Do you believe aliens exist?

[Lupus]

Pirates of the modern variety

Nah that's the torrentors

 

[wizardofid]

Nah that's the torrentors

anyway back to dem darn aliens, messing with my crops again....

 

[wingnut771]

anyway back to dem darn aliens, messing with my crops again....

What about coral castle man who defied gravity?

 

[wizardofid]

What about coral castle man who defied gravity?

First, the key is understanding leverage. Leedskalnin probably didn’t try to lift the stones straight up. Instead, he would use long wooden poles as levers, placing a fulcrum under the stone so that with very little force he could tilt or pivot it bit by bit. This alone lets a single person “lift” tons of rock in small increments without any superhuman strength.

Next, he likely used ramps and inclined planes. By sliding a stone up a gentle slope instead of lifting it, the force needed drops dramatically. Even a very heavy block can be moved if you just push it slowly up a wooden or earthen ramp, especially if the ramp is slightly lubricated with sand or water to reduce friction.

Pulleys were probably another big part of it. A block-and-tackle system allows a single person to multiply their force. If you combine that with careful anchoring points, you can raise one end of a stone, rotate it, or lower it into position, all alone. Leedskalnin hinted at “magnetism” in his writings, but in practical terms he was just rigging things so that physics did most of the work.

Balance is huge. Some of the stones in Coral Castle are carved with slots or holes that act like handles or pivot points. By balancing a stone carefully on a small edge or corner, he could pivot or rotate massive blocks with minimal effort. It’s kind of like tipping over a giant seesaw—once it starts moving, it keeps going until it’s in place.

Finally, patience. Moving a multi-ton stone alone isn’t something you do in an afternoon. Leedskalnin spent decades on Coral Castle, moving one block at a time, adjusting, testing, and retrying. The combination of clever rigging, physics tricks, and relentless persistence is what allowed him to build the place solo.

So when people say he defied gravity, it’s really just that he mastered physics and patience to an extreme degree. To anyone watching, it looked impossible, but with the right levers, ramps, pulleys, and careful planning, it was totally achievable.

 

[porchrat]

Don’t you think people then would have the same anti-god and sentiments as people today, with their motives being the same as the egotistic and materialistic motives of today?
Why would they be more fearful of their ‘gods’ than us now?
What makes us so much more advanced than people 12000+ years ago?

Is this a genuine question?

People back then didn't understand jack schit about the world around them relative to what we know today. They didn't know what caused the tides. They didn't understand gravity or where lightning came from etc.. The gods were behind basically every natural phenomenon they could observe. They had no other explanation.

They were also, thanks to their lack of technology, far more vulnerable to those phenomena. They feared those phenomena.

Were there some people who didn't believe? I'm sure there were. Nowhere near what we see today though. We're seeing a trend of a loss of religion in mankind as we learn, not as we get more ignorant.

"Materialism" as a concept didn't even exist until the 6th century BCE. Ancient Egypt stretches back to over 3000 BCE. It took them 2 millennia and some change to come up with the IDEA that maybe the physical is all there is, let alone for it to be widely accepted.

Why on Earth would they think as we do today under those conditions? They lack almost all of our knowledge.

 

[Jings]

As far as crafts filmed up close I think this is one of the best footages, even though it's from 1996, same year as Varginha, Brazil incident.

 

[wizardofid]

As far as crafts filmed up close I think this is one of the best footages, even though it's from 1996, same year as Varginha, Brazil incident.

Back in the late ‘90s, a guy named Jonathan Reed (real name supposedly John Rutter) claimed he was out hiking near Mount Rainier when his dog got attacked by a small alien. Reed said he whacked the thing with a stick, killed it, and then took it home. He even showed off a video of the body and some supposed “alien bracelet” that could teleport him. Sounds like prime-time Discovery Channel weirdness, right?

Now, when people actually dug into it, the whole thing started to fall apart fast. The “alien” looked like a store-bought prop. The footage was conveniently shaky, grainy, and edited in a way that screamed “camcorder horror project.” Then came the big one: people recognized Reed as a guy who’d previously been involved in other hoaxes under different names. Not exactly a good look for an interdimensional whistleblower.

Then he tried to back it all up with a few “scientific tests” — which, surprise surprise, turned out to be done by no one credible. Every photo, video, and “sample” he ever presented was either lost, stolen, or conveniently destroyed in some bizarre conspiracy story. And that teleportation bracelet? Never worked on camera. Ever.

In short, the whole thing checks every box of a classic UFO hoax: shaky video, missing evidence, unverifiable witnesses, and a lead character who changes his story every few years. The alien looked less like E.T. and more like something from a Halloween store clearance bin.

So yeah — Jonathan Reed didn’t meet an alien in the woods. He met a great idea for a sci-fi fan film, and then just... kept pretending it was real.

 

[EmmanuelGoldstein]

As far as crafts filmed up close I think this is one of the best footages, even though it's from 1996, same year as Varginha, Brazil incident.

Even AI can do better than that

 

[wizardofid]

full video

Makes it waaaay too easy to debunk.
Calm demeanor, no one is ever that calm
The quality of the video, no camera's in 1996, weren't that ever bad, video quality from 1996 was between 332 pixel to 720 pixel, for higher end models.

Here is a random video example from the 80's, video camera's still had amazing quality to it, even 16 years before this one.

Turtle necks were popular in the 90's, why is it wearing one, why is the assumption aliens wear clothes or have the concept we do of clothes.
Clothing is a cultural, environmental, and biological response, not a universal constant. Humans wear clothes because of a combination of factors — lack of fur, need for protection from the elements, social signaling, modesty norms, and fashion as a social language. But those are all human-specific conditions that evolved on Earth.
An alien species could have an entirely different biology: maybe a thick exoskeleton, thermal-regulating skin, or a natural biofilm that shields them from radiation or cold. They might even exist in an atmosphere or temperature range that makes “clothing” a nonsensical concept.

Even the social aspect — hierarchy, modesty, beauty — depends on shared cognition and emotional structures. There’s no reason to assume aliens would think in those same symbolic terms. They might communicate chemically, bioluminescently, or telepathically — in which case, “dressing up” would be as absurd as us “perfuming our thoughts.”

So yeah, imagining aliens in clothes is mostly just anthropocentric projection — we’re wrapping the unknown in something familiar so our brains can make sense of it.

Apparent alien blood
Honestly, if aliens exist, the color of their blood would depend entirely on what chemistry their bodies evolved around. On Earth, we’ve got red blood because of hemoglobin — iron binds with oxygen, and boom, red color when it’s oxygenated. Pretty straightforward. But not everything here bleeds red. Octopuses and some crustaceans have blue blood thanks to hemocyanin, which uses copper instead of iron. Some worms go green, and a few others even have purple or clear blood. So color is really just chemistry showing off.

If an alien world has similar oxygen levels and access to iron, then yeah, they might also have red blood. Iron’s pretty common in the universe, and oxygen-based metabolisms make sense. But if their environment favors other metals or gases — like copper, cobalt, or even sulfur compounds — the blood could be any color imaginable, from blue and green to black or transparent.

So the odds? Maybe not even fifty-fifty. Red’s possible, maybe even likely under Earth-like conditions, but there are way too many variables out there. Could just as easily be a blue-blooded squid-looking thing or a green-blooded methane breather. Either way, it’s probably not ketchup-colored like ours..


Our atmosphere might be absolute poison to them. We’re adapted to a very specific mix of gases, pressure, temperature, and even microbes. For aliens from another world, that could be completely incompatible with their biology.


Think about it — even on Earth, creatures evolved for one environment can die instantly in another. Fish can’t breathe air, deep-sea organisms explode at surface pressure, and humans pass out in thin air at high altitudes. Now imagine an alien that evolved on a world with a methane-rich atmosphere or different gravity. Oxygen could literally burn their tissues, or our microbes might wipe them out before they even blink.


So yeah, a space suit or some kind of environmental shell would be essential. It wouldn’t just be for breathing either — it’d be protection against radiation levels, pressure differences, temperature swings, and all the microscopic life floating around here.


It’s actually more likely we’d need the suits if we visited their planet.

Really applying some reasonable logical thinking hoaxes would jump out at you and murder you......

Just ugh, pitch please.

 

[scud]

Your entire world is based on facts and physics. How do you think your phone, computer or car works?

Stop gaslighting me with your so-called ‘reality’ . I expect next you’ll tell me gravity isn’t optional.

 

[gotaway]

Is this a genuine question?

People back then didn't understand jack schit about the world around them relative to what we know today. They didn't know what caused the tides. They didn't understand gravity or where lightning came from etc.. The gods were behind basically every natural phenomenon they could observe. They had no other explanation.

They were also, thanks to their lack of technology, far more vulnerable to those phenomena. They feared those phenomena.

Were there some people who didn't believe? I'm sure there were. Nowhere near what we see today though. We're seeing a trend of a loss of religion in mankind as we learn, not as we get more ignorant.

"Materialism" as a concept didn't even exist until the 6th century BCE. Ancient Egypt stretches back to over 3000 BCE. It took them 2 millennia and some change to come up with the IDEA that maybe the physical is all there is, let alone for it to be widely accepted.

Why on Earth would they think as we do today under those conditions? They lack almost all of our knowledge.

I asked this because we’re quick to assume the past was primitive and that we’re the pinnacle of human knowledge. Maybe some ancient people were far smarter than we give them credit for - not with lasers or spaceships, but with skills and knowledge that have been lost over the millennia. Who knows what else vanished?

The Antikythera Mechanism predicted astronomical events. The Incas’ stonework is precise. Roman aqueducts and concrete still stand. Ancient Egyptian medical texts show detailed knowledge.

Exceptional humans were sometimes mythologized - like Hammurabi, remembered as chosen by the gods, or Jesus, divine in Christianity but a revered prophet in Islam.

Today, when we see something unexplained, we often think aliens, not gods. In both cases, extraordinary knowledge or achievement gets turned into “other” rather than recognized as human.

Occam’s Razor: Aren’t gods and aliens just humans being smarter than we’re willing to acknowledge? Jumping straight to aliens, assuming we know all of history, or labelling ancient societies as “primitive”? That’s modern ego, not open-mindedness.

 

[wizardofid]

I asked this because we’re quick to assume the past was primitive and that we’re the pinnacle of human knowledge. Maybe some ancient people were far smarter than we give them credit for - not with lasers or spaceships, but with skills and knowledge that have been lost over the millennia. Who knows what else vanished?

The Antikythera Mechanism predicted astronomical events. The Incas’ stonework is precise. Roman aqueducts and concrete still stand. Ancient Egyptian medical texts show detailed knowledge.

Exceptional humans were sometimes mythologized - like Hammurabi, remembered as chosen by the gods, or Jesus, divine in Christianity but a revered prophet in Islam.

Today, when we see something unexplained, we often think aliens, not gods. In both cases, extraordinary knowledge or achievement gets turned into “other” rather than recognized as human.

Occam’s Razor: Aren’t gods and aliens just humans being smarter than we’re willing to acknowledge? Jumping straight to aliens, assuming we know all of history, or labelling ancient societies as “primitive”? That’s modern ego, not open-mindedness.

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Ancient humans.
Ancient humans who?
Ancient humans smarter than us… but we call it “aliens” or “gods” because admitting we got outsmarted hurts our ego!

 

[Lupus]

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Ancient humans.
Ancient humans who?
Ancient humans smarter than us… but we call it “aliens” or “gods” because admitting we got outsmarted hurts our ego!

This is always the thing, people forget that people have always been smart. Sometimes there were things that held us back, just play a Civilizations game ;-) (jk)

 

[wingnut771]

Why did all these advanced ancient civilizations that lasted thousands of years fail? Even the ones in the middle of nowhere.

 

[Lupus]

Why did all these advanced ancient civilizations that lasted thousands of years fail? Even the ones in the middle of nowhere.

Why did the Roman empire collapse, why did the British Empire crash? Empires rise and fall with them generally their tech as well.

 

[wizardofid]

Why did all these advanced ancient civilizations that lasted thousands of years fail? Even the ones in the middle of nowhere.

Every so-called “eternal” civilization eventually faceplanted, usually for the same handful of reasons. They got too big, too greedy, or too set in their ways. The land that fed them started fighting back after centuries of overfarming and deforestation, the climate shifted, the rivers dried up, or the soil just gave up. The elites hoarded wealth, regular folks lost faith, politics turned into a circus, and before long the whole thing cracked under its own ego.

Even the ones tucked away in the middle of nowhere couldn’t escape it—when your environment turns against you or your society forgets how to maintain its own systems, isolation becomes a coffin, not protection.

Civilizations don’t really “fall” in a single moment; they slowly stop remembering what made them work in the first place, and by the time they notice, the weeds have already claimed the temples.

Wars were usually the final shove off the cliff. Most of these civilizations were already wobbling from internal decay, greedy elites, overextended empires, drained resources, and populations tired of holding up a broken system.

Then along comes a rival power, a rebellion, or a group of desperate outsiders, and that’s all it takes. You see it over and over, Egypt tearing itself apart in civil wars, Rome stretched too thin fighting everyone, the Maya splintering into city-states that couldn’t stop stabbing each other.

Even the isolated ones eventually turned on themselves when competition or paranoia took over. It’s never one big event; it’s death by a thousand bad decisions, with war being the loud finale that writes the history books

 

[wingnut771]

I wonder how many years left we have before we have another dark ages.

 

[Lupus]

I wonder how many years left we have before we have another dark ages.

Probably a few generations.

 

[Moosedrool]

A bunch of M100s. You'd need less than 10 of them. (EDIT, not true, you'd need a few more, but you could do it)

Unless you're wondering how you lift it vertically? You don't. You pull it up a ramp.

It's not that it's impossible to do these things today. It's that we just have no need to build this way. Why the fsck would we want to? It's so wasteful. All of our technology is built around building efficiently. Not moving big fsck off bits of stone for no readily apparent reason.

The argument that we can't today do things ancient Egyptians etc. did is idiotic. We can. We just have absolutely no reason to. Imagine how much it would cost to build a pyramid today? All for what? A handful of tiny rooms inside with less square meterage than the average 2 bedroom home? Jesus why would any sane person WANT to do that?

Exactly.

Physics like newton gave engineers the ability to build things more efficiently. We can move heavier things with less as well but if there’s no need to then we don’t do it.

 

[wingnut771]

Probably a few generations.

I wonder what the first world countries will look like after they've let all the third world in.