Former Israeli Space Security Adviser Says Outer Space Not What It Seems

[narrativus]

Late last year Former Israeli Space Security Chief claimed that the Americans were in contact with aliens, but also stated that the big secret was in knowing what outer space actually is and what spaceships are. I wonder how a sci-fi mind would unpack this statement. Is the movement of a UFO on our world like passing through outer space rather than an oxygenated, gravitational environment? Does that allow the craft to move in spurts and stops thereby ignoring inertia? What kind of planes could be created? Also, what kind of missiles and bombs? If the bombs can zig zag with pointed direction, would it be even worse than the atom bomb? Also, could we travel to other planets with greater ease? Does this mean that we could mine asteroids even easier? It seems like a simple statement to the layman, but what do sci-fi fans think of it? What are your thoughts?

 

[hitmouse]

Not sure this fits in Technology.

 

[J Riff]

...was gravity uninvented or whaat?

 

[hitmouse]

If you change Former Israeli Space Security Chief to David Icke this makes more sense.

 

[Venusian Broon]

(from Wikipedia): UFO investigator Nick Pope told NBC News (about the comments from Haim Eshed, the Israeli in question), "Either this is some sort of practical joke or publicity stunt to help sell his book, perhaps with something having been lost in translation, or someone in the know is breaking ranks."

Now Mr Pope does his own grandstanding for whatever book he has coming up on the topic, and he is pretty ensconced in the world of UFO woo-woo, so if he is saying this guy is probably doing it as a publicity stunt to sell books, a practical joke and is probably lost in translation, I'd actually go along with him.

However I don't think he is breaking ranks.

Normally I be sceptical of Nick Pope and a bit wary, but this time he's covered the most probable bases.

 

[tinkerdan]

Here is a link

Former Israeli space chief says aliens exist, and Trump knows about it

A "galactic federation" has been waiting for humans to "reach a stage where we will understand... what space and spaceships are," Haim Eshed said.

www.nbcnews.com

At the end of the article it says:
“There are still some missing pieces of the puzzle here,” he said.

I'd agree that something might be missing.

"They have been waiting until today for humanity to develop and reach a stage where we will understand, in general, what space and spaceships are," Eshed said, referring to the galactic federation.

I think he is saying we understand it now 'until today', so seems there shouldn't be too much more to reveal about space and spaceships.
Though it seems that we haven't changed our understanding a whole lot in quite a number of years--so how far back is his 'today'.

 

[Wayne Mack]

The US has secretly been working with aliens? Does that mean Men in Black was actually a documentary?

 

[paranoid marvin]

This assumes we think we know what outer space is; we don't. Dark energy, dark matter, black holes, quasars etc etc. There's lots of speculation and theorising, but little in the way of hard facts. Could there be folds in space, could there be invisible worlds out there that are staring us in right in the face, but we don't have the knowledge or equipment to know they are there? Could there be unknown elements or differing properties in time and space that we are not yet aware of? If there are ways of controlling time so that it is not linear, or if there are regions of space where time runs differently or even ceases to exist in any way that we know, then distances quickly become irrelevant and the universe suddenly becomes a lot more accessible.

The chances are that as a species, we will never likely know the half of what is possible and what is 'out there'. But not knowing is what makes science fiction so much fun.

 

[mosaix]

(from Wikipedia): UFO investigator Nick Pope told NBC News (about the comments from Haim Eshed, the Israeli in question), "Either this is some sort of practical joke or publicity stunt to help sell his book, perhaps with something having been lost in translation, or someone in the know is breaking ranks."

Now Mr Pope does his own grandstanding for whatever book he has coming up on the topic, and he is pretty ensconced in the world of UFO woo-woo, so if he is saying this guy is probably doing it as a publicity stunt to sell books, a practical joke and is probably lost in translation, I'd actually go along with him.

However I don't think he is breaking ranks.

Normally I be sceptical of Nick Pope and a bit wary, but this time he's covered the most probable bases.

Many years ago I attended a talk by Nick Pope just after he’d left his job of cataloguing and ‘investigating’ (for what it’s worth) UFO sightings. Not sure if he was at the MOD or some other department.

Anyway, he was quite scathing about the reports and treated the whole thing as a joke. It must have been some time later that he realised he would make more money out of it if he pretended to take it seriously - so he does.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Many years ago I attended a talk by Nick Pope just after he’d left his job of cataloguing and ‘investigating’ (for what it’s worth) UFO sightings. Not sure if he was at the MOD or some other department.

Anyway, he was quite scathing about the reports and treated the whole thing as a joke. It must have been some time later that he realised he would make more money out of it if he pretended to take it seriously - so he does.

Yeah, he plays up his role as 'X-file' agent a lot. Whether he actually investigated anything at all at the time, I don't know!

 

[Dave]

Did he have a poster in his office that said "I don't want to believe"?

 

[Vladd67]

Yeah, he plays up his role as 'X-file' agent a lot. Whether he actually investigated anything at all at the time, I don't know!

I doubt he ever investigated anything, he was a civil servant with the MOD, I imagine he just collated the reports from other departments.

 

[J Riff]

I asked the ETs and believe me... physics is real !!

 

[hitmouse]

This assumes we think we know what outer space is; we don't. Dark energy, dark matter, black holes, quasars etc etc. There's lots of speculation and theorising, but little in the way of hard facts. Could there be folds in space, could there be invisible worlds out there that are staring us in right in the face, but we don't have the knowledge or equipment to know they are there? Could there be unknown elements or differing properties in time and space that we are not yet aware of? If there are ways of controlling time so that it is not linear, or if there are regions of space where time runs differently or even ceases to exist in any way that we know, then distances quickly become irrelevant and the universe suddenly becomes a lot more accessible.

The chances are that as a species, we will never likely know the half of what is possible and what is 'out there'. But not knowing is what makes science fiction so much fun.

I will defer to one of our physicists here, but the question has to be: outside the licence of fiction, why would one assume that the more robust principles of physics and astrophysics and chemistry might not apply locally or generally?

Even though there are some very major unanswered questions of cosmology ( dark matter is a biggie) that uncertainty still fits within a general framework of understanding.

 

[Dave]

There are various Physical Constants with fixed values that really cannot change within our universe because if they did the chemical and physical properties of matter would totally change beyond any recognition. Everything would react and behave in a different way. We can observe quite a very long way into space, and so we know these don't change as far as we can measure. Are there parallel universes that have different values for these Physical Constants? Theoretically, I guess there could be, but the universe that we know could only exist with the Physical Constants that we have now. I think it is proposed that they could have been different during the first seconds of formation. However, we have no way of getting from here to any such parallel universe and we couldn't survive within it if we could. Could an advanced technology find a way to travel between parallel universes and so appear to pass through matter as described by the OP? Well, that is certainly delving into the realms of science fiction.

 

[Venusian Broon]

There are various Physical Constants with fixed values that really cannot change within our universe

There are many respected theorists who have been suggesting/playing with/hypothesising that the physical 'constants' we observe are in fact variable.

Also there has been some very interesting actual observations that might validate these ideas and claims. (Yes,
some come from observations from "quite a long way into space")

Just saying.

 

[paranoid marvin]

I guess that I don't have too much faith in science and what we 'know' about how the universe operates. If you'd had faith in the science of the 1600s or 1800s - which was based on what was known data - then things would have been very different. Who is to say that what we know is true now won't be disproved or superceded by the next breakthrough? How has our understanding been changed by the discovery of dark energy and matter (of which we know very little), and how might a better understanding of these phenomenon help shape our understanding of other things?

I just think that there is too much that is unknown, and perhaps even beyond our comprehension, to be able to take anything at more than speculative value.

 

[Dave]

The changing of Physical Constants would not just mean that Gravity might be a little less, or more, or that kind of difference. It would fundamentally change the properties of matter. The periodic table might have a different shape, as some elements might not exist and other elements would have fundamentally different chemical properties. Think about if Carbon could no longer form long chains. Think about if compounds like Water didn't have the same properties. Our body's biochemistry wouldn't work. The matter that makes up our bodies would not exist where those constants were changed.

So, that is what would inform my scepticism that variable values for constants could exist within the same universe, even at the far edges, because what would happen at the interfaces? Different universes could have different fixed values, but how could we visit them without being disassembled sub-atomically at the transition. How could we even observe them with probes?

But yes, I can accept that a sufficiently advanced technology might find some way around theses problems that currently would seem like magic.

I'm just not sold on his idea that we have already met beings with a sufficiently advanced technology and it has been covered up.

 

[Saiyali]

I can't see why anyone would travel tens or more likely hundreds of light years just to meet us. Assuming they had even 'heard' us, assuming they even knew we were here, and assuming it's even possible to travel fast enough to make interstellar journeys feasable. We're not exactly at the heart of things, in galactic terms. Who would bother (assuming a RL lack of warp drive, hyperspace, wormholes or long-distance teleportation etc)?

For now, I for one assume getting from planet to planet in reality will essentially involve accelerating to halfway then decelerating. How fast the acceleration can occur will depend on physical needs, but 1G would mean pretty fast acceleration .. and then there's the risk of hitting an unseen asteroid at a hundred million metres per second, which would spice things up.

So, is it worth the risk, the time, the expense (however any alien species might judge that)? Or, there's the 'drifting drum' idea, travel slow and make your own gravity with a spin. That's obviously for any species that has many generations dedicated to the journey. So then it had better be worth it and to a known destination.

No wait .. unless they want our nickel-iron core, and our water .. and we are the reward...
Everybody, sshh!

I want to add that when I was younger and partaking in errr better medication, I and certain friends got really into the idea that Atlantis was an alien spaceship parked in the ocean, and that the 'great flood' was caused by it leaving.
Ahh happy days.

 

[Venusian Broon]

The changing of Physical Constants would not just mean that Gravity might be a little less, or more, or that kind of difference. It would fundamentally change the properties of matter. The periodic table might have a different shape, as some elements might not exist and other elements would have fundamentally different chemical properties. Think about if Carbon could no longer form long chains. Think about if compounds like Water didn't have the same properties. Our body's biochemistry wouldn't work. The matter that makes up our bodies would not exist where those constants were changed.

So, that is what would inform my scepticism that variable values for constants could exist within the same universe, even at the far edges, because what would happen at the interfaces? Different universes could have different fixed values, but how could we visit them without being disassembled sub-atomically at the transition. How could we even observe them with probes?

Looking at observations at great distance from us is not looking "at the far edges" - as I am sure you are aware the universe as best we know it, does not have one - it is looking back far into time. And things could be subtely different far in the past and still have chemistry very close to ours. Which was what one of the actual observations seemed to hint at.

A contender, the fine-structure constant, alpha, which which quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between charged particles, has been suggested might be variable and given that it's pretty important for processes involving carbon, even a miniscule change in the past may have had subtle but important differences in the early universe. Yes, perhaps even with what we'd call standard chemistry, who knows? Perhaps carbon-based life was impossible because of this in the first 8 billion years of the universes expansion? And when life became possible as alpha 'tuned' into the "right" value, Earth was formed at just the right time for the first life to appear on the young surface? (Might also make a good solution to the Fermi paradox).

Note that stars, galaxies, quasars and all the like could still form and shine even if alpha was a little different from today's value.

Of course getting to the past to check out what was there is (as far as we know, impossible ) but we can interpret the ancient radiation of various objects from billions of light years away.

Now I'm not saying this is true - more and better observations are required - and a deeper understanding would be needed. I'm not totally compelled by the evidence, but with a heathly sceptical and open mind, I find it very interesting.