Here we have confirmed military video and and expert multiple eye witnessing of an actual event that has magical capabilities and yet most of the world believes there's an invisible man in the sky and some badgers are calling others fucking stupid to postulate these are things are not from round here.

Mistaken might be a less adversarial word.

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Except it’s not “that impossible”. It’s a scientific breakthrough or two beyond what we currently have. Those breakthroughs could have happened without our knowledge.

bad_hair_day wrote:

Mistaken might be a less adversarial word.

Twas a joke.

SpaceGazelle wrote:

The Drake equation is it's not an equation but a biased guestimate based on Earth stuff, which is exactly the opposite stuff it's trying to guess about. It can, in no way, be used to estimate anything, even probalistically. The observable universe is so big it makes more statistical sense to consider it infinite in size (and it may well be) but finite in age. 1% of infinity is still infinity and Drake doesn't even attempt to answer this.

That's the treatment it deserved. 

What Professor Seager tried to do with the idea was drop some of the cruft (the probability of a civilisation regenerating (wtf), the assumption of the use of radio), and re-purpose it as a tool for estimating how many planets, with life, could be out there. Mostly to provide a starting point for how and where you'd possibly begin to look.

I don't think that's nonsense.

That's how many of the great ideas start out (like, what did everyone do before Planck's constant?).

I guess the difference here is that there's no discernible clue for a 'pattern' or even a precise goal to a search for life beyond Earth right now. So it's easy to fuck with anyone with any kind of conviction.

So they probably recognised the appearance of them elsewhere as a sign of an advanced civilisation.

Some of you are on another fucking planet. How'd you get there?

Nobody’s disbelieving the eyewitness, we’re just pointing out that there are more plausible explanations than the one that you’ve jumped to.

Planet Yoss, dullest planet in the Ennui system. Inhabitants benefit from an equal distribution of misery. Atmosphere predominantly vape.

Diluted Dante wrote:

The question that never seems to be asked is, if we were able to track something on radar, how did we miss it's approach to the planet, descent through the atmosphere, and subsequent ascent to space and leaving earth?

The account described here is in the Pacific Ocean which is slightly large compared to possible radar coverage and temporal satellite resolution. That is, if something was there at all.

I don't believe the people are lying, but nor do I believe aliens have visited here. The universe is big and there are bound to be other forms of life and civilisations we might be able to recognise if we ever met. But the idea that is more attractive to me is that we are too far separated in time and space to ever meet one outside of a beacon of a long extinct one.

The argument the universe is large is obviously true, but time is deep. Single cell life emerged on Earth relatively quickly (about a billion years after the planet), but it still took another 3.5bn years for multicellular life to emerge, and another 0.65 billion years for us to emerge as a species. If evolutionary pressures work throughout the universe on essentially similar principles, this naturally makes it possible to statistacally argue that whilst life may be common, intelligent life will likely be very distant from other intelligent life on other planets.

The dark ages didn't hold anything up.

Although statistically you wouldnt expect an even (and consistently enormous) separation in space between life-supporting planets. Given similar starting conditions (progenitor supernovae ejecta, stable star forming region, dense molecular clouds of protein building blocks, CO, OH, etc) it is reasonable to assume there will be clusters of solar systems in relative proximity with the right ingredients for life.

Of course that then requires rocky and water planets forming in benign environments, and all sorts of beneficial chance events. The same way we look at Mars for possible life should also hold for nearby stars - we shouldn't be surprised to find similar chemical mixes around the region of stars that formed near the sun (although these will all likely be dispersed through a larger volume in the galaxy, so it wont necessarily be our nearest stars we would find these conditions).

Why the fuck would it be aliens when it’s clearly time travellers?! Jesus.
(Who was probably also a time traveller)

Should look up a def of Dark Ages buddy