Yeah, but if they're only 10 years ahead of us in technology, they've launched their version of Kepler and are watching us right now (and trying to figure out how to travel faster than light speed in order to communicate with us). But what if they're much more than 10 years ahead of us in technology? What if they've already figured out how to overcome the light speed barrier? This is gonna sound pretty creepy, but in order for that to happen, the ship is gonna have to have it's own little gravitational "bubble" surrounding it, and instead of just propelling the ship, the entire bubble would have to be propelled. Within the bubble inertia would be unaltered regardless of how the bubble traveled. ... and in order to understand that, we need to completely understand gravitational fields and how to create/control them... which we don't. That's another thing that's amazing. We still don't know why gravity exists. We can measure it and predict it, but we still have no idea why an object that has mass (which is all objects, really) creates a gravitational field.
Yall can apologize now. Video proof of an alien landing: Spoiler <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qWZo9rvWv_w&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qWZo9rvWv_w&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Then you meet people like my bro who work at NASA, and you are glad they aren't throwing money over there...haha JK! My bro probably won't even read that comment
Let me take on a few of these notions: 1. The government doesn't have to buy airtime. If there was a major UFO/alien announcement and Obama wanted to tell the world, networks would cover it for free. 2. The idea of an open air stadium is absurd. There would be only two reasons to do this: --You wanted a bunch of people there. However, how can you have a bunch of people there if you don't tell them why they're attending? --You have something big to show people. if this is the case, can you imagine the panic if you flew a spaceship into a major metropolitan area's stadium? Again, if you had something big, you could tell the media that the President will make an announcement at Nellis AFB and park the spaceship there. The media would come to the spaceship. 3. Why Florida? Granted, KSC is there, but JPL or even JSC would be more appropriate. 4. This would not be a US only decision. There are many societies and religious groups that would freak out. Any announcement would have to be coordinated with a bunch of folks across the globe and thus would not remain secret. The info on the Mars maybe-it-was-worms rock leaked (with specificity) before the official announcement.
We are. We are so very, very dumb. I'm not really saying that I believe that we've been visited by aliens (honestly I don't believe for or against that; I really have no idea). But I do believe in the possibility that other intelligent life exists - in our section of the Milky Way, even. I believe that one day it will be possible to find them.... to communicate with them.... and to eventually visit them. I don't know where I'll be then... but I won't smell too good, that's for sure.
You make some good points, but this one is a softball. It's cold out there in space and all the aliens have moved to Del Boca Vista.
But as you accelerated to a fractional percent of c, you'd begin to suffer time dilation effects. As you approached c, they would become nontrivial, and from the frame of a planetary observer, pretty soon your apparent acceleration would slow to a point that it take longer than the life of the universe to actually reach the speed of light (which, in fact, you'd never be able to reach).
I haven't been this excited for something since Beethoven 2 was released back in 1992 featuring Charles Grodin and Beethoven the dog.
