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I just… Don’t believe it. I generally believe there is more going on than nothing but if the US had a spaceship with an alien body then we are really fucking bad at capitalizing on that technology, past the point of believability.

I believe aliens exist, somewhere in the universe. Statistically it seems inevitable, I just don’t believe they’ve visited earth or even know we exist, just like we don’t know they exist. You can sit on something like that, there would be much better evidence than grainy fake looking videos and second hand accounts.

Earth is a very early stable planet, I’m sure there will be lots more species in the coming billions of years. We might even be the most advanced civilization in the galaxy. But we’ll probably never contact anyone else, best we do is notice signs of life on a distant planet.

I know this sounds kinda kooky but personally my (completely no basis) guess is that UFOs (in the most convincing video evidence) are some kind of natural phenomenon that exists partially outside of our understanding of physics. If they have some sort of intelligence and they aren’t just random noise, I think they would be so different from us as to be utterly unparsable. If all that is true and they interact with us, their motivations would be similarly unknowable.

I’m depressingly not convinced faster than light travel will ever be possible, especially for humans or human-like organisms…

I’m very interested in them though. I’m very hopeful that studying them seriously might lead to some incredible insights about physics.

Just so you know, faster-than-light travel is not necessary to explore the stars. With enough constant acceleration (which seems to be achievable with the tech that these craft have demonstrated) you could go pretty much anywhere in the galaxy in your lifetime. The obvious downside is that the further you go, the more time-dilation becomes an issue for everyone else. For example, you may travel ~9 light years to Sirius in a matter of months from your perspective, but 10 years pass for everyone else. Still, if your goal is to explore, I find this to be quite a decent trade-off, and given that we are already making strides in life-extension that time may become a non-issue very quickly.

I don’t want to be rude but this isn’t correct as far as my understanding. I’m no expert, so I’m not confident in my ability to describe exactly how… But the phrase “you may travel ~9 light years to Sirius in a matter of months from your perspective, but 10 years pass for everyone else.” I don’t think that is correct exactly.

Again not trying to be rude and I am very happy to be corrected but I want to understand it.

I’ll put it another way then: any information you intended to send back after you arrive in Sirius would take ~9 years to arrive back home. Due to causality, this means that you cannot interact with Earth in any way for – at minimum – 9 years. However, from your perspective, you accelerated at let’s say 10 Gs (speed increased by 98 meters per second every second), until you were half-way to Sirius, which will take about 5 months. Then you decelerated at -10 Gs to arrive with 0 speed, another 5 months. You perceive only 10 months of travel, but you are now 9 light-years from home.

The math is not the part which is difficult, and requires only a basic understanding of relativistic physics. The issue is maintaining 10 Gs of constant acceleration for 10 months.

Yeesh I’m just not good at that kind of stuff. Time dialation is what is making this hard for me to wrap my head around, but basically the big issue with this method of travel is you need infinite energy (which might be something these ships somehow do) and its like fast forwarding into the future, so even if you go back immediately it will be like you were gone ~18 years but only experience less than 2.

It is certainly an interesting thing to think about, but sounds depressing in practice. If this is the practical way that some beings have traveled here, I feel like we are missing a piece of the puzzle for long distance space travel. Maybe they have a way to do something about time dilation. Or maybe they just don’t ever die…