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SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Compendium / Miscellaneous

I see three possibilities, in a descending order of likelihood.
1/ There are no aliens, and all of the honest sightings are caused by mistakes (the psychosocial hypothesis).
2/ There are aliens, but they are too weird for us to interact with. In this case they will never make contact. and every single witness alive today will die without ever knowing the truth. We are probably better off not making contact with these weirdos.
3/ There aliens, and for some reason they have waited an entire lifetime (possibly much more) before making contact, thus condemning an entire generation of witnesses to uncertainty and ridicule. But they will make contact soon.
I think the last option is the least likely, and also the most inconsiderate. Very large numbers of people have been driven to obession, distraction and sometimes insanity and suicide by the failure to make contact. Basically, the aliens can fuck right off, if that is their strategy.
 
If there is an advanced alien civilisation that has been monitoring us with hypertechnology for upwards of 72 years, maybe we should submit a class action against them when they finally bother to make contact. All the billions of people that have died in agony from diseases that they could have treated, or from poverty that they could have alleviated, even from old age that they could have ameliorated, have died while those callous bastards have been joyriding around in the skies.

Something tells me that if they are out there, just watching and sitting on their hands, they have a serious attitude problem.
Wouldn't that be completely arrogant and presumptuous of us to expect them to help us?
Perhaps they are watching us to see how we deal with it ourselves?
 
If so, why are they showing themselves to us? Just to taunt us?
To encourage us to become a space-faring civilisation.
As in 'look at us, you can be us too'.
 
If so, why are they showing themselves to us? Just to taunt us?
One would think intervention if things get out of control would happen, based on the level of contact and past interactions; i.e. there is no "Prime Directive" being followed.
 
3/ There aliens, and for some reason they have waited an entire lifetime (possibly much more) before making contact, thus condemning an entire generation of witnesses to uncertainty and ridicule. But they will make contact soon.
As governments seem keen on covering up UFOs and maintaining secrecy, the program of aliens revealing themselves to the public (UFO sightings, etc.) could be a response to that.
 
I don't agree with the 'government cover-up' hypothesis at all.

1/ Governments are crap at covering things up. Neither the UFO cover-up, or the Moon Hoax, or the 911 conspiracy, could be maintained without whistleblowers for more than a few years.
2/ There are numerous governments around the world, many of which are unsympathetic to each other, so would be happy to discredit one another by disclosing whatever information they have. Remember that the USA is only ~5% of the Earth's surface, and ~5% of the world's population. That means that around 95% of all sightings should occur outside the region directly controlled by the US government.
And don't make me laugh if you think the UK government is covering anything up. The UK government barely exists at the moment.
3/ There are UFO investigation organisations in several countries that are associated with the government. Elizondo and his crew were technically incompetent, and Nick Pope was a joke, but even ones which are fairly competent, like GEPAIN, have found no evidence of a coverup.

The only reason some details about various sightings are not released is because they might disclose secrets about the defence capabilities of their own detection capabilities or secret aircraft. Other details, such as the vast bulk of the data about Roswell, have simply been lost by bureaucracy.

If you are waiting for disclosure, you will have an even longer wait than waiting for contact.
 
Well, there is classified information that pertains to national security issues, and individuals can be prosecuted for revealing the information. Apparent!y many individuals have been told to ignore their sightings, or they report them and then are ignored. Often they have been ridiculed, and fear for careers if they discuss it, even while the government studies it. True, the government isn't leak proof,of course information gets out; that's how we hear about it. If Elizondo hadn't come out, we wouldn't know about AATIP.
Shostak:
"The Pentagon has fessed up, and it seems that observers who accused it of hiding information about possible alien visitors were right."

https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sh...ying-objects-and-air-force-project-blue-book/

"Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations by the Air Force. Given the current environment of steadily decreasing defense budgets, it is unlikely the Air Force would become involved in such a costly project in the foreseeable future."
 
The "Estimate of the Situation" (probably very similar to Cometa Report) apparently existed; where is it?
Lift that veil..


"In a 1967 lecture to the Greek Astronomical Society, broadcast on Athens Radio, Santorinis first publicly revealed what had been found in his 1947 investigation. "We soon established that they were not missiles. But, before we could do any more, the Army, after conferring with foreign officials (presumably U.S. Defense Dept.), ordered the investigation stopped. Foreign scientists [from Washington] flew to Greece for secret talks with me". Later Santorinis told UFO researchers such as Raymond Fowler that secrecy was invoked because officials were afraid to admit of a superior technology against which we have "no possibility of defense"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_rockets
 
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If craft were able to enter our airspace with impunity on a regular basis and literally fly circles around our aircraft, hassle our navy, and demonstrated a totally different and advanced technology, and was of a very strange nature, we wouldn't try to downplay or deny it to reduce problems, while we studied it? Initially I think this WAS the case, until the late '40s and '50s --when they realized what they were dealing with.
 
feinman,

Pardon me for butting in (I embrace your train of thinking), however, I speculate that the DoD refuses to reveal what information has collectively been acquired, fearing that they will 'leak' the significance of Earthian Military knowledge re; ET presence and their ongoing Human agendae, due to the fact that Earth can not take a fight to their world, and therefore must remain absolutely docile in that context.

plutronus
 
That entire letter consists of 'I don't know' and 'I wasn't personally involved', and a bit of hearsay. Devastating stuff.
The information didn't originally come from him, but rather the US government via the Canadian embassy.
 
feinman,

Pardon me for butting in (I embrace your train of thinking), however, I speculate that the DoD refuses to reveal what information has collectively been acquired, fearing that they will 'leak' the significance of Earthian Military knowledge re; ET presence and their ongoing Human agendae, due to the fact that Earth can not take a fight to their world, and therefore must remain absolutely docile in that context.

plutronus
I don't think we're a threat; we are lucky if the whole of our civilization doesn't fall into chaos because of our terrible mismanagement of the biosphere. I do agree that the population couldn't handle the strangeness of the truth; and thus the government has continued plausible deniability, stretching it past the breaking point.
 
feinman,

I no longer gift life-power to debate with folks who won't accept that ET are active within Earthian space, as I suspect that only experience may alter their thinking otherwise. Debating with non-knowers really does not cause forward evolution of the knowledge-sphere, if it did I might consider doing so and debating just for the art of it, was ok in school, but I'm an adult now while life is raging around us.

Exactly where we 'fit' within the mutual threat-envelope is unknowable from the public vantage, in my opinion. However, problem as I understand things is that we **ARE** developing counter-measures and while the public remains in the dark, generally speaking, there has been a long history of organized data collection which is being collated by the militaries of the world. It is easy to speculate that there is something very dire that the US Military knows re; alien activities, as every time some country begins to publically disclose their collected ET behavior information to their public, the US Military 'visits' them and they **TOO** go quiet. It has been suggested in the past that those countries were paid-off, but I suspect that they were shown information that scared the crap out of them. I was in direct contact with investigative elements of the Brazilian Military "ET Studies Directorate" via my SETV group in 1998 when they were visited and they went quiet. Should've heard what they were disclosing. Its an eye-opener and they clammed right up. One of my DARPA jobs, which I can't say too much about, was, in my opinion, then and now, a planetary defense weapon and that was in 1984. So Earthian Military is in fact developing countermeasures, but until we can take the fight to them, we gotta walk softly around them, never making too much eye-contact, and we shall not reveal just how much we know, else they could, again, shake the milk, breakup the culture....

plutronus
ps...as an after-thought, let me put it this way, I suspect that ET doesn't give-a-hoot what we do as long as we do not interfere with production...
 
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There ought to be billions and billions of alien races...
 
Plutronus,

..I no longer gift life-power to debate with folks who won't accept that ET are active within Earthian space, ..

So you will not discuss with people who do not agree with your belief ?

INT21.
 
I don't know if Plutronus has had his own experiences with these devices, but I understand his sentiment. At this point the whole UFO debate is farcical; I've talked with so many folks who were in the military in the '40s and '50s or have been in more recently, and they just laugh and shake their heads. Especially, if you have experienced them in an unambiguous manner and are familiar with the pattern of contact evident in old reports, skeptics can be particularly annoying, but if interaction is chosen, compassion and patience is necessary, and no one has limitless amounts of that (much of my store of that, for example is exhausted on my chorgi). All one has to do is watch Frank Manor or countless other witnesses from waves in the past, and now including folks like Mr. Fravor, etc., and one sees the profound consternation that developed in them over time, as they tried to communicate their experiences to others..
 
Quantum SETI
Vast datasets and machine learning could link SETI to quantum computing

What's the answer? It could be with quantum computing. As much as there is excruciating hype (and misunderstanding) around quantum computing, it does hold enormous promise for some of the tasks that current deep-learning systems rely on (for instance, very large matrix manipulations). It's possible that we'll eventually manage to utilize quantum computing to help train our machines, and then unleash them on huge SETI datasets. Looking for signals in ways that we can't even imagine.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...yKVVxtsdqpmfHTQtguWDAt7tkD1jlYtjsOLrxhU1xHlgE
 
This new Scientific American opinion piece poses the key issue nobody's been willing to address for decades now ...
Life as We Don't Know It

In 1985 ... I covered a symposium at Harvard inaugurating the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay (META), a computer system designed by physicist Paul Horowitz to sift through millions of narrow radio channels for signals from other civilizations. ...

No one at the symposium was rash enough to predict whether or when Horowitz’s project would succeed. But if you’d told the assembled scientists that 35 years would go by without META or any of its successors detecting even a hint of a signal, they’d have reacted with disappointment and disbelief. The aliens ought to be out there; they ought to be broadcasting; we ought to be able to hear them. But a 2020 Astronomical Journal paper detailing a search of 1,327 nearby stars at the highest sensitivity to date found zero candidate signals. So how is it that the Great Silence—to use the title phrase from astronomer Milan Ćirković’s 2018 book— continues? ...

... I’ve come to suspect that there’s something missing in our approach to the search for off-world intelligence. This search is built around the hope that if technological societies are out there, they’re communicating (1) using the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum we can most easily scan from Earth’s surface, namely radio and optical frequencies, and (2) using encoding schemes such as pulse modulation that we can easily recognize. Those assumptions made sense in the early days of SETI in the 1960s, when the field was still a quirky offshoot of radio astronomy.

But today they seem fatally Earth-centric and human-centric. As Nathalie Cabrol of the SETI Institute wrote in a paradigm-busting 2016 Astrobiology paper, “So far, in our quest to find ET, we have only been searching for other versions of ourselves.” ...
FULL ARTICLE: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/life-as-we-dont-know-it/
 
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This new Scientific American opinion piece poses the key issue nobody's been willing to address for decades now ...

FULL ARTICLE: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/life-as-we-dont-know-it/

I attended one of the late great Patrick Moore's last public presentations on the subject of First Contact back in 2001.
In the Q & A session that followed, I was honoured that he picked my question to answer - namely are we being too Earth-centric in defining the possibilities for alien life. I mentioned the restrictions of the "Goldiocks Zone" as being particularly unhelpful. Sir Patrick thanked me for my question, but was adamant that we should rely on the science we know.
He was probably right, but I was a little disappointed that the great man didn't share my sense of wonder.
 
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He was probably right, but I was a little disappointed that the great man didn't share my sense of wonder.
I think he probably did, in private. In public, he probably had to maintain a rigid position.

rigidposition.jpg
 
The public computing side of SETI as now been put into hibernation as of 31-03-20
no more work units will be sent, the program was running for just over 20 years.
 
They supposedly have so much data that needs further processing that they don't
need any more,
 
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