The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis : Fact and Fallacy

[marduk]

Done some digging on how MK-Ultra came to light.

By the early years of the 1970s, a series of troubling revelations had appeared in the press concerning intelligence activities. First came the revelations by Army intelligence officer Christopher Pyle in January 1970 of the U.S. Army's spying on the civilian population[1][2] and Senator Sam Ervin's Senate investigations produced more revelations.[3] Then on December 22, 1974, The New York Times published a lengthy article by Seymour Hersh detailing operations engaged in by the CIA over the years that had been dubbed the "family jewels". Covert action programs involving assassination attempts against foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens.

Church Committee - Wikipedia

In short, it looks like whistleblowers and the press brought MK-Ultra and other secret programs into the light somewhat via the Church Committee. It wasn't the military industrial complex deciding to disclose, it was forced to because of leaks.

So my premise remains: is it rational to think the same military industrial complex could keep UFO crash retrievals, etc secret for 70 years, but not this other stuff? Why think they are some kind of ubermensch when it comes to UFOs but can't keep secrets when it comes to most everything else?

 

[mike]

So my premise remains: is it rational to think the same military industrial complex could keep UFO crash retrievals, etc secret for 70 years, but not this other stuff? Why think they are some kind of ubermensch when it comes to UFOs but can't keep secrets when it comes to most everything else?

What if the ET's are helping with that aspect though. Or even entirely responsible for the secrecy.

If they have time travel ability they could manage their public perception any way they like.

They could edit history to suit their own agenda.

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

I love Uncle Stan, but he does a pretty good job muddying the field - MJ-12, Roswell, et all.

One point on the MJ-12 documents has anyone found out who did them in the first place ? and have all breadcrumbs trailed back to the individuals? Who paid for them to be produced? On Roswell Case : Staton, went on the information he had at the time and the case is still open until the Official Records are out in the open.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

What if the ET's are helping with that aspect though. Or even entirely responsible for the secrecy.

If they have time travel ability they could manage their public perception any way they like.

They could edit history to suit their own agenda.

Yep. I try not to raise this point too often because it sounds so crazy until you study the theoretical physics behind it, but if some or most of these devices utilize a gravitational field propulsion technology – and the observations do conform beautifully to the explicit predictions of that model, then these devices represent a true spacetime technology. While we humans are still bumbling around engineering within the limited context of special relativity, these devices clearly appear to represent a genuine general relativistic technology – which is an absolute game-changer.

We’re moderately comfortable with the “space” aspect of a spacetime vehicle – star-hopping, so to speak, but curving spacetime entails manipulating time as well. And the mere existence of such a device would prove that substantial negative spacetime curvatures can be produced technologically – which opens the door to things like wormholes and time travel, according to the general theory of relativity. But really we already have proof that negative spacetime curvatures are physically real, because that’s what appears to have driven the inflationary epoch of the Big Bang, and what’s driving the present cosmological acceleration (aka dark energy) as well apparently, plus, a 2014 theoretical paper showed that the positive energy theorem doesn’t apply to our universe for these reasons as well as a formal differential geometry proof.

I remember seeing photos of a distinctive hat-shaped ufo that was photographed in the 50s (I think) through the window of a pickup truck, and an identical-looking hat-shaped ufo in a photograph halfway around the world and many years later (decades, iirc). So was this; two different but similar-looking devices traversing the sky years apart, or the same device returning years later, or was it the same device traveling through time moments apart from the reference frame of the device? According to our best physics model, all three of those possibilities are physically viable.

If we’re dealing with civilizations capable of that level of time manipulation, then we would appear to them as Flatlanders in the famous thought experiment (this is one of my favorite moments in Carl Sagan’s marvelous Cosmos series):

Think about that seriously for a moment, because we have every reason to think that’s possible, given what we know about theoretical physics today. A newborn infant in diapers is on a more equal plane of existence with us, than we would be with a civilization that readily manipulates the physics of spacetime.

Now let’s go down the wormhole for a moment to consider one of the many mind-boggling possibilities that time travel might present for a species that advanced in the physical sciences.

The only apparent solution that I’ve found to the problem of the Grandfather Paradox, stems from a theoretical model published by a brilliant theoretical physicist at USC named Dr. Itzhak Bars (I used to read his pre-prints about superstring theory when I worked on his floor at the graduate physics office at USC, coincidentally). Dr. Bars has shown that our universe could be the four-dimensional “shadow” of a six-dimensional universe with a specific gauge symmetry. This 6D universe has two time dimensions and four space dimensions, but it appears to be a 4D universe due to the gauge symmetry. Now if there are two dimensions of time, then infinite temporal possibilities exist at each moment in time, like the radial directions surrounding a point on a sheet of paper, so one could follow a curving trajectory back to the same point in time without violating what we might call “global causality” – the higher-dimensional answer to the linear causality that we all know and love. Think of it like moving in a line across a sheet of paper in the forward time direction, then circling back to a point behind you to start a new branch of forward-moving time, except this time you’re in two places at once – your current self, and your previous self, who might look out the window and wave at you. The previous timeline still exists, unaltered in the plane of global causality, but now you're creating an additional and independent timeline on the same plane. The two versions of yourself are now writing a new linear causality sequence together, exploring the additional degree of freedom provided by the second dimension of time, which together define the total plane of time rather than merely a single line.

In practice this would mean that you could pick a position, say, behind the Moon, and wait a moment, then travel back to your arrival, and wash, rinse and repeat, until you had an armada of versions of yourself aboard your spacetime vehicle, all neatly lined up together in formation. Then you could emerge from behind the Moon, in what would appear to be an instant later to us Earthlings, with a hundred or a thousand or more versions of yourself ready to conquer the Earth. All 100% paradox-free thanks to the second dimension of time.

Since we’re already way the hell out there, I might as well mention that the mystics have been describing a second perpendicular dimension of time for eons – they usually call it “eternity” to distinguish it from the ordinary notion of time. The general idea is that our internal monologue of uninterrupted thought tethers our consciousness to the single dimension of forward-moving time, but if we can achieve internal silence for 44 consecutive seconds, then we suddenly become aware of the additional time dimension. One theory I’ve read even claimed that the cross signifies this intersection of two dimensions of time, but I don’t recall if the idea was that Jesus sacrificed himself on a cross to immortalize the concept of two dimensions of time, or if that was only an interpretation proposed after the fact. Anyway, the whole idea is that the awakening/enlightenment experience shared by Buddha and Christ and the other avatars was the conscious awareness of this additional “eternity” time dimension.

I find it fascinating that two such wildly disparate realms of human thought could arrive at the same very exotic idea, which just happens to resolve one of the most famous paradoxes in modern physics.

 

[marduk]

You guys gotta read Neal Stephenson’s latest book if you want to think about time travel - at least backwards (we’re all going forward) in the only way that really makes sense to me.

If we live in a multiverse, it may be hard to go back to your own past, which would resolve the grandfather paradox.

His new book ( D.O.D.O) is hilarious about it.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

So my premise remains: is it rational to think the same military industrial complex could keep UFO crash retrievals, etc secret for 70 years, but not this other stuff? Why think they are some kind of ubermensch when it comes to UFOs but can't keep secrets when it comes to most everything else?

I’d argue that for every program like MKUltra that gets leaked, there are probably >100 that don’t get leaked. The thought that every classified program eventually gets leaked to the public is a comforting notion, but it’s groundless. I suppose that many people are misled by the secret aircraft scenario, where highly classified aerospace projects are eventually declassified so we find out all about them after they’ve been deployed. And the occasional drips that we hear about with cases like MKUltra and the Chelsea Manning leaks and the Edward Snowden leaks, reinforce this cozy notion that the US military-intelligence complex is so utterly incompetent that everything they do ends up under the public microscope. It doesn’t take much research to discover that this is a fairy tale, however – Secret programs sometimes leak, Top Secret programs very rarely leak (and when they do it dominates the global press for quite awhile), and Special Access Programs (and above) never leak. I've never seen a SAP document, and I’ve looked. But I’m confident that most of our global adversaries pilfered some SAP intelligence from Hillary Clinton’s unencrypted basement server, so maybe I could ask them for a copy. That’s the only time I’ve ever heard of Special Access Program intelligence being removed from government custody, by the way – so frankly I’m amazed that she’s not in prison, despite her vast political power: usually people who leak Secret intelligence get promptly arrested and imprisoned (or make a deal involving a guilty plea if they're very powerful), and people who leak Top Secret intelligence get hunted down like dogs and end up either tortured in military prison or dead under suspicious circumstances.

I don’t know how many people are aware of the levels of security classification in the US, so basically it goes like this, in ascending levels of compartmentalization (with the increasingly classified programs nested within the less classified programs, akin to the layers of an onion, which allows leakers to be severely prosecuted without any official admissions regarding the existence of the highly classified stuff, and also provides excellent cover for large highly classified operations):

- Confidential
- Secret
- Top Secret
- Special Access Program
- Unacknowledged Special Access Program
- Waived Unacknowledged Special Access Program

The last variety, Waived SAP’s, are prohibited from keeping any records, so there’s no evidence to leak. If somebody were to ever yap about such a program, and somehow lived long enough to get it to the press (who probably wouldn't publish it anyway because the corporate news media is very much in bed with the Deep State), they’d never be able to prove anything and a covert intelligence+press operation would neutralize them anyway, generally through a well-orchestrated smear campaign. It was interesting to see how the Deep State tried to frame Julian Assange as a child molester last year, for example. And he’s just a publisher, not a leaker.

I have no idea if extraterrestrial technology is in the hands of the US military complex, but if it is, it would certainly be hidden as deeply as possible, in a Waived SAP program. Why? Because such a thing would obviously pose the greatest existential risk imaginable to the United States – imagine if such a program leaked the secret of an achievable gravitational field propulsion technology to a hostile nuclear adversary: they could then develop a delivery system for placing nuclear or biological weapons payloads over critical US infrastructure in a matter of seconds - far more quickly than we could ever respond. Because even if we had the same technology in our arsenal, the human response time to such an attack is several minutes.

But that’s just the obvious part; it’s actually much worse than that. Consider the horrible scenario of some crazed leader of a nuclear country *simply learning* that the US was successfully working toward a virtually instantaneous delivery system. He’d be faced with only two options; 1.) strike now before we achieve that capability or B.) don’t strike and wait for the US to achieve complete military domination and thereby forever live under the threat of total, instantaneous, and indefensible nuclear annihilation at absolute US discretion. All notions of national autonomy pretty much vanish with that second scenario, where the US achieves compete global domination without having to fire a single bullet. Naturally I’ve often considered this very simple and terrifying geopolitical scenario as an excellent justification for hiding very deeply any extraterrestrial technology that may have been recovered, and I’m somewhat relieved by the fact that we’ve never seen any real evidence that we possess such technology, for this reason, among others. In fact it’s even occurred to me that an alien civilization might crash a couple of their devices so we can reverse engineer them, and just wait for us to annihilate ourselves because we humans are clearly not even remotely prepared to survive the sudden arrival of such an awesome military capability.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

You guys gotta read Neal Stephenson’s latest book if you want to think about time travel - at least backwards (we’re all going forward) in the only way that really makes sense to me.

If we live in a multiverse, it may be hard to go back to your own past, which would resolve the grandfather paradox.

His new book ( D.O.D.O) is hilarious about it.

Yeah that's one of the three commonly proposed attempts to resolve the grandfather paradox.

I've always found the Novikov self-consistency principle and Hawking’s “Chronology Protection Conjecture” to be deeply unsatisfying, unphysical, and ad-hoc in nature. I think it's bad science to start with an unproven assumption like "the timeline is immutable," and then work backwards to rationalize the conclusion. And in this case, the narratives they presuppose read more like slapstick comedy than physics - tripping at the threshold of your time machine and dying from a concussion because the universe prohibits backward travel in time, or being able to go back in time but running into a range of random-seeming obstacles if you try to change anything in the past. Rubbish. And the many-worlds interpretation (where you never go back to your own past, only one that appears to be identical to your own) doesn't just throw Occam's Razor out the window - it subjects it to Medieval torture and then sets it on fire screaming bloody murder.

The two-time-dimension solution extends the physics elegantly...without mandating the infinities upon infinities of burgeoning universes at every quantum event everywhere throughout the apparently infinite universe, which the MWI describes. To me, the MWI is an excellent cautionary tale that reveals the perils of mistaking the mathematics of physics, for the physical reality itself. The math is simply a description, nothing more. And we know that the current description is imperfect, or at least incomplete, because quantum field theory is incompatible with general relativity. So a better and more complete description remains to be found, and I think we should wait until we have that in hand before we go positing infinite realities spewing forth every time an electron or a photon interacts with something, which is constantly and basically everywhere. But, sadly, I guess we can't completely rule it out until we arrive at a grand unified theory that accurately describes all of the eggs in our basket.

 

[marduk]

In practice this would mean that you could pick a position, say, behind the Moon, and wait a moment, then travel back to your arrival, and wash, rinse and repeat, until you had an armada of versions of yourself aboard your spacetime vehicle, all neatly lined up together in formation. Then you could emerge from behind the Moon, in what would appear to be an instant later to us Earthlings, with a hundred or a thousand or more versions of yourself ready to conquer the Earth. All 100% paradox-free thanks to the second dimension of time.

How would you deal with breaking both the first and second laws of thermodynamics?

I mean, you would have just created a thousand versions of yourself out of nothing. That's a whole lotta energy and entropy to account for.

 

[marduk]

Yeah that's one of the three commonly proposed attempts to resolve the grandfather paradox.

I've always found the Novikov self-consistency principle and Hawking’s “Chronology Protection Conjecture” to be deeply unsatisfying, unphysical, and ad-hoc in nature. I think it's bad science to start with an unproven assumption like "the timeline is immutable," and then work backwards to rationalize the conclusion. And in this case, the narratives they presuppose read more like slapstick comedy than physics - tripping at the threshold of your time machine and dying from a concussion because the universe prohibits backward travel in time, or being able to go back in time but running into a range of random-seeming obstacles if you try to change anything in the past. Rubbish. And the many-worlds interpretation (where you never go back to your own past, only one that appears to be identical to your own) doesn't just throw Occam's Razor out the window - it subjects it to Medieval torture and then sets it on fire screaming bloody murder.

Totally agree with that last bit, and it got a laugh from me.

In a two slit experiment though, what is it that the individual photons are interfering with if it's not themselves in another reality? The multiverse is a pretty blunt force solution to that, but it's a solution.

Your comment reminded me of this old SCTV episode "Beauty and the Beets:"

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Totally agree with that last bit, and it got a laugh from me.

In a two slit experiment though, what is it that the individual photons are interfering with if it's not themselves in another reality? The multiverse is a pretty blunt force solution to that, but it's a solution.

Your comment reminded me of this old SCTV episode "Beauty and the Beets:"

Hahaha - god I loved SCTV. That was one of the few things on television that my brother and I could always agree on, growing up.

There are at least a dozen different interpretations of quantum theory today, and nobody knows if any one of them is correct, or if the correct solution has yet to be discovered. We did a podcast about them in our previous PhysicsFM podcast series. The MWI is probably my least favorite, primarily for the reason of economy - my inner physicist is simply revolted by the ham-fisted approach of "all of the possibilities happen simultaneously, happy now??" It's not that the different iterations of the same particle interfere with each other - you're thinking of the standard Copenhagen interpretation, which is sort of the red-haired step-father of the MWI, and where all the real trouble started. In the MWI each universe exists totally independently of the others - the idea is that every possible trajectory is followed, each in its own universe, and we're in the specific selection of infinite universes defined by these random possible outcomes - the interference pattern is thereby the result of the probability distribution defined by the quantum wavefunction. If that makes you uncomfortable, it should: this means that the MWI doesn't explain why the wavefunction is what it is, so ultimately it doesn't actually explain anything - it simply redefines the notion of probability by claiming that all possible outcomes actually occur whenever we encounter a range of possibilities. When you flip a coin, for example, you get heads and tails with each flip, and each outcome gets its own universe so you're only aware of one of the outcomes. If you think that's a dumb idea, then congratulations: you've just properly understood the many-worlds interpretation ;

Rational physicists have posed a darkly humorous challenge for MWI advocates to test the many-worlds interpretation. All you have to do put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. Because the MWI states that your consciousness will continue in a universe where the gun gets jammed or the bullet is a dud, etc. As far as I know, nobody's had enough reckless faith in the MWI to accept the challenge...or perhaps they simply haven't lived to tell about it.

My two favorite solutions to the double-slit experiment (which as Feynman famous stated, is pretty much the single core phenomenon in quantum field theory that requires a sensible explanation), are, in no particular order:

A.) The de Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave theory, which describes the electron or photon as a real and ever-present particle that follows a path dictated by a surrounding wavefunction which is the product of the field interactions between the particle and the apparatus and environment (including the entire universe, ultimately). Weak-measurement experiments have demonstrated that this model accurately predicts the interference pattern without resorting to the concept of superposition (which is the awful and widely favored view of the Copenhagen interpretation...which also requires the dreadful and insoluble problem of "the collapse of the wavefunction" that has spawned painfully stupid ideas like "the observer generates reality itself" that so many woo-meisters get off on). And in recent years Coulder and Fort have performed a macroscopic demonstration of this concept using droplets of oil bouncing on a vibrating oil bath - they reproduce the double-slit experiment with the interference pattern, so that's a perfectly classical explanation for quantum behavior. It's called pilot wave hydrodynamics, btw. Here's a video about it:

B.) Stochastic electrodynamics, which I mentioned on the show, postulates a Lorentz-invariant field of real energy pervading all of space. In this model, the quantum wavefunction that produces the interference pattern is a direct result of the particle vibrating as it interacts with the universal background field of stochastic (random) energy. In addition to its alarming number of successes explaining a wide variety of quantum phenomena from classical first principles, it also appears to be the only legitimate contender for a theory that actually underlies quantum field theory. And frankly, it sounds exactly like the field of energy that Tesla often spoke of, and claimed to experimentally interact with to produce myriad exotic effects and technological devices. It also presents a very tantalizing prospect - if the background field is composed of real energy, then we may be able to tap into it someday to extract useful energy anywhere in space. And this might not only solve our global energy problems someday, but it sure would be handy for interstellar spaceflight because it would mean that there's a vast energy density available at all points in spacetime just waiting to be tapped.

 

[Randall]

What if the ET's are helping with that aspect though. Or even entirely responsible for the secrecy.

If they have time travel ability they could manage their public perception any way they like.

They could edit history to suit their own agenda.

The way time travel seems to distill down is that, like afterlives, it isn't possible in the usual sci-fi sense we usually see it portrayed. Or more accurately, it's only possible in that way if whatever is able to do it has full control of our universe and is able to undo and redo everything that's ever happened right to the precise point they emerge. But if that's the case then the ramifications are that nothing is real in the sense we think of it either.

Everything would have to be a copy stored in some vastly powerful buffer, and of necessity the aliens would have to be from some other universe that runs on the same system as this one, or they couldn't exist concurrently in this one with us. The only other option is a situation where the timeline can branch, but even then we're dealing with the spontaneous creation of a copied universe, in which case they're not really changing time in the original universe at all.

The YouTube videos I've seen on time ( and I've watched many ) generally don't take enough into consideration and tend not to differentiate between relative rates of aging or localized reverse aging, and time travel in the sci-fi sense used here to suggest that some alien race could control the timeline on macro levels. Maybe I'm missing something in the logic though. If so maybe someone can help me see where I've made the error.

 

[Randall]

The only apparent solution that I’ve found to the problem of the Grandfather Paradox ...

I don't get why people have such a hard time with this. Conceptually it's as simple as digital editing. The whole thing is basically cut and/or copy/undo/paste. The interesting thing is that this whole line of reasoning also suggests that time is quantized. Each moment we think of as reality is essentially a still frame that the big system created according to the content of the previous frame and the rules that govern how change is made when compositing the next frame. And this suggests that nobody ever really lives, at least not the way we normally think of it. It's all an illusion.

​

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

How would you deal with breaking both the first and second laws of thermodynamics?

I mean, you would have just created a thousand versions of yourself out of nothing. That's a whole lotta energy and entropy to account for.

In this model, we've previously mentioned a new and more general law that we called "global causality conservation" to replace the "linear causality conservation" of a single-time universe: by looking at the 2-time-dimension plane from above we see that, from the 6D spacetime perspective, causality is still preserved: you actually did travel back in time after you arrived at the Moon, then you actually did do it again, and again - time is sequentially passing aboard your craft operating in 6D spacetime, and the unfolding events actually all make sense from that 6D reference frame. It only appears that you've suddenly burst into an armada of identical copies of yourself from the 4D perspective - but if you could see the clocks aboard each ship, you could see that they were all slightly different - each craft is slightly older than the next.

In the same way, we'd have to replace the conservation of energy with a more global definition of conservation of energy that encompasses the additional dimensions. And from that higher perspective above the temporal plane, we can see that there's only one of you, moving around in a spiral. So given that "your past" is always preserved causally, you'd have to attack the Earth and then travel back in time to do it again at another target, over again over again until the people of Earth witness an armada of your craft obliterating the Earth all at once, and all but one of them would then circle back in time, leaving the oldest iteration of yourself to move forward in time from that moment onward. Sorry for the mistake - thinking in two moving time dimensions is very confusing. So from the 4D perspective it would all balance out in the end because an equal amount of matter vanishes backward into time after the attack, as appeared to make the attack - so it's like "borrowing mass from your own future" to temporarily manifest it all at once in the present. When the attack is over and your younger selves have all vanished backwards in time and the Earth is a smoldering cinder, you're older than you would've been if you hadn't traveled back in time again and again, so the total mass x time energy content of the 6D universe remains constant: at every instant of time in your 6D reference frame aboard the craft, you only exist at one point in that 6D spacetime because you never intersect with your past or future selves in both dimensions of time simultaneously. So you would experience every consecutive attack on the Earth in sequence, and you would be able to see all of the previous iterations of yourself making the attacks you've already done, but you'd never see your future self making the next attack because it hasn't happened for you yet. And because we’re in motion along two perpendicular axes of time (and moving with the equivalent of C through time according to our constant 4-velocity, but in both dimensions of time), you can return to the same Tx position, but you won’t be at the same Ty position anymore, so your previous incarnations aren’t materially collocated with you in the Ty dimension. Your former selves can’t see you above them in the Ty dimension, but you can see them visually but not interact with them because you’re only collocated with the light that they reflected/emitted along the Ty axis, not their physical matter, which is behind you in Ty time by the temporal distance equivalent of the additional time passed aboard your craft times the speed of light.

You can see why physicists greeted Dr. Itzhak Bars' 6D, 2-time-dimension physics theory with deafening silence - the implications of a 4D spacetime manifold are quite hairy enough to reckon with, thank you very much - most physicists have no interest in trying to rationally grapple with the confounding perplexities of 2-time physics, which are ultimately logically consistent, but very challenging to untangle with our squishy little monkey brains that are conditioned to think in only 4D terms.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

I don't get why people have such a hard time with this. Conceptually it's as simple as digital editing. The whole thing is basically cut and/or copy/undo/paste. The interesting thing is that this whole line of reasoning also suggests that time is quantized. Each moment we think of as reality is essentially a still frame that the big system created according to the content of the previous frame and the rules that govern how change is made when compositing the next frame. And this suggests that nobody ever really lives, at least not the way we normally think of it. It's all an illusion.

The grandfather paradox is a genuine paradox if we confine physics to a single dimension of time, a line, because there can be only one line unless we bring additional universes into it with each trip back in time (which feels like a BS solution, because it is). Imo, traveling back in time doesn't create a new universe anymore than each quantum event creates an infinite array of alternative universes, as we've seen with the MWI.

So if you only have the one line to move around on, then if you travel backwards on that line, then you're re-writing your own history because you (the older you) weren't there during the first go-around. And how can you retain the memory of a timeline that you've changed? In the TV show 12 Monkeys, your brain gets re-wired when you change your own history, so you're unaware that it's changed. But that seems silly to me. Because it doesn't solve the grandfather paradox - if you travel back in time and prevent your own birth, then how did you ever exist to prevent your own birth in the first place? A linear timeline runs into a brick wall with that simple paradox, and that's why most physicists decided to just sweep all of that shit under the carpet and stipulate that the positive energy theorem bars the possibility of time machines. But now we know that the positive energy theorem doesn't apply to our universe, so that evasive maneuver of rationalization is finished.

The three attempted solutions to this paradox, which we went over a couple of posts back, all seem either wildly contrived, or grossly uneconomical in the case of the MWI cop-out.

The two-time dimension solution is the only one that appears to solve the riddle with logical consistency and economy: you can travel back in time without changing your own history, but only by incurring a displacement in the extra time dimension that we humans aren't even conscious of, so you're never actually ever collocated with yourself in 6D spacetime...but we puny Earthlings can't discern the displacement in the Ty time dimension. If we could see aboard each craft, though, we might notice that each one's clock is different, and that the younger ones don't seem to be aware of the older ones, and thereby surmise that they're displaced from one another in the Ty dimension even though they're all at the same Tx position that we are.

 

[Randall]

The two-time dimension solution is the only one that appears to solve the riddle with logical consistency and economy ...

I'm not going to pretend to be able to do the math, nor am I going to bother. All that seems to matter is that in these sorts of explanations time is reduced to a variable rather than a real-world concept. As soon as that happens it becomes an abstract mathematical model that might be internally coherent to mathematicians, but that doesn't mean it remains coherent with respect to the real world, or even what we're talking about here with respect to some craft coming back in time from some future point on our timeline, if that is even possible, which I seriously doubt.

But whatever the case, the cut & paste analogy seems to work just as well and isn't that hard to visualize. It doesn't need more spatial or time dimensions either. It just requires that we look at time a bit differently, from a sort of God's eye view outside this timeline. Maybe that's what they mean by other "dimensions". I don't know. BTW I say "cut & paste" as a convenience term, but as I alluded to it's more complex and a closer analogy would be full editing capability including compositing, and beyond that to include dynamically generated content.

 

[Trajanus]

So my premise remains: is it rational to think the same military industrial complex could keep UFO crash retrievals, etc secret for 70 years, but not this other stuff?

Apples and oranges. As I wrote before, ULTRA remained secret for thirty years after there was no longer any real need for secrecy. By 1975 the axis had been history for three decades; revealing the secret cracking of their codes was of no real importance at all. In sharp contrast, proof that ET is here and generally far ahead of us could have serious consequences, if revealed. Can the government reassure us it could deal with an invasion, overt or otherwise? Maybe at some future point but, not now so disclosure could result in panic. There is a very compelling reason to keep it under wraps.

Why think they are some kind of ubermensch when it comes to UFOs but can't keep secrets when it comes to most everything else?

Oh they can keep secrets especially if there's a strong incentive.

 

[Trajanus]

One point on the MJ-12 documents has anyone found out who did them in the first place ?

Bill Moore perhaps.

 

[Trajanus]

What if the ET's are helping with that aspect though. Or even entirely responsible for the secrecy.

Seems hardly plausible given Malmstrom and other evidence of ET-government adversarial relations instead of cooperation. ET probably keeps quiet because his agenda is nefarious, and the government keeps quiet because as long as it can't match ET, disclosure would only make things worse.

 

[Trajanus]

I’d argue that for every program like MKUltra that gets leaked, there are probably >100 that don’t get leaked.

Right.

I have no idea if extraterrestrial technology is in the hands of the US military complex,

Inasmuch as Roswell has no earthly explanation, there's a pretty good chance it does.

but if it is, it would certainly be hidden as deeply as possible, in a Waived SAP program. Why? Because such a thing would obviously pose the greatest existential risk imaginable to the United States –
Naturally I’ve often considered this very simple and terrifying geopolitical scenario as an excellent justification for hiding very deeply any extraterrestrial technology that may have been recovered

But there's no need to invoke it at all. While the government may have ET technology it doesn't necessarily follow that it has mastered it. There's no good evidence I'm aware of.
But never mind some foreign country, or a scheming US, ET clearly does have such technology. Since we're all but defenseless, for now, disclosure could invite panic.

In fact it’s even occurred to me that an alien civilization might crash a couple of their devices so we can reverse engineer them, and just wait for us to annihilate ourselves because we humans are clearly not even remotely prepared to survive the sudden arrival of such an awesome military capability.

Why not just annihilate us themselves? Btw Roswell may have involved just escape pods, as the main craft was completely destroyed. So having ET technology doesn't necessarily mean having the gravitational field propulsion.

 

[marduk]

Hahaha - god I loved SCTV. That was one of the few things on television that my brother and I could always agree on, growing up.

There are at least a dozen different interpretations of quantum theory today, and nobody knows if any one of them is correct, or if the correct solution has yet to be discovered. We did a podcast about them in our previous PhysicsFM podcast series. The MWI is probably my least favorite, primarily for the reason of economy - my inner physicist is simply revolted by the ham-fisted approach of "all of the possibilities happen simultaneously, happy now??" It's not that the different iterations of the same particle interfere with each other - you're thinking of the standard Copenhagen interpretation, which is sort of the red-haired step-father of the MWI, and where all the real trouble started. In the MWI each universe exists totally independently of the others - the idea is that every possible trajectory is followed, each in its own universe, and we're in the specific selection of infinite universes defined by these random possible outcomes - the interference pattern is thereby the result of the probability distribution defined by the quantum wavefunction. If that makes you uncomfortable, it should: this means that the MWI doesn't explain why the wavefunction is what it is, so ultimately it doesn't actually explain anything - it simply redefines the notion of probability by claiming that all possible outcomes actually occur whenever we encounter a range of possibilities. When you flip a coin, for example, you get heads and tails with each flip, and each outcome gets its own universe so you're only aware of one of the outcomes. If you think that's a dumb idea, then congratulations: you've just properly understood the many-worlds interpretation ;

Rational physicists have posed a darkly humorous challenge for MWI advocates to test the many-worlds interpretation. All you have to do put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. Because the MWI states that your consciousness will continue in a universe where the gun gets jammed or the bullet is a dud, etc. As far as I know, nobody's had enough reckless faith in the MWI to accept the challenge...or perhaps they simply haven't lived to tell about it.

My two favorite solutions to the double-slit experiment (which as Feynman famous stated, is pretty much the single core phenomenon in quantum field theory that requires a sensible explanation), are, in no particular order:

A.) The de Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave theory, which describes the electron or photon as a real and ever-present particle that follows a path dictated by a surrounding wavefunction which is the product of the field interactions between the particle and the apparatus and environment (including the entire universe, ultimately). Weak-measurement experiments have demonstrated that this model accurately predicts the interference pattern without resorting to the concept of superposition (which is the awful and widely favored view of the Copenhagen interpretation...which also requires the dreadful and insoluble problem of "the collapse of the wavefunction" that has spawned painfully stupid ideas like "the observer generates reality itself" that so many woo-meisters get off on). And in recent years Coulder and Fort have performed a macroscopic demonstration of this concept using droplets of oil bouncing on a vibrating oil bath - they reproduce the double-slit experiment with the interference pattern, so that's a perfectly classical explanation for quantum behavior. It's called pilot wave hydrodynamics, btw. Here's a video about it:

B.) Stochastic electrodynamics, which I mentioned on the show, postulates a Lorentz-invariant field of real energy pervading all of space. In this model, the quantum wavefunction that produces the interference pattern is a direct result of the particle vibrating as it interacts with the universal background field of stochastic (random) energy. In addition to its alarming number of successes explaining a wide variety of quantum phenomena from classical first principles, it also appears to be the only legitimate contender for a theory that actually underlies quantum field theory. And frankly, it sounds exactly like the field of energy that Tesla often spoke of, and claimed to experimentally interact with to produce myriad exotic effects and technological devices. It also presents a very tantalizing prospect - if the background field is composed of real energy, then we may be able to tap into it someday to extract useful energy anywhere in space. And this might not only solve our global energy problems someday, but it sure would be handy for interstellar spaceflight because it would mean that there's a vast energy density available at all points in spacetime just waiting to be tapped.

Ya, I’m pretty much with you.

The MWI is so entertaining though.

The observer problem is pretty funny the way it’s misinterpreted. The observer doesn’t have to be a conscious entity at all - just a device capable of measurement.

If we create reality, then so does my nest cam.