[News] UFO Report: US Finds No Explanation For Sightings

[OzMike]

Apart from the one where Keanu Reeves is the star, the name of the film escapes me, though I know it was a remake of an old black and white one.
All aliens in movies that come here are blood thirsty aggro merchants and thugs, when watching this type of film I wonder how they could invent something like interstellar travel machines.
Then wifey says that the clever ones invent the machines to get rid of this type, like transportation.
She might have something.

 

[sydney]

Apart from the one where Keanu Reeves is the star, the name of the film escapes me, though I know it was a remake of an old black and white one.
All aliens in movies that come here are blood thirsty aggro merchants and thugs, when watching this type of film I wonder how they could invent something like interstellar travel machines.
Then wifey says that the clever ones invent the machines to get rid of this type, like transportation.
She might have something.

WA has been a bit of a mecca for stargazers over the years , it also has an enormous land mass which is largely uninhabited , you would think that if aliens were buzzing around anywhere near earth in their interplanetary gizmo's WA would be a prime location for their attentions .....the sitings here are very few and far between , if aliens have approached earth after travelling across the cosmos you'd have to think they are going to hang around and have a pretty good look at what we're up to .....unless they already know somehow , it's a fascinating subject , parallel universes, parallel dimensions .....i personally think there has to be life out there somewhere but i think it is probably too far away for us to make contact.....150 billion light years is a fairly long trek.

 

[Igzilla]

Even our first radio transmissions of 100+ years ago will have only travelled about 200 light-years from the Earth, our galaxy alone is about 100,00 light-years across. Not surprising we haven't heard much yet.

We may find simple life on those ice/water/moons in our backyard...Enceladus? Europa? (Apologies... haven't done my detailed research ), AND remember the Universe is so vast, with galaxies millions of light years away from us, that any radio waves emitted from that far may just not have reached us yet.
It's vast, huge, incredibly so... I can't imagine we are the only life form in the Universe...surely that is statistically (almost, never say never) impossible.

That Marconi was a clever bloke

Ok I misread the article, make that er... about 100 light-years?

Also, the radio transmissions we've "sent out" (i.e. leaked) will be incredibely hard to detect, as their intensity will change as an inverse square of their distance, so double the distance, a quarter of the intensity. In addition, as 99.9% of all radio braodcasts weren't meant to be beamed out into space, the energy in the transmitted waves that actually got sent into space would be less than 50% at most (some radio frequencies being reflected back to earth by the ionosphere, or absorbed by it). You'd have to have a sensitive detector, tuned to the right frequency, looking in the right direction to catch them. Interestingly, now we're moving towards more and more satellite comms and fibre optic delivery, we're sending fewer and fewer signals into space, so in some sense it's a window of opportunity. if other civilisations follow a similar technological patth, then we may never see their radio transmissions as they transition to a more efficient method.

 

[Questions]

The Doyouthinktheysaurus?

I don’t mind setting you up.

 

[Lyndhurst 14]

No religious beliefs but definitely open to the possibility of other life forms. I remember watching Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and seeing how utterly insignificant this planet was in the grand cosmic scheme but thinking there has to be something else out there. Then you also think is this just wishful thinking, like religion, and in reality there is nothing out there. It does seem that an awful lot of factors need to be in place for life to exist in the first place - right distance from the sun, abundant water, a few lightening strikes to jump start life etc. etc. Possibly other life forms exist that aren't carbon based and we do not currently have the technology to detect them. Perhaps other life forms are aware of our existence but view us as primitive and inferior and are not interested in making contact, a bit like having a nasty relative - you know where they live but there's is no point in going to visit. There have been some very good movies on this, Contact (based on the novel by Carl Sagan) and The day the earth stood still. All you can do is keep an open mind

 

[raymondo]

Also, the radio transmissions we've "sent out" (i.e. leaked) will be incredibely hard to detect, as their intensity will change as an inverse square of their distance, so double the distance, a quarter of the intensity. In addition, as 99.9% of all radio braodcasts weren't meant to be beamed out into space, the energy in the transmitted waves that actually got sent into space would be less than 50% at most (some radio frequencies being reflected back to earth by the ionosphere, or absorbed by it). You'd have to have a sensitive detector, tuned to the right frequency, looking in the right direction to catch them. Interestingly, now we're moving towards more and more satellite comms and fibre optic delivery, we're sending fewer and fewer signals into space, so in some sense it's a window of opportunity. if other civilisations follow a similar technological patth, then we may never see their radio transmissions as they transition to a more efficient method.

Thanks! Very interesting and factual