Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick had a few choice words for the public on his way out the door of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
Sean Kirkpatrick was once the man in charge of a D.C.-backed agency tasked with investigating claims into unidentified anomalous phenomena, the new term for what most people still call UFOs. He stepped down from the position in December, and has now published a excoriating farewell letter in Scientific American detailing some of the reasons why.
So why did he stop hunting for UFOs on behalf of the American government? In short: Because congressional leaders believe in conspiracy theories with absolutely no substantial proof. “Our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative,” Kirkpatrick said in Scientific American.
If you had the tech for FTL travel, you could destroy any planet with a single ship.
Just kamikaze it and your target literally couldn’t see it coming.
It makes a nuke look a balloon popping.
If they existed and knew about humans, and for some reason were scared of us… First contact would be Earth getting vaporized.
It would be the equivalent of a human putting down a rabid racoon to that species.
First, FTL travel cannot exist with our current understanding of physics. This is why you see most sci-fi going to either wormholes/jump drives - Orion’s arm, star gate, BSG; or by jumping into not-our-universe- Star Wars, also star gate, and andromeda. Maybe Star Trek, but Alcubierre drives themselves would not be able to go FTL. The short explanation is it would violate causality. (Wormholes don’t actually violate causality, but otherwise bridge two points in space-time)
Secondly, it should be noted that while technological advancement does impart military advantages… evaporating a space rock serves no real purpose; and doing so would represent a massive economic investment; further on this point, the sightings are insisting they’re visiting frequently.
Which given our instability (they have every season of the Jerry springer show, for example.)… the question isn’t would they decide to send us to oblivion, or not. But visit us.
And given the energies involved getting here, a species that hasn’t thought twice about nuking themselves isn’t going to think twice about reverse engineering their tech and doing exactly what you propose. And we are very likely to take their presence… the wrong way.
Final though: if aliens were to show up on earth? It’s either to harvest the only thing that makes earth special: life. (Aka they’re slavers or something.) alternatively, they’re space Mormons.
I might prefer the slavers.
Wouldn’t it be annoying if they were both?
There would be a reason to destroy Earth if you were an alien species and the reason some scientists say we should silence our communications to the rest of the universe. Namely, to eliminate us as a potential threat/competitor. SETI has written about it themselves. The example given is from Greg Bear’s novel, The Forge of God:
http://www.setileague.org/editor/wolves.htm
This is an answer to the Fermi paradox. The idea that one species grows so xenophobic or territorial or whatever as to destroy all other life.
The good news is that such an end would be quick, so I tend to not worry about it.
The other answer is… they actively avoid us. Which seems more reasonable and optimistic.
We have mathematically worked out near light speed travel, we just lack the energy requirements to test it currently. There are two methods proposed, one being riding a wave we create and the other riding under space(this one was way more confusing). The wave one would accumulate debris ahead of the wave so you aim at a planet then stop short propelling everything the wave has gathered at near light speed into the planet, instant obliteration. We are trying really hard to solve fission which is the only thing holding us up right now. Optimistically we might see a practical test in our life time albeit very late into our lives.
No we haven’t. There is no known mechanism to create an alcubierre drive.
At the risk of being dismissive, there’s no known way to mess with things in such a manner- nevermind enough understanding to say what happened to debris in the path.
What we have are hypothetical models that assume we have these things. But everyone acknowledges they’re purely speculative. (Fun, even possibly useful, but speculation all the same.)
ELI5 how we go under space?