What am I picking up...you're a skeptic re: area 51? What, you don't believe it exists or that nothing special is there?

Its a top secret military base,probably something similar to the skunk works.

Yeah. If I'm not mistaken skunkworks did a lot of their testing outta Edward's.

Yes its the most famous top secret base in the world! 😆 😆 They will probably do tourist tours of it in the future, a bit like they do with Station X (Bletchley Park) here in the UK.

Here is a link

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

I have been there and they have a German U-Boat on the lawn! Dont ask me how they managed that! It was a very strange sight to see. It was a bit like being in the film Close Encounters! 😆 You know, the bit with the ship dumped in the desert 😎

Looking at the old pictures that place definitely didn't look like a code breaking facility 🙂 But it is funny on their main page all the activities and tours etc... when just 50 years ago was used to so very secret work.

Kinda looks like the wormhole created by John Crichton's gravity flyer, Farscape One, to me...

Am I correct in thinking that the explosions you have seen have been in the atmosphere? Why assume that the lights in the movie/pics are anywhere near Norway? They can see the moon from Norway...

This is an interesting thread. Not only is the universe large, but it is old, too. It took something like 4 billion years for life to develop to the Internet phase in our solar system, but we know that there are other systems at least 14 billion years old -- maybe older. Think about what we have done in the last hundred years -- from horse and carriage to stealth aircraft, to Mars, and beyond. Ten billion years is a lot of time for somebody else to come up with a fresh idea and a new way to get around!

And, yeah... if FTL is not possible, then there almost certainly is cool stuff (and life) out there that we don't know about. If FTL is possible, who's to say that aliens haven't been here but kept their presence quiet? Or that we did not even recognize them? Maybe we mistake them for, oh, jellyfish or whales or advertising executives?

As for the lights themselves, some kind of weapons test is certainly possible. Just because they saw the light in Norway doesn't mean that the event was anywhere near Norway.

Don't forget that the Earth's atmosphere is much larger than the stratosphere (100,000 feet) which is what we usually think of as the edge of space. Air pressure is close to zero there, but there are ionized gases floating around that are 20x farther away.

Also remember that part of Norway is above the Arctic Circle and the lines of Earth's magnetic field are pretty close there, which is why they can see the Northern Lights so often. The Northern Lights are caused by ionized gases glowing as they get charged by solar wind bouncing off Earth's magnetic field.

So what if somebody exploded a missile in the mesosphere? It wouldn't even have to be a high yield explosion to create an effect similar to the Northern Lights, and Norway is exactly where one might be able to see such an event [diagrams below].

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This did come to mind in my thoughts but this theory wasn't really mentioned in anything that I read. There have been a few scientist that have expressed some opinions that they doubt it was a reaction to the 'northern lights' because of the shape and the color of the event.

I know my skepticism comes into play when people may suggested worm holes or other theories of that nature. Not that I don't want to believe, but just for the simple fact of why now? If there is some sort of extraterrestrial on the planet please do come to SSC and give us a heads up 🙂

I mean we know about facilities like the 'Hadron Collider' and i'm sure there is some secret projects of this nature going on and how do we know there has been a breakthrough or mistake.

Well, sure. It obviously is not the northern lights. I meant that a man-made explosion that stimulates ions in the mesosphere could interact with the magnetic field in a way that luminesces, like the northern lights. Such an event would probably not look much like the northern lights at all. The only similarity would be the glowing nighttime sky.

Right!

On the other hand, there are historical reports of some pretty strange phenomena in the sky. So maybe people have seen similar things in the past. We were just lucky that somebody with a camera got some pics of the Norwegian "event".

Most of these things are hoaxes. The photos here could simply be a creative fireworks display. That would be my first guess, actually. The glowing-ionized-gas thing is my second-most-likely guess.

But that doesn't mean that it cannot be something with more exotic origin. We have been developing (electronic) stealth technology for like 20 or 30 years. What would a race that is, say, a million years older have figured out? Or a billion years older? If they can beat light speed, then they can almost certainly remain undetected if they choose.

Or maybe they don't even care. It isn't as though we go around making a big effort to introduce ourselves to ant colonies, right?

Exactly! CERN is kind of hard to hide. The Fast Hadron Collider is 5 miles in diameter and spans two fairly populated countries. But a 5-mile circle is not all that huge. How do we know that they don't have one at Area 51, or in some truly secret location. Heck, the summertime population of Antarctica is 4,000... what do all of those people do there?

As you say, they are trying to create black holes and dimensional rifts at CERN. As you and others have pointed out, that's only what they admit to. It is certain that there is stuff going on that we don't know about. So, yeah... an accident almost seems inevitable. If it has not already happened, it almost certainly will.

Have you seen Flash Forward?

Something like that!

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the area 51 theme park,where can see aliens being chased around by security or if you are brave enought go on the

alien autopsy ride. 😆

I do like the idea that the The Fast Hadron Collider may be trying to sabotage itself from the future. 😀

Here is a nice article (6 pages) that talks about the 'God Particle' that CERN is trying to create. I mean there trying to recreate a big bang style event as an experiment.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/ ... nbach-text

There has to be more they are doing than this research, many countries are putting billions of dollars into this research and there has to be more to it than this?

I have never seen this show is it like X-Files or Fringe?

That is an awesome article, Darkone! It does a great job of distilling some complex topics into language that normal human beings can read.

Let's just hope that their "big bang" is pretty small! We don't want any of those self-sustaining apocalyptic events from the movies. I am hoping that they are smart enough to think about that before they create something they cannot contain.

Cheap energy, faster-than-light travel, and weapons. The usual stuff.

In the past hundred years or so, we have consumed a large portion of the fossil fuels that took tens of millions of years to create.

Half a century ago, there were 4 billion people on the planet. Now there are nearly 7 billion.

We simply cannot sustain our numbers and growth rate. It's just arithmetic.

We have to go off-world pretty soon, like in the next couple of hundred years. Or cut back on our numbers. If we don't, then there are going to be big, big wars, which means that we will need equally big weapons.

So, yeah, a lot of countries pour money into places like CERN in hopes of finding some answers to our long-range problems.

Oh, man, if you are thinking about this stuff then you have to see the first episode of Flash Forward!

One otherwise normal afternoon on Earth, everyone on the planet blacks out for a couple of minutes. There are car crashes everywhere, buses drive into the lake, etc. During those couple of minutes, most folks experience some kind of weird deja vu or daydream that seems real but has details that don't make sense. It seems as though everybody skipped ahead in time for a few minutes, then came back to normal.

On the TV show they are still trying to figure out what caused the event, but my first thought was the Large Haydron Collider!

We have the ability to lessen our consumption of these fossil fuels but it really is about $$$. I mean if I could afford to put solar powered shingles (yes they have them) on my roof then I would because I could power the whole house. Why can't they just make all housing like that period and within a few years the strain on the power grids all over the world would go down. Which in turn could bring down oil consumption because people wouldn't need natural gas, coal, oil to heat homes because they could use electric that there homes provide 🙂

I'm not a 'green' fanatic but I just look at it as common sense. I can quit paying over $200 a month for electric and hundreds more on heating and fuel for vehicles. There are ways to improve resources but the one resource we might be lacking in will be food and water as the earth population grows.

You can sense a war coming personally, it's not going to be real soon but it will come. I mean it's been 50+ years since the last one I guess we are due for another WW and it will probably be just about the earthly resources. I do think CERN projects are worth the $$$, anything to get the ball rolling for humankind to expand and prosper is good thing and can be done peacefully.

Hey you have to like the Star Trek mentality of things were they work for the betterment of mankind. Why can't we adopt that? 🙂

Exactly! We could do the right thing, but human nature is to be more concerned about ourselves, our families, and people that we know. In the end, it is cheaper (and more effective) to create a super-weapon than it is to try to persuade everyone in the world to be nice.

Yeah... when did Star Trek first run? During the hippie era? "Make love, not war", right?

It's a great idea, but the moment some large group starts acting all communal and altruistic like that, some predator is going to come in and take advantage of them. Being oppressed by "the man" is a constant on Earth -- not only for humans, but pretty much for all species.

Peace out, Man!

(PS: Although the Federation was all about the betterment of mankind, I cannot help noticing that their "exploration" star ships were better armed than almost every other ship in space. It's the Teddy Roosevelt peace plan: Talk [nice], but carry a big [freakin' energy cannon]. )

Yeah there was alternate fuel sources over 50 years ago but there was no money in it since the average person would have been able to produce what they needed to power their vehicles 🙂

I have been waiting for a government of the world to show off some new sweet power source that they recovered from an alien craft. Come on I know you got something good just let us have a peek at it 😆

You have to watch the first few episodes of ST Enterprise, their ship wasn't really a heavily armed vessel but they had to go back to space dock to get refitted because they were getting there asses kicked out there. As far as we know there is no weapons of any kind on the space shuttle....?

Cant say I agree with you on that Darkone, if we are to have a future, which does not look like Fallout 3, it's more likely to be like Aliens, B5 or dare I say it, Elite! 😉 Commerce is largely absent from the Trekkian view of the universe, however if its off world you want, then commerce is the key. To quote Mel Brookes in Spaceballs The Movie, "Spaceballs 3, The Search For More Money" 😆 Once the big corporations wake up to the fact there is money to be made up there, then you will see the advances required to get there. Anyone wanna buy some shares in Titan Mining Crop? 😆

Here is some interesting videos on the Norway Lights and the Conspiracy behind it.

IMHO those images looks like somebody was having fun with Photoshop 🙂

This really did happen and there is videos of it. It's the whole story that is fuzzy, they say it was a faulty missile but I doubt that highly and I think those videos I posted do have some merit and worth a watch to see another side of things.

Hello, hey nice missile effect, I am all pro-counter missile defense system but totally against any sort of development of multi nuke payload or any nuke payload delivery system. I don't consider the best defense is a strong offense, only one earth after-all! Ballistic missile countermeasures is were money and research should go, high speed micro missile take-down systems. Nukes should be left for space travel and mineral mining on asteroids etc..

Also seems that was a empty missile test, I don't think anyone has anything to fear. Also with a range of 5000 miles? it could have been fired from anywhere initially (thought appears to come from close). The repulsion system must be pretty weird to cause such a effect thought.

PS. Hi 🙂