A thought experiment. The universe is extremely large and billions of years old. Let's imagine life has developed within a few of those billions of galaxies out there, then imagine this started 1 billion years before us. How advanced to you think we could get in another billion years (assuming we don't annihilate ourselves)? What's really impossible?
We have a pretty good idea about physics and can say with very high confidence that interstellar travel needs a lot of energy. That makes aliens visiting us with small crafts for fun an unlikely theory.
We think we have a pretty good idea about physics - just as cats have a pretty good idea about scratching posts and ants have a pretty good idea about scent trails.
Cats literally can't understand what the Internet is, and ants can't understand what a cat is.
It's astoundingly naive to assume we don't have equivalent cognitive limitations.
I don't think that article is really addressing the same argument. The argument Asimov is addressing seems to be whether human scientists will always disprove the previous century's human scientists.
The argument the poster above is making is that human scientists may be cognitively limited, and our species objectively stupid. You can't really definitively argue against this in an essay, because if you are a stupid person who is a member of a stupid species, your reasoning skills can't be trusted. You might argue it pragmatically makes sense to assume your species is smart enough to understand the universe, but that's a different argument than Asimov is making.
Asimov seems to assume humans are objectively an intelligent species so his reasoning skills can be trusted, which of course may not be wrong, but is pretty hard to prove.
If there were cognitive limitations you'd expect big holes in the theories we come up with unless you believe that for some reason we happen to be limited in a way that we observe a subset of the universe which is strangely internally consistent and shows essentially no signs of interaction with an bigger universe, yet alien species can somehow use the bigger universe to interact with our subset of the universe in a way that appears to be magic. I find that pretty far fetched.
There are big holes in the theories we come up with. The inability to reconcile QM and relativity is the most famous one. M-theory requires 11-dimensional spacetime, but no one has ever observed most of those dimensions. Recent astronomical measurements, if confirmed, may falsify parts of the standard model. The list is pretty long.
Well it pretty much goes without saying that we don't know what we don't know. But we could actually be getting close to learning everything there is to know about the laws of physics. Finishing them up in the next century or two doesn't seem like a big stretch.
I'm not a scientist, just a dumb dude watching Youtube. But there is a problem in physics with tests not being avaialble for stuff they're theorizing about. From my limited understanding, string theory currently has zero path to empirical research to prove or disprove. So it might take a bit longer than a century or two for that reason.
Maybe all you need to travel from one star to another is just a pair AA batteries, and a 5 min. journey. Hence, very small UFOs would be essentially drones managed from another star.
How could it be possible, well, you have to take a closer look to the probably underlying physics you can infer from the UFOs behavior. Probably the still secret videos from DoD have a lot more to offer than most of the currently available videos.
But for now we have these phenomena reported:
- UFOs can go to full stop instantaneously, even if they are travelling at several times the speed of the sound
- UFOs can go from fully static to several times the speed of the sound, instantaneously.
- UFOs can remain fully stopped, seemingly unamovable, even under a hurricane.
- UFOs can submerge almost instantaneously, almost with no "splash", even if they do at extraordinary velocities.
- UFOs can travel underwater at the speed of the sound, or even more faster.
- UFOs have been reported to go "into mountain bases", decades ago.
- and the most important, UFOs have no apparent source of energy nor thrust, nor anything seeming usable as wings to remain in the air, or some rotors to move underwater.
Then, the physics? The UFOs are probably superdimensional entities / vehicles / vessels.
What we are seeing is maybe a fraction of the actual vessels, most of it located out of our three dimensional space, and you can see "here" is a small sphere of "metal". Maybe this spheres are just small arrays of sensors, from a way bigger unobservable vessel.
The evidence is empirical at most yet, maybe the still secret videos from DoD actually show clearly stuff or moves that reveal the superdimensional features, like a UFO "crashing" into solid rock, just to "re-emerge" from solid ground a couple of miles farther. Or maybe some time-related movements, like appearing / disappearing "from nothing".
If the UFOs are superdimensional capable vehicles, and our three dimensional universe actually has upper dimensions, maybe time itself is a physically traversable dimension, from a hypothetical 5th dimension. Hence, you could actually have FTL - Faster Than Light - travel, but without breaking any physics rules from the three dimensional space. You could be just "fastly walking" a couple of kilometers in maybe 15 minutes in the 5th dimensional space, and you could be displacing yourself several light years in the three dimensional space.
Then the energy required to do a multiple light year travel would be trivial, and the time required to displace yourself in the three dimensional space, too.
You could "jump" from star to star in maybe 5 minutes, using the energy from two AA batteries.
The consequences go far beyond that if the time is a physical dimension: you could go back and forward in time, just like you displace yourself in the three dimensional space. Hence the "time travel" thing remains impossible in three dimensions, but it is easily doable in 5 - or more - dimensions. Even closed loops are possible, because time as physical dimension would imply that "everything is happening at the same time", hence you could travel "backwards" in time and change something, and going back "forward" you'd find some things have changed.
What happens if you can also "travel" in time just as fastly, years in minutes, using just a pair of AA batteries? What if you can go back and change history? You could be changing stuff continously, improving at exponential pace. Maybe the aliens have done so, and they don't have "billions" of years of evolution, but have found a way to make the process faster.
Similarly, the implications of the existence of upper dimensions for the humans in its current level of technological evolution would be amazing. If you can displace solid matter like a plane, using an upper dimension, you could make traverse solid matter in the three dimensional space, maybe even not interacting at all with the solid matter: you could make vehicles capable of travelling throug solid rock mountains, or even traverse across the planet.
Some implications are just wow, if you can travel through solid matter in the three dimensional space or you can build vehicles capable of not interacting with mass in the three dimensional space, automagically most of the weapons and defense systems in the world became meaningless overnight. You could go inside any bank, any militar base, not worrying about missiles, bullets. You can't defend yourself by staying in three dimensional space, but in the upper dimensions you'd can't either: the enemy could travel in time and change its strategy to win this time, they'd just need some observer far away from the theather, assessing if the actions have had success or not, if not, go back, advise and repeat.
So, maybe the "first contact" isn't really the problem, but what happens if humanity suddenly realizes about new, radical advances in physics, available not only to super-powers and super-rich entities, but to anyone with a pair of AA batteries?
Almost no upper echelons of power in anywhere in the world would likely want the entire population know about as radically prone to sudden and profound changes in societies, as a discovery of the existence - and cheap accesibility - of upper dimensions, beyond the three dimensional space.
So you - maybe any super-power, nation states and private groups of powerful people - keep aliens out of sight from the general population, UFOs are psychological operations, not a thing like UFOs actually exist, whatever.
For that reason. You want nothing to change from what it is right now.
“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
haha, could be, after all our kids play with ants,
and the ants most probably think that we are highly advanced entities.
and it doesn't take the kids too much energy nor technological resources - for the human technological level - to play with ants, but ants probably would see the kid's resources as incredible advanced, well beyond its current technological capabilities.
So yeah it could be 5th dimensional kids playing with us (ants from their perspective).
As far as we know there is no extradimensional space where you can hide matter/energy. So I find it unlikely that UFOs are "superdimensional entities". How would these dimensions interact with the dimensions we know?
I'm suggesting the UFOs could be the first widely public evidence of upper dimensions beyond our three dimensional space.
I'm thrilled about UFOs happily breaking several laws of physics in front of us, and we should be thinking about what are we missing, what's out of sight, beyond our current understanding of physics that the UFOs obviously manage and exploit.
The upper dimensions is just a - pretty obvious - hypothesis.
"How would these dimensions interact with the dimensions we know?"
I don't know, but whoever has built the UFOs, certainly knows.
Some ideas: because you should not be able to impact the ocean surface at mach 4 without obvious physical consequences, and not submerging almost with minimal to absent "splash", maybe those UFOs are just leaking some photons into our three dimensional space,
hence "submerging" could not be precisely what they are doing, maybe they are just re-locating the "output" of the vessel out of sight of the humans.
Also those "metallic orbes" look amazingly similar to some kind of "black hole" or singularity, maybe those things are not vessels at all, but just a hole opened to our three dimensional space, to watch us, study us. That would make sense about the "orbes" doing nothing but keep running from us, appearing aparently everywhere with some interesting stuff to look at.
Yeah, it's very plausible that if another civilization exists some 10 light years away, the vehicle they use to travel 90,460,730,472,580 Km in order to get to Earth has the size of a compact car and copies the design of a 1950s experimental aircraft.
