Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Books are my comfort food!

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

He really is that stupid.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Open Thread: Space, the Final-ish Frontier

Open Thread: Space, the Final-ish Frontier

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We want to believe, but within the limits of possibility… — “Why NASA Wants Your UFO Videos”:

Last year, as the topic of UFOs was exploding back into the mainstream, NASA convened a panel of outside experts, the UAP Independent Study Team, to assess the unclassified evidence the government had collected. (UAP, for “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” is the government-approved euphemism for UFO.) The group was a science-nerd murderers’ row whose purpose was to help the space agency handle a subject that had long attracted conspiracy theories — but which was also grounds for legitimate questions, considering the unexplained objects people had been observing and recording with increasing frequency. Heading the 17-member panel was Dr. David Spergel, a longtime Princeton professor of astrophysics who in 2021 took over as president of the Simons Foundation, a $5 billion nonprofit that supports basic science research. The group held a public meeting to discuss its work in May and released its final report last month. Among its top-line findings was that it had found no evidence of extraterrestrial UFOs, but that more data would be needed to settle the matter conclusively — including data from civilians who capture unidentified phenomena. It was a circumspect conclusion that, predictably, did little to satisfy true believers on either side of the UAP divide.

Intelligencer spoke with Spergel at his office at the Simons Foundation’s building near Madison Square, where he discussed why NASA got involved in the hunt for UFOs, what the odds of finding aliens are, and whether David Duchovny really believes that the truth is out there.

Why did NASA want to get involved in UFOs?
This starts with the Navy starting to declassify a bunch of images. The most famous one is the “Tic Tac” [filmed by a U.S. Navy fighter off the coast of San Diego], which is about 20 years old now. You look at those incidents and you say, “There’s something weird going on we don’t understand.” Then, having delved into the incident a bit, you realize that you wish they collected better data. What we’re left with is hard to interpret. NASA is a scientific agency. It’s charged with investigating the unknown. And the head of NASA announced, “We’re going to weigh in on this.”

After looking at evidence declassified by the Pentagon’s UAP organization, AARO (“All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office”), the panel concluded that most reported UAPs were either balloons, drones, or airplanes. What does that tell you?
The number of drones that are up at any given moment is enormous — they’re just monitoring fires and gas pipelines and helping farmers monitor crops. There’s also a ton of balloons. It turns out that small amateur balloons below a certain size didn’t have to be reported to the FAA. There’s probably some regulatory cleanup needed to make sure that balloons at low altitudes are not a threat to pilots.

Why is the U.S. government interested in publicly investigating UAPs now, after 70-odd years of inaction?
The Chinese balloon incident is very illustrative. There’s a class of events that are associated with unusual objects seen around U.S. Navy planes, particularly in the Pacific. It’s clear that the Chinese have an active program of monitoring the U.S. fleet. Understanding that class of events is absolutely within the military’s area of responsibility…

How many UAP reports has the government investigated?
Right now, what we have is 800 events that AARO has looked at and studied, and they’ve explained many of them. The set of events they’ve explained is too small for machine learning. You’d like to have 100,000 reports of balloons by people taking multiple pictures of each one so that you can learn what balloons look like from different angles. That way, for any anomaly someone reports you can quickly say that’s a balloon or it’s not.

Of those 800, how many are still interesting?
One or two percent…

The panel’s report advises NASA to release a phone app that would allow people to record UAPs in a way that would generate the most useful data. How would that work?
Your cell-phone camera wants to enhance the picture so it looks better. For recording data, you’d rather not have that. Also, you could do things in the metadata to reduce the probability of spoofing — you don’t want people to edit in pictures of E.T. My hope is that an app would create a set of public data, and then citizen scientists could go through it and see what’s there. You can have an open discussion. If someone sees something and says, “This is weird,” it can be discussed. It removes some of the element of conspiracy.

You’re a serious scientist. Did you ever think you’d find yourself investigating UFOs?
I actually see this as an opportunity for science education. There are a lot of people fascinated by the subject because the question of “Are we alone?” is fundamental. It’s a question that not only scientists ask, but lots of people. So there’s a lot of public interest in UFOs…

Do you think that, just by making your data public and opening the discussion of it to the public, you can push back against pseudoscience?
That’s the hope. I mean, I don’t think we will solve the problem. But it takes a step. It’s important to say to people, “Look, we’re not dismissing your claim that you saw something strange. Don’t feel that because you reported seeing something strange that you’re crazy. It’s interesting you saw something strange. Let’s collect more data on the strange thing. Let’s see if other people collect it. That’s how we figure stuff out.” And if we get that message across to some fraction of the people, that, I feel, would be a success. If we figure out the nature of more of these events, that’s even more of a success. If it turns out to be something truly exotic, fabulous.

Reader Interactions

79Comments

  2. 2.

    Other MJS

    The reason I can’t take UFOs seriously is that crossing interstellar space is insanely difficult, and anyone who managed it would not just fool around buzzing Earthlings.

  4. 4.

    Dan B

    @Other MJS: The nearest star to us is Alpha Centaurie, almost four light years away.  At close to the speed of light it would take four years but you’d also arrive after centuries had passed because of relativity’s distortion of time space.

  5. 5.

    bbleh

    Sudden Silence From NASA Lab

    There have been no communications from the NASA laboratory where samples from the OSIRIS-REx satellite, which reportedly include “organic molecules,” are being investigated.

    Journalists seeking to interview scientists at the facility were turned away by military police and were warned not to approach the building because all entrances are being targeted by snipers.

    Several unidentified people in full-body HAZMAT gear and carrying flamethrowers were observed near the building.

    Reports of sudden full-body blood clotting were unconfirmed, as were alleged sightings of large tentacles extending from a broken second-floor window

    NASA and military spokesman released a statement describing the situation as a “routine training exercise.”  Calls from reporters were not returned.

  6. 6.

    Alison Rose

    @Other MJS: Yeah, I was just reading a Michio Kaku book and as I’ve seen elsewhere, he notes that any intelligent life in the universe that had achieved this kind of interstellar travel would basically think we were a bunch of boring ass dolts.

  7. 7.

    Anoniminous

    They found 20,000 organic molecules composed of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, or sulfur on the fragment. “Organic” because of the carbon and hydrogen.

  8. 8.

    Ken

    @Other MJS: anyone who managed it would not just fool around buzzing Earthlings.

    Sure it would be stupid if that’s all they did. But there are also cattle to mutilate, and crop circles to draw.

  11. 11.

    wjca

    nasa, stone cold flying a robot helicopter on mars since 2021

    Ingenuity:

    Plan was 5 flights at 3-5 meters altitude of <90 seconds each.  Basically, a proof of concept.

    Currently, 60+ flights.  Maximum altitude of 24 meters.  Maximum duration of 120 seconds.  Proof of concept has moved on to demonstrating operational capabilities.  Exceeding expectations . . . and still going strong.  For example, there are software updates planned which will increase that maximum altitude.

  12. 12.

    Ken

    @Anoniminous: That sounds off — 20,000 molecules, even relatively chunky ones, would have a total mass in attograms.

    Was it 20,000 different kinds of molecules? Though that also sounds wrong, as it would take a fairly long time to detect that many.

  14. 14.

    SpaceUnit

    I used to work with high end video equipment, the sort of stuff you’d have in a television studio.  The “tic tac” and other UAPs supposedly captured by military jets looks a lot like a digitally generated image superimposed onto video.  We used to screw around with that just for laughs.  It’s probably some kind of thermal image plastered over the live feed.  I think the pilots were just messing around.

  15. 15.

    Ken

    @Alison Rose: The stuff about sudden hideous deaths, HAZMAT suits, and tentacles is just the cover story. They don’t want the public to know the truth because it would cause panic.

  16. 16.

    wjca

    @Ken: But there are also cattle to mutilate, and crop circles to draw.

    So, we’re being visited by the alien equivalent of frat boys on Spring Break.  Awesome!

  19. 19.

    MattF

    @SpaceUnit: There’s also Roadside Picnic by the Strugatskys about the aftermath of an alien visitation where the aliens visited, had a picnic, and then carelessly left behind some advanced alien trash by the side of the road.

  26. 26.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    Anal probing, cattle mutilation, unidentified vehicles doing crazy stuff in the sky, crop circles and more seems to indicate that aliens use our planet as one of their favorite spring break destinations.

  28. 28.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Odie Hugh Manatee:

    Had a guy I worked with years ago who was really into this stuff and pontificated at length about aliens and anal probes.

    One of the old guys called him out one day, saying, “Dammit, Rodney, WTF would aliens with superior intelligence and technology travel billions of miles just to look up someone’s asshole?”

  30. 30.

    Timill

    @wjca:

    Douglas Adams says:

    Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them, meaning that they find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises. The concept of teasers was explained to Arthur Dent by Ford Prefect. Ford had arrived on planet Earth fifteen years prior to its demolition by hitching a lift with a teaser.

  31. 31.

    lamh36

    Good Saturday Evening BJ!

    Been a long busy azz couple weeks for me.  Found out that our lab is transitioning from our contract employer (lrg ref lab managing company) to the local “state” funded private management company.

    Basically we are going from a national employer and insurance plan, to a localized employer.  The pay is likely to be less, the insurance is likely to be not as good and we are not “guaranteed” our position as listed, especially is the new parent company doesn’t have a parallel position.  Luckily for someone in my position (higher education, decades of experience) not too much changes other than the insurance and the employer.

    Good things: 1) I’m ->THIS<- close to having enough payments to finish getting my student loans forgiven under the old PSLF plan (I was able to get in before the 2022 deadline), but my contract employer was NOT an eligible PSLF employer…the parent company IS. 2)I have more options than others.

    Anyway, cha-cha-cha-changes.  I plan to “Gloria-Gaynor” it all.

  32. 32.

    lamh36

    Good Saturday Evening BJ!

    Been a long busy azz couple weeks for me.  Found out that our lab is transitioning from our contract employer (lrg ref lab managing company) to the local “state” funded private management company.

    Basically we are going from a national employer and insurance plan, to a localized employer.  The pay is likely to be less, the insurance is likely to be not as good and we are not “guaranteed” our position as listed, especially is the new parent company doesn’t have a parallel position.  Luckily for someone in my position (higher education, decades of experience) not too much changes other than the insurance and the employer.

    Good things: 1) I’m ->THIS<- close to having enough payments to finish getting my student loans forgiven under the old PSLF plan (I was able to get in before the 2022 deadline), but my contract employer was NOT an eligible PSLF employer…the parent company IS. 2)I have more options than others.

    Anyway, cha-cha-cha-changes.  I plan to “Gloria-Gaynor” it all.

  36. 36.

    Bill Arnold

    A planet where the dominant wildlife is organizing an exponential technological rise is interesting. Because they will either destroy themselves (many emerging existential perils ahead), or become something, and that something that they become will be of a sort that plays nice with others, or not.

  40. 40.

    Another Scott

    Relevant APOD – Red Sprite Lightning (from October 2):

    Explanation: Sometimes lightning occurs out near space. One such lightning type is red sprite lightning, which has only been photographed and studied on Earth over the past 25 years. The origins of all types of lightning remain topics for research, and scientists are still trying to figure out why red sprite lightning occurs at all. Research has shown that following a powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning strike, red sprites may start as 100-meter balls of ionized air that shoot down from about 80-km high at 10 percent the speed of light. They are quickly followed by a group of upward streaking ionized balls. Featured here is an extraordinarily high-resolution image of a group of red sprites. This image is a single frame lasting only 1/25th of a second from a video taken above Castelnaud Castle in Dordogne, France, about three weeks ago. The sprites quickly vanished — no sprites were visible even on the very next video frame.

    (Click over for the picture and embedded links.)

    There’s still all kinds of natural stuff that we aren’t close to understanding. We don’t have to construct stories about aliens, or CCP superweapons, or whatever when we see something new or unusual. We just need to keep our wits about us and investigate carefully.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  41. 41.

    bbleh

    @Other MJS: @Dan B: and yet, in our astronomical observation, there is tremendous excitement whenever a potential “life-sustaining” planet is discovered, or even one in the “Goldilocks zone”  or  one from which available spectrographic data suggest the possibility of water vapor or organic molecules in the atmosphere.  I can easily see such planets being initial targets of long-range space exploration.

    As to “how,” I can only imagine cheap robots, at least at first.  Interstellar travel by critters, even with time dilation, seems at least a few orders of magnitude more complex, and … why bother?  But maybe a planet with an atmosphere such that spectrographic analysis suggests extensive industrialization, perhaps combined with observations of fragmentary radio-wave transmissions (which at this point are what, over 100 LY away?), might make us A target for an initial “manned” exploration.  “Oh, and check this place out while you’re on your way.  It’s only about 0.07 LY off course.”

  42. 42.

    Chris T.

    Some alien race kid playing with a toy will discover our radio broadcasts and bring them to the attention of the alien adults: “Radio … they’re trying to use electromagnetic waves to communicate? Bwahaha, how backwards they must be!”

  43. 43.

    lamh36

    Today I had to work with two coworkers who been beefing all year. I wanted to get my work done and leave them there, but I was too dang busy.

    Let me check my schedule to see if I’m working with these 2 folks before the end of this year, cause NEVER AGAIN! Chile…left work an hour overtime…between my own busy work them 2 women were like a couple of damn children…

    I was busy on my own work, even left work an hour later than usual.   These two adult women, refused to talk directly to one another. Pissed me dafuq off. I had to do 2x the work basically, my own bench work and fuq’n people management.

  44. 44.

    Timill

    @lamh36: You probably want:

    more patience, or

    more butter, or

    more eggs, or

    less heat.

    I take a pan over medium-high heat, melt plenty of butter, and add the beaten eggs. I then let them set to have a reasonable crust, and see if it will move when the pan is shaken. If not, I lift the edges of the omelette and add more butter to try to get it to unstick. Repeat as necessary…

    Add filling, fold, and serve…

  47. 47.

    Doc Sardonic

    @Other MJS: You’ve apparently never talked to Navy Aviator. My late uncle was a retired Navy pilot, and according to him buzzing things was referred to as one of the most fun things one could do with clothes on. Especially if you weren’t supposed to do it.

  53. 53.

    Dan B

    @bbleh: My feeling is this generation is so at home with virtual reality that unmanned probes will be preferred to crewed  spacecraft.  Why do one crewed mission when you can, for the same price, do twenty.  Plus the time shift issues of interstellar flight won’t be much of an issue to robots.

  55. 55.

    Bill Arnold

    @bbleh:

    As to “how,” I can only imagine cheap robots, at least at first. Interstellar travel by critters, even with time dilation, seems at least a few orders of magnitude more complex, and … why bother?

    The academic literature about the Fermi Paradox (“Where Are they?”) is mostly about Self-Replicating Probes (“SRPs”), that travel a small fraction of lightspeed. (There’s a new paper every few years.) The concept was first formally describe in 1980 by Robert A. Freitas Jr., though machine self-replication was described by John von Neumann.
    In that technological theme, and restricted to a single causal history, there is no reason to presume that current humans would understand the motivations of a (hypothetical) advanced technological civilization/entity that transcended its biological limitations at least millennia ago, and are now very long-lived  (and probably at least mostly what we would call machines) and functionally super-intelligent compared with their evolved origin biology.

  57. 57.

    Bill Arnold

    @Chris T.:
    <blockquote. “Radio … they’re trying to use electromagnetic waves to communicate? Bwahaha, how backwards they must be!”.
    Sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable from noise. (Really!)

  62. 62.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Dan B: ​

    My feeling is this generation is so at home with virtual reality that unmanned probes will be preferred to crewed spacecraft. Why do one crewed mission when you can, for the same price, do twenty. Plus the time shift issues of interstellar flight won’t be much of an issue to robots.

    I’m right with you. I’m a mid-Boomer, but I’ve long failed to see the importance of putting people into space. Human beings in space require extensive life support and protection against cosmic radiation, let alone the vacuum of space. I’m no expert, but I’d bet that the vast majority of the cost of any human-crewed mission is about keeping the humans alive.

    Fuck that. Space is for robots. They don’t need food, water, or air. They don’t need protection against cosmic rays. They can go see it all, do it all for us, and send us back the videos. I’m so good with that.​

  65. 65.

    kindness

    Travel from one star system to another wouldn’t be done in a straight line going really fast.  Einstein was right.  As matter approaches the speed of light, it expands.  This would kill organic life as well as our circuit boards/transistors.  No, space travel is done by bending 2 points in space till they are next to each other and then jumping across.   We already see space being bent by looking at large gravitational objects like stars, galaxies & the like.  How does one do it?  I don’t know.  If I did I sure as hell wouldn’t be here.  But others have figured it out.  It’s a very big universe after all.

  66. 66.

    Ken

    @Bill Arnold: Sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable from noise.

    Because broadcasting unencrypted communications in all directions is just inviting the hostile galactic empires to come and enslave you.

    “Solutions to the Fermi Paradox” would be a nice Medium Cool topic.

  71. 71.

    bbleh

    @Bill Arnold: true, but seems like it’s also true of the question.  We likely can’t understand what “their” answer to the question would be, but by the same token they might not understand, or have, the question itself.  “We don’t have any idea how they might answer a question we don’t have any idea whether they might have.”

    All of which confirms my decision to binge-stream something instead of worrying about it.

  72. 72.

    Philbert

    @Ken: “Because broadcasting unencrypted communications in all directions is just inviting the hostile galactic empires to come and enslave you.”

    And we have been broadcasting for 100 years, so that’s 100-light years out. “Man Who Fell to Earth” had a great scene where the alien David Bowie is addicted to 100 TV channels at once.

    Also: Omelets: To make the fluffy ones add some milk to the scrambled eggs first.

  73. 73.

    eversor

    @smith:

    I’m waiting for someone to mind **** and implement the idea (comic books or warhammer 40k style preferably with all the pain and blood involved) that it’s not enough to be the first to Mars if you aren’ the first man to set foot on Mars.

    Mostly cause I want to see them die a horrible death due to their own hubris.

  74. 74.

    RevRick

    As a retired UCC minister I always find it somewhat hilarious when scientists declare that such-and-such discovery gets us closer to answering questions like Who We Are, and What We Are, and Why We Are, whether they are exploring space or investigating quantum physics. Science can get us closer to answering the whatish, whenish, howish, and whereish sort of questions, but when it starts with the Capital Letters existential questions, it moves closer to alchemy and astrology. (I speak as a former college chemistry major.)

    I understand the impulse and desire. It reflects the fact that we are weirdly spiritual creatures. As C.S. Lewis described us, we are, in a sense, essentially amphibians, simultaneously living in two distinct worlds, one anchored in this physical realm with all its real limitations, and one which longs for moreness, one that’s aspirational and beyond. We are aware of our finitude and the reality that one day we shall plunge into the Void. For 13.6 billion years, we weren’t, and then, we absurdly are, and soon, we will cease and be forgotten.

  75. 75.

    eversor

    On omlettes.

    You need a gas range and a griddle or don’t bother.  You can also get a device that will cover your stove in ye slab of metal like you see in diners but again requires gas to work.

    From there it’s easy.  Mix eggs, pour on griddle, put stuff in eggs, take off griddle and fold.

  76. 76.

    Another Scott

    @Nukular Biskits: At least a few years ago, lots of physicians/scientists thought it was sleep paralysis.

    PubMed:

    Sleep paralysis, sexual abuse, and space alien abduction
    Richard J McNally 1, Susan A Clancy

    PMID: 15881271 DOI: 10.1177/1363461505050715

    Abstract

    Sleep paralysis accompanied by hypnopompic (‘upon awakening’) hallucinations is an often-frightening manifestation of discordance between the cognitive/perceptual and motor aspects of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Awakening sleepers become aware of an inability to move, and sometimes experience intrusion of dream mentation into waking consciousness (e.g. seeing intruders in the bedroom). In this article, we summarize two studies. In the first study, we assessed 10 individuals who reported abduction by space aliens and whose claims were linked to apparent episodes of sleep paralysis during which hypnopompic hallucinations were interpreted as alien beings. In the second study, adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse more often reported sleep paralysis than did a control group. Among the 31 reporting sleep paralysis, only one person linked it to abuse memories. This person was among the six recovered memory participants who reported sleep paralysis (i.e. 17% rate of interpreting it as abuse-related). People rely on personally plausible cultural narratives to interpret these otherwise baffling sleep paralysis episodes.

    Our brains are really good at making explanations for things, even when those explanations are impossible or wrong, sometimes as protection mechanisms.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  77. 77.

    kalakal

    @Another Scott: I used to have sleep paralysis a lot, very rarely now. It’s horrible. Can’t say I ever thought of aliens, burglers yes, ghosts & other beasties yes, aliens no. Mostly auditory but some very vivid visions on occasion.

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