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UFO Reports Are Fertilizer For Military Budgets
Since December 2019 the United States has a Space Force as one of eight branches of U.S. Armed Forces. Each of those branches has lots of higher ranking officer positions. All people who are put into those want a lucrative board seat at some weapon manufacturer when they retire. They will only get one if they manage to create enough revenue for those manufacturers while they are still in uniform.
The new command therefore needs new weapons. Otherwise there will be no revenue for the weapon manufacturers and no lucrative board seats for retired officers. But spending tax dollars on weapons requires at least some nominal justification. There needs to be a threat that requires new weapons to counter it.
Thus we are presented with an onslaught of UFO rumors and silly grainy videos:
The idea of UFOs has gone mainstream. The dam broke with a New York Times story about a year ago on three declassified Navy videos. Last weekend, 60 Minutes did its own report, and The New Yorker has a nice long writeup of the history of the debate within the American government.
The sightings involve objects that seem to defy the laws of physics.
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It’s the “physics-defying” aspects of UFOs that imply an advanced alien civilization. Although some suggest that Chinese or Russian drones could be behind what people are seeing, the idea of those nations being that far ahead of the United States can probably be dismissed.
From believing in alien UFOs to making laughable stupid claims is just a short step:
Josh Rogin @joshrogin – 2:23 PM · Jun 4, 2021
There are two theories about the UFO’s. One is they are from another planet, one is that they are from another dimension. In other words, it could be humans from the future, not an alien species.
This reply is fitting:
Cheryl Rofer @CherylRofer – 3:24 PM · Jun 4, 2021
Today's lesson from Logic 101.
If you have no explanation for an observation, it does not mean that any explanation is a good one.
It does not follow that
We can't explain some observations, so they must be aliens/ a directed-energy weapon/ a lab leak.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is none for either of Rogin's theories.
Many of the reports about Unknown Flying Object aren't even about flying objects but are based on natural light phenomenons, dirty lenses or long fingers which randomly create fuzzy blobs.
by XKCD – bigger
This is simple. UFO's aren't real:
Mick West has spent years debunking chemtrails, UFOs, and other conspiracies. This interview of him (vid), brought to my attention on Twitter, seems to conclusively show that the Navy videos can be explained with some basic trigonometry and an understanding of how cameras work.
He’s even replicated some of the camera tricks to recreate images that resemble what we can see on the Navy videos. If you’re interested in the topic, I highly recommend watching the interview. Here’s a shorter video for those who want the basic idea.
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As West points out in the first video above, there is nothing new about the latest UFO releases. All that has changed is that now the government has released its own footage, which is basically the same kind of evidence that he and other skeptics have debunked in the past, just with better resolution. But because the government now tells them it’s ok to believe something, people take that as a sign of credibility.
What’s depressing about this, as someone who writes about foreign policy, is that the national security bureaucracy is apparently still considered credible.
So credible, we are told, that even obvious nonsense about extraterrestrial origin of UFOs must be taken somewhat seriously.
Caitlin Johnstone points that if there were extraterrestrials (there aren't) the military should be kept as far away from them as possible:
One of the disconcerting things I’ve been seeing again and again from all the major players in this new narrative like Lue Elizondo and Christopher Mellon is the absurd assertion that not only is it entirely possible that the unknown phenomena allegedly being regularly witnessed by military personnel are extraterrestrial in origin, but that if they are extraterrestrial they may want to hurt us.
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I’ve sat through so much video footage on this subject, and I just get so frustrated listening to all these military-minded men talking about the need to know what the “capabilities” of these things are and how to prevent them from posing a threat to “national security”. If we are in fact not alone in this universe and are in fact being visited by other civilizations, these are the absolute stupidest questions we could possibly be asking ourselves about them. Not how can we contact them, not is it possible to communicate with them, not what could we learn from them, not where are they from and what is their story, but how can we kill them if we need to.
I have no idea if we are being visited by ETs, but if we are the US military is literally the worst thing our species could possibly use to relate to them.
Despite all the UFO hype it will be difficult to explain to the public that the military needs more money to fight extraterrestrials which do not exist.
Thus, just in time, the campaign gets redirected. Now it must be the 'real enemies' who have caused the dirty lenses phenomenons. Caitlin in another piece:
The New York Times has published an article on the contents of the hotly anticipated US government report on UFOs, as per usual based on statements of anonymous officials, and as per usual promoting narratives that are convenient for imperialists and war profiteers.
Together with one voice, the anonymous US officials and the "paper of record" which is supposed to scrutinize US officials assure us definitively that the mysterious aerial phenomena that have reportedly been witnessed by military personnel are certainly not any kind of secret US technology, but could totally be aliens and could definitely be a sign that the Russians or Chinese have severely lapped America's lagging military development.
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Oh well if the US government has ruled out secret US government weaponry programs, hot damn that's good enough for me. Great journalism you guys.
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"Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could have been experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China," the Times reports. "One senior official briefed on the intelligence said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology. He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology."
None of the UFO sightings discussed recently is consistent with anything hypersonic.
Russia and China have developed hypersonic missiles to overcome U.S. missile defenses in a return strike after a U.S. first strike nuclear attack. They keep the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction alive even after the U.S. designed and deployed missile defenses to destroy it.
Hypersonic is defined as flying faster than Mach 5. It is one of those fields in which the U.S. military makes a joke of itself:
Steve Trimble @TheDEWLine – 7:46 PM · Jun 2, 2021
Speaking at live CSIS webcast, DOD hypersonic director Mike White says today that US hypersonic weapons now in development can hit targets 500 miles away in 10 minutes.
If you do the calculation, that equates to an average speed of Mach 4 over the 10 minute period.
Mach 4 ain't above Mach 5.
On the other side of things the U.S. military defines about anything as a 'threat'. From a recent Wall Street Journal piece about Russia's northern coastline:
The [Russian] military has renovated other airfields across Russia’s northern coast and deployed S-400 air defense systems and state-of-the-art radar to complicate potential advances from North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries.
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The U.S. has recalculated its own Arctic strategy, pushing plans to put more fifth-generation fighters in Alaska than anywhere else in the country, in an effort to overwhelm the threat from Russia’s antiaircraft defenses.
Russia's antiaircraft defenses are as much a "threat" to the U.S. as UFO's are.
It is all propaganda. The U.S. military-industrial-media complex is creating a new cold war to justify spending for weapons that are not needed. As Caitlin concludes:
I have no idea what if anything is going on with these UFO phenomena, but I do know the world-threatening new cold war the US is waging against Russia and China is insane. There is no valid reason our planet's dominant power structures cannot at the very least cease brandishing armageddon weapons at each other and begin collaborating toward a better world together.
Reject the propagandists and cold warriors, no matter how elaborate or bizarre their manipulations become. Keep an eye on these bastards, and help spread awareness of what they're about.
Just to give you all an idea of scale: the closest stars to Earth (besides the Sun) are Alpha Centauri A and B – a pair of stars with no candidates for intelligent life (they’re a binary system, which practically excludes the possibility of any planet capable of sustaining life) – which is 4.37 light-years away.
That means that, if you could travel at the speed of causality (which you can’t; only particles with zero mass can, but let’s assume you can travel at speeds close to the c), you would take 4.37 years to travel from Earth to Alpha Centauri AB. That’s already one hell of a long trip for a human being (you would have to have a spaceship with natural resources large enough to keep a human being for four years and four months, but most likely enough resources to keep a little colony or a team of astronauts of at least four); it would be hard enough to find astronauts willing to volunteer to that useless trip (he or she would be wasting 9 years of his/her lifetime, in Earth time, abstracting from the dilatation of spacetime, where time would be slower to the astronauts).
But that’s if we can travel to speeds close to the speed of causality. With the technology and imagination we have today, the fastest speed we could travel (without a human being, just a probe) would only reach Alpha Centauri in circa 100,000 years (rounding down). That’s obviously beyond the human scale, there’s zero chance it will ever happen in the foreseeable future.
If there’s intelligent life in the Universe besides ours (which is very likely), then they’re most likely at least some hundreds of millions of light-years away (we can estimate that from the few candidate planets we “found” with decades and decades of telescopes). So far, all the candidate planets we found have zero chance of having intelligent life: the only probability is that they have primitive life (most likely, unicellular life). And those planets already are very far away.
The average life-span of a complex species is 30 million years, but most likely less than that (10-15 years). The homo sapiens will probably not get much beyond the 10 million year mark, if we take an educated guess based on past species. That means we have 10 million light-years left of existence, realistically speaking.
That means an intelligent form of life would have just 10 million light-years to find us, in whatever stage of our civilization development (they could find us in the Paleolithic; they could find us at our apex; they could find us at our terminal decline). They can’t travel at the speed of causality, so that means that, either they must live within 10 million light-years of us to meet us, or they will arrive in a planet without any intelligent form of life (natural selection doesn’t tend to intelligent forms of life; intelligent forms of life are not naturally better adapted than non-intelligent forms of life; it is unlikely another intelligent form of life will immediately succeed the homo sapiens unless the homo sapiens itself evolves to another intelligent species, but extinction is always statistically more probable). And all of that assuming this alien form of life can already travel at speeds close to the speed of causality at the right time (i.e. while we exist). That’s a virtually impossible combination of factors – and remember: the homo sapiens can only exist once; once we’re extinct, we will never come back to life ever again, we’ll be gone forever (DNA survives for some hundreds of thousands of years in ideal circumstances, therefore the “aliens cloning us” hypothesis doesn’t extend the likelihood of us meeting them that much).
Just with this simple calculation, we can already conclude it is impossible for an intelligent alien form to meet us. We know there are no intelligent life within a 10 million light-year radius from us. And, even if there was, we would never be able to meet them, as we (and/or them) would be extinct by the time we would get to them/them to us.
And no. No alien species will ever be able to travel above the speed of causality. It is already theoretically proven this is impossible for anything with a mass.
The only chance for intelligent species to meet each other is if an entire solar system or a group of relatively close solar systems, by a miracle of the universe, has more than one life-capable planet, and have to, by pure luck, develop intelligent species independently and more or less at the same time. Then we would have a scenario where intelligent forms of life live at the same time, at relatively short distances. But that, if possible, will not be us, as we know our Solar System is an isolated, in the middle of nowhere, solar system (which may, according to some theories, be a condition sine qua non for life to exist; in that case, this “galaxian confederation hypothesis” becomes even more unlikely).
Posted by: vk | Jun 5 2021 21:45 utc | 36
A lot of science being taken in vain today, but not just by UFO nuts. (There are strange things in the sky and there may well be alien life, but there’s no reason to connect the two. No reason is by definition irrational, sad to say.) As to why the military would play around with this nonsense? Because they are people in a decaying society and superstition comes naturally. Alien encounter mythology is a modern religion, period.
Particular weird remarks in comments.
“Travel to the past is impossible.” It is a practical impossibility but then so is a space elevator. See the literature for closed timelike curves. This may have been an incorrectly phrased attempt to deny the possibility of temporal paradoxes. There are no paradoxes, except in words. At any rate most scientists seem to have concluded Einstein was all wet, so they simply ignore the theoretical possibility.
“You can only time travel forwards.” This is incorrect, in the sense people really use the term. “Time travel” has always meant somehow going from “now” to “then” without going in between. This is not what it means to age. Incidentally, in the apparent loopholes in General Relativity that suggest time travel to the past is a feasible theoretical construct *as of now,* there is no such thing. Travel through wormholes, which really is from here to there without going in between, the last I looked, is impossible. (For those who’ve read that exotic matter might make a wormhole traversable, there is no clear idea of what this exotic matter might be. In my view, that means it is not even a hypothesis.)
“The concept of multi-dimensions only really makes sense in quantum mechanics, where extremely small particles can and probably do inhabit multiple dimensional spaces (therefore they also transcend time).” Fools rush in where angels fear to tread! The status of time in quantum mechanics is not transcended. If anything, it’s equations (formalism) assume a kind of absolute time, which does not exist, as the need for relativistic corrections to GPS satellite coordinate prove. It may well be QM’s reliance on a simple undefined version of time, instead of spacetime as in General Relativity, is why the two theories are not mathematically compatible. As to whether infinite dimensional Hilbert space, an essential part of QM’s mathematical structure, is deemed to be an actual thing? People who reject General Relativity and commit to QM are divided. Some believe infinite dimensional Hilbert space is merely a mathematical trick permitting us to calculate probabilites for a given experimental setup. Others think fundamental physics, by which they mean QM or possibly superstring theory, doesn’t describe reality, but merely correlates laboratory measurements for a given experimental setup. Or possibly that there are multiple realities which are mutually inaccessible at some point. Or that reality isn’t really describable but merely given, presumably by God though they are generally too coy to say so. Or something. Which is why the injunction, “Shut up and calculate” is so popular.’
“We should not extrapolate quantum mechanics physics to the ‘macro” world.” This is possibly the nuttiest one of all. The fact that nobody can “extrapolate” QM to the macro world (something highlighted by the Schroedinger cat thought experiment) is not a problem to be resolved by declaring there is no problem if you don’t try to “explain” the universe from QM. The problem is, the universe doesn’t agree. Macroscopic quantum phenomena exist. Lasers, superconductors and superfluids are three commonplace examples. Further, the universe itself was once a micrscopic, i.e., quantum object. The expansion of the universe from those microscopic beginnings is a practical extrapolation from the micro to the macro.
The Alcubierre construct does not accelerate any mass to light speed, so it does not violate c. The notion that the practical impossibility isn’t enough, that someone just has to flat out pronounce “No” like a Pope rejecting the ordination of women priests is merely insolence. It would be a real objection to say the Alcubierre construct requires the equivalent of antigravity, which isn’t a thing and *that*’s why it doesn’t work even in principle. But, sorry, “no” is not even a real objection, much less a correct one.
Causality is not a thing in the same sense as electromagnetic radiation, therefore phrases like “the speed of causality” however really are pseudoscience.
And, despite another commenter, the Drake equation is *not* pseudoscience. *If* one puts in the uncertainties (or error bars if you prefer) the Drake equation conclusively proves we cannot authoritatively pronounce on the statistical distribution of intelligent alien life forms. Most people don’t put in the uncertainties, but that’s bad math, not pseudoscience. Or maybe lying with statistics, at worst. But not pseudoscience. The idiocy about it being like astrology because of “unbounded or tested [sic] variables” in the Drake equation is a new low in idiocy. The number of stars in the galaxy etc. is testable and is also bounded. Astrology has no measurable variables, *not even in principle.* There are no bounds to the gloom-making influence of the planet Saturn. Indeed, the constellations are not even things, being collections of stars at wildly varying distances, instead of bounded entities like a galaxy. And of course the mechanisms of astrology are immaterial.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Jun 6 2021 0:37 utc | 59
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