Whistle blower says non-human bodies recovered from crash

[UngainlyTitan]

Just finished watching Dr Brian Keating's "Into the Impossible" podcast on Youtube. (Its over an hour long) and he is talking to some ex Navy airmen about this topic. From their testimony it would seem to me that the Pentagon should be taking this more seriously. They are reporting getting radar return after upgrades not previously seen on their older kit and that upon investigating the objects they are getting missile locks from the IR sensors on their sidewinders.
I think if I was a senior Pentagon bod, I would be interested to know, are these sensor artifacts, or real and if real, are they something the Dept. of Defence should be concerned about?
The airmen in question seem to be concerned from a air safety perspective but I think that there is more to it.

 

[Reynard]

How much risk is there really? At what point can you prove beyond reasonable doubt that he lied, if he did? Does he listen the people that he has his information from? Does he listen the locations the wrecks or non-human bodies were stored? Does he offer anything that can be verified by an investigation?

We don't know what he told them in the classified briefing, but it was enough for them to threaten to cut off funding if DoD and others don't cooperate.

 

[briggart]

I think you are not reading what I have written. Star systems as the orbit the galaxy pass near each other. Sometimes, they even interpenetrate. The Oort Cloud is between 0.03 and .08 light years away from the Sun. There are likely eccentrically orbiting comets that go out farther.

A quick google search suggests that the sun gets within a light year of another star every 500k years or so, that would put the neighbouring Oort Clouds within 0.84 lightyears of each other.
30 to 40 years at 2% lightspeed or so. That would seem doable.

This ignores the base hypothecital that the premise is based on. That a civilization can exist pretty much indefinitely in the Oort Cloud of a star system.
I do not know that we can create viable space habitats. I do not see any reason they cannot be built but I will concede that the engineering is unknown and some of the associated life science is currently unknown.
My thesis is that given the proposition that we: can build space habitats, colonise the Oort Cloud and do so over a period of mega years then colonisation of the habitable zone of the galaxy should follow over a period of a billion years or so.

Bit of nitpicking: the Oort Cloud inner boundary is supposed to be somewhere around 0.03 and 0.08 ly from the Sun, but the Cloud itself is supposed to extend to about 1ly from the Sun. Granted, the optimal zone in terms of resource availability will be closer to the inner boundary than the outer one, so I don't think it will make a lot of difference to your argument.

 

[Reynard]

I'm not going to argue with the math I don't understand, but it seems completely wrong to me that we get within one light year of another star every 500k years. When was the last time it happened? Are we currently getting closer to another star? Which one?

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Bit of nitpicking: the Oort Cloud inner boundary is supposed to be somewhere around 0.03 and 0.08 ly from the Sun, but the Cloud itself is supposed to extend to about 1ly from the Sun. Granted, the optimal zone in terms of resource availability will be closer to the inner boundary than the outer one, so I don't think it will make a lot of difference to your argument.

Ok thank, I just looked at the Wikipedia article.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I'm not going to argue with the math I don't understand, but it seems completely wrong to me that we get within one light year of another star every 500k years. When was the last time it happened? Are we currently getting closer to another star? Which one?

From the link I referred to (Which has links to papers, from the Gia data)

Edit: I could not argue the math either, but I have come across mentions that star systems can come very close occasionally and occasionally intersect. This was the first link I came across that seemed to have some good information.

A new contender on the scene is HD7977, a G3 dwarf that may have come even closer at 0.02-0.12 pc about 2.72-2.80 million years ago.

The oncoming close encounters seem to be:

Using the re-reduction of the Hipparcos astrometry, Bailer-Jones (2014) has integrated orbits for 50,000 stars to look for objects that might come or might have come close to the Sun.

The K-dwarf Hip 85605 is the winner on that timescale, with a "90% probability of coming between 0.04 and 0.20pc between 240,000 and 470,000 years from now".

The next best is GL710 a K-dwarf that will come within about 0.1-0.44pc in 1.3 million years.

From my read there are huge error bars on these estimates. Very small errors in estimations of position and velocity of these bodies right now can mean huge deviations from the estimates over time scales of hundreds of thousands to million years.

 

[briggart]

I'm not going to argue with the math I don't understand, but it seems completely wrong to me that we get within one light year of another star every 500k years. When was the last time it happened? Are we currently getting closer to another star? Which one?

Most of these stars are brown or red dwarves, with masses 0.01-0.10 that of the Sun, so their effect would be relatively minor. They typically don't have "common names", mostly just catalog designations. According to wikipedia:

List of nearest stars - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

most recent one was about 70k years ago, next significant one is expected in 1M years.


Edit: Ninja'd by UngainlyTitan

 

[Clint_L]

If the Oort Cloud had been teeming with VN probes for (presumably) a couple million years, we would know because they would long ago have expanded into the inner Solar System. We would see them swarming in the asteroid belt, the rings of Saturn, in orbit around Earth itself.

The whole point of the Fermi Paradox is that if spacefaring alien life behaves as life does on Earth -- expanding into every habitat it can, transforming those habitats in the process -- then we should not have to go looking for it. It should have colonized us already. There are three solutions:

1) Spacefaring alien life does not behave like life on Earth.
2) Spacefaring alien life doesn't exist.
3) It has colonized us already, and we just can't comprehend what's right in front of us.

There are so many more than three solutions offered for the Fermi Paradox.

Here's one: Spacefaring alien life exists but spreading out across a galaxy just isn't economically worthwhile.

 

[trappedslider]

There are so many more than three solutions offered for the Fermi Paradox.

Here's one: Spacefaring alien life exists but spreading out across a galaxy just isn't economically worthwhile.

or
Came here and went "eww" and made this whole area of space off limits

 

[MarkB]

or
Came here and went "eww" and made this whole area of space off limits

I like the take on it from the Midnight Burger podcast. Aliens keep Earth off-limits but broadcast us to three galaxies because we're just so darn funny.