• Signtist@bookwyr.me
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    19 hours ago

    You can definitely make up some reason why this UFO would be able to match the Earth’s speed without requiring all of physics to be wrong, but it’s actually pretty easy to get people like this to believe that everything we’ve been taught is a lie to cover up some grand truth that’s being kept from us. It makes them feel smart and validates their common paranoia that world is against them.

    It benefits the grifters leave these inconsistencies in because it weeds out the people who weren’t fully hooked, and makes the ones who do continue to believe more delusional, isolating them from their support network and making them more reliant on the grifter. I unfortunately watched this happen with my mom, who ended up dying after spending most of her money on random scams claiming to cure cancer because she’d been convinced that the conventional treatments were the real scams.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    I think the UFO conspiracy is bullshit, but a slight counterpoint is that the craft was moving relative to the earth, sun, and galaxy from the very beginning so being able to negate or slightly offset that wouldn’t change its course unless force were added in the opposite direction. At most it would just slowly hover off on a tangent of the orbit at an incredibly slow rate relative to the earth.

    • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Also, if a civilization is advanced enough to create space-time bubbles, they are advanced enough to have speed matching cruise control.

    • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
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      1 day ago

      That works for linear motion but not for rotation—that requires acceleration (provided by gravity).

      (I know, it’s a meme comment and I’m being pedantic…)

    • BootLoop@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      I forgot when the first manned spacecraft went into zero gravity and they got left behind as the Earth hurled away from them but OP reminded me about it.

      • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Well “zero gravity” doesn’t really mean zero gravity. It’s free fall (due to gravity). If you’re in orbit, you’re moving so fast “sideways” that you perpetually “miss” the Earth and just continue falling forever.

        But also free fall (only being acted upon by the force of gravity) is exactly the same as experiencing no force at all, and that’s general relativity in a nutshell

      • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        zero gravity

        “Zero gravity” isn’t actually zero gravity. In orbit, you’re still falling, the planet is just curving away at the same rate as the fall

      • Pencilnoob@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        the spacecraft doesn’t immediately lose all the celestial relative velocity just by going into space, it’s still moving extremely fast:

        • with the sun and earth through the galaxy
        • with the Earth around the sun
        • and is still affected by Earth’s gravity, just now it’s able to counter Earth’s pull with a faster motion pulling it outward, so it balances out to appear weightless

        Just by going into orbit and counterbalancing the Earth’s gravity with rotational velocity doesn’t mean it’s not still moving extremely fast relative to the stars

  • QueenHawlSera@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Sadly, I’ve come to the realization that the sueprnatural doesn’t exist.

    There’s no psychic powers, no chaos magic, no God, no UFOs. the universe is cold and dead, and the fact that any of us are alive and aware is a temporary “glitch”

    Conciousness is a mystery, and given that Integrated Information Theory was recently branded a pseudoscience. It will remain so, but neuroscience says it aint the fucking soul.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      19 hours ago

      Aliens are not the same things as ghosts. They’re not supernatural. They’re just people who evolved on a different planet to us it doesn’t require anything other than basic science.

      To be clear I’m not saying that any have ever visited earth but you don’t need to lump them in with ghosts unicorns and magicians.

      • Zron@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        Oh aliens definitely exist. Everything from slime molds to interplanetary and even interstellar species probably exists somewhere.

        They’re not gonna fucking come here though. No one in the universe besides us can probably even detect earth as having intelligent life. We’ve only been broadcasting radio for a little over a century, on a planet that’s 4.5 billion years old.

        And If you can travel between stars, you can also live perfectly fine without a planet. I’m sure there are star systems with much better resources than sol, that don’t have omnicidal apes with itchy nuclear trigger fingers.

      • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        Aliens, at least highly advanced ones, actually function very similar to angels, gods, demons, etc philosophically. Imagine an alien species that evolved a hundred million years before we did. Unless we’re already close to some upper limit to science and technology, such aliens would be as gods to us.

        Alien visitors thus end up functioning very similarly, philosophically speaking, to gods and angels. Traditionally unknown natural phenomena would be attributed to gods. But aliens can serve the same function. See something strange in the sky? No matter how strange, super advanced aliens might be responsible. We have no idea what they’re capable of. Astronomers discover a star behaving really oddly? Could be aliens. Strange comet flying through the solar system? Could be an alien space ship.

        We cannot begin to predict the capabilities of a species millions of years more advanced than ourselves. Thus, just like the gods of old, advanced aliens can be used to explain any unknown natural phenomena. Instead of god of the gaps, you get aliens of the gaps.

    • Taldan@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Plenty of “supernatural” things exist.

      We can fly through the air with nothing connecting us to the ground at all - flight was as fantastical as magic to early humanity.

      Psychic powers? We can already silently communicate across the world in fractions of a second - is that not functional telepathy?

      Chaos magic? We have the ultimate earth rending fireball spell. We call it nuclear arms.

      To repurpose a saying about alternative medicine: Supernatural phenomenon proven to exist is just science

  • rtxn@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    We, stupid primitive monkey people, can make drones that hover in place by counteracting extermal forces, and VR devices that can track their position in space using only visual and inertial references, but apparently the super advanced aliens with their gravity-defying technology can’t figure it out.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I think the more pressing issue is the “we’ve got film footage of an object that defies basic physical laws in a variety of unexplainable ways” and the conclusion is “this must be an alien aircraft with borderline supernatural powers” rather than “this film footage is distorted or entirely fake”.

      Stupid primitive monkey people have been making shadows on the cave wall for even longer than we’ve been making drones and VR devices. But apparently we should absorb the footage incredulously while attributing increasingly far-fetched technologies to a blurry dot presented by an organization full of serial liars.

      • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        That’s a bit unfair. How do you explain all the IR sensor and radar evidence in some of these incidents? In those incidents, the objects weren’t defying the laws of physics, necessarily. It only seemed unlikely that any lifeform as we know it could survive the G-force that would incur from such rapid acceleration, which–in my opinion–means the objects were likely drones of some kind.

        I don’t necessarily believe the sightings are aliens, but I do think they warrant further and continued inquiry. There have been too many of these “orb” sightings around military aircraft and naval ships to simply ignore/dismiss them outright.

      • SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Or issue #3: “it’s perfectly normal footage that wouldn’t seem supernatural at all if you had stayed awake in high school physics class”

  • Ajen@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    every scientist on planet earth is wrong about basic physics

    Until someone comes up with a unified theory that works for both Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics I’d say this is true - we’re all wrong about basic physics.

    • SatyrSack@quokk.au
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      22 hours ago

      Science is a liar sometimes! This is Aristotle. Thought to be the smartest man on the planet. He believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and everybody believed him, because he was so smart. Until another smartest guy came around: Galileo, and he disproved that theory, making Aristotle and everybody else on Earth look like a bitch. 'Course, Galileo then thought comets were an optical illusion, and there was no way that the moon could cause the ocean’s tides. Everybody believed that because he was so smart. He was also wrong, making him and everyone else on Earth look like a bitch again. And then, best of all, Sir Isaac Newton gets born, and blows everybody’s nips off with his big brains. 'Course, he also thought he could turn metal into gold and died eating mercury, making him yet another stupid bitch!

      https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zgk8UdV7GQ0

      It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia S8E10 “Reynolds vs. Reynolds: The Cereal Defense”

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      It’s generally useful to think of these things in more nuanced terms than right or wrong. If/when they are unified, it will be a refinement.

      https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html

      My answer to him was, “John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      18 hours ago

      It’s not Newtonian physics, we know Newtonian physics is wrong and have done for about a century.

      It’s Einstein physics and quantum mechanics that need to be unified. Of course the fact that they don’t agree probably indicates that one, or the other, or both is also wrong.

      I suspect that the real answer probably has something to do with our misunderstanding in how coarse graining plays inro quantum mechanics, because it just seems sort of a cop out to say that changes smooth out over larger distances. It’s just putting an arbitrary boundary between the two realms. It’s a good explanation but it also doesn’t really make any sense because why would the universe care?

    • Taldan@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      When they come up with that model, it’ll be able to explain both how protons are formed, and show that the 9th planet, Vulcan, exists…

    • alias_qr_rainmaker@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 hours ago

      I guess I should have made it clear that not every single person in the UFO movement is a grifter, there are plenty of people like yourself who saw something in they couldn’t explain. I just don’t think those unexplained lights in the sky are ET phoning home

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      You saw a flying thing you didn’t identify and that doesn’t really mean anything towards the existence of aliens or even advanced secret technology.

      It just means you don’t know what you saw.

      Doesn’t make you a grifter. If you start claiming it was actually aliens and write a book about it to sell, then it’s a gift.

    • Taldan@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      It’s crazy to think how fast we’re moving through the universe without encountering much of anything; energy or matter. Thanks heliosphere and the vastness of the universe

      …Still makes me uncomfortable to see visualized though

  • lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 day ago

    To be real, a lot of these UFO documentaries are filled with gish-gallop arguments, manipulative music, disguised light hypnosis, and flashing lights and sounds.

    Can’t really see theses as anything but a grift tbh, even if all the arguments were true, all because of the framing.

    Have a UFO documentary that is framed like a oldschool 70’s BBC documentary, and then we can talk.