Are we alone in the universe?

[Philo Sofee]

Hey, man. Don’t forget about my black triangle sighting in Nevada.

- Doc

Realistically, that's human tech......wish it was something else, but my research shows its probably human tech, darn it.

[Res Ipsa]

Hi Ajax,

Given the sheer size of the universe, my guess is that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But, because of that size. The laws of physics that prevent faster than light travel, and the absence of evidence of intelligent life in the systems of the closest stars, I don’t think earth has been visited.

I do think so. Garry Nolan's view on this really struck me as being more right than not.

Not so for me. Immunologist speculations carry little weight with me.

[ajax18]

You obviously haven't watched the age of disclosure. Harry Reid, Kirsten Gillebrand, James Clapper etc., these are not right wing politicians. Nobody pushed for disclosure more than Harry Reid.

True story that........ his bulldog determination also demonstrated that there is someone in power who does NOT want this information out to the public.

Do you have a theory on why the people in power do not disclose this information?

[Philo Sofee]

I do think so. Garry Nolan's view on this really struck me as being more right than not.

Not so for me. Immunologist speculations carry little weight with me.

As if an immunologist can't think it through logically and study something else for decades. Lol.......

[Philo Sofee]

True story that........ his bulldog determination also demonstrated that there is someone in power who does NOT want this information out to the public.

Do you have a theory on why the people in power do not disclose this information?

Yes, there are entire books written on this topic alone. One actual valid one, though they abuse it, actually is concerning national security. Another one is they want the tech for themselves. Greed in other words.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Hey, man. Don’t forget about my black triangle sighting in Nevada.

- Doc

Realistically, that's human tech......wish it was something else, but my research shows its probably human tech, darn it.

Yeah, there was a guy who ran a ufo/black triangle sighting website, this was years ago by the way, with whom I had a small email exchange who suggested the same. He thought it might have been a stealth dirigible collection platform kind of thing. My sighting had the triangle perpendicular to the ground, rather than horizontally oriented.

I dunno. That is my one and only UAP claim to fame.

[Physics Guy]

Here's a list of some of the strangest theories I found. They're pretty wild, but they all have some level of scientific backing ...

These are "theories" in different senses of the term.

- The Holographic Universe Theory, is for the proposition that our entire reality, everything we see, feel, and touch is actually a projection of information from a two-dimensional surface at the edge of the universe.

This isn't exactly a theory about how things are, but rather about how things could possibly be described. Causality already implies that everything in all of space and time is a projection of one instant in time, with everything before and after that instant being fixed by causality. That doesn't mean that time doesn't exist, only that how things change over time is constrained by physical laws. The Holographic Principle postulates a similar but more drastic mapping, from four dimensions down to just two instead of to three. It would imply that how things change in both space and time is more constrained than we otherwise thought. It's just a speculation, though, and it has been a speculation for a few decades now. So it might still turn out to be important, but it's not worth getting excited about it.

- The One Electron Theory, proposed by Richard Feynman is for the proposition that every electron in the universe is actually the exact same electron, moving backward and forward through time to appear in trillions of places at once. What we perceive as trillions of separate particles are actually the same single electron weaving through the fabric of space-time.

This is more a joke than a theory. It's kind of a mathematical pun, to notice that you could maybe think about the equations this way if you wanted. It doesn't change the equations, though, so it doesn't imply anything different about reality. Lots of electrons and positrons, versus one electron that can "go" back and forth in time, are just different words for the same thing, at least if you stay vague about exactly how this "going back and forth in time" thing really works, which you have to do in this "theory".

- The Arrow Time Theory is for the proposition that time is actually an illusion and trick of the brain. Some physicists believe we live in a Block Universe where the past, present, and future all exist at once and our brains act like a movie projector and can only see one frame at a time.

This is another case where it isn't a theory of how things could really be different, just an observation about how we could use different words to describe the same thing, if we wanted. As soon as you try to unpack exactly what "illusion" means, in this case, you find that you're never talking about any actual differences, just about choice of words.

- The Everywhere at Once Theory proposes that light doesn't just travel a single path from an object (star, lightbulb, sun, etc) to your eyes. Light actually fills the entire universe, but we only see the light when our eyes or a camera act as a destination point that forces all other paths to settle into a single, visible beam.

These statements about light would only have been controversial in about 1850, when the wave theory of light was still getting going. It has long since been clear that stars do not just send light in a straight line to your eye. They emit light waves in all directions, and your eye lenses focus a tiny bit of that light onto your retina. A more radical extension of this kind of idea is in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, in which probability amplitudes propagate in all directions in the space of possibilities. You don't have to use the path integral formulation if you don't like it—and usually it's the hard way to do anything. It's just one way of representing the same quantum theory as always. On the other hand the possibility of expressing quantum mechanics in that way does mean that something kind of like it must really be there in quantum mechanics however you express it.

- White Holes Theory is for the proposition that Black Holes suck everything in, but the math of General Relativity also allows for the exact opposite, White Holes. Some physicists believe the Big Bang wasn't a random explosion, but actually the exit of a White Hole. This would mean our entire universe was born from a Black Hole in another, older universe.

Black holes don't exactly suck things in. You have to fall into them, but then, yeah, if you do, you can't ever get out. A white hole solution to Einstein's equations is like the ultimately exclusive club, that throws all customers out and never lets anyone in. The Big Bang is mathematically somewhat like a white hole, and some people have speculated that if the equations we now have are wrong for the extreme conditions of the early universe (which they very well might be) then perhaps the real equations will make the analogy even closer, and there could have been a previous universe before the Big Bang. Maybe, yeah, but so far all concrete proposals for how this would work have not fit well with astronomical observations.

- E8 Theory (The Geometry of Everything) was proposed by physicist Garrett Lisi and suggests that the entire universe, all particles and all forces of gravity, is just one incredibly complex, 248-dimensional geometric shape called E8. Every subatomic particle we see is just a different vibration of this massive crystal structure.

There have been a lot of attempts at this kind of Theory of Everything. The E8xE8 version got a bit of buzz ten years ago or so, but it doesn't work. People keep trying. Something like it may well be true. We're already not too far from that, after all. Everything in the universe is "just" a bunch of interacting particles and fields, of which only a small set of different kinds exist. Pursuing "Theories of Everything" is just a matter of trying to compress our concepts a bit further still.

- The Egg Theory (The One-Soul Universe), although not in the realm of physics, this theory suggests that every intelligent being who has ever lived (whether on Earth or on other planets in the Universe) is actually the same soul, reincarnated over and over across time. You are currently living as you, but in your next life (which could be in the past or the future), you will be the person you just walked past on the street. The universe is essentially a giant egg designed to help this one soul (you) mature. Once you have lived every single human life and all other intelligent lives on other planets (experiencing every joy and every tragedy) you will finally hatch and become a God.

Okay, this one I've never heard of, and it does not count as physics, so I have no comments to make.

[Physics Guy]

Travelling faster than light is harder than you might think, because it's not just that it becomes harder and harder to go faster, the way it gets hard to fly faster than sound. It's that travelling faster than light isn't travelling. It's already being there. Worse, it means that you have to already be there, simultaneously, at every point along the journey. So all your atoms are piled up on top of each other, at every point along your light-years-long path. That's no way to live.

I'd bet instead on some kind of wormholes, where there's like this bubble in space, and if you step into the bubble, then you're suddenly someplace that would be really far away if you couldn't use the bubble. Once you're inside the bubble, you're actually outside a bubble, and inside that bubble is the place from which you came. So the bubble is a shortcut in space.

That would be really hard, but it doesn't seem logically impossible the way FTL travel does.

[Philo Sofee]

Travelling faster than light is harder than you might think, because it's not just that it becomes harder and harder to go faster, the way it gets hard to fly faster than sound. It's that travelling faster than light isn't travelling. It's already being there. Worse, it means that you have to already be there, simultaneously, at every point along the journey. So all your atoms are piled up on top of each other, at every point along your light-years-long path. That's no way to live.

I'd bet instead on some kind of wormholes, where there's like this bubble in space, and if you step into the bubble, then you're suddenly someplace that would be really far away if you couldn't use the bubble. Once you're inside the bubble, you're actually outside a bubble, and inside that bubble is the place from which you came. So the bubble is a shortcut in space.

That would be really hard, but it doesn't seem logically impossible the way FTL travel does.

All true indeed! But there is nothing to say a group could not have started out from way away from us say from
Ross 128 b which is about 11 light-years away. It's a quiet red dwarf (good news for atmospheres) so about 64.7 trillion miles distance. That gives them 147,000 years to get here. But it doesn't have to be the original group which started out the journey. If they populated as they came this way, someone (assuming they survive) could easily get here who had many tens if not hundreds of millions of years to evolve in the first place, and gain an enormous amount of knowledge first. There are also clusters around 12–12.5 light-years, including:

Luyten b (GJ 273 b) about 12 light-years distance and Teegarden’s Star b also about 12.5 light-years, so it would not by any means be impossible for their later descendants to get here assuming there was intelligent life in those clusters. Proxima b is also about 11 light years as well.... and as far as difficulty of finding us? No problem, we found them already and we ain't even 250,000 years old yet as a species! We understand what it takes assuming atmosphere and water, in order for life to evolve, they, if they had 400,000,000 years to evolve and develop could easily have already known about us through their own space telescopes or whatever trips they traveled.

[Res Ipsa]

Not so for me. Immunologist speculations carry little weight with me.

As if an immunologist can't think it through logically and study something else for decades. Lol.......

You know, I winced about 10 minutes after I posted, after thinking about who I was responding to.

It’s a fact that some of the worst scientific cranks are scientists who get out of their lanes. Hypothetical FTL travel is at the intersection of subjects in physics that are incredibly complicated and unintuitive: quantum mechanics, general relativity and special relativity. in my opinion, someone can sound good to us ordinary folks and be completely full of crap. I have a very high level of skepticism for any scientists who purport to be experts outside of their narrow field.

I didn’t intend to throw any shade beyond that.