such behaviors are common to living creatures, ourselves, for all our "intelligence", included.
I have a few theories on that, which dovetail into why the universe seems so quiet to research efforts such as SETI.
"Jihad Plan 9 From Outer Space"
I doubt there's anything we humans possess, that can't be had in great abundance, throughout the cosmos. A race so advanced that they'd harnessed the technology to shrink time and space wouldn't need to take anything from this third-rate mud ball of a planet.
I have a few theories on that, which dovetail into why the universe seems so quiet to research efforts such as SETI.
I think that SETI is monitoring the wrong sort of frequencies. I highly doubt that ET uses the radio band to communicate. I won't venture a guess as to what carrier wave they might be using, but if SETI were to stumble across it, I think they'd be overwhelmed with the volume of traffic "out there".
I'll allow for the possibility that our civilization could wind up there in a hundred years, and that the advance of technology on this planet could actually go backwards, but in the scenario I laid out, technology will continue to advance, and even the rate of advance will quicken over time.
We can throw all sorts of Armageddon-like what-ifs into the mix, but the point is, if a culture can survive its own destructive nature, it can advance to levels where it achieves an awesome degree of mastery over the physical universe.
I'll even allow for the fact that not every culture will be oriented to technological innovation. We see this difference between cultures on our own planet.
But, if we can widen the examples set by the various cultures on this planet to extend across galaxies, then we see that at least some of the cultures that may exist out there will take the path that our own has. Ours is one of constant improvement, discovery, and innovation in the physical realm, and there's no indication that this proclivity is likely to change.
An extraterrestrial culture with the same bent toward technical innovation, and with a head start on us, would possess technologies that boggle our minds, and which would seem to us to be straight out of science fiction.
That may be, and I would hope that such would be the case. But beyond sheer material needs, I am of the opinion that if a lifeform reaches sufficient intelligence to where it can destroy itself as a species, it must also, as a race, master itself in terms of its animal origins. View it as a test of sorts, and most races fail, as humanity very well may, animal nature and its difficulties being what it is. That would make for a bit of quiet... although I would also agree with you that whatever methods of communication such races use, it is probably designed to be undetectable.
Those races that do manage to survive themselves would behave in a benign fashion, neither helping or hindering, allowing other species to follow their own course. I would like to think that creatures of a sufficiently advanced nature would not need for anything, nor be disposed to take what they need by force if that wasn't the case.
There's one more bit you mentioned about "cracking the physics puzzle" to allow interstellar transport. Something I note about all these various UFO sightings, which actually date back thousands of years, is that the basic geometry of these things hasn't changed in all that time. As you note, just look at how our own technologies have reshaped themselves over and over again within just the last 100 years. These things haven't change in over 2,000 years. Whatever they're using here, it appears to have hit the bottom of physics.
Crafts are demon ships and it is also possible that angels may also use crafts at time but this is only a possibility. They are from the spiritual realm which is essentially right here not from millions and millions of miles away.
These things haven't change in over 2,000 years. Whatever they're using here, it appears to have hit the bottom of physics.
That is quite interesting, isn't it? I suppose that there's a "bottom" to every technology. A point at which there isn't any further need for improvement or change.
Take for instance, the simple bowl. That's a design that's difficult to improve on, nor is there any practical reason to. A brick is a brick is a brick, unless it's a block, which is simply a variation on that timeless building unit. I suppose we could name thousands of human inventions that have hit their developmental "bottom".
Your observation would tend to argue that at least some of our visitors have reached a plateau in their technological advancement. It would seem to me, in that case, that scientific curiosity would have to be their chief interest in us.
There's also the political to be considered. Perhaps the Sol system is disputed territory. Perhaps it's even traded hands a few times.
Wouldn't it be interesting to find that our politics are little more than primitive tribal disputes, and that the politics that really matters is going on light years away from here.
Unlike your picture the center is independant of the spinning outer area and does not spin. Why not?
I am in total agreement with that. Actually, their technology would seem more like straight-up unadulterated magic rather than scence fiction. I can just imagine if someone from 900AD (let alone 300 BC) materialized in New York, or Dubai, or Tokyo! He couldn’t even begin to describe what he saw ....reminds me of the part of Ezekiel of the spinning wheel. Hmmmm
I agree with that. As you stated in your example, imagine someone from the year 900AD arriving suddenly in the present day. Even the simplest things (that we take for granted) would be utterly confounding and totally mind-boggling to them.
I think such a person would overwhelmed to the point of terror at the (seemingly) magical quality of everything in our world.
Now, take any garden variety human from the 21st century and propel them forward in time to the 31st century, and you'd likely get the same reaction. Technology of that time will be so advanced beyond what we know today, that we wouldn't even have a context in which to understand the most ordinary things. Just like someone from our distant past would experience in our world.
I believe it's very shortsighted of people nowadays to believe that faster-than-light travel is impossible, or that in all the vast universe, we're the only intelligent species with advanced technology. Logic and reason compel me to take the position that the universe is teeming with intelligent life, and that many civilizations exist that possess technologies far in advance of our own.
Yes, he did say that. Thanks for the reminder. Arthur C. Clarke was completely right about that.
Well, similar over 2000 years, but maybe not their 2000 years. Perhaps they are time travelers from our future and we see the same craft over time which it jumps around in, and avoiding contact because of the time paradox of changing the past. Or maybe they ARE changing their past to avoid what happened in our future, which given the subject of nuclear weapons, is rather dramatic. Who wouldn’t argue for killing Hitler before he came to power?
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