OT Peter Jennings Reports

"John Scheldroup" wrote in news:36tepcF56rjubU1 @individual.net:

What is that quote? Something about telling a lie loud enough and often enough, and people will start to believe it.

Well not much of an opening to a conversation, I don't know how I can respond ?

John

I was trying to comment on the idea that people have been hearing about UFOs for so long, they're starting to believe in them.

UFO's are kinda like religion. Can you prove or disprove the existence of God?

Malcontent

Not necessarily as a deductive conclusion, but by a preponderance of evidence. By the same mothod, it seems quite unreasonable to believe that UFOs are visitors from another planet.

Nothing much can be learned that way if we don't talk about it then maybe they'll go away. The scientific method has to be applied in these areas so to make your words true or not true that UFO's are not visitors from another planet or maybe they are. If its swamp gas, or the Earth's own magnetic field somehow that effects our reasoning at the frontal lobe lets find out if that's what causes people to see these things.

Decades before, if people talked to much about aliens from another planet and they lived in a small community our town folks might have said this person was crazy, and centuries before that you would have been burned alive or stoned to death.

Let me tell you a little story about this lady friend I often had chit chat. Often times on a Saturday afternoon this lady would come to my house things started with casual chit chat then she got into this bible preaching, well in her wild years as a teenager and early twenties when she carried on slept around her conscience got the better and when she turned 40, she went into this religion big time, becoming a born-again Christian.

Anyhow, often a pleasant lady to talk with, when one day I mention, did you see the program on television about this supposed Roswell crash in NM back in 1947 ? She says no John I don't watch or talk about such things anymore, because I believe they are demon devils, and if you are one to believe in them, you are worshipping the devil to.

Needless to say I was kind a shocked, what a strange thing for this lady to say that I was better at devil worship then studying the ufo phenomena, when it was just a short time before that she herself was telling me about this lady friend that lived on a farm that she often went to visit comes out with this story, one night she saw a bright light in the back

40 behind the barn, and the following morning she walks back there to describe what she saw. Her friend tells her and my friend tells me there was this burned area in the grass some 30' diameter and she still has the picture to prove it but doesn't want any public consumption.

Well this lady and her husband stopped coming to my house on Saturday for a beer bbq and some chit chat, she is now deeply involved with the fundamentalist church. Finally this brings up this "to much ufo talk" and being told that if I believe in aliens according to some says that I believe in and worship the devil.

I come to find out that this lady friend must had been watching the 700 club! see below.

Finally, when one departs from applying the scientific method onto things that are unexplained, the human mind seems not to capable of predicting a peaceful outcome when patterns into reason take shape these will often form a basis of conclusion that is devoid of fact and conjecture, enveloped within these patterns forming a basis for fact one hurries to make a picture to satisfy the minds eye which can be impressed by the peer group.

The peer group can even reinforce the basis for fact much faster then could you do it alone, if the peer group says that someone whom studies the phenomena of ufo's while not a member of our group, this fact forming takes on epic proportions as the peer group scrambles to meet its deadline having not done the fact digging and research needed to build the patterns that form what's called partial evidence or inconclusive evidence for the time being that is.

In other words the peer group says that I he or she worships the devil, talks to much about aliens, ufo's and should be stoned to death!. A flawed human trait which says logic without reason having done so leaves nothing else but were told to believe. These facts were drawn not by the scientific method, but it goes by another type of causality namely brain washing.

While adults most anyway no longer believe that Santa Clause is coming to town, it is true that a scientist does not believe object A is real and object B is not without causality that can best describe and imitate its behavior then effect until it can be restrained and tested using the best scientific principles around, until a UFO can be examined in a lab later reverse engineered all evidence is inconclusive however, it is not unreasonable that beings could not travel to earth from a star 40 ly distant.

Not to far back most people believed that hominids would not land on the moon, while today many believe we never did. The human mind is pattern seeking animal can often play funny tricks with scientific principles you can eliminate allot of this foreplay.

-- According to Pat Robertson, that people who *believe* in space aliens should be put to death by stoning...

The 700 Club, 1997-JUL-8 Freedom Writer magazine is published by the "Institute for First Amendment Studies." Its 1997-JUL/AUG mentioned a statement by Pat Robertson from his 700 Club program.

He was discussing the possibility that UFO's have been visiting earth from far-off galaxies. He seems to have advocated that UFO believers be executed in accordance with Old Testament laws.

"...A segment on the July 8, 1997 broadcast of The 700 Club featured news of the Mars Pathfinder mission. Employing the historical event as a starting point, the program delved into the possibility of the existence of UFOs and space aliens.

"While Robertson viewed the space program with suspicion, on a more serious note, he launched into a diatribe against those who entertain the existence of space aliens and UFOs. He said, in a rambling discourse, that if such things exist, they are simply demons trying to lead people away from Christ. According to Robertson, the threat is so serious that people who believe in space aliens should be put to death by stoning...

"Here is what he said to the children of Israel about this whole matter:...

According to the most complete understanding of physics, it IS unreasonable to think that physical objects can travel at any velocity necessary for interstallar travel. It's just too stinking far. I find this disappointing, but I have no reason to discount it. There is just too much evidence that indicates it's not possible. Every mechinism postulated for interstellar travel is speculation, with no evidence supporting them.

Most people, or "experts"? I'm not aware of any historical scientific system that said travel to the moon is impossible. Maybe I've just not heard of it. Newtonian mechanics certainly doesn't forbid it.

It's unfortunate that a misguided and mis-informed "Christian leader" would make such reckless comments. You can see the trouble it makes out of common people who are just trying to do the best they can. Pat Robertson should NOT be taken as the best of anything in the Christian "community".

Nope.

You have lots of sources for your research and I can't read them for you but here are a few.

John

A wormhole is a shortcut created through spacetime, formed by massively warping the spacetime to shorten the path between two objects to virtually an instantaneous trip. This is basically what we think of as folding spacetime.

"The most common analogy is: Imagine you want a pencil to travel from one end of the page to the other, but it has a limited speed. The fastest way would be to manipulate the actual paper and the wormhole is analogous to folding the paper in half so the two points are now touching."

While it isn't certain whether wormholes exist solving the Einstein Field Equations clearly points to such phenomena.

Is it possible? Maybe it is known that spacetime can be warped and distorted but whether such distortions could be accurately predicted is another matter. The main problem here though is whether it would be possible to actually make a wormhole.

While "it is known spacetime can be distorted it is also known that "it takes tremendous mass and density." A suggested method is to take an enormous amount of super-dense matter, such as that from a neutron star (not sure how we are supposed to collect this), construct a ring (several 100 million miles across), charge them to impossible voltages and spin them at the speed of light and?do the same at the other end of where you want to go, you might get a wormhole formed.

Of course to do this you must already be at the location that you want to go. There are other problems as well, theoretically the wormhole would instantly close and there are massive gravitational forces that would rip apart any structure we sent in. The only way it is likely that we will be able to open a wormhole, hold it open and protect the ship will be through very advanced gravity control (either by electromagnetic control, negative energy density, or some unforeseen possibility).

Until we have this ability this is almost certainly a non-starter, but perhaps we will be able to reassess it when the technology arrives.

Exactly my point. The problem with worm holes has always been that you have to do a number of impossible or amazingly impractical things just to see if it _might_ work. And even then, it most likely wouldn't be useful.

Not all science fiction comes true. The amount that has come true is a vanishingly small fraction. Most of that was looking just past the horizon anyway, and not specualting things that were thought to be flatly impossible.

So, can we do it?

Control of gravity Exceeding lightspeed

We ?

Those are all pretty speculative, and require colossal energies. I'm ok with people thinking about it, but it's far short of convincing me that it's possible.

Besides, you wouldn't want to pull that hard on space anywhere near an inhabited planet.

Here's some interesting things to think about.

Energy is conservatory while it can be said that "mass is energy". Since quantum field theory considers the vacuum ground state not to be completely empty, but to consist of a seething mass of virtual particles and fields, "energy is quantized".

"Electrons within an atom occupy certain discrete energy levels. Absorbing light energy of specific frequencies causes an electron to jump to a higher energy level. In releasing this energy, the electron falls back to a lower energy state. The electron cannot occupy levels between these quantized energy levels."

"The idea of a negative mass is conjectural, since no material object has ever been found that can be shown by experiment to have a negative mass. Nevertheless, it will be shown below that the mass equivalent of the energy in a gravitational field is negative, therefore, it may be instructive to speculate on the physics of negative mass."

At one time it was common knowlege that if you managed to travel faster than 60 miles per hour, you would die from the extreme speed.

Gunner

Rule #35 "That which does not kill you, has made a huge tactical error"

OK then... how about this stuff:

In the least, it makes for great reading

D

Common knowledge is a long way from well established physics.

That's going in mt list of quotes. Good one.

Hi David,

IMHO, I doubt Einstein would have done something like this, he was pacifist.

"It is a fact that the unified field theory was completed by Einstein and given to the US Government. They have it and they don't want anybody to know they have it. It was never released publicly in any books."

"Until the end of his life Einstein sought a unified field theory, whereby the phenomena of gravitation and electromagnetism could be derived from one set of equations. Few physicists followed Einstein's path in the years after

1920. Quantum mechanics, instead of general relativity, drew their attention. For his part, Einstein could never accept the new quantum mechanics with its principle of indeterminacy, as formulated by Werner Heisenberg and elaborated into a new epistemology by Niels Bohr. Although Einstein's later thoughts were neglected for decades, physicists today refer seriously and awesomely to Einstein's dream--a grand unification of physical theory. "

John

Pretty deep subject for such a shallow mind.

You mean long held beliefs in physics, or theory or hypothesis. What was fact before, is often disproven later.

Gunner

It's better to be a red person in a blue state than a blue person in a red state. As a red person, if your blue neighbors turn into a mob at least you have a gun to protect yourself. As a blue person, your only hope is to appease the red mob with herbal tea and marinated tofu.

(Phil Garding)

I don't think it's resonable to doubt the established principles of a mature scientific field. Relativity and it's predictions are extrememly well established by experimentation. I don't think it's resonable to expect it to be overturned just because people used to believe silly things. In other words, the widely held speculations of the past do not logically imply that the rigorously tested theories of today are equally flimsy.

Relativity is one of those things that is rigorously tested. Refinements at energies we can't currently reach (where we are still speculating) are still possible. But where expermentation has left room for refinements, there are practical limitaions that would still make interstaller travel unreasonable.

Another good one. I just remembered a variation I heard once on #35 that goes something like this:

"That which does not kill you only softens you up for that which eventually does kill you."

Not something you might like to build an inspiring life on, but it sure seems right, especially after an episode of Futurama.