On Jan 3, 2015, at 11:31 PM, Jacques Vallee wrote:
Beowulf is right on. About 1970 Paul Baran (inventor of packet switching at Rand and arguably the true grandfather of the Internet) tested the first radio prototype of the Arpanet by spread spectrum on the range of frequencies of the SFO control tower. He could do that without interference with air operations because the spread spectrum signal was undetectable -- low in the noise. This means that in 50 years or so since humanity had effectively used radio our own
communications had become undetectable by the tools in common use. What does that say for the way a really advanced technology (thousands of years ahead) might look to us, assuming we could even imagine its existence?
Jacques Vallee
In a message dated 04/01/2015 04:33:27 Romance Standard Time, Robert Addinall com writes:
Harrumph. This analysis again assumes that advanced civilizations would use technologies observable to us using our current tools. Look, someone could have been using radio communications all over the place while sneaking around the Roman and Chinese empires 2000 years ago, and the Romans and Chinese, the greatest civilizations of the time, would have had no clue. So far as they knew, sending your voice across thousands of miles to come out of a small box was impossible, or, if possible, black magic. Similarly, we still don't know what the possible ultimate form of high speed communications might be. Of course I can't say for certain, but my guess is that we are still at a very early stage of technological development. What we don't know is very much more than what we do know. It's not possible to draw conclusions about what's going on in the rest of the universe yet, apart from generalities, like stars usually have planets or that the universe is expanding.
From: Jack Sarfatti
Sent: Saturday, January 3, 2015 6:48 PM
To: Kim Burrafato
Subject: Nostrums from Bostrum
http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf On Jan 3, 2015, at 6:34 PM, Jack Sarfatti <
On Jan 3, 2015, at 4:07 PM, Robert Addinall wrote: I actually tend to think that few civilizations will end up building Dyson spheres. Again, my suspicion is that it's possible (though not easy in the initial stages) to develop techniques for generating and containing negative energy/mass, and then you have warp drive/wormholes. At that point you can colonize (or terraform and then colonize) new planets. Most likely you don't want more than two or three billion inhabitants per planet (Earth is probably currently overpopulated). You'll primarily use FTL (some sort of wormholes or else readable quantum entanglement) for communication and not put out significant radio signals. So, I would really expect to *only* see regular planetary systems. We can't really say anything for certain until we get enough telescope resolution to see Earth-like planets and whether
(1) they show evidence of biological processes like photosynthesis and oxygen-rich atmospheres, and
(2) lights illuminating metropolitan areas. Even such observations would not rule out intelligent life of very different forms than those found on Earth.
From: creon levit NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration Sent: Saturday, January 3, 2015 5:02 PM
To: JACK SARFATTI
Subject: "zeroth order null result" from WISE for free energy and for UFOs.
More evidence of no high level ET civilizations in our galaxy: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.1134.pdf The Gaia mission, currently in orbit, will provide a much tighter (probabilistic) bound. It is surveying a billion local stars. If any of them have a something like a Dyson sphere, we will know. The Kepler mission found that most stars have planets, and that a significant fraction have habitable planets. So for those like me who do not at present find UFO evidence convincing, these missions, and the negative results from all SETI searches to date, reinforce the Fermi paradox. It leads one either towards “we are alone” or to the great filter. For an amusing but serious summary of these issues see Bostrum’s essay "why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing"
Jack Sarfatti On Dec 29, 2014, at 3:19 PM, Jack Sarfatti <
From: Hal Puthoff Date: December 29, 2014 at 2:01:38 PM PST To:
Subject: Re: The RAND Corporation on UFOs !
Though overlooked by many, the recently declassified UK MOD report (so-called Condign Report, interestingly enough!), assembled in 2000 by the Defense Intelligence staff, though written to 'get out of the pubic UFO business,' has within its > 100 pages a number of gems of technical details, including an assessment EM frequencies hypothesized to possibly be involved in the Rendlesham Forest event. Available on the Internet from the UK National Archives - see below. Hal << Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in the UK Air Defence Region The Ministry of Defence has released this report in response to a Freedom of Information request and we are pleased to now make it available to a wider audience via the MOD Freedom of Information Publication Scheme. Where indicated information is withheld in accordance with Section 26 (Defence), Section 27 (International Relations) and Section 40 (Personal Information) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. UAP in the UK Air Defence Region: Executive Summary UAP in the UK Air Defence Region: Volume 1 UAP in the UK Air Defence Region: Volume 2 UAP in the UK Air Defence Region: Volume 3
From: Kim Burrafato <
To: Creon Levit Sent: Mon, Dec 29, 2014 3:19 pm
Subject: Re: The RAND Corporation on UFOs ! What about the testimony of Base Commander, Colonel Charles Halt, and all of the other airmen who were up close and personal witnesses to the highly strange events at Rendlesham forest? All the people involved in Rendlesham were reliable, extensively vetted RAF Bentwaters USAF security personnel — after all, this was a NATO nuclear weapons storage facility. They would never have attained those security positions if they weren’t exemplary soldiers. Unlike Roswell, where key witnesses weren’t interviewed until many years after the alleged incident, the majority of witnesses in the Rendlesham forest incident are alive and well. Halt maintains to this day that the object he and others observed at Rendlesham was extraterrestrial technology. Despite the apparent lack of physical and photographic evidence to that effect, we cannot discount all that important detailed and reliable eyewitness testimony. And it’s a safe bet that if any physical or photographic evidence was gathered, it has been sequestered deep within the black catacombs of the national security establishment.
On Dec 29, 2014, at 9:43 AM, creon levit wrote: Ok I'll read John's book too !-)
On Dec 28, 2014, at 11:25 PM, Colonel John Alexander wrote: The evidence in favor of UFOs is simply overwhelming and I agree with Hal's comment on Bentwaters. In my book, UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities that is one of my top cases as it had physical evidence as well as veridical eyewitnesses. In addition, it was not a singular event. Like the Phoenix Lights and Gulf Breeze it recurred over long periods of time. That said, the ETH is only one hypothesis and may not be the best fit when all the evidence is considered. As I end my book, whatever it is (they are) the UFO phenomena are more complex than we ever imagined.
On Dec 28, 2014, at 1:13 PM, Robert Addinall wrote: My current guess is the same as that of the 50s AF generals; probably a small percentage of reports are caused by interstellar vessels. The rest would have mundane explanations and I'm also willing to entertain other explanations; perhaps a handful are some sort of "interdimensional" clouds of energy/organisms that occasionally show up. Some reports seem to indicate rather odd, amorphous shapes and lights, but others, such as those cited in the RAND report, do seem to clearly indicate mechanical craft. I would consider "killer" proof to be recovery and verification of a physical artifact in the public domain:
1. A spacecraft or substantial component of a spacecraft (ie. large piece of wreckage with enough intact components and structure to indicate that it could not have come from any other type of aircraft).
2. An EBE (extraterrestrial biological entity). At least a more or less complete body that could not be mistaken for anything else. Preferably a living being who can talk to reporters, academics, government officials etc on camera.
3. Keep in mind the possibility that a mechanical artifact might also be a self aware AI that could talk to us.
So, #3 is a combination of #1 and #2. Now if we prove that we can generate and contain negative mass or negative energy density and go ahead to build a working warp drive or wormhole generator, such a human made artifact would be highly suggestive - you would probably be justified in making the leap of saying that UFOs are mechanical craft driven by this type of technology and so the AFC explanation is correct. However, in the absence of a physical artifact or being, either mechanical or biological, I feel that we must simply treat the AFC explanation for the small percentage of reports unexplainable by mundane reasons as a good one, but we can't be certain. Given that FTL travel also necessarily implies possible time travel, some of the craft may be ours from our future light cone, or from civilizations that have become connected with us in some way in our future light cone. I treat this as a subset of the AFC hypothesis. Aliens need not be totally alien. How such back from the future interactions might play out we do not yet know - whether there is some chronological protection mechanism law of physics that makes consistent closed timelike curves (CTCs) or whether they are actually changing their past/our present.
On Dec 27, 2014, at 11:33 AM, Robert Addinall wrote:
They did quite a good job IMO.
1. Cocteau's estimate of how many highly advanced civilizations may exist in the galaxy was very good and almost exactly how I've tried to articulate the problem at times. I'll probably now use this as a reference. I was surprised at the estimate of 100 million advanced civilizations/average spacing of 10 light years between advanced civilizations. My estimates tended to be an order or two of magnitude lower, but his methodology seems solid even ~ 45 years later. Of course we now know for certain that most, if not almost all, stars do develop planetary systems, but observing earth sized planets is difficult, so we're still not sure how abundant they are. We do know that a fair number of stars appear to have planets too close or too far to be in a habitable zone, but even that is already taken into account by Cocteau; he estimates 1000 million sun-like stars out of 100 billion stars and drops the number with planets in acceptable orbits to somewhere around 600 million. Interestingly recent observations and computer models seem to suggest that binary and trinary star systems can have planets in stable orbits around each star, so long as the stars orbit a common barycenter at a sufficient distance; indeed some studies claim to have detected planets circling the two main Alpha Centauri stars (the third smaller star would circle the whole system outside of the two local systems). So perhaps Cocteau's estimate is even conservative. To get ~10 LY average spacing we should expect civilizations in at least two of the following three systems with reasonably sun-like stars: Epsilon Eridani (though it's probably too young), Tau Ceti and Alpha Centauri. To maintain the spacing places like Gleise 86 would probably have to be inhabited too. So, either there should be loads of activity out there, or else: (a) correctly sized planets in habitable zones are very infrequent for some reason we don't yet understand; (b) for some reason we don't yet understand life fails to get started or to evolve beyond relatively small, simple forms; (c) civilizations tend to destroy themselves. I keep an open mind but in the absence of data all I can say is that my instincts suggest that (a), (b), and (c) are wrong, which should mean that Cocteau's methodology holds and that there is a lot going on around the galaxy.
2. Another point where we now have a bit more to go on - the old light speed limit discussion further down in the paper. We now have the Thorne wormhole and Alcubierre warp metrics and the associated requirement for negative energy or mass, and we also have the accelerating expansion of the universe, which suggests that negative energy does exist in the universe. This is much more than having no clue as to how interstellar travel might work. Possibly we've actually already figured out generally how it works, but not the details yet. Obviously we can't build anything like this until we know how to generate and control negative energy. Things like Jack's idea about changing the flexibility of spacetime by changing the speed of light might be techniques that further augment FTL travel or reduce the negative energy requirement.