Updated 11 Jan 00 * Copyright 1999 by Andrew Homer.
Webmeister -StarHeart Web Designs
"We can use doubt in a corrosive way that keeps us from getting anywhere. Or we can doubt
with an innocent open mind stating 'I really want to learn something.'" - Charles
Tart
"If we mock what we do not understand, we might learn too late that our arrogance has led
to our annihilation"- Outer Limits
"You must either create your future or others will do it for you."
- Joe Michael Stracynski
ZoX, says Hi!
"Why do you need SETI?
We're already here."
Have you seen
NASA's STS-80 video?
The STS-48, STS-80, and STS-96 videos shows "fastwalkers" and proves
that THEY are here!!!
IMAX THEATERs FEATURING
NASA FILM WITH UFOs
The huge IMAX movie theaters are showing a film called "Mission to Mir."
One scene shows the US Space Shuttle near the Russian Mir space station with three disc shaped UFOs approaching
Mir. Calls to NASA by MUFON's distinguished Ernest Jahn have failed to confirm the UFOs. The NASA footage shows
two unknown objects fly slowly past the Mir and the third UFO stops and appears to observe the space station. The
movie features Astronaut Sharon Lucid aboard the Mir.
Holidays in Space Only 20 Years Away?
Nov 17, 1999
LONDON (Reuters) -Imagine an ultra expensive holiday with nothing to do but stare into
space.
Though that prospect may do little to lure you to rush out and book, the World Tourism Organization predicts it
will soon be a popular choice and that space travel will be commonplace by 2020 -- low orbit trips may even take
off within three years.
And as companies trip over each other building crafts to whisk adventurous tourists there first, an international
design firm is concentrating on building a place for them to stay.
Architects Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo (WAT&G), creators of the Legoland Theme Park in Windsor, southern
England, are hoping to solve the outer space hotel dilemma.
Their space resort, part cruise ship and part theme park, will accommodate 100 people as they orbit the Earth 186
miles up, dining on hydroponically grown food.
Still in its conceptual stage, the space hotel will be like a spinning bicycle wheel with spokes
that will simulate normal earth gravity in some parts and have zero gravity in others, allowing for weightless
sport and entertainment.
Howard Wolff, vice president of WAT&G, expects to have the space resort up and
running by 2017.
"A flight up to the resort will be quicker than flying from Hong Kong to Singapore," he told
Reuters.
PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - An unmanned $125 million spacecraft, intended to
be the first interplanetary weather station, went missing Thursday and NASA scientists said they feared it had
broken up just as it was starting to circle Mars.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said there also was a possibility that the Mars Climate
Orbiter may have crashed into the Martian surface.
Scientists lost communication with the unmanned orbiter after it circled behind the Red Planet at about 5:30 AM
EDT.
Project manager Richard Cook told a news conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
"We believe the spacecraft came in at a lower altitude than we thought it would and that
potentially resulted in the loss of the mission."
The most likely scenario, he said, was that it had broken up.
"There is a possibility that it impacted the surface, but that is a remote possibility," Cook
said.
The climate orbiter was launched in December 1998 with NASA hoping that it would gather data on atmospheric conditions
on Mars through each of its seasons and learn about past and future weather conditions.
It aimed to study Martian weather for one Mars year -- about two Earth years -- to glean
information on the cycles of water, carbon dioxide and dust on Earth's neighbor.
Cook said that NASA scientists had expected that the orbiter would approach Mars at an altitude of between 87 and
93 miles when it fact it came in at 37 miles above the surface of the planet. He said the minimum survival altitude
was 53 miles.
The project's development manager, John McNamee, said, "We don't believe that (37 miles) is survivable."
Cook said there was a "significant drop" in altitude in the last few hours of the approach to Mars, but
the reason for that had not yet been determined.
Asked if human error, software or mechanical problems were to blame, Cook said, "We are essentially ruling
out spacecraft (mechanical) error and we are looking at the other two."
But both Cook and McNamee stressed that their ground crews were not suffering from "burnout."
Cook added, "Deep space navigation is very complex. We are pushing the state of the art to its limits. Yesterday
we believed that we knew where the spacecraft was but we were out by about 100 kilometers (62 miles). This is a
very significant change in altitude and that is why were are so shocked."
Cook said scientists still were looking for the craft by sending signals into space over a broad wave band, but
had been unable to locate it.
The apparent loss of the climate orbiter follows a dazzling string of successes for the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration's "better, cheaper, faster" program.
NASA has launched successfully 20 unmanned deep-space probes in the last two
years,
including the Mars Pathfinder mission that grabbed the attention and imagination of the
world with its little Mars Rover, which sent back thousands of pictures and millions of pieces of information as
it examined the surface of the Red Planet.
Carl Pilcher, the mission's science director, said with such a launch rate it was inevitable that something eventually
would go wrong.
"It is an inevitable part of pushing the envelope. There will be failures. I would like to say we would be
successful 100 percent of the time but that won't happen, but we will be successful most of the time," he
said.
Mars Climate Orbiter also was intended as a vital link in the Mars Polar Lander mission.
That craft is due to land on Mars on Dec. 3 and the climate orbiter would have acted as a relay station between
the lander and scientists on earth.
Cook said the probable loss of the climate orbiter would complicate the lander mission, but contingency plans were
already in place for the lander to transmit data directly to Earth
through the Deep Space Network and via the Mars Global Surveyor.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Related story: Six months ago Richard Hoagland, of Enterprise Mission, predicted that the Mars Probe would
be "reported" as being inoperable once it got near Mars.
CIA Director Woolsey and President Jimmy Carter have seen UFOs.
Campaigning for the Presidency, Jimmy Carter promised to reveal the truth
about UFOs. He didn't follow through. After he left office, a journalist reminded Carter of his pledge. He said
nothing, choked up and walked away.
Project
Twinkle 1948.
Roswell Crash Shortly after we got the CIA, the Air Force splitting off from tha Army, the National Security
Agency, and Project Blue Book.
See the 1951 film "The Thing" and Spielberg's 1978 film "Close Encounters".
Operation Blue Book
Majestic-12
Men in Black
Could extra-terrestrial travel be interdimensional travel?
Cydonia
The artificial structures on Mars, in the Cydonia region, were inhabited
by 12-feet tall humanoids about a million years ago. They may have been our ancestors. Yes, Virginia, we too are
aliens. - Joe Monagle
Since NASA has violated its 1958 charter from Congress to provide space
technology for commercial use, Robert Bigelow, of Las Vegas, Nevada, is taking matters into his own hands. The
billionaire Bigelow announced on Art Bell's Coast-to-Coast Radio Show that he will be financing the construction of a luxury hotel cruise ship
for space flight around the moon. While looking for business partners, Bigelow is committing $500 million over
the next 15-years.
National Institute for Discovery Science
To report anomolous sightings (UFOs, fireballs, cattle mutilations, etc.) which just occurred, call
NIDS at 702-798-1700.
December 3, 1999 SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Shanghai
appeared convinced on Friday that an unidentified flying object had visited China's commercial capital.
Usually staid official newspapers insisted Thursday's sighting was no vision.
"UFO darts across the city's skyline," screamed a headline in the official Shanghai Daily.
"UFO appears in the sky over Shanghai," the Wenhui Daily said in a front page story with
color photographs.
Nearly 100 people claimed to have seen a cylindrical object with a flaming orange tail
moving over the western part of the city for about an hour Thursday afternoon, the
newspapers said. They offered no theories on what it might have been.
But the Shanghai Daily ran the story on the same page as an advertisement for "The X Files
Movie," based on the popular television series about two U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who probe
unexplained phenomena.
What Do You Say
to a Naked Alien?
For starters, ask it about its mother and father.
by Joel Achenbach. Nov. 22, 1999
The spaceship comes down in your backyard, crushing a bed of petunias, and
out steps the alien. This is always an awkward social moment. What, exactly, do you say to someone who may hold
the secrets to the universe? After, that is, you finish quivering and quaking and wondering if he (she? it?) is
going to suck you down like a raw oyster?
Obviously you would want to get some consideration out of the alien--no easy trick, to judge from most alien-encounter
narratives. The aliens who show up in the middle of the night and abduct people are notoriously stingy with information.
They never solve any mathematical equations. They don't offer up the long-sought simple and "elegant"
proof of Fermat's LastTheorem. They don't tell us where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.
Then aliens do communicate with humans, they're always a bit like the Michael Rennie alien in the 1951 movie The
Day the Earth Stood Still: They tell us to behave. They say we need to get our act together. They're self-help
gurus. A fellow named Darryl Anka channeled an alien named Bashar for many years, and Bashar, though wise, didn't
really have much data to offer, just advice on how to live a better life. (Anka, when I last spoke to him, said
he'd given up channeling Bashar and was working on designing a UFO theme park.)
There's a scene in Carl Sagan's excellent novel Contact when Ellie Arroway, his protagonist, whooshes down some
kind of intragalactic "wormhole" and winds up on a sunny beach, face to face with an alien. The alien,
annoyingly, doesn't seem to know who built that wormhole subway system. Eventually Arroway gets around to asking
what is no doubt her most urgent question: "I want to know what you think of us, what you really think."
How. That's really the wrong question there. That's blowing it big time. This gal crosses half the galaxy and is
tossed and rattled around to within an inch of her life, and when it's over she starts fishing for a compliment!
No, a better question to an alien would be: What are you made of? Are you based on carbon and liquid water? Do
you have DNA as your information-bearing molecule or something like it?
Stephen Jay Gould put it this way, on Timothy Ferris' recent PBS program Life Beyond Earth: "What's your biochemistry?"
Some people may argue that other questions should precede the biological ones. They might, for example, choose
a political question, asking who, exactly, is in charge of this universe. Or they may skew theological, and ask
if there's a God and what exactly he's got on his mind. A good argument could be made that a physicist should pose
the first batch of questions to an alien, asking whether it's possible to go faster than the speed of light and
whether there are other universes outside our own. The physicist and the alien would no doubt get embroiled in
a discussion of string theory, and soon they'd be jotting down incomprehensible equations about 10-dimensional
vibrating loops. Maybe at the end of the encounter we'd figure out how to yank free energy out of the quantum vacuum.
We'd have a new trick for cooking a hot dog.
My feeling is that the biology questions trump everything else. We know essentially nothing about life beyond Earth.
Because we are ignorant of other biological systems, we have no context for understanding Earth life, for knowing
to what extent the life we see around us is, on the cosmic scale, relatively ordinary or totally freakish. We don't
know, for example, if Earthlike planets are common. We look around our own solar system, and what appears to be
common are planets that have no life whatsoever.
We also see signs that Venus and Mars were once more hospitable to life and over many hundreds of millions of years
became inhospitable. Bad stuff happens to good planets. It'd be nice to know more about that trend.
He also don't know how life originates and to what extent it evolves in an orderly pattern. The debate in Kansas
over the teaching of evolution misses the real debates within the field. There are those who argue passionately
that life originated with a single replicated molecule. Another camp favors the notion that it began with a kind
of garbage bag of molecules that more or less eased its way from nonlife to life. And the biggest question may
be to what extent evolution is divergent or convergent.
Divergence gives us a bewildering variety of life; convergence gives rise, repeatedly, to certain anatomical features,
like wings and eyeballs. You can make an argument that intelligence is an extremely unlikely, random, quirky event
in terrestrial biology, or you can make the counter-argument that you can see intelligence coming down the pike
from many millions of years in advance. On that issue hinges the abundance of intelligent life in the universe.
How likely is it that life elsewhere will go through the same evolutionary leaps as life on Earth? To take one
obscure but critical example: Life on Earth remained entirely one-celled for 3 billion years. For at least half
of that time, those cells didn't have a nucleus. They couldn't use oxygen in their metabolism. They were pitiful
even by microbial standards.
So, how lucky was the evolutionary leap from prokaryotes (non-nucleated
microbes) to eukaryotes (nucleated, and using oxygen)? It happened here about 2.1 billion years ago. Was that our
lucky break? Or does life, in general, figure out the trick of using oxygen and growing big and brawny?
And, of course, we don't really know what we're talking about when we talk about "intelligence." We tend
to think of creatures that use technology and language. But that could be shortsighted. Maybe most intelligent
creatures are dolphinoids, blissfully swimming in an alien ocean with little interest in building spaceships.
Imagine for a moment that we could see the universe through the eyes of an alien creature. Would the universe look
more or less the same? Or would we be confused, dazzled, and feel as though we were hallucinating?
Are the aliens interested in the same things that interest us? Could we carry on a meaningful conversation? We
should prepare ourselves for finding something out there that's totally unexpected. And we have to prepare for
bad news, or at least bad news in the context of our Star Trek fantasy. We may have wildly overestimated the abundance
of extraterrestrial civilizations. Carl Sagan thought there were millions such civilizations in existence right
now in our own galaxy. The actual number may be a handful. Or we could be, as Sagan's old collaborator I.S. Shklovskii
argued, "functionally alone." Not literally alone, just so isolated that there's no practical way to
make contact of any kind with another intelligent species.
Whatever we do, we shouldn't take ourselves for granted. There may be something extremely rare and wonderful about
a world in which water splashes on the surface, and where life survives for nearly 4 billion years, where it has
the leisure to evolve and, through natural selection, explore the possibilities of complexity.
The search for life beyond Earth always doubles back to our own existence. Why are we
this way? How did we come about? How special is it to be a thinking organism? This is the kind of stuff you'd want
to discuss with the aliens. And remember, they like it when you compliment them on the really cool spaceship.
Related in Slate - Upon the 1996 release of Independence Day, Robert Wright pondered how humankind would respond to an alien invasion and
speculated about the lessons civilizations might learn.
Related on the Web - Although Darryl Anka has stopped channeling Bashar, he continues to market tapes of the alien's
life lessons on the Bashar home page. On one tape, disciples learn the relationship between "personality and [one's] spiritual nature" and "how
to get pregnant." Click here to buy Carl Sagan's Contact. PBS has posted much of the information from its series
Life Beyond Earth on an excellent Web site, including an
archive of interviews with scientists on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. If
you want to read a less conflicted view of the subject, visit this page, which outlines the locations of alien bases on Earth. And if you
encounter aliens yourself, pass on word to the National
UFO Reporting Center, which keeps a comprehensive database of all sightings.
Joel Achenbach is a reporter for the Washington Post.
Illustrations by Robert Neubecker.
Andrew Homer wrote:
Hi Larry,
Sounds like you're a science historian rather than a speculating researcher.
Yes, we each know what we know. But we don't know what we don't know.
The ETs sighted may not be extraterrestial, but could be time travelers or may come from a parallel universe. Either
way, human science is so young and advanced beings could be so old ...
I concede you're a noble historian. I'll conjecture. I'll keep the Patent
Office open.
You wrote: "As for UFOs and the like, I am one who would only consider these prospects if an ET were gnawing
on my arm."
I'm afraid if you made such a report that the Larry Crowells of this world wouldn't believe you.
If they really bit then they would leave behind DNA that could be sequenced
and not identified with existent terristrial animals. So far as I know not one strand of alien DNA has been amplified
in a PCR.
Did you know that Enrico Fermi used falling pieces of paper to measure the strength of the first atomic bomb at
Trinity Site?
Anyway the file I sent you involves new physics that gives a fundamental reason for the Planck scale cut off for
quantum gravity. This is new physics, not history. This cut off was first advanced by Andre Sakharov in 1969. Andre
Sakharov developed the hydrogen bomb for the Soviet Union, and became a dissident after being disturbed by the
deaths of eagles at the Novya Zemlya test sight.
The problem is that there is utterly zero data for the existence or nature of ETs, whether they are space travelers
or time travelers. I am rather skeptical about time travel, for while the Einstein field equations will allow for
such, as seen with the Godel universe (an exact solution to the differential equations of general relativity),
the problem is that the matter-fields required to generate such a spacetime do not give stability when they are
considered as quantum fields. Time travel involves closed timelike geodesics that enclose a two cocyle determined
by a nontrivial spacetime topology. The problem is that there is a dichotomy between the classical solutions and
those that involve quantum mechanics. There are a couple of papers by Ford and Pfenning in 1994 and 1996 in Physical
Review D on the subject. In order to travel in time one needs to violate the Hawking-Penrose stress-energy conditions
(Hawking, Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime, Cambridge University Press 1973). Essentially the expansion
of the fields in harmonic oscillator modes results in enormous stochastic fluctuations for violations of the Hawking-Penrose
stress-energy conditions, so that in order to travel backwards in time one would need to use as much energy as
there is mass-energy available within the observable universe. One can also look at this according to general causal
principles, such as what Robert Wald has done. If there are time travelers then they must have some sort of causal
influence upon our current world and its state of affairs.
In my book that is being published by World Scientific Publishers I have examined the conformal structure of spacetime
with these types of solutions. I have found that nontrivial topologies only appear to exist where spacetime itself
is quantized, but that where spacetime is classical one arrives at the same rather negative result above. It would
appear that wormholes, warpdrives and time travel are only the province of quantum gravity where there does not
appear to exist a unitary equivalence between Hilbert spaces of quantum states.
While the results may appear negative, the reality of science is in fact a lot more interesting than those of pseudoscience.
