they're doing their best to come up with rational explanations, but i think they need to take a step back and determine if some of these "comet tails" might be something else entirely.

they may have caught something intelligent.

http://www.nature.com/news/hubble-space-telescope-spots-unprecedented-asteroid-with-six-tails-1.14133

"what's happened is that a weather balloon has gotten lost in the asteroid belt, and caused an exotic refraction event where one tail appears as six"

no, honestly. i think the probability of historical extra-terrestrial contact is many times higher than the probability of god. so, before you write the idea off as nuts, carefully ask yourself which is more likely.

in fact, i'm not the first person to point out that the bible actually makes perfect sense if you interpret the judaic religions as ufo cults. all those seemingly whacked stories about beings in the clouds are brought out of the level of fantasy into the level of allegory.

that's nothing approaching empirical evidence, mind you. but it's an interesting way to interpret religion. and i have to admit believing that there's something to the idea.

the biggest problem from a physics perspective, i think, is simply that it's hard for humans to understand space travel relative to our relatively short lifespans. yet, if we could live for five or six thousand years, that limitation would dissolve. a distance of 100 light years would be nothing.

i don't see any good reason to think that a hypothetical alien species couldn't live that long.

it does put a limit on ourselves, though. things like tachyon space ships are probably impossible. there's probably not warps in space time to take advantage of. if there are creatures floating around through space, it's more likely that they're very long lived than that they've found some ingenious way to "break physics". and that means we're probably more or less out of luck.

well, i guess we could freeze ourselves or something, but that's still a gigantic limitation.

imagine, though. like, 10,000 years is more than the length of human civilization up to now. the entire rise and fall of human civilization could be something that an intelligent extra-terrestrial creature could experience in one life time.

"wow. the last time i was here, you creatures were obsessed with building pyramids. what happened to the nose on that one?"

trees can live for thousands of years. whales and turtles live for hundreds. it's not out of the realm of plausibility.

i mean, how long did dinosaurs live for?

(answer: can't really tell from bones.)

no david icke, please.

jellyfish are thought to be potentially immortal.

but, yeah. wouldn't the asteroid belt be a natural place to find mining craft?

jeff
As with the lobster, they grow until eaten. As for the Bible it is highly possible to be speaking of aliens although no evidence, it is still a believe in my books. As far as space travel, age is slowed and with understanding of physics and anti gravity etc there life span could be highly lengthened to travel the distances required. Not to mention the idea of worm holes or Muti~ dimension travel. I could go on but hate typing so..

jessica amber murray 
lobsters will keep growing until they die, but they aren't actually immortal. they will die of old age. with jellyfish, they could in theory just never die - although they do, of course, die due to various other reasons.

what i'm talking about specifically are a number of stories in the bible where alien contact could be presented as a rational/scientific explanation to something that otherwise seems like utter fiction, like the story about a chariot of fire coming down from the sky to take elijah to heaven, for example. there's a ton of stories like that in the bible, and as many (if not more) in east indian, native american, egyptian and other religious sources that seem to quite literally be describing extra-terrestrial contact. the standard rationalist/skeptic approach to these stories is currently to just write them off as nonsense. i'm not entirely comfortable with that level of dismissal. the stories must mean something. salvaging them as weakly remembered contact encounters is one way to give them a rational meaning.

if you take the idea as a possibility, it's easy to construct a narrative of these primitive ape-like creatures (us) running around through the forest collecting berries and coming into contact with these incredible spaceships. got the mental image? good. the next step is interaction with these far more advanced beings, and the inevitability of humans interpreting them as gods. there's even a historical comparison: a number of native american tribes (not all) interpreted the spanish as gods because they had far more advanced weapons and far more advanced ships. it's hard to think how hunter-gathering humans would interpret galaxy-jumping aliens, except as gods. and, so, religion is born from a naturalistic and rather biological explanation.

what it is is a hypothesis, and all hypotheses require some sort of faith in their incubation stages. by definition, really. science doesn't reject faith, so much as it demands that faith be erected upon evidence and subject to modification as the evidence changes. not "i believe, because.", but "i believe because...".

i think what you're trying to say about time-dilation is that close to light speed travel would necessarily require that a much longer period of time transpires on their home planet, but, as mentioned, that's an issue that would decrease in meaningfulness if the hypothetical aliens have very long lifespans. from the perspective of somebody in the spaceship, time outside their frame of reference would actually be dramatically sped up. the point i was trying to make is that if there are aliens zooming around then they would have to be creatures that live very long lives.

worm holes and hyper-dimensional travel likely exist only in the world of science fiction. alas...

jeff
Agreed, Indian culture is by far the most understanding when talking about alien culture even Indian (Hindu) kids understand the possibility to the point where it's a normal event. I wish I had more patient to type all I want to say but... Again the Bible I my mind is clearly a lack of understanding of what they are witnessing and trying to describe. The reason the Bible stands out is before writings everything was by word of mouth, when writing came about the most important of things and issues where scripted. If these things were true or just for sake of the church is another story all together. As far as hyper~dimensional travel not existing may be cause it can't or we don't understand it/how. Example.. Earth is flat till we found out it wasn't. Bad example maybe?. Going back to how long aliens life spans are to achieve long distances, I would like to think that they require the same fundamental things as us(food source and water). The fact that the greys etc.. Have same features( eyes,mouth,nose) leads me to conclude that there organs are similar as we'll(maybe no appendix etc). Which makes them of the same evolution timetable. If from same timetable but clearly more advanced then that species is in the same galaxy or closer. And clearly more older of a species(duh)lol. I wonder why you never see baby aliens is it because by the time they travel to there destination they have aged? Just kidding lol! What I'm saying is that species is clearly and older species but the life span can't be longer than 150 because of the same make of looks(nose,mouth,eyes) which means that the organs can only function so long or their tech. has allowed for a longer life span. None of what I wrote is backed by fact so take it with grain of salt. Just alot of wasted time on documentaries etc.

jessica amber murray
ah, but tortoises have similar features and yet are thought to have maximum lifespans approaching 300 years. whales can live at least more than 200 years - and they're even mammals! conversely, frogs and pigs and dogs and cats have similar features and much lower lifespans. i'm not convinced that what would be convergent evolution to similar phenotypic expression has much to say regarding average lifespan.

the popular representation of aliens is based on a combination of leprechaun folklore and a description by science fiction writer hg wells. it's not really something i'm taking overly seriously. i'm not even convinced that they're carbon based, really.

i will say, though, that aliens are often presented as short and wrinkled, which does suggest an advanced age. take et, for example.

in order for hyper-dimensional travel to exist, we first must demonstrate that we exist in a universe with more than 3 spatial dimensions. a wormhole is essentially travel through the 4th dimension. it's an exotic idea that exists in some mathematical models, but is not necessitated by them; we can mathematically show that wormholes *might* be possible, but we have no reason (at this point) to think that they *ought* to exist. black holes definitely exist, but we don't know what happens when we go through them (and think it's unlikely that anybody gets spat out alive on the other side). the flat earth metaphor is consequently indeed a sort of bad one. the better extrapolation of the spherical earth to the universe lies in analyzing it's shape. the universe might be shaped sort of like a donut. it might be possible to set off in one direction and end up back at the earth again. we don't really know yet, though. the quality being discussed there is curvature: curvature of the earth, of the universe. with dimensions, the more standard analogy to use is an ant. pretend ants can't climb up walls, that they can only move on the ground. they'd only understand two-dimensions. no understanding of the up/down axis. as far as they know, it doesn't exist. yet, it does. is there a fourth spacial dimension that we likewise have no understanding of? if there is, are we any more able to understand it than an ant is able to understand up/down? the standard, mainstream position in physics right now is that there is no evidence of extra spacial dimensions, and that building evidence is probably impossible. also, the way that extra dimensions are used in certain extensions to quantum mechanics (such as string theory, also a mathematical contrivance with zero experimental reasoning) is not at all the same thing, conceptually. bluntly: hyper-dimensional travel is unlikely because extra spacial dimensions are unlikely.

surreal fact: a lot of the old testament is newer than the new testament. and the oral sources were not exclusively from the middle east. the iranian religion of zoroastrianism seems to have been a dominant influence. regardless, those ideas have their own histories, and i do think there's something to this idea.