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sharknado slashfic)
Delta-Wye posted:Velocities are all relative but I liked how Avi Loeb described it as being largely motionless compared to average motion of everything around and we zoomed by 'Oumaumua as opposed to the other way around. That's a good way of explaining it. That thing was really tearing rear end on it's way outta here though. It's velocity relative to the sun is supposed to basically return to that background speed of 26 km/s when it leaves the solar system, but it got up to 87 km/s when it whipped around the sun. Probably a rock though
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# ? May 24, 2021 20:19 |
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 20:38 |
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PawParole posted:yeah, if you tortured the average dominos employee dude and stole away his adopted niece and gave his best friend cancer, I don't think they would be off the DM-5. It would have been nice if the poster could actually communicate consistently, like how there are either thousands or millions of inhabited planets but only seven (7) precisely have any religion. Or maybe talk more about the interesting stuff (like the experience with the technology, what they watched the videos on, how they got onto the ship, what the aliens looked like), instead of their own mental health problems (join the club).
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# ? May 24, 2021 20:27 |
Avi Loeb seems like an interesting guy in general. I think he knows exactly the kind of info and theories that catch my ear at least. For instance, he pointed out that we just started looking for these kinds of objects. The chances of them being rare and us just happening to see one when we start looking are pretty slim - it actually implies they are pretty common. I'm hopeful as time goes on we will have more observations of such objects. Whatever it is is pretty novel looking be it natural or not.
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# ? May 24, 2021 20:30 |
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BeefThief posted:It would have been nice if the poster could actually communicate consistently, like how there are either thousands or millions of inhabited planets but only seven (7) precisely have any religion. Or maybe talk more about the interesting stuff (like the experience with the technology, what they watched the videos on, how they got onto the ship, what the aliens looked like), instead of their own mental health problems (join the club). That's what makes it good folklore. It has to be weird and the lines connecting discrete parts of it have to be obscured or leave a lot to the reader's imagination. The part about religion and religious experiences and deja vu somehow being key to understanding the nature of the universe, which is a simulation but isn't because the aliens are certain that's not the right way to describe it even if they can't do a better job, is so weird and unexpected that it's 100% perfect as something that sticks in your mind as you try to resolve it into sense. That's the aesthetic experience of the sublime and I love it.
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# ? May 24, 2021 20:31 |
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:That's what makes it good folklore. It has to be weird and the lines connecting discrete parts of it have to be obscured or leave a lot to the reader's imagination. The part about religion and religious experiences and deja vu somehow being key to understanding the nature of the universe, which is a simulation but isn't because the aliens are certain that's not the right way to describe it even if they can't do a better job, is so weird and unexpected that it's 100% perfect as something that sticks in your mind as you try to resolve it into sense. That's the aesthetic experience of the sublime and I love it. yeah i don’t really understand complaints about the writing. for what it is going for, it’s perfect. 7 planets is a beautiful little nugget of detail in a story with some functionally irrelevant distinctions.
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# ? May 24, 2021 20:42 |
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Soulfucker posted:Read Footfall Waiting for someone to say this and be WRONG
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:04 |
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:That's what makes it good folklore. It has to be weird and the lines connecting discrete parts of it have to be obscured or leave a lot to the reader's imagination. The part about religion and religious experiences and deja vu somehow being key to understanding the nature of the universe, which is a simulation but isn't because the aliens are certain that's not the right way to describe it even if they can't do a better job, is so weird and unexpected that it's 100% perfect as something that sticks in your mind as you try to resolve it into sense. That's the aesthetic experience of the sublime and I love it. It definitely doesn't help the cause of understanding what the gently caress these things actually are when people who clearly seem to be having mental health issues, or just straight up making things up, are the heroes carrying the torch. Every time somebody gets attention for saying crazy, unverifiable stuff that makes for intriguing fiction, it's one step backward for taking a scientific approach to the subject. "Oh, I can't remember what the actual name of the aliens is, but here's what it translates to" yeah okay. If these UAPs or UFOs or whatever are actually aliens like they seem to be, I want to know. I think people deserve to know. Maybe there's some fun to be had along the way but intentionally providing bad data, or poo poo data, upsets me
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:07 |
endocriminologist posted:i did my best to make a great post and this is the thanks i get...
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:07 |
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i wanna see a ufo irl so bad. kicking myself for not looking at the sky more. it kinda hurts during the day though because i got tons of floaters
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:19 |
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Bullfrog posted:i wanna see a ufo irl so bad. kicking myself for not looking at the sky more. it kinda hurts during the day though because i got tons of floaters i've never seen one, but I did go camping in new mexico last year. got high as gently caress looking at the stars, and listened to alien podcasts. A+, would recommend
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:23 |
light pollution is a bitch
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:29 |
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Soulfucker posted:Read Footfall i read Lucifer’s Hammer and it was racist trash so im going to skip this one.
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:39 |
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Think Less posted:i've never seen one, but I did go camping in new mexico last year. got high as gently caress looking at the stars, and listened to alien podcasts. A+, would recommend That pilot in the video earlier made a passing comment about "They ARE over Mexico!" or something and now I'm wondering if pilot gossip has Mexico as a hot spot. I want to see one too, but I have never have. My grandfather did tell me he saw one once in Ohio but he never gave details. I'm skeptical because of all places on earth to go, Ohio has to be bottom of the list.
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:40 |
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https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/oklahoma/enchanting-star-park-ok/ this place is pretty mindblowing on a clear night too. people come from all over the world to set up telescopes, and i think the okc astronomy club has events there still
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:40 |
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I thought I saw a UFO once but it was just the planet Venus
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:43 |
i have seen the ufos
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:50 |
ive seen a whole bunch of ufos i still haven't identified them, and i didn't then, too
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# ? May 24, 2021 21:50 |
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scary ghost dog posted:i read Lucifer’s Hammer and it was racist trash so im going to skip this one. Niven has extremely reactionary politics and it comes out in basically all of his books in one way or another
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# ? May 24, 2021 22:14 |
Sounds like an excuse to read more Le Guin and fewer fascists
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# ? May 24, 2021 22:21 |
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Hatebag posted:That's a good way of explaining it. That thing was really tearing rear end on it's way outta here though. why is it a good way of explaining it when it was really tearing rear end on it's way outta here though?
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# ? May 24, 2021 22:25 |
Feral Integral posted:why is it a good way of explaining it when it was really tearing rear end on it's way outta here though? i didn't explain the 'after' part at all. my understanding of the gist is it was 'motionless' and our local group moved by it. when it passed by our sun it caught a gravity boost and took off. if i remember avi spoke about how supposedly the acceleration doesn't seem correct for pure gravity acceleration but idk all the details there. things being relative, it doesn't really matter much whether we were moving or if the sun moved by it other that it feels like it gives no indication of where it may have originated from.
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# ? May 24, 2021 22:32 |
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Ross DaouThot posted:yeah i don’t really understand complaints about the writing. for what it is going for, it’s perfect. 7 planets is a beautiful little nugget of detail in a story with some functionally irrelevant distinctions. I hate it, ruins the suspension of disbelief. OK there's millions of other inhabited planets and this is one race of many tooling around the universe but everyone is super interested in 7 (everyone's favourite number, by the way) planets, of which 3 (durr, favourite number again. what is it with the low primes?) are super duper special and we are one of those super special planets! nope, dumb, sorry. either the galaxy is teeming with life and we're one among untold millions/billions or life is extremely rare, those are the only options I'll accept. life is common but we are still super special and important for some reason is the most embarrassingly common and solipsistic sci-fi trope out there.
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# ? May 24, 2021 23:14 |
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I've never seen anything, but my mom did on her sisters rural minnesota farm back in the 70s. She woke up in the middle of the night because she had to pee really badly, so she gets up and on her way to the bathroom notices weird lights coming from the kitchen. So she obviously goes to see whats up, and when she gets to the window in the kitchen she sees a big ol saucer with all sorts of lights sitting on the ground a little ways from the house. Right back to the bedroom she goes and waits until people start getting up hours later to use the bathroom. The thing I've always thought makes it particularly compelling is that she really had to use the bathroom, so its not like she was in some sort of altered state or w/e, and she also never went back to sleep. I dunno, but I've been meaning to write it down somewhere and this'll do as a start. Anyway, her sister's husband was super pissed she didn't wake anyone up because he 100% would have walked out to the thing and knocked on it to see wtf
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# ? May 24, 2021 23:14 |
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Also the last few pages rocked to catch up on thank you everyone for your hard work
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# ? May 24, 2021 23:17 |
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Often Abbreviated posted:I hate it, ruins the suspension of disbelief. OK there's millions of other inhabited planets and this is one race of many tooling around the universe but everyone is super interested in 7 (everyone's favourite number, by the way) planets, of which 3 (durr, favourite number again. what is it with the low primes?) are super duper special and we are one! nope, dumb, sorry. either the galaxy is teeming with life and we're one among untold millions/billions or life is extremely rare, those are the only options I'll accept. life is common but we are still super special and important for some reason is the most embarrassingly common and solipsistic sci-fi trope out there. Not important or the most important, but worthy of study as part of an investigation that humans can’t comprehend. What’s the alternative? Humans are merely of interest as part of a conservation/track-and-study project by like wildlife specialists? That’s so boring that the first-gen ufo crazies made it up in the 70s. You gotta go weirder than that.
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# ? May 24, 2021 23:19 |
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theres only one alien on earth and he's my friend, he says he wants everyone to stop trying to find him and just leave him alone. he lives in my converted garage and is pretty cool but he leaves trash out a lot. hes saving up to go back home but i dont have the heart to tell him they dont have antimatter at the gas station (he doesnt go outside, he teleworks at a call center) i think if he dies of old age or whatever some dumb rear end common cold virus ill use his life savings on an rtx 3090
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# ? May 24, 2021 23:20 |
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I thought I saw the planet Venus once, but it turns out it was just a probe in my rear end.
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# ? May 24, 2021 23:21 |
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Not important or the most important, but worthy of study as part of an investigation that humans can’t comprehend. I'm not sharing all my rad sci-fi story ideas, you'll just steal them but for something like this where the main objective is to keep the story just within the bounds of believability enough to give the reader the heebie-jeebies, I'd say why even go that far? you don't need to give the aliens a direct, comprehensible motive. just maybe certain questions that they ask, certain responses that seem to interest them and let the reader guess from there.
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# ? May 24, 2021 23:24 |
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scary ghost dog posted:whats a good alien invasion book thats not as boring as the three body problem but just as “realistic” The Genocides
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# ? May 24, 2021 23:24 |
Feral Integral posted:why is it a good way of explaining it when it was really tearing rear end on it's way outta here though? Its initial speed was the same as the local standard of rest, the speed of things near our solar system. so from one reference point, it's not moving except when the sun buzzed it and changed its trajectory, causing it to move. Maybe it's not a good way of explaining it though because everything is moving.
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# ? May 24, 2021 23:41 |
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gh0stpinballa posted:The Genocides thank you
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# ? May 25, 2021 00:01 |
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gh0stpinballa posted:The Genocides i cant find this who is it by
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# ? May 25, 2021 00:02 |
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scary ghost dog posted:i cant find this who is it by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Genocides
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# ? May 25, 2021 00:08 |
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scary ghost dog posted:i read Lucifer’s Hammer and it was racist trash so im going to skip this one. Footfall's thing is that in order to make an alien invasion "realistic" instead of just having them throw asteroids at us, Niven and Pournelle make the aliens dumb as poo poo, like I mean in the text the aliens are literally total idiot morons so that way they actually land on Earth and try to fight us hand to hand.
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# ? May 25, 2021 00:29 |
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Jetto Jagga posted:Footfall's thing is that in order to make an alien invasion "realistic" instead of just having them throw asteroids at us, Niven and Pournelle make the aliens dumb as poo poo, like I mean in the text the aliens are literally total idiot morons so that way they actually land on Earth and try to fight us hand to hand. that sounds like a really bad book
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# ? May 25, 2021 00:35 |
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Yeah asteroids would p much do it
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# ? May 25, 2021 00:49 |
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scary ghost dog posted:that sounds like a really bad book Yeah!
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# ? May 25, 2021 00:55 |
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a lot of (most?) big name sci fi authors from that time era are just trash luckily there's obscure weird good ones too who had much more interesting conceptions of alien life
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# ? May 25, 2021 01:04 |
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Related, here's a quick piece about reactionary Science Fiction posturing as "cold and rational," written by classic New Wave author Cory Panshin:quote:The real reason John Campbell was so fond of this clumsily-written little story was not because it offered an accurate prediction of the future of space travel, but because it closely reflected his own conservative approach to the world. The essence of that approach is that when anything goes wrong you can blame nature, or blame the victim -- which is the properly hard-nosed thing to do -- but you never, ever blame the corporation or government agency whose self-favoring policies created the situation in the first place.
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# ? May 25, 2021 01:07 |
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 20:38 |
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Turtledoves Worldwar series ( in which lizard aliens invade earth during ww2) is far better.
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# ? May 25, 2021 01:07 |