Disclosure Project by Steven M. Greer: Reliability?

[FlexGunship]

my question in the past was how could light from point b ever reach us at point a, if a and b are expanding away from one another at faster than the speed of light ?

and the reply was that special relativity breaks down at large enough distances. but it is explained by general relativity.

You are thinking of frame dragging, I believe (the space around a quickly spinning neutron star or black hole experiences this).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

The Alcubierre drive is an example of where real physics could intersect your thoughts. However, you will note that it is not feasible. Simply a clever mathematical trick you can play on paper.

Think of light speed in the following manner. There are four dimensions (as we presently understand them)x, y, z, and t. You always always always have a constant speed through them. The faster you go through x, the slower you go through y, z, and t. If you are using 100% of your velocity to travel through x, y, and z (like light), then you cannot travel through t (like light).

Relativistic effects are a reality. If we didn't understand them, then GPS systems all over the world wouldn't work.

 

[Physics-Learner]

btw jared,

you do have some understanding of sr, as time dilation is part of that.

i had forgotten about that. i do agree with you that according to the theory, he can go back and forth in much less time than we would measure his time to be.

 

[Physics-Learner]

hi flex,

there are objects in the universe moving away from us at faster than the speed of light. my question was how can the light still reach us ?

 

[FlexGunship]

hi flex,

there are objects in the universe moving away from us at faster than the speed of light. my question was how can the light still reach us ?

First of all, this is an oversimplification.

Galaxies that appear to recede from us at a speed close to light are not. Instead, the universe (not just the things in it) is expanding. The farther away you are, the faster it appears to expand.

Objects that exceed the apparent speed of light no longer appear to emit light. Hence the universe has a visible boundary (about 47 billion light years away). However, it didn't take 47 billion years to get there. Space is free to expand at any rate (even faster than light), but something cannot exceed the speed of light through space.

The most distant light we can see was emitted about 400,000 years after the big bang, but it is (again!) 47 billion light years away. This is due to spatial expansion, not things moving faster than light.

Please see the following link for more information.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe)

 

[Physics-Learner]

thanks for the discussion guys,

i am open-minded with regard to greer and his group.

the main reason for my interest is the claim that we currently have technology that could help the betterment of the people on this planet.

i will just have to wait and see, but i won't hold my breath, either. LOL.

 

[russ_watters]

greer is claiming that these ets travel faster than light. that is some sort of substantial claim.

Well, that is half of what I had asked for 5 years ago: a concrete claim. The other half is compelling evidence to support that claim. Do you have any?

if a society is millions of years ahead of us, most anything is possible.

You have the role of science backwards. When we know nothing, anything may seem to be possible because we don't know what the limits are. As science progresses, it figures out limits, so in a way, the more we know, the less is possible.

The faster-than-light travel thing is a good example. It is explicitly forbidden by current scientific theory. So it can't just be something we don't know yet, it would have to be something we think we know (and, by the way, have an enormous amount of evidence for) that turns out to be badly wrong.

i totally disregard illusion, delusion or hallucination.

Well, it's a free internet so you can do what you want, but if you want correct answers, you can't disregard correct answers. It is known for certain that the vast majority UFO sightings are "illusions, delusions or halucinations" (or, to be nicer about it: misidentifications of mundane things). Not even the most die-hard of serious alien spaceship hunters doubts that. The only question is whether it is almost all or actually all. A die-hard alien spaceship hunter will believe that even if 95% are misidentifications of mundane things, that still leaves thousands of actual sightings of alien spacecraft .

And btw, you say you have an open mind, yet it seems to me that you have closed your mind to the most likely possibilities.

 

[Physics-Learner]

hi russ,

if i personally had evidence, i would not be here asking - LOL.

regarding the rest of what you said, it might depend on how full one thinks our glass of knowledge actually is - LOL.

my suspicion is that we have a tremendous amount left unlearned, and that a million years from now, much of what we think we know today will have evolved into something different, much like gravity has evolved from Newton's explanation of it being an innate attraction of matter - to einstein's explanation of it as matter traveling in the direction of least resistance in a curved time space. my suspicion is that neither is correct.

and it may be that we are not necessarily badly wrong about light, for example, within our frame of reference of knowledge.

but there may be something dimensional that we have no clue about.

in any case, ets can come and go at less than the speed of light within their lifetimes, if they have a way of GOING REALLY FAST. LOL.

 

[JaredJames]

if i personally had evidence, i would not be here asking - LOL.

And yet youve already drawn a conclusion. Like I said, drawing a conclusion and then looking for the evidence to support it is the place of religion, not science.

 

[Physics-Learner]

what conclusion do you think i have come to ?

 

[Physics-Learner]

hi russ,

i don't believe the claims by these high level people are illusions.

 

[JaredJames]

hi russ,

i don't believe the claims by these high level people are illusions.

This conclusion.

You have decided they are not illusions and are now looking for proof to back it up.

 

[Physics-Learner]

well it certainly has nothing to do with religion.

there are too many high level people making substantial claims, regarding different events at different times at different locations. and most of these claims involve more than one person.

instead of religion, i would liken it to probability.

 

[Physics-Learner]

i think i admitted to flex that there are few things in the world with a 0 or 100 probability.

but i give it such a low percent, that yes, i am looking for a conclusion that is more likely.

right now, i can come up with it being true, or it having some sort of agenda that i can't figure out.

 

[JaredJames]

well it certainly has nothing to do with religion.

No, it's just that this sort of thinking is the same as that employed by religions.

there are too many high level people making substantial claims, regarding different events at different times at different locations. and most of these claims involve more than one person.

High level or low level, quantity does not equal quality.

i think i admitted to flex that there are few things in the world with a 0 or 100 probability.

but i give it such a low percent, that yes, i am looking for a conclusion that is more likely.

right now, i can come up with it being true, or it having some sort of agenda that i can't figure out.

The likelihood of any of these sightings being actual aliens is slim to none. Not impossible, but so highly unlikely that discussion otherwise is futile.
The reason I say this is simply down to the fact there has been no credible evidence provided to substantiate any of the claims. If a million people all claimed that a spaceship hovered over london, and yet no pictures or video of said event existed, would you believe it? Conspiracy theorists will provide a whole number of reasons for there being no evidence, but they always seem to provide answers based on 'alien technology' which we just can't understand or answers that are so far fetched we just can't disprove directly. That doesn't answer or prove anything.

 

[russ_watters]

my suspicion is that we have a tremendous amount left unlearned, and that a million years from now, much of what we think we know today will have evolved into something different, much like gravity has evolved from Newton's explanation of it being an innate attraction of matter - to einstein's explanation of it as matter traveling in the direction of least resistance in a curved time space. my suspicion is that neither is correct.

If our understanding evolves similar to the way Newton's theory evolved into Einstein's, FTL travel will still be impossible. That's exactly what you are missing about how science works.

 

[Physics-Learner]

hi jared,

the type of "reasoning" to which you are referring is common amongst people in all sorts of thought processes, religion being one of them. so can we leave religion out of our discussion ?

what you are referring to is seeking evidence for something that you want to believe.

i certainly did not do that. up until a couple weeks ago, i had dismissed ets, because i thought it had extremely low probablility.

upon listening to all these high level people (who have quality, they are not local yokels from hillbilly country) stating their claims, i could no longer simply dismiss the concept that there could be ets.

if it was any other topic, i believe you, and the average joe, would give it a lot of credence. the fact that you can simply still dismiss it as just an illusion, suggests to me that you are the one portraying biased thought processes.

 

[Physics-Learner]

hi russ,

the time separation between Newton and einstein is pretty small, in terms of number of years. if we go back just a few thousand years to say the ancient greeks, and compare that to einstein - pretty big difference.

that is a few thousand. now try going a million in the future. or 10 million.

it reminds me of the old proverb about a bird landing in a tree, and he asks the other bird there if this tree is alive. the other bird replies, "i don't know, it hasnt moved since i have been here."

in other words, i would not put too much credence in our ability to extrapolate what we may know a million or more years from now, based upon our extremely limited time frame in which we have lived.

as i said, how full is our cup of knowledge. if we fill it one grain at a time, and have a million grains in it, boy are we ever advanced when compared to just the one grain. but if our cup can hold 10 trillion grains before it fills up, we still aint very far along the learning curve.

 

[Physics-Learner]

i am trying to determine what sorts of ways an alien would be able to detect us.

i know our society throws off em waves with our radio and tv transmission.

we are electrical beings. as far as science knows, do our bodies send off any sort of energy. if so, what is it ?

is there any other way that is known, where something on our planet emits some sort of energy ?

 

[russ_watters]

hi russ,

the time separation between Newton and einstein is pretty small, in terms of number of years. if we go back just a few thousand years to say the ancient greeks, and compare that to einstein - pretty big difference.

that is a few thousand. now try going a million in the future. or 10 million.

Since science was invented at the time of Newton (essentially by him and Galileo), you can't extrapolate back further than him.

it reminds me of the old proverb about a bird landing in a tree, and he asks the other bird there if this tree is alive. the other bird replies, "i don't know, it hasnt moved since i have been here."

in other words, i would not put too much credence in our ability to extrapolate what we may know a million or more years from now, based upon our extremely limited time frame in which we have lived.

as i said, how full is our cup of knowledge. if we fill it one grain at a time, and have a million grains in it, boy are we ever advanced when compared to just the one grain. but if our cup can hold 10 trillion grains before it fills up, we still aint very far along the learning curve.

The learning curve is a good analogy that you didn't develop: the cup analogy is an improper view of science that will not serve you well in your quest for knowledge. Scientific knowledge is not gathered in equal-sized grains over time, along a linear path.

The learning curve is a way of saying that knowledge follows a curve with, for example, 90% of knowledge being gained in the first 10% of the time, 99% of knowledge in 11% of the time, etc.

The fact that knowledge advancement is curved and not linear is easy enough to see in the level of accuracy with which we can model/predict natrual phenomena (though that is a little tough beyond the last 100 years, as education wasn't very formalized and the scientific process not very mature). Early in the development of an area of investigation, you quickly hone-in on the true value of a measurement and then you can spend decades digging into that last few percent. For example, here are some of the Michelson Morley experiments done in the first 50 years after it was devised. The accuracy difference between the first and one done in 1927, 46 years later was 99%. The accuracy difference between the first and one done in 1958, 77 years after the first was 99.97%. So after almost twice as much time, the deviation from the expected result only decreased by 0.97%. So that's an even steeper curve than I pointed to above: 99% of the way to the expected result in 40% of the time elapsed between the three data points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment#Most_famous_.22failed.22_experiment

 

[Physics-Learner]

you are making a statement about how you perceive science to be, such that anything before galileo was not science.

10 million years from now, they may be saying that about us.

btw, the next time i see probably the most brilliant man of all time, i will tell him that he was not being scientific. i will give you a hint - he discovered integral calculus, hydrostatics, statics, the lever, a gazillion mathematical principles, and was able to defeat the roman armies all by his thinking and inventions.

 

[russ_watters]

you are making a statement about how you perceive science to be, such that anything before galileo was not science.

10 million years from now, they may be saying that about us.

No, they won't. It is clear that you don't know what the word "science" means. Science is nothing more or less than a method for investigating the natural world. Before Galileo, there were brief and isolated hints at a method similar to science, but for the most part, people used philosophy and mysticism. The development and acceptance of a functional method for investigating the natural world is the reason why we started actually figuring out how the natural world works. You should read the wikis on the scientific method (starting with the history section), the scientific revolution and the history of science:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science

A quick quote from the second:

In the history of science, the Scientific Revolution was a period when new ideas in physics, astronomy, biology, human anatomy, chemistry, and other sciences led to a rejection of doctrines that had prevailed starting in Ancient Greece and continuing through the Middle Ages, and laid the foundation of modern science...

The science of the late renaissance was significant in establishing a base for modern science. The scientist J. D. Bernal stated that "the renaissance enabled a scientific revolution which let scholars look at the world in a different light. Religion, superstition, and fear were replaced by reason and knowledge".

btw, the next time i see probably the most brilliant man of all time, i will tell him that he was not being scientific. i will give you a hint - he discovered integral calculus, hydrostatics, statics, the lever, a gazillion mathematical principles, and was able to defeat the roman armies all by his thinking and inventions.

Archemedes is one of those rare examples (as I noted above) of an ancient who was able to actually figure out a lot about how the natural world works. He is a predecessor of modern science who probably could have done a lot more if science had existed then to act as a framework for his investigation. There is a reason guys like him were few and far between: at the time, there existed no logical framework from which to even begin the type of work they did. Whatever method he used, he had to develop from scratch.

Aristotle, on the other hand, was probably an intelligent man, who nevertheless believed that philosophy was the proper way to investigate the natural world. As a result, he came up with a lot of wrong answers to questions he probably should have been able to answer correctly, and his prominence helped to block the advancement of our understanding of the natural world. Among other things, he reasoned that:
-A fly should have 4 legs for stability.
-Objects of different weights should fall at different rates proportional to their weights.

...and he apparently never even bothered to capture a fly and look at it or drop two weights and watch them fall. So ingrained were his misconceptions that it is rumored that a thousand years later, Tycho Brahe used to awe guests at parties by dropping fruit to demonstrate how wrong Aristotle was.

I mean, seriously: how hard is it to drop two pieces of fruit to see that objects of vastly different mass fall at the same rate? It never happened because people simply didn't think that way. Investigation of the natural world truly was a shot in the dark back then and it isn't today. It seems you believe it still is and that is probably why you think "anything is possible".

 

[JaredJames]

the type of "reasoning" to which you are referring is common amongst people in all sorts of thought processes, religion being one of them. so can we leave religion out of our discussion?

I understand this, I was using religion as an example of the type of reasoning. I am not saying you are some religion. It is an example, nothing more.

what you are referring to is seeking evidence for something that you want to believe.

i certainly did not do that. up until a couple weeks ago, i had dismissed ets, because i thought it had extremely low probablility.

You have come to a conclusion based on 'eye witness' reports. Not credible evidence. You have decided that "ets must exist" and are now here looking for evidence to back this up. You have admitted to this. You have made an irrational judgement and are now searching for evidence which backups up said judgement. This is not how science works.

upon listening to all these high level people (who have quality, they are not local yokels from hillbilly country) stating their claims, i could no longer simply dismiss the concept that there could be ets.

We have already shown how 100,000 people, all looking at the same event can be wrong. Why would we accept one person giving a sketchy testimony at best. There is nothing at all to back up their claims.

if it was any other topic, i believe you, and the average joe, would give it a lot of credence. the fact that you can simply still dismiss it as just an illusion, suggests to me that you are the one portraying biased thought processes.

If it was any other topic... I'd still require credible evidence, just like any other rational person. Period.

I personally believe that somewhere out in the universe there is other life. Given the size of the universe I think this is a fairly rational judgement. However, this belief in there being some other form of life (I'm talking anything from single cell to similar to us) is just that. I do not have any reason to accept they can violate the laws of physics anymore than us. Therefore, the probability of them visiting us is extremely low, as you rightly said.
It is the differentiation between these two viewpoints which is key. There is believing there may be "life out there" and then there's believing in "life forms so advanced they can effectively switch on/off the laws of physics on demand to accomplish impossible feats".

 

[JaredJames]

i am trying to determine what sorts of ways an alien would be able to detect us.

i know our society throws off em waves with our radio and tv transmission.

This is the only way to detect us, aside from looking for 'like' planets in the universe as we currently do.

we are electrical beings. as far as science knows, do our bodies send off any sort of energy. if so, what is it ?

is there any other way that is known, where something on our planet emits some sort of energy ?

And now we are deeply in the realms of crack-pottery and psuedo-science.

Nuclear bombs, power stations, microwave ovens, lights, engines and so on. There are a lot of things emitting energy, but not substantially. The Earths gravity is one of its biggest influences on surrounding space, but even that is nothing in comparison to other sources in the solar system.
Again, look at how we are currently looking for planets.

 

[Physics-Learner]

russ,

i agree with your last post. i am very familiar with the scientific method. if i recall, it was actually started by the empiricists, who actually "battled" aristotle, but lost out. and then we went thru the dark ages, and it got even worse.

that is where the we get the term "empirical method".

contrary to his usual arrogance, Newton is credited with saying something to the effect that "if i have made a lot of contributions, it is because i was able to stand on someone's shoulders".

he was referring to copernicus, kepler, and galileo.

aristotle had no shoulders to stand on.

i can't think of any more astonishing scientific find than when we discovered at least some of what he had written down on "paper". if i recall, it had been written over by the monks, but not erased, such that we still had access to at least that tablet.

he was so far ahead of his time, that people (especially the romans) considered him to be a magician. instead of killing him, they were actually trying to capture him for themselves to take advantage of his knowledge.

 

[Physics-Learner]

hi jared,

earth's gravity would be of no help, since that would only denote that there was a planet there. i was looking for ways of determining "intelligent" life. and then trying to determine what an alien could do in order to find us.

radio has been around for 100 years or so ?

fyi, i don't take faster than light easily, either. and we have no physics whatsoever to explain what happens at ftl.

it would not surprise me though, if we as electrical beings emanate some sort of energy that is detectable by an advanced civilization. but let's assume that we dont.

that only gives aliens the last 100 years with which they could have discovered life on our planet.

if my relativity is correct, both us and the aliens would measure that it took "x" years to get from us to them, if they are "x" light years away. they pack up, and leave that day, traveling at the speed of light. they measure that they get here instantly, but we still measure them as taking another "x" years to get here.

which means that we measure it as taking "2x" years for the entire process. if our first signal left 100 years ago, then the alien could at most be 50 light years away, which is very close by the terms that we usually use when we talk about neighboring solar systems, etc.

 

[Physics-Learner]

hi jared,

i have not come to a conclusion "that aliens must exist". i do suspect that they exist, but i am at this site regarding "are they here". i am now open-minded about it, whereas before i had not given it enough probability that i ever looked into it. the disclosure project interested me enough to give it some consideration.

i am being very scientific, as i only want the truth.

i have stated over and over again that there is a huge difference between one event being witnessed by 100,000 somewhat primitive people, versus several hundred DIFFERENT events being witnessed by top level military people.

to pass that off as them all seeing illusions gets almost to the point of being ridiculous. as i said to flex, the probability is not 0, but pretty darn close.

i think there is a much better chance that they are all lying, and working on some sort of agenda, than that everything that they have claimed to have seen WERE ALL ILLUSIONS.

 

[FlexGunship]

you are making a statement about how you perceive science to be, such that anything before galileo was not science.

10 million years from now, they may be saying that about us.

You are fundamentally wrong in this assertion.

At one time we did not have Boyle's law, but now we do. Nothing will "undo" Boyle's law except a fundamental change to the physical constants of the universe.

At one time we did not have Maxwell's equations, but now we do. Nothing will "undo" Maxwell's equations except a fundamental change to the physical constants of the universe.

Take some time and actually consider that. Even if the equations are made more accurate, or modified to better reflect reality, that doesn't mean that they are fundamentally wrong right now. They do a remarkable well describing reality even if the're slightly wrong.

Science is cumulative.

 

[FlexGunship]

i am being very scientific, as i only want the truth.

You are NOT being scientific. Simply wanting the truth does not make your endeavor scientific in the slightest. In fact, you are behaving in a profoundly unscientific way!

You are allowing wishful thinking to cloud your judgement. You are accepting some data as preferential to other data. You are disregarding negative results.

All signs of a ruined experiment.

i have stated over and over again that there is a huge difference between one event being witnessed by 100,000 somewhat primitive people, versus several hundred DIFFERENT events being witnessed by top level military people.

to pass that off as them all seeing illusions gets almost to the point of being ridiculous. as i said to flex, the probability is not 0, but pretty darn close.

Don't you get it?! A crowd of 100,000 people (including university professors) claimed to see the sun fall from the sky. Integrate this into your thought process.

Learned, intelligent, smart, trained, highly academic people in a HUGE crowd of other observers from all walks of life can all succumb to illusions. They're not even primitive as you claim. This was Portugal in 1912.

It's getting very frustrating. People are giving you articles to read. Information to absorb but you claim stupidity and ignorance as a defense. How can you not see this?

You've clearly made up your mind already.

 

[Physics-Learner]

i give up on you guys. you might want to look into a mirror.

good-bye.

 

[JaredJames]

Hold it, hit the brakes right now. You've gone way off the radar this time!

earth's gravity would be of no help, since that would only denote that there was a planet there. i was looking for ways of determining "intelligent" life. and then trying to determine what an alien could do in order to find us.

Aside from radio transmissions, there is no way to tell if intelligent life exists on a planet without visiting.

radio has been around for 100 years or so ?

Right, so it only covers a maximum of 100 light years. Not even remotely close enough to cover enough solar systems. We would be very lucky if something has picked it up by now.

fyi, i don't take faster than light easily, either. and we have no physics whatsoever to explain what happens at ftl.

You are taking it easily, you are saying "aliens have visited and as such they must have traveled faster than light or used an alternate dimension". We have physics which show we can't get to the speed of light, what happens at it is irrelevant.

it would not surprise me though, if we as electrical beings emanate some sort of energy that is detectable by an advanced civilization. but let's assume that we dont.

Let's just be blunt here, we do not emanate some magical 'energy'. Period. This is akin to people claiming we have auras'. Complete BS. To say "lets assume that we don't" is saying "we do, but for the purpose of now, we'll pretend we don't". We do not. There is no evidence for it and as such is a personal theory and purely speculative on your part.

that only gives aliens the last 100 years with which they could have discovered life on our planet.

Correct.

if my relativity is correct, both us and the aliens would measure that it took "x" years to get from us to them, if they are "x" light years away. they pack up, and leave that day, traveling at the speed of light. they measure that they get here instantly, but we still measure them as taking another "x" years to get here.

which means that we measure it as taking "2x" years for the entire process. if our first signal left 100 years ago, then the alien could at most be 50 light years away, which is very close by the terms that we usually use when we talk about neighboring solar systems, etc.

I give up on this, we're getting nowhere.

You're refusing to accept even basic principles and proofs given by people here.