ALIENS – THE SPACE KIND

Today, two of the blogs that I follow made mention of aliens.   

The Brain Police posted a video about the Mormon religion and their belief that the human race was seeded by god/aliens from outer space. 

  

Then on Squatlo’s Rant, Squatlo  begged the question that if there are little grey (not green) men perhaps they are not an alien species, but the evolution of the human race many centuries into the future, traveling back in time to view their more primitive predecessors (being alien, male and human would account for their obsession for probing the sexual organs – vice cat scan.)

Just for the sake of the exercise there are scenarios that could fit this proposition. 

Einstein’s formula for light travel, posed that moving away from an object near the speed of light slows the time in the traveling object with respect to the relatively stationary object.

 

For physics nerds the formula is:  time change equals laps time on the traveling object (rocket,) divided by the square root of one minus the speed of the rocket (as percentage of the speed of light) squared, divided by the speed of light squared.

It works out that if a rocket were to travel from earth at eight tenths the speed of light, after thirty years aboard the rocket the earth and its people would have aged fifty years – the crew of the rocket returning to earth would have traveled twenty years into the future.

  

The closer to the speed of light traveled the more time slows aboard the rocket and speeds up on the earth.    This has been scientifically tested on a small scale and found to be correct.

So travel into the future is possible; but, not into the past – according to current theory.

  

However, who is to say that people of the future would not have found the key to time travel into the past… worm holes etc.

  

Now for the big headed, small bodied, large eyed aliens of science fiction

We can see a scenario where mankind of the present pushes the climate change past its tipping point – the ozone layer is depleted resulting in sun rays becoming deadly. 

Humans would have to become nocturnal and possibly subterranean dwellers.

Over the eons, through evolution, human bodies could become more fragile, eyes become larger and brain pans enlarge to house the advance brain functions necessary to devise technologies suited to the new environment.

If these humans traveled back in time to view us, their more primitive relatives, it could account for our obsession with ET and Paul.

Squatlo; I think you have a better argument than the Mormons.

I’m just saying

the Ol’Buzzard

A MOMENT OF GEEK

In an earlier post I mentioned that I believe that time is perceived differently by people of different ages.   So here is my reasoning.

According to Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity time is not absolute – it can vary according to the speed of an object.   The theory pertains only to the time relationships between two objects where one is moving away from the other at a fixed speed.

To simplify the theory let me give an example:

 A            rocket              B

A is a base station that shoots a burst of light to station B every two minutes.

There is a rocket ship traveling between A and B at ¾ the speed of light.

Every time the rocket receives the burst of light from A it fires an identical burst of light to B. 

Because the speed of light is constant B receives both beams of light from A and the rocket simultaneously at two minute intervals.

But, because the rocket is moving away from A at ¾ the speed of light (constantly increasing its distance from A) it is receiving the light flashes from A, not at two minute intervals, but at three minute intervals. 

Ref: Einstein’s formula – for geeks…

Elapse time = the square root of the  time in reference-one divided by one, minus the speed of the rocket square divided by the speed of light square.

The crux of this is that A is transmitting light burst at two minute intervals - and B receives the light from station A and the rocket at identical two minute intervals; where as the rocket is receiving and transmitting its light burst at three minute intervals.

Time is moving faster on the ground than it is on the rocket ship.  What takes two minutes to happen on the ground takes three minutes to happen on the ship. 

By the way, this has been proven in experiments.

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity deals with time variations due to strong gravitational fields.   

But we don’t have to go into that - it is enough to know that time is not constant but can seem to vary under different circumstances.   (Actually the cosmos doesn’t give a damn about time and gravity and space – these concepts only matter to humans as we try to understand and catalog everything to our limited understanding.) 

Now for the Ol’Buzzard’s Theory of Relative Time:

A child of ten perceives a year as one tenth of his life.   It seems forever between one Christmas and another, or birthdays.

A man of seventy perceives a year as one-seventieth of his existence – a relatively short time between birthdays.

Time is experienced seven times faster for a seventy year old than for a ten year old.

Each year I seem to get older faster.   That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  

the Ol’Buzzard  

JULY 16 ANNIVERSARY

 HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB.

In 1939, at Einstein’s insistence, President Roosevelt formed a committee to oversee Atom Bomb research.   The Congress appropriated $6,000 for the program.

In 1942 Dr. John Oppenheimer (a German immigrant) was named director of the Atomic Research Laboratory.

Oppenheimer’s team consisted of:

·       Hans Albert Bethe (German)

·       Enrico Fermi (Italian)

·       Willard Libby (American)

·       William Penney (British)

·       Leo Szilard (Hungarian)

·       Harold Urey (American)

The central question in developing the bomb was the critical mass of (U-235) enriched uranium.  It was felt that too little uranium and the neutrons would escape without producing a chain reaction.   Too much uranium might cause a massive chain reaction that would destroy Los Alamos and its 5000 employees.  There were even some scientist that questioned whether the chain reaction could actually be controlled or might it initiate an event that would destroy the earth. 

July 16, 1945

The bomb was six feet long and two feet in diameter, weighing 4 tons.  Using plutonium 239 the bomb exploded atop a 100 foot steel tower with a force of 20,000 tons of TNT.  The steel tower was instantly vaporized and one mile of desert sand was turned to glass.   The concussion from the blast was felt ten miles away and a mushroom cloud was produced that extended 40,000 feet into the atmosphere.

 the Ol'Buzzard

DAJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

A RAMBLING FROM NERD LAND. 

Over my seventy-plus years I have, rarely, but occasionally been in a situation where I had a flash insight that I had experienced a particular place, situation or group of people before – though I never had.    This feeling usually came out of the blue, lasted for a second and passed; and later was hard to remember or totally forgotten.  

If it were just me I would write it off as some synapse in my brain misfiring and giving me a visual presentation of a memory download.   But, my wife has experienced it - and almost everyone I know says they have had similar experiences.  

The most comfortable solution would be a brain fart; but, stick with me on this: when it comes to understanding reality, experience can be deceptive. 

Over the last three hundred years, despite continuous religious opposition, Science, and especially Physics, has demystified most of the natural occurrences of our earth and  our solar system.  Science has now moved to the realm of explaining the universe and the cosmos, relying heavily on Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.   Many of these theories require you to leave your comfort zone and accept strange concepts of reality. 

Physicists come from a wide discipline of studies: theoretical physics, relativistic physics, quantum physics, cosmological physics, computational physics and unified physics.    The hope is, at some time in the future, a unification of all these different disciplines will result in one overall grand theory that will explain all phenomena.

The one thing that is curious about all the physics disciplines is that at some point they all converge to a theme of parallel-universes.   Theoretical Physics proposes the possible of parallel – mirror universes that are just beyond our reality: universes where we exist in a complimentary energy realm.  This would pose the question of which realm was the bona fied and which was the mirror image. 

Einstein’s Special Relativity depends on the assumption that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light: among other things, this theory continues on to say that as you approach the speed of light, time in your frame of existence slows down.   The thought is that if you could exceed the speed of light time travel into the past would be theoretically possible.

 Recently, in the super Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland a particle traveling faster than the speed of light was discovered: it popped into existence for a small fraction of a second and then vanished.   

Rather than traveling through time I might pose that this particle was transiting across parallel universes.

Making a big circle: could our experience of  Daja vu be an electronic flash from a parallel-mirror universe?     

I’m just asking. 

Maybe that's where all those extra socks come from in the drier.  

the Ol’Buzzard

Kinda makes the Republican convention seem more ridiculous doesn’t it.