Subject: Daniel - Agree with some parts, but I am more optimist
Comment:
See Original Content on OpEdNews in article titled "US Govt UFO "Disclosure" Open Thread"
Daniel -
Agree with some parts, but I am more optimistic about life wanting to expand beyond its natural boundaries being an emergent property of such life, and especially intelligent life, everywhere - or, pessimistic, if you believe as Stephen Hawking did, that alien contact, if it happens, will be of the conquering kind, like Columbus leading to the annihilation of most of the Native Americans (possibly through some update to Jared Dimond's Guns, Germs and Steel).
As for propulsion methods for FTL travel, NASA is already seriously looking into it with fusion propelled spacecraft, though their proposed launch date in 2069 is probably beyond the lifetime of most people reading this (though, maybe not if Life Extension technology becomes possible, which also has implications for long space voyages).
Aside from fusion, even Science Fiction as far back as the original Star Trek was proposing some sort of matter/anti-matter drive. If one could contain/create anti-matter and store it long enough, perhaps in a magnetic field, then combine it with matter in a controlled way, the resulting explosion would make a hydrogen bomb look like a firecracker. Energy is everything.
Acceleration is not a problem. At 1G that Earthlings are comfortable with - and aliens might have entirely different comfort zones, perhaps 2G or more - you can reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, in just 3.58 starship years, or about 6 years back here on Earth, due to relativity. I haven't checked the math on the usually reliable physics.org site, but I've seen similar quotations elsewhere and have no reason to doubt it.
May 2, 2013 #11 Eli Botkin 101 0 To yoyopizza: Travel to a distant star needs to be realistically comfortable for the travelers. That implies that spaceship acceleration (to speeds near light speed) should be about the same as the gravitational acceleration one experiences on Earth, namely 1g (which = 1.0326 ly/y^2). Accelerating at 1g to the midpoint and then decelerating at 1g from midpoint to Alpha Centauri will result in a trip time of about 3.58 years on the travelers' clock and 6.00 years on Earth's clock. At midpoint the speed will be about 0.952 c.
I should have mentioned in the earlier reply that your story need not be limited to traveling to Alpha Centauri. With 1g acceleration/deceleration any galaxy/star in the observable universe (that is, out to about 13.7 BILLION light-years) can be visited with less than about 45 years of traveler's time.
Source click here.
There is supposedly a calculator showing what you could reach at a given acceleration/deceleration here, but it is an old link and I couldn't get it to work. (click here).
Alpha Centauri was the destination of the original Lost in Space TV series, and although the creators of that marginally scientific series couldn't have known it back then, it turns out that Alpha Centauri is a prime candidate for having worlds that may harbor life, including intelligent life. The second link above also discusses how we could get to the Alpha Centauri system; with 3 stars, there would be a lot to explore, including several possible life-bearing worlds!
None of this, of course, means that intelligent life, even if it exists, can or has visited us. Perhaps they have better things to do with all that great technology. But I wouldn't rule it out either.
However, the "proof" we're being dribbled out with in this new report, doesn't even move me 1% closer to believing that we are being visited by alien craft. I tend to agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson who tweeted that "if blurry...images like these are the best that can be offered, we have a long way to go." It's almost as if the American public is being tested for how gullible it is. But you don't have to invent, or release, UAP pictures too tell Americans are pretty gullible already.