Astronaut Chris Hadfield Calls Alien UFO Hype 'Foolishness' (cnet.com) 156
The Canadian astronaut, who commanded the International Space Station and recorded the famous microgravity rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity, on Sunday spit some fire at true believers who see a link between UFOs or UAPs (for "unidentified aerial phenomena" in the newish military parlance) and some sort of alien intelligence. From a report: "Obviously, I've seen countless things in the sky that I don't understand," Chris Hadfield, a former pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force, said during a CBC Radio call-in show.
"But to see something in the sky that you don't understand and then to immediately conclude that it's intelligent life from another solar system is the height of foolishness and lack of logic." [...] Hadfield added that he does think it's likely there's life somewhere else in the universe. "But definitively up to this point, we have found no evidence of life anywhere except Earth," he said, "and we're looking."
"But to see something in the sky that you don't understand and then to immediately conclude that it's intelligent life from another solar system is the height of foolishness and lack of logic." [...] Hadfield added that he does think it's likely there's life somewhere else in the universe. "But definitively up to this point, we have found no evidence of life anywhere except Earth," he said, "and we're looking."
So what you are saying then is... (Score:5, Funny)
to see something in the sky that you don't understand and then to immediately conclude that it's intelligent life from another solar system is the height of foolishness and lack of logic
So what you are saying is... there's a chance.
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I didn't immediately conclude it. I let the excitement of the possibility of aliens die down a bit before jumping to that conclusion. It took a while, it wasn't immediate.
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At this point, can humans honestly say they have mastered understanding of the universe and physics?
How can we even rule out there are no advanced space faring civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy? Looking for something as primitive as EM emissions, when we're already researching quantum entanglement [scientificamerican.com]?
I don't believe there is proof of alien vistors yet, but I find it unlikely that out of all of the anecdotal stories, every single one was lying about their experience.
As someone with an interest in science an
Time and distance ... (Score:5, Interesting)
How can we even rule out there are no advanced space faring civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy?
Its not been ruled out. Its merely pointed out that there is no evidence of a visit, and the distances involved and laws of physics make such visits extremely unlikely.
I don't believe there is proof of alien vistors yet, but I find it unlikely that out of all of the anecdotal stories, every single one was lying about their experience.
Well there are also honest mistakes and the delusional.
As someone with an interest in science and biology, I find our planet to be very very interesting. I would imagine that alien explorers would at least slow down to take a look.
The argument is not that they are passing by and are disinterested, its that distance and time suggest they are extremely unlikely to ever be in the neighborhood.
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The argument is not that they are passing by and are disinterested, its that distance and time suggest they are extremely unlikely to ever be in the neighborhood.
By our standards, yes. For a civilization that invented electronics ten thousand years ago, and has had time to understand physics to a much finer detail, perhaps not.
Prohibitive amounts of energy (Score:2)
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Source: L. Ron Hubbard
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The time constraint has always seemed to me rather provincial and human-centric. From what I've read it seems likely that another doubling of our lifespan is possible over the next 50 years even if we don't play with our genes (and who seriously thinks that won't happen?) If an organism had a 10,000 year lifespan travel to Alpha Centauri and back becomes possible even with the physics we currently understand. For an undying organism (or construct) travel might be all there is to do after the first few mi
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Well there's no intelligent life around Alpha Centauri, so we'll have to look quite a bit further. Too much further though, the distances involved would mean for the aliens to arrive now, they must've set out long before humans developed civilization. In other words, they would have come expecting to talk to saber tooth cats, dinosaurs, ferns or cyanobacteria. Most likely that last one, since only those have been around for billions of years.
That leads us to a new problem. If life is common, then cyanobacte
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Well there's no intelligent life around Alpha Centauri
How do you know that?
Or should I ask: how could you possibly know that?
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Sending a probe wouldn't provide any more information on whether there is intelligent life. If they were ahead of us technologically, we would have detected their orders-of-magnitude greater energy usage and waste heat production. If they were behind us, then they're not intelligent. Since habitability for each planet is reached hundreds of millions or billions of years apart, the chances of them being anywhere near us in development is near zero.
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A question is the energy requirements, trip to Alpha Centauri or further (interesting places are likely to be 10's-100's of light years away), means getting a large mass, perhaps an asteroid up to a decent speed and then keeping life support happening for 1000's of years is going to take a lot of energy. I don't know enough to do the numbers but have seen others make claims that make it look unlikely even with fusion. Anti-matter might work but it is a bitch to harvest the energy (gamma rays) even if you ha
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keeping life support happening for 1000's of years
I'm frequently puzzled by how often the objection i put forward that life support or engines or some other part of the spacecraft will have to function for hundreds or thousands of years. Do people really think that the people living in the craft will be utterly unable to maintain (an probably improve) their home?
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Well, consider the state of the art currently, fission. Fuel degrades over time and has to be reprocessed. At the end of the trip when deceleration is needed, those fissionable materials need to be be ready to work after perhaps a thousand years of half lives degrading the fuel and you only have whatever you left with.
Fusion looks better, but still, you leave with X amount of fusion-able material and that is it. Sure you can improve your home, but without outside sources of materials, you are limited.
As I s
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Space is not empty, there is a lot of stuff floating around, from dust to entire planets. It's very diffuse, but there is a lot of space to pass through. Fusion would probably be necessary, as radioactives are not common enough. They will continue to communicate with Earth, and will have a complete suite of tools to maintain the ship, and technology doesn't stay static. I'd be very surprised if they didn't arrive at their destination with a much better craft than they left with.
Conflating engineering prob with science prob (Score:2)
The distance argument is only persuasive from the perspective of a primitive civilization like our own with no understanding of technological progress. Because from the perspective of a technological civilization that's been around for thousands of years, crossing interstellar distances may be as trivial to them as crossing the oceans is to us. Moreover it should be understood that one must not take their own limitations to be similar to the limitations of others. That's a logical fallacy.
Crossing oceans as an analogy for crossing interstellar distances is a rather poor analogy. You are conflating an engineering problem with a scientific problem. The basic laws of science did not need to be overcome to sail ships. We simply needed to improve our engineering. Matter of fact science was on our side, buoyancy.
Also you fail to consider the knowledge of the respective time frames. In those early sailing days "science" was more group consensus around what seemed reasonable, less so something we
Re:So what you are saying then is... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure there's a lot of fundamental stuff we don't know about, but I *also* think when we learn that new stuff it won't invalidate most of what we know in the contexts we have studied those things -- just like classical mechanics is still perfectly useful.
And along exactly those lines one detail in the reports coming from the Navy leaps out at me: the UAP is reported to move at high hypersonic speeds -- by "high" I mean above Mach 70. The "thing" (assuming it is a thing) may have been exotic matter and have exotic propulsion, but the air it's moving through is still plain old air, and there ought to have been an observable trail of superheated, ionized gas.
This leads to me to think that the way the scenarios were strung together doesn't fit any explanation of a single "thing" tying togther all the observations made. If you told me someone set of a nuclear bomb over the Eiffel Tower, and I look out the window and see the Tower still standing, I'm pretty sure that didn't happen because it should have left observable consequences. It doesn't mean you didn't see something, but whatever it was, wasn't a bomb.
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And along exactly those lines one detail in the reports coming from the Navy leaps out at me: the UAP is reported to move at high hypersonic speeds -- by "high" I mean above Mach 70. The "thing" (assuming it is a thing) may have been exotic matter and have exotic propulsion, but the air it's moving through is still plain old air, and there ought to have been an observable trail of superheated, ionized gas.
It should be creating a sonic boom every time it stops and moves at those too, which it doesn't. It would seem that pushing gas against the hull at those speeds would be a very inefficient use of energy. Those capable of creating craft equipped with FTL drives may be advanced enough to solve this problem in a way that seems like magic to us.
I'm not sure your analogy is fitting, because it is too reductive. We may assume to expect certain results based on prior experience and knowledge, but there can only be
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Magic fools the eye. Physics, too.
People want any slim chance of alien tracks because they're wholly enraptured with the idea. Forget that we've put up nearly 100K satellites, any of which can bounce sunlight and do interesting refractive/reflective dances on our fairly limited visual spectra.
But, they'll say, it could be true!! I want it to be true. Aw, can't it be true??? Pretty please?
This is why Las Vegas is so successful.
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Wanting something to be true doesn't change the fact that there are aerial phenomena that can't be explained away as light from Venus reflecting off swamp gas.
Without sufficient evidence, the claim that the phenomena are alien in origin can't be proved. Likewise it is unreasonable to rule out a specific explanation, without sufficient evidence, simply because we expect it to be unlikely. The possibility remains.
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Objectivity is important. People have wanted to believe in UFOs for a very long time. Wanting them doesn't make them real.
Even a micro-chance that there might be a teensie-weensie chance that they might be real, drives them to endless speculation. And speculation is fine.
Many armed forces have been more than willing to perplex the armed forces of another country, both for smugness, laughter, and to keep them distracted. These and other endless possibilities exist until they don't.
Humans are wired for cults.
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People believe in all kinds of weird shit. Like there being a creator of the universe that will torture people them forever if they don't behave a certain way. So what? I don't see how that or the people wanting to believe in UFOs as alien visitors is relevant to the actual data.
Of course Occam's Razor is a useful strategy to evaluating a situation, because most of the time the likeliest explanation is the correct one. However,
being objective means recognizing the limitations of your own understanding that
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There are a few adventurous souls that might want to go. We spend billions and more on space flight and satellites in the quest to dominate our small turf of the universe. Some of it's to feed the fantasy of "what's out there?".
Mostly, what's out there are land/sky/turf-grabs for future trillionaires. Genuinely usable scientific advance is only a small part of the yield.
Humans like to personify that aliens are like us. It's my own speculation that this ideal isn't likely to be true. No one wants to think ab
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Humans like to personify that aliens are like us. It's my own speculation that this ideal isn't likely to be true. No one wants to think about that. I don't blame them.
Which is why I agree with Hawking that we shouldn't be beaming signals into deep space. We have no idea what's out there, and the universe couldn't care less if our species was consumed.
But we can make assumptions based on our own intelligence, that advanced aliens would understand patterns representing prime numbers. That they would have their own form of mathematics. That curiosity would also be a shared trait, because how else does science progress or discoveries are made? Then there's basic traits of ho
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I have no problem admitting the possible existence of unknown facts. I just have difficulty with the dismissal of known facts. Even *negative* facts -- the proverbial dog that didn't bark -- still have to be accounted for.
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I have no problem admitting the possible existence of unknown facts. I just have difficulty with the dismissal of known facts. Even *negative* facts -- the proverbial dog that didn't bark -- still have to be accounted for.
I agree.
Just as I have difficulty with the conceited idea that we actually know what is out there, with such a degree of confidence that the possibility of phenomena explained as objects alien in origin is something to be summarily dismissed as absurd.
Evidence, even a collection of inconclusive evidence, is still evidence until the possibility can be ruled out.
Re: So what you are saying then is... (Score:2)
Re: So what you are saying then is... (Score:2)
You know its better than replacing God with ourselves, and saying we can KNOW anything so we know this thing must ram into air particles like we do. The thing could be shoving blocks of space time behind itself without perturbing particles in those blocks for all we know.
And frankly? You do not even need aliens. How long back would you have to go to find a human answer so limited by brain size they cant go to college? High school? Do arithmetic? Speak?
All it takes is some Nazi weirdos in an underground base
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That's not a fair assessment. I'm arguing that the possibility of alien visitors not be automatically dismissed in approaching the problem of unexplained phenomena, because our body of knowledge is lacking. Whereas creationalists believe complete nonsense on the basis of faith.
People assume there's nothing out there, based on the limits of our own current technology. If anything, that is like believing creationalism, because it is fixed belief based on an assumption. The fact remains that we're not even awa
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What if it's not an object in our reality of 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time. What if instead it's a higher dimensional object interacting with our reality, that is how it can disappear in one spot and suddenly appear 60 miles away without any sonic booms. A higher dimensional object like a tesseract interacting with our reality we'd only see certain sides or shapes of a section or whatnot and the tesseract could rotate causing one side to blink out of our reality only to appear instantly miles away or
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The flying triangles were pretty obviously reflections from inside the scope itself. They move absolutely in sync, they blink in time with someone's running lights, they move WITH the wobbles of the scope itself, and they're visibly two-dimensional. (And I would bet are easy to reproduce, once you know what's going on.) Further, I have a camera that does the same damn thing (except its "UFOs" are round, because they're due to dried condensation on the back of the lens) as do some of our state highway cams w
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So at least one of those pieces of Jesus toast must be real, right?
Interesting hypothesis.
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Do you think it is fair to compare jesus toast, to the witness testimony of train air force pilots?
One of these is more credible than the others.
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You mean because an air force pilot is somehow bequeathed with omniscience so that every unidentified thing is immediately known to be alien in nature? It's almost as if you have no idea what the letters UFO stand for.
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So what you are saying is... there's a chance.
Yep. We have to keep an open mind, any one of these might be The One.
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Not exactly. The story with the lab is like you find a kid with chocolate smeared all over his face, and you ask him "how did that happen?!" and he says "it just suddenly appeared", and then you remember, oh, right, there's a chocolate factory right down the street.
Re:So what you are saying then is... (Score:5, Informative)
Do you know why that particular lab was situated in Wuhan? It's because the WHO and Chinese researchers found that there were several bat coronaviruses in that area which were likely to mutate to the point where they would be human-contagious. So your kid might still be innocent if the chocolate factory were known for spraying effluent out the front gate and across the sidewalk. "It just suddenly appeared" might well have been what he expected, but his mouth wasn't in quite the right place to catch it.
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Source?
By the way, the coronaviruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 are naturally found in Yunnan province [wikipedia.org], nowhere near Wuhan (about 1500km to the southwest). So it almost certainly didn't originate from local bat coronaviruses, if there are any.
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Even if the lab didn't exist, it would only have been a matter of time before the virus found its way to humans. It has demonstrated its ability to cross the species barrier and cause outbreaks in meat farms. It would have went from bat to pig to humans, or bat to chicken to humans, or just bat to humans directly, since the lab wasn't the only one collecting bats. Once evolved, nothing could've stopped it from becoming a global pandemic.
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Yes, there's a CHANCE.
One of two propositions is true. Either...
1. God created life on Earth or
2. Life occurred here based on the quasi-random influences of radiation and chemicals.
If #1 is true, then there's a chance that God created life elsewhere. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1... [gutenberg.org]
If #2 is true, then there's a chance that similar conditions may have occurred elsewhere. With trillions of planets in this galaxy and trillions of other galaxies, it's almost certain that life DID or WILL occur on some other
Nice try (Score:5, Funny)
That's exactly what an alien masquerading as a human would say. Prepare to die, fellow earthlings.
Translation: UFO != Aliens (Score:3)
Extraterrestrials: Beings from another planet. What people think UFOs are.
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Well except beings that come from another planet may not always fly here.
Definition of a UFO (Score:2)
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Or just have freaky sex with a bunch of complete strangers and not have to worry about pregnancy or STDs.
Stupid strawman (Score:2)
If anyone actually listened to what Jeremy Corbell, the one who has been bringing these videos to the surface has been saying, he's never once claimed that it was aliens. That's not even the claim the government is making. You have something unidentified and unexplainable according to multiple systems documented by authoritative sources.
It's pretty funny to watch all these skeptics try to paint him and others into the corner and then discredit them entirely based on that false suggestion.
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"But the videos are of objects moving in such a manner that no aircraft built on earth could possibly accomplish." - Only if your guess of the size and distance is correct, if the objects in reality are closer and smaller than you guess then they are not doing anything special.
Right you are - and this is the problem with every one of these claims of "impossible to explain behavior" is that I have not seen these claims made by anyone that seems qualified to make them, nor is the analysis supporting these claims available for review. Sensor malfunctions, misjudging range, misinterpreting parallax effects, etc. are all quite plausible ways of explaining every video that has surfaced as far as I can tell.
We don't need a whole bunch of these - just one video that can be reliably analy
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And if they're objects.
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The objects we are talking about were on radar, so we exactly know how fast they were and how far away.
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They all had radar data, it is just not in the video.
As the videos are not really "special crafted" and cut together scenes from different sources.
The idea that the navy can not measure the speed of a wether balloon with ship based radar: is completely ridiculous.
The idea that a weather balloon flys so slow/fast that an Mach 1.2 fighter plane can not intercept it, makes no reals sense.
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You're assuming the videos show objects moving and accelerating fast. That assumption may not be true; they might be computer glitches (this is a computer display, not a photograph out the window), they might be multiple slow objects simulating a single large object, they might be lots of things with much more mundane explanations than "aircraft built somewhere else in the universe."
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try to paint him and others into the corner and then discredit them entirely based on that false suggestion
That's called a 'Strawman Fallacy', seen most often in political and religious debates. I suppose most UFO discussions can come under both those categories.
https://medium.com/purple-theo... [medium.com]
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Oops. I generally ignore the titles of posts. Duh.
Hadfield is a good guy (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked with Chris Hadfield when he was a Canadian exchange test pilot at the Pax River Naval Air Test Center in the early 1990s. A wonderful, witty, and fun guy to be around (Iâ(TM)ve played volleyball and picnicked at his house), and Iâ(TM)ve had fun watching him over the years through his space career and since.
Obviously nobody has all the info, but I do appreciate his (if you'll pardon the pun) down-to-earth perspective on UFOs.
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Hadfield seems to be a nice guy and did that viral music video on the ISS of Bowie's Space Oddity, but still, I wouldn't expect the Canadian government to provide him with that kind of knowledge. That doesn't make him an authoritative expert in any sense of the imagination on UAP/UFOs just because people assume they're from space.
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If Trump didn't leak the UFO secrets, there aren't any.
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"Why would aliens even want to visit Earth?"
No one talks about, nor wants to confront, the one most terrifying reason aliens would be interested in Earth. Religion.
How many times through history have missionaries gone to strange lands to convert the "heathens" to the word of God. Mostly ending in disastrous results.
This is the main issues political/religious leaders don't want to face. Especially when a religious text states we were made in "God's image". What if this alien religion has the same concept. Do
He's just upset... (Score:5, Funny)
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...that aliens don't have any interest in Canada.
Yeah, we're okay with that, eh? We'll keep the beer and hockey and maple syrup and you can have the secret midnight anal probes.
P.S. Sorry.
P.P.S. If you want some beer, hockey, or syrup after the anal probing, we'll still share, eh?
Re: He's just upset... (Score:2)
It IS stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
And it's symptomatic of our
- abandonment of education - and I'm NOT *just* talking about mouth-breathing anti-vaxxers and creationists, I'm talking about the woke-mafia pushing "everything is about racism, victimization, and greivance culture" and "1+1=2 is white patriarchy" (I'm not kidding, that last one is a thing)
- infantilization of our culture; everything is about self-gratification and self-benefit, you know - the same priorities babies have. We bubble wrap our children and insist that they be protected from hurt feelings for 30 years and wonder then why they are incapable of dealing with life?
- puerlization of the media: in service to varied mixes of politicization and corporate commercialism, the idea that news is simply "reporting what happens" has long since become naive ideal. It's not even an ideal - journalism students today are taught to be little more than glorified Vice writers, filling every piece with begged questions, vacuous assertions, and faint understanding of what they're even talking about with a mortar of grievance and emotion. All written in a context of complete obliviousness to historical context and devoid of the ironic recognition of the strawmen they cheerfully insert.
OF COURSE even our government now pursues with serious intent ideas that would have only populated the silliest issues of the National Enquirer 30 years ago.
Trump was the fucking SYMPTOM, not the cause you idiots. Raging at him for four years I'm sure felt very, very valid. You spoke truth to power, right on. But in the meanwhile, the melanoma has probably metastasized to fatal.
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Wow! That also describes the behavior of a few members of the current crop of Slashdot editors.
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Mod parent up. This should be rated as insightful, not troll. The poster is exactly correct.
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"1+1=2 is white patriarchy" is a great soundbite. The only hit I got on DDG was someone talking about how CRM is a bad idea. Is that where you saw it?
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Sure: is "Math professor claims equation 2+2=4 'reeks of white supremacist patriarchy'" close enough?
https://www.washingtonexaminer... [washingtonexaminer.com]
Hliariously, 3 years previously the Babylon Bee called it: https://babylonbee.com/news/2-... [babylonbee.com]
https://www.washingtonexaminer... [washingtonexaminer.com]
(go to the WE story for the embedded links to the actual PDFs from the Oregon board of education, if they haven't been post-coverage removed.)
"A newsletter sent by the government body last week included the mention of a course titled "A Pathway to Equit
yeah, its all bullshit (Score:2)
UFO (Score:2)
My favorite UFO so far is:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]
As far as an actual UFO, I'm sure there's plenty of balloons, swamp gas, ball lightning and other crazy stuff people do that aren't readily apparent at first.
As far as extra-terrestrial UFOs, I kinda hope (if they're friendly) but I'm waiting for one to land at the White House before I believe.
Grainy footage (Score:5, Interesting)
How come all footage of aliens is grainy regardless of whether it is from the year 1951 or 2021. I suspect we will soon have better imagery though seeing as how we have 3D graphics software that can easily create alien looking creatures. It surprises me that we STILL donâ(TM)t have credible alien footage if they are out there careless enough to be seen in 50 years ago. We have a thousand times more airplanes in the air and ships in the sea yet UFO footage remains grainy and rare. Also, if aliens do exist they clearly want to be well hidden. Is it wise to expose them? They might get angry and annihilate us and sterilize the planet before we have the chance to do it to ourselves.
Re:Grainy footage (Score:4, Funny)
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When you see high-quality video of a rocket or airplane several miles away, or wildlife on a David Attenborough documentary, it is with a lens that probably costs more than your car.
So, why aren't cell phone videos that clear? The technology exists, right?
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Even aliens can't make the "enhance" algorithm work?
Easy explanation and simplest too (Score:2)
Yeah Canada! (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok Chris,
How do you explain THIS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(Link to Canada's most famous UFO sighting, witnessed by a LOT of people simultaneously (including government officials), from different angles, distances, terrains etc).
Yo Grark
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Three or four lights in line seen falling into water from a distance, and nothing is recovered later? OMG - that must be aliens!
Here is good account of what was actually reported at the time [skeptoid.com] (not made up later, a pervasive problem with the UFOlogists). Key excerpt:
The best way to find out what really happened is to go to the primary sources: the newspaper reports written immediately after the event, getting the exact words from the witnesses first hand. The Halifax Chronicle-Herald did just this, in a series of articles. A pair of teens reported three reddish-orange lights descending, each appearing in order, forming a line declining at about 45 degrees, but then their car drove out of view. Four other teens saw the same thing, but got the number at four instead of three, and called them yellow or white, and watched them descend gracefully all the way down to the water. One of these said he remembered them turn off and back on, but the others did not. One person said he heard them make a whistling noise, the others did not; another person said she heard a loud noise when they hit the water, but nobody else reported this either. So, all we can say from taking the witness accounts as a whole is that a small number of bright lights were seen to descend toward the water, where one remained floating for a short time. That's probably the best rough description we can come up with for what was actually seen.
So maybe a meteor that broke up or a boat flare? No, I am not saying is aliens but its GOTTA BE ALIENS! /s
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Small hot air balloons? Drones? or, as you say, flares on parachutes
I'm just wondering why (Score:2)
stubborn closed-mindedness (Score:2)
Bears in the woods also have trouble believing any foreign/"alien" life-form would be interested in them. But there have been PLENTY of studies where they were sedated, dragged out of their dens, had tissue/blood samples taken, "probed", and implanted with trackers.
And that's on the same damn planet.
Bears in deep woods, isolated from cites/towns/villages probably have an equally hard time imagining the why's and how's.
I'm not saying abduction cases are true, but to say, "why would they be interested?" is an
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Throughout mankind's history, we've thought of ourselves as the center of the universe, and that it revolves around us.
Currently, we're post industrial barbarians that only just recently invented something as basic as the solid state transistor. Yet the arrogance of some people, as if we're already masters of all things relating to time and space. We're infants, not even out of our own cradle yet.
Every year, I observe eagles nesting and raising chicks [youtube.com]. These animals have no way to even conceptualize
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This actually turns your initial observation - that humans are not the center of the Universe - upside down (or inside out, or something).
It is believing that if there is other intelligent life in the Universe, that they here and are spending their time semi-sneaking around observing us, is keeping the "we're the center of the Universe" fallacy going.
We aren't that special to the Universe.
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I don't doubt that there are all kinds of strange and unexplained occurrences in the world. But until I've actually shook hands with a little green man, I'm not prepared to credit them to extraterrestrials.
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Reminds me about this one: https://www.pinterest.de/pin/1... [pinterest.de]
So What You're Saying Is... (Score:3)
> to immediately conclude
Almost nobody is doing that.
Why is this guy trying to muddy the waters? Of course there are kooks at the 0.0005 fringe wearing Hollywood alien costumes and the like.
But what is Hadfield's agenda that he's pretending like that's anything but fringe outliers? Nice strawman that it can get a press headline, I guess.
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Ipsos did a poll last summer that found that 29% of Americans believe the Earth is visited by aliens, and roughly a quarter believed there's a crashed UFO being hidden in Area 51. It's fair to assume that virtually *all* of that crowd thing the Navy UAP videos are alien craft, and that's a lot more then "almost nobody".
Even educated people I know are saying, after watching the recent 60 Minutes segment on UAPs, that it's starting to seem plausible that we're dealing with aliens. I watched the segment too
Let me rephrase that.... (Score:2)
"But to see something in the sky that you don't understand and then to immediately conclude that it's intelligent life from another solar system is the height of foolishness and lack of logic."
But to see something in the election results that you don't like and then to immediately conclude that it's aliens from another country is the height of intelligence and lack of wokedness.
UFO = Lab Leak (Score:2)
Media is coupling the UFO stories with the Wuhan lab leak stories. I wa wa wonder why?
I'm with Hadfield.... (Score:2)
Re:life from another solar system (Score:5, Informative)
There is only one Solar System. And we live in it.
Here is Merriam-Webster's definition:
1. The sun together with the group of celestial bodies that are held by its attraction and revolve around it
2. A similar system centered on another star.
There are many star systems though
Here is Google's definition for a "star system":
A star system or stellar system is a small number of stars that orbit each other, bound by gravitational attraction.
So a "solar system" and a "star system" are not the same.
Re: (Score:3)
Google's definition is a strange one. I've always seen star system used to mean other solar systems. OP is technically right that solar system is supposed to be a proper noun, but like a lot of things its changed over time to be more generic. That's why in Sci-Fi you more often see our system referred to as the Sol System.
Re: (Score:2)
Right, like if we traveled to another star system, and had panels on our craft, would they still be 'solar' panels?
Or if you land on the planet and get a sun burn, is it from 'solar' radiation?
Christ, we just went through this with Macedonia (Score:2)
... 's ok
Aliens agree to call their system the "Republic of North Sol"
Re: (Score:2)
Is that you moderating Neil Degrasse Tyson? Beakman was always a better scientist than you, loser.
Don't be so harsh, it can't be easy to live in the shadow of Carl Sagan.
Re: (Score:2)
In all fairness they started out calling them 'lunar quakes' and 'mars quakes' and 'selenology' (can't remember the term for Mars), but the press (in their typical "dumbed down because the journalist doesn't know squat about science" fashion insisted on corrupting it.
Pushing glasses up on nose ... (Score:2)
Gotta keep the pendants happy.
I think you mean "pedants"
Then again maybe you do mean something suspended.
Re: (Score:2)
If just one person saw it.... (Score:2)
A likely explanation is simple mental defect. Roughly 1% of people have outright defective brains. I.e., mentally ill.
And even people who aren't consistently mentally ill can have transient hallucinations. Think visual migraines....
It's a lot harder to use this explanation on things that multiple people have seen.
--PM