ARmy Rumour SErvice

I've met a few aliens in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh in my time. But only once did I find it necessary to render one unconscious.

I was skulking around Brecon (I think it was) in the dark when I saw a UFO. It was a ring of bright yellow lights suspended in the air, like something straight out of Close Encounters.

My eyes adjusted to the light and I realized it was an ammunition store on an adjacent hill, with floodlights around the circular perimeter fence. I had been about to report it on the radio; I would never have lived that down.

afghan kandak is a UFO, unidentified fucking oxymoron

saw a flying object at RAF Leeming once, cant have been RAF as it was a weekend.

I was wondering about the folding of space. The question that came to me is: how long does it take to fold two points together?

Take a piece of paper. On opposite diagonals, mark a point. Fold the diagonals so the points meet. Then unfold. That takes time (not a long time, but still takes time). Now imagine the points are 186,000 miles apart. Light travels this distance in one second - how long would it take to fold these corners? Now consider the points are 186,000,000 miles apart. How long to fold? The analogy breaks down, because we cannot fold paper faster over that distance in less than 1000 seconds (exceeds c). So how does science sidestep the slight problem of "folding" an area which contains mass in an "instant".

I wonder if "ftl" travel over great distances might be accomplished by the manipulation of time... going from memory, if I travelled at light speed to Alpha Centauri, as of 1300hrs 12 Aug 2011, then I would arrive at 1300hrs 12 Aug 2015 earth time (assuming its is 4 light years). However, by my calendar it would be 1305hrs, 12 Aug 2011... SciFi light speed travel ignores this quirk of relativity, and it is this "ignorance" that we would need in order to establish any meaningful interstellar civilization. So, our space craft travels through space at light velocity, and at the same time travels "backwards" through time. It makes the journey in x minutes/hours/days, and at the same time has travelled backwards in time to the same relative timeline point. To revisit the analogy, the time of arrival at Alpha Centuri in 'local time' is the same as the relative Earth time.

Headache.

Originally Posted by King_of_the_Burpas

Why the fuck would an "advanced" alien race want to travel all the way to a crap hole like Earth?
Probing the anusses of shitkickers and the mentally ill is not a sufficient benefit, imho, for spending 60 years in a saucer just to get here.

Nonsense. I happen to know that the lads of the Alien Rumour Service like nothing better than a good century out with their muckers. Inevitably, after 10 pints of Old Tentacle Wobbler the answer to the age-old question "Would you do an Earthling?" is a resounding "Yes!". This explains Stockton-on-Tees (a Grimmy competition) and Norfolk (a Dimmy competition).

Assorted world class physicists have looked at the possibility of faster than light travel/time travel - Lawrence Krauss and Kip Thorne come to mind. The general conclusion they came to is that FTL and/or time travel is not forbidden by Einstein's laws of relativity and hence is theoretically possible. But how to do it is another matter. We have no understanding of how to achieve these things in practice and (as far as we know) it would require an absolutely prodigious expenditure of energy.

Which would lead to the assumption that any alien race with those abilities would be unbelievably advanced.

Fermi's Paradox is an interesting question.

Fermi paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.

In other words, if there are technically advanced aliens in the galaxy, where are they?

In 1950, while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the physicist Enrico Fermi had a casual conversation while walking to lunch with colleagues Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller and Herbert York. The men discussed a recent spate of UFO reports and an Alan Dunn cartoon facetiously blaming the disappearance of municipal trashcans on marauding aliens. They then had a more serious discussion regarding the chances of humans observing faster-than-light travel by some material object within the next ten years, which Teller put at one in a million, but Fermi put closer to one in ten. The conversation shifted to other subjects, until during lunch Fermi suddenly exclaimed, "Where are they?" (alternatively, "Where is everybody?") One participant recollects that Fermi then made a series of rapid calculations using estimated figures (Fermi was known for his ability to make good estimates from first principles and minimal data, see Fermi problem.) According to this account, he then concluded that Earth should have been visited long ago and many times over.

Someone has calculated that (even with our present technology) we could expand and explore the galaxy in 5 - 50 million years. As the galaxy is far older than that, logically we would have encountered another intelligent race. Yet no undisputed evidence for alien contact has ever been found.

Wordsmith

[QUOTE=tiny_lewis;3898251]I was wondering about the folding of space. The question that came to me is: how long does it take to fold two points together?

Take a piece of paper. On opposite diagonals, mark a point. Fold the diagonals so the points meet. Then unfold. That takes time (not a long time, but still takes time). Now imagine the points are 186,000 miles apart. Light travels this distance in one second - how long would it take to fold these corners? Now consider the points are 186,000,000 miles apart. How long to fold? The analogy breaks down, because we cannot fold paper faster over that distance in less than 1000 seconds (exceeds [I]c[/I]). So how does science sidestep the slight problem of "folding" an area which contains mass in an "instant".

I wonder if "ftl" travel over great distances might be accomplished by the manipulation of time... going from memory, if I travelled at light speed to Alpha Centauri, as of 1300hrs 12 Aug 2011, then I would arrive at 1300hrs 12 Aug 2015 earth time (assuming its is 4 light years). However, by my calendar it would be 1305hrs, 12 Aug 2011... SciFi light speed travel ignores this quirk of relativity, and it is this "ignorance" that we would need in order to establish any meaningful interstellar civilization. So, our space craft travels through space at light velocity, and at the same time travels "backwards" through time. It makes the journey in [I]x[/I] minutes/hours/days, and at the same time has travelled backwards in time to the same relative timeline point. To revisit the analogy, the time of arrival at Alpha Centuri in 'local time' is the same as the relative Earth time.

Headache.[/QUOTE]

simples, to join two opposite points, you stab through the paper to make a hole, a gateway to the other side. Its based on toroidal theory to prevent interconnecting nodes crossing each other. Last saw this on Jonny Balls think off a number many many moons ago.