>A former Israeli space security chief has sent eyebrows shooting heavenward by saying that earthlings have been in contact with extraterrestrials from a "galactic federation."
>"The Unidentified Flying Objects have asked not to publish that they are here, humanity is not ready yet," Haim Eshed, former head of Israel's Defense Ministry's space directorate, told Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper. The interview in Hebrew ran on Friday, and gained traction after parts were published in English by the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
>A respected professor and retired general, Eshed said the aliens were equally curious about humanity and were seeking to understand "the fabric of the universe."
>Eshed said cooperation agreements had been signed between species, including an "underground base in the depths of Mars" where there are American astronauts and alien representatives.
>"There is an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here," he said.
>Eshed added that President Donald Trump was aware of the extraterrestrials' existence and had been "on the verge of revealing" information but was asked not to in order to prevent "mass hysteria."
>"They have been waiting until today for humanity to develop and reach a stage where we will understand, in general, what space and spaceships are," Eshed said, referring to the galactic federation.
The man's credentials:
>Haim Eshed alternatively romanized as Chaim Eshed (Hebrew: חיים אשד; born 1933)[1][2][3] is a visiting professor of aeronautics and astronautics at various space technology research institutions.[4][5][6][7] A retired brigadier general in Israeli Military Intelligence, Eshed was director of space programs for Israel Ministry of Defense for nearly 30 years, is former chair of the Space Committee of the National Council for Research and Development for the Ministry of Science, Technology and Space and a member of the steering committee of Israel Space Agency.[8][9] Eshed is responsible for the launch of 20 Israeli made satellites,[10] and he is widely cited as the father of Israel's space program.[11]
What do you make of this, lads? He was obviously shilling for his book (The Universe Beyond the Horizon), but would he outright lie just to promote a book?
>humanity is not ready yet
One particularly vital question that I would have expected this man to ask when told this is, "What do we need to do to become ready?" Without an answer to that question, there is no way to really be sure. But the Israeli Clangers clearly thought this guy was ready, and they can't be that advanced or they'd have known he was not able to keep the secret.
I am happily convinced that aliens are out there, but I am enormously sceptical that they can get here regularly, because the distances involved are insuperable, and the laws of physics suggest that we can't just invent a way round that. Any aliens that come here certainly won't be able to go home again. And even if they can come here, I don't believe there are enough such races that they can all visit each other and decide to team up to form a galactic federation.
If I was being generous, I would suggest that KGB spies wondered if they could feed a load of LSD to senior members of the Israeli armed forces without getting caught, and they succeeded wonderfully with at least one of them.
I reckon that's exactly the sort of thing if I was a retired bloke of very high authority and social standing. Bit like your grandad winding you up when you were younger, he just got up one day and thought "Fuck it, I'm going to tell everyone there's aliens. Bet they won't dare say I'm bullshitting", and he's having a good chuckle about it now.
>>Eshed added that President Donald Trump was aware of the extraterrestrials' existence and had been "on the verge of revealing" information but was asked not to in order to prevent "mass hysteria."
Will Trump be running for office, again?
Bill Clinton absolutely would have told us about aliens. There's no way a government could keep that kind of thing secret for decades.
>>5383 >Any aliens that come here certainly won't be able to go home again. And even if they can come here, I don't believe there are enough such races that they can all visit each other and decide to team up to form a galactic federation.
It wouldn't take that long on a galactic timescale to colonise the galaxy even without FTL. A few million years once you have a species able to start sending things to other solar systems and you can visit the Magellanic Clouds in under a million years at a decent fraction of lightspeed.
Point is it's a fermi paradox because if there was anyone out there with what is a margin of error on a geological timescale head start we'd absolutely know they were out there.
Galactic colonisation isn't the thing that's impossible, in fact it's perfectly reasonably possible.
The part that's impossible is our sci-fi pop culture image of a galactic civillisation. There would be no Star Trek, Mass Effect style system-hopping ships that can jet you off on holiday to Zygos V and have you back in Persius-6-Delta for your nan's birthday. There will be no space stations with an intergalactic council and ambassadors from every race's home world, and booming intergalactic trade fleets.
Instead colonising the galaxy will look like the earliest attempts at colonising the new world here on Earth, only on a vast, incomprehensibly long timescale. Every new planet we land on will be another Roanoke, settled by the distant descendants of the original crew of a generation ship that set off centuries or more ago, with a society resembling very little of the one that birthed it. Life on these colonies will be brutal and primitive at first, because even taking technology with us, it would still take decades of infrastructural build up to get to the stage of industrialisation we have on earth.
Perhaps the worst part about it is that even communication is a hard obstacle to overcome. We likely won't know if the settlers arrived safely or if the ship went all Event Horizon ten years after departure, because with the distances involved just sending simple messages could take years. For all intents and purposes there's no way of maintaining any social cohesion between the neo-humans living in Alpha Centauri, and the Earth humans here on Holy Terra.
The absolute best we'll get out of spreading into the stars is knowing, or at least hoping, that if the sun explodes and wipes us all out, somewhere out there in the cosmos, human DNA will keep replicating.
>>5395 This actually does make it more likely we'll have Star Trek style aliens though. Earth descendants isolated culturally and eventually genetically becoming the Romulans, we also know from history that instantaneous communication does not preclude the influence of an overlord.
The most plausible way I've seen such a federation described is based on information superhighways using directed communication. If you stop behaving then you stop getting signals from the federation (including Earth) which would be a terrifying prospect given the scale of a galactic civilization.
It's also an interesting prospect that if the initial colony founding fails, and the humans there are plunged into a dark age, when they eventually develop their way back out of it in a few thousand years, they'll find their very own Ancient Aliens origin story, and that'll be a proper mindfuck for them.
Or we might send new settlers, and by the time they arrive, find themselves in a conflict with a society of primitive "natives" exactly like the first settlers in the new world did; only it's the surviving descendants of the first failed colony.
Either way I think maintaining any kind of imperial authority would be hard. In the old days of Rome or what have you, it might take a while, but you could still reasonably send an army to deal with anyone who didn't play ball. With the distances we're talking here, any military action would take centuries, by the time those soldiers arrive the original reason they were sent is a minor detail in the history books, and their equipment would be woefully outdated. It would be like if we sent an army to deal with the rebellion of the thirteen colonies in 1775, but they didn't show up until 2016; and promptly got wiped out trying to bring their 12-pounders to bear on M1 Abrams tanks.
>>5394 I don't want to pollute this place with that nonesense, but long story short a mentally challaged metal head, living in a tiny village, made his address public and its been hell there since.
>>5398 >conflict with a society of primitive "natives" exactly like the first settlers in the new world did; only it's the surviving descendants of the first failed colony.
You don't really need that second clause, that is exactly the same situation. The colony can't be said to have failed if there are still surviving descendants there.
Nah, it's not really the same if all their space magic broke and they've devolved into a cargo cult living in yurts gathered around an obelisk they've made out of scrap spaceship parts.
>>5397 Romulans are an offshoot of the Vulcan species who left Vulcan for ideological reasons and because they were absolute dicks. Following their exodus they have since developed into a subspecies with a radically different culture to the Vulcans based on being a dick, turning the Vulcans into dicks, giving POWs their dicks and possibly giving the Remans a more sustained dicking.
Then they all died because of some supernova bullshit and the remnant are ninjas or whatever nonsense is going on in not-Trek these days.
>>5398 I wouldn't mind seeing it as a science fiction setting. Kind of a cross between Andromeda, Battlestar Galactica, Planet of the Apes and Hard to Be a God.
If we're staying in the bounds of known-physics you can just throw some relativistic kill missiles or create a death ray and there won't be a thing they can really do about it. The big question is what would actually be the point of rebelling as you're unlikely to really feel any oppression from Earth or those space-bat-people from All Tomorrows - not at least compared to your hatred of the people living around the gas giant or on Earth 88's the southern landmass.
I honestly think I'd cum in my pants if someone found out that faster than light speeds were possible. I remember how excited I was when that anomolous result about a particle going FTL got publicised all over the place years ago, even knowing it was probably a mistake and that it had only gone about 0.002% faster anyway. Although I'm increasingly convinced that even if we could skip centuries of hassle and turn into The Federation tomorrow, a myriad of incredibly powerful wankers would ruin it before we'd had a chance to do a lap around Saturn.
>>5400 If you sent them off to gather and return rare minerals or engage in scientific research and they're peeing in open sewers and using trial by combat to settle witchcraft cases, I'd say that's a failure.
>The big question is what would actually be the point of rebelling as you're unlikely to really feel any oppression from Earth
And, equally, what's the point of Earth ruling them? What can we really do, and what can they do for us? At the very most we'd just be sending broadcasts to one another to let each other know about scientific developments, how the grandkids are doing, and all that. Effectively they'd be autonomous and at best exist in a loose alliance with Earth, any notion of imperial allegiance would be symbolic more than anything really.
Maybe we could maintain some kind of interlinked economy based on digital transactions, though. Imagine buying nudes from a young colonist's Only Fans and by the time you get them she's in her 60s, I bet that would scratch somebody's itch.
Grug may have sent Nimtuk over the ice horizon to bring back seal meat only for Nimtuk to decide to stay there, in what's now Canada. It doesn't make Nimtuk's descendents a failed colony just because they forgot to make whaleskin breeches the same way as Grug did.
By that logic the whole world is a colony of the first sub-saharan hunter gatherers. Technically you could say that was true, I suppose, but it's absurd beyond the point of being a meaningless usage of the word colony.
That logic is a lot more correct than one that says a scientific expedition which did no science but instead colonised a planet, failed at being a colony.
I think the pedantry over the word colony here is misplaced. In fact our misunderstanding is over the term failed.
For instance, I have fulfilled every rational, objective measure of being my father's son. He impregnated my mother, I was born, and I am now his adult offspring adult. We even have the DNA tests to prove it. But he still says I'm a failure.
If a colony colonises then it's successful as a colony. If your father considers you a failure for not being a scientist or a miner, then you're still his son, but a failure as his scientist or miner.
>Luis Elizondo is a former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and former employee of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
>Elizondo is the former director[5] of the now defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a $22 million special access program initiated by the Defense Intelligence Agency in order to study unidentified aerial phenomena, also known as UFOs.
If this man is to be believed, then aliens are 100% real, the US government has recovered biological material from crashed vessels, and there markers in our DNA which show evidence of tampering from more advanced civilisations (not outright stated but implied).
Breaching national security is a very serious criminal offence. Talking bollocks is broadly legal. Either there are a remarkable number of people who get away with revealing state secrets, or there are an unremarkable number of bullshitters who have seen an opportunity to make a few quid.
Was going to say something similar myself. You don't just get away with blabbing state secrets, and it's not like that stops applying because you retired. Even my grandad, who was just an RAF base fireman, had to sign for the OSC, and he basically knew little more classified information than what sort of tyres the planes had.
I suppose there's an argument that arresting him confirms it, but I also think if you're that deep into a secret like this, you know that leaking it all but confirms you'll have a nasty accident in the coming weeks.
