This guy? Wow, just when you think you’ve seen it all. Dang, now I’ve got to take time out of my busy day, the book reviews I want to write, and a million other things I need to do before 2023 runs out, to offer my opinion on aliens. Yes, I love the movie Aliens. It is my all time favorite movie…Sigorni Weaver, Bill Paxton, et al. “They mostly come at night, mostly”. And on and on. I’m a SciFi fan. A big one. I even use SciFi as the answer to my password question on the United Airlines flight-app. I’ll do that this morning as I fly to alien central, I mean Nevada. It’s ok that you know my password question. The United app is so worthless, I can barely log onto it myself, so good luck hackers! I digress, I really don’t want to waste my time with nonsense, but here we go.
Many places from Roswell New Mexico, Bishop California, to Tonopah and Rachel Nevada, I’ve been there, done that. But not in the sense of a tourist trip, a.k.a. from the movie “PAUL”, but in the sense that they are real world places, they exist, people live there, people work there. I work there. Things happen there…real world things. It's not Disney. It’s not an imaginary place. But extraterrestrial things do not happen there. That’s just plain crazy talk. We call those people (the crazy people) who believe in extraterrestrials, the tinfoil hats. They also frequent those places--or at least the perimeters of those places. For national security reasons, we restrict access to those places. As we do with most government facilities, we are trying to keep secrets from our adversaries. It’s a privilege to be trusted by the country to be granted access to these places. One thing the government does not burden us with, however, is to keep the existence of aliens secret. Because there are no aliens.
Conspiracy theories arise in two ways.
First, when something happens that is so big, it is out of balance with its actual cause, the human mind can’t rationalize the event and bring it back into balance. When out of balance, cause and effect, a conspiracy theory will arise. The assassination of JFK is a prime example. Huge impact on the country at the trigger finger of a lone gunman. That incident is still out of balance with human nature and continues to spawn conspiracy theories.
Second, when something is intentionally kept secret and the ego of an inquisitive person is too large to be contained outside the secret, a conspiracy is created. This is also known by its better name, paranoia. This happens at the local level and is the source of most family drama. Try to keep a secret in your family if another family member knows there's a secret. All hell breaks loose. But it also happens at a grand scale at the national level, when a journalist breaks a story, and doesn’t have all the facts. Good journalists, with their egos of normal size, fact check, and report only facts. Bad reporters simply speculate wildly about things they know nothing about and create fictions. To be clear these are not alternative facts, they are, in fact, fictions. That’s what’s going on now. Grusch has an outsized ego for the limited information for which he has access. We are witnessing the net result. Pure speculation giving rise to conspiracy theories. It’s worse in this case, because, sometimes, when in possession of the facts, the decision can be made to disclose the facts, and all but the most ardent conspiracy theorists will accept those facts. As in the first case, with the JFK assassination, The Warren Report, if you read it, dispels all rumors of any conspiracy in the President’s assassination (I’ve read it cover to cover).
I don’t think anyone else in our Country has. In the case of Grusch, it’s impossible to disclose all the facts because 1) the real facts are unrelated to aliens and are classified--we would damage national security to appease one man’s ego 2) there are no real facts regarding aliens. They don’t exist so there is nothing to disclose. This is the classic search for the black cat in the dark room. And there is no cat in the room. This is not Schrödinger's cat, since the cat is neither alive nor dead. There is no cat.
And now the news has been a flutter with the latest “credible” testimony of David Grusch in a tin-foil hat. He is a wing nut who just left NGA and announced to the world that, “We are not alone”. That leads me to wonder who “We” are. Apparently “We” includes us and the central governments of multiple countries who have been concealing the existence of aliens from the rest of the world--and in our country--from congress. And he’s testifying before congress. That’s him in the picture above in front of congress with a friendly visitor on the right. To be clear, this is stone cold fuck nuts crazy. Yes he is crazy, but so too are our fellow Countrymen in congress who allowed for this ridiculous entertaining theater. This is the start of how it ends folks. We thought we had a Banana Republic under Trump. Now we have “tin foil hats” being taken seriously in Congress.
Since I’ve spent the better part of 40 years running in the same circles as the whistleblower David Grusch…and I’ve actually worked with him…I keep getting the questions from my friends, family, and colleagues. We’ve once again been distracted. There is always a red herring to chase. Similar to far more credible Chinese balloons, and just as likely to do harm, which is none. It's just a distraction. Let's make 2024 the year we are not distracted (not likely giving the run up to the election). As for pure distraction, I like the NY Times article that paints this entire thing as a conspiracy of the government to distract the population. Well, that is also not true, but it’s actually in the space of something that could actually occur. Not probable, but inside the realm of the possible.
So let’s start with Grusch. First, there is no “credible” alien witness. Anyone claiming or showing as such is wearing a tin foil hat. Why? Because it’s not true. Can’t be true. And anyone with basic knowledge of science can immediately come to that conclusion. The fact that Grusch worked in a technology area, should suggest he knows a little science. Clearly he doesn’t know a thing about science. A conspiracy theory can't wish itself into being true. Science…science will reveal the truth. To be absolutely clear in what I am saying, a true scientist would never generate a conspiracy theory to chase the impossible. Which is what I want to walk you through today, the impossible. Five things stand in the way of aliens and all of it is science. Here are the things: 1) evolutionary biology. 2) regular physics 3) space-time physics 4) large number math, and 5) social science. There is a 6th thing as well but it’s not science. We could attack the witness directly with regard to his critical thinking skills. I’ve already called him a wing-nut. That’s sufficient. Psychology Today does a pretty good job at dismantling his critical thinking skills so I’ll just leave it to others to attack Grusch personally. You can read the article here.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-logical-take/202307/a-logical-take-on-the-new-news-about-aliens
This is so simple. You don’t have to be Einstein to see the facts of science and understand the many flaws in the alien argument. Any one of these conditions rule out alien visitors. But there are five of them. For Grusch not to understand a single one of them defies logic--he wouldn’t understand the 6th one inherently--or he’s looking for a book/movie deal with Hollywood. That might have some merit. In fact, in October the New York Times reported that Grusch’s most ardent supporters are, in fact, YouTube content gurus…if that doesn’t say it all. His attorney’s didn’t pick him up at the airport, to whisk him off to his congressional testimony, YouTube content creators picked him up and were his escorts. This is disgusting. You can read about all of that here.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/of-interest/2023/10/05/ufo-david-grusch-uap-congress-yes-theory/
The other options suggest he’s no longer reasoning logically. Which means he should seek a doctor for an immediate MRI of his brain. Something is seriously wrong…if this were new. But since I can tell you he was a wing nut when I knew him eight years ago, it’s seemingly his natural state. But let’s not worry about Grusch’s health. He’s a wingnut…maybe he will cash in and make appearances on TV. He might crash and burn. Fuck around and find out. He might find out.
In order to believe in science, however, you have to believe in science. Meaning you have to suspend all your preconceived notions about science and understand that it is possible for some things to be known. You have to believe, for instance, that science can create gold. Apart from the failed efforts of the alchemist, and the search to create gold, gold can indeed be synthesized in the nuclear lab (done in 1941). You start with Platinum (or Mercury), and add a proton (or remove a proton), and you have gold. Good luck doing that in your garage, however. The point is that you can do it. Science can do that…it’s not magic. Magic, on the other hand, is magic. Arthur Clake told us, “any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. This is a true statement. But the facts remain, it’s not magic. Aliens would be magic.
So now we have a “credible” witness, with no evidence, raising some sort of alarm bell based upon what he heard, formulated in his head. And people actually believe him. People, please do your own thinking on this subject. And base your thinking on facts, not the feeling that you want it to be true. Before I dive in, let’s talk about where Grusch has worked. Isn't that what makes him credible? He worked for the NRO and for NGA. Those organizations have nothing to do with aliens. The search for, the discovery of, the communication with, the concealment of. Don't confuse these agencies with MIB. Just because they are US intelligence organizations doesn’t mean crap. Discover something at the CIA and then, perhaps, he would have some credibility. But this guy would never work for the CIA. They actually review the people they hire fairly well. Point I’m making is that the CIA briefs the president. If there were an alien liaison office, it would be at the CIA, not at NGA or NRO. That’s just how organizationally it would be aligned.
The world population, generally speaking, should trust science on the whole. And as much as I don’t like Elon Musk these days, he did have a few relevant things to say recently on this subject. He’s the guy trying to go to Mars. He knows the physics of space travel. It’s not just hard, it’s near impossible. But Musk has already addressed the subject, No aliens. It should stop right there for Musk and his followers. There are no aliens on planet earth. So let’s dive in and walk through the five things I mentioned.
1) Evolutionary Biology
Are we alone? The answer to that question is simple. We are not alone. Look around you. Are we alone on planet Earth? No! The Earth is brimming with life. Life has expanded to every crack and crevice from deep ocean trenches to high mountains to deep in the ice of Antarctica. Since every species on earth evolved from a jellyfish It's not hard to envision something like a jellyfish swimming. We only need water. Hydrogen and oxygen are abundant in the universe and on the surface of ice on a moon orbiting Jupiter for instance. Multiply that by the number of planets in the solar system and then by the number of solar systems in the galaxy by the number of galaxies in the universe and the chances that we are not alone is a very small number indeed. We are not alone. We will find life soon. But that doesn’t mean intelligent aliens visiting from another planet.
But this is about evolutionary biology. Should aliens actually look like lizards, I think they are called Sleestak’s in Land of the Lost, and they wear Tunics. They would have evolved on a water world. In a water world, it’s doubtful you are leaving the planet. It is too hard to make gunpowder underwater. Which means, you would have crawled out of the soup, lived on dry earth for several million years, probably would have evolved hair and eyelids to shield the sun. Definitely fingers and thumbs. Or, as is the case of aliens that do live underwater (The Abyss), they evolved to control water with their or some type of energy.
It took millions and millions of years for us to evolve in a way we did to breathe air and not have the air kill us…or gravity kill us…or anything else like the sun, which could easily kill us. You can’t just wish an “M” class planet into existence. If an alien shows up and can fly in our atmosphere…and breathe our air…that would be an astounding bit of luck.
Biology takes time. A lot of time. And biology evolves to what is here, the environment. Take any biology out of its environment and it doesn’t last long. Eco systems are very fragile. Evolution is not. But the single ecosystem is fragile. Destroy one and another one will take its place, that’s what evolution does. So let’s hope, aliens don’t arrive anytime soon.
A good book to read here would be Jared Diamond’s classic “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. The best take away from this book would be the true alien invaders would be the Conquistadors who showed up in the new world with guns, and decimated the indigenous population with germs. There were perhaps 20 million indigenous people living in the new world, when the aliens arrived. One need only look at a map of Indian tribes in North America to realize, Diamond is far more right than wrong.
2) Regular Physics
First let's start with flying saucers. Why am I so confident there are no aliens whipping around our planet in HG Wells flying saucers? And I just watched Cowboys and Aliens!! Great flick, Oliva Wilde is beautiful…just saying. But I digress yet again. Because of the laws of physics. Regardless of what the world thinks they are seeing in those Navy videos that can’t be explained, things that defy physics are not physically possible. It might be true that any significant advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic but that only applies to a pig looking at a wrist watch. It’s not true that it is indistinguishable from physics, so anyone with half a brain can see the facts of the real world. We are all not pigs, some of us are, in fact, scientists. The world population doesn’t have to become like Albert Einstein to study a few principles and know what can and cannot happen. Or the alien craft said to exist by Grusch that our government and other governments are in pursuit of in order to reverse engineer and weaponize in order to gain advantage on our adversaries
The ability to fly was invented just over 100 years ago the desire to fly has been around ever since humans observed organic things taking flight and documented it which is on a scale of thousands of years Whereas evolution has had a millions of years to produce the natural things in our environment that use the air. That includes insects, birds, and even plant life such as spores and those really annoying seeds from maple trees that fill the gutters. Whereas a large portion of science has moved in the direction of mimicking natural animals and their evolutionary successes most of our flight has happened by brute Force…originally we started with light things then went to fabrics then moved towards aluminum and titanium and now we are headed in the direction of composites me.. there's not too many other choices in the periodic table of elements from which to choose our materials. It's important to note that everyone in the universe including the aliens on the planets have the same periodic table of elements...they also do not have many choices…there are about 100 useful elements...just because you're an alien scientist doesn't mean you can invent a new element…transparent aluminum from Star Trek, or Adamantium (X-Men), or the stuff called Vibranium from Wakanda or what we call in the business Un-obtainium. Many good ideas die on the drawing board because of the availability of the element of obtaining. Alien engineers have the same problem. It's not that we haven't tried to create new elements we certainly have but the ones we've been able to create are at the tail end of the periodic table and tend to only live for seconds or less before they deteriorate back into something stable. It's hypothesized that there are up to 170 elements...most of those additional 70 will not be useful. Other elements simply are not possible. The wagon is full. Study up on the periodic table…gaps for these extraordinary new things simply don’t exist. Of all the things we do, the material science is pretty well understood. There is no “transparent aluminum”. If you don’t know this reference it’s to the material used in Star Trek 6 to transport whales to earth from another planet. They created huge light weight tanks to carry the beasts. I think it was more important for Hollywood to have clear tanks so we could see the creatures rather than realize that tanks of water (at 7 lbs a gallon) will quickly outweigh any material used to contain the water. But that’s what we love about science fiction and the imagination of Hollywood writers.
And as hard as we try we can't do much better than tungsten for density titanium for strength. But that’s not really the direction we are heading in. We are not heading in the direction of anything metallic. We are heading in the direction of composites and nano structures. Any of the alien machines are going not going to be made of some strange metallurgy…they will be made of the same things we make them out of…something composite in the air, something strong and with tiles, if it’s coming into air (heat of friction), and something very large with a lot of shielding if it’s coming extra terrestrially. The best shot at an extra terrestrial spaceship would have been something like that asteroid shaped like a cigar that passed by a few years ago. Repurposing an asteroid, and living on it…inside…propelled by a nuclear something, is probably our best shot, in the next few hundred thousand years, at least. Or seeing something from our galaxy. Forget about seeing something from another galaxy. Unless they are bending space time…and we know what’s required for this…a sun sized space ship with that much power, conceivably, has a shot.
Propulsion
Birds flap their wings - it took millions of years to evolve on this planet. A bird will not be able to fly on Mars. We know it’s not going to be an internal combustion engine…those breathe air. Those evolved to live in our atmosphere just like we did, and run on carbon. Coincidence?
So to leave the planet, we need a rocket. Not internal combustion, but something that requires carbon. Our rockets tend to be a mixture of ignited hydrogen and oxygen. With the most powerful engine we’ve built, it would take a long time to reach the speed of light. Accelerating at 1 g, which would not be comfortable for humans, we would have to accelerate for a full year to reach the speed of light. Rocket engines burn for minutes, not months and months. So propulsion will have to be something else. We slingshot around the solar system…that takes a lot of extra time…but we can move really fast doing that… The fastest thing we have and the thing fathers from the earth, Voyager 1, has only recently left the solar system. It's taken…42 years to travel that far…and is only traveling at about 10% the speed of light. So humans or aliens are not getting out of the solar system that way. What’s next?
A nuclear reactor that generates electricity that can activate an ion propulsion system. The nuclear reactor, particularly if its fission/fusion will last a long long time. But even ion propulsion requires some sort of propellant.
The Sun itself can propel things using solar sails…but we are never going to transit long dark portions of the galaxy where there is little energy from a star, let alone, between galaxies. But it doesn’t matter…the distances between stars is great enough to make this an impossibility in any useful time scale for us humans.
Traveling the galaxy on a planet or in a star is the way to do it. Even an asteroid would be too small. When a planet from outside our solar system enters our solar system, we are being visited.
3) Space/Time Physics
The radio astronomers in Bishop California, the facility that belongs to Caltech, I think Jody Foster and Carl Sagan's book Contact will be the first to tell you that they're not searching for alien life. They're working towards making better and better maps of the universe with a secondary mission to contribute to studying gravity waves and the bending of space time. Not only will they be able to see deep into the universe and create images they will be able to exclusively time the arrival of energy from these distant objects with such. Precision there will be able to correlate it back to other observatories that search for the feeling of gravitational waves as they make their way across the universe. Forty years ago it was SETI. Now, it’s to firmly establish the physics of space time. Corroborate Einstein, or debunk him. Feels like he will be corroborated.
Plus…we are a very advanced civilization…however, most advanced civilizations, like us, will have depleted the resources on their planet in a few thousand years. If they progress, according to the laws of physics, if they are lucky, they will have an earth sized planet circling next to them…another Earth like heaven that was slow to develop a civilization that would eat their planet… something just like earth, close by, with nothing more than a few dinosaurs, something easily dealt with, or not that easy, like an Avatar civilization that can fight back.. A planet we could pillage for another few thousand years while we get our act together… With a third planet, that the aliens could rape, for another period of a few thousands years, before beginning to leap frog through their local galaxy…until they could harness an asteroid, and then, perhaps a planet, and then a very small sun, and then a larger sun, and then maybe a tiny black hole…it will take space/time physics to be harnessed if there ever will be visitors…It took us 14 Billion years to get to the point where we even understand and can consider the possibilities. It will not happen any faster anywhere else.
4) Math.
The universe is so big it defies human understanding. 14 billion light years across, and we may be off by 2x based on some recent work. It’s helpful to write all those zeros out. Here goes, 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. That’s a 40 with 19 zeros after it.
I can’t imagine numbers that large. One look at the deep space field from the Hubble telescope should give you that impression as well. And then multiply by a thousand when you see the same deep field images from the new James Webb telescope. In a few years, hopefully, images will be processed by the DSA 2000. DSA 2000 will be the largest radio telescope ever constructed. So big, with so much data, that it will actually make images from radio waves. It’s not magic. They just use a lot of processing, a lot of data, a lot of math, and ten minutes of a supercomputer's time for each image.
Not unlike how images of the first black hole were constructed -- a lot of images and a lot of processing time. It's important to note that the scientists from CalTech building the DSA 2000 in Bishop California, will not be searching for ET, unlike the scientists who built the radio telescope in Arecibo who were looking for extraterrestrial life, most scientists have given up on this pursuit. They haven’t given up on life, or the possibility of first contact in the local galaxy, they certainly have given up on the possibility of a visit. The universe is too big. China built a bigger one. They will not have any luck. The scientists at Bishop, however, will be imaging the universe as well as assisting the science into gravitational waves. Other sensors will be feeling around for events that cause warping in space time, and when they literally feel that happen, the DSA 2000 will be able to measure the timing sensing the stretching of space time by timing the reception of radio emissions. This are very physical things and physical things can be described by physical laws that we can measure and captivity using that math
Since there are billions of galaxies, there is a change. Webb had 13 billion years.
So the real inconsistency is that the only way to do it was considered by Carl Sagen already. Something like a machine that pushes us through space time…it’s not a spaceship at all. It’s some sort of portal where we can communicate…with another species. So no aliens… could we be talking with aliens…and thus could they have found a way to send us instructions to communicate with them… That is more probable than spaceships… It wouldn’t look like a flying saucer…
5) Social Science
There are no secrets. It’s hard enough for anyone to keep a secret, let alone there be a collusion amongst governments to keep the secret of worldwide research into the existence of aliens by multiple governments, across decades, in the can. This is either the greatest secret ever kept, or the solution is somewhat simpler. There is no secret. I personally prefer the simpler solution. Since the movie “Men in Black” depict MIB as a secret organization with flashy things that make people who leave MIB forget, or lose their memory of all things alien, I guess we should believe those exist, because that’s literally what it would take. Through the decades, thousands of people, ultimately, must be in the know. But, we still don't have a shed of proof. The reason is so simple. There is no evidence because there are no aliens. And why is it a secret, to begin with? Because if the population actually knew of their existence, we would lose our collective shit? It’s interesting that MIB treats both of those symptoms. They have a magic flashy device that erases memories, thereby helping keep the secret. And…the world is always about to end, at the hands of these aliens, thus it must remain a secret, otherwise the population would lose its collective shit. So not only must MIB exist, they also must be highly effective because they have, in fact, kept the world safe. We have not been destroyed.
So, friends and family, no aliens. Sorry. The rest of you. Think what you want, but, and I’m glad to quote Elon Musk on this one, “no aliens”.
No comments:
Post a Comment