No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public

[WillBrink]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/u...reid-navy.html

So UFO’s are real, government officials admit to classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

And, classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee occurred on Oct. 21, 2019, and to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.

JFC folks this is huge!

While this is a big step forward to the gubment admitting officially that there's something in our airspace the can't explain and it's not us (the US), I don't see an actual admittance of it from the above. The DOD did admit the vids from the planes were legit - which some took as meaning the objects in the vids were legit - but again, stopped well short of admitting to UFOs officially.

I will be very interested to see what it is they let out.

[WillBrink]

Why?

There are billions of grains of sand on the beach, so clearly one of them should be a silver dollar?

The shear numbers make it so unlikely it's as close to zero as you could ask for. That's why. Even your most conservative scientists are all in agreement on the probability of life on other planets. The real debate is whether that life could and has traveled the distances to visit us, which is a different Q and far fewer scientists on board with that one. All the grains of sand on the planet are but a fraction of the number of stars and planets in our galaxy alone, and there's at least 100 billion more galaxies each with 1-3 hundred billion stars in them, and that's just the observable universe. Add to that all the ingredients for life such a water, carbon, etc are all very common and everywhere we point a telescope, we find new planets. And on and so forth.

so the statement "statistically, there is no way we are alone in the universe" is accurate, but more accurate would be "the statistically likelihood of us being the only life in the universe is as close to zero as it could get" or similar statement.

[TomMcC]

Of course that assumes that life arriving by natural means is really not a rare or nearly impossible, or an actually impossible thing. If it's an extreme long shot, say 1 chance in 10 to the 60 th power, and we really don't know at all what natural process is involved, and the universe is an extremely inhospitable place, then would it change things concerning the likelihood of alien life existing...I think so.

[WillBrink]

Of course that assumes that life arriving by natural means is really not a rare or nearly impossible, or an actually impossible thing. If it's an extreme long shot, say 1 chance in 10 to the 60 th power, and we really don't know at all what natural process is involved, and the universe is an extremely inhospitable place, then would it change things concerning the likelihood of alien life existing...I think so.

One can assume life is extremely rare inputting the most pessimistic numbers into say the Drake equation and still come out with thousands of planets with intelligent life on them. The human mind simply not capable of really fathoming the types of numbers we are working with, and then again added to that the fact all the basic things we know life needs, like water, etc, are very common in the universe.

Make it extremely rare and make it "nearly impossible" to happen, and you end up with a big number of planets with life on them. When you're working with number and time frames like that, along with what we know about life on earth, being neither fragile or rare as once assumed, the statistically likelihood of using being alone is as close to zero as one can get until we find something, or something is released to us that proves it and so forth.

That's really all there is too it and one can reject what ever that want from it as it suits their word view and such.

To repeat, a totally different discussion to whether any of them have visited us, and that's far less likely in the view of most scientists who do that for a living. I'm a reductionist and try to distill things down to it's basic level where I can get no further without more intel.

I am, as are many, convinced that there's something in our airspace that can't be explained by any known way. The Nimitz event alone is one of many, and there's a handful of them that are a lock for me. That leaves two possibilties:

(1) It's us (human tech)
(2) It's not us

Exploring either of those options brings up a lot of interesting Qs and were covered at length in prior threads. Most probably land on option 1, but that seems to imply we have developed tech that defies physics as we know it, and highly qualified SME's who have seen the capabilities of the UFOs are clear we are not even close to such tech.

[Business_Casual]

The Drake Equation is specious.

[TomMcC]

Putting aside the validity of the Drake equation for a moment. The number that i gave as the probability for abiogenises is a low number, I think its much much higher. Even that surpasses by a huge magnitude the estimated number of stars in the known universe. I think you may be down playing the magnitude of the problem of live coming from non life.

[WillBrink]

The Drake Equation is specious.

Use any equation you wish, they'll all come out the same results give or take.

[WillBrink]

Putting aside the validity of the Drake equation for a moment. The number that i gave as the probability for abiogenises is a low number, I think its much much higher. Even that surpasses by a huge magnitude the estimated number of stars in the known universe. I think you may be down playing the magnitude of the problem of live coming from non life.

The Drake equation, like most equations is as valid as the data you input into it, and at this point, what gets inputed into that equation mostly a WAG. I mentioned it simply as a reference point. As we have n = 1 example currently, no one really knows the probability of life existing on another planet from the aspect of the staring point itself. Life on this planet demonstrates its neither rare nor fragile as once thought, and again, along with the shear numbers, and the fact all the needed chems of life are common, vast majority of scientists in the field conclude, well, you, know.

[Adrenaline_6]

Again, like I mentioned earlier. It doesn't matter how common organic chemicals are, how many planets that have them and can support life there are...if the theory that life can be made from organic chemicals is false, all those numbers are multiplying into 0.

If it's true, then yes, if it can be done once, why can't it be done again....but be as it may, that theory is still totally unproven. There are many unanswered questions by critics of the theory that cannot come close to being answered with our current knowledge.

[TomMcC]

Again, like I mentioned earlier. It doesn't matter how common organic chemicals are, how many planets that have them and can support life there are...if the theory that life can be made from organic chemicals is false, all those numbers are multiplying into 0.

If it's true, then yes, if it can be done once, why can't it be done again....but be as it may, that theory is still totally unproven. There are many unanswered questions by critics of the theory that cannot come close to being answered with our current knowledge.

I think the issue becomes can we rely on scientists that dismiss supernaturalism from the get go and assume as the only viable position to hold naturalism/materialism. Since naturalism is the only viable position, then it follows that non-living chemicals had to evolve into living things. What else do we have? As improbable as abiogenesis is, it had to happen that way. We're just waiting for science to catch up for the explanation. I think denying the possibility of supernaturalism is irrationalism (some do here, some don't). Even if life does begin from natural processes, here and out there, I wonder how probable it is that it would evolve past the stage of worms, to the stage of interstellar travel.