Things That We Don't Understand

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There is just so much we don't understand about things. You would think that being as technologically advanced as we are, that we would have learned a lot more. Some say that we have, but due to a tremendous amount of government secrecy around the world, we are being held back in a lot of areas. I have heard it mentioned many times that we have cures for some of the most devastating diseases, but for some reason they have been classified top secret. I personally would hate to think that this is true. Could you imagine a government that would allow people to die because they wanted to keep something secret that might have a use on the battlefield? Some say that there are also devices and technologies that could be used that are far better at monitoring our health than anything currently on the market, but because of the way they are constructed, they could also be used for other more sinister purposes and that is why they are being kept secret.

We as common citizens have no way to know if any of this is true, but there are problems out there that we have not been able to solve even though we might have been trying to do so for years. One problem that comes to mind is a problem that they are having in Venezuela. The problem has existed since at least 1987 and has been studied by scientists since then. It is called La Mancha Negro. It seems that a black goo appears from time to time on the highways in that country. As cars hit it, they skid and it causes many accidents. There have been about 2,000 deaths credited to this substance so far and it is said that scientists today are no closer to solving the problem of where this stuff comes from than they were when they first discovered it. You would think that the source of this stuff wouldn't be that hard to discover, especially after a scientific examination of what it is composed of.

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We know that there are drugs that can eliminate pain. Many different experiments have been done that contain pain killing drugs and placebos. One experiment that I heard of was where a patient with pain is given morphine for several days and his pain disappears during that time. After a week or so, he is given a saline solution, but thinks that it is still morphine. This still takes his pain away. Why does this work? How can a shot of water relieve pain in someone that has severe pain? Could it be that the morphine itself does not relieve the pain, but tricks out brains into releasing some substance or electrical pulse that is really the pain reliever and we are giving the credit to the morphine? Another point, if thinking we are getting a drug can relieve pain, we don't really need the drug. We should be doing a lot more research into how the brain reacts to medicines, but I am sure the drug companies wouldn't want this and they might already know the answer and could be keeping it from us.

One person was saying to me that they couldn't understand why things from China were so much cheaper than things from here? One has to reply that higher wages, employer contributions and such make things more expensive. Then he asked why we couldn't build robotic factories that would turn out objects without workers and wouldn't this make our stuff even cheaper than Chinese goods? It would seems so wouldn't it. We have no industry any more to make much of this stuff, so building these kinds of factories would create some jobs, but you have to find people that are willing to put forth such a huge investment. If we were to do this, then what is there to stop countries like China from doing the same thing and then underselling us because of government subsidies? We really don't fully understand how to combat such low prices for items.

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Scientists still don't know exactly how the human brain works. They have invested many years studying our brains and have learned much, but there is still much that confounds them. One only has to ask a scientist if he could do a brain transplant and look at the blank look on his face when this request is made, to realize that we don't even know how the brain is completely attached to the body. Not knowing how the brain works didn't stop a team of scientists in Scotland however. They have developed a robotic scientist. The scientist is capable of performing many experiments on its own. One of the scientists stated, "Although the problems we set for the robot were relatively simple, the research has shown that the potential is there to help solve real-life problems. This has important implications as there is increasing need for automation in the biological sciences." Currently the robot scientist has been assigned the task of discovering the different tasks of genes in baker's yeast.

One thing that we surely don't understand is alien languages. I am talking about extraterrestrials. We really don't know if they even exist or that if they do, that they have a spoken language and yet a scientist claims that he has developed a device that will translate at least some alien languages. How can this be so? He states that what he did was create a database of 60 different earthly languages and his device will compare any alien language to them. He believes that any language will have recognizable speech patterns. Is he correct? Who can say at this point. Maybe he should try and compare Dolphin sounds to his data base first and see if they are recognizable as intelligent speech. The Dolphin has long been suspected of having a language of its own.

When it comes to space there are a lot of things that we don't understand. Not the least of these is cosmic rays. We thought we understood the basic concept which is that a cosmic ray travels through our galaxy and gets weaker as it hits other particles, until it gets here. Unfortunately, we have found some very strong cosmic rays that just don't fit the pattern. We tested them to see if they came from sources here, but they didn't. This remains a mystery as does the fact that the universe seems to be on a plane and is exactly even on both sides. Again we don't understand this. Some scientists say that there just isn't enough time for the universe of the big bang to have traveled as far as it did without breaking the light speed barrier, but if that were the case, then Einstein is wrong and we can travel faster than the speed of light. This has scientists puzzled all over the world.