Devils Advocate for ETH

[Ron Collins]

Okay, just playing devils advocate here in defence of the ETH. It is being bashed again in some of the posts so I thought this was a good time to toss this up. Oh, and some random doomsday hypothesis as well. Here we go:

ET's have been observing us. They are deeply interested in our psychology. They learn how we fear the unknown and sublte variation on the familiar. They choose certain subjects to study. They learn from a cross section of the population what we as a society would do if confronted with certain situations. They learn how a culture reacts to various stimulus and how they regard others with slightly differing points of view on "reality".

Imagine the vast database of observations.

Now imagine the motivations for wanting to know these things.

First blush, you have the happy and the scary.

Happy == They do not have such a wide and diverse emotions. They need to understand this before making formal contact.

Scary == Tsun Tzu

 

[Aaron LeClair]

I don't get too caught up in origins. My own species origins are still a great mystery, so figuring out what ever is behind ufos and abductions will probably be tougher.

I think that a lot that goes on is like the 3 blind men and the elephant. Each grab a different part then conclude it's either a leg, trunk, or ear, and fight with one another over it. For all I know, we in the future develop interstellar travel by means of manipulating space/time which gives us interdimensional abilities, then travel back in time and make bases here or the moon /shrug. I hope it's ets though. I'd hate to one day get to the bottom of this stuff and still not know if we're alone in the universe. If it is a version of us, lets hope they know the answer and can tell us if and when there is more open contact

I have nothing against the ETH btw. I don't cringe when someone thinks they're ets. They could be.

 

[TClaeys]

I don't have a problem with it either. If we look from our perspective and the way space exploration is going, We ARe THE ET'S. If we find as much as a microbe, then ETH is validated and I have a hunch I may see something like this in my lifetime if I live long enough.

Then the problem is the distances. And that can debated out in numerous ways. Geez we are begining tp genitically engineer life. As zany as it sounds wouldn't out first step be to send some kind of droid, living or not to do our bidding? I mean where is Pioneer 10 now?? Point being couldn't we send off missions to wherever with the intent of taking root somewhere habitable?? Sure this scenario is far in the future, but within the grasp of reasonable extrapolation.

Then there is the philosophical questions of how to handle and intercede in other alien biospheres. What would we do if we came across an archaic, yet somewhat intelligent planet? One full of non-intelligence or non-consciousness? One full of primordal soup? Would we be there to save the planet and their societies? Or for some more inimical reason?

The ETH is as valid as any other I think. I don't know that we have a encompassing grasp on what space-time means. We don't fully even understand gravity. Or light. Or quantum mechanics. Thats why we keep smashing atoms among other things. I'm sure there are huge dazzling unexpected discoveries to be made. And perhaps that will allow us to use previously unknown aspects of space-time.

Maybe we don't need other dimensions. We don't even know if they exist. We just have a tendency to fill in these weird UFO characteristics with an unknown thing: other dimensions. It kind of reminds me of the "God of the gaps" arguments made by creationists. We don't know how life got started for sure, so lets fill it in with God. I'm not saying other dimensions don't exist or that even God doesn't exist, but there is no proof for either as much as we try.

Guess I'm playing Devils advocate here also. I don't worry too much about the sourcing either, but it's interesting to contemplate.

 

[dorkbot]

Why do we insist that if something resembling the ETH is correct then superluminal speeds are involved? One light year is one year of observer time, not traveler time. Not to bring up Paul Hill again but as he is the standard bearer of ETH as far as I am concerned:

From any star within 100 light years, a vehicle traveling at 0.99999 light speed can make the trip in less than one year of experienced time on board.

100 light year distance made by accelerating from 0 to 0.999 light speed at 140 g is 4.5 years of on-board, experienced time. The same trip accelerated to 0.99999 takes 0.52 years.

Traversing one light year at 0.999999 speed of light takes 12 hours and 35 minutes of experienced time.

I believe the latest catalog we have indicates there are 7,031 known stars within 100 light years.

Superluminal travel may indeed be involved but it doesn't seem to be mandated. Perhaps the massive ships are their society, having left wherever they originated for good. Perhaps they are the B arks full of hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.

 

[TClaeys]

From any star within 100 light years, a vehicle traveling at 0.99999 light speed can make the trip in less than one year of experienced time on board.

Traversing one light year at 0.999999 speed of light takes 12 hours and 35 minutes of experienced time.

I guess I just don't get this.

Here is my understanding:If something is travelling at light speed, it still takes a year to travel a light-year, even from the travellers point of view. When that person gets out, he finds out that he has barely aged, if at all. Everyone else is probably long dead, from this observers perspective and massive amounts of time has passed. Similarly, a small amount of time (10 minutes) travelling at light speed would result in a proportional time dialation whereby, people have aged exensively. But the time travelled is still 10 minutes whether the experience is felt to be 10 minutes or not.

I could be completely wrong. I still have a brain force shield that repels a complete understanding of special relativity. I imagine others have the same problem. It's difficult to really wrap your mind around it.

Anyway if you have any links you might refer me to, I'd love to try and learn more about it. In the meantime, distances seem to be problematic at least in my head. But as I suggested in the previous post, perhaps there are things about space-time that we don't understand and can overcome in an effort to explore and sprinkle life throughout the universe. Or maybe that has already been done.

 

[CapnG]

Here is my understanding:If something is travelling at light speed, it still takes a year to travel a light-year, even from the travellers point of view.

No. According to Einstein, time stops at light speed, so if you were on board a ship travelling at light speed no time would pass for you until the ship decellerated.

So if a ship left earth to travel to a star 100 light years away, 100 years would pass on earth before it arrived but for the people on board the craft ZERO TIME would have passed from the second they hit light speed to the moment they decellerated. What he's saying is that at 99.9999% light speed only five or six months of time would have passed for the crew of the ship but 100 years would have passed on Earth by the time they arrived. Make sense?

 

[TClaeys]

Here is my understanding:If something is travelling at light speed, it still takes a year to travel a light-year, even from the travellers point of view.

No. According to Einstein, time stops at light speed, so if you were on board a ship travelling at light speed no time would pass for you until the ship decellerated.

So if a ship left earth to travel to a star 100 light years away, 100 years would pass on earth before it arrived but for the people on board the craft ZERO TIME would have passed from the second they hit light speed to the moment they decellerated. What he's saying is that at 99.9999% light speed only five or six months of time would have passed for the crew of the ship but 100 years would have passed on Earth by the time they arrived. Make sense?

Yes, thanks. So, is this proportional if we continue to reduce the speed at which we travel? In other words ,if we travel at half the speed of light is our time frame cut in half? 100 light year journey @ half light speed = 50 years? Because I understand that even with our feeble speeds at present times we see clocks run at a difference of mere seconds or milliseconds.

Even so, it seems that ET would HAVE to travel at near light speed to get anywhere in any amount of time. (Barring light speed itself) OR ET has ridded itself of the aging mechanism altogether which would allow for more time to travel. Still they would need energies for propulsion, sustenence, and TV. And another understanding of mine (or probably another erroneous misconception) is that as speed increases so does mass, being that at light speed something becomes infinitely massive. With this would we require more energy to combat the increasing mass as a "ship" is accelerating?

Alright I'm done for now. Please excuse my blabbering on this post (or any other one for that matter). Thanks for the correction Capn, and for the ones upcoming. I'll try and educate myself on this a bit more so I don't sound like a complete idiot.

 

[CapnG]

Yes, thanks. So, is this proportional if we continue to reduce the speed at which we travel? In other words ,if we travel at half the speed of light is our time frame cut in half? 100 light year journey @ half light speed = 50 years? Because I understand that even with our feeble speeds at present times we see clocks run at a difference of mere seconds or milliseconds.

I dunno the exact formula (definately NOT a math guy) but I'm pretty sure it's not proportional, it's more of an exponential growth curve (ie the closer you get to lightspeed the more drastic the time dilation).

Even so, it seems that ET would HAVE to travel at near light speed to get anywhere in any amount of time. (Barring light speed itself) OR ET has ridded itself of the aging mechanism altogether which would allow for more time to travel. Still they would need energies for propulsion, sustenence, and TV. And another understanding of mine (or probably another erroneous misconception) is that as speed increases so does mass, being that at light speed something becomes infinitely massive. With this would we require more energy to combat the increasing mass as a "ship" is accelerating?

Well yes but that's only assuming that our current understanding of physics is correct. Photons travel at light speed and are for all intents and purposes massless. The question then becomes does normal matter convert to photons at light speed? And (more importantly) if they do, how the hell do you change them back?

As for the travel thing, we're told that ETs live for hundreds if not thousands of years. Some accounts claim that, barring injury, they're effectively immortal. And any ship that can break light speed probably has a kick ass power source. I highly doubt they're burning 87 octane...

Thanks for the correction Capn, and for the ones upcoming. I'll try and educate myself on this a bit more so I don't sound like a complete idiot.

Happy to help. And don't worry, if there realy are aliens that have this whole light speed thing licked we're all complete idiots...

 

[dorkbot]

So, is this proportional if we continue to reduce the speed at which we travel? In other words ,if we travel at half the speed of light is our time frame cut in half? 100 light year journey @ half light speed = 50 years?

You would need to be doing .866 light speed to halve your experienced time. As I don't have a math text editor handy atm the formula is: experienced time(.5) = the square root of [1 minus your traveling velocity(.866) squared].

Here are some speed vs time ratios:

0.0 light speed = 1.0 time
0.866 = 0.500
0.900 = 0.436
0.990 = 0.141
0.999 = 0.0447
0.9999 = 0.01414
0.99999 = 0.00447
0.999999 = 0.00141
1.0 = 0.0

I have no idea if everyone is restricted to subluminal speeds. A lot of really smart people seem to think there might be ways around it but what I like about this is that it lets us at least play with the idea of interstellar travel without resorting to dimension hopping/wormholes/warp drives etc. It's worth keeping on the table until proven otherwise I guess.

 

[Aaron LeClair]

From what I've learned nothing that travels slower than light, can travel up to or past it's velocity. But 99.999999 etc. can in theory be achieved. But who knows, maybe there's more advanced physics out there and Einstein is wrong.