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Comment by excalibur | Hacker News Reader

> The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel. That is, if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks, proper time.

The authors are not actually suggesting that the craft are flying faster than light speed, they are arrogantly defining the reference frame of a traveler aboard the ship as "proper time". It would still take over 4 years to get to Alpha Centauri from our perspective.

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"That is, if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space"

If the observed accelerations of my car were sustainable in space, I'd be able to do interstellar travel pretty easily.

Stack this up with the other crazy assumptions made in this piece (check out the first comment, for instance). You want to assume high tech has 1000G acceleration? OK, you know, sure, fine. But it also moves through the air at massively supersonic speeds without causing friction or sonic booms? That's another separate piece of technology that's basically magic. (Honestly not even sure which I find less believable!)

And then this amazing advanced technology is flying around is moving around on that flight pattern because... uhh... why would any aircraft fly that way again? Look at that flight path. What possible use could that have?

I've never heard even a sketch of a motive that suggests why these craft would fly in such crazy patterns around aircraft that isn't better met by some other approach, that is, whatever goals something flying such an astonishing craft may have, they could simply obtain directly.

The theory that these are "technologically advanced craft" requires an incredibly precise combination of high technological skill matched with utter ineptitude and stupidity, beyond merely "oh we just don't understand their goals". This is not intelligence acting in ways we don't understand; this is lack of intelligence.

Please see exactly how these objects were tracked before you degrade these researchers work. They're using the scientific method but you are not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316

The researchers are making a lot of unwarranted assumptions. Hardly scientific.

They may be using the form of the scientific method, but they are not using the substance. I value the latter much, much, much more than the former.

> moves through the air at massively supersonic speeds without causing friction or sonic booms?

Wasn't one of these tictac anomalies seen going into and coming out of the ocean at supersonic speeds? Water isn't very compressible and hitting the water at modest speeds is often a death sentence for bridge jumpers and can completely annihilate a falling airplane.

But here's something large, fast, and observed going into an incompressible liquid as if it wasn't even there.

Obviously if this is some sort of tech it is doing things we don't even think are possible according to known laws of physics. Which is interesting.

Maybe you could say that the are obviously not from this world...as many of the piolets have said.

>they are arrogantly defining the reference frame of a traveler aboard the ship as "proper time".

Arrogantly? That's the correct definition of proper time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time

Point taken. I was personally unfamiliar with (or more likely had forgotten) the term, but that doesn't mean it's not well-established.

> That is, if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space...

Usain Bolt has an average acceleration of 3.09 m/s^2 in the 100 meter dash. Per http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel..., this means he can run to Alpha Centauri in a subjective time of 6.9 years (8.4 here on Earth).

That quote makes me think this is not a serious paper.

EDIT: Read some parts, yep. That's someone who hopes that with enough integrals and over-analysis no one will notice they base their claims on very sketchy data and assumptions.

A good example as to why people who decide on how to spend taxpayer money should have a bit of science education. This is intended at impress someone who doesnt do math.

They mention this in the paper:

> Such a craft accelerating at a constant 1000 g for half of the trip and decelerating at the same rate for the remaining half would reach the Alpha Centuri system within 5 days’ ship time due to the fact that it would have been traveling at relativistic speeds for most of the trip. However, for those of us on Earth, the trip would take over four years.

Fair point. All I know is I want to fly one of those.

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