Moontanman

What does that have to do with advanced aliens giving Earth a look from time to time if they are already here? So if we can't find any evidence for life nearby then looking for alien technology is a waste of time? I would never expect a captured UFO, I would expect a lot more than microbes on Mars before i would accept UFOs as alien spacecraft... BTW the OP is about alien technology not microbes on Mars..

You missed my point completely, yes has investigated and those investigations are highly suspect and definitely not scientific, the Air Force only wanted to debunk, not explain, since it's first investigation concluded that UFOs were interplanetary spacecraft and that was rejected by people because they refused to accept it, not because the study was flawed... So you expect a culture capable of interstellar travel to be dumping garbage on us? You are simply being insulting now, you change from alien technology to alien bacteria as though they were equivalent, the alien fossil microbes from Mars are a far cry from a spacecraft... Not to mention the finding was 20 years ago and now thought to be simply minerals...

Hard to dig out of a hole...

As far as you can dig...

This has pretty much been the stance of the Air Force and the scientific establishment nearly from the very beginning... Again, aliens visiting Earth would imply a technology past ours, to expect them to provide undeniable proof is a bit much. I don't honestly see how we could expect to find such proof. A crashed alien spacecraft might do it but that is like people on a isolated island seeing jet vapor trails and expecting to find physical evidence before they can even admit that the trails exist. Any alien will do, while I am sure that most theists would only acknowledge their god the detection of anything like a god would be earth shattering..

That would be even more world shattering but OT...

I'm not sure what your point is here. Indeed I think you did, no one much less me is suggesting that UFOs are anything but unknowns. I am suggesting that the current paradigm of "nothing to see here move along" is self defeating... Ok, I'll agree that it proves nothing but that calls into question why you used that example... And no matter what these people find it's never enough, they do not have the qualifications necessary to get a proper response to anything they find much less have the resources to really investigate the issue. The air of ridicule surrounding the issue makes sure that anyone who wants to look risks loosing the respect of his peers at the very least... At the very least the idea that current investigations are anything but the equivalent of children being sent out to search for tasmanian tigers instead of professionals... All humans are Jesus shaped, what is your point? For the same reason discovering anything profoundly new and unknown is important. What could be more important than to learn if, how, and why aliens are colonizing the outer solar system?

I am proposing that we can know, there are ways of falsifying this hypothesis, as far as I know there is no way to falsify religion... You don't think finding a T-Rex corpse washed up would make a difference? Finding such a thing would have world shattering consequences! The implications are enormous. Finding that just one alien habitat is real would be the most important find in our history..

I said "probable enough" to justify investigating not enough to draw conclusions. Lots of time and money are being spent right now on passive detection of aliens who would have to be broadcasting a signal intentionally to show they are here. A great many people still think that we could detect "leakage" from a civilization but it's simply not true. Leakage from our own civilization could not be detected by our own current technology at the distance to the nearest star... Obviously, I wouldn't expect them to be yet so many people seem to think that somehow a sample of metal should be able to show evidence of its origin being non terrestrial, highly unlikely... I am not rushing to any conclusion but I'm betting that there is an ongoing effort to physically find a tasmanian tiger, sitting around waiting for one to shit in your hand seems a bit less than effective... Do you think this proves nothing was there or just that you didn't see anything? Obviously not, I am not asking anyone to do so, what I am asking is should we be actively looking? Is the current evidence we have justification for actively searching for nearby aliens? I think it is, at the very least it's as valid as scanning the sky looking for a signal from someone screaming "here we are" across the universe... To me the really sad part is the attitude that until a flying saucer lands on the white house lawn we can't know so why try... This is a particularly grievous mistake from my perspective. It's like finding a rotting T-Rex corpse washed up on the beach, the tide takes it back out and no one even cares to get in a airplane and scan the coastal waters for the corpse, it can't be real and it stinks to high heaven so why bother..

That was my attempt to show how silly the idea of testing something and being able to tell if it was extraterrestrial becomes. What exactly would you expect positive evidence of something being of extraterrestrial to look like? So many people seem to think that a rock from outer space would somehow be different from a rock from the earth or an asteroid but inevitably the universe is made of the same basic materials everywhere and believers, especially believers, seem to think that dust or rocks are labeled as to their origin. Nothing could be further from the truth and while such gradations can be made it takes extremely sophisticated equipment and a point of reference for those sort of tests to be meaningful. What sort of trace evidence would be acceptable? The main difference in our stance is I think it can be tested. I think the quality of at least some sightings makes it probable enough that non terrestrial technology could be involved. I think we could falsify this one way or another. One way might be via detecting waste heat given off by artificial habitats, the distance factor, Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud, would make it a challenge, but like most challenges even failing would be better than not trying... Like most people, and I don't fault you for this, you raised the bar on what you would accept as soon as it became apparent that at least some trace evidence exists. We can go on splitting hairs over what constitutes good evidence, for me that evidence is already here. Like most people I tend to feel like really good evidence is too good to be true and all other evidence is inconclusive at best. In the 1952 Washington DC sightings a very poor job of investigation coupled with a military that was trying it's best to appear to be in control resulted in less than believable explanations being taken as gospel by both points of view. Some people need to believe it's not true, some seem to need to believe it is, for whatever reason, just as fervently. At some point you need to decide what level of uncertainty in the evidence prompts a more specific investigation and how that investigation can be done. Now we have the possibility of a way to find out. Decades of pictures, eyewitnesses, radar returns and abduction reports become moot if a real way to do more than just pour over old reports and speculate. The real question about evidence is whether or not what we have justifies further investigation and do we have a means to investigate. I think the answer to both questions is yes.

Me too, mine barely toasts bread...

We react to things according to chemical reactions. At it's most basic all life is just chemicals, emergent properties like consciousness cannot be separated from the basic chemical reactions of life...

Considering that it is 7th in size among all the inner asteroids I think massive is accurate...

Of course there are natural alternatives but none of them held up in the bigger picture. Yes an airplane confirmed at one point that one of the returns was a boat on the river... case closed? No of course not because while some of the sighting can be blamed on natural phenomena most of it cannot. I pick this one sighting because of the multiple threads of evidence in the sighting. Hell I'm still not convinced what was going on but I do know that trying to explain parts of it as mundane and ignore the meat of the report gets us nowhere. I am more than willing to concede this sighting to the role of explained but not at the expense of reality...

I misunderstood what was being said, I was thinking a new asteroid in the inner solar system... Thank you.

That would make it the 7th largest asteroid... very big...

I cannot agree, a bacterium at the very least can react to its environment, can a toaster react its environment without lots of tweeking? I know my toaster does not do this...

Where did you get the size of the object? I think maybe you are off by a factor of 1000...

How would dirt or dust be identified as alien? https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/763816/UFO-landed-earth-proof-Delphos-Dr-Erol-Faruk https://listverse.com/2015/05/20/10-ufos-that-allegedly-left-physical-evidence-behind/

No one is claiming that aliens are responsible for everything not immediately recognised by radar operators, radar is quite a bit more than just some random technology being used to intentionally scam people. You insinuation of this is yet another attempt at poisoning the well. Either Radar can be evidence of a UFO or detecting objects at a distance is just more silly pseudo science. Which is it? You cannot have it both ways. Not true, in fact people get the death penalty from eyewitness testimony. https://capitalpunishmentincontext.org/resources/trialprocess http://www.ufoevidence.org/Cases/CaseView.asp?section=PhysicalTrace I would agree but with the caviate that being sarcastic about they are is not helpful either...

I may have missed the point as well, I did read a paper many years ago that asserted that protists were as aware of their environment as small mammals but to be honest I thought it was quite a stretch...

FTL depends on things like negative mass and negative energy, until we can demonstrate they exist FTL is just a pipe dream...

Until you can make a toaster do that along with reproduce (I know moving the goal posts) but reproduction with variation is a big part of the idea that toaster is as alive as a bacteria...

Well exactly, the fact that the maths can be worked out say nothing about the actual doing of things like warp drive or worm holes... Well you do have a good point, my main reason for this line of speculation is to show the idea of it being improbable if not impossible is simply not true and in fact would be quite easy to do. We just have to get past all the science and fiction that seems to show how we would do this and get back to what is likely to be done. Once you put aside all the impossible and improbable ideas the fact remains that we should be able to detect these "aliens" if they are here. an alien habitat giving off orders of magnitude more heat than a natural object should would be a big clue detecting such a heat source out to the Oort cloud would be difficult but doable...