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Build Your Own UFO
Are Belong To Us dept. writes "Guess where the billions of dollars in the super-secret
Air Force program are going? Build your own for $10 in parts. They're popularly called "Lifters" and they're flying (one
of many videos) without engines and can hover in
place. Admit it, it would have been cool to see a
UFO. Never mind if you didn't, because now you can
build your own (another, step-by-step
instruction, here), like lots
of people around the globe already have, for $10 in
parts. A number of patents surround the technology, some by
NASA. The best introduction
site to all of this is Jean-Louis Naudin's site. There goes your sleep - this is fascinating stuff. ;-)" Any website that uses the phrase "a simple 30KV power supply" is okay in my book.
If they are so simple, hmm. I haven't seen any flying around my neighborhood. Have you?
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lifters.htm
Anyone else think the picture on the top looks like a flying pair of underwear?
Erm... you call that a UFO? Looking at the picture, it looks more like a kite/toy or something...
Ah yes. The Buttered Cat drive. Actually works too. Got a car powered with that very drive. Well, I did, until those bastards at the oil companies crushed it into a tiny tiny cube.
Simple premise of the Buttered Cat drive is based in elementary physics. First, go and butter a slice of toast, then drop it on the floor. Note that it will, without err, land butter-side-down.
Next, obtain a cat. Fling it. Observe how it persists on landing feet-side-down.
Simple deduction would see that by attaching a buttered slice of toast to the back of a feline, would simply spin in place several feet above the ground.
Harnessing this energy is simple. All one needs is multiple cats and multiple slices of buttered toast. And string. Mustn't forget the string. Place the Buttered Cats into an enclosure, and marvel as it rises from the ground. Attach a ship around it, and voila! One flying saucer. To power this ship, tack shag carpet to the interior of the enclosure and draw the static electricity from within.
This explains the bright blue lights and humming/buzzing/PURRING that UFOs emit.
Try it yourself. Its great fun!
Teeee-quila! baby, Ten shots tonight. Let's try for twelve before I hit the floor. Heh...
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
I found this via Google recently:/ ownufo.htm
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/pagrosse
A feasible project?
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I'm sure the scientologists will like this...
I know this is real stuff, I've seen it done before. The thing that scares my is if you read the page you see some stuff refering to "electrogravatics" stuff, i.e., pseudoscience. Can anyone really provide a reasonable explaination as to why we get this effect? I notice in the illustrations that the ground is shown as reference voltage (0V), while the craft is at 30kV. Isn't this just simply Coulombs Law at work?
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
About a year ago I built a UFO and let it fly away at about 1am. It was brightly lit and flew eastward, and it went way out of sight. I'd give exact details, and link to the photos, since I'm sure many people would LOVE to know the details. I heard some neighborhood children in the distance (I didn't know they were there prior to lift off) have a total fit after they noticed it. So the effect was that I spent about an hour rolling around in my yard laughing so hard I was unable to breathe.
Anyway, I'm a little concerned that releasing something that size that flies away on it's own and goes who-knows-where might be breaking some law somewhere. It certainly wasn't going to stay airborn forever and I know if it had come down and damaged someone's property (or unlikely, but possibly injured someone)I would be held liable if I could be linked to it (also unlikely...but I'm not taking any chances).
Anyway, the point is -- Making UFOs that fly away and freak people out isn't new. It's probably the cause of most UFO reports. It's also a whole lot of fun.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
nah, its about 3 times as big
Police! This is an emergency! I am being attacked by a UFO with a color monitor!
Hell I'll build two and save one just for driving to church on the weekends.
;0)
All I need now is the shrink ray so i can fit in it
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
I have Opera under KDE, and yes, the bar has more height than usual.
I can't easily tell from the HTML why this is being rendered like that, but I think there is a class for one of the input styles which is not referenced.
I don't have the HTML of the other to compare.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I don't see anything in the text of the article about lifters, UFOs, or anything of the sort. All rather tenuous.
Can someone else see anything that has to do with homemade high voltage electricity toys?
Incidentally, this all reminds me of the high voltage stuff that came from science toys a while back: aluminium foil on your CRT linked to a polystyrene cup with foil on it making a motor out of simple office equipement.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I just don't see any use in owning a ufo unless i can kidnap farmers in iowa and probe their bodily orficies like the real aliens.
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
The physics is electrostatics - a technology known in the time of ancient Greece. Scrap TV parts were a little scarse in the time of Aristotle and Ptolemy, because NO ONE watched daytime TV, and no one made UFOs.
I used to regularly make UFOs myself in the 1970s. Me made wierd shaped kites out of metallised polyester, (used gas balloons) and then flew them at night with car headlights pointed up at them! They go higher than this electrostatic stuff, and real big ones can carry a man My grandad flew in a kite in the 1920's. Most technical stuff is not as new as Americans think!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I'm using IE 6, and the fucker's huge. 3 or 4 times normal size, much like my cock.
3 or 4 times normal size, much like my cock.
So what would make your cock, what, 1 inch normally?
This is not a reactionless thruster, it just uses whateven matter is surrounding it. The sharp edge is ionizing the air or other matter, leaving it with a negative charge (this is called corona discharge). since the aluminium foil is also negatively charge, the ionised air is repelled, pushing the "verhicle" away from it (up).
Maybe it's an upside down load-meter.
Years and years ago some friends built tissue hot air balloons powered by sterno in a light tin foil gondola/heater. They let em rip at night on the Chicago lake front north of a SAM site (long gone). The light glowing from the white tissue was a strange vision as they lifted out of view. On a lark they sent one up with a bunch of tin foil stips to reflect radar. A short time later a jet scrambled from one of the nearby bases.
Any real scientist or expert in physics knows anti gravity is possible, they also know our government most likely have anti gravity,
The problem is, its expensive, and requires ALOT of energy.
Theres no way I'm going to believe some little toy anyone can make, can defy gravity, all that is, is a trick.
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You should do more research on up to date science.
The theory of everything, super string theory, or Mtheory, but these theories talk about other dimensions and we cant prove they exsist, the only evidence we have, is the 5th force i spoke of.
"Ó Copyright February 18, 2001 by Ron Ewart
The story revolves around two simultaneous scientific events located in the mountains of Virginia. One is a Plasma fusion experiment and the other a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) experiment. When SETI's antennas pass through the M-33 Galaxy in the Triangulum constellation, a huge powerful signal engulfs the SETI equipment and backs up through the Kerr Dam generators into the Plasma fusion experiment, enlarging the Plasma core and creating a rift in space. In so doing it exposes the Fifth Force. There are four major forces that govern everything in the Universe. They are gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. The fifth and undiscovered force is the Fifth Force. The force that binds the very fabric of the Universe together, empty space."
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Possibly, assuming that it works (which I don't necessarially), the only explination I can think of is that its a variant on the ion drive.
It isn't reactionless, the reaction just comes from ionized air. If you look in the 1968 copy of WorldBook encyclopedia it gives instructions on building ion engines. They're pretty low thrust, and, of course, only work in an atmosphere.
I notice that the guy's site had pictures of one working in a farady cage, but not a vacuum chamber.
I'm not saying that it *IS* an ion drive, its probably a hoax. But if it does work, then its probably an ion drive.
Note, recently the Deep Space 1 probe that NASA sent out was described as using an "ion drive", this is a completely different type of drive, and not related to the "ionized atmosphere" drive that I think this guy has built. DS1 used reaction mass, but got thrust from it by ionizing it and repelling it from a thin mesh.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Just throw something into the air. Boom. It's defying gravity. Eventually gravity does win, but it was briefly defied.
You can also use two magnets to defy gravity, by making one float above the other. Place them in a non magnetic cage and one will float for a long long time. Electromagnets work too.
Ah - but the toast only lands butter side up if you do it from a table - if you do it from a worktop which is higher it has further to fall and usually lands the right way up.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Well, as you can see from this picture of the HeadQuarters of Project Hessdalen, you can see that the Norwegian Government also is also quite eager to spend huge amounts of money on UFO-Science!
At the start of the 20th century it was the general consensus of the scientific elite that heavier than air powered flight was a pipe dream and impossible. While it was conceded that birds and insects could fly it was obvious that they were light - nothing heavy enough to carry a man could possibly fly. Attempts to do so were met with great scorn.
There was only one serious scientist attempting heavier than air powered flight; professor Langley. His repeated failures were held as proof to the scientific establishment that flight was an impossibility and a waste of time and money - pseudo science at its worst.
Fortunately for mankind a pair of bicycle mechanics didn't know that it was pseudo science and impossible. When the Wright brothers succeeded in doing what all of the physicists said was impossible they changed the world. Of course today airplanes are an obvious fact of reality and no one but a complete idiot claims that there is any pseudo science involved in their construction. The ridicule of the early 20th century has long been forgotten.
Now in the early 21st century mainstream science ridicules 'electrogravitics' as pseudo science. Once again mainstream physicists are simply wrong. The key point in anything is "Does it work, and is it repeatable?"
General relativity predicts electrogravitics - one case which has been solved is this: if a cloud of charged particles is allowed to expand outward an inward pointing gravitational field will be generated.
Einstein used Maxwell's equations in formulating general relativity. All of you are familiar with the concept that mass and energy are related; if mass can change space-time why is it impossible for energy to do the same thing?
Basically what is going on in these lifters is this: When you charge a capacitor energy flows into the capacitor from the surrounding space via the Poynting vector. When you charge an asymmetrical capacitor you draw energy from the surrounding space in an asymmetrical fashion; this distorts the surrounding space. Distorted space is a gravitational field.
This is not 'ion wind' NASA has tested asymmetrical capacitors in vacuum chambers; the thrust is still there. Not much has been said about this in the general public but the fact is that the world is about to change dramatically.
In some ways the 21st century is an echo of the twentieth: science will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future whether it likes it or not, and once again very important work has been done by non scientists.
Like the early history of flight the field is full of both crackpots and people who know what they are doing. When you view these web pages understand what you are looking at; you are seeing the equivalent of the 'box kites' which were flown by experimenters and dreamers in the late 19th century. There is a direct line from those crude box kites to the space shuttle - the difference is 80 years of engineering.
See for yourself whether or not these 21st century box kites fly - if they do don't worry about the science: it will be forced to catch up. This is real, and it is quite literally 'warp drive' unfolding before your eyes.
By the way - the voltages involved are lethal - if you do these experiments be damned careful!
You can't build your own UFO as you'll know what it is.
UFO == Unidentified Flying Object
If you know what it is then it would be an Identified Flying Object.
These are just plain old FOs. They are easily identifiable.
A long time ago they were looking for "strange" ideas... or funny explanations for common events.
One of the them was the giant "Cat-Array", basically a bunch of cats with buttered bread strapped to their backs used to generate power...
my favorite was the "yawn" theory. You yawn, and other people reflexively do so to balance out the atmospheric pressure of the area .
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
NASA actually commercialises this technology. See Technology Opportunity
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By the way - the voltages involved are lethal - if you do these experiments be damned careful!
high voltage does not mean it's lethal. it's the combination of voltage and current that kills. the current in this project should probably be measured in microamps, so this is unlikely to kill you, unless you have a pacemaker. (if you do get zapped, it will hurt like hell, and it can damage nerves and stuff)
When you're pushing electrons away to get a thrust in the other direction, it is not a reactionless drive. Remember your 8th grade science lesson about static electricity? Electrons tend to collect and flow from sharp points. Like that sharp edge along the bottom of the thruster.
The Lifter4 website bears the following caption.
The Lifter v4.0 is maintained on the ground base with 4 thin nylon threads to avoid that it escapes to the ceiling...
Of course, one easy way to film this is to place the table upside down and mounted on the wall. Then film the "UFO" falling under gravity in slow motion. It will appear to rise under "electrogravity" and be caught by the nylon threads. I would suggest that there is no way to tell from the photos and movies which way is actually up.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
In the first place, it takes a huge amount of mass to "bend space" as one other poster alledges this is doing. The amount of energy (power, kids, not voltage) to be equivalent to this is huge. I would want to see one of these myself, in a vacuum chamber, with a testing device to see if anyone were creating sneaky large induction fields to repel this thing, since it obviously could not fly as described.
/. main page says it can be built for 10 dollars in parts, which is of course a lie. Go out and buy (even just the componenets) of a 30,000 volt power supply for less than $10. Or maybe the jerk who posted this story assumes that we all have 30kV HPVS' just lying around.
BTW: The original story posted to the
Yes, I have one in my TV, but it is in use (powering the CRT in my TV set, which is why I own one). Also, it generally requires an input voltage of 115 +/- 5V AC to run, not 12-24 VDC, and also, in a TV set install of these electronics, there are built-in safeguards from electrocution and inhalation of potentially harmful gases and chemicals that could form in atmosphere (in, i.e., a residence) from the presence of improperly contained HV, like O-3 and others.
Good luck, heheheh!
PS: Like the "Anarchists' Cookbook", the only recipies in this are recipies for disaster, and good ways to die while looking extremely foolish in the attempt. You could end up (if you are young enough and have no kids) in line for a much uncovetted Darwin Award. Wouldn't that make your charred corpse feel special?
Again, good ZZZZZZZZZTTTTCK! luck.
~Me.
UFO stands for unidentified flying object. so, please, tell me how, if you build it, you cant identify it. if you build it, it simply becomes a flying object. a UFO isnt neccessarily an alien spacecraft, its simply something that you cant identify.
Guns are like umbrellas and condoms. Better to have one and not need it, than need it and not have one.
Sounds verrrry familiar. Would that be north of Montrose harbor? I did the exact same thing mid 1960's and would be curious who you are.
I remeber making my own hydrogen balloons (helium party tanks weren't yet available)from aluminum foil strips dissolved in sodium hydroxide. I did the same thing - attached aluminum foil to the balloons and watched them float our over lake Michigan. Later I heard that jets were scrambled.
I used to think that some small percentage of UFO reports *had* to represent entities from outer space -- there were too reports of them, and too many of them came from people who had a lot of credibility (Air Force/NASA people, law enforcement, etc).
I doubt that any of them represent space travelers anymore.
SETI hasn't found squat -- you would think that if there was anyone "close", say within 20-30 light years would have been observable by SETI.
The distances space travellers would need to cross strain at the laws of physics as we know them. The technology needed to travel extra-solar distances are staggering. Leads me to believe that its not possible or practical for anything smaller than an aircraft-carrier sized starship to travel such distances and at least tens of years of travel.
Even if you assume that these space travellers are further evolved from a technology and physics perspective and can cross great distances in something much less than a human lifetime, what could they *possibly* want with earth? Its small, primitive population can't teach them very much, and our meager resources can't be of any use to them.
And of course the most damning evidence is that entities from outer space haven't made themselves known in any kind of a verifiable way (ie, appearing on Larry King Live).
I'd like to believe that there are advanced civiliations with cool technology that can travel the galaxy, but it seems kind of unlikely.
It's not plagarism. The original was posted anonymously, so like this comment, it has no owner and is in public domain. You may note the supposedly plagarized comment got a 0 or 1 while the identical comment with an account ID got a 4 Funny.
/. moderators don't think much of posts by AC's. Bitch all you like, though, it's a free cyberspace (for now!)
This is because
By the by, how do you know the same poster didn't make both comments, and realized belatedly that he/she did not log-in before posting, then reposted under his/her account to fix.
Another thing: someone should have taught you that you attract more karma with honey than vinegar, so you might try ASKING the moderator to mod the parent down, rather than ORDERING him/her to, since you have absolutely no authority to issue such an order. When in school (or are you still there?) you were the kid who reminded the teacher to take-up the homework due that day right before the end of day bell rings, weren't you.
Anyway, to paraphrase the other responder to your stupid MOD PARENT DOWN post- why don't you please kindly button your cockholster.
~Me.
Big Fuckin Deal. OLD stuff from the 60's, yawn.
That hardly qualifies. The model rockets I built in middle school are better 'UFO's than these things.
-- Adam
Hey dickwad. Does the phrase "fr1st p0st!" mean anything to you? Yes folks, I was the first, non-AC post on this thread. So eat me, AC fagknocker
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
Alex Chiu already has UFOs that can carry people and create crop circles.
--
I romp with joy in the bookish dark
I find claim 10 rather amusing, though:
10. A linear accelerator, comprising:
a support rail;
a capacitor module comprising a first conductive element having a cylindrical geometry and a first sliding electrical contact; a second conductive element axially spaced from said first conductive element and of a geometry of smaller axial extent than the first conductive element and having a second sliding electrical contact; and a dielectric element disposed between said first conductive element and said second conductive element so as to form the capacitor module;
a frictionless connection for connecting said capacitor module to said support rail for movement therealong; and a high voltage source, having first and second terminals connected respectively to said first and second sliding electrical contacts, for applying a high voltage to said conductive elements of sufficient value to create a thrust force on said module inducing movement thereof along the support rail.
Before you bother looking... no, they don't disclose how to create a frictionless connection. :-)
Does it only work in a direction opposite to gravity? Just curious ... if it does only "lift" then it is precisely anti-gravity. If it works perpendicular to gravity, then it is not precisely anti-gravity.
Brian
Oh so since we have pictures, knows who built it, who's controlling it, have the diagrams, I think it's safe to say that this UFO now is a IFO. ;)
Oh yes i've spotted a UFO once.
On a friday evening i had been hacking at a friends place, installing a linux machine. At 02:00 am in the saturday morning i drove home. After a couple a miles i took a switch to a new
highway which leads to a rather large airport.
First i didn't even get alarmed it must be a UFO,
but on the left of the road behind some buildings
and tree's there was this laser show going on.
I looked and thought, damn thats a pretty damn
huge fake UFO they built for that party over
there. I was looking at it and thought , hmm
nice party. Then i looked at the road to
see if was still going ok, not crossing lines.
I looked aside again to have another look, and all was gone!!
Of course i had a couple a beers, but not that
many.
So to be honest, why would anyone be surprised
if there would be real UFO's out there?
Remember the Dean Drive, a frequent subject of articles and editorials in Astounding (or was it Analog then) in the sixties? Dean had discovered that Newton's laws of motion were only approximate, f didn't equal ma, there was a tiny little high-order nonlinear term in it... which meant that big, massive, unbalanced, counter-rotating linear weights could generate a tiny little linear component. Without any reaction mass.
There were all sorts of photographs of the device in action. They were all marred by little details. Somehow it could never quite lift its own weight, although a simple scaling up would, of course, do it. The device was always tethered, or on a surface...
The best one was the before-and-after shot of it sitting on a bathroom scale. When turned off, the scale showed one reading. When turned on, the scale showed a lighter reading. Unfortunately the pointer was a little, well, BLURRED, but the accompanying text vouched that there was a net weight reduction and that the camera had not just captured an extreme swing of an oscillating pointer.
Whatever... HAPPENED to the Dean Drive? You don't suppose it could have been a fraud, do you?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
First...
Translation: it works, but we're not sure why.
Second...
OMFG! (as they say), so it does (may) work in space! So does it need a "fuel" of some type? As in, are we talking about feeding it some kind of substance, and the mechanism acts to accelerate the mass? Or does it run all on it's own?
From the first link:
The Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth H. Bacon, "Do we get it right 100 percent of the time? Of course not."
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Those are the damnest things, best $350 I've ever spent on a gadget, but thats not really relevent...
Does anyone know for certain how this works? I'm guessing its the same way the Quandra air filters at Sharper Image work -- they move air electrostatically, although I haven't found any good writeups online about exactly how they do it.
Makes me wonder, though, if they'd work in a vaccuum. I'm guessing not, that they are actually using the electrical potential to move air to provide thrust.
...not really an Unidentified Flying Object if you built it yourself now is it. Maybe an IFO, or just simply a FO, but certainly not an UFO.
f. Prospects for Nuclear Electric Propulsion Using Closed Cycle MHD Energy Conversion, Ron Litchford, NASA MSFC [abstract] [presentation]
g. Ultralight Vapor Fueled Cavity Reactors with MHD for Powering Multi- Megawatt NEP Systems , Travis Knight et al., New Era Technologies (NeTech), Inc. [abstract] [presentation .
Apparently these power sources could be built for a couple of billion dollars, this is where the military dark budget of $30bn comes into play (see the New York Times quoted in the story).
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
I think there's actually something to both the Biefield-Brown Effect, and to the Podelklenov effect as well. However, there is a lot of fringe "research" in this field, and that just makes it harder for people like Marc Millis to be taken seriously.
All the same, I am really tempted to try and build stuff like this and this!
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
Wow. You can build a flying thing that you can't even identify yourself.
Really, though, all you need for that is a case of beer and a paper airplane. "*toss* Whoa, what the heck is that? *snore*"
They tried making one at PumpConn (sp?) in Philly this year. They said it didn't fly, but moved arround on the table a little.
My best guess is that the demmo they saw had a hidden wire in one of the supports for the upper electrode. The wire would then be couled inside the lower electrode place before finally being electrically connected to the lower plate. This would make a hidden electromagnet to repel the hidden eectromagnet in the table or whatever it was teathered to.
If the NASA patented device actually produced enough thrust to lift one ot these things off the ground, they'd be in every satelite. The guy in france claims to left four nuts... that's what, 100g? The entire thing must way what, 1 kg. Assume NASA can make them 1.5 times as good for 1,000 times the cost. That's 15 N (1.5 kg * 10 m/s^2) of thrust indefinately and cheaper than a small rocet motor. Put 100 of them on a small satelite and you've got constant 1,500 kN of thrust. Anyone have an eastimate for the atmosperic drag (yes, there is drag, even in outer space, it's just miniscule when the molecules average 1 m appart) and solar wind forces on a small satelite? IIRC, propellant is usually the limiting factor on satlite life. If it only cost them a little bit of money to counteract drag and solar wind indefinately, they'd go for it.
Also, think about interstellar probes. If they made a small 500 kg interstellar probe, 1.5 kN would give them 3 m/s^2 acceleration. That's 94,608,000 m/s/y. That's .1c per year. relativistic affects aren't noticable until over .9 c, so you'd be at 0.9 times thespeed of light and accelerating after only 9 years. Of course, to communicate with Earth, you'd probably want t use infrared lasers or something to communicate with earth so that you get reasonable bandwidth after the dopler shirts up arround 0.98 c.
The point is that we'd have a cheap, high speed probe on its way to Alpha Centauri reight now if the NASA patented devices had anywhere near the thrust these thing claim to have.
P.S. Ladies and gentlemen that plan on reproducing, please invest in some lead gonad shields if you're going to be playing with 60 kV power supplies. I'd have to dig out my solid state chem book from freshman year, but I think you're starting to get low ammounts of X-rays being given off from the low ammounts of streaming electrons at those voltages. It'sprobably not statistically significant until one of you starts sleeping next to one of these experiments for a few years, but I wouldn't put it past some of you.. It's all fun and games until someone bears a mutant.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
There's an active mailing list at Lifters group for people exploring this. Has complete archives, but you need to get on the list first to be able to access them.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
You need to take a look at this page with all the successful replications: The Worldwide Lifters replications.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
Aliens are too advanced for us to find them, we find them when they want us to, and they will definately have found us first.
Which is why Seti is useless, its hoping aliens make newbie mistakes us humans make and pollute space, but I dont think so.
What would aliens want with earth? Theres life on earth, perhaps they are curious and want to study us.
Why on earth would humans go in the deep ocean and study microscopic lifeforms?
We do it, why wouldnt aliens? Not to mention earth is the only planet in this solar system which can support life, Aliens are bound to focus on it.
And its not unlikely that theres aliens, its very likely, whats unlikely is, why would any aliens want to make themselves known to us? We are stupid enough to send our DNA into space, and send waves out to contact aliens, but aliens sure as hell arent stupid enough to do something like that.
I'm sure they remember the last time they did that and were enslaved for a few hundred million years.
Oh and I'm sure if Aliens do see us, and how brutal we are, Aliens would treat us like wild animals, tag us, and keep their distance. I dont see you going to shake hands with a wild lion or ape in the jungle.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Sure maybe 40-50 percent are hoaxes, this is saying one out of every two people is a liar.
That being said, The rest is something else. If the government werent keeping secrets, why is it always the government whos first to say its a hoax, they dont even investigate it, they hear UFO and they yell hoax a few seconds later.
Disinformation, and leading people to think its hoaxes, even aliens, would benifit the governments agenda.
problem is, this would also benifit Aliens agendas, they dont want to be known so we can attack and try to kill them so they'd abduct people in the middle of no where, people with very low IQs, so its not believeable, and only do it at night, so they cant be seen.
Either way, i think theres more evidence for these two theories, than millions of people all being hoaxers for no reason
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The project is certainly interesting, but all this UFO and antigravity stuff?
Hmmmmmm...
If you read the pages you'll see that they are burning about 100 watts per ounce. Look further and you'll see that this mysterious device generates a down draft, about 1.5 MPH. This is called an ion wind. It is a well known phenomena. Hmmm, don't helicopters work by generating down drafts? Someone did some math and came up with the figure that it would need to create a 3 MPH draft in order to lift itself.
The downdraft is only half of what he thinks it would need to lift itself that way. Therefore this thing must be generating a mysterious UFO force. Or maybe he got the math wrong.... Nahhhhhh. Must be UFO stuff.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
There are only two real technical responses to this article:
/. followed this advice, maybe we'd have more system uptime ("it's a network problem").
* I tried it, and it doesn't work
* I tried it, and it works
Everything else is just the typical slash-snot: "I can't belive it, these people are id10ts for believing it!"
Geez people, your opinion on whether the earth is round or not won't affect the fact that the earth is round (or not). Likewise just because you don't believe something is possible makes no difference to whether something is possible or not.
If anything, it just goes to show how closed-minded most of the posters about really new tech are. If it's outside the model, most posties are like "no way, it won't work." But do they actually try and see if it does work? Nope!
There's only one way to disprove something in a scientific way: try and repeat it, and fail. Thought experiments are useful tools, but stopping at thought experiments is the sign of a lazy mind. Your model may be wrong!
Heck, if everyone on
April fool's day seems to be a little early this year.
Back in middle school, we did the Invent America competition. For those who aren't familiar with it, Invent America is where you get a bunch of little kids to create such amazing things as non-spill dog dishes and nintendo controllers with colored labels so you don't mix up the wires.
:)
I ended up designing (I use that term extremely loosely) an ion-wind drive. My plan was to use it to make a platform rise off the ground.
Unfortunately, nobody would let me near the multi-kilivolt power supplies I needed to prototype it. I probably would have killed myself playing with them anyway... not that that would have been the most dangerous thing I played with as a kid
We displayed our projects in a local mall for a few days. Most people would walk around and talk to everybody about how cute their projects were... until they got to me. Then they would just stare, except for a few engineers from local aerospace companies. They would try to engage me in debate, losing me after about two seconds.
I didn't care. I had a bag of candy orange slivers I had got at the dollar store and a mouse we bought from the pet shop. Stay with my project for fifteen minutes and then it was off to play StarFox on a SNES display.
Life was good.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
I may have missed something, but where is the connection between the 3 year old New York Times article and building a UFO?
- The device has to be as light as possible. And I mean LIGHT. Strip everything you can.
- I used the simple kitchen folium (aluminium sheet they put cabbages and chicken in), please try to remove sharp edges, as they start ionizing and lower performance. Just roll it rounder.
- I folded two times the upper side of the sheeth and placed a very very thin slice of bamboo into it, a bit of glue, and I had a strong structure.
- At the corners I added a bit stronger bamboo sticks. I made them side by side, and then attached to triangle using a piece of tape.
- As a power source - old SUN monitor, so, I did SUN powered anti-gravitics
:)
- It flies no matter the polarity, tho one is more efficient.
- Place the wire as low as you can, to achieve maximum thrust. But be careful, lightning's not good. Mine once even caught fire.
- It always flies towards the wire, but do attach it to ground using nilon or whatever is handy. U don't want it to fly into your face or something.
- When u turn out the lights you can see the problem spots where it leaks. Try to remove them.
- After success I made more sides and got a 4 triangle device. It flew also, tho that needed a bit more tuning because my powersource wasn't very juicy. But. You don't need lots power. You just need a light construction.
- HIGH VOLTAGE! KILLS! DANGER! SAFETY!
- After success I broke down an old CD-ROM, took the rolling part, attached wires close to the surface of a CD (opposites sides 0, +20K, CD was rolling freely) and voila - after turning power on it started turning, fassssst. Oh geek joys. Then I made one using two iso-star cans and a rotating coce can.
- The ultimate question: does it work in vacum (space)? I have no idea.
Disclaimer: If you manage to destroy your life, monitor or cat I take no responsebility, habbahabbahbaa. You're adults. Be careful.Hmmm, don't helicopters work by generating down drafts?
No, they don't. They work the same way as airplanes, producing lift by moving air over an appropriately shaped airfoil, reducing the pressure above the wing, causing the vehicle to rise. The only difference is that in the helicopter's case, the lift is generated by moving the wing around in circles really fast. In the airplane's case, the wing is moved laterally through the air really fast. The result is the same.
Ah, yes, The Demon-Haunted World. While I agree wholeheartedly with the principles of baloney detection you quoted, it should be noted that The Demon-Haunted World itself is hardly a paradigm of objectivity. I regard Sagan's ideas from this book as a valuable skeptical tool, and applied appropriately (like I think you did here), can be extremely useful. The flip side of it, however, can be the casual disregard for anything that doesn't fit his predetermined worldview (the attitude of, "I don't need to look objectively at X, I already know X doesn't exist because I know X doesn't exist" can be a slippery slope). I think Sagan's skepticism, while again very useful in part, came off overall as smug, self-serving and dogmatic. Personally, I keep The Demon-Haunted World on the shelf (both literally and metaphorically) right next to Charles Fort and Patrick Harpur's appropriately titled "Daimonic Reality", which takes on a far more interesting and challenging question than Sagan did, namely, "how do we account for all aspects of human experience, and who decides what is real?" Fun stuff!
Because as the system fails, the repulsive force gets stronger, whereas the attractive force gets weaker.
So instead it is preferable to attach a buttered peice of toast to the belly of the cat, butter side facing upwards.
For years, every Christmas, New Years, birthdays, or other celebration that involves many people and copious amounts of alcohol, we set off to make UFOs out of very large garbage bags and a simple heat source. It's a lot of fun trying to glamorize them and still make a successful launch.
Try joining two 140 litre bags to make one big bag and line the inside lower circumference with aluminium foil with a couple of green and orange glow sticks to add a mysterious glow in the sky.
It can be dangerous at these lengths though because it might get stuck in a tree or just die out and drop on a house somewhere (no I haven't set any houses on fire). They usually either don't work though or fly higher and higher until they disappear.
It makes you wonder how many people see them on New Years especially, when thousands are partying in the streets looking at fireworks and see some large glowing undeterminable object flying by.
hehe
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
"....how come your UFO only abducts the pretty girls"?
Table-ized A.I.
#1 How to build your own UFO #2 How to build your own alien??
It's not antigravity, the thrust is directional. It works in vacuum (as tested by NASA, sorry no link). The Ion wind has been insulated, and it still works, see both of these pages: Wind tests, and The Ion Wind Tests on Transdimensional's Lifter.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
How can NASA patent the Biefeld-Brown effect? Actually physicist T. Townsend Brown was a contemporary of Einstein's. He has a rather interesting life story. Lots of intriguing stuff at his family's home site.
an old saying from back in the tube days - basicly the higher the voltage the nastier the kick it will give you but you need to run current thru your body to actually do damage (burns etc).
With one exception - run a small current thru your heart and you can nuke its internal electrics - which is why you always work with HV with one hand behind your back so that you never run a current from arm to arm passin the heart
Thanks for your balanced comment. This is the kind of story that seems designed for a fascinating discussion, given Slashdot's putatively "nerd" demographic.
But what do we find instead? As usual, just hostility and derision. Not that I'm claiming this is antigravity - that's massively unlikely.
What we do have is an interesting little website with videos of the damn thing working, and a series of at least moderately interesting tests of common explanations of why this happens.
All we hear instead is "Damn Pseudoscience, what a crock, extraordinary proof required, this is clearly all lies.
Sheesh. If there's a commonly accepted explanation for this effect, I want to hear it! If there are flaws in the experiments, detail them. I just get so bloody sick of this reflexive pseudointellectual negativity masquerading as a "scientific" viewpoint.
Bah.
after reading some of the comments posted here I have lost faith in humanity. only some of the comments caused this. most of the comments were about how stupid the government would be to invest in this... personally this would be a great tech to work on. imagine making this mainstream and powerfull enough to like a car. hell you could make it into a mode of transportation. right now its in its infant stages (its tinkering stage) it can lift small weights, do some basic manuvering and float. what people need to learn is to have faith in the pseudosciences. most of them have roots in sci-fi writing but they are slowly becomming a reality. look at star trek (TOS) we never would have thought that we would have computers that would be able to control anything. now look we have computers controlling almost every facet of our lives. back when radios were first introduced mainstream people thought they were pointless. 'we will never have a use for a squakbox' they would say... now look... people depend on their car radios for entertainment and news.. what I am getting at is embrace new tech don't bash it. again this is in its infancy stages. give it some time and some tweaking and it will be better. Thats my 2 Credits... Press start to continue.
Yes, the Dean Drive was a fraud. One of many that Astounding's editor John W. Campbell fell for during the Fifties. Well, "fell" might be a little strong. He defended and supported the "alternative" science crowd a lot more than a real scientist would.
The other was a little thing called "Dianetics", a "science of the mind" one of his authors cobbled together. Campbell gave it star billing as a new scientific theory in a 1950 issue -- a strange thing for a fiction magazine author to do. Campbell was sucked into Hubbard's new business for quite a while until he became disillusioned with the "religion" angle Hubbard rolled out: Scientology. All of this is my opinion, of course, but it's pretty much common knowledge. No one likes to talk about it, because the you-know-who's were as rabidly defensive then as they are now, perhaps even more so. There's a story about L. Sprague de Camp, a critical article he wrote about the dangers of the Hubbard Church Militant, a defamation campaign against him, and a gag agreement he allegedly signed, that I wish de Camp would have told before he passed on.
The early science fiction fen community was mightily fractured on the validity of Dean Drives and Dianetics in the fifties, as well as other notions that I can't remember after all this time. Campbell lost much of his reputation because he had a mind that was just a little too open.
Issac Asimov's autobiography told a little of the story. The rest can be picked up here and there.
And the magazine was "Astounding" until Ben Bova rechristened it "Analog" in the sixties, I think.
Well, it might have been silly, but they did have a lot of fun back then, didn't they?
Of all places, I would have expected their to be some more objective people here on slashdot. Largely, what I've seen is a bunch of people with little or no scientific training calling this guy names and making light of his experiments. There was another time people did that, in the middle ages. Luckly, this thing called the Enlightenment happened and the scientific method allowed for the discovery of most of the luxuries the ignorant masses (of which I see nicely represented here) take for granted. There have already been lots of references to powered flight, but others, like electricity, AC vs. DC power, the automobile, etc all have examples through history.
I could justify you and I could stomach this crap if he was asking for investors or money. He's not. He has a genuinely interesting effect, he has indicated that here's how you do an INDEPENDANT VERIFICATION, and he has also proposed a number of experiments that can be done to see if there is something interesting here. Nowhere does he claim anything other than a interest in the science and experimentation with high voltage effects. Like you people do when you experiment with the kernel - after all, you're just a bunch of fools when there's tried-and-true existing kernels on the market, right? That's sarcasm, for the challenged.
I have actually built one of these things on a different design years ago. This is a well known ion-engine concept. The problem is the power suuplies needed to make it work in any kind of practical application. The effect I designed for was a air turbulence effect that used the high voltage to ionize air molecules and accllerate them downward. That is why I suspect that the devices have problems in humid situations. BUT YOU COULD EXPERIMENT AND PROPOSE THIS. There is an experiment that rules out an external field, the faraday cage one. You could try to reduce the air pressure and see if the effect drops linearly, or blow compressed air at it to try and reduce lift, or even put it in a vacuum chamber. BUT THOSE ARE EXPERIMENTS!
Calling this guy a crackpot without any attempt to verify his well laid out experiments is a disgrace. If you see a problem with his experiments or apparatus, tell us. Or if you care that much, replicate his experiment. If it fails, post your results. I might get bored and try some of this sometime. But the information is all there!
Kudos to this guy for showing the spirit of backyard experimentation, and shame on you mods for promoting the kind of crap that's in the parent.
..don't panic
It's the "electrogravitic" part that's the extraordinary claim. You want us to believe that the rewired guts of a 14" colour monitor are distorting space instead of just ionizing some air.
And no doubt you'd have us believe that since anyone can light things on fire, the phlogiston theory of combustion is proven.
Here's a pro-phlogiston article, by the way. Don't mind the printing date — look instead at how much it looks like all of the defenses of doomed crackpot theories that you can dredge up on the Web today.
...and so on.
Mind the Gap
Everyone,
Whatever you think about these things, remember your basic Physics. Under the laws of physics, when you move away from a mass, you spend kenetic energy to gain potential energy. You can regain that energy by allowing yourself to return to your original position.
If there is some sort of "anti-gravity", or "gravity shielding", it cannot break this law (nor the laws of inertia for that matter). Otherwise, you could turn on your "gravity shielding", assend to a position of larger potential energy than your current position, then simply turn off your "gravity shielding" and get free energy by falling back to your original position.
Therefore, any "anti-gravity" or "gravity shielding" must also keep you from moving along any path that is not equi-potential. Also because of this, any "anti-gravity" or "gravity shielding" device must also be an anchor of sorts.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
My recommendation is: those who are uncertain of their HTML coding abiliities should stick to plain-text and simply give the URLs:
That's all I have to contribute. Despite all the debate, "build your own UFO" looks like a fun thing to distract myself with some weekend.
helicopters do not work by pushing themselves up, rather that is not the primary form of lift. Rather (and if you dont understand airfoils, that is what the internet is for) you simply have an airfoil moving through the air generating lift because of the air moving, much like a propeller. And propellers do indeed pull not push the plane.
There is no mystery or enigma with lift. It has been proven through numerous experiments that ALL wing bearing lift is the primary force of pressure differential that actually PULLS the airfoil towards the higher velocity and thus lower pressure liquid (or air).
Now it is indeed true that planes and helicopters have an 'air pillow' effect that is manifested and observed sometimes when a pilot lands (especially on hot asphalt, but that adds more variables in to the mix :) the craft will 'bounce' and must slow down even more in order to eliminate this cushion. As fascinating as that is though, the fact remains as evidenced by scientific study through the entire last century that airfoils work by pull not push. Any down wash by a helicopter is not enough to push it up except in very specific circumstances, as in when it is close enough to the ground in just the right conditions.
Reducing the pressure above the wing does NOT 'cause' a down draft anymore than the rotation of the Earth could be said to cause a drunk and arrogant person to fall down (no matter how much he argues). The action/equal and opposite reaction is this: Air flows over both halves of an airfoil destined to attempt to reach the end point at the same time (don't ask me, maybe the have synchronized watches), when the surface on one half (the top in this instance) is larger and thus requires the air to travel farther, then the air actually travels faster on that half than the other (yeah, obviously... I know). This speed causes a differential pressure change. The air moving faster up top is not only faster than the bottom but is also faster then the rest of the air surrounding the entire airfoil. This simply causes a suction action pulling the airfoil up in an effor to normalize the pressure.
Now what you were saying is not without merit however. Most when seeing a cross section of an airfoil most will say, hey! the air at such high velocity will push against the top 'bubble' and thus push it down, (the action of it sliding down over it producing the friction and thus differential to push the object down or try to), and if the airfoil is at an upwards Angle of Attack (or upwards angle basically --WIND--> \ )like so, then won't that 'push' the airfoil UP? Yes, to both questions... however studies have proven that these effects are not significant enough to lift, push, or move the airfoil enough to achieve actual lift except in very very rare conditions in which the wing is strong enough to take that stress, but super light and the body of the plane is ultra light... like the gliders they use to be powered by a dude riding a bike or the sun. Only modern innovations of material and design can bring us that however, and we have been flying for basically a century.
I've seen these incredible beasts. I've even flown in a few! Yep! They're called airplanes. The government has a whole slew of them too.
The problem is, its expensive, and requires ALOT of energy.
Seems to fit the description of a 747 quite nicely.
A variation of this principle does indeed work in a vacuum - it was recently tested on NASA's NASA Deep Space 1 spacecraft. It's the same basic principle of accelerating molecules by ionization, except that in the case of Deep Space 1, the molecules in question are supplied from a tank.
Of course if they were on your level you'd shake their hands.
But we arent on the level of aliens who have been around for millions or billions of years.
Face it, we are infants, we are like apes. Intelligence? Sure we are more intelligent than Apes, in the same way Aliens are more intelligent than us.
We look at Apes brutality and consider them Animals, Aliens look at us with our wars, terrorism, and consider us Animals, inferior species not worthy of communicating with.
Before Aliens communicate with us we have to at least prove with wont destroy ourselves, or try to destroy them. And face it if aliens Landed in front of the White house, George Bush would declare war on them, and all of these religious freaks would either call them demons or worship them as gods.
We arent READY for contact and wont be ready for it until we stop having wars, and are open minded to new things, those two things may not happen within our generations, maybe in a few thousand years with luck.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Why to you assume that aliens are too advanced for us to find them? Why assume that aliens are technologically more advanced than us right now? If the universe is teeming with life, there is likely to be races more advanced and others that are less advanced than us. Maybe some are a little bit more advanced than we are...maybe some are nearly-omniscient, nearly-omnipotent beings (I hope they're not too cranky)...On the other hand, we could basically be among the most technologically advanced species around - if that's the case we won't know about alien species for a while...
We have only been around for a few hundred thousand years, a million tops, this is not a long time in space time, in fact its the blind of an eye. Go back 5000 years with all the technology we have today, you'd be worshipped as a god, you'd be that much more advanced, go back 100,000 years to when men were in caves and forrests as hunter gatherer warrior types, and you'd be so far above these groups they'd either worship you or run from you.
Now imagine some alien race a million years more advanced than us, and pay attention to the advancements we've had in the last 100 years, and will have in the next 100 years such as nano technology, warp drives, etc, Aliens a million years above us most likely control all matter, manipulate time, understand dimensions, and are so much more advanced than us that if we did speak to them we'd think we were talking to god.
If you were an Alien, would you contact a group off people who werent ready, who would call you god and worship you, or call you a demon and fear you? Would you land in front of the white house when you see missles in space (missle defend system) or see how we nuke each other? ALiens most likely think we are unstable since we are destroying ourselves we'd certainly attack them too.
And if they control all matter and genetics through nano and bio technology theres no way in hell we can see them. To top it off, we were stupid enough to put our DNA into space for any group of aliens to take.
The only way i think Aliens would contact us right now, is by using our genetics and coming to earth in human form to attempt to save humanity from itself. Because currently humans are just busy destroying everything. I dont think we are gifted, They have been around for billions of years, we havent.
Now, as well as we can figure out organic chemistry, all life is probably based on carbon (or perhaps silicon, but that's very speculative). Like all other elements except for Hydrogen, Carbon is produced inside stars as gravity forces protons and neutrons to merge into heavier elements. However, Carbon is only produced when second- or third-generation stars die (thus releasing the heavier elements into space). First-generation stars produce only lighter elements (like helium and lithium). That means that life as we know it could only have started after the formation of third generation stars (like our sun). If the universe is about as old as we think, that means that not too many races should have gotten a billion-year headstart on us.
Theres lots of planets in space which could have simple lifeforms, Mars, Europa, etc etc, because theres ice. But as far as intelligent life, if theres intelligent life, meaning more intelligent than us, they arent controlled by the elements like we are, they are the controllers of the elements.
This means they can create and destroy stars, control matter itself on the atomic level, etc.
Imagine for example there is aliens which can control matter, We'd have no way of seeing them but they could be all around us, they could appear and vanish at any moment, and what could we do? Nano technology, and Quantum entanglement are technologies we have just discovered, and its proven in labs that you can teleport, and you can control matter itself, imagine Aliens who have had this technology for thousands of years, or millions of years, it would be so advanced that they may not even exsist in this physical form anymore, and this would mean they wouldnt be limited to our dimension like we are.
Distance would no longer matter if you can teleport, Distance would not matter if you can morph your body into particles of light and then atom by atom put yourself back together at the destination, or create worm holes and bend space itself.
The universe is BILLIONS of years old, and thats just this universe, there may be others. So if you have a 50 billion year old universe, There could be species who have been around for billions of years.
Thats a longg long longg fucking time, We've been around a few hundred thousand years and look at us. Even a species a few thousand years ahead of us would be like gods compared to us. Imagine how far nano technology and quantum physics will take us in just the next 300 years, we could be at star trek capabilities in a few hundred years.Do you really believe aliens who have been around for hundreds of millions of years, or billions of years, wouldnt be like gods to us?
Now, while civilization and technology may develop at a relatively rapid pace, evolution itself is very, very slow - especially when you start at the unicellular level. As it is, it is not that clear that there would actully be those "ancient races" so prevalent in cosmic sci-fi. But as I said, we can only speculate. And every theory is about as valid as the other. But we shouldn't assume anything.
These are aliens, they most likely control their own evolution. They most likely can control their genes, not to mention they can use computers and nano technology to give themselves whatever form they wish to have, evolution is not really hard to control when you reach a certain technology level.
There is no way for us to know of these things. The most we can do is make an educated guess. That's why - unless some kind of "manager" alien race (or council of races, if they're all suffiently advanced and not too xenophobic) is actively blocking electromagnetic transmissions around Earth - there's no reason to think that SETI would not at some point catch an alien signal, a distant proof that, at some point, an alien race was using radio waves to communicate...
Who says aliens use technology which leaves signals? Like we have stealth bombers, aliens may have it, hell aliens could like i said, communicate in such a way that we would think its just random space dust, if you an control atoms, and matter, and particles with nano technology, you could communicate and be completely stealth. Theres no way we could check all the particles floating around in space to see if theres some sort of pattern and even if we do find a pattern it still wouldnt prove its aliens. Not to mention, Aliens may not need to communicate in this way, they could use telepathy for all we know, sounds silly, but all it would take is a brain to computer interface of some sort, and perhaps a sort of internet.
Face it, we arent efficient with our technology because we just discovered it, we expect aliens to bee making the same mistakes we are making, but if they have been around for millions of years instead of hundreds of thousands like us,chances are, they've been there, done that, perhaps they left junk in space before and other aliens saw it and came and enslaved them, attacked them etc, and so they dont do it anymore.
You dont realize how dangerous it is, to send DNA and maps into deep space, there could be good aliens and there could be evil aliens, if the aliens are anything like us, expect us to bee conqoured and enslaved someday in our grandchildrens future, because if we keep it up, acting like we own space when we really dont, its bound to piss somebody off eventually.
If aliens want to study us, they don't need to actually come to earth. We broadcast plenty enough material into space using those same electromagnetic wave. Perhaps they're even fans of Gilligan's Island.
here you go againn with humans are the center of the universe BS. Perhaps Aliens dont want to study just us but everything on our planet, theres many ways they could do this and we would never know it, they could spread little microscopic particles all around which gather information and them capture them (almost like Nano Dust that our government is using as spy technology)
They could abduct a few people, do some tests, and see if we are ready for contact. But really, my point is, if aliens want contact with us, chances are they will find us first, now if we do find aliens its most likely going to be life not as intelligent as us.
As far as us being too brutal, I don't know...if such aliens are indeed watching us they're the dominant species on their home planet, they very probably have had a violent, often brutal past. There's no reason to think that the darwinian concept of "survival of the fittest" would work any differently in an alien setting. But definitely they might think we are overtly greedy, materialistic, and live in a world where great social and economical inequalities persist.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Humans created survival of the fittest, as an excuse for the brutality. Theres no reason for survival of the fittest when you can have survival of all. Its ideals like that, which scare aliens away, when you believe everythings a competition and that lifes about winning and losing, Aliens have no reason to ever contact you, you are too busy trying to be better than them for them to waste their time with you.
Aliens may have believed in survival of the fittest, MILLIONS of years ago when they first started to evolve, and some intelligent Aliens still may beelieve that, but we dont want to meet Aliens like that, Survival of the fittest = Enslave the humans, take over the earth, and use the planet to harvest resources.
Yeah Survival of the fittest, that means Survival of none, because everyone through competition eventually destroys themselves.
And thats why Humanity is in the position its in now, on a path to self destruction, if we ever get out of survival of the fittest way of thinking we might evolve past war, slavery, terrorism, nazism, and other human vs human fighting, because its like highlander, survival of the fittest will not cease until theres just one left.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
William B. Stein
September 5, 2000
The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility that Electrokinetic Propulsion is just another manifestation of the Ionic Wind Effect. Three different cases were explored; the first being normal atmospheric operation, in which the surrounding atmosphere was ionized. The second case used atmospheric ions present within a vacuum. The last case used the actual dielectric media as the ions."
The paper can be found here
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
Finally, I found a reference to vacuum tests. It's at Gravitec's corporate page: "The initial vacuum test showed as suspected that field propulsion did not require any exhaust gasses to operate. These tests, while good, are not enough to bring to the scientific community, because something this extraordinary in nature needs extraordinary proof. We currently need to perform a more controlled and metered vacuum experiment to eliminate all doubts that have surrounded the phenomenon in the past."
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
I think it's safe to say that if you see the acronym "IIRC" in a Slashdot post, assume anything that follows is total bullshit.
Cheers
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Well most of what you say is unfortunately not based on scientific fact but rather wild speculation. Yes, there could be matter-bending aliens who control enery with a thought. There could also be a god (who'd be even more powerful). There may be universes within universes. The thing is, when there are infinite possibilities, it doesn't make any sense to try to guess what we don't know (like you do). In fact, it is a complete waste of time, because when there are an infinite number of possibilities, chances are that the one you'll pick will turn out to be wrong.
You also make numerous assumptions that could turn out to be false. First, there's the fact that I've already mentioned. Given that the age of the universe is about 15-20 billion years (which we can calculate with increasing precision - there's no reason to believe we're way off mark here), and that it takes 10-15 billion years to get third-generation stars (we need that Carbon, remember) and that evolution - in our case - took about 5 billion years until we got intelligent life, there is a very good case to be made about the fact that there are probably no such "extremely advanced" race as you mention. Well, perhaps not a very good case, but at least as good as that of telepathic, teleporting aliens. You also assume that technology will keep on developing at the same rapid pace...well, again, there's no proof that this will always be the case. There always the possibility that development will go through plateaus, and who knows how long these can take...theoretically, it's impossible to bring a physical object to the speed of light. Perhaps you'd like to imagine that it's possible, but again there is no proof that it is. Now, to go faster than light...Even if it was possible, it could take use thousands of years before we'd achieve it.
There is also another assumption that you make which, unfortunately, could be false as well: that civilization can both advance technologically and survive. I believe that the development of nuclear energy (which, like the discovery of fire, is on the roadmap of every intelligent species' development) is an important test of intelligent species - one that we have yet to pass, even though we seem to be doing better these days (Bush notwithstanding). But there might be other species-threatening discoveries that await...now, these other advanced species you speak of would have had to go through these scientific "ordeals"...since they probably weren't much more advanced than us when they did, there is always a chance that they did not actually make it!
As far as "teleportation" is concerned, I think that perhaps you read a little too much science fiction. Even though there are theoretical advances, we are still far from the day when you can just teleport to the corner store to get a quart of milk...
Of course, perhaps you are right. Like matters of religion, it is mosly a question of faith, and not logical debate. But remember: in spite of our technological "primitiveness", we have discovered the basic tenets of rational thought: logic, the empirical method of scientific research, euclidian geometry, the basic principles of mathematics, physics, chemistry...these principles are universal: natural laws are the same here as they are on the sixth planet of Epsilon Eridani (nice place, too). We can already figure that out...it always makes me smile to see that those who expound on how primitive we must be compared to imagined alien races usually don't know too much about the current state of human scientific knowledge. I'll grant you: it's not as romantic, but it's a lot closer to the truth (as far as we can tell).
Perhaps incorporeal aliens exist - though you'd have to wonder how evolution would get them to that state - and perhaps God looks down upon us from heaven. The two beliefs are identical in nature. We'll probably never know who is right, so in the end this discussion is rather pointless and sterile. Meanwhile, I'll keep on giving computing cycles to SETI, just because it's the best thing to do with the information we have today...and because the speculative road leads everywhere and thus nowhere, that's the only alternative we've got.
Reminder: find a new sig
Considering we know how to teleport stuff in labs, and know how to build warp drives on paper.
This means Aliens are doing it right now. This means they can travel faster than light. Sure theres a chance they could be on our level, theres even the chance we found technologies they didnt find, fact is saying they cant get earth if they are thousands of light years away is a diffrent story.
They can easily get here, we already have ways of how we'd get there, we just dont have the energy, money, and technology to take it out of the labs and off paper.
Theres 6 billion people on earth, now Imagine a planet 1000 times the size of earth, with 200 billion alien lifeforms on it. The pace of evolution and technology increases with the size of the population.
Yes theres infinite possibilities, but if we are searching for life and not finding it, and the universe being in its infinite size, its HIGHLY unlikely that we are the only life in the universe. Its also HIGHLY unlikely that we are the oldest, smartest life in the universe, in fact I'd put us on the lower levels.
15 20 billion year old universe yes, matter in the universe was created in the big bang, but thats it. Before that, there was just space and energy, from what we know, there could be a multiverse which could mean Aliens from trillions of years ago could exsist.
Fact is anything is possible, its just more likely using logic that we arent alone, and that other aliens which were here before us would be superior.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
...what happens to the lifter when the power is shut off and it smacks back down (UP!) into the table above it? :)
CAKman
do you have a link?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I've sifted through the posts and not found one mention of Thomas Townsend Brown who was a pioneer in this field. http://www.soteria.com/brown/ So now I've set the record straight. Yes it does work in a vacuum otherwise NASA would be looking at it as a thruster. The only question I have asked is how big does it have to be to be manned to work in the atmosphere.
Lifters apparently emit X-Rays.
Seastead this.