Ufo's

[Tealeaf]

Originally Posted by jaysay

Just a thought on UFOs when you think of the vastness of the galaxy it would be very starnge if we were the only forms of life, there must be something out there somewhere, wether they are like us or are little geen men is anybodies guess

There is some very strange alien life on the Accy Web.

[jambutty]

Originally Posted by jaysay

Just a thought on UFOs when you think of the vastness of the galaxy it would be very starnge if we were the only forms of life, there must be something out there somewhere, wether they are like us or are little geen men is anybodies guess

Just what would an alien be like? Would he be like us? Who knows as no one has ever seen one - or have they?

They would obviously be intelligent and that means a brain and that means a place for the brain to be, like a head. In the interests of bodily efficiency the sensory organs would need to be near the brain and those sensory organs would need to be able to sample light, sound and smell. Without any of those attributes then I suggest that the alien would not have evolved as he did and would have been consigned to the evolutionary dustbin aeons ago.

So the alien would have a head, two eyes for binocular vision, anything less would be too much of a handicap and in any case you need two eyes to judge distances. He would also have to have two ears to enable him to hear sounds from all around him. He would a need a nose so that smells can be monitored and to breath through. Where all these organs might be is a matter for evolution but I suspect that they wouldn't be too different to ours. Our alien would also need something with which to eat with, like a mouth, which would double as a breathing device. So I guess that our arrangement will be pretty much universal as the animal kingdom here on earth has shown.

In a similar way the alien would have something akin to our internal organs encased in a body and legs to propel that body from place to place. The foot would probably have evolved into a four digits affair as we can do without our little toe when it comes to maintaining a balance. Any fewer digits would make the foot narrow and not too good for a major balancing act.

The alien would need arms on the end of which would be dexterous fingers, otherwise he would never have been able to build his space ship in the first place. Whether he has four fingers and a thumb is a moot point but if he has six or more digits then it would interfere with his dexterity. If his hands are to be different to ours then I suggest that he will have just three fingers and a thumb on each hand. It certainly won't be just one finger and one thumb. You need three digits to grip something firmly. It is unlikely that he would have just two fingers and a thumb as the fourth digit adds to the dexterity and grip. So an alien, being evolved further than we are, would probably have just four digits on each hand. Our little finger isn't much use to us except in playing musical instruments or typing. Then again five digits do give a stronger grip.

Finally his body would be covered with a skin of some sort, which would reflect his evolutionary environment. The whole package would walk upright to make the best use of eyes and ears and its height would be determined by where it evolved. A planet with a heavier gravity than ours would mean a shorter person than us unless they were immensely strong and vice versa. In any case a tall body on a planet with a heavier gravity than ours would need one hell of a heart type thing to pump the "blood" around. Evolution would have kept the body short. Then again we had monstrous dinosaurs.

All these organs would need to be nurtured and in order to do so there would need to be a commodity like blood to take the required nutrients to them. I suppose that it could be a gas of some sort but either way you couldn't rely on gravity to do the job so there would have to be a system where the "blood" is pumped around the body against gravity. If the circulation system relied on gravity they would never have crossed the millions of miles of zero gravity to get to us.

So there we have it, our alien wouldn't be too different from us but that would depend on how far up the evolutionary ladder he has progressed and where, in terms of gravitational pull, he came from.

The truth is out there, somewhere.

But has it been here?

[jambutty]

Originally Posted by Tealeaf

There is some very strange alien life on the Accy Web.

It takes one to know one!

[panther]

Originally Posted by Tealeaf

There is some very strange alien life on the Accy Web.

LOL, and i bet i know who that is...........

[jaysay]

Originally Posted by Tealeaf

There is some very strange alien life on the Accy Web.

I did contenplate saying that myself but I wasn't brave enough Tealeaf

[Boeing Guy]

Okay,
JB the SR71 flys at 90,000 feet well above commercial traffic, it would be too dangerous below 50,000 we are all up there.

IF and it is a bloody big if, there is other life out there and they can reach us by interstellar travel, which is quite hard after all even if you can travel at the speed of light you will only travel 5,878,625,373,183.61 Miles in a year. In comparison our Galaxy the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across.
So these Aliens are really really clever.... SO why do they only pick up Mad American Rednecks? Slightly unhinged people? If such beings exist, why have they not landed at the UN? or the White House? or Red Square? If they can travel such vast distances, they will be able to translate our language. No problem.
I have no doubt that there is intelligent life out there, but whether they can visit us, well I doubt that.

[jambutty]

Originally Posted by Boeing Guy

Okay,
JB the SR71 flys at 90,000 feet well above commercial traffic, it would be too dangerous below 50,000 we are all up there.

Of course the SR71 magically appears at 90,000 feet after take off. Rather it climbs like any other aircraft and in doing so is under the control of air traffic control, either civilian or military, which will make sure that each aeroplane has enough airspace so as not to be a danger to other aircraft.

At 90,000 feet that is all the more reason why its engine noise wouldn’t be heard at ground level.

Sound, as we know, will not travel through a vacuum and struggles through a partial vacuum or a rarefied atmosphere. Unless my math has deserted me, 90,000 feet is about 17 miles. At between about 20,000 feet and 90,000 feet the atmosphere is thinish and gets even thinner the higher that you go.

So the next question is will sound travel some 17 miles in our atmosphere let alone through a good portion of rarefied air? If it was incredibly loud and well above the noise of a jet engine at full throttle it might. The level of sound is inversely proportional to the distance travelled. But the frequencies of the noise is also against long distance travel.

It is well known that the foghorns that once upon a time blared out their mournful sound to alert ships of proximity to land were of a very low frequency. It was proved that low sounds travel further than higher sounds but even these are limited to a handful of miles, if that. I wouldn’t recommend standing next to a shore based foghorn when it blasts out its sound. The ringing in you ears would take on a new meaning.

[jambutty]

Originally Posted by Boeing Guy

IF and it is a bloody big if, there is other life out there and they can reach us by interstellar travel, which is quite hard after all even if you can travel at the speed of light you will only travel 5,878,625,373,183.61 Miles in a year. In comparison our Galaxy the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across.
So these Aliens are really really clever.... SO why do they only pick up Mad American Rednecks? Slightly unhinged people? If such beings exist, why have they not landed at the UN? or the White House? or Red Square? If they can travel such vast distances, they will be able to translate our language. No problem.
I have no doubt that there is intelligent life out there, but whether they can visit us, well I doubt that.

I agree that it is highly unlikely that anyone from outside our galaxy has made the trip to liddle ol’ earth. But then we don’t know where our technology can lead to. And we know even less about any prospective alien technology.

So why indeed should an alien wish to come here? After all our solar system is very low down on a scale of universal significance.

Even if some advanced civilisation had the ability to travel vast distances in very short periods of time (via hyperspace if such a place exists?) what is so special about this planet? Well our green and pleasant earth can support our type of lifeform even if we are doing our best to destroy this attribute. Our planet is alive and self sustaining if given the chance and that must be attractive to a would be explorer.

Oxygen and water are the mainstays of our life and without either we would cease to exist. So any other lifeform that finds us would need to be similar to us to make it worth their while to land here. It is always possible that a lifeform that uses nitrogen or carbon dioxide as we use oxygen would find our planet a place to covet as both those gasses are plentiful in our atmosphere. Then there is gravity and the effects of living in a different gravitational field to the one that they were evolved into.

Any lifeform that has other living requirements would see earth as a hostile environment in the same way that we view Mars, Venus or the moon and would only give us just a cursory glance unless our planet was abundant in any minerals, energy or food sources that they would covet. They may be interested in Earth if they had the technology to make whatever alterations that they need or were able to adapt themselves to our environment. But that has to be some technology to alter a global environment or their own structure. We haven't colonised the oceans of the world because of the life threatening hostile environment underwater and have only rarely visited such areas.

So any visitation has to be from our own Galaxy. It is hard to imagine a being from another Galaxy being able and interested enough to go to another Galaxy. Even if they had the technology to "jump" from one Galactic Empire to another, surely their own Galaxy is more than big enough to keep them occupied for millions of years, unless they started millions of years ago. If the civilisation is that old, just imagine how far advanced they should be and would we interest them? Except for the odd "expert" are we as a species interested in the amoeba?

So with the assumption that it is highly unlikely that beings from another Galaxy would visit us, that only leaves creatures from our part of the Universe.

Our Galaxy is, as you say, 100,00 light years across so for anyone to leap from one end to the other they will need a very advanced technology. If Einstein is to be believed that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light then space travel is very limited indeed because of the vast distances and short life spans involved. They will need the capability to travel throughout our bit of the Cosmos in less than one tenth of their life span. Anything more would be hopelessly impractical unless their longevity is in the order of hundreds of years. Even so imagine using one fifth of your life to go somewhere and come back. If you relate it to humans then a journey of fifteen years away to somewhere and then fifteen years back is something that very few would contemplate. We can barely keep a man in space circling the globe for six months let alone thirty years. And even then we have to re-supply him with food etc. at short and regular intervals.

Just suppose that there is a lifeform out there that has evolved and advanced sufficiently to be able to make such a journey, would they come here as adversaries, explorers or what? I would suggest that any being from out there would come as an explorer or by accident. I find it hard to believe that an alien would come with a view to conquering the planet.

No one would venture on a journey of exploration without having some means of defending themselves and if they have the technology to get here quickly then surely they will have weapons that we can only dream about in our worst nightmares.

So if anyone is capable of visiting us they must do so as explorers or survivors.

Would the alien visitation be just one craft with a handful of crew? Unlikely unless he was sort of lost in space. If his visit were deliberate or exploratory then there would be a number of craft each carrying plenty of voyagers especially if they thought that there was a prospect of coming across other lifeforms. The lone starship exploring the Galaxy is a concept confined to Star Trek etc. and not reality. After all wouldn't he have some sort of back-up system like other craft in case of accidental damage to one of them? Columbus wasn't on his own when he discovered America.

So there we have it, an alien from our own Galaxy arrives to be greeted by us, a hostile and suspicious race only too ready to fear the worst. Wouldn't that alien reconnoitre first to see what we are like before committing himself to a meeting?

Would he just land in Hyde Park and announce to a startled passer by, "Take me to your leader?" Er! No! For a start he would have to have learned how to speak English, as it is very unlikely that his mother tongue was the same as ours.

He would observe our world from a distance and monitor our radio signals to try and find out something about us. He may even decide to come closer for a look see and having discovered that we have reached a particular level of progress in technological terms, would, I suspect, be wary of making contact especially if his was the only craft around with only a handful of crew. Even with a fleet at his command I suspect that before making an attempt to contact with us he would try and find out as much about us as possible, especially our defensive and offensive capabilities.

Any alien worth his salt would quickly establish that our flying machines in the atmosphere are limited for speed by that atmosphere and our miserable attempts to invade our own solar system are a joke, at least by his standards. He may observe our missiles and judge them to be a possible threat. Being clever enough to have got here from millions of miles away he would reason that except for a lucky break we are no match for him and would make a few sorties into our atmosphere for a closer look. He may even attempt to snatch a creature or two for analysis and that includes humans. After all don't we take specimens of lifeforms when we explore new lands and we don't put them back? Not that there are many areas left.

Even so his visits would be intended to be secretive except with the billions of people on this planet it is always possible that someone, somewhere would observe something.

Now comes the vexing question of, has there been a conspiracy of silence with some world governments?

If governments can keep secrets locked away for fifty years or more "in the national interest" then who is to say what they are capable of. Station X at Bletchley Park has been unknown for over fifty years, except to the ten thousand who worked there, until the recent documentary on TV. So if ten thousand can keep a secret, so can a few hundred.

Let us suppose that our alien had the misfortune, like ET, to be left behind after an exploratory mission to earth and he is picked up by the military and he was sufficiently different to us in appearance to make it obvious that his origins are more than just suspect. Would the military announce to the rest of us that "they" have landed? Definitely no! This discovery would have a security clamp around it tighter than around Fort Knox.

For a start it would destroy religion at a stroke and show it up for what it is, a means of controlling the masses. No government would willingly give up a means of controlling its citizens.

The military would try and gain the visitor's technology secrets for themselves so that they would have a real advantage in their world's petty squabbles. I think that the military (for military read government) would kill to keep their secret, even from their own citizens because they would consider it to be that important. Would the military be able to back engineer the technology found on a "star ship"? Would someone like Alexander Graham Bell be able to back engineer a simple digital watch had one been presented to him?

[Boeing Guy]

So thats me told then, god only trying to inject a bit of common sense.

However JB they SR71 only used to fly from US bases inside the US. However your superior knowledge all things means we should not dare to disagree with you.
So I won't

[jambutty]

Originally Posted by Boeing Guy

So thats me told then, god only trying to inject a bit of common sense.

However JB they SR71 only used to fly from US bases inside the US. However your superior knowledge all things means we should not dare to disagree with you.
So I won't

No it hasn’t. I never said you were wrong. I even agreed with some of your post and went on to give my view.

It wasn’t me who brought the SR71 into this thread, (Your post #55 and then #66).

Not much common sense in suggesting that what I heard might have been an SR71, then declaring, “they SR71 only used to fly from US bases inside the US.”

I can’t think of a reason but then I thought what the heck, why not. So have some Karma to help you get off zero.

[Boeing Guy]

Okay so maybe, i was a bit quick off the handle, thanks for the Karma.

[jaysay]

As a matter of interest there's a program on channel 5 tonight at 8pm called Britain's Closest Encounters, about UFO sightings in GB begining with the Welsh Roswell

[panther]

seems interesting!, might watch that meself

[jaysay]

Originally Posted by panther

seems interesting!, might watch that meself

Ya never know panther we might se some one off here

[jambutty]

Is there anyone else who is willing to help Boeing Guy get some Rep Power on the board?

Come on - be generous with your Karma. Its not as if it comes out of your stash.