Ufo Sighting

[Uttara]

Today, it was around 7.57pm when we saw a flying object in the sky. The object was shining brightly like a huge star. It was blinking with the mixture of amber, green, red and white color lights. It shone in the sky for around 5-10 minutes. It shone brighter and brighter, and got disappeared within seconds. We have had this experience not only for the first time, it has happened for over 2-3 times that too in the same direction, at the same time and at same location.

[exchemist]

Today, it was around 7.57pm when we saw a flying object in the sky. The object was shining brightly like a huge star. It was blinking with the mixture of amber, green, red and white color lights. It shone in the sky for around 5-10 minutes. It shone brighter and brighter, and got disappeared within seconds. We have had this experience not only for the first time, it has happened for over 2-3 times that too in the same direction, at the same time and at same location.

I think these are commonly caused by sunlight reflecting off satellites in orbit. For example, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare

[fahrquad]

Unidentified Flying Object means any object in the sky you cannot identify.  It does not mean an alien visitation.  I saw a UFO when I was visiting my parents a few years ago and was outside smoking.  I saw flashing lights but did not hear any jet engines.  I do not know what it was so it classifies as a UFO in most definitions.  Considering the distance between habitable star systems, an advanced alien species would have had to sent out an expedition long before we sent out our first radio waves, even traveling at light speeds.  We would have been in the pre-historic era for them to send out an expeditionary  group to get here by the Cold War Paranoia of the 1940's  and 1950's and we were not sending any signals out before then.

[fahrquad]

"Hardly any signals before then".  Is what I should  have said. I think the first signals sent by Marconi date back to 1919 and should be reaching the first habitable planet in a few million years.

[CraigD]

"Hardly any signals before then". Is what I should have said. I think the first signals sent by Marconi date back to 1919 and should be reaching the first habitable planet in a few million years.

The closest terrestrial exoplanet candidate is Proxima Centrui b, about 4.22 light years from Earth. There are at least 10 other terrestrial exoplanets candidates thought to be within their stars’ habitable zones within 50 light years of Earth, so if ETs on those planets were listening with very sensitive radio receivers for artificial radio signals, they might have detected ours many years ago.

 

(source wikipedia article "List of nearest terrestrial exoplanet candidates")

[fahrquad]

So can anyone (Including Aliens) travel at or near the speed of light?  We will long be dead before anyone can answer any signal we have sent.  The feeble probes we have sent are millions or billions of years away before hitting the next system, much less a habitable system. 

[A-wal]

Any civilisation advanced enough to get here would have far better things to do, unless we are the first alien life they've encountered. This means we'd actually be less likely to get a visit if life in the universe is common because nobody would care enough to come here.

Edited November 15, 2016 by A-wal

[CraigD]

The closest terrestrial exoplanet candidate is Proxima Centrui b, about 4.22 light years from Earth. There are at least 10 other terrestrial exoplanets candidates thought to be within their stars’ habitable zones within 50 light years of Earth, so if ETs on those planets were listening with very sensitive radio receivers for artificial radio signals, they might have detected ours many years ago.

 

(source wikipedia article "List of nearest terrestrial exoplanet candidates")

So can anyone (Including Aliens) travel at or near the speed of light? We will long be dead before anyone can answer any signal we have sent.

Speeds approaching that of light aren’t necessary to travel the 4.22 ly from Proxima Centuri b to Earth in less than a human lifetime. A speed of about 0.1 c could do it in about 40 years. There are a lot of engineering reasons why it might prove impossible for even technologies much more advanced than ours to go much faster than this.

 

The feeble probes we have sent are millions or billions of years away before hitting the next system, much less a habitable system.

Your numbers are both under and overstated. ;)

 

Spacecraft like Voyager I won’t actually reach our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centuri, at all, because they’re not going the right direction. Worse, they’re not fast enough – Proxima Centuri is moving about 39604 m/s in a direction that’ll take it within about 2.501 ly of Sol, then away. To intercept it, the spacecraft would need to have a speed of at least 32661 m/s. Voyager I’s speed is about 17000 m/s. If it had a handy rocket that could give it the needed minimum additional velocity – which isn’t beyond our technological means , just not in Voyager’s planning – it could intercept Proxima Centuri b in about 56800 years.

(Source: common online astronomy and spacecraft data and some quick and easy geometry :) )

 

This is a good bit longer than human history, but several orders of magnitude less than millions or billions of years. If our civilization was really into it, I’d guess we could build spaceships that could make the trip in a few tens of years at speeds around 30,000,000 m/s (0.1 c) – whether we’ll prove to be or not is hard to guess.

 

All this discussion of space travel is moot if we assume, as most of the SETI community does, that first contact with ETs would be by radio.

 

I was being a bit sneaky saying “if ETs on those planets were listening with very sensitive radio receivers for artificial radio signals”, because to detect unintentional signals from our communication radios would take much more sensitive receives than anything we’ve ever built. With our technology, it would take radio telescope dishes larger than planets. A civilization able to build these would also be able to build optical telescopes of a similar size, then just look at our planet with high enough resolution to see what we Earthlings are up to.

 

To send a radio signal powerful enough to be detected by a receiver similar to those we have searching for ET radio signals, we have to send a purposeful, directional one. We’ve done this a few time – see Wikipedia’s “List of interstellar radio messages” – but none AFIC toward Alpha Centuri b. The closest star system we’ve sent an IRM is Gliese 581, about 20.4 ly away. IT was sent in 2008, so the earliest we could get a reply is 2049.

 

(A couple of good pages I read about interstellar radio signaling were faqs.org's "How far away could we detect radio transmissions?" and the SETI League’s "Optical SETI and the Arecibo Myth")

[fahrquad]

So you agree with my basic premise that alien visitation as a result of our radio signals is nearly non-existent?  I am not concerned that the numbers in my statements are over or under-inflated as long as the main point is correct.  Some points are not worth the effort to delve too deeply.  Sorry if this undermines my credibility.

[fahrquad]

You might find this Nat Geo article about Proxima Centauri b interesting.

 

 

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/earth-mass-planet-proxima-centauri-habitable-space-science/

[CraigD]

So you agree with my basic premise that alien visitation as a result of our radio signals is nearly non-existent?

I think that the likelihood of ETs discovering that our intelligent civilization on Earth exists from an accidental radio signal is low. Such signals are much too weak to be distinguished from natural background noise by any signal processing technique we know, and I think these limitations would apply even to ETs with much more advanced technology.

 

If we were to be discovered due to a radio signal, I think it would have to be an intentional one like these, which I linked to in my previous post.

 

The limitations imposed by nature on detecting weak artificial radio signals are not present in visible and near visible light astronomy. An advanced civilization might have very large, space-based optical telescope systems that would allow them to observe planets like ours as closely as we presently can with near-Earth spacecraft. For this reason, I’m optimistic that, if an advanced civilization with the desire to find intelligent people on other planets exists in our galactic neighborhood, it will eventually find us. I hope that we are becoming such a civilization, and will, within the next century or so, begin a high-resolution optical survey of interesting nearby exoplanets, so that if there are intelligent people out there that build the sort of large artifacts we do – road, cities, etc. - we’ll discover them.

 

I am not concerned that the numbers in my statements are over or under-inflated as long as the main point is correct. Some points are not worth the effort to delve too deeply. Sorry if this undermines my credibility.

I enjoy delving deeply, so don’t worry much about whether it’s worth the effort. Avoiding larger errors in estimating is critical, so I encourage you to be concerned about such details.

 

When it comes to credibility, I think none of us are very credible if we make confident-sounding statement about what can and can’t be possible concerning ET life, civilizations, and technology. I think we need to have a wait-and-see attitude, accompanied by a sense of deep humility and puzzlement, like that attributed to Fermi and his famous 1950 quip asking “where is everbody?” which he then followed with a sketch of the probability that we should be being visited then by space-traveling, human-like-intelligence ETs, which he guessed was very high. We’d now call a sketch of the Drake equation, which Drake would bring to the scientific world’s attention in a meeting in 1961. Fermi and his companions in 1950 seem to me to have been honestly puzzled – their understanding of physics, biology, and astronomy told them visits from ETs should be common place, yet there was no credible evidence that such visits had happened anytime in reliable history. Their critical skills told them reports they read about in the press and UFO-ologist fringe (which, according to best accounts, were what started the conversation where Fermi made his famous quip) about such visits were most likely bogus. Veterans of WW II atomic weapons projects, Fermi and his fellow had a lot of experience with secrecy, so had good intuitions about the likelihood of ET visits happening, but somehow being kept secret from them and the greater world.

 

You might find this Nat Geo article about Proxima Centauri b interesting.

...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/earth-mass-planet-proxima-centauri-habitable-space-science/

I do – thanks for the link! :thumbs_up

 

The bit I liked best in the article was a reference to Breakthrough Starshot project, which has this website. The folks there (I can’t tell much who they are from the website, where all I found was the projects board, Stephen Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg, and Russian businessman and establisher of the Breakthrough science prizes Yuri Milner) are seriously working toward what an long-time spaceflight fan like me recognizes as a relative of the Starwisp late physicists and science fiction writer Robert Forward wrote about in 1985.

 

Forward’s concept was an about 1 kg pushed spacecraft pushed by a microwave beam from an Earth-orbiting satellite, while the Starshot project’s is for a “gram-scale” “nanocraft” spacecraft pushed by a visible light beam from a ground-based “light beamer”, so I see this newer concept as a further miniaturization of Forward’s at-the-time radical idea

 

I’m skeptical that a spacecraft capable of sending a signal back to Earth across 2+ lightyears can be made as small as they hint. The Starwisp cleverly combined propulsion, system power, and a radio antenna into a single 10000 m² 0.003 m carbon fiber mesh. The Starshot website appears to lack an easy-to-find FAQ page giving essentials of the proposed system, which I suspect are somewhat vague now, but this 12 minute PBS Space Time YouTube video gives the size of the nanocraft as being about 1 m².

 

The Starshot people suggest that it will take about 20 years of technological advancement for their system to be feasible. I see a potential showstopper with an inability to send any data back to Earth.

 

Strategically, I’m not sure that putting resources toward build this system to take flyby video of exoplanets is sound (Forward dodged the resource issue by having the microwave laser (maser) to propel the StarWisp have a primary job of beaming solar power to Earth for commercial consumption, making its role in the interstellar probe program a relative freebie). The Space Time video quotes the goals of the Starshot system as being to return, by about 2062, images about equivalent to what a 300000 m optical telescope near Earth could get. I think we’d do better to spend the next decade or so developing the capability, then building, such a telescope in space.

 

I agree with proponents who believe artificially pushed lightsails to be the best system for interstellar travel, but think we’d do better to leave the surveying to extraordinarily large space telescopes, and save the lightsailships for getting big things to neighboring stars. Chief among those big things would be machines to duplicate the system’s giant lasers at other stars, allowing for travel both from and to Earth, and spreading the network from star to star.

 

The answer to Fermi’s paradox may, I think, be similar to the answer to a 15th century geographer speculating that there must be continents on the far side of the globe, and those continents must have people, then asking why they haven’t yet been visited by them. Europeans discovered people in the Americas, by virtue of making the trip before Americans could. It may be that Earthlings will discover people on exoplanets by virtue of doing it first.

[anomalous29]

Ben Rich, 2nd CEO to Lockheed Martin Skunk Works states, "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do it.”

 

“We now have technology to take ET home. No it won’t take someone’s lifetime to do it. There is an error in the equations. We know what it is. We now have the capability to travel to the stars.”

[billvon]

Ben Rich, 2nd CEO to Lockheed Martin Skunk Works states, "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do it.”

 

“We now have technology to take ET home. No it won’t take someone’s lifetime to do it. There is an error in the equations. We know what it is. We now have the capability to travel to the stars.”

Speaking of pseudoscience . . . .

 

From snopes:

=================

Bushwhacked Did former Lockheed Martin engineer Boyd Bushman provide evidence of alien life on his deathbed?

 

David Mikkelson May 2, 2015

Claim:   Former Lockheed Martin engineer Boyd Bushman provided evidence of human contact with alien life before his death in August 2014.

 

FALSE

====================

[exchemist]

Ben Rich, 2nd CEO to Lockheed Martin Skunk Works states, "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do it.”

 

“We now have technology to take ET home. No it won’t take someone’s lifetime to do it. There is an error in the equations. We know what it is. We now have the capability to travel to the stars.”

Citation required. I do not believe anybody in that position in a reputable organisation would say what you claim he has said.

 

You seem to make a speciality of making dubious claims. I think it is about time you started to justify them. 

[fahrquad]

When I look around, I am not so sure that intelligent life exists in THIS planet, much less any others.

[inverse]

Today, it was around 7.57pm when we saw a flying object in the sky. The object was shining brightly like a huge star. It was blinking with the mixture of amber, green, red and white color lights. It shone in the sky for around 5-10 minutes. It shone brighter and brighter, and got disappeared within seconds. We have had this experience not only for the first time, it has happened for over 2-3 times that too in the same direction, at the same time and at same location.

 

- INTERDISCIPLINARY -

 

Hello; to begin with;

 

I would thank to you very much and  we are  especially dealing with such researches. 

I wish you shared the video here :(

But if you are able to respond,I would request you to share the answers of the queries given below.(if you would like to respond,please follow the order numerical as given below) 

 

1---->> how was that defined object when it had disappeared (had you observed any geometric drawing or any shape when it was going away)?

2---->> what was happening just when it had been disappearing ??

3---->> and how had you realized that object when you had seen it? (could you let consider the previous two query for this one)

4---->> had you slept before seeing that object (means you had newly woken up before seeing that object) and/or had someone made you so much worried or had you been feeling yourself very much happy before the circumstance which you defined here)

 

RECOMMENDATION

 

we recommend that you NOT to be alone when you observe/see such things. And we also STRONGLY recommend that you record the video if you see once again. however, you are of course free to share any contexts  or not.

 

Regards

Edited December 25, 2016 by inverse

[DrKrettin]

 

 

we recommend that you NOT to be alone when you observe/see such things.

 

A profound piece of advice. Considering that these sightings are unpredictable and random, if they happen at all, I recommend that nobody ever goes outside alone, just in case they see a UFO. Or a unicorn. I saw a skink in my garden a few weeks ago, but nobody believed me, and I was alone. Never again.