East Tennessee’s Tim Burchett, a Republican, said he believes that aliens must have the technological capacity to “turn us into a charcoal briquette”.

  • fearout@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’ve seen so many UFO-related news during the last month, it’s insane. From that whistleblower to various reputable sources coming up with different pieces of info here and there.

    It’s never aliens tho. What’s going on?

  • style99@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    If I were an alien from another planet, I would definitely feed crazy, easily-dismissed people with some good information. That would make it way easier for me to fly under the radar.

    • experbia@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      to fly under the radar

      it’s more “flying under the sonar” underwater though, yeah?

  • Arn_Thor@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I knew I’d heard that name before:

    On March 28, 2023, Burchett responded to the Covenant School shooting, where three 9-year-old students and three staff members were killed in Nashville, by telling reporters: “It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the second world war, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’” Burchett also said he sees no “real role” for Congress in reducing gun violence, other than to “mess things up”.

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

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I mean, he’s kinda right though. If someone is set on committing a crime, they’re going to do it. Whether they get the weapon legally or not, they’re still going to commit that crime. The only way to truly stop crime is to stop people from having free will, which is impossible.

      That’s not to say there should be zero protections. But take gun control in the US for example, there already are gun control laws, California being the strictest. And there are still crimes committed with firearms every single day. Even if you somehow (by actual magic because it would be actually impossible) banned sales of guns and confiscated every firearm the ATF knew existed, there are still so many firearms already in the black market, or smuggled across borders, or even 3D printed, that the criminal will still have access to firearms, conceivably forever.

      I mean, look at fireworks. Most cities in California have banned fireworks, but every 4th of July the night sky lights up like a rave party. Or hacking groups that constantly cyberattack literally anything they can, just because they can. If people want to do something, it doesn’t really matter how much red tape you throw at them, theyre still going to do that thing.

      • Ragnell@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, there’s no absolute protection but it does help to put up barriers. I watch a lot of true crime, and a ton of spree killers and gun killers are just lazy or stupid and they would actually be deterred at certain points. Others, well, nothing’s gonna stop them but getting caught. Of course, a guy who gets caught on his first try doesn’t get to become a serial killer at least.

        Come to think of it, if a guy gets caught violating a gun control law… then he doesn’t even get to actually become a killer, does he? I’ve seen them run down a couple of cases including one where the Alabama Department of Investigation (I think?) GAVE BACK a gun to a guy who was under a protection order that in that state actually did restrict him from having a firearm. A law against domestic abusers having firearms would mean that a lot of them could be off the streets before they could kill their victims.

      • QHC@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        If we banned guns sales today (something only an extreme minority are asking for, btw) and it took 100 years to filter them out of society to the point the death rate by firearm in the US was similar to the EU–it would be better than doing nothing.

        Something the “guns are inevitable” argument always seems to miss is that changes to the law have more of an effect on society than purely the immediate physical result. Even without removing a single gun from society, passing legislation like that, which would likely require an amendment, would be a huge sign to the entire country that the US as a country is going to be thinking about firearms differently than in the past.

        There’s no magical solution, but doing nothing is the most certain to have no measurable impact.

  • Max_Power@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    It’s all tinfoil-hat-talk until someone demonstrates the technology live and with reputable scientists present.

    • Flaky_Fish69@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s really not that hard.

      Edit: To clarify, any species advanced enough to come here from another star is going to be advanced enough to understand basic chemistry- chemistry, that we’ve been using for for more than 2000 years (at the very least.)

      Such a hypothetical species would almost certainly also have the capability of doing spectral analysis to detect elemental composition in our atmosphere (JWST can do this,) and detect the radioactive fallout from our nuking ourselves- multiple times.

      They would almost certainly be extremely careful in coming here. To be clear, the energy contained in a ship capable of reaching earth in any meaningful time frame, would be capable of wiping life out on Earth- far more powerful than any nuke ever detonated here. More importantly to them, such a space craft could conceivably be reverse engineered with enough capacity to attack them.

      For comparison, the fastest moving space craft made by humans- the Parker solar probe- is traveling at 150 kilometers per second- the probe was designed to fall very close to the sun…it’ll be going about 190 km/s- it’s orbit was crafted to fly between the sun and Venus. It’s in its sixteenth of 24 planned passes.

      190 km/s is about .04% the speed of light- or .0004 c. At those speeds it’ll take more than 10 thousand years to reach the nearest star (proxima centauri at 4.2 light years.)

      And that’s assuming we don’t care about slowing down.

      Any species to get here is going to be technologically advanced enough there’s no economic reason to come here. That leaves curiosity- specifically us. And we’re fucking psychotic enough to nuke ourselves.

      Do i believe aliens exist? It’s probable.
      Do i believe they come here? Not likely.