Sometimes you have to wonder how we as humans, who can't even understand a lot of the things around us, will ever succeed in conquering the stars? There is so much that we don't understand that it would fill all the libraries in the world. As we discover new things, we also discover new mysteries. As I am fond of saying, we don't even understand what electricity is yet. The truth of the matter is that in the overall scheme of things, we are no where as advanced as we think that we are. Oh we are making progress and someday we may have most of the answers, but we are very far away from that time right now.

Fusion Reactor
Photo Source: DOE

We have been working on the problem of generating electricity by nuclear fusion for many years and yet, we haven't been able to make it cost effective yet. Some scientists say that we may be as far as 30 years away from accomplishing this. A few years back, we thought that we may have had a breakthrough and it was called cold fusion. The idea was to create fusion at room temperature chemically. It turned out that even though a scientist stated that he had accomplished this, no one else was able to duplicate his results. Many people have worked on this problem, I am talking about cold fusion here, but to no avail. As far as conventional fusion reactors go, we are still experimenting with them. The idea is to create a heavier atom from two lighter ones. When this happens energy is released. This is all well and good if you can get more energy out of the reactor than you put in, but that is where we have failed so far.

When we talk of the entanglement of atoms, we are talking about something that seems impossible and yet there it is. This is something that we don't understand and yet we are able to use the theory. What this means is that if you change the state of an atom anywhere in the universe, it will instantly change the state of another atom, no matter where it is. Distance is not a factor. I know that when I first heard this, I remember thinking that it seemed impossible. Well was I wrong. A device that accomplishes this was built at the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. The device worked and an atom was “teleported” successfully. It is being hailed as a successful step toward the first quantum computer, another device that we really don't understand. Scientists state that if you watch a quantum computer perform a calculation, it will change the result. Chew on that for awhile. We have found out that atoms are paired and one of the atoms in the pair can be anywhere and yet it is affected by what we do to the other atom. We certainly don't understand this yet.

We have been studying the universe for many hundreds of years. We think that we understand how it was formed, but just when we believe that we have found the answer, something goes wrong with the theory. It could be that new evidence is found that shows that our ideas are not correct, or it could be that a better theory comes along. We really don't know how the universe was formed, but I bet there are plenty of scientists out there that will say that we do. One of the most popular theories about the formation of the universe was the Big Bang theory. For years we believed that this was the holy grail of universe theories. It stated that all matter in the universe came together and formed a super atom, which then exploded from all the pressure and heat, sending out matter and gas. It also stated that the material would eventually slow down and start to be attracted back until it finally formed that super atom again and exploded. We have found out that not only is the expansion of the universe not slowing down, but it is speeding up. Now we have theories that state that eventually everything will drift apart. At one time it was thought that something called dark matter, which we have never really seen, would make up the difference in the gravitational field and cause the expansion to stop, but it didn't. By the way, we don't understand dark matter either and have yet to find an example of it.

The human brain is another area where we are making progress. We understand it a little, but not enough. If I were to ask a brain surgeon to transplant a human brain, he would look at me like I was crazy, because he wouldn't understand how to do this. We have been able to use brain waves to control devices lately, which is quite a leap, but most of the brains functions are still a mystery. The human brain puts any computer system that we currently have to shame. It is far more capable. If we ever do discover everything about it, we will have changed the entire way that we are evolving, because we will be able to do things that will even surprise nature.

I guess that one of the biggest mysteries to us is life itself. If we understood life, we would be able to create it, but we don't and we can't. Some scientists claim that they have created the primordial soup that all life comes from. We attempt to imitate life with machines that have what is known as artificial intelligence or AI, but this is just a pale imitation of the real thing. Will we be able to build a person from scratch someday and then breathe the spark of life into them? If you ask the clergy they will say that only God can do that. The truth is that they should have answered yes, because man has free will. Along with life comes death. Do we know what death is? Some will say yes, it is the end of everything for an individual. Others who have experienced near death experiences will say that it is the start of a new and wonderful life. This is also the position of most religious organizations. Some people that have died and then been revived, have reported seeing a light that led to paradise and even encountered their dead relatives and friends. We have a long way to go before we ever understand death.

There are also social problems that we don't seem to understand as a race of humans. Just look at how we are constantly at war. There are always people trying to overthrow governments, governments that are despotic, companies that have no conscience and people in general that think nothing of taking the life of other humans. We don't seem to understand how to stop all this. One theory is that if we all have the same standard of living, much of this would go away. I think that I have to agree with this theory, but the only way to know if it would work, would be to give everyone that standard and who is capable of doing that? It is beginning to look like the world is headed that way on it's own. The standard of living is improving in many of the emerging third world countries. If we look at Asia for example, we see the success these countries are having and how their economies are improving. Unfortunately, this also drives up the need for oil and since there is only so much being pumped, the competition for this energy source could start another war. We have to understand how we can all get along better, before we can make the world a better place to live.

We want to begin to travel through space, but we don't understand how we will be able to travel between stars, since the distance is so great and rockets are just not efficient enough to be able to do this. We have created a new engine, called the Ion engine that is more of a light than an engine. It sends out electrically charged particles to propel the ship. An improved version has been created that is said to be capable of traveling anywhere in the solar system and maybe even a nearby star, if we want to travel in a ship for a very long time. For true travel between stars to take place, we have to understand how to either travel much faster than light, which Einstein stated was impossible, or find some other method of getting around, such as folding space, which is something else we really don't understand. Many scientists will say that they do understand this, but I would have to reply that if this is so, why can't we do it?

Lastly, we even seem to have forgotten some of the things that we knew. This means that for x amount of steps forward, we seem to take y amount of steps backward. One has only to look at some of the ancient structures to see what I am talking about. Some of them were built on top of mountains, others in jungles and still others in deserts. Many of them have one thing in common, they contain blocks of stone so heavy that we could not lift some of them today, using the average construction equipment. As for those that were build on mountain tops that used blocks of stone over 20 tons, that had to have been brought there from hundreds of miles away and hauled up a mountain, this remains as one of the greatest mysteries of all time. When people are confronted with this type of thing, some will always say that the aliens must have done this. The truth is probably a lot closer to home. The ancients found some method of moving these stones that we just don't understand today. If we look at the Coral Castle in Florida, we see a huge castle structure that was built by one man. It is said that some of the blocks of coral that were used in the construction were over 30 tons in weight and that no equipment at the time of it's construction was capable of lifting that weight. To make things even more mysterious, the castle was moved several miles by this guy from it's original location and he claimed he did it just using a truck. No one ever said that they saw anything, which seems impossible. Had this man discovered the secret of the ancients? We will never know, since he took the secret to his grave.

So there you have it. These are just a few of the things that we don't know, there is so much more, but that is for another time.