Planet trek and the search for life

America spends much money on the hunt for extra terrestrial life, and they also spend a lot of money looking for planets that can support life.

This second notion is based on the concept that where there is water, there is life, of some form or another. The real question is, to what end?

What do we do if we find life, be it in whatever for it is? It is perhaps only worth finding it, if we had any chance of communicating with it. This is quite ironic, as we have a planet that is just teaming with life, and Americans can't even communicate with much of it. For example, Americans can't communicate with fish, dogs, insects, cats, dolphins, whales, trees, plantlife (in general), birds of any kind with wings, spiders, watermelons. You get the drift.

Americans can't even communicate well with earth beings who speak other languages. Americans have a tendency to shoot first and try to communicate later. So, let's just say that should all these efforts at interstellar communications result in a race of beings coming all the way to our planet in a faster than light ship, then the likelihood is that America would be threatened, and they would try to nuke whatever it was that was trying to communicate.

The best example of this would be to take the Star Trek 4 scenerio, and shift it into our time now. How would we, be able to cope with a race of beings form of communication was destructive to the human race. America would see at as a threat and try to destroy it before it did too much damage, yet it was coming at our invitation.

Just another thought with respect to one of the basis surmises of our setting up a communications protocol with alien races. Movies would have us believe that prime numbers are the key to setting up such a protocol, yet the prime number set is based on a decimal system, which is based on the number of fingers on the human hand, so the concept of the prime number as being a UNIVERSAL standard is somewhat flawed as not even all the creatures on earth have 10 fingers. Its only human beings.

One other problem exists in the context of our location in space. We base our position in space relative to known quasars, relative to us in space. Yet the universe is dynamic in that it changes. Also our galaxy is flying through space at a high velocity, and with a speed that makes it relative to other nearby galaxies and black holes. Also the farther away from the earth they are, then in light year terms, they are also in a relatively different place in space and time to where the earth and the quasars actually are, which means that even if they could decipher where we are relative to the location of quasars, which will also be placed differently relative to where they, then given time and space travel, they would never find us, because we would have moved too.

So why does America place so much creedence in the need to find life. There is speculation of life on one of the moons of Saturn, under the ice. What do we do with it if there is. Do we expect it to talk to us? Do we expect it understand? Do we hope that it is telepathic, and that it has mates that it will talk to for us? And what do we have to say?


I think it would be fascinating to know if there is life out there, but in the meantime there are millions are starving people here on the planet Earth, who have nothing, and could do with some of the money spent on the star trekking. Even if there was life on Mars, it is not there now?? What can we gain by knowing.

I think America hopes for a short cut. The concept of finding a more intellectually advanced race that can show the human race how to get off the planet, is a dream, harboured in US movie making, yet with little sense of reality.

While I agree that the Universe is a big place, and that scientists imagine there are millions of opportunities for life, the chance of a correlation between where we are, and what we are, and finding a similar correlation to something out there, given our novelty as an "intelligent race", leaves much room for speculation and expectation, yet, everything we are and do, and our knowledge base is way too basic and primitive to allow for anything beyond speculation.

The recent tests in which particles were found to travel faster than the speed of light raises big questions about our perceived knowledge of the universe, and what are its limits, and size. The questions that relate to the mass of the universe and the black stuff, which we can't see, also raises questions about what we are?

Is there a relationship between the "dark matter" and the elusive "Higgs Boson" particle?

They are both speculative theories, and yet to be proven?

In an earlier post I made the statement that the universe is so big, and that with our telescopes we can look back in time to see the universe as it was. I raised a question that if we looked in the right direction we would see the light from our own galaxy as it was bent around the universe so that it came back to us. Would we recognise the light from out own galaxy if we did see it, and the light was 6,000 million years old?

That's all for now. Have a good day.

Slow progress on GFC2

Well it has been a month since my last posting.
The big fear now is that Greece will still default on its loan repayments. Great Britain is reluctant to help Greece but will. The German Chancellor wants to help, but the German people don't. How much money will it take to save the faulting economies of Italy, Greece and Spain?
And the United States is not good either. High unemployment, still buying more off China than making themselves. USA may be a powerhouse but it is running out of steam (energy).
When the crisis hits, how bad will it be?

Australia sits well away from Europe and the United States, and while its economy is dependent on China, in terms of buying its resources, what will happen if the GFC hits?

Could it be another great depression with suicides and unhappy people?

Time will tell, and no one knows whose side time is on?

Global Financial Crisis 2 Still Not Here

Things seem to be moving slowly when it comes to GFC 2. When will it hit. One cannot help thinking that things are being kept artificially floating. Unemployment is still high in the USA. Unemployment in Australia is higher than it could be too, although economists are saying that Australia is doing OK...perhaps!!!

So when will it hit, those with job security will be OK, which may not be so true if Tony Abbott gets elected. This may happen if Julia and Labor can't claw back some public opinion in their favour.

This look shakey for Labor if they lose any members of the house of Reps. Tony Abbott is seeking to rock the foundations of the government by finding a way of getting rid of a member, then having a by-election in which the Libs could win a seat. Abbott could himself cause a giant loss of confidence in the Australian economy, if Joe Hockey is to be the new treasurer. He is a man who knows nothing about the economy. He is like a Mafia hitman in the parliament. He is like Tony Soprano without the authority. Abbott himself has presented little policy  to the Australian people. He is a man devoid of intelligence.

Could Abbott be the cause of GFC 2? Time will tell!!

Global Financial Crisis 2

Thanks to the USA and its bickering version of capitalism, are we all about to plummet into an abyss of fiscal demise that will upset the whole world, to which the USA will say...I know nothing!!!

More questions about us human beings

One must wonder what is the probability that human beings such as us actually existing. We are a particular combination of cells that have come together through evolution, to operate ina particular way.
We exist because the conditions that creaed us on this planet flowed in a particular order, and created the cells that then met, joined and evolved into more complex organisms of which we, through successive evolutionary steps, beginning, supposedly with the Femure ancestor, gradually developed into us, with large thumbs, an ability to talk, and walk, and be creative, and of course kill.
Yet our position on the Earth, or terra, as the sci fi fictions might have us called, is tenuous, trivial, and fragile beyond belief. We do not have armour, except for skin. We can't take large G-forces, we can't survive heat, too much dust, too much heat, too much or deep cold, even though we survived the last few ice ages. Many animals are bigger, stronger, and have sharper teeth than us. If we had no weapons, we would not survive. We have buildings that can be knocked down by big waves, big earthquakes, and of course volcanos. We cannot survive tsunamis morethan ten metres high. We melt if the temperature gets above a 1000 degrees C. We die if the temperature gets about 150 degrees C, for an extended period. We die without water. We die without food. If the oceans rise too much, then land disappears and we fight each other to keep the land that is left.
We also die when there is too much radiation. If not from the sun, from which the amount of emitted radiation would kill us if not for the Earth's magnetic field. We are also dying slowly self effects. After years of Hydrogen and Atomic Bomb testing, the amount of radioactive air, water and earth, must be significantly higher, must be killing us all very slowly. What causes cancer? Cancer the mutation of the human gene. The human body doesn't like mutated genes, in fact they kill us. So radiation mutates genes, so ultimately we are surrounded by radiation that is in fact killing us. It is in our food, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.
So what is our place in the universe. How did we come to be? What purpose do we serve? How do we relate to other beings that are not us?
Well, on this planet, we do a dreadful job, we can't talk to dogs (our best friends), cats, birds, dolphins, whales, cockroaches, butterflies, jellyfish, barramundi, sharks. Sometimes we can't talk with each other, so we shoot each other, or murder each other, or run each other over.
We live in cities, where we all get on with each other???
The Universe is a large place, or so we would like to believe. How much do we see? Well not much really!! Do we understand our universe?? Not really!!
We exist ina world in which the human population is consumed by the will to survive, or as some might call it, capitalism. Capitalism is driven by advertising, and vice versa. Money rules what we can own, and how pleasant our lives are. Yet this is only a motivation in the human ape, or the human being. Do chimpanzees care where they live. They need food yes, and they need to mate, but do they cherish luxury goods over food, do they fit into Maslow's geometry of needs, or is this merely a human being notion.
Richness of live should be a simple thing, yet to the human being, greed and happiness are almost opposites. The financially richest people in the world live in big cities, are surrounded by slaves, or workers, and may be able to have short term hedonistic pleasure, but what do they get in return, they have the constant threat that someone else will get their riches off them.

Bill Gates (Microsoft) once said that the entrepreneur he was most afraid of, was the other human being who would come along with an operating system/software like his, and so he would lose his wealth to someone like him, so he goes about metaphoricaaly killing off the competition, and stealing software that makes his work better, and having to go to court, and eventually have to pay people for their originality. Mr Gates these days holds several billion dollars in charitable funds that he uses to better the world. He does so out of guilt for all those lives he has maimed. All those years of supplying operating systems that never work quite right, and then charging the users of his products for updates that should be free. Mr Gates is the example of capitalism working correctly, yet it does nothing for the human condition.

WHY DO WE EXIST? WHAT PURPOSE DO SERVE? WHAT DOES THE EARTH OWE US? WHAT DO WE OWE THE EARTH?

If this seems somewhat pessimistic, then maybe it is. One might also view it as optimism, as it points out that we can recognise our fallibilities, and we can change them.
For instance, instead of wars, why don't we put some of that money into learning to communicate with the other animals on our planet?
Why don't we help the people in third world countries, give them food, help them grow food. Give them education, learn to talk to them, understand them, love them...?

Last Question.
WHAT WILL IT HAVE TO TAKE FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO SHOW THAT WE ARE WORTH THE PLACE WE HAVE IN THE UNIVERSE?

Our Galaxy "The Milky Way" a new question

The facts that we know, or think we know are that: when we look out into space we are looking backward into time. Why because the distances are so vast and that light takes a long time to travel between stars. The light from the sun is 8 seconds old when it reaches Earth. The light from Jupiter and Saturn and the outer planets is minutes old when it reaches us.

Scientists would like us to believe that light travelling through the Universe bends due to the gravity effects of galactic clusters and dark matter, so here for the scientists is a new thought.

If in looking out into space, though Hubble or some other technology, how would we know whether or not we were looking at our own galaxy sometime in the past.

We would not recognise our own sun, nor would we recognise our own Solar system which was probably different in structure several billion years ago. Our planets would not necessarily have the same number of moons, and their distance from the sun would be influenced by the effects of gravity within the solar system and by the effects of gravity outisde our solar system.

Would our Galaxy still be the same shape 8 billion years ago, or 4 billion years ago, compared to its current shape and existence. The further out we look the farther back in time we look. The question being, would we recognise our own galaxy if we saw it?

Man has had such a short time in the Universe, we are arrogant to assume we would recognise an earlier version of our galaxy in a Universe we don't understand!!!

The Speed of Light and other spacial anomolies

Einstein the father of E=Mc^2 was revolutionary, he was a post-modernist in taking the view of what would it be like to sit inside a ray of light as a new perspective.

From his thinking comes the notion that as as an object approaches the speed of light it will become heavier as it approaches speeds closer to the speed of light. The implication is that it would become infinitely heavy at the speed of light, and so need an infinite amount of energy to allow it continue, let alone go faster. The further implication is that such an object of infinite mass would in fact become a black hole, with infinite mass from which no light could escape. Other factors that would be seen by an observer, if Einstein is to be believed is that the object would get shorter as light speed was being approached, the implication being that at light speed the object would be infinitly short, perhaps even looking somewhat like a singularity.

Further implications of this is that if an object of any mass travels near or at the speed of light, its mass will increase to infinity the faster it goes.

So what of light itself. Does a photon of light have mass? If light can be bent by the gravity of dark matter, or of large galactic clusters, then must it have mass, or is the light itself being delected by the supposed gravity holes created in Einstein's model.

Light itself is composed of energy, it must have had a certain kinetic energy that is converted to momentum when the light itself is created in a sun or through whatever stellar or otherwise phenomena created it. If it holds some sort of energy, how is it stored? How, for instance can a photon exist for some 13 billion years without deteriorating, although light is known to dim. How can a particle of light exist in order to travel across the universe and be seen by us on planet Earth sometime later?

Returning to the previous notion of light having mass.

If light has some mass at all, then as light which travels at the speed of light, then by implication it must have infinite mass and so become a black hole. Simply then, light should, according to Einstein have infinite mass and take an infinite amount of energy to move. So what of the photon, that holds lights energy? What is the photon? Is the proton a small black hole that perhaps emits light? Or is it something else? Maybe light is not what we believe it to be.

Is there a link between light and what we call gravity. Is light the source of gravity, and our understanding or lack of understanding of gravity based on our perception of the effects we see and experience.