is there evidence for alien abductions etc.?

[btimsah]

Oh, and by the way, Robert, you let your nasafiles site die. Not enough of us on the forums, I guess.

Yeah, well there are allready too many of these damn forums

 

[btimsah]

Might as well say the same for past life regression. Both these simply cast doubt on the capabilities of hypnosis as a way of really getting at real memories.

Innocent people have been convicted of child abuse based on unsupported evidence of "suppressed memories" supposedly retrieved by hynosis.

Hypnosis is a very frustrating issue. Because the simple fact is real hidden memories have been proven to have been recovered via hypnosis. However, false memories have also surfaced.

But the problem is, if you don't accept hynosis as a means to recover memories then you can't ask for evidence of alien abduction's. Because without hypnosis there's no basis at all for abduction's.

(Without hypnosis it greatly reduces the cases of abduction's)

 

[Giambattista]

Angels carrying lamps is a less complicated version than mere gravity holding the planets in position? Please, that's absurd, and so is Vallee.

People used to believe such things. People used to be so simple!
Anything too complicated for them was magic. It was less complicated to believe in magic. I believe that is what Jacques Vallee was getting at: people believed that because it was the only thing they knew. They had no way of knowing anything greater than their own myths.
Occam's razor, therefore, worked just fine for them, being primitive and superstitious, and seeing no need to go further, they settled for the earth on the back of a turtle, because it was the simplest in their minds. Simple doesn't translate to correct, though, does it?

And what, pray tell, is so "mere" about gravity, anyway? Why have men spent their entire lives trying to fully understand what gravity is and why it does what it does? Is it REALLY that simple?

Has someone finally figured out where all the matter and energy in the universe came from, and why it existed in the first place? Is this a law? Or just one of many theories that comes and goes?

Why is it that men with PhD's as their credentials can theorize and talk about far fetched things such as multiple dimensions, time travel, wormholes etc and actually be taken seriously (and get paid to do it) but if someone believes there's something to a phenomenon like UFOs/aliens and decides to devote their time to researching it, they're wasting that time on bullshit, because of course it's so "out there" and it's obviously explainable in mundane terms, without having to resort to belief in non-human life?

For many years, most scientists ridiculed notions of the phenomenon of ball lightning. It wasn't until later in the 20th century that it finally began to get the attention it deserved.
To this date, there is no single theory that adequately explains every single characteristic of ball lightning.
Since it is most frequently seen during thunderstorms, and particularly accompanying or being spawned from lightning, it is called "ball" lightning, because it is generally believed to be similar in nature to normal lightning.

However, it is not so easy. One of the strangest and hardest to explain of it's characteristics that has been noted multiple times is it's ability to pass through objects and keep it's form without causing damage, and at other times it collides with objects and explodes.
People who have had them pass within a close vicinity have noticed no heat, and other people at other times have been burned by having them pass by.

A professor of electrical sciences (who apparently is still teaching, to my shock, that old man!) aboard a passenger plane, as they were passing through a storm, witnessed a flash of light outside, and then a glowing orb which originated near the cockpit area and moved down the center of the aisle. He also noticed no heat emanated from it.

It has been noted to bounce off of objects instead of passing through or colliding. A person saw an small orange sphere bouncing down stairs in a house and then it flew into a wall, leaving a small hole.
It also lasts anywhere from a few seconds up to a minute or more, and can vary in size and color.
They apparently have also been seen underwater.

There have been many theories, including plasma vortices and anti-matter. None of the theories are excepted by everyone. The most recent theory involves lightning creating a vortex of metallic, conductive particles. However, these orbs have been seen during very windy situations and were seemingly not hindered in any way, which one might expect from something if it were an ignited gas, or charged dust particles. There are also several cases of ball lightning forming in clear weather, with no storm clouds to be seen, and thus lightning could not be the sole cause.

Skeptics often use Occam's razor against UFOs as a legitimate enigma, saying it is just an amalgam of various naturally occuring, scientifically identifiable events. They've assumed that because many sightings are vague and most likely explainable (and of course, many HAVE been explained), than they're ALL explainable and unmysterious. And they ridicule people who would come to different conclusions about certain of these sightings.

The startling and contradictory abilities of ball lightning has proven that an explanation of the mystery is NOT simple. The simplest explanation when using only a few of the sightings would be that it is simply a form of lightning or plasma.

I take it you have never read anything by Jacques Vallee? What he was getting at is that sometimes people are simplifying something more than they should. Simply calling ball lightning a ball of electrical energy is not adequate to explain everything it has been seen doing on numerous occasions.

What is perhaps most interesting is that scientists (who were often skeptical of the phenomenon in the past because of it's bizarre nature) are generally believers in ball lightning and will entertain any number of theories about them. Most will not entertain the theory that some UFOs are piloted by non-human intellegence, even though there ARE some very good cases, as Mr. Vallee himself brings up in his books that are NOT easily explainable, and insisting that they're all misidentified natural occurences is doing a disservice, and could possibly be considered dishonest.

 

[Giambattista]

lets look at a famous media skeptic... micheal shermer

history

*Much of his writing concerns the personal experiences that shaped his worldview. He once tried to enhance his athletic abilities with various New Age techniques, such as iridology, rolfing, and mega-vitamins. He even kept a pyramid in his living room to increase energy. His skepticism developed in reaction to his earlier credulity.

tactics

*For example, in his "Skeptic" column in Scientific American in March, 2003, he cited a research study published in the Lancet, a leading medical journal, by Pim van Lommel and colleagues. He asserted this study "delivered a blow" to the idea that the mind and the brain could separate. Yet the researchers argued the exact opposite, and showed that conscious experience outside the body took place during a period of clinical death when the brain was flatlined. As Jay Ingram, of the Canadian Discovery Channel, commented: "His use of this study to bolster his point is bogus… He could have said, 'The authors think there's a mystery, but I choose to interpret their findings differently'. But he didn't. I find that very disappointing" (Toronto Star, March 16, 2003).

look at how the pseudos conduct themselves

pathetic, ja?

Egos to polish? What ego?

 

[Giambattista]

By the way, thanks for the interesting link.

 

[Giambattista]

After noting that Sylvia Brown-a huckster psychic who appears often on CNN’s Larry King Live-is known as “claws” among JREF staff because of her long fingernails, Randi expressed the hope that while scratching herself, she would tear an artery and die, a prospect which evoked hearty laughter from the audience.


The tone of the conference was geared more toward ridiculing the enemy than engaging in thoughtful scientific discussion.
Needless to say, the siege mentality and the spirit of scientific inquiry have never exactly been bedfellows.


No wonder I have to take these people with a grain of salt. They can be extremely vicious!

In his bestselling handbook on logical and not-so-logical thinking, Why People Believe Weird Things, Shermer describes a great many “weird” ideas harbored by ordinary people. What he fails to mention is that the chief source for weird ideas in the modern world is none other than science itself, starting with Copernicus’ assertion that the earth is in motion around the sun, an observation that flies in the face of common sense. After all, as anyone can plainly see, the sun rises in the east and crosses the sky to set in the west. But Copernicus’ weird idea prevailed, and it’s been like that for 400 years now, with gravitational and electromagnetic fields, the divisibility and vacuity of the atom, the convertibility of energy and mass, warped space-time, wave-particle duality, quantum complementarity and uncertainty, nonlocality, a ten dimensional universe, and on and on. The history of science can be summarized as the story of weird ideas displacing “common sense.” As long as skeptics view the world in terms of science versus weirdness, they are guaranteed to remain parochial in their outlook.

 

[btimsah]

After noting that Sylvia Brown-a huckster psychic who appears often on CNN’s Larry King Live-is known as “claws” among JREF staff because of her long fingernails, Randi expressed the hope that while scratching herself, she would tear an artery and die, a prospect which evoked hearty laughter from the audience.


The tone of the conference was geared more toward ridiculing the enemy than engaging in thoughtful scientific discussion.
Needless to say, the siege mentality and the spirit of scientific inquiry have never exactly been bedfellows.


No wonder I have to take these people with a grain of salt. They can be extremely vicious!

In his bestselling handbook on logical and not-so-logical thinking, Why People Believe Weird Things, Shermer describes a great many “weird” ideas harbored by ordinary people. What he fails to mention is that the chief source for weird ideas in the modern world is none other than science itself, starting with Copernicus’ assertion that the earth is in motion around the sun, an observation that flies in the face of common sense. After all, as anyone can plainly see, the sun rises in the east and crosses the sky to set in the west. But Copernicus’ weird idea prevailed, and it’s been like that for 400 years now, with gravitational and electromagnetic fields, the divisibility and vacuity of the atom, the convertibility of energy and mass, warped space-time, wave-particle duality, quantum complementarity and uncertainty, nonlocality, a ten dimensional universe, and on and on. The history of science can be summarized as the story of weird ideas displacing “common sense.” As long as skeptics view the world in terms of science versus weirdness, they are guaranteed to remain parochial in their outlook.

Amen to this;

As long as skeptic's view the world in terms of science versus weirdness, they are guaranteed to remain parochial in their outlook.

Stanton Friedman would be proud.

 

[Mr Anonymous]

nice.
now what about future tech? do you see us getting close to light speeds? what would it take?

A very great deal and it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference if we did - light speed isn't anywhere near fast enough to accomplish interstellar travel on a viable basis, the distances between stellar masses is simply that ludicrously great.

The speed of light itself forms a fundamental physical impediment to the whole proposition to begin with - when it comes to pure energy, light is it. There's virtually bugger all else to it - all other forms of energy either travel at a speed equal too or less than light.

When it comes to moving a thing like a ship it needs to expend energy in order to move - the problem is the speed of light physically is as fast as energy itself is capable of travelling. Consequently, after a point of about half light speed the ration between energy expenditure and acceleration bottoms out and it becomes increasingly harder to accelerate further.

Think of it like rolling a rock along an endless smooth plane that gradually curves ever upwards until vertical. At first it takes a fair amount of energy to get the rock moving, but once underway a relatively small increase in energy expenditure increases forward momentum and so on and so forth until about the mythical point of halfway when the ground begins to curve upwards. From that point on further increase in acceleration becomes ex potentially harder to achieve and, in achieving it, as you travel further, you're essentially making it even harder for yourself because the incline your on grows ever steeper with further progress until eventually you reach a point where you're chucking everything you have into the thing and not actually travelling any faster.

Chucking more energy into it doesn't make any difference - there isn't enough of the stuff in the entire universe because energy itself has a physical top speed - and that speed is the speed of light.

So even close to light speed travel in itself represents a profound physical problem in order to over come however, even in attaining light speed travel itself it still isn't anywhere near enough to make interstellar travel a viable thing to do.

Viable interstellar travel requires faster than light speed travel, and that in itself, given that the speed of light is as fast as energy itself is capable of travelling, gives your average ET a very singular problem about what they're supposed to be using for fuel, because whatever it is, it has to be able to propel a starship faster than energy itself is capable of traveling...

Whatever else that solution may be, I doubt it's unleaded.

 

[Gustav]

heh
thanks for the excellent exposition
now i am absolutely depressed

 

[Light]

A very great deal and it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference if we did - light speed isn't anywhere near fast enough to accomplish interstellar travel on a viable basis, the distances between stellar masses is simply that ludicrously great.

The speed of light itself forms a fundamental physical impediment to the whole proposition to begin with - when it comes to pure energy, light is it. There's virtually bugger all else to it - all other forms of energy either travel at a speed equal too or less than light.

When it comes to moving a thing like a ship it needs to expend energy in order to move - the problem is the speed of light physically is as fast as energy itself is capable of travelling. Consequently, after a point of about half light speed the ration between energy expenditure and acceleration bottoms out and it becomes increasingly harder to accelerate further.

Think of it like rolling a rock along an endless smooth plane that gradually curves ever upwards until vertical. At first it takes a fair amount of energy to get the rock moving, but once underway a relatively small increase in energy expenditure increases forward momentum and so on and so forth until about the mythical point of halfway when the ground begins to curve upwards. From that point on further increase in acceleration becomes ex potentially harder to achieve and, in achieving it, as you travel further, you're essentially making it even harder for yourself because the incline your on grows ever steeper with further progress until eventually you reach a point where you're chucking everything you have into the thing and not actually travelling any faster.

Chucking more energy into it doesn't make any difference - there isn't enough of the stuff in the entire universe because energy itself has a physical top speed - and that speed is the speed of light.

So even close to light speed travel in itself represents a profound physical problem in order to over come however, even in attaining light speed travel itself it still isn't anywhere near enough to make interstellar travel a viable thing to do.

Viable interstellar travel requires faster than light speed travel, and that in itself, given that the speed of light is as fast as energy itself is capable of travelling, gives your average ET a very singular problem about what they're supposed to be using for fuel, because whatever it is, it has to be able to propel a starship faster than energy itself is capable of traveling...

Whatever else that solution may be, I doubt it's unleaded.

Well explained!

And I'll add something on top of that. The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri and it's 4.22 light-years away. Even if you assume we could eventually acheive light-speed somehow, a round trip there would take 8.44 years!!! And that's traveling at max velocity every inch of the way and doesn't even allow time to visit their local Dunkin' Doughnuts before you have to start back again.

 

[Mr Anonymous]

heh
thanks for the excellent exposition
now i am absolutely depressed

Yes, sorry about. Just happened to be passing and read your question.

Y'don't want to let this kind of stuff put you off though. Whatever the physical problems associated with all this business of, essentially, doing the Star Trek thing for real - problematic, yes. But ultimately this isn't to say impossible.

There are ways around the problem - it's called relatisc travel, either moving through or actually using space itself in such a way as to bring about the same effect as if one were travelling faster than the speed of light without actually physically travelling anywhere near as fast...

The problem is that opens up the Pandora's Box of really, really silly buggers you made mention of previously because, fundamentally, if you could actually travel faster than LS you'd wind up physically travelling backwards through Time.

Either use or move through space as if your were travelling faster than LS (relatistically) and you bring about the same consequence as if you were really travelling faster then the speed of light - chronological displacement takes place.

When considered in the context of happening over a span of many light light years, as you are in the context of interstellar travel, physics really doesn't have anything much of a problem when it comes when it comes to instances of Time Travel taking place - one may physically arrive in ones own past, but in arriving at a point in space light years away from where one started one is physically nowhere near ones own actual history....

Not on the face of things at least.

But say you're an alien species and your go off to investigate this tiny blue/green planet called Earth. You may not know very much about it, but pretty quickly you are going to realise there's a technologically driven species on it that actively engages in space exploration for its own ends.

Primitive in comparison, infantile in outlook we may be, but space exploration for us is an undertaking of but a few short decades, nowhere near like a realisation of what our full potential could be. Who knows, in centuries to come we could possibly be doing the Star Trek thing for ourselves. After all, if our friendly neighbourhood aliens can do it for a fact, it means travelling in these sorts of terms is actually possible not merely idle speculation.

And herein lies the rub.

Though currently we haven't fared terribly far, one day we might. We are on that kind of road, the first teetering steps at least. If we ever advance as much as our visiting alien friends we ourselves will be displacing chronology to exactly the same extent as any visiting aliens must be - and in visiting a species like ours at this point in time the problem for any visiting aliens is that they have absolutely no idea whether or not, or to what extent, our species has had an effect on their development at some point in their past.

In the context of a light and frothy conversation regarding a silly bugger business, such matters as these provide no impediment to the proceedings whatsoever - but if the things people insist in maintaining regarding UFO's, Alien Visitations and all the rest prove in fact true, these very much do become actual real, physical problems to be worked out because this is very much the territory these sorts of idea's exist in.

Nothing in the slightest either simple or straightforward about so much as a stick of it I'm afraid, and no matter how enthusiastically espoused there really are certain underlying physical problems such as the ones outlined that have to be thoroughly explained and accounted for in order for whatever version of the ET visitation scenario one chooses to posit - and sense, I very much doubt, is liable to be forthcoming from any of it really...

Still, pays the bills. Some days...

Well explained!

Eiiiiiiithenkyow!

 

[phlogistician]

Well explained!

And I'll add something on top of that. The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri and it's 4.22 light-years away. Even if you assume we could eventually acheive light-speed somehow, a round trip there would take 8.44 years!!! And that's traveling at max velocity every inch of the way and doesn't even allow time to visit their local Dunkin' Doughnuts before you have to start back again.

Yep, and imagine travelling at or very near C, and the damage that a speck of dust would do to your ship. Now, here's a question, is it possible to deflect such a piece of dust if you are on a ship travellling at C? Electric and Magnetic fields deform around objects moving at such speeds, so trying to ionise and move a dust particle wouldn't be possible, would it? Even using a powerful beam of laser light to push dust away wouldn't work, as the light wouldn't actually leave the laser, if the laser was already travelling at C, ... so, how to remove dust/debris from your path?

At light speed, how much friction would the inter stellar medium provide, and how much would this heat up a ship also?

Anybody?

 

[Giambattista]

It is at this point that reverse electromagnetism becomes necessary.

I'm half-serious, there.

 

[Giambattista]

Amen to this;



Stanton Friedman would be proud.

Yes, I imagine ol' Eyebrows is nodding his head!
I've never visited his website. Is it interesting? I'll check it out.

Woowoos are often underachievers, and poorly educated, but have an ego they need to polish, so self aggrandize by involving themselves in some large scale conspiracy that only they know the 'truth' about.

About ego: I'm sure phlogistician isn't fully aware of how the professional non-believers conduct themselves. Then again, I do believe "woowoo" is direct from their own dictionary, so maybe he is familiar after all.

 

[Giambattista]

I was seated near the front of the passenger cabin of an all-metal airliner (Eastern Airlines Flight EA 539) on a late night flight from New York to Washington. The aircraft encountered an electrical storm during which it was enveloped in a sudden bright and loud electrical discharge (0005h EST, March 19, 1963). Some seconds after this, a glowing sphere a little more than 20 centimeters in diameter emerged from the pilot's cabin and passed down the aisle of the aircraft approximately 50 centimeters from me, maintaining the same height and course for the whole distance over which it could be observed.

This is Professor Jennison's account of the ball lightning that occured aboard the aircraft.

He teaches electronics and radio astronomy at the University of Kent.

 

[Giambattista]

However, for UFO sightings, I think you’ll find that using demographic and statistical analysis to ‘weed’ sighting cases will actually reinforce the credibility of certain sightings. In this respect I would draw a sharp distinction between abduction reports and UFO sightings.

You are very correct here. The differences between UFOs and abductions are like night (terrors) and day. What is experienced in a semi-conscious state is not nearly as reliable as that experienced while fully conscious. And there some very excellent cases out there. Reliable witnesses, photographs, film, and video evidence of UFOs exists in abundance, while most abductions have little evidence other than testimony to support them.

I believe it is necessary and logical to treat the two things separately, and only look for correlations when they are readily apparent.

 

[duendy]

'Mars in 3 Hours: scientists believe they can reach the final frontiers of space using a Star Trk-style "hyperdrive".
They say it is possible to build a device which will propel a spacecraft to Mars in just three hours - and to te next solar system in less than three months.
The design is based on teideas of a German physicist who modified Albert Einstein's theories. Burkhard Heim said it was possible tocreate a multidimensional world in which the forces o gravity and electromagnetism are fused together.
Testing the idea would equire a huge ring rotating above a super-conducting coil to generate an intense magnetic field.
A large enough current and magnetic field should cause te ring to rise and gather speed. A paper drawing on the theory last year won the American institute of Aeronautics' Future Flight prize.
At last one space propulsion scienist thinks itmay be possible to make te idea reality.
Roger Lenard of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, runs a powerful x-ray generator known as the Z-machine. He told New Scientist magazine that it could "probably generate the necessary field intensities and gradients." http://www.mirror.co.uk

so, hint hint. IF WE are theorizing about tis, how credible is it tat some other life form may have a much more advanced head start,which would even blow this theory away?

 

[Mr Anonymous]

Yep, and imagine travelling at or very near C, and the damage that a speck of dust would do to your ship. Now, here's a question, is it possible to deflect such a piece of dust if you are on a ship travellling at C? Electric and Magnetic fields deform around objects moving at such speeds, so trying to ionise and move a dust particle wouldn't be possible, would it? Even using a powerful beam of laser light to push dust away wouldn't work, as the light wouldn't actually leave the laser, if the laser was already travelling at C, ... so, how to remove dust/debris from your path?

At light speed, how much friction would the inter stellar medium provide, and how much would this heat up a ship also?

Anybody?

Well, since y'asked....

Doubt very seriously anyone is ever actually going to build a genuine light speed engine - the fuel resources necessary alone remain almost literally astronomical and its a vacuous waste of fuel. besides, there's potentially a way around it.

Just sitting on your jacksy reading this your travelling at a speed of around 67,000 mph constantly without having to expend so much as a farts worth of energy in physically propelling yourself anywhere - simply by being on the Earth your mass is travelling with the dame degree of inertia the Earth is and that's how fast we are orbiting the Sun.

Y'can, of course, try expending the occasional farts worth of energy in propulsion if you wish, but frankly its hardly scientific and most other people around you won't see the value in the nature of the vital scientific research your undertaking, but that's neither here nor there and generally ends up going everywhere and I digress.

67,000 mph however is peanuts in comparison to how fast the Sun we're tethered to is travelling in orbit as the Galaxy turns, a speed on top of which we can also add the outward expansion of the Universe as a whole and the surface shift across the face of our expansion front of all the Galaxies as they swirl like the film on the surface of a soap bubble as the bubble is being blown up - in short, we are constantly travelling at speeds of, propulsive speaking, very high energy expenditure quite without the necessity of expending anything in constant propulsion whatsoever.

Everything is already moving and in given directions.

Anyone who can find some way of freeing themselves from that constant motion, essentially finding a way to slow down, effectively gets to exploit everything else's constant motion and speed.

If something is travelling away from you at 100 mph you have to travel at a greater velocity in order to catch up - if however, the thing your interested in is travelling toward you at 100mph you can either stand still and wait for it to arrive or, if you travel at an equal speed towards it from that position of being relatively stationary you infact reach your target in half the time with half the apparent energy expenditure it appears you'd be using.

From the point of view of both observation and measurement, for a person observing something behaving in this way, simply slowing down relative to everything else, the vehicle doing that appears to be speeding up as if acting under constant propulsion - the slower it actually physically travels the faster the appearance of speed. To all practical intents and purposes the benefit of travelling slower amounts to all the advantages of actually travelling under propulsion but without the constant energy expenditure associated with it.

Fire up an actual engine and that vehicle could exploit everything's else's velocity and direction without actually travelling anything like as fast as it would appear to - and without physically travelling at actually close to the speed of light at all the problems associated with charged EM field distortion and lazer deflection, as you originally ask about, don't apply.

The ship itself isn't physically moving fast enough for these sorts of problems to occur.

Much as a journey due East here on Earth is both quicker and more economical due to the rotation of the Earth, the advantages gained in travelling in the direction opposite to that motion are lost on the return journey due West - or so one would think. However, when you consider how, with inter-solar system travel, we configure the orbits of the probes we send out to use planetary bodies and gravity to slingshot and increase the speed of the vehicle, by once again exploiting the motion of everything else and the direction it's travelling in a similar sort of principal of using any and all available travelling masses momentum should in principle be equally usable on the journey home - non of which remains in the slightest bit as simple and straightforward as Jean Luc Picard sitting in the comfy chair on the bridge of the Enterprise and declaring "make it so", but moderately tenable...

One thing that does occur though. If indeed high velocity travel through the medium of space would be sufficient to generate some degree of surface friction for the ship - that would rather dictate you were setting up a bow wave of some sort through the medium you were travelling through forward of the ship.

Not going to put off the interstellar version of an oncoming ice berg, but hardly unlikely to have zero effect on oncoming particulate material, which, we have to bear in mind, the frequency of which diminishes rapidly outside the confines of solar systems....

Doubt anyones going to want to plough through a nebula at speed a lá The Wrath of Karn even if it does look utterly gorgeous on screen...

 

[Communist Hamster]

Everything is relative, and zero motion is impossible.

 

[phlogistician]

Doubt very seriously anyone is ever actually going to build a genuine light speed engine - the fuel resources necessary alone remain almost literally astronomical and its a vacuous waste of fuel. besides, there's potentially a way around it.

Hence the 'imagine' part. Even if the massive difficulties of making a drive were solved, I was pointing out there are still issues with just moving through space at anything approaching C.

One thing that does occur though. If indeed high velocity travel through the medium of space would be sufficient to generate some degree of surface friction for the ship - that would rather dictate you were setting up a bow wave of some sort through the medium you were travelling through forward of the ship.

Hence my question about the Interstellar medium. OK, one atom per cubic metre doesn't sound like much, but if you are travelling real quick it all adds up.

Not going to put off the interstellar version of an oncoming ice berg, but hardly unlikely to have zero effect on oncoming particulate material, which, we have to bear in mind, the frequency of which diminishes rapidly outside the confines of solar systems....

Yep, but there only has to be one particle of dust hitting you at C in 4.2 light years travel, for it to be all over without some sort of shield.

Now, can you imagine a way of deflecting particles at speeds close to C?