detecting UFOs (if they exist) using LIGO and Co.?!
25 Jul 2008 17:37:20 UTC
Topic 193778
(moderation:
Hi there,
I guess you are wondering what this is about. This is after all a serious science board and not for fantasy.
This thread is NOT about whether UFOs exist or not.
For this thread I assume some sightings have been real. This NASA video shows something moving VERY fast around the earth and then shoot up into space directly against the force of gravity and perpendicular to the surface of the earth.
For what I am asking/proposing here it does not matter who made that craft (nothing natural can move that way) or why. If it is man made then someone is hiding a lot of knowledge from the majority of the people of this world. In any case it may help us understand what gravity really is and how it works.
NASA has a site called: Warp Drive, When? where they explain that from all the propulsion systems suggested in SciFi only the Warp Drive of Star Trek looks to be use full for interstellar space travel. The reason is simple. It is the only one that "pushes directly against space-time". Actually it does not push but it compresses and stretches space-time to "pull" space past the ship instead of the ship past space.
All others depend on impulse which means throwing something out of the craft in one directing to create an acceleration in the opposite direction. However what ever that is it takes up space and mass and it needs to be accelerated as well and so reduces the payload. Thats OK for interplanetary but not interstellar space travel.
The interesting part for this discussion is that space-time needs to be folded for that. UFOs that move like the one shown in the video would need to implement something similar I would assume.
I read: The Speed of Gravity What the Experiments Say and am not sure I really understand the difference between gravitational waves and gravitational force but from my understanding the movement of such a craft would cause ripples in space time like a ship moving on water leaves waves on the water surface and also sonar waves.
I wondered if the gravitational waves of such a craft of lets say 10 or 20 m diameter would be strong enough to show up on LIGO or other Gravitational Wave Detectors. If so I think the search pattern should include such occurrences as well. This could be a joint project for Einstein@Home and SETI@Home and the first SETI approach that if successful would produce direct use for human kind.
The only down side I can currently see is that the governments (especially the over paranoid US) would suddenly be very interested in those projects.
So far military and science together never meant something good.
I would like to hear what other think on that subject. I'm I totally of course here or would this work if UFOs do exist?
Thanks for considering
Holly
Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
E. E. Cummings
Give everyone the benefit of the doubt
because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Erin from BigCloset-Topshelf?
detecting UFOs (if they exist) using LIGO and Co.?!
)
I just found out the site has been moved and can now be found here: Warp Drive, When?
The old address only leads to the cover page but all links seem dead.
Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
E. E. Cummings
Give everyone the benefit of the doubt
because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Erin from BigCloset-Topshelf?
Greetings and Welcome I
)
Greetings and Welcome
I believe the question is on whether LIGO could detect a warp drive if it was nearby...
I am just an Amateur..
If a possible warp drive created gravitational waves, we would need to know the characteristics of those waves before the analysis could be used to capture them..
In other words... We would need to know how the Warp Drive works in theory, the frequency of the waves it produced and our analysis would have to to be look for that particular waveform. I think this would be a big undertaking...
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
RE: In other words... We
)
Well that makes sense.
I was hoping that it would create an obvious spike of some sort like the bow wave of a ship. Even without knowing what kind of ship it is (sail, steam wheeler, motor boot ...) so what kind of propulsion it uses we could say more or less what a bow wave for a ship of a certain size and speed should look like.
I thought it should be an obvious signal since it would suddenly appear.
As long as the craft is not moving there should be no gravitational waves be emitted. While the ship accelerates this signal would change its frequencies, amplitude and its origin in space-time. While it is its current speed and direction the signal would still change its origin.
I would assume it all sticks out like nothing else would since no natural source would move that way even if its frequency might change this way. A sudden non rhythmic stop and go of such a signal would also not seem natural or is there a source that could produce that kind of change?
In any case the change of direction of the origin of the signal should make it distinguishably from other sources and back ground noise.
I would suggest that if there was an UFO sighting that seems to be a real one then one could look through the date of all gravitational wave detectors in that time frame (a few hours) and look for moving source. If one compares the data of at least 3 detectors it should be possible to triangulate the signal. Since we would also know what direction to expect the signal from we should at least the difference of the strength of the signal for each detector.
If we could measure the delay of the signals we could calculate the speed of gravity. From what I have read it seems to make no sense to assume it is infinite but it may be well beyond our abilities to measure so far.
I thought the biggest problem would be if the signals amplitude would be strong enough to show up on the detectors. Here comes into play what you said. Since we do not know how such a drive would work (at least not in detail) we have no idea how strong the actively created part of it would be.
However given that video I mentioned is real. NASA can't explain it in any case. Could we not just guess its mass and take the speed and acceleration from the video and distances calculated from the earth in the background together with its location relative to the shuttle at the time to calculate what kind of wave the ship itself would create with such a motion?
I would compare this to a steam wheeler and a sail boat.
Both have a bow wave depending on the ships form and speed.
Lets assume they had exactly the same form of the body in the water.
The sail boat would not distort the wave any further where the steam wheeler would distort it with its wheels. I would assume the same should apply to a space ship.
Well I guess you get my point.
Do thouse thoughts change your answer in any way?
Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
E. E. Cummings
Give everyone the benefit of the doubt
because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Erin from BigCloset-Topshelf?
Gravity waves travel at the
)
Gravity waves travel at the speed of light.
The problem with the proposal , is that LIGO is specially designed (analysis) and uses public funds to detect the possibility of gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars. I think To suddenly change its priority or include other priorities would take a considerable time, effort, money and will..
Who knows, The signal output of LIGO (in all that noise) might include the gravitational signature of a passing warp drive :-)
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
RE: Gravity waves travel at
)
AFAIK it's Einstein@Home, not LIGO, that has a focus on spinning neutron starts. LIGO is the antenna that picks up the rippl,es of space-time in a certain frequency band, no matter what's the cause : neutron stars, black hole mergers, binary inspirals, or even unknown sources.
But...think of it: Can you imagine a scientist releasing a paper stating "The observed signal is consistent with an extraterrestrial spacecraft using it's WARP-drive near earth" ??? Even tho nobody has seen a warp-drive before?
I think even for more conventional astronomical sources, a undisputable detection would involve a double observation: a signal in the GW detectors being correlated to something which is observed by other means (Gamma ray bursts, known pulsar measurement, etc). The only way to have an acceptable UFO sighting with LIGO data would be if you also see that ship on CNN, don't you think so?
CU
Bikeman
P.S.: In case funding for LISA should run dry, it could still be advertised as a prototype for an early warning system against alien invasion of our solar system :-)
RE: [ P.S.: In case funding
)
Sounds like it would be a good black project for DARPA... and as paranoid as I am sometimes I would be a bit surprised if they are not working on it :-)
Edit: I watched to many X-files Episodes
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
On a more serious note, there
)
On a more serious note, there has been funding and discoveries related to the Cold War in the field of astrophysics that are quite surprising. The NAVY supported research for Neutrino detectors, probably hoping that results could be useful for building detectors to spot nuclear powered submarines. Also Gamma Ray Bursts were first discovered (and kept secret for some time) by a US satellite that was designed to detect nuclear explosions (e.g. for spotting nuclear tests in space).
Bikeman
With regard to detecting
)
With regard to detecting alien spacecraft at all, if alien civilizations go about learning things the way we have, then the ability to make an object invisible comes some time before the ability to travel to other stars (see Here's how to make an invisibility cloak). Which means any visitors wouldn't have much trouble avoiding detection. And the reason they would want to avoid detection, if they go about learning things the way we have, is the same reason that great care was taken on the Phoenix mission: to keep from contaminating the very thing they're trying to learn about. There's simply too much mass/energy in the cosmos for any intelligent civilization to have to go around conquering or invading anything...
Any reasons why it would be otherwise?
RE: t. There's simply too
)
Maybe they want to feast on our tasty flesh.. That replicator stuff leaves a tinny taste in their mouths..:-)
________________
That's right I seen to many science fiction movies too..:-)
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
RE: RE: t. There's
)
Maybe, but you'd think their line of domesticated livestock wouldn't have that wild gamy taste either, and considering all the many carcinogens that get ingested here (at least in my major-metropolitan-area case), I don't think they'd even risk feeding me to their pets :))
[edit] omg! I guess I can't anymore rightfully refer to myself as "organically grown" !!