Politics Thread!

[Orava]

They had nice summer parties, got a lot photos from the 1930s all men in uniform though.

[Ratsoap]

My grandparents were born in the early 1900s. And both sides were members of the IKL, the Finnish equivalent to the Nazis. Was everyone's grandpa a bit nazi?

My Grandfather dropped bombs on the Nazis, so I don't think so...

[Orava]

He was a very kind grandfather but he did occasionally make a very bad war-time joke about the jews. Don't know about my mothers side, he died in 1944 but I imagine a similar mindset.

[Dio]

Bomber Harris was such a lovely chap too.

[Rhythm]

My grandparents were born in the early 1900s. And both sides were members of the IKL, the Finnish equivalent to the Nazis. Was everyone's grandpa a bit nazi?

My Grandfather dropped bombs on the Nazis, so I don't think so...

Mine shot some of his toes off to avoid having to fight at all.

[gilesgoat]

My grandparents were born in the early 1900s. And both sides were members of the IKL, the Finnish equivalent to the Nazis. Was everyone's grandpa a bit nazi?

My Grandfather dropped bombs on the Nazis, so I don't think so...

Mine shot some of his toes off to avoid having to fight at all.

No longer alive but there was the father of a friend of mine he was in the Italian army can't remember where he was when that happened but he managed to see/listen in person one of Hitler's speeches, one of the not so many that can say he saw Hitler when he still was alive.

[Ratsoap]

My grandparents were born in the early 1900s. And both sides were members of the IKL, the Finnish equivalent to the Nazis. Was everyone's grandpa a bit nazi?

My Grandfather dropped bombs on the Nazis, so I don't think so...

A good friend of mine at school was the illegitimate great-grandson of Oswald Mosley though, so swings and roundabouts.

[PFVA]

Just wondering

Why are UFOs all of the sudden being considered a national security problem for the USA?
After all they have been spotted around for a long time? They have not invaded Earth yet why would they do it now?

Note: this is in the regards to the U. S. Congress hearings on the subject.

[Dio]

It's nonsense. My perception is that ghosts and UFOs and other 'Fortean phenomena' actually largely went away for a long while, mostly (I thought) because of the ubiquity of the smartphone; when everyone is recording every moment of their lives, that we haven't been deluged with more solid evidence for this stuff indicates that it was never really happening.

But of course, there are always conspiracy theorists, and some of them have got noisy in recent years (see also Trump, Donald J).

So I noted (before this hearing) that the test would be if there are any specific actionable items that come out of this - like names, places, dates, etc. - or will it be unsubstantiated waffle where exciting things definitely happened and lots of people supposedly know lots of things and there are reports on everything somewhere but when pressed on any specifics then suddently it's all vague, they "can't talk about it" or it's I heard someone knew that someone else saw something but I can't say who it was for no obvious reason.

Guess which it was? Ting!

[Rhythm]

It's nonsense. My perception is that ghosts and UFOs and other 'Fortean phenomena' actually largely went away for a long while, mostly (I thought) because of the ubiquity of the smartphone; when everyone is recording every moment of their lives, that we haven't been deluged with more solid evidence for this stuff indicates that it was never really happening.

This, pretty much. Although it's been interesting seeing the move to digital cameras bring with it it's own new class of "phenomena" thanks to the differing ways certain cameras capture images. An awful lot of "spooky" videos getting shared are really just showing lens flare or over-zealous image processing by cameras trying to build a stable image in low light.

I note that the dude on the stand the other day was remarkably lacking in actual detail, despite having been previously full of descriptions, info etc when he'd been interviewed by magazines. As soon as he's asked to elaborate for the formal record his recollection drops entirely or it's all "I can't share that information". It's all bullshit.

Even the cases where the military have released videos, most fit an easy track of identification. There was one supposedly "genuinely unexplained" video released a couple of years ago that just looked like an insect in the mechanism of the camera. The audio was giving it "woah, it's following us wherever we point the camera" and "it's matching our speed" and all I could see was a greenfly (or similar) crawling over the chuffing lens.

[KlaxonCow]

Even the cases where the military have released videos, most fit an easy track of identification.

Thunderf00t debunked one of these "Pentagon releases UFO videos":



He gently hints at the answer whilst providing the background - is that the sound of ducks and geese I hear? - but once he lands the mundane explanation, you'll be kicking yourself.

It's a bird.

The reason why it looks like it's moving so fast, as the ocean below zooms by, is because the plane is flying fast. They've auto-locked the camera on the bird, which is high up in the air, away from the ground, so you've got parallax that makes the ocean look like it's zooming by super-fast.

It's not really. The bird is flying at a fairly pedestrian speed. What's actually moving fast is the plane, which has the gimbal camera, locked onto a bird that's flying high in the air above the ocean.

The readings on the HUD, if you know which bits mean what, actually help confirm this. The plane is moving fast, the camera though is trying to lock onto a relatively slow-moving thing high up in the air (the gimbal's angular readout is on the HUD) and this makes the ocean look like it's zooming by super-fast but it's parallax / relative motion.

What's really "unidentified" here is whether it's a seagull or maybe a duck. Hmm, probably a seagull, as ducks tend to migrate together in those "V" formations and this is a lone bird.

[F-ZeroOne]

Its kind of amazing how these supposed alien visitors can navigate the vast gulf of interstellar space but somehow not know how to land safely upon arrival. Though not quite as amazing as how many Republican politicians can deny climate change, COVID-19, vaccine safety, the existence of gay and trans people, but accept Area-51 has a UFO storage cupboard.

I once witnessed a UFO myself - an absolute classic, a bright orange, near perfectly spherical ball ascending rapidly in near total darkness with few visual cues around to guage its true size. I'd have been completely mystified if I hadn't also heard the whoosh of the flames in the Chinese lantern...

[Orava]

I think we are alone in the universe, intelligent life is very rare and the distances involved make contact very unlikely.

[KlaxonCow]

I'm fairly convinced that aliens do exist somewhere out there in the universe.

But the problem is that the statistical arguments that makes me think that's likely, also tell me that the spacetime distances involved make life encountering other life negligibly near impossible.

Space is big.

So, within our own galaxy, we've got some roughly 300 to 400 billion stars - and a rough estimation from exoplanet hunting means we can expect at least as many planets as stars - in a galaxy that's estimated to be 13.6 billion years old.

Here's the problem. Let's imagine a galactic space empire, which has spread out to encompass a thousand worlds. And which reigned for a million years. And let's imagine that there's a thousand such empires - a thousand empires encompassing a thousand worlds each, each lasting a million years.

What's the odds of any of them overlapping, or neighbouring each other close enough for "first contact"?

Well, what's a million out of 300 to 400 billion? AND - don't forget the fourth dimension, because maybe this empire existed "a long long time ago", even when they do overlap in space, they just don't overlap in time - a million years out of 13.6 billion?

Douglas Adams' comic understatement applies: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is".

But, equally, the very same argument works in the favour of alien life existing.

Because, you know, when you have 300 to 400 billion opportunities, multiplied by 13.6 billion years - as stars have lived and died within this galaxy over and over again - multiplied by hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Billions by billions by billions.

Even if the formation of life has a vanishingly small chance of occurring, then it's surely happened many times, when you consider how many opportunities it's had to nail the correct formula, purely by random chance.

And, honestly, there's nothing in the science to suggest it should be a particularly rare event. In that, on Earth, life sprang up pretty much instantly (in cosmic terms) after the molten ball of rock cooled down enough to permit it. Almost no delay, as if perhaps almost inevitable, so long as you end up with the right kind of planet.

If you list off the most common elements in the universe and then list off the most common elements found in the human body (or body of any animal on Earth) then - what do you know? - they're pretty much identical (with the exception of helium - because helium doesn't react with anything, so it's not useful for forming things from). And not just that, but they're found in roughly the same order, quantity-wise, as well. There's absolutely nothing "rare" about what we're made of.

The caveats, in the other direction, would be that you can't have rocky planets around first generation stars. Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium - and, remember, helium is useless for building things, as it's so unreactive - are formed from supernovas. So you need at least one star to have lived and died beforehand, to have generated enough heavy element "dust" for those types of planet to exist (a pure hydrogen gas giant would be possible - basically, just a failed star, which could never get big enough for spontaneous fusion - but those would not be too interesting from a "life" perspective, without any heavy elements floating about).

Indeed, that's the one that's rarely mentioned but blows my mind. If the concept of "Deep Time" was already screwing with your brain to imagine that this Solar System and our planet are some 4.5 billion years old. Ah, that's nothing. Entire stars lived a full life and died on this spot, at least once, probably a few times, in order that there was enough carbon, oxygen, silicon, nitrogen, etc. lying around to spin up not just Earth, but all the planets and dwarf planets and asteroids and shit.

So if "the Earth is 4.5 billion years old" was already frying your brain, then the fact that, nope, we absolutely couldn't be "first generation", so that had to have been other generations of stars - on this spot - which lived and died a full life long before us. That's the one that really fries my brain to just consider how monumentally ancient that sort of "Deep Time" can get. Remember, 4.5 billion years is only around half-ish the full lifetime it's likely to lead. Multiply this all up and let your mind be boggled.

But, yeah, the problem is that the very same statistical argument which tells you that there's almost certainly other life out there somewhere - there's just so many opportunities for this to have occurred, numbering in the many quadrillions and threatening higher orders of magnitude, when we know this stuff occurs with the most plentiful elements available in the universe - is also the statistical argument that tells you the odds of any of it ever meeting are pretty much zero.

Then you add in the "speed limit" of lightspeed. Then you have the expansion of the universe.

The problem with the expansion of the universe is that you might think "well, if life can't physically meet, then it could still send radio signals to each other" - like with the SETI project to listen for aliens sending out signals. But this is scuppered - or at least made increasingly unlikely - by some annoying physics.

The strength of your radio signal attenuates by the inverse square law. Because everything does. Gravity does, light does, etc. as we live in a three dimensional universe and there's not much you can do about that.

Your signal spreads out. And it does so by the square of the distance. So if it's halved by a certain distance, then it's ninth'd by twice that distance, sixteenth'd by triple that distance and so forth. The further you send that signal, the vastly weaker it gets. And, you know, there's a point where it's so weak, you're not pulling that signal out of all the "noise" that naturally exists in the universe.

More over, the expansion of the universe also means that this signal is getting red-shifted. The longer it's travelled, the lower and lower frequency it gets. So the signal is not just getting weaker, it's also getting stretched out, the further it has to travel. So if the fact that your radio signal is now at infinitesimally low volume wasn't already enough, which it is, it's also being played back at increasingly slower and slower speeds the further it has to travel. It's all about that bass, that bass. No treble.

The thing about the "cosmic microwave background" is, well, it's in the microwave range already. It started at way higher frequency but it's descended down the scale to be at microwave frequencies now. It just gets stretched and stretched and stretched by the expansion of the universe as it travels.

And the kicker is that "speed limit". So even if you did actually somehow pick out that "alien signal" that took 200 million years to get here, then your response is going to take more than 200 million years to get back there (expansion of the universe in the meantime, you see, is what makes it "more than"). You are not having a useful conversation here, with such "lag".

So, you know, by the numbers, are there aliens out there? Almost certainly. Are we ever going to meet them? No fucking chance.

Heck, even with the invention of warp drives or stargates, so we could travel the stars in reasonable amounts of time, then we're still looking to win an extremely unlikely universal lottery here.

And, as I've said, don't forget the time dimension. That it's "spacetime", not just space. So, you know, there WAS a "Vulcan Empire" right next door to us that encompassed hundreds of star systems for over a million years, but they sadly died off some 2 billion years ago. We won't just fail to meet them, but after 2 billion years, there's probably no "fossils" left for us to even know they were once there either.

The universe is very likely teaming with life. But, sorry, physics says that it doesn't really matter.

Space is big. Space is far, far, far too big.

[Orava]

Then there are always the problem of physical conditions, if your planet is a water-world then you are unlikely to get to space even if they are as intelligent, say dolphins as they are.