Author Topic: Science vs Science Fiction  (Read 3602 times)

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Offline Libertas

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Science vs Science Fiction
« on: February 22, 2019, 12:03:54 PM »
These signals are real, their exact origin however is unknown.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/01/10/repeating-radio-bursts-detected-from-a-galaxy-1-5-billion-light-years-away/#698f469b4223

...now there is an internet conspiracy afoot involving the UN and some Rooskie scientist about a visit by a triangular-shaped UFO there is no clear evidence of that hovered over the Pentagon sometime last December that transmitted a signature matching the signature of the signal in the article - FRB 180814.J0422+73 that resides some 1.5 billion light-years away.

Uhh huh.

My skeptical mind has the same attitude about ET's as it does about Bigfoot etc...bag-n-tag ladies and gents, or it ain't real!   ;)
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Offline Solo

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Re: Science vs Science Fiction
« Reply #1 on: April 09, 2019, 12:23:28 PM »
These signals are real, their exact origin however is unknown.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/01/10/repeating-radio-bursts-detected-from-a-galaxy-1-5-billion-light-years-away/#698f469b4223

...now there is an internet conspiracy afoot involving the UN and some Rooskie scientist about a visit by a triangular-shaped UFO there is no clear evidence of that hovered over the Pentagon sometime last December that transmitted a signature matching the signature of the signal in the article - FRB 180814.J0422+73 that resides some 1.5 billion light-years away.

Uhh huh.

My skeptical mind has the same attitude about ET's as it does about Bigfoot etc...bag-n-tag ladies and gents, or it ain't real!   ;)

Well....at long last...
Someone who thinks with their intellect and, therefore, doesn't conflate Science with Science Fiction!

No....we're not (nor have we ever) been visited by Extraterrestrials!  How do I know that?  Because "SCIENCE" tells me that the Speed of Light ("C") is a universal constant.  Moreover....no one has ever witnessed a phenomenon which might contradict that.

Einstein tells us that, as you approach the speed of light, the mass of any object increases towards infinity--thus requiring infinite energy to sustain its speed.

Ergo.....no faster than light travel!  No faster than light travel, then no extraterrestrials visiting the planet....nor are we ever going to visit theirs!  The distances are simply too vast!

That...is science.  To believe otherwise...is "faith"--not science!

Is there intelligent life somewhere else in the Universe?  Probably.  But...we're never going to meet them.




Offline Libertas

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Re: Science vs Science Fiction
« Reply #2 on: April 09, 2019, 12:29:30 PM »
These signals are real, their exact origin however is unknown.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/01/10/repeating-radio-bursts-detected-from-a-galaxy-1-5-billion-light-years-away/#698f469b4223

...now there is an internet conspiracy afoot involving the UN and some Rooskie scientist about a visit by a triangular-shaped UFO there is no clear evidence of that hovered over the Pentagon sometime last December that transmitted a signature matching the signature of the signal in the article - FRB 180814.J0422+73 that resides some 1.5 billion light-years away.

Uhh huh.

My skeptical mind has the same attitude about ET's as it does about Bigfoot etc...bag-n-tag ladies and gents, or it ain't real!   ;)

Well....at long last...
Someone who thinks with their intellect and, therefore, doesn't conflate Science with Science Fiction!

No....we're not (nor have we ever) been visited by Extraterrestrials!  How do I know that?  Because "SCIENCE" tells me that the Speed of Light ("C") is a universal constant.  Moreover....no one has ever witnessed a phenomenon which might contradict that.

Einstein tells us that, as you approach the speed of light, the mass of any object increases towards infinity--thus requiring infinite energy to sustain its speed.

Ergo.....no faster than light travel!  No faster than light travel, then no extraterrestrials visiting the planet....nor are we ever going to visit theirs!  The distances are simply too vast!

That...is science.  To believe otherwise...is "faith"--not science!

Is there intelligent life somewhere else in the Universe?  Probably.  But...we're never going to meet them.

Agreed.  Unless somebody finds a loophole...like a stable wormhole...again...about as likely as me getting a date with a supermodel...0.00000000000000000000000000001% chance...at best.
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Offline Alphabet Soup

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Re: Science vs Science Fiction
« Reply #3 on: April 09, 2019, 01:28:26 PM »
These signals are real, their exact origin however is unknown.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/01/10/repeating-radio-bursts-detected-from-a-galaxy-1-5-billion-light-years-away/#698f469b4223

...now there is an internet conspiracy afoot involving the UN and some Rooskie scientist about a visit by a triangular-shaped UFO there is no clear evidence of that hovered over the Pentagon sometime last December that transmitted a signature matching the signature of the signal in the article - FRB 180814.J0422+73 that resides some 1.5 billion light-years away.

Uhh huh.

My skeptical mind has the same attitude about ET's as it does about Bigfoot etc...bag-n-tag ladies and gents, or it ain't real!   ;)

Well....at long last...
Someone who thinks with their intellect and, therefore, doesn't conflate Science with Science Fiction!

No....we're not (nor have we ever) been visited by Extraterrestrials!  How do I know that?  Because "SCIENCE" tells me that the Speed of Light ("C") is a universal constant.  Moreover....no one has ever witnessed a phenomenon which might contradict that.

Einstein tells us that, as you approach the speed of light, the mass of any object increases towards infinity--thus requiring infinite energy to sustain its speed.

Ergo.....no faster than light travel!  No faster than light travel, then no extraterrestrials visiting the planet....nor are we ever going to visit theirs!  The distances are simply too vast!

That...is science.  To believe otherwise...is "faith"--not science!

Is there intelligent life somewhere else in the Universe?  Probably.  But...we're never going to meet them.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPUNsN-0Lz4

LOL

Online IronDioPriest

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Re: Science vs Science Fiction
« Reply #4 on: April 09, 2019, 01:51:51 PM »
Just to play devil’s advocate... if there’s anything regarding the impossible that we DO know, it is that there are many, many things which heretofore were considered scientific impossibility which turned out to be very, very possible.

I don’t believe in ETs. But I don’t disbelieve in them either.
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Offline Solo

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Re: Science vs Science Fiction
« Reply #5 on: April 09, 2019, 04:34:51 PM »
Just to play devil’s advocate... if there’s anything regarding the impossible that we DO know, it is that there are many, many things which heretofore were considered scientific impossibility which turned out to be very, very possible.

I don’t believe in ETs. But I don’t disbelieve in them either.

I hear that argument a lot.

Consider....You don't believe in ET's.  I'm willing to wager that you don't believe in the Tooth Fairy, either.  Moreover....I doubt that you might suggest that, just because the Tooth Fairy is a "scientific impossibility", doesn't mean that science won't someday find a way to detect her.

Same thing with E.T.

We don't now, nor will be ever consider the existence of the Tooth Fairy as a possibility.  The reason is that there is zero scientific evidence that such a thing could exist.  The exact same thing is true of "FTL" travel.  Everything we understand about science (and we understand quite a bit) tells us that it is not, nor will it ever be, possible.

It's just the shear scale of the task, if nothing else.  You must realize that, in order to accelerate a mass the size of a dust mite to Light Speed would require every single bit of energy in the entire known universe...and you still wouldn't get there.

That's a long long way from flying faster than the speed of sound or traveling to the moon.  After all....rifle bullets showed us that it was possible to go faster than sound and Newton's calculations got us to the moon and back.  There is no analog among our accumulated scientific knowledge to indicate that FTL travel even exists in the universe--much less that we could emulate it!


Offline Libertas

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Re: Science vs Science Fiction
« Reply #6 on: April 10, 2019, 07:33:14 AM »
To be the second devil's advocate...

I agree with you, the speed of light is the universal cap, but Einstein with General Relativity and Eddington's eclipse observations confirmed the oddness of space-time...gravity wells and warped space...time being both slow to the point of not moving and moving forward or backward...black holes.  Einstein also gave us the cosmological constant, something which bothered him but his calculations cannot work without it, nobody's can.  And the world of quantum mechanics and all the oddities of that.  He basically struggled the rest of his life trying to find a grand unification theory to pull the large and small workings of the universe together.  Nobody has come close.  All we get is more speculation that cannot be proven - multiverse, string theory. 

IMO Einstein was the most brilliant mind to have ever resided inside a human being...and I have yet to see someone surpass him.  Humanity had inspiration in spurts, from Democritus, Aristotle and Archimedes we largely had a gap until Leonardo, Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo and Kepler, and then a brief gap to Newton and then a sort of gap while people digested a Newtonian universe...then the golden age of Faraday, Tesla, Planck, Hubble and culminating with Heisenberg, Eddington, Einstein and Fermi.  We are still digesting the Einstein universe.  When this gap closes...who knows?  I see the people around me and I cannot help but wonder if as a species we are getting dumber by the second.

So, could somebody someday here on Earth (or anywhere else past, present or future) figure out a way to nullify mass and create a more reasonable energy conversion into propulsion possible to propel sentient life to near light speed velocities?  I cannot categorically say no, but they have to account for that cosmic speed limit and the conventional rules on mass, energy and velocity IMO make it clear that mass may be the easier variable to tinker with, though how that may occur is a long long way off from being understood.

So, until then...bag n' tag those ET's or talk to the hand!
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.