Sean Carroll

Adam Mills says, I have a crackpot question about UFOs.

Consider the claim of gravitational propulsion put forth in recent years by the UFO community, essentially a non-reactive system that instead manipulates the medium of space time for propulsion, fine.

What has me thinking is this,

Considering that the Earth is subjected to a myriad of gravitational influences, including the Sun, the galaxy, the Great Attractor, etc., wouldn't this give it a sort of complex trajectory through spacetime?

And if so, in order for an object that is existing outside of the influence of gravity, like a UFO, to follow an object that is being influenced by gravity, like the Earth, wouldn't it also need to know...

that very specific trajectory through space-time in some way.

If that all tracks, my real question is this.

How would you speculate that this could be accomplished?

What mechanism or concept do we know of that can bridge between two objects that are theoretically separated by gravity like this?

Look, the only honest answer here is that all of this is just nonsense.

As I said before, my reason for

not giving a lot of credence to claims of ufos being alien intelligences and so forth it's just that the scenario as a whole makes no sense you know why would these aliens be doing this why would the why would they be so bad at avoiding detection why would they be so good at avoiding clean crisp images being made of them but they only were only allowed to make fuzzy little images etc etc etc etc there's lots of reasons to just give this essentially zero credence

These particular efforts, and I'm not super familiar with them, I just don't have the patience, but by mistake have been exposed to some of them, to try to imagine how UFO propulsion or rather UFO motion without propulsion in some of the cases could just sort of get rid of gravity, right?

Like these people clearly don't know what gravity is.

They don't know how general relativity works.

They're just making things up, right?

And if you're trying to sort of attach sensibility to them, it's taking a list of random numbers and trying to think about what it means, right?

It doesn't really mean that much.

There are things within general relativity about moving through space-time, quote-unquote, faster than you might expect, right?

That's what the Alcubierre warp drive is all about.