Let's just say the King of the Jews will soon be known as The Emperor.

This is going to make the beginning of act 3 really awkward

Up/Downvote this comment to make your opinion known!

I hear you, but to be completely honest almost all of our "insult" words and phrases are derived from pretty abhorrent places. There's really no point in substituting one for the other when you're trying to tell someone you think they are stupid.

Yep, they're really coming out of the woodwork.

Those effects only occur from the perspective of, for example, Earth. If you could exert force upon a space ship traveling away from you, it would require more energy to continue to accelerate it as its speed increases relative to you. But from the reference frame of the ship, this does not hold. Now, of course it will still require an insane amount of energy to maintain a constant acceleration, but from the spaceship's perspective energy expenditure is constant (assuming the mass of the ship isn't changing due to fuel loss).

Quite simply, it is the witness testimony under oath. That is evidence by any court's definition.

Except it's not just one guy saying aliens are here, it's hundreds, and these three said it under oath unlike the scientists you speak of. Yet you believe the word of the scientists and not the word of these men. You don't see the hypocrisy there?

Ah, so then you think Bill Cosby should walk free, yes?

I'm glad we agree, because the problem is that it's hypocritical. There is a double standard for the quality of evidence that you deem acceptable between this topic and most others. You believe many things despite never seeing physical evidence or based only on the testimony of others, because those topics fit into your current world view. You have subconsciously created a filter for yourself of your biases, and you now refuse to acknowledge them.

And you clearly did not read my post?

Absurd. It falls apart as even the most basic level, because outside of communities like this most people still have no idea this is happening. It's being largely ignored by the media. Plus, hundreds of pilots have seen things and we'll see more and more come forward in the coming weeks. If the government doesn't want you to know about something, they don't have to create a diversion, they simply don't report it.

No, it means "I am going to dismiss any and all evidence until such a time as it satisfies my definition of believable."

Crack cocaine, what of it?

The real answer is that it doesn't; you simply hear about it more. The other superpowers who are flying super-sonic jets around all day are much more secretive and if you think the retribution is bad here let me tell you it is worse in China or Russia. Also, people see these things with their naked eye all the time. Seriously, drive out to the mid-west and just look at the sky at night. You will see them up there, making their 90 degree turns and all. But the stigma is really so bad within our culture that people just don't talk about it, and light pollution is so bad in the cities that you can't see the sky anywhere near one.

You're saying there's no physical proof of evolution?

Now you're getting it!

Nope, but I don't go around pretending I have. You see, unlike you I am open to changing my opinion based on evidence.

Do you think, then, that we should reverse any decisions made purely on witness testimony? Grusch spent four years investigating this in his official position and is testifying under oath that he has seen incontrovertible evidence of it. That IS proof, and about as damn good testimony as we've ever had in our history.

But look, I know you're not going to change your mind, because you are as inflexible in your beliefs as a brick. I'm only making a point here because other, more mature folks may happen upon it and I want them to know how much of a mongoloid you are for coming into a UFO community just to fart out your brain-dead, parroted opinion for us all to ruminate in.

You make my point so eloquently. You take it as a matter of fact that Evolution exists, despite never actually validating this yourself. It is, in your eyes, ridiculous to think that it doesn't exist -- after all, you were taught that it does in school. But before the 19th century the theory of Evolution didn't even exist. Probably some speculated about it, but were not taken seriously. Yet you have fully accepted it without, as you say, seeing it.

Indeed, micro-evolution is quite fast because the rate of mutation is relatively high and generations are short. Macro-evolution is actually not generally well-understood by lay-people, primarily because it involves thinking on a scale that is so far outside of our short lifetimes. Not many people are capable of thinking on a scale outside of their own asses let alone across thousands of generations, hence the severe level of closed-mindedness in this thread alone...

You should take a step back and ask yourself why you're posturing like this.

😂 Why on earth would you think I give a shit about you enough to read your profile? How self-centered can you be...unbelievable. Maybe you should ask yourself why you're spending time in a community about UFOs if you're not willing to accept the possibility that they exist. You realize that makes you one of those trolls you mention, don't you? Don't you??

I'm quite sane, but thank you for your valuable contribution. I'm sure you feel good dismissing people you disagree with as mentally unwell.

Its literally impossible to do so with telepathy.

Ironic that you believe my logic to be flawed when you are making bold-faces assertions without any evidence.

Sure, I don't mind explaining. No, we would not need near-infinite energy. We are quite capable of accelerating at 10 Gs in space right now, but eventually you will run out of fuel. So, let's say you add more fuel, well now you have more mass to accelerate so it costs more fuel per second. This becomes a balancing act which we can not overcome for long, and it's the reason space shuttles are so complicated and have multiple stages which break away to reduce mass.

This is primarily an issue because we use quite simple propulsion techniques, which rely on Newton's third law -- that forcing mass out from behind a ship will propel it in the opposite direction. It may be possible to accelerate using an Electro-Magnetic field, which would not involve burning fuel but instead some kind of depleting battery storage, or perhaps a nuclear reactor. In this case, accelerating at 10 Gs is simply a matter of matching the energy requirements to the mass of the ship, and for some perspective on the energy capabilities of nuclear fission, the Little Boy bomb reacted less than a gram of nuclear material to create the explosion in Hiroshima.

The uranium in the Hiroshima bomb was about 80 percent uranium 235. One metric ton of natural uranium typically contains only 7 kilograms of uranium 235. Of the 64 kilograms of uranium in the bomb, less than one kilogram underwent fission, and the entire energy of the explosion came from just over half a gram of matter that was converted to energy. That is about the weight of a butterfly.

So, obviously we aren't capable of converting that energy into a useful method of propulsion yet, but have some heart, because the pieces are all there -- we just need to put them together.

Bans do not seem to work. The button spins forever, and unlike some other similar issues this one does not seem to resolve in the background after some time.

I thought it was quite good for a first hearing. Rational discourse was had even across the aisle, and ultimately the topic was treated with the respect it deserves. I think everyone should actually watch the entire thing. Too many people are jumping on headlines or sound bytes, but that's the way of the Disinformation Age I suppose.

You don't need infinite energy, to be clear. Mathematically, you would need infinite energy to cross the light-speed barrier, which is why we don't believe that it is possible. You would simply need a LOT of energy. How much would depend on the mass of the craft. Actually the bigger problem may be negating the internal G forces, as humans cannot survive 10 Gs for long (or at all), but again it seems that these UAPs are capable of that.

Here's my point: Your reasons for believing in Evolution are your own, but don't pretend that you know it for a fact. We all have to accept things we cannot personally verify to make progress as a society and that very progress should be your driving force, NOT your own biases.

Oh, you can, surely. But have you? As Mac says, "Have you seen these fossil records? Have you poured through the data yourself? The numbers, the figures?"

Confidently denying something because you haven't personally seen the evidence makes you look as much an idiot as confidently accepting it without evidence.

I didn't mean to go for your throat, you just brought up a topic I wanted to address. However, I will say that the problem is not that people refuse to believe that telepathy exists. Obviously we have no proof of that. The issue is that people deny that it exists, with no evidence. These people, many of whom would claim to believe in science, are completely ignoring the scientific method. We must accept that either possibility could be true until one is proven. Instead, they take a hard stance that everything is bullshit unless they personally see proof. "I'll believe it when I see it" et al.

Some food for thought. We have already proven that it is possible to read minds, using a simple MRI machine and electro-magnetic fields. We now have neural networks that can describe what you are seeing just by observing the patterns in your brain. Who's to say definitively that telepathy is impossible?

So you think we've always known how that works then? There was never a time when that was simply magic?

Question for you, do you believe in Evolution?

This is the most convincing part, in a political climate that can be called divisive at best.

I'll put it another way then: any information you intended to send back after you arrive in Sirius would take ~9 years to arrive back home. Due to causality, this means that you cannot interact with Earth in any way for -- at minimum -- 9 years. However, from your perspective, you accelerated at let's say 10 Gs (speed increased by 98 meters per second every second), until you were half-way to Sirius, which will take about 5 months. Then you decelerated at -10 Gs to arrive with 0 speed, another 5 months. You perceive only 10 months of travel, but you are now 9 light-years from home.

The math is not the part which is difficult, and requires only a basic understanding of relativistic physics. The issue is maintaining 10 Gs of constant acceleration for 10 months.

Here's the full text, for people who can't get to it:

A small group of House lawmakers called Wednesday for greater transparency in the government’s reporting on encounters with unidentified phenomena, in an unusual congressional hearing featuring the testimony of UFO witnesses.

But the hearing, which one freshman Democrat remarked was the most bipartisan discussion he’d seen in his seven months on Capitol Hill, oscillated between statements of concern about the potential national security threat posed by unknown objects flying close to U.S. military aircraft and more extreme allusions to government conspiracies to hide the existence of alien lifeforms.

Convened by a House Oversight subcommittee, the hours-long discussion captured the intensifying public interest in the unexplained and what federal authorities are doing to document and investigate such reports.

“We’re not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing — sorry to disappoint about half y’all,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said. “We’re just going to get to the facts. We’re going to uncover the cover up.”

In response to reported encounters by Navy pilots, the U.S. military and the intelligence community have sought to more closely analyze such incidents. The sightings, including some that are believed to be drones or unmanned craft — like the Chinese surveillance airship shot down in U.S. airspace earlier this year — have fueled concerns that American adversaries could have developed new technologies that pose a threat to U.S. security.

The Pentagon has implemented new policies meant to encourage military personnel to come forward if they see something unusual so it can be investigated and accounted for, and last year established what it calls the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to further study such reports. NASA has undertaken a similar independent initiative.

Officials also have moved away from the term UFO, short for unidentified flying object, preferring instead “UAP,” for unidentified anomalous phenomena — meant to be inclusive of unexplained objects also detected underwater or on land.

Lawmakers attending Wednesday’s hearing said the government hadn’t done enough.

“For decades, many Americans have been fascinated by objects mysterious and unexplained. And it’s long past time that they got some answers,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said in prepared remarks. “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, nonhuman intelligence and unexplainable phenomena,” he added, noting that he was quoting Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), and not “a UFO Twitter account.”

“We must demand transparency from the Department of Defense, our Intelligence Community, and our defense industry on their UAP work,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), the subcommittee’s chairman, said Wednesday in his opening remarks.

So far, government officials say that none of the sightings has led to the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Earlier this year, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office determined that nearly 200 of 366 recently reported sightings were “unremarkable” and possibly can be attributed to routine objects found in the air, including drones, balloons and clutter, such as plastic bags.

Those quotidian explanations haven’t stopped some from zeroing in on the 170 uncharacterized UAP incidents in that report that “require further analysis,” and investigating the possibility that the U.S. government has collected evidence of alien visitations to earth and is withholding that information from the public.

“Do you have any personal knowledge of people who’ve been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal these extraterrestrial technology?” Burchett asked one witness, David Grusch, a former employee of the Pentagon’s UAP task force, who has sparked controversy with his unsubstantiated claims that the government has a secret repository of downed alien spacecraft and corpses.

Grusch, a whistleblower who said he’s suffered retaliation for going public with what he knows, couched many of his answers during the hearing by suggesting that saying what he knew could bring him harm. He told Burchett that he did “personally” know of people who were harmed or injured amid a coverup.

“Have you heard [of anyone being] murdered that you know of or have heard of?” Burchett asked.

“I directed people with that knowledge to the appropriate authorities,” Grusch said.

Several congressional officials familiar with previous testimony that Grusch provided in classified hearings have said they were unable to substantiate or corroborate his claims that the U.S. government secretly runs a program to recover and reverse engineer crashed alien vessels.

Wednesday’s hearing was not the first in Congress on UAPs. But it was unusual in that it focused on eyewitnesses to the phenomena and others who have closely studied them. Previous hearings have featured testimony from more senior government officials who have not claimed to have had firsthand experience with UAPs.

The two other witnesses, Ryan Graves, who heads Americans for Safe Aerospace, and David Fravor, a retired Navy commander, both said they witnessed UAPs during their service as Naval pilots based in Virginia and California, respectively, and spoke to the stigma of reporting the incidents. They urged greater research and transparency for the sake of national security and the safety of those operating military and commercial aircraft.

“If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case unidentified objects are concern for flight safety,” Graves told the committee. He said his organization had received testimony from more than 30 UAP eyewitnesses, most of them commercial airline pilots.

Funny how no one bats an eye when a german shepherd sniffs out a missing person based on almost undetectable particles or a bird knows exactly which direction is north, but we scoff at the idea that there may be ways to communicate with your brain alone. Why? Because that's the stuff of TV and movies -- fiction. Culturally, I think we've been so disheartened by our inability to realize our most extravagant dreams of the future (hovercars and etc) that we have basically fallen into thinking that the mere existence of a topic in science fiction discounts its credibility as a real-world subject. This is why we get articles like "Scientists say they are closer to Star Trek Warp Drive", where everything must be tempered just in case. We don't want to look like we actually believe in Science Fiction, now do we?

Just so you know, faster-than-light travel is not necessary to explore the stars. With enough constant acceleration (which seems to be achievable with the tech that these craft have demonstrated) you could go pretty much anywhere in the galaxy in your lifetime. The obvious downside is that the further you go, the more time-dilation becomes an issue for everyone else. For example, you may travel ~9 light years to Sirius in a matter of months from your perspective, but 10 years pass for everyone else. Still, if your goal is to explore, I find this to be quite a decent trade-off, and given that we are already making strides in life-extension that time may become a non-issue very quickly.

It's wild the lengths people will go to so they can avoid updating their beliefs. They would rather believe that the US found a dog in a crashed Russian rocket and mistook it for an alien, or that the government would hire two pilots and a high-ranking intelligence official to testify under oath in front of Congress just to distract from...what exactly? Hunter Biden's laptop?

Look, I get it. Nobody wants to look like a gullible idiot -- but enough is enough. Yes, people have and will continue to be ridiculed for this, but you don't have to participate in the cycle. As they say, either get with it, or get out of the fucking way. We're going to drag this fucked up culture into the interstellar age, kicking and screaming.