What if they are so simple that they could survive in space, perhaps generating energy via available elements?
Tag: Rob Sheldon
Could the unusual ET phenomena be animal types – not human types – of life forms?
Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts on NASA and the unexplained phenomena that prompted the recent report
Readers may remember our recent note that the Pentagon is rethinking the practice of merely making fun of odd findings reported by pilots.
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts:
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Not to enflame the alien hunters out there, but videos of the UFO’s taken by jets show two characteristics:
a) high speed (altitude)
b) high acceleration.
The shape is less important, but being pill-shaped means you are not aerodynamically suited for high velocities in high density air.
Humans can go at these high speeds, Mach 25 for the space shuttle, but it takes an enormous amount of fuel and rocket power. Plus, the shuttle has to have special tiles to dissipate the heat. Tiles and fuel = heavy and bulky which these UFO’s are not.
Second is the acceleration. Pilots wear “g-suits” that tighten when maneuvering, so that all the blood does rush to the head or feet. Even so, 3-5 g’s is typically the maximum a pilot sustains and at 9 g’s they typically go unconscious. These videos show UFO’s that appear to be pulling 20 or more g’s. I’d have to analyse them frame-by-frame to get the actual acceleration. But if you or I were in that craft, they’d be scraping off the cockpit with a spatula. Most s/c instruments that I build for satellites cannot handle 15 g’s, so we prefer liquid fuel boosters.
So the observation is a light weight, non-aerodynamic high-speed, ultra-high acceleration object. Is it human made? Hardly. Is it weather phenomenon? Unlikely, though not ruled out. Is it US research? I wish. Is it little green men? Only if their biology is very unlike ours. Once again, having seen what extraterrestrial life looks like (cyanobacteria on comets) it is very likely that any ET is built like us, so I don’t think this is LGM. That leaves “other” as a category.
Where is this taking us? Well I think that these objects show purpose. Their motions aren’t random like Brownian motion or determined like meteor trails. So there is a rudimentary sensory/propulsion system apparent. But the need to handle high g’s means it is very rigid. The lack of rocket or fuel system suggests they are also very light. Their shape is also reminiscent of bacteria, where the surface/volume ratio is maximized. This leads me to think that they are biological, they are mostly air, and the biology is in a thin surface material or skin. Their energy source must be at high altitude, because they aren’t designed for thick atmosphere. The only energy sources at those altitudes are electric, with large electric potentials present over thunderstorms or in the aurora. Electrostatic forces can create very high forces, and that would be the form of propulsion. One way to check, is to see if the electric field is parallel to their motion, or if the magnetic field is perpendicular to their motion.
So in summary my best guess is that these are space cows, grazing on the energy in the high atmosphere and inflated by hydrogen. Perhaps if we knew what they ate, we could put a deer stand in the Space Station.
Once again, I let ID direct me toward biology, instead of knee jerk reaction the ID leads to mechanical space probes. It fits with what we know of biology, but is a compete projection of our insecurities when we think of it as a machine made by an alien race. Like Father Brown in GK Chesterton’s novels, who said “It wasn’t a ghost because I believe in ghosts”, likewise I think it is biological because I believe in human ID and biological ID, and it certainly isn’t human.
Note: Rob Sheldon is also the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II .
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No, it’s not necessarily aliens. But smirk is not a good approach to science or any other body of knowledge.
See also: The Pentagon’s UAP (UFO) report signals a sharp attitude change The brass have committed themselves to going “wherever the data takes us.” No, they didn’t report UFOs. But they reported enough mysteries to stop merely debunking and discrediting… and follow the evidence.
The wall between classical and quantum physics is shifting
Rob Sheldon explains, if nearly visible objects can be turned into waves — as was done recently — the wall between quantum and classical physics has moved.
Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts on Richard Dawkins getting canceled by the American Humanist Association
Sheldon: Dawkins was part of the cancel culture 30 years ago “Christianity is like smallpox only harder to eradicate”. So the fact that the cancel culture turns on its own, is not surprising.
Science writer critiques the “many worlds” (multiverse) fantasy; Rob Sheldon weighs in
But the multiverse isn’t really about evidence or falsifiability. The theory is held in defiance of the demand for evidence and believed in such a way as to make falsifiability sound unCool. As Ball perceptively notes, “Even though most physicists dismiss or even deride it, it is often eagerly embraced by physics popularizers and their audiences.” Perhaps it is best described as a lifestyle choice.
Rob Sheldon on Larry Moran and the junk DNA
Sheldon: If I recall correctly, the original definition of “functional” was whether that piece of DNA was turned into a protein, which depended on finding a “start” and a “stop” codon. The Human Genome Project reported that some 90% of the human genome didn’t have these “start/stop” features, and hence was “non-functional”. [“Non-functional” underwent considerable revision later.]
Is a new “muon” finding evidence for a fifth force of nature? Rob Sheldon weighs in
Sheldon: I hate to disappoint you, but most of my gut reaction is negative… In fact, this 40-year stasis in particle physics has meant that two generations of graduate students have never had a successful breakthrough experiment, or confirmed a new theory. The field, as Sabine Hossenfelder reminds everyone, is littered with wrong papers.
Rob Sheldon reflects on skepticism about the findings from research brain scans (fMRI)
Sheldon: The skeptical neuroscience student talks about the sin of employing too many statistical searches on the data, also known as “p-hacking”. Once again, the sin is not in using statistics, but rather in refusing to tell the world how many searches you made on the data before you settled on this one. Because the significance is not simply the data p-value, but the search space you used in finding it.
Rob Sheldon takes aim at black holes: How much is really known?
It is most unfortunate that both scientists themselves and the popular press discuss black holes (bh) as if they are (a) a scientifically defined object; and, (b) an experimentally observed one.
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, Should Stephen Hawking have won the Nobel? Rob Sheldon weighs in
Rob Sheldon: Hawking did not get the Nobel, however, because he hung his hopes on the radiation emitted by BH–the so-called “Hawking radiation”. And it was never observed. Sabine tries to explain why. But one argument that Sabine doesn’t make, is that Hawking radiation may never have been observed because BH are themselves never observed.
Rob Sheldon: Biologists’ use of the term “half-life” shows just how tenuous many of their propositions really are
Recently, our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon took issue with the use of the term “half-life” to describe the survival of DNA in fossils. He says the term has a specific meaning with respect to radioactive decay that just does not apply to other events in nature. In the biology paper at issue, with “half-life” Read More…
Does DNA really have a “half life”? Physicist Rob Sheldon is skeptical
Sheldon: “As a physicist, I would like to point out that biologists are misusing the word “half-life”. DNA does NOT have a half-life of 521 years. Radioisotopes have a half-life, because the nucleus is unstable to natural decay through the weak force (for isotopes of interest).” He goes on to say that the weak force of the universe “is unaffected by temperature, pressure, time, or chemicals.” Not so for DNA.
Horizontal gene transfer as a serious blow to claims about universal common descent
Trust our stalwart physics color commentator Rob Sheldon to draw the logical conclusion about horizontal gene transfer between plants and insects: If plants and insects can exchange genes (and who knows what else can?), what are we to make of dogmatic claims about universal common descent?
The latest Darwinian obfuscation: “Unnecessary complexity”
Possibly, the most productive aspect of Darwinism in these times is the minting of new terminology to try to paper over the plausibility gap.
Rob Sheldon has some questions for the multiverse
Sheldon has some fun with the logical nonsense of the concept.