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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.
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 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.
Police! This is an emergency! I am being attacked by a UFO with a color monitor!
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
And I thought reactionless thrusters were impossible... Can some physics guys help us out here?
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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).
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."
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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!
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.
You are going to get someone killed: when you charge up a capacitor you store energy which can supply enough current to kill someone. These experiments are potentially lethal. The flyback circuits used to generate the high voltages are dangerous.
Flight experiments are _always_ potentially lethal.
You think that flying at several times the speed of sound is safe?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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.
I skimmed through the the NASA patent in question.
... not my crappy dead 14" CTX.
It's not a reactionless drive. The propellant photons. The patent proposal seems to be a variant of an end-fire phased array antenna. (Or a less sophisticated version of laser propulsion system.)
However, if you have a background in propulsion, you are probably aware that photons are terrible for thrusters. It you want to spit off directed momentum, photons give you the _least_ bang for your buck. Photons are classically massless and only give you h_bar omega / c momentum. Only if your are talking about hard gamma do photons even start to compete with propellants of current rockets.
As far as the lifter page is concerned:
What is the damn frequency of the power supply? Heck, I have all the equipment (even a dead 14" monitor for salvage). I would build it for fun.
Monitors use both a high DC voltage for acceleration of electron beams and an two sawtooth-ish AC components for sweeping the beam (vertical at 70Hz and horizontal at 100KHz). Is this a purely DC phenomena or should I tap the sweep signals?
All in all, he didn't give sufficient details to replicate his work so it sets my BS detector humming. Or more likely, if I replicate it and it doesn't work, I'll probably be told that only magical NEC monitors from the mysterious Hokkaido forest manufacturing plant work
Kevin
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
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?
Sorry to respond to my own (once again typographically challenged) post.
However, thinking about it, assuming the lifter is using the AC from the horizontal monitor sweep, what you are probably seeing is an induced dipole effect.
This is nothing new. Take a balloon. Rub it against the carpet (charge it up statically). Stick it to the wall.
Why does the balloon stick?
The static electricity induceds dipoles in the wall. These dipoles attract the balloon.
In the case of the lifter, the + wire on top and the grounded foil forms a dipole. This dipole induces a mirror image dipole in the ground beneath it. However, if the AC is near at frequency that is in the general vicinity of the horizontal sweep frequency of the monitor, the induced dipole in the surroudings (table/ground/floor) will be out of phase with the regular dipole. This will cause a repulsive force.
As it stands though, the lifter is highly not optimized. The frequencies could be optimized which in turn would give you a stronger force (or conversely require a lower voltage power supply). The lifter layout could be redone to for a strong dpole moment or made out of studier materials (as the system currently is put together, the force would be very very weak).
Here is the difference between science and pseudo-science. The above is _testable_.
- The device should exhibit power supply frequency dependent characteristics. Notably there should be frequencies ranges exhibiting repulsive and attractive forces and these the ranges are dictated by the speed of light and the effective distance of the induced dipole.
- The device should be sensitive to the surroundings. i.e. it would have different operational characteristics if you operated it starting from a wooden table or a metal table.
No dubious "electrogravitics" required.
Kevin
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.
And I thought reactionless thrusters were impossible... Can some physics guys help us out here?
Ionic propulsion. Another method is to put a pulsed electromagnet which repels the ionized air (ionized air is vulnerable to magnetic fields) between the charge pulses. There isn't much thrust over a single flat surface, but that can be improved drastically by increasing the surface area of the cathode over the anode. The downside on this method is radioactive emissions. The surface area of the cathode can be increased cheaply by a network of small wires pointing vertically perpendicular toward the anode (preferably a screen like a screen door screen). The electromagnet is placed behind the cathode so that it's field can be charged full-strength as the air is ionized.
The other problems with this method lays in the heat generation, rapid corrosion of the electrified surfaces, and required power levels. On the upside the propulsion surface and discharge plates can be shielded as only the repelled ionized air is needed for thrust and the intake ports can be shielded well from emitting radiation.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
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.
A standard exam question is why that won't work.
If you are spitting off electrons, you are building up a large positive charge. Eventually, the positive charge will overcome any thrust you got from the electrons.
Thrust charge neutralize is a _big_ issue in ion thrusters.
So, go back to the 8th grade and pay more careful attention.
Kevin
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!
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.
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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.
I may have missed something, but where is the connection between the 3 year old New York Times article and building a UFO?
Actualy it can kill you. Pretty much any high voltage electricity that comes out of a transformer can kill you. It has high enough amperage.
I have always heard that the stuff coming out of neon sign transformers is lethal.
The only HV electricity that won't kill you is static electricity.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
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.
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!
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?
i assume you plan on sending your interstellar probes out connected to the world longest extension cord? ;)
Ehh... your reasoning is correct... if you're going to have 1 g acceleration all the way to Alpha Centauri. Think a little more. Satelites can't get themselves of the ground. I wasn't suggesting that they'd be using lifters as booster rockets, only as long-term acceleration for most of the journey.
I wasn't suggesting getting it to escape velocity using these things. You'd use chemical rockets to get it out of this gravity well we call home. 100 kg for an unshielded Thorium or Plutonium reactor will get you a fair ammount of power, leaving 400 kg for other stuff. You might want a small chemical rocket "bus" with solar cells for high thrust durring gravity asists inside the solar system, but you'd prbably do a sustained burn to get every last Joule out of your fuel, use the miniscule power you're getting from the slar cells to bring the reactor online, and then jettison the bus with it's empty fule tanks, useless cheical rockets and useless photovoltaic cells.
Anyway, my whole point is that these things would seem to have an absolutely fantastic power/weight/fuel ratio when coupled with unshielded reactors and used for multi-year accelerations.
Iit was just a jab at a fanciful satelite design. THere are probably many flaws in what I threw out there, but the weight of the power supply srely isn't one of them. Remember, I estimated the weight of the satelite at 1,100 pounds. It would be impractical to recieve radio commands from 10 light years away on a spacecraft traveling at .9c, so you'd do without a recieve and onlyhavea transmitter... etc., etc. you fill in the blanks. Something along those lines would be feasable ifthese things were for real. Trust me. Maybe the estimates are off by a factor of 50, but that's still performance that chemical rockets can't come close to touching. My claim is simply that these things claim to be too irresistable for NASA to pass up, and NASA has a patent on them... so why aren't they being used. Take of the tin foil hat and put out the crack pipe before you tell me that we secretly have space probes on their way to Alpha Centauri right now.
I've been in person to talks on resistogets, arcjets, and ion thrusters put on by NASA. I've held a prototype NASA ion thruster at the Experimental Aircraft Association annual airshow. NASA wouldn't be wasting their time with ion thruster technology if these fliers worked as advertised. An ion thruster won't come close to lifting itself off the ground, even if you put it in a vacuum and externally supply power and fuel. These things would completely replace ion thrusters if they were for real.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
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
I'm not calling you a liar, it just takes a lot to convince me. Sometimes it's one of my greatest strengths and sometimes it's one of my greatest faults.
I would love to be stumped and dumbfounded by one of these. Which polarity is more efficient? Maybe the guys will bring a working model to the next 2600 meeting. I think they'v kinda given up on the ant-gravity machine, though, and are working on a zero-point energy device. No, I'm not making fun of you. These guys really were going to try to put together a perpetual motion machine.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
"Sure maybe 40-50 percent are hoaxes, this is saying one out of every two people is a liar."
No, it's saying one out of every two *UFO reporters* is a liar. Or confused/mislead -- the person who reports the UFO need not the the person responsible for the hoax.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Your theory would explain the lifters pushing themselves off of the ground, but did you see this page? I think it rules out an induced dipole explanation. Could it instead have something to do with ionized air being drawn through the device? I would really like to see this done in a vacuum.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
You should check out this link, which explains the fairly extensive work done with these devices (Ionocraft) in the 1960's. Here's a quote (sorry for the overexplained nature of the text):
High negative voltage is shot from the spikes toward the positively charged wire grid, just like negative and positive poles on an ordinary battery. As the negative charge leaves the spike arms, it peppers the surrounding air like buckshot, putting a negative charge on some of the air particles. Such negatively charged air particles are called ions, and these are attracted downward by the positively charged grid.
"Okay," I said. "But I still don't see what holds it up." "I'm getting to that," Yorysh assured me as he spelled out the rest of the Ionocraft principle. In their mad rush from the ion emitter to the main grid, the ions bump into neutral air molecules-air particles without electric charge.
The terrific wallop in these collisions hurls a mass of neutral air down-ward along with ions. When they reach that air grid, the ions being negative are trapped by positive charge on the grid. but the grid has no attraction for the neutral air particles that got bumped along. So the air flows right through the open grid mesh, making a downdraft beneath the Ionocraft. The contraption rides on this shaft of air, getting lift just like a helicopter - by sucking air down from the top.
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.
I loose? LMAO!
had you just submitted that you were wrong
Weeehee. Pardon me if I get a bit sarcastic.
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... and if the airfoil is at an upwards Angle of Attack Huh? Something is attacking? (or upwards angle basically --WIND--> \ ) Ohhh! you mean it's not like, flat or something? I get it! Thanx Mr. Wizard! like so, then won't that 'push' the airfoil UP? Yes, to both questions Ahhh! Those are exactly the two questions I had!
Gee, thanx Mr. Wizard! That must be EXACTLY what I was thinking! Silly me. And ya know, when I look at an emty glass I think there's nothing in it! You know, like a vacuum or something!
Reducing the pressure above the wing does NOT 'cause' a down draft
BZZZT! Wrong answer! The low pressure pulls the wing up and the low pressure also pulls the air above it down. This causes a downdraft, just like I said. I just didn't bother going into detail. There are always equal and opposite forces. For any upwards force on the plane/helicopter there *MUST* be an equal downwards force on the air. Downdraft Q.E.D.
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)
Don't ask you? But you're Mr. Wizard!
Ok, just ask me instead. Imagine a vertical plane at the front edge of the wing and another at the rear edge. No matter what volume of air passes in through the front plane above the wing, an equal amount must pass out the rear plane. Same goes for the bottom. If the air didn't exit at the same rate on the top and bottom the air would keep piling up on one side for not exiting fast enough.
So, yeah. You have the basic principle right. You were just ignorant (not a bad word, btw) of the fact that it *does* cause a downdraft. You therefore assumed (a bad word, btw) that I had some pretty naive ideas.
P.S.
maybe they have synchronized watches - LOL. That one's a killer!
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well still it says half the population are liars, considering millions every year claim reports
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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.
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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.
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A couple of brief comments ... people claiming several different effects (and possibly mixing things up) ... I am trying to put together a coherent picture.
Ion wind: accelerate ions to use charge exchange collisions to accelerate a neutral gas. There is a fair amount of mainstream research into this for fusion applications (look for papers on neutral beam injection). My intuition says that this is probably not a great way to generate thrust, but, after all, these lifters are made of tin foil and balsa wood. Furthermore, this is not an area where I would trust my intuition.
Assuming ion wind, the lifters should not operate in vacuum. Some people are claiming that these do. I doubt it these claims are coherent or tested sufficiently, especially because making a really large ultra high vacuum chamber is well outside what even moderately sized organizations have the means to do.
A historical side note: many early plasma experiments were completely misinterpreted because the experimentalists didn't have sufficiently good vacuum chambers (the technology didn't yet exist) and they assumed that the effects (glowing discharge chambers and what not) were occuring in regions of hard vacuum.
Induced dipole: a number of people have made me roughly aware of the frequency conditions (DC to tens of Hz sometimes with pulsed operation modes). Thus, I would guess that an induced dipole effect like I proposed is not operating. That is not to say that it still isn't some type of induced dipole effect / just that the phase lag mechanism I proposed is likely not the mode of operation. The frequencies are way too low.
Kevin
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!
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.
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helicopters do not work by pushing themselves up... propellers do indeed pull not push the plane.
Right, they are pulled up rather than pushing down. However, you are the second person to try to correct something that is not wrong. I never said they work by pushing the air down. I said "don't helicopters work by generating down drafts?"
The airfoil does indeed generate a downdraft. The low pressure above the airfoil pulls the wing (or blade) up. It also pulls the air above it down. For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction.
As a matter of fact the pressure from the downdraft creates a downwards force on the ground equal to the weight of the plane/helicopter. If you doubt it, imagine a van with 100 birds in it. The van will have the same weight even if some/all of the birds are flying. Same as if you put a plane/helicopter in a really big box.
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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.
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No, there are *not* millions per year, and even if there were, it would *still* not mean half the population are liars.
5 3/99med ia.htm
t ion/demo02.htm).
E /PRESS- RELEASES/040698PR.TXT
http://www.ufonet.it/archivio/canada2.htm
According to this page, the year with the most
reports of 1989-1992 was 1992, with 223 reports.
This page says there were 259 reports in 1999:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Rampart/26
Let's generously assume that 1999 (the largest year mentioned on pages I found) is a fairly average year. Now, that's just Canadian reports, and there are about 30 million Canadians (http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/People/Popula
Assuming that UFO sightings are universal around the world, that's only about 51800 cases per year. And of course, even true believer moron kooks like you know that *some* UFO sightins are nothing more than airplanes, weather baloons and the like. Since most of the world has far fewer of those than Canada, even this assumption of uniformity is extremely generous.
As for the "half of all UFO sighters are liars, therefore half of the population as a whole are liars," well, I suggest you learn something about selectivity bias. On the other hand, it is true that there are far more liars than UFO reports. The California DMV has 6000 fraud cases a year:
http://www.sen.ca.gov/ftp/sen/SENATOR/PEAC
And a population slightly larger than Canada's. So, extrapolating globally the same way, there *are* over a million liars (since all fraud requires deception).
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Lifters apparently emit X-Rays.
Seastead this.