[HN Gopher] The Galileo Project: Daring to Look Through New Tele...
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The Galileo Project: Daring to Look Through New Telescopes
Author : madspindel
Score : 75 points
Date : 2021-07-24 08:26 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (projects.iq.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (projects.iq.harvard.edu)
| erdewit wrote:
| These UAPs love to troll US Navy pilots but seem otherwise not at
| all interested in communicating.
| [deleted]
| tgflynn wrote:
| If this project wants to be taken seriously they should really
| improve their copy editing.
|
| > For example, a megapixel image of the surface of a human-scale
| UAP object at a distance of a mile will allow to distinguish the
| label: "Made in Country X" from the potential alternative "Made
| by ETC Y" on a nearby exoplanet in our galaxy.
|
| An unparsable, non-grammatical sentence that seems to be trying
| to make some very odd claims like this one doesn't exactly
| inspire confidence.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| I think the last quotation marks are just in the wrong place
| (should be at the end of the sentence).
|
| Fwiw, the sentence didn't impede my reading flow.
| tgflynn wrote:
| OK, that at least allows me to understand what the sentence
| is supposed to say.
|
| I still find the content of the claim highly dubious. For one
| thing it would obviously depend on how big the label is. In
| addition it certainly depends on what kind of optics are in
| front of that camera. My smartphone camera has more than a
| million pixels but there's no way I could read a label on an
| object a mile away with it.
| guenthert wrote:
| Note that 'iq.harvard.edu' is The Institute for
| Quantitative Social Science. I can't help but think they
| are trolling.
| pulkitsh1234 wrote:
| I am worried about a time when we do get a good quality photo,
| the hard part would become convincing everyone that it is a real
| photo and not cgi.
|
| I have this fear for pretty much everything, so much of our
| digital lives depend on the assumption that things are real.
| Security cam footage, audio recordings for criminal proceedings,
| UFO footage, everything, how will we prove something is actually
| real in the digital world ?
|
| Think about the reddit AMA proofs[0], I am pretty sure within 10
| years there would be no way to actually provide proof for a
| digital entity representing something real. There are obviously
| proofs for digital-to-digital entities (cryptographic
| signatures), but what is the "cryptographic signature" to prove
| that something is real ?
|
| [0] => https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/wiki/proof
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I'm convinced that one day we'll have a public trust net. It's
| the only thing I can think of that can solve questions of
| belief and trustworthiness at scale. If I know Sally from high
| school and she highly trusts the general announcing the
| findings because she knew him at West Point, it is going to
| take a _lot_ of evidence or other members of the trust net that
| to convince me that they 're faking the photo.
|
| The drawbacks of trust nets are well known, but I think they're
| solvable if we're willing and if people have a secure way to
| opt out.
| samizdis wrote:
| > I am worried about a time when we do get a good quality
| photo, the hard part would become convincing everyone that it
| is a real photo and not cgi.
|
| Perhaps corroboration, as video/camera ubiquity approaches. I'm
| encouraged by such things as the Chelyabinsk meteor [1] in
| 2013, or the impressive (and thankfully non-fatal) "Hollywood-
| style crash" in which a car seemingly takes flight over a
| highway in California earlier this month, and as covered by The
| Drive [2].
|
| Yes, these things were either bright or in broad daylight, but
| might still have been CGI. It's the coverage by more than one
| independent recording device that provides evidence favouring
| real rather than faked footage.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
|
| [2] https://www.thedrive.com/news/41623/speeding-camry-soars-
| ove...
| kaielvin wrote:
| You've said it, cryptographic signatures are the way. Then it
| all becomes a trust economy where someone vouching for a claim
| puts their reputation at stake, and that is exactly what gives
| the claim a certain level of reliability.
| api wrote:
| It would be like everything else today. Reality would bifurcate
| along political lines.
| Aachen wrote:
| The title should really be changed, perhaps even resubmitted
| under a new title to give it a second chance at serious
| conversation. Everyone's talking about haha look bad picture
| quality ufo crazies (and they're not wrong), but the article is
| about comets traversing interstellar space that we can observe
| when they drop by our solar system.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Yes. And those things aren't ufos, they aren't even flying.
| dylan604 wrote:
| And they've been identified and even given names
| Aachen wrote:
| Is Voyager 2 flying? Not sure if the definition of flying is
| propulsion and/or steering, or if it requires atmosphere. If
| it's the former, Oumuamua might actually count if you choose
| to not reject the implausibly unlikely but interesting-to-
| explore hypothesis that it's a space ship. Or at least that
| it has propulsion (iirc that's the part we're sure of)
| regardless of whether it's intelligently designed or can
| steer.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| They are falling, thier movement dominated only by gravity.
| Flight is a winning fight against gravity by another
| stronger force. A floating balloon is flying. A falling
| meteor isn't
| Aachen wrote:
| Oumuamua wasn't just falling, is the interesting thing
| about it. For Voyager probes I guess one could argue are
| falling most of the time, but specifically on this topic,
| comets are not always only acted upon by environmental
| forces.
|
| Hmm actually isn't that characteristic of a comet, it
| being icey and having a "tail" of exhaust gas? But then
| Oumuamua's acceleration could iirc not be explained by
| that exhaust, so it's even more than just that.
|
| Of course that doesn't make it a space ship, it
| (presumably) lacks controls for one, but it does mean
| that comets are by definition not falling, and
| specifically the objects this project will be looking for
| might be doing even more than just venting under
| influence of heat.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Those forces are nothing compared to the acceleration of
| gravity. Flying means that gravity has been overcome.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Did UFOs become more rare proportionally to how our cameras
| became better (and more ubiquitous) over the past decades?
|
| https://xkcd.com/1235/
| goatse-4-this wrote:
| This comment is reiterated in so many forms on every UAP topic,
| and what's so damn ignorant about it is that there are clear
| videos released nearly every day that may or may not be real,
| but are not obviously fake and not always blurry either.
|
| If you all could get over your pretension, you might start to
| actually learn about these exotic aircrafts in our skies.
| pps wrote:
| It's quite the opposite
| https://www.statista.com/chart/8452/ufo-sightings-are-at-rec...
| pps wrote:
| There will be more on this in Brian Keatings (he's a cosmologist)
| podcast this Monday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3tBDJk6rgc
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I've always said that it's "funny" how UFOs as a rule magically
| prevent auto-focus from working.
|
| In this era, this kind of project is just the bucket of ice water
| we need to shake off some silly beliefs and get back to reality.
|
| Or discover that the CCP has secretly developed fully functional
| hypersonic planes...
| pps wrote:
| I, on the other hand, don't understand why people assume that
| all photos should be great looking. I own Samsung Galaxy S9+
| and the quick close photos it takes are very good, but when I
| want to focus on something that is 20 meters apart it looks
| bad. Pictures taken at night are super bad. I know that there
| are some magnificent smartphones in the wild, but I doubt most
| people have them... Obviously people want to believe and will
| post grainy looking things as UFOs, but in reality it's also
| not that easy to make good, sharp photo or video for objects
| from further away.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Nobody assumes all photos should be great looking, but if
| there were really spacecraft or aircraft of foreign origin,
| wouldn't you expect the occasional high-quality image or
| video of it?
|
| Instead we only see blurry UFO images, because all images
| that aren't blurry turn out to show mundane things.
| pps wrote:
| No I wouldn't expect that. Assuming these things could be
| real (the only thing I could even imagine would be some
| form of a probe without live being on board) how many of
| them could be flying here? There are only a couple of
| thousands reported sightings a year - even if some of them
| would be real (which I don't believe) it's obvious to me
| that the chance that a real alien spaceship is captured on
| high-quality image/video is super small and this is not an
| argument for them not being real, there are much better and
| honest ways to disbelieve that (mainly knowing some physics
| and how big are the distances between star systems).
| dogma1138 wrote:
| US navy surface vessels have state of the art electro-
| optical sensors capable of taking very detailed photos
| and videos of airborne and surface targets.
|
| These are used for both SAR and for target identification
| purposes you don't want to blow up another civilian
| aircraft or a fishing vessel by mistaking it for with a
| military target.
|
| I don't know exactly what the US is running but sensors
| from other countries I've seen are capable of reading the
| tail number of a passenger jet from a substantial
| distance.
|
| These sensors are also thermally stabilized and corrected
| for atmospheric disturbances as much as possible, and
| usually capable of visual spectrum + NIR and NUV to
| provide even higher fidelity.
|
| If these sightings around carrier battle groups and
| fleets are indeed so common we should have pretty decent
| evidence of what these things are.
| pps wrote:
| If that's true, that's another reason to not believe in
| US army engagement into that topic. Some of the released
| videos are easy to debunk (like the "pyramid ufo" which
| in reality is bokeh effect as proven by Mick West
| https://www.youtube.com/c/MickWest/videos and others) and
| are still being considered as unexplained by US army or
| whoever did this recent UFO report.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| These are the sort of sensors that are on surface vessels
| https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30057/u-s-warships-
| hav...
|
| These systems are powerful and precise enough to be used
| for fine grained targeting, in fact in many cases the
| guns of the ship and the CIWS systems will be guided with
| electro optical sensors rather than radar.
|
| Radar picks things up, the ElOp system then interrogates
| the target, ranges it with with a laser which provides
| much higher precision than radar range finding and if
| need be guns go brrrttt...
| pps wrote:
| All right. For some reason they didn't use that before -
| maybe it wasn't available at the time, or maybe they are
| using that, but they deliberately want to spread
| disinformation. Anyway, we'll see how it will go with
| this linked project, it's privately funded and it will
| require new research, so there is no harm in doing that,
| only new opportunities.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Keep in mind that DSLRs were sold in huge numbers, and many
| come with great telephoto or zoom lenses.
|
| Why is it that nobody has _ever_ obtained an in-focus picture
| of a mysterious flying craft?
|
| I mean, I would understand if a significant proportion were
| out-of-focus, or a tiny dot due to distance. But... never?
| Ever ever? Not one? Not in the history of the human race?
| With _billions_ of phone cameras in pockets? Hundreds of
| millions of "proper" cameras out there, and at least a few
| million high-end DSLRs with decent glass attached?
|
| Makes it seem like UFOs are the invisible dragon in my
| garage, if you know what I mean...
| WesleyHale wrote:
| Phone cameras are not built to take clear pictures of
| objects miles away from you.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| It's not that easy though. First you have to rule out the
| night cases, and then it's not that easy to catch a moving
| object with your phone in the focus.
|
| But I do agree with your sentiment.
| rmu09 wrote:
| I suggest grabbing a random DSLR with decent glass and
| trying to capture a bird in flight against the sky. Most of
| the time not even the species will be discernable. People
| with no prior experience photographing birds will have a
| hard time taking anything that is not blurry. It is
| actually not that easy even tracking something in flight
| through the viewfinder, especially at long focal lengths.
| Shaking, focus / depth of field, dynamic range, sensor
| noise and exposure time all work against you.
|
| So I would be extremely suspicious of sharp clear properly
| exposed pictures of UFOs.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Birds are much harder to take pictures of than a UFO
| would, though. They are flying only a few meters above
| you, therefore having much higher and less predictable
| angular velocity, as well as requiring more lens movement
| to focus compared to infinity.
|
| I can take clear pictures of airplanes flying ~400m above
| me without any issues.
| momerath42 wrote:
| I shoot birds in flight as a hobby. It takes some skill,
| but it's not _that_ hard. And a bird taking up 1/4 of
| your FOV is close enough that you have to focus on it. A
| plane/UFO taking up 1/4 of your FOV is much further away,
| and you can just pre-set your focus at 'infinity'. >1% of
| UFO photos should definitely be taken with good equipment
| by someone who knows how to use it.
| ufo_pilot wrote:
| With my DSLR I took many zoomed photos of airplanes over
| passing (not landing). The pictures were clear, you could
| see many details.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Can you upload a few to imgur and link them?
|
| (I don't think you are lying, but it's nice to see an
| example. Also I strongly like " _pics or it didn 't
| happen_".)
| Sillzen wrote:
| I'm not the GP however I do the same, and even as a
| fairly lousy photographer I'm able to get photos where
| you can usually see some reasonable detail. Here are some
| examples: https://imgur.com/a/Nr5NIgt
|
| All shot on a Canon 1100D with a 75-300mm zoom lens,
| using manual focus with the "full auto" mode for
| controlling aperture, shutter time etc. Usually I am
| leaning out of a window or standing in my garden to
| capture these shots.
|
| As you can see, none of these images are particularly
| "good": the subjects in the first three images are
| underexposed due to their dark colouring against a light
| background, some are slightly out of focus, some show
| evidence of dirt or other marks on the camera sensor, yet
| you can still make out various details on all of them.
| One would imagine that if there were an equivalent photo
| of an actual "alien" UFO, it would be on the front page
| of newspapers across the world.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Nice!
|
| (One trick that I use for family photos is to use a delay
| of 1 second, to avoid the movement when I press the
| shutter. (It's not useful when there are kids. One second
| later they are in another room.))
| Sillzen wrote:
| I've been meaning to pick up a shutter release accessory
| for a while now since the 1100D only has 10s shutter
| delay in automatic modes, or 2s delay in the manual
| modes. Fortunately the movement when pressing the shutter
| button isn't much of a problem for these type of shots as
| the camera + lens is weighty and quite well balanced.
| pps wrote:
| I'm from Mick West "camp" (
| https://www.youtube.com/c/MickWest/videos ) - you don't
| need to try argue with me that UFOs are not aliens, BUT
| "there are billions of phone cameras" is simply a bad
| argument IMO. My phone is quite old now, but still is way
| above what most people in the world have, and I know that I
| wouldn't be able to make good photo of something on the
| sky, because I tried (wasn't supposed to be UFOs of
| course). I'm sure there are ways to do good photos for
| objects from distance with this and even weaker phones, but
| I, like most people, didn't invest my time into it. Also -
| let's be honest - you see your supersharp, ideal
| photo/video of weird spaceship-like object from some random
| human with great camera: would you really believe it's
| real? I know I wouldn't, it's just to easy to fake things.
| RobertoG wrote:
| I don't think that's the problem, the problem is that progress
| in cameras is parallel to progress in drones and CGI, so we
| always will be able to explain away everything. If there is
| something to this phenomenon, no individual video is going to
| be enough.
|
| For instance, if we see something like these, the explanation
| is going to be drones:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVTlN41Mr9w
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5CSReaPNcg
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a95YERVRBM
|
| If we see something like these, CGI, I suppose:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wskl8NJ2wU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE-Yrv1-chI
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JRi7VUZTcA
|
| This one is taken by a military grade camera at night, I
| suppose it could be a drone or a bird:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1qiZ_L8wX4
|
| Because it's not reproducible it's always possible to explain
| away everything. It's an epistemology nightmare but I find it
| very interesting, specially when you have testimonies from
| people that you don't have a reason to doubt. I have to think
| if, maybe, our priors are too strong in one direction.
| perlgeek wrote:
| There are millions and millions of sharp photos; on all of them
| you see it's not an alien spacecraft (but weather ballons,
| light reflections and very mundane objects).
|
| Independently of how good our technology is, there'll always be
| pictures of low quality that leave room for speculation.
| agent327 wrote:
| I've made tens of thousands of razor-sharp photos over the last
| ten years. Three years ago I visited the world's largest model
| train track in Hamburg (go see it, it's amazing!) and in one
| part of the track they have a little UFO coming down on a wire.
|
| I took several photos of it, but after I come home I realized
| they were all unsharp - unlike the rest of my photos, which
| were fine, including those taken during the night cycle. I
| wrote that down to 'excessive realism' on the part of the
| builders...
|
| Anyway, apparently the device that causes photos to blur can
| easily be miniaturized and installed on a 5cm large UFO.
| mtreis86 wrote:
| "I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. It's not the
| photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that's extra scary
| to me. There's a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the
| countryside. Run, he's fuzzy, get out of here." -- Mitch
| Hedberg
|
| Maybe they have some sort of skin on the craft that scatters
| light in a way where it appears not to be in focus.
|
| If the craft is, in effect, bending gravity to fly, maybe it
| also bends the light around it causing it to look blurry.
| teknopaul wrote:
| You can't get a clear picture of a UFO by definition. As soon
| as you get a clear picture it stops being an unidentified
| flying object and starts being either an identified flying
| object or an inconvenient optical effect.
|
| however, don't let these simple facts ruin the magic. ;)
|
| Sometimes the real world is more fun: China has hypersonic FO
| operational since 2019 per https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-
| ZF
| ufo_pilot wrote:
| My conspiracy theory is that aliens don't want definite proofs
| of their existence, just vague ones.
|
| So in all of their technological might they track in real time
| the location of all photo sensors in the world, and only reveal
| themselves in locations where only potato cameras are present.
| ufo_pilot wrote:
| One Navy pilot insisted on Joe Rogan/Lex Fridman that UFOs would
| visit their carrier strike group day after day for weeks.
|
| I always wondered why nobody thought about getting a few goddamn
| proper cameras out there in the fleet and on the planes so that
| we would finally have some quality high resolution pictures.
|
| If I was a senior officer on one of those ships sailing near
| California, I would have hired 5 camera crews from Hollywood and
| called Elon Musk to lend me the team who is filming SpaceX
| launches, who are able to get clear pictures of a rocket
| screaming and many kilometers per second from tens of miles away.
|
| If I was just a regular sailor, I would have gotten my hands on a
| DSLR with a good zoom lens and film it for eternal Internet and
| world fame. Imagine being the one who got the first clear shot of
| an UFO that you see every day for weeks.
|
| Or maybe that pilot was just full of shit...
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| A potential explanation I've recently heard is that, due to the
| impossibly fast, silent maneuvers made by UFOs, is that maybe
| they have Alcubierre drives - they don't move through space,
| they move space around themselves, enabling moves at any
| acceleration/speed without the ship experiencing the utterly
| brutal acceleration observed. This localized bending of
| spacetime would create gravitational lenses that obscure their
| true shape, so a "clear" picture is not possible unless one
| turned off their engine, in which case it would be in freefall,
| a clumsy move. The sharpest footage yet seems to be from CBP in
| Puerto Rico in 2013, you can see the footage here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldV5LUsTkJM
|
| The description on the video has a link to a page that goes
| into much more detail. Obviously the page gives similar vibes
| to any (other?) conspiracy theory page, but the explanation
| seems more consistent than any other I've heard.
| naasking wrote:
| > If I was a senior officer on one of those ships sailing near
| California, I would have hired 5 camera crews from Hollywood
| and called Elon Musk to lend me the team who is filming SpaceX
| launches.
|
| This was back in 2004, before Musk even had any money, before
| high resolution cell phone cameras were common, and when policy
| around sightings was basically "don't ask, don't tell". If
| you're going to dismiss eyewitness testimony, at least get the
| basic facts right.
|
| Now that the official policy is changing, maybe we'll see
| better imaging.
| totoglazer wrote:
| PayPal IPO'd and was acquired by eBay in 2002. Presumably
| Musk had hundreds of millions by 2004.
| jetrink wrote:
| If anyone has the ability to get a clear image of a nearby
| vehicle or aircraft, a carrier strike group does.
|
| E.g.,
| https://www.ball.com/aerospace/Aerospace/media/Aerospace/Dow...
| Aachen wrote:
| What does this have to do with the article? The edited headline
| mentions UFOs presumably for clickiness value, but the article
| is about interstellar comets that show acceleration properties
| we're not sure about, like Oumuamua did.
|
| Though I can understand the confusion, given the misleading
| headline and they never explain what UAP stands for (so it
| could be a euphemism for UFO since I imagine "ufo research" is
| a good way to get your funding cut). I happen to have read a
| book on Oumuamua so coincidentally know that this isn't exactly
| UAF (yes at this point I'm parodying U* TLAs) fighter pilot
| related.
| noxer wrote:
| The article also says UAPs. UAPs include UFOs but not
| interstellar comets and such stuff. The A stands for Aerial.
| The title is not misleading UAP is what normal people name
| UFO. Its just more correct because some things visible in the
| sky are not not flying and or not an object. for example ball
| lightnings.
| 35mm wrote:
| I assume you're taking about Cmdr. Fravor?
|
| When he was interviewed on Lex Friedman, he was asked why more
| was not done at the time to investigate.
|
| His reply was along the lines that he and everyone else had
| plenty to do for their day job already. They were doing 'work
| ups' for a deployment and Cmdr. Fravor was at that time the
| youngest of that rank on that ship and perhaps in the navy. So
| it would be a large reputation as risk to stop a busy training
| schedule to investigate this.
|
| He also said that if it had a Russian or Chinese flag, they
| would have no issue in re-assigning every resource available to
| investigate.
| unknownOrigin wrote:
| Won't happen, as we all know, the aliens have special technology
| that prevents all decent cameras from capturing their craft.
| tonmoy wrote:
| I am not sure if you are joking because a lot of UFO proponents
| actually do believe that
| unknownOrigin wrote:
| Yes I'm joking, but that some may think I'm not doesn't
| surprise me. People believe a lot of shit and there's a lot
| of people.
| xgbi wrote:
| Somebody just posted (and deleted?) an answer to your post
| with a video of the night sky and a man tracking satellites
| as they disappear at the terminator. That guy was telling
| "this is cloak tech" whereas he doesn't even understand
| that a satellite is bright only when lit up with the sun.
| Satellites you see crossing the sky can, and will,
| disappear mid-sky because they get into the shaded part of
| the earth. This is why you can't see LEO sats long after
| the sun go down, and brainless interpolation is why idiots
| like the poster of that video believe they see cloak tech.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I like your comment, except the last sentence. The
| guidelines ask to write civil comments, and I believe it
| even includes people that is not here.
|
| The video is 15 minutes long and I get bored a. When does
| exactly the satellite "gets cloaked"? The second comment
| in YouTube links to https://earthsky.org/space/i-saw-a-
| flash-in-the-night-sky-wh... Is that a good explanation?
| xgbi wrote:
| Yes that was not very subtle, sorry about that.
|
| It might be iridium flares, although it looks like he got
| slow moving sats, so higher in altitude. Either way, they
| all look like that, fast straight moving lights, not
| pulsating like stars, not red/green like planes.
|
| You can see the ISS very clearly when it passes above. It
| sometimes disappears mid-pass when it is late and the
| shadow of the earth is obscuring half your sky. You can
| also see the SpaceX sat train (60 sats in a straight
| line) passing by just after a launch. This will freak you
| out though, it looks like a straight comet trail moving
| half the sky in 1 min.
| waldenn wrote:
| Craft cloaking footage:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYsNJMCXHUE
| willis936 wrote:
| Working outside of a falsifiable framework is a waste of
| time. Nothing made inside of it carries any weight in
| reality.
| Roritharr wrote:
| I'd love to get paid to work on this, the technical challenges
| are pretty interesting if you take the "observables" seriously.
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(page generated 2021-07-24 23:01 UTC)