People used to think Earth was flat. Since flat things have edges, Earth had edges, which meant Earth was likely finite. If someone walked in one direction far enuf, they would fall off an edge or hit a wall, one or the other.
People now know Earth is a ball moving thru space. Walk far enough on a ball, get back where you started, right? Does this simple fact imply Earth is infinite? Of course not. We know it isn’t. Earth has finite area, which can be roughly calculated.
Today, no one understands enough about space to know how much of it there might be. Some think space goes on forever. Regardless of direction, spacecraft can never reach the end because space is all there is and must therefore be infinite.
The problem with this view comes from what folks think they know about gravity. Massive objects seem to bend and twist space in ways that make time slow down and light bend. It’s mysterious, because if you think about it, why should they?
Isn’t it crazy that massive objects have profound effects on things they don’t touch? They change path and timelines of whatever travels nearby. Something unseeable transforms invisible oceans of spacetime putty, which pushes about whatever lies buried inside.
Einstein showed how to calculate power of massive objects like stars and (then unknown) black holes to warp space in ways that forced changes to direction and speed of anything at all that moved by, but he didn’t explain why or how. It seems puzzle pieces are missing which found would at long last reveal what this malleable stuff might be.
It’s nothing we measure. Many have tried but space seems to be entirely empty. Virtual particles pop in & out of existence, yes, but taken together their measurable qualities add to zero.
What answer makes sense? —infinite space or not?
Einstein’s answer was that spacetime makes no sense apart from existence of mass & energy, which are two sides of a coin, like light, which measured becomes point-like momentum or spreading energy undulation. Apart from mass & energy, space & time cannot, do not exist.
Isn’t non-existence the meaning of the word “space”? Under any scenario that can be imagined, space & time have no meaning except to help thinking people describe peculiar relationships between objects we observe & measure. In this sense, every massive thing is connected to every other.
Energy saturates the universe. It’s everywhere we look. It fills gaps between objects with 3 dimensional ripples of undulating something or other. It means that we—tiny neural networks that we are—live trapped in cosmic amber, like prehistoric insects.
At the scale of stars and galaxies we are truly constrained; frozen in time; unable to move in any way that can be noticed—were anyone out there at scales able to observe & take notes. It is impossible for any living thing to secure vantage points in spacetime where it might observe the entire universe.
In this sense, the Universe is a single, solid object, which is imagined by something conscious trapped inside. Perhaps, somewhere far away beyond our vision an event horizon emerges beyond which mass & energy have no place.
The universe ends not with a wall or wail but instead a whisper, a whimper, a last desperate gasp. Light fades to embers, then into dark night where imagination does not go and black birds no longer sing.
Billy Lee Note: a version of this essay was first published by Billy Lee on Quora in January 2025
I’m happy to publish this essay because it is filled with insights about how the Universe might work. Physicist Mark John Fernee spent his career thinking about and doing experiments to work out some answers that ring true, at least to me. I learned about him on Quora.
Since humans first grasped the idea that stars are not tiny holes in a tarp that shades Earth from Heaven, scientists have made progress toward resolution of questions both fundamental and mysterious which can finally be defended with logic and evidence.
Think about it.
Is a creator necessarily constrained by laws of physics to initiate the cosmos people see? Is a first cause necessary to start any Universe? What underlying reality hidden from science permits God to evade any concept of law to become the essential, fundamental, irreducible first cause of all that has ever been or ever will be?
People, a few of them, continue to believe that stars are pin-holes; Earth is flat, disease is demon-caused, and on and so on. These speculations are obviously false to anyone who tests them against dispassionate observation, which is the process called science.
Is the Universe deterministic? The answer to this question—should anyone know—might help answer whether anyone is truly free to decide. Can people make decisions unconnected to events that go back to some conjectured beginning or are they instead prisoners of delusions of freewill peculiar to all conscious life-forms like us?
What follows is an answer, first posted on Quora. I let it percolate on the site for months to absorb whatever reaction it might garner from interested folks. I wrote not only to learn from others but to make the idea of determinism comprehensible to the curious who can read.
Of course, I’m a Pontificator, not a credentialed scientist nor theologian nor philosopher. What I’ve learned—what I write—remains unvalidated by any expert or guild.
Added at the end of the essay is a link to one of many posts on Quora by Mark John Fernee about some of the science of determinism.
For the interested, click the link at the end of my essay to review some of Fernee’s thoughts on the physics of determinism. After reading, login to Quora to access readers’ comments and Fernee’s responses.
(Note: It will be necessary to visit several spaces on Quora to find every comment.)
Unusual insights hide in plain sight like Easter eggs.
Here goes my essay:
It might be difficult for intelligent, science-indoctrinated people to accept but the universe at all scales is most likely not deterministic and never has been.
Before folks who “know better” wander off to search for something more confirmational of their biases, I hope to convince a few of the more open-minded to reflect on a couple of stomach-churning examples.
After all, simple statistics suggest that some preordained percentage of readers will read on; a well-defined subset of those readers are certain to agree with my arguments, which might take any arbitrary form at all—depending on the vagaries of my imagination and what I ate for dinner, perhaps.
Sounds deterministic, doesn’t it?
Not really.
The truth is I have no idea what I will write before I write it. I’ve staked a position, which I intend to defend until I convince myself of its truth. Some predictable number will read and be likewise convinced.
Let me admit right now that I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic. I don’t know if my will is my own or someone else’s.
I don’t know who I am, where I am, what I am, or why I am. I don’t know what time it is. I don’t know where I’m going. I can’t remember where I’ve been. I have no clue what 99% of me looks like because it’s inside a place I can’t see. It’s never been photographed. I’ve seen no reflection or picture of almost all of me.
I don’t know how my brain works or why I’m conscious. I haven’t seen my brain. Doctors tell me I have one. They gave me some films from an MRI and told me the grey smears were it. I took their word. It’s puzzling because the universe inside my head seems larger—infinitely more vast than plate smudge.
I have ideas but 99% of them are likely to be mostly wrong. Why? Because my ideas come from somewhere else, and I alter them. I channel ideas but if you ask where they come from, I can’t say. I don’t know why I think and say and write the things I do.
Well, most of the time I think I know. It’s called being well-grounded. Yeah, that’s me. I’m grounded to a reality that makes no sense during those times when I think deeply about what reality might be.
Take blue for instance—the color. It’s a hallucination, right? It tells me nothing about the wavelength of light that triggers blue in my brain. I’ve never seen a photon, have you? When stripped of color, what might a photon be? I have no idea. Some say it’s an electromagnetic corpuscle with wave-like properties.
What the hell is that?
Who knows that galaxies are fragile? So are orbits of planets and moons. As are universes.
The Higgs field is unstable, right? It can undergo phase transitions. Scientists say it’s true. It’s like flushing a toilet. One moment the toilet is a stinky mess; phase transition is the sound of swirling water—a whirlpool that dumps all into the abyss. What returns is blue water and clean porcelain.
What will all that went before mean? Trillions of lifeforms found comfort in the mess. What kind of determination pushed the handle to upend the destinies of trillions of tiny creatures no human will meet or see?
Why do humanoids feel free to make arbitrary decisions if it isn’t true that they make them? Does it mean that everything they believe is a lie?
Has the Universe made us its fools?
I will tell you this: the thought has occurred to me that the Universe might be my fool. Without me to tell its stories it’s nothing but a dead thing with no past and no future.
Apart from conscious-life—in particular, my life—the Universe is simply impossible.
I don’t believe the consciousness we experience dies. It’s something foundational that everyone plugs into when they live. Somehow, we all live inside each other, and conscious life lives inside us. When we die our bodies abandon consciousness and decay away, but conscious life lives on into the past and future as it always has and always will.
Our bodies count for nothing. It’s why none have seen themselves. A quick, confirmational glimpse of this or that part of us is all we can hope for—then it’s gone.
As my Quora readership inches closer to 500,000 views, more admins are asking me to become a contributor to their spaces.
On Quora, a half-million views is almost nothing, but for me personally it seems like a lot. I’ve had answers throttled and in some cases pulled-down for violating rules that no one can explain. Fortunately, I’ve successfully appealed every take-down.
I live in fear that Quora will one day “disappear me” as so often happens to controversial people on other social sites. Whatever sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Quora are about, freedom of speech does not seem to be one of their core values, at least to my way of thinking.
Isn’t it obvious?
Social media is run in the main by faceless administrators who have hidden agendas; they don’t abide by any First Amendment in any Constitution anywhere in the world.
Because pontificators have an expectation that they will be allowed to express themselves freely on the internet, we play along while the sites we promote use us in ways we don’t understand. Admins don’t seem to want to come clean. When was the last time any administrators explained themselves when not under threat of subpoena?
Some observers of social media say it’s about money; others say it’s about political persuasion to the far right or to the middle or away from the far left; others say it’s service to intelligence agencies who experiment to throw elections.
Who really knows?
The following questions are among the several dozen I addressed on Quora.com during the last of the 2019 winter holidays. The questions and answers are mostly about science and politics. I threw in a couple about Jane Fonda; she’s controversial in some spaces.
Billy Lee
Disclaimer:Billy Lee is a pontificator, not an expert. The people who read, upvote, and share his answers don’t care. The Editorial Board
1 – From the point of view of those who live on planets at the “edge” of the observable universe, would the diameter of their observable universe differ from how we on Earth view the diameter?
If the Big Bang theory is right and we are living in the only universe, it must be true at the periphery that some observers will look to the center to see many stars and galaxies while others will look away to see nothing at all.
If we live in a multiverse, the folks at the periphery who look away will likely see universes like ours that emit EM radiation. Those universes that don’t broadcast electromagnetically will be as invisible as dark matter, which many believe makes 85% of the stuff that lies all around.
Presumably, universes look different than stars or galaxies; observers at the periphery might be able to tell the difference.
Some conjecture that universes are nothing more than black holes, which together form an infinite foam that flows perhaps to infinity.
Inside each black universe are more black holes which house black holes that contain more black holes and on and on in a progression that pushes holes to infinity like the reflections in funhouse mirrors.
Black holes emit Hawking radiation, which means they glow in the dark of space. Perhaps it is Hawking radiation observers at the peripheries will learn to detect, measure, and catalogue as they study a multiverse humans will never see.
Sadly, Earthlings are buried somewhere inside an enormous place at least 93 billion light years across. The periphery of this vast expanse is pushing outward at 7 times the speed of light.
We can’t see to the edge of our own universe; we have no way to observe universes that lie beyond the reach of our telescopes—should more than one be “out there.”
Observers at the periphery should know things about the nature of reality that Earthlings can only guess. They see beyond our peripheries.
But isn’t it also true that we know things they don’t? Because of our more “central” location we understand better than those at the peripheries what the size and age of the universe must be.
Maybe.
If we could only collaborate with the Peripherans to share what we’ve learned. Laws of physics make a forever prison that walls away the truth of all that goes lost beyond the boundaries of human sensors.
2 – Do all EM waves travel at the speed of light?
All electromagnetic waves travel at lightspeed in the medium of space where the nearest mass is too far away to have any effect.
Notice I said the medium of space, not the vacuum.
It’s not entirely clear that what astrophysicists call vacuum is in fact empty.
The conjecture that 95% of the universe is not electromagnetically active but is active gravitationally should be kept in mind because light bends and decelerates in the presence of gravity. The best known example is black holes, which divert and trap photons.
Are there volumes of space inside the Universe where the conjectured dark energy and dark matter don’t reside? If so, does the speed of light increase or decrease inside these volumes?
Light slows as it passes through materials like glass. Some kinds of glass slow photons by as much as 40%.
One explanation is that photons excite electrons as they pass over and through the molecules and atoms that make glass. Because photons passing through are not necessarily at frequencies resonant with the electrons in the glass, electrons are unable to absorb enough energy to jump from one energy state to another. Instead, they vibrate just enough to emit polaritons, which impede photons like a pool of molasses impedes dropped pebbles.
The photons of light seem to acquire mass as their velocity decreases. When the photons exit glass they again go “massless” and resume lightspeed instantly.
Could a phenomenon similar to that of glass be typical of the space inside the Milky Way Galaxy where planet Earth resides? If so, what everyone thinks they know about EM waves and the isotropic nature of the Universe might need some tweaking.
If it turns out that despite the consensus of science, photons do indeed contain a small amount of mass, they might have enough in aggregate to account for the curious behavior of galaxies. Conjectures about the invisible dark no one can see might not be necessary.
3 – If the universe is expanding faster than light, how can we currently withstand that kind of speed but we can’t if we replicate it under our current conditions? Is it a matter of relativity? Am I misunderstanding something?
The space in the universe is expanding by 14 miles-per-second for every million light-years of distance.
If this distance is scaled down to equal the circumference of Earth, the expansion will measure about one-tenth of a mile per year. Over a human lifetime the expansion will measure 8 miles. No ordinary non-scientist will notice the difference at this scale.
The universe is at least 93 billion light-years across. Do the math to see that space is expanding from one side of the universe to the other at 7 times the speed of light.
But some perspective is in order. Inside the Milky Way Galaxy, which is roughly 100,000 light years across, the expansion is a mere 1.4 miles-per-second. Remember: a light year is almost 6 trillion miles. The Milky Way is almost 600,000 trillion miles across. 1.4 miles-per-second is practically nothing.
The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.5 light years away—26 trillion miles. In one year the space between us and it expands by less than 2,000 miles. Meanwhile, the star itself is moving away from our Sun 200,000 times faster—about 12 miles-per-second. The expansion of space accounts for almost none of the separation.
Force is a measure of mass accelerating, right? Mass is not really accelerating due to the expansion of space. Space is puffing up like a loaf of raisin-bread in an oven. The raisins (galaxies) get carried along by the expansion.
The light that travels between stars and galaxies stretches into redder wavelengths as the loaf grows. But forces accelerating galaxies and stars are almost entirely due to masses acting over distances too short for the expansion of space to have any more than a statistically negligible effect.
The expansion of space adds up over larger and larger distances to become enormous, yes, but in the much smaller volumes of space where a few dozen or so galaxies live the gravity-induced distortion of spacetime by mass overwhelms it, at least for now.
4 – What existed before the Big Bang? Was there always something? How did the universe come into being from nothingness? Is God a possibility?
No one knows the answers to these questions one way or the other, but smart, popular people have published opinions based on their prejudices and what little they think they know for sure.
Currently, I favor the idea by Roger Penrose and others called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC). The basic idea is that a sufficiently old and expanded universe will lose all its mass through evaporation out of black holes; the metrics of spacetime become indistinguishable from a singularity, because without mass, spacetime is meaningless.
The universe puffs along like smoke from a choo-choo train—each universe emerges in a kind of “big bang” from the dying gasp of the last.
In this scenario, the universe is eternal backward and forward in time. It has no beginning or end; it has EONS that last trillions of years and endlessly repeat. The universe never collapses; it expands. When its mass evaporates into energy, it triggers a new expansion that generates in its wake new matter and gravity to provide the metrics necessary for spacetime to once again emerge.
This idea does not rule out the possibility of God, but it doesn’t support the idea either.
It also doesn’t rule out the possibility that humans live inside a simulation.
Smart thinkers like Nick Bostrom have argued that the statistical probability of a simulated universe approaches certainty. If so, humans can’t know what the underlying reality is that enables a simulation like ours to be created and sustained.
Such a state of affairs opens the possibility that we are created and accountable to a creator of worlds who has its own reasons for doing things, which aren’t necessarily ones we can understand.
The hard problem of consciousness is a clue for those who believe the universe comes first and consciousness second that they might have the order reversed. The possibility that conscious life is fundamental and foundational is something folks might want to keep in mind.
5 – Does Lawrence Krauss believe in an infinite number of universes?
I don’t know.
Alan Guth is the most prominent voice for this conjecture.
Evidence for B-Mode polarization of gravity waves would support the idea that cosmic inflation is likely to be unstoppable; some think that runaway inflation creates matter and gravity in its wake. The process forms universes that bud and break off into new universes as the expansion of space foams along.
E polarized waves in the cosmic background radiation can be transformed into B polarized modes by either gravitational lensing or cosmic inflation. Determining which is which is difficult because space dust can and does mess with the data to give misleading results.
The problem is that no one has been able to prove that anyone has detected B-mode waves that aren’t the result of either gravitational lensing of E-modes or their interaction with space dust.
EDITORS NOTE: 2019-02-05 Some readers have complained that E & B mode waves are incomprehensible. To help, we have added a video followed by an excerpt from Wikipedia about the Cosmic Microwave Background:
From Wikipedia: The cosmic microwave background is polarized at the level of a few microkelvin.
There are two types of polarization, called E-modes and B-modes. This is in analogy to electrostatics, in which the electric field (E-field) has a vanishing curl and the magnetic field (B-field) has a vanishing divergence.
The E-modes arise naturally from Thomson scattering in a heterogeneous plasma.
The B-modes are not produced by standard scalar type perturbations. Instead they can be created by two mechanisms: the first one is by gravitational lensing of E-modes, which has been measured by the South Pole Telescope in 2013; the second one is from gravitational waves arising from cosmic inflation.
Detecting the B-modes is extremely difficult, particularly as the degree of foreground contamination is unknown, and the weak gravitational lensing signal mixes the relatively strong E-mode signal with the B-mode signal.
Scientists like Brian Keating have claimed in the past that they detected B-Mode polarization in gravity waves only to have to retract later when others offered alternative explanations. Nevertheless, Keating is involved in an effort in Chile to gather new evidence that he hopes will be incontrovertible and lead to a Nobel Prize.
If gravity waves with B-style polarization are not found, an argument will be made that cosmic inflation is not creating alternative universes. The proposals for ekpyrotic and other cyclic models of cosmology by folks like Steinhardt and Penrose will be strengthened.
The statistical certainty required to qualify a discovery is at minimum 99.9994% (5σ). In the best data so far, 97.2% is the closest to 5 sigma that anyone has reached.
The statistical metric that proves B-style gravity waves is formidable but within our grasp should it turn out that cosmic inflation really is generating universes.
So far, the evidence for alternative universes is not sufficiently robust.
6 – Is Jane Fonda correct to say that Trump’s actions are criminal?
I don’t know what actions by Trump Fonda says are criminal.
Trump and his thugs slander a lot of people; they lie continuously about the smallest things; they undermine our Constitution and public institutions. Somewhere in their mess of cruelty and paranoia are crimes against America and the voting rights of the public.
Only morons and deplorables would defend a man as depraved as our president has proven himself to be over decades. People are afraid of the president and his Russian/Israeli mob connections.
Jane seems to feel that seeing something wrong obligates her to speak up to point it out. With any luck at all, exposure can disinfect bad deeds.
One of the worst atrocities the United States has committed in modern times was its conduct of the Vietnam War. Jane Fonda was among the first of prominent Americans to say our country was doing bad things for no good reason.
People who visit Vietnam today say it is an amazing place. Communism and reunification have been good to the people who live there, which includes thousands of ex-pats.
Remember, we killed and wounded millions for nothing but the thrill of the kill. We poisoned vast areas of the country with cancer inducing defoliants like Agent Orange. When we tired of cruelty, we left.
Everyone knows what we did was wrong. Jane Fonda showed courage to say so and try in the most creative way she knew how to stop it. We owe apologies to Vietnam and reparations to fix what we broke.
It’s not going to happen, right?
I resigned an officer’s commission rather than fight this vile war. It makes me sick at heart that many of the people who did bad things have not yet asked God to forgive them.
Time is running out.
I believe everyone answers to God someday for the wicked things they’ve done. Pointing a finger at Jane and calling her “traitor” isn’t going to cut it with the Christ, because Jane belongs to Him; he defends her now as he defends us all.
Jesus said peacemakers are children of God. Does anyone believe it?
No one can say for sure you’ve asked the right question.
It’s likely humans live inside a simulation where reality is dumbed down in the same way video games are dumbed down to imitate a fantasy version of “real” life.
In a simulation, the simulants won’t necessarily see other life; their “science” is likely to be nonsense, which explains nothing and satisfies no one. Their history will be fabricated and make no sense to any simulant who takes time to examine origins.
Such is the state of human affairs. Humans continuously wage war, which our hosts might find endlessly entertaining. We search the heavens for companions but find none. The pinholes of light in the canvas tarp that entraps us—humanoids call them stars and galaxies, right? It’s illusion. Everything simulants believe is lies.
Who knows?
If humans live inside a simulation, reality outside the simulation might be foreign to the sensibilities of any simulant “genius” who tries to decipher and make sense of the rules.
In the reality that exists beyond, stuff other than mass and energy might be fundamental and foundational. Conscious life might not be troubled by the mysteries of existence, because outside the simulation there are no mysteries.
Is it possible that somewhere “out there” beyond the walls of the simulation, everything makes perfect sense?
8 – Why hasn’t the mass of the Earth increased from the dust of everything that ever lived on it over the last 4.5 billion years?
You are overestimating the weight of the biomass.
Almost everything that lives is mostly water, right? Water evaporates, falls as rain, freezes and so on, but the amount of water inside life-forms is a tiny fraction of the water that makes the oceans, lakes, rivers and clouds.
Shrink Earth to the size of a basketball made of polished metal like aluminum or steel. Breathe on the surface. At that scale, the mist of your breath will form a film that is deeper than the deepest oceans.
There is a lot of life in the oceans, but it is a tiny fraction compared to the amount of ocean water, which is itself a tiny fraction of the mass of Earth.
In the oceans formed by the moisture in your breath, the mass of life is unmeasurable compared to the weight of the mist of your breath and the weight of the polished basketball.
It is likely that more mass falls to Earth from space in a year than all the bio-mass that has lived and died on our planet during the past 4 billion years. I haven’t worked out the numbers, but it seems to me that there might be a reader “out there” who will enjoy doing the calculation.
9 – Would impeachment be beneficial to Trump’s reelection campaign?
Deplorable people develop ravenous appetites for scum. The more evidence presented that Trump is scum, the more his followers love him.
Trump lost the popular election by 11 million votes—3M to Hillary; 8M to independent candidates.
As long as votes are flipped in certain strategic counties, he will win the electoral college even if he loses the popular count by 20M or more.
It’s not possible to defeat a cult where everyone cheats to get the results they all want.
I know evangelical Christians who volunteered for the first time to work at polling stations in 2016 to make sure Trump’s votes were counted.
My question is whether these cult followers took as much care to make sure the votes of Trump’s opponents were counted fairly.
We’ll never know.
10 -What happens if we cannot guarantee a fair election in 2020?
People have trouble accepting the mathematically provable fact (look it up or take a college course) that fair elections are not possible. It is not possible to set up an equitable system to select a slate of candidates from which voters are able to fairly pick a single winner.
Nevertheless, we do the best we can, right?
In the USA, fair results are further disrupted by state election boards who flat out cheat, and we have the problem of the electoral college.
The current president claims he won by a landslide in the electoral college, but the truth is that he lost by the largest popular margin in the history of elections—11 million votes, which were 8% of the ballots. Clinton got 3 million more than Trump; third party candidates gathered in another 8 million.
Trump proved that he could win in the electoral college by tweaking the results in a few counties in three states. Confirmational recounts and challenges were squelched by GOP state courts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Even in Michigan where state-wide election results favored Democrats by 20 points, no recount was permitted Hillary Clinton who lost by 10 thousand votes.
Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA specialist. She offered NSA documents to prove the Russian military gained access to USA voting machines in 2016. Editor’s Note 5 December 2021: The information Reality released was used to help harden the 2020 presidential election against foreign interference according to CBS News. The USA holds Winner incommunicado — as they hold other whistleblowers like Daniel Hale of the NSA and Teri J. Albury of the FBI.
NSA analyst, Reality Winner, is currently serving an 8 year sentence of incarceration and media censure for trying to alert the public to voting machine tampering that executives at the National Security Agency know occurred.
Everyone remembers (or should remember) the fiasco in Florida that elected Bush Junior in 2000. The consequences were a disaster from which the USA is yet to recover. Twin Towers, Iraq War, financial collapse, and Great Recession are trigger words to help people remember the nightmare some may have repressed to stay sane. The USA came close to becoming a third-world country almost overnight.
In 2016 Americans shoved their way onto the Titanic one more time—the captain of the ship doesn’t even know how to swim. There is no way most Americans will survive the catastrophe that is on its way. We are going to hit an iceberg in the middle of the night. The water that we die in will be cold. In this movie, no one is coming to the rescue.
11 – Why has it been so hard to recreate the brain? It’s billions of years old, and still more complicated than any machines we have ever made.
Multi-celled life with neuron based brains came on line less than 400 million years ago.
One celled organisms like amoebas and protozoa are incredibly intelligent and agile yet they lack neurons, which seem to be the foundational units of modern brains. Fossils of amoebas have been found in rocks that are older than 400 million years.
To mechanically recreate a modern brain requires much more than simply wiring-up in three dimensions a hundred billion or so logic gates. Actually, such a building project would be prohibitively expensive and impossible to accomplish using current fabrication capabilities.
Even if it were possible to create the neuronic architecture of a brain, other mechanical structures such as nanoscale microtubules are probably essential to bring the brain into a conscious state such as the one experienced by humans.
Microtubules are the bones of cells—a sort of scaffolding to hold everything together. They play an essential role in meiosis and mitosis to keep DNA from becoming an entangled mess during cell divisions. They have a quantum nature that adds a probably essential complexity to neuronal activity inside brains.
Brains also have a chemical nature that enables them to interact with the complicated hormonal chemistries of the body to drive emotional intelligence—an intelligence essential to survival that depends on feelings to work properly.
The point is that before anyone can build a working brain, they will need to understand what a working brain is and how it actually functions. This knowledge may lie hundreds of years into the future. It might require super-computers to figure out how brains work; artificial super-intelligence is what might be required to create the schematics, blueprints, and production protocols to build living brains.
It’s possible that the artificial intelligence of a distant future will be what is finally able to recreate brains by deploying strategies that humans can never hope to understand, because sadly homo-sapiens may not be smart enough.
12 – Is light the most significant thing in the universe?
Light is electromagnetic radiation. We can feel some frequencies as heat, some we can see, but most frequencies we don’t see or feel. Humans evolved to see and feel frequencies of light that are prevalent at the surface of Earth and are able to penetrate into a few feet of saltwater in the oceans.
Earth’s magnetosphere and its atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen deflect or block high frequencies of light that pack a lot of energy. Life on Earth didn’t evolve to sense light frequencies that don’t get here.
Astronauts in space encounter these higher frequencies of light. Excursions into space are carefully choreographed to avoid solar flares and other known sources of high energy light. So far we’ve been lucky. No space traveler has yet been cooked by light they can’t see. On Earth people have learned not to stick their hand into an invisible beam of microwave light. They heat their coffee with microwaves instead.
If humans were the size of galaxies and lived in space, they would sense less than one percent of the energy and mass that is out there. 95% of the mass and energy in the universe is not electromagnetic according to the latest conjectures by astrophysicists. Space people will sense only a small fraction of the 5% that is electromagnetic—what everyone calls light and matter.
In the large scales of space, humans are tadpoles in the desert. Nothing in space makes survival easy for lifeforms accustomed to living under a blanket of heavy gases inside the comfort of a massive magnetic field that is generated by a planet unlike any other that astronomers have yet seen.
13 – What will happen to the Earth in three billion years?
It’s impossible to know, but the most probable scenario is that it will be swallowed by the Sun. Earth is likely to be struck by an asteroid that will break it into pieces; many will fall Sunward.
Solar systems have the reputation of being unstable over long periods. A popular conjecture of some cosmologists is that one or more of the giant outer planets might have moved inside the orbit of Mars during the distant past. Were this event to play out again, Earth’s orbit would be disrupted; it might be flung out to the faraway depths of the solar system or into the Sun.
If Earth drifts to the outer reaches of the Solar System it will—over many millions of years—freeze solid. It will generate its own heat only by radioactive decay of the uranium and thorium in the material beneath its crust. Radioactive heating seems to be typical in objects like Pluto and several of the moons that orbit Jupiter and Saturn. They have, some of them, warm oceans many miles below the frozen crust and ice that make their surfaces.
The moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt and rotation on its axis. The moon is receding at 1 to 1.5 inches per year. In 3B years, the moon will be 60,000 miles farther from Earth. Its gravitational pull will drop to almost half of what it is today. Computer simulations show that Earth is likely to start wobbling chaotically, even tip over onto its side. Such a scenario will disrupt climate and seasons to spark extinctions of plant and animal life.
A more urgent crisis is the production by humans of many thousands of tons of radioactive poisons, chemical toxins, and biological agents that can induce disease. These materials must be secured and protected for many tens-of-thousands of years to prevent breaches of containment structures, which will rust and rot after the humans who maintain them no longer can.
Risk analysts like Nick Bostrom have speculated that humans are likely to suffer an extinction event during the next few thousand years. Without human caretakers it might take less than 500 years for the poisons to break out to soak the earth like vinegar in a sponge.
People have a lot of ideas; the one that seems most reasonable to my mind is Conformal Cyclic Cosmology introduced by Sir Roger Penrose about 15 years ago where he proposed that the Universe is eternal into both the past and future; it has no beginning and no end.
CCC produces EONS in an infinite progression of puffs—much like a steam locomotive emits a series of puffs from its smokestack as it chugs along on its tracks.
These eons last trillions of years. At the end of an eon all matter has been sucked into black holes where it evaporates by the mechanism of Hawking Radiation. The Universe ends devoid of matter, which is necessary to establish the metrics of space and time.
A universe without matter is conformally equivalent to a singularity. The process by which a universe emerges from a singularity will be the same process that pushes a universe devoid of mass into becoming a new universe.
Under the CCC scenario “big bangs” create new universes on the ashes of the old to eventually introduce the matter necessary to establish the spacetime metrics of relativity and the foundational realities of the quantum world.
If CCC is valid, evidence of Hawking Points left behind from prior universes should be able to be identified in the cosmic background radiation. The search for these points has already begun.
15 – How did the earth get far enough away from the first photons of the cosmic background radiation that they are only now, 13 billion years later, arriving at our observatories?You are referring to the surface of last scattering, which isn’t a thing but is instead an estimated location.
The cosmic background radiation is a thing—1E90 photons released in the great photon decoupling event that occurred, I don’t know, maybe a half million years after the origin of the Universe we live in now.
These photons are still here; they saturate all space like vinegar in a sponge.
The surface of last scattering is the place where astronomers look to get an idea of how uniform was the decoupling of photons when the Universe turned on the lights.
The location of the decoupling event is a long way away (13.7B light-years maybe), but the distance to the edge of the universe on the other side of the surface of last scattering is a lot farther.
One reason is that space is currently expanding at 14 miles-per-second for every million light-years of distance. The edge of the Universe beyond the surface of last scattering is at least an additional 32B light-years; at its edge the Universe is expanding outward from the perspective of Earth at 3.5 times the speed of light.
We live at the center of a sphere of celestial objects we can detect that is 27.6 billion light-years across. Our physics predicts that the universe we can’t see is 93B light-years across at minimum. Across 93B light years, the expansion of space adds to 7 times the speed of light.
Because it is almost certain that Earthlings don’t live at the center of the Universe, most scientists familiar with the matter think that the actual universe is bigger than 93B light-years—perhaps a lot bigger.
16 – How did Jane Fonda betray Vietnam American POW’s during the Vietnam War? Were there repercussions after her visit to North Vietnam?
If I’m a prisoner, I want visitors. Celebrity visitors are even better.
Jane provided a first-hand account—a picture—of the captivity that helped war planners set up the conditions for an eventual release. We got almost all the POWs back.
Jane Fonda doesn’t get credit for the good she did. Probably the most important thing she accomplished was to remind Americans that we were attacking a primitive people thousands of miles from home for no good reason.
Had Vietnam been a nation of puppies and kittens, the atrocities of war would have affected more people whose hearts became stone as they continued to fight for too many years.
Many veterans have hearts that have yet to melt. Many are unable to apologize for their gullibility even now in their golden years as they prepare to meet God and account for their lives. Their leaders lied; soldiers believed the lies then; some continue to believe.
History has proved that those who protested the war were right. We owe Jane Fonda big time for having the courage to speak truth to racists and killers.
How many civilians display courage in the face of evil?
The United States killed over two-million souls during that depraved debacle. How is the world better? We have bitter people on all sides who won’t look into the mirror and take responsibility for what they did.
Blaming Jane Fonda for our moral failings is a mistake we must fix in order to heal.
17 – Is it possible that an object has weight but no mass?
Remember the formula that says force equals mass times acceleration.
F=m*a
Force is weight, right?
Mass accelerated by a gravitational field is what gives an object its weight (or force).
So it seems reasonable to believe that if mass is zero, force must also be zero. But that idea would be wrong. Another concept in physics is momentum. It is mass multiplied by its own velocity. Momentum is energy that can be used to do work.
Massless objects like photons have energy too. Photons have the ability to do work. The energy of light is related to its color (or frequency). The higher a photon’s frequency the more work it can do. Gamma photons have the highest frequencies. Some have energies equivalent to baseballs thrown by professional pitchers.
So it seems that both massless photons and massive matter have energy that can do work. Energy is energy so momentum must have some kind of equivalence to the frequency of massless photons.
What is work? It is force multiplied by the distance through which it moves. Since both massless photons and massive matter can do work they both must have some kind of equivalence related to force.
Therefore it is true that a massless photon can exert a force, which when measured can be thought of as its weight. The wave-particle duality of photons is another way of saying that an object with no mass can have weight (or force).
The idea that an object with no mass can exert a force which can be measured as “weight” has puzzled folks for a very long time. However, a string of formulas can be constructed to show that it is true.
The energy of photons goes up in tiny increments called quanta as their frequencies increase. When the energy gets high enough it gets difficult to force a photon to step up to the next highest energy level. It is something to keep in mind when pondering the physics of quantum phenomenon like black-body radiation or the photo-electric effect that Einstein described to win his Nobel Prize.
18 – Where do the ideas for the left/progressivism in the U.S. come from?
It’s been a long time since most Americans challenged the powerful elites who rule America. I would say the last serious challenges came during the Civil Rights and Vietnam war eras.
Since then, people have gotten lost in their personal lives; first responders have not fire-hosed too many black people; the Feds haven’t forced kids to fight in senseless wars. Everything is voluntary except that business owners are not permitted to exclude minorities from participating in the American way of life.
Some complain. Christians don’t want to bake wedding cakes for gay couples, but most eventually submit to the rule of law and do what’s right. Chick-Fil-A recently announced that it pulled back its financial support of organizations opposed to human rights for homosexuals.
Unless someone is poor (or sick or handicapped), they don’t understand what disadvantaged people go through. 75% of America is low-income, but the oligarchs have wrecked education for the marginalized by reducing funding for public schools while advocating for private education and the voucher-funding of home-schooling. Without good public education, most poor people and disadvantaged minorities don’t learn what they are missing or why.
Without a media that cares about inequality and highlights it, the 10% who live in the suburbs remain oblivious.
Some will pass by a gated community and wonder why they aren’t allowed in, but most keep on trucking, because they are powerless and ignorant. Companies hire conservatives, because they want docile employees who support capitalism — a form of slavery under which the slaves sometimes get to choose the plantation where they work.
The rewards for submission are good. A docile employee who does what they’re told and doesn’t complain can go a long way in America; sycophants make up a large percentage of the population. The risk of being kicked out of this fraternity of cowards keep almost all from telling anyone with power how they really feel.
Recently, angry people voted for a rich fool to even their score with liberals who annoy them with unintelligible warnings about fascism and its endless wars that only those with direct experience fully understand.
With no one in media to explain why oligarchs always create a colossal mess for regular folks, ordinary people will continue to tread water until they are overwhelmed by scarcity and danger. Only after will some learn through suffering the hard life-lessons that liberals try to help them avoid.
A felony arrest for protesting injustice is the most direct route to the truths that make one a progressive liberal. I look around and don’t see anyone willing to take righteous risks that lead to knowledge about what it is to be attacked by one’s own country for standing up for what is fair and good.
People pretend everything is fine until they no longer can. When that happens, they go in one of two directions – left or right.
19 – What do you think will happen to our democracy if Donald Trump is re-elected?
We lost our country when the Russians took the executive branch of the USA government in 2016.
Trump works for Russian oligarchs who make the mafia look like a class of unruly kindergarten children.
People on the front lines of this war against America are scared, but many are brave.
Republican leaders are the most scared, not of impeachment but of retaliation if they don’t do what they’re told. They embrace their abusers to avoid cognitive dissonance, which is a painful psychological condition that humans expend a lot of mental effort to avoid.
Impeachment poses no threat to Trump, because he isn’t leaving even if convicted by the Senate.
Americans are in denial that their institutions are failing; the protections of checks and balances in the three branches of government are in meltdown.
The executive branch feels no constitutional responsibility to honor the powers of the people’s house, which is conducting an inquiry into the illegal activity by the president and his cult followers.
The coming election is going to be a joke.
Americans have a sense of humor but this joke will be on them. After the shock of Trump’s contrived landslide election victory, many Americans will go into denial and embrace their tormentors. It’s called the Stockholm Syndrome. It’s how Hitler became popular in Germany.
Caesar became popular after he ended representative government in Rome centuries ago. The story is as old as history.
Some men are not afraid to do bad things to get power. Power permits those who hold it to do unspeakable things to those they despise.
It’s simple really.
It’s why America was created in the way it was. Its founders hoped to prevent tyranny from raising its ugly head inside the United States.
They failed, obviously. This rise of the Trump family promises to be a mess of catastrophic proportions involving suffering by tens-of-millions of people who get caught in its cross-hairs.
The hydrogen and oxygen that make water are the first and third most abundant elements in the universe. Both elements are found in stars.
Water saturates almost all the debris in space like water saturates a sponge. The water is frozen solid and trapped by silicates in space rocks.
The debris that made Earth brought water with it. At first, Earth was hot; any water at the surface boiled away to escape into space. Earth was in fact bone dry at its surface for hundreds of millions of years.
Eventually Earth cooled and became gravitationally strong enough that steam was able to escape from its interior, condense, and fall back to Earth as rain. The process continues to the present day.
How much water are we talking about? It turns out that despite what we think we know about how deep the oceans are, the amount of water compared to the mass of Earth is minuscule.
Think of Earth as a polished metal basketball. Breathe on the basketball to form a film of moisture. At this scale the mist from your breath is deeper than Earth’s deepest ocean.
It’s not much water at all; almost all of it migrated upward as vapor from materials many hundreds of miles beneath Earth’s surface. The process took billions of years to make the raging oceans we experience today.
For decades now, Nick Bostrom has defended his view that the reality of existence can be described by one of only three possible states:
1 – Life is rare in the universe; what life does exist always perishes before it reaches “technological maturity.”
2 – Life is rare in the universe; some life reaches techno-maturity, but all advanced life decides to avoid the temptations and the consequences presented by its mastery over artificial super-intelligence and other high-technologies.
3 – Life is abundant in the universe, but it is simulated. A few technologically mature civilizations yielded to temptation; their thirst for knowledge and entertainment pulled them into a spawning-orgy to artificially inseminate faked-life within an ever-increasing globe of stars and planets, galaxies and clusters — perhaps throughout all space.
Bioethicist and philosopher of artificial intelligence, Nick Bostrom.
This injection of simulated-life (and the infrastructure to sustain it) serve the research and entertainment needs of the original civilizations who created the simulations and then broadcast them into the cosmos like farmers throwing flower-seeds into empty gardens.
By now, faked life is pervasive. By now — after at least three generations of star formations — the number of simulations is hundreds-of-millions; perhaps billions; perhaps hundreds-of-billions.
Humans forced to wager on the odds that they themselves are artificial — that they are in fact simulated — must place their bets knowing that the odds could be as high as a billion to one, maybe more.
Humans are machines; they aren’t real; they aren’t what emerged from the chemistry of the universe but were instead invented in the imaginations of super-computers programmed by an ancient civilization whose address and time may forever remain unknowable.
If human civilization is faked, so might be its history, what it has been allowed to know, and what technologies it feels compelled to develop. A simulated, artificial civilization won’t necessarily know what is the time or era or eon in the real universe that exists beyond its view. It might never be able to understand how large or old is the real universe where its creators live and play.
Simulations might be created by life-forms curious about how certain scenarios they can imagine play out. Simulation might be a mature-tech version of television where advanced life-forms unveil the vagaries of their visions for the entertainment of vast audiences.
Some simulations could be simple games designed for small children to entertain themselves while mommy does laundry and dad mows the lawn.
Simulations might be simple algorithms developed by quantum super-computers to test the limits of their power.
Even the rules-of-play embedded in some releases might be undiscoverable — hidden by super-intelligent gamers who perhaps don’t really care about us; they are sure one day to lose interest and unplug the simulation.
What are the odds?
People who think like Nick believe the odds make countless simulations a near-certainty. If it were not so, then it is equally certain that human civilization will implode like all those civilizations that came before; humans will become the victim of their own technological march into the high-risk skill sets that lead inexorably to oblivion.
It’s what the Fermi Paradox is all about, right? Astronomers assume that life is common — pervasive perhaps — but they search the universe in vain for our companions.
Where is everybody?
Is it possible that the evidence will forever be that in this cosmos humans are alone and on their own?
If life — pervasive intelligent life — makes itself known, can anyone be sure that it will be authentic and not a simulation created by a life-form they will never meet? Can anyone trust that this newly encountered life is conscious?
Or is consciousness simulated so that no one real can discern who is genuine, what is authentic, who is faking true love, or what might behave in blind obedience to rules that render impossible any prejudices against faked life, which does not care?
What are the odds?
During his #1350 podcast of 11 September 2019 Joe Rogan asked Nick Bostrom why it cannot be true that we humans are the first to broach the limits of the technologies that are spread before us. Why cannot humans know for sure that they are real, not simulated?
Why is it not realistic to assume that human civilization is on the cusp of becoming the first creator of simulations and artificial life instead of being itself one more simulation added to a long line of simulations that have spanned the cosmos during the past billions of years?
In a simulation, which of its fake creatures is able to determine how old is the authentic universe it will never see? What avatar is able to determine how long or short-lived will be the simulation where it is trapped?
Why can it not be more certain that the civilization that survives and prevails will be ourselves, the species human, who will be first to spawn false populations and fake technologies to coat with lies the cosmos whose lifespan is likely to last trillions of years?
Nick Bostrom went through the numbers with Joe. He described how the probabilities of his ideas are constructed; he explained that if humans are not fake; not simulated; not artificially created, it is more likely — much more likely — that homo-sapiens won’t make it into the future.
We will suffer the extinction of every advanced civilization that went before, no matter where in space and time they were once located — if ever there were any.
Neither Nick nor Joe seemed interested to discuss more than perfunctorily the validity of the second listed possibility — the existence of technologically mature civilizations who refuse to extend their capabilities to logical conclusions.
The idea that civilizations might forego the use of artificial super-intelligence to secure their grip on the universe seemed a boring and unrealistic option. Nick included the possibility on the list of three only because it is possible to imagine that dozens of civilizations might decide, perhaps independently, to lay down their powers for some higher, universal moral-order.
Such a scenario defies common sense, does it not?
So the choices seem to have collapsed from three to two: self-annihilation or a successful breach of the barrier that enables breachers to create new, simulated worlds — to raise their status, finally and forever, to the heights of what the ancient-world called “gods”, the creators of worlds.
Is the ancient-world even real? — or is it another fabrication by simulators?
What do we know and when did we know it?
Why does science and history make no sense?
What are the odds?
Every theoretical physicist seems to be saying that quantum mechanics and general relativity cannot be fundamental. A reality underlies these systems of physics that seems to lie beyond our reach.
Physicists today admit that at least for now they are stuck on stupid. They wait for la seconde venue d’Einstein — Albert Einstein, part two.
How smart and creative can a simulation be when it can’t answer basic questions like:
What time is it?
Where am I ?
Is anyone in charge?
Why do the simplest things make no sense?
Are simulated life-forms — necessarily separated by their natures from reality and truth — always insane?
Are simulations evil when they challenge the authentic life that created them? Is authentic-life virtuous when it destroys the faked-lives of its troublesome simulations?
Which deserve to feel the emotions of existence more intensely — real-life? or artificial super-intelligence? or the billions-of-simulations, which Bostrom’s probabilities argue flow from them both?
Billy Lee
Warning from the EDITORIAL BOARD: Billy Lee sometimes “pontificates” to try out ideas, which to our minds are absurd.
For one thing, Billy Lee seems to imply in FAKED LIFE that the absence of evidence for intelligent life in the Universe is exactly what a civilization locked inside a simulation would experience.
Simulated life hidden behind the walls of a game constructed by “Super-Intelligence” will inevitably come to believe it is alone and dependent on a Supreme Being who loves only the “simulants”, because no one else is “out there” for God to love.
Billy Lee postulates in FAKED LIFE that the universe and its history make no sense, because it isn’t real. Maybe Billy Lee is dumb; maybe he doesn’t get things, because he can’t. Did the possibility that he is stupid ever cross his mind?
Perhaps “pity” is what Billy Lee deserves.
Billy Lee has written in the past that desperate folks might want to trust God to explain things they don’t understand; otherwise, they will miss chances to make the world a fairer and more loving place for the billions of people who live in misery — the weak and impoverished, right?
According to Billy Lee, the Bible says that God created people; God is love; He promised to never abandon the poor, the sad, the humble, the strivers for what is right, the merciful, the pure-hearted, the peacemakers, the persecuted.
God’s power is that He cannot change.
So, according to the Bible, it’s all true. We are simulants who will never be unplugged. The rules of the game are simple: love God who gave us our lives; love each other as much as we can.
Who will do it?
We are as real as our Creator made us to be. God decides who is real and who is fake, who lives and who dies. In His eyes, we aren’t fake — even though some of us say He is.
Some readers may know that I post on Quora about all kinds of subjects.
I don’t hold back. I write a lot of random stuff that I would never publish on my blog.
Well, not always.
People want to know — What’s up with all the reports about ALIENS on the internet?
I recently answered a question about “space-invaders” that 10,000 viewers chose to read during the first hour of posting.
People like to read about aliens — but only if they come from deep space.
I took the time to work out the answers to several questions.
All true facts. No fake news. No messing with heads.
This stuff is real, people.
Read, learn, and be afraid.
Why do people think NASA found an alien base on Jupiter’s moon?
You are referring of course to the moon Europa, which is one of 79 moons that orbit the massive planet Jupiter.
Europa is a perfect place for a base, because the escape velocity is less than 185 mph—easily attainable by small jet-planes and other craft. Europa’s icy surface is smooth enough to land and take off with specially equipped seaplanes.
Plenty of water, plus gravity that is 1/8 of Earth’s, and abundant food resources in the under-ice oceans—Europa is a paradise compared to other moons in the Jovian system.
The Japanese established several bases on Europa in 2007. President Bush — preoccupied by the coming financial collapse of 2008 — decided against a challenge to Japan’s hegemony.
Obama didn’t want to deal with the hysteria that would follow an official announcement; it would interfere with his passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Trump decided that the Japanese are “very fine people”. He has fallen “in love” with Europa’s Commander, Admiral Yoko Oh No (the Sumo-wrestler “snowboarder” who poses in the pic below).
The “best people” on the president’s advisory council decided that a “premature” announcement of Japanese sovereignty over an “alien world” would likely undermine the orange man’s reputation for stability and genius—qualities of character they are unwilling to sacrifice to those who might accuse the Donald of being a “nut-case” should he disclose what he knows to a public suffering from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).
So, permit me to answer your question.
Ham radio operators listen in to the communications (in Japanese) between Europa and Earth all the time, but government officials won’t confirm what they have known for nearly 12 years.
Six families own all the media in the world. They won’t report the story, so it remains untold.
In the era of fake news, who will believe truth when they hear it?
Admiral Yoko Oh No — Japanese Commandant, Europa, Jupiter. Reduced gravity makes snowboarding easy for the 400-lb. Sumo-wrestling enthusiast.
Why are aliens so interested in our planet?
Aliens swarmed Earth in the 1950s.
Everyone who doesn’t live under a rock knows it’s true.
The problem for the aliens is they didn’t bring weapons. Many hundreds of the captured are kept in cages in Area 51. Surely, someone “out there” knows about Area 51 and what goes on, right?
Does anyone believe that the computer and iPhone are the product of human ingenuity? Has anyone anywhere ever met a human who is capable of inventing these technologies and building them?
Of course not.
All this “high tech” stuff is always built in faraway countries inside factories no one has ever seen or can ever visit, right?
Has anyone considered that there might be good reasons why no one understands the technologies they are using?
Knowledge is unattainable. Resistance is futile. We all know why.
The orange man puts aliens in cages for a reason. He sucks brains to increase his power.
Challenge the orange man, anyone who is foolish enough to try. They will find themselves “throttled” by Quora, Facebook, and Twitter among other “collaborators.”
Those who don’t believe, look at the view statistics for this post. Though hundreds-of-thousands will see, the “official” view count will never exceed a few dozen.
Upvotes? Forget it.
“They” don’t want civilians to know the nature of the new Earth where “orange man” forces homo-sapiens to languish — suffocated and imprisoned by confusion; overwhelmed by terrors unleashed by ruthless captors of alien hoards.
Another alien swarm from “out there” is making plans to rescue their friends. This time they won’t forget weapons. Meanwhile, they burn forests to deprive Earthlings of oxygen. Once their sapient tormentors are debilitated, the aliens will unload.
After the fluids of humans settle finally into the warm dirt of Earth, it is the human captors — the survivors — who will live in cages.
The aliens plan to convert Area 51 into a zoo where tourists from other worlds can visit to learn about evil humanoids and their orange leader.
Aliens will place the chosen one, with all the reverence due him, into the largest cage of all.
All organisms on Earth are carbon based. Do you think there are silicon based life forms out there?
Silicon based life forms are called “rocks”.
Four phylum of rocks exist: pebble, stone, boulder, and sand.
These life forms move around, reproduce, and sometimes present an aggressive demeanor that can threaten humans.
How many times have we read accounts of boulders cascading down mountains to crush folks who travel unawares on our national highways?
It is almost impossible to eradicate boulders. Even an explosion of many tons of TNT creates instead tens-of-thousands of stones and pebbles. These silicate life-forms are particularly annoying, especially when humans walk barefoot on dirt.
Silicon-based life-forms are an urgent problem that demands to be solved.
Are we watched by aliens?
Extra-terrestrials made their first visits to Earth about 5,000 years ago according to accounts in the Bible and other sources from that era.
They left after exploring nearby planets and moons. They stayed to explore for about a 1,000 years give or take.
In the 1950s extra-terrestrials returned in force. Tens of thousands of UFO sighting became a matter of public record. The Air Force and CIA spent considerable resources to understand the threat UFOs posed to humans.
What they discovered was a blunder by aliens that no one anticipated.
The aliens came unarmed.
When aliens finished their initial explorations 4,000 or so years ago, they reported to their leaders that life on Earth posed no threat. The need to bring weapons on a second voyage was considered an unnecessary expense, energy depleting, and useless. Leaving weapons behind would save billions of units of whatever currency they were using at the time.
Since the 1950s, a coalition of nations have learned to capture and successfully detain aliens. Many aliens have escaped, but thousands who weren’t so lucky now live in cages in the area numbered 51, which some readers may have read about.
These aliens are essentially prisoners. Some have been trained to communicate with humans.
Information gleaned from interrogations has yielded a treasure trove of new technologies, which have been introduced as rapidly as possible during the past two decades.
It is humans who now observe extra-terrestrials.
The current situation is this: Aliens are preparing to swarm Earth in a “third wave” to rescue their compatriots. This time they will bring weapons.
Trump is currently negotiating with an advanced guard who his advisors refer to as the “Deep State”. The future of Earth depends on the president’s ability to negotiate and to act the “stable genius” people everywhere have learned to believe-in and love.
President Trump is the only one who can save humankind from the alien hordes, who intend to alter forever Earth as we know it through terra-forming.
What makes you sure there are/are not aliens visiting planet Earth?
Aliens swarmed Earth in the 1950s and never left. They occupy many positions of power and influence. Their base of operations is near Lake Vostok in Antarctica.
How can humans identify space-aliens?
The identification process is easy but it takes a little work. Many so-called news celebrities are aliens. Listen carefully for mispronounced words and unusual turn-of-phrases. These are dead giveaways, which are ignored by most people.
Also, search for signs of Botox poisoning. Alien skin sags in Earth’s highly oxygenated atmosphere. Almost all aliens use Botox to prevent the reptilian appearance that frightens so many children. The overuse of Botox can make aliens look like “cat people.” Again, they aren’t difficult to spot if one remains vigilant.
Another identifier is reliance on teleprompters. Most aliens never achieve true fluency in human language, preferring to chirp or hum loudly when not reading from prepared text. Heavy reliance on teleprompters by powerful aliens is one more sure sign that humans should never ignore.
Aliens tend to rule from the right, because conservatives are the easiest people to outsmart. Trump switched from Democrat to Republican to take advantage of GOP stupidity to win the nomination in 2016.
Aliens immediately endorsed him.
What is the likelihood that aliens would be able to decipher the messages on the gold plate on the Voyager spacecraft?
The message on the gold plate is simple: life exists somewhere else.
Aliens who discover the craft will use artificial super-intelligence to decipher its information — if not immediately, then eventually as they develop the capability.
Once the message is unraveled, aliens will know our location and weaknesses. The streaks in the image on the lower left of the gold disc reveal Earth’s location relative to 14 pulsars, which are GPS beacons to any civilization as advanced as ours.
Click pic to enlarge in new window.
Aliens will determine from the materials that make the craft what resources exist on Earth and whether these resources are worth pursuing.
Should aliens decide to visit, they are likely to bring weapons to overwhelm us; they will take whatever they want.
What might they take?
Look at any picture of Earth from space. Isn’t it obvious that Earth is a paradise where water exists in three phases—liquid, solid, and gas (oceans, ice, and clouds)? What alien wouldn’t want to live here to research and perhaps rule to satisfy its idiosyncratic desires?
We’re vulnerable.
How do we defend Earth against aliens who know all about us and our capabilities while we know nothing of theirs?
Thank you, NASA.
Thank you to all the eggheads who may have given our location away to monsters they’ve never met—maybe not now but someday.
Good luck, planet Earth.
Is Russia really larger than Pluto?
It depends on what the definition of “larger” is.
When it comes to demographics, Russia’s population is thought to be much larger but a census of the dwarf planet has yet to be released to the public.
When it comes to nuclear warheads, well… Pluto takes its name from the chemical element plutonium, right? The Plutocrats who run the place keep the number of warheads a tightly-guarded secret but NSA analysis of data gleaned during the recent “fly-by” speculates that the white-planetoid might harbor both the capability and the desire to destroy the solar system.
During recent tests of stockpiles, Plutonians blew up the Kuiper Belt. It’s not something military planners are likely to ignore.
Economy?
Isn’t the answer obvious?
Everyone who’s been there says Pluto boasts the best ski-resorts anywhere.
The Japanese, for some reason, disagree. They ski indoors; the temperature is warmer, which means humans don’t have to “layer-up” or even wear gloves.
Plutonians scoff at amenities like comfortable temperature, oxygen canisters, and helicopter rescue teams who “stand-by” to retrieve tourists who downhill into craters.
In some respects the argument about who is larger, Pluto or Russia, has faded to irrelevance. Revenues from ski-tourism enabled Pluto to buy Russia from the Communists decades ago. Today, Pluto-installed oligarchs have hand-picked the “Orange-One” to tighten Pluto’s grip on power over everything human.
The future of Earth is secure; it’s as solid as ice; it’s as safe as the Kuiper Belt where resistance from Kuiper terrorists evaporated during the plutonium accidents of yesteryear.
Did the USA and Russia find an alien presence on the moon and is that the reason they have not revisited?
The first astronauts who landed on the moon communicated off-line for almost an hour with NASA about structures on the horizon that appeared to be unnatural.
On a subsequent mission, astronauts used a dune buggy to travel to the structures to explore them.
Inside structure two, they found a photograph of a large lizard in a space suit. Other pics showed the lizard naked — surrounded by five other lizards of various sizes.
The surprising part was the conclusion by NSA analysts that the lizards seemed to be frolicking in a water park of some kind.
Subsequent radioactive dating revealed that the age of the structures and photos was 137 million years; everything was preserved in pristine condition — due possibly to the moon’s sterile environment.
No astronaut who was involved in the discovery or the coverup that followed is currently employed by NASA.
Retired astronaut Guy Gizzard works at a zoo near Orlando where he cleans lizard cages. He doesn’t do interviews according to the New York Times.
Why astronauts no longer travel to the moon remains a mystery.
As civilization advances, so does arrogance. Instead of colonizing Mars, why not spend the money to save Earth?
All civilizations approach an asymptotic limit to knowledge and technology that dramatically reduces their odds of survival.
No evidence has yet been found to show that any intelligent civilizations have survived anywhere in the universe — at least in those areas of space where humankind has been able to look.
Should people survive for a few thousand years more, will the evidence for human isolation change?
Maybe not, but it would be good to be proved wrong.
Billy Lee
Disclaimer by the Editorial Board: Despite what Billy Lee claims, we warn readers that no one has been able to verify anything he wrote.
