Science Gripes

Sometimes I can't help but feel that most scientists really don't know what they are talking about, especially when it comes to other races existing on far out planets in the universe. I don't know how many times I have heard the statement that no other race could have visited earth because they would be too far away and it would take too long to get here. One of the things that comes to my mind is since we don't know what a particular race would be like, that statement is inaccurate, to say the least. Time might be completely different for an alien race. They might live for millions of years, or for a second of our time and be able to have a complete lifetime in that time span. Maybe they would seem to be not moving at all to us, because they moved so slow and yet to them that was normal and it seemed that we lived and died so fast that they would never see us. A race of beings that had these different time constraints might feel like they were traveling for only a few minutes in a space ship that took thousands of our years to reach its destination.

The Human Brain
Photo Source: Stock.xching

We tend to think of building more and more powerful engines to travel in space, at faster and faster rates of speed, but if we look at our history, we have to note that new discoveries and inventions are happening at a faster and faster pace. What if there is a completely different way of traveling and we have not discovered it yet? Have you noticed how brain power is being used more and more to control computers? People that are paralyzed can now control a computer with their thoughts. They have to wear a special device of course, but they can control the computer never the less. As we examine our brains more closely, it may become possible to amplify our thoughts, after all they are only electrical impulses and as we know, electrical waves can be amplified. Could such amplification some day allow us to power a ship with just our minds? If you think that this is far out, let me remind you that in space the least amount of push can power a ship and who is to say that we will not be able to push quite hard with our thoughts some day?

Hot Planet - No enlargement available
Graphic Source: Me

The search for planets like our own may turn out to be just a waste of valuable resources, because if we are looking for life in the universe, it just might appear in forms that are completely alien to us. It could turn out that our type of planet is the exception for life and that most life will exist in places that we never could have believed. There might even be life floating around in space. When it comes to searching for life, we really don't have much to go by, other than this planet, but maybe life is more prevalent on extremely hot planets, or extremely cold ones and that life might not even be carbon based. Our science is childlike in this area, because we simply do not have enough data and won't until we discover life in other places. We know that some life exists in the boiling waters near volcanic vents in the ocean and that never would have been believed a few years ago, so we can not rule out anywhere when we search for life.

We talk about extending life, but there are some things that we must really learn first before this can happen on a grand scale. The first thing is how to beat the body's rejection system. We really are in the primitive stages of this. Right now the idea is to grow organs and such using the cells from the body that this new organ would go into, thus avoiding rejection, but that is not the same as conquering it. We have to be able to take an organ and stick it in someone else without fear of rejection, regardless of blood type and such. When we accomplish this, we can move on to trying to learn how to transplant the human brain, the biggest challenge of all. If we can advance from growing cells into organs, to growing a body, hopefully without its own brain and then transplant a brain into it, we have instant youth. Could this ever happen? It is probably just a matter of time, but a very long time.

Modern Skull
Photo Source: Stock.xching

Another thing that annoys me is announcement of the recent finds of some kind of gorilla looking creature, that is supposedly the oldest relative of man. I think they said is was about 4 million years old, but you can correct me if I am wrong. Why does this annoy me so? It is because when they find a skeleton of modern man that is even older, they send it to a basement somewhere and never talk about it. No archaeologist ever wants to talk about these things, because they fear peer pressure and are afraid of becoming a laughing stock. Our civilization is being deprived of the true history of our race. When the gold rush took place in California, about a hundred and fifty years ago, miners began to dig into the hills and mountains. The mountains are said then to be about 3 million years of age and the soil in them about 7 million years of age. Complete human skeletons were found inside these mines. I am not talking about only one skeleton, but quite a few. They were sent away and never heard about again. The same thing is true for human skeletons that are millions of years old that are found in other parts of the world. Then there are the tools that have been found that are millions of years old that are just disregarded and what about those paintings made thousands of years ago in South America of humans and dinosaurs? No, I am not convinced that some find of a non human creature is a link to us when we know that human skeletons have been found that are even older in some instances.

Maybe one fault is the way we think about things. An example of this just might be SETI, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. They are searching for radio waves from alien races. Maybe I should say electromagnetic transmissions to be precise. These types of transmission might not be the way an advanced alien race would communicate. Maybe we should start examining every type of particle stream that hits the earth to see if there is some sort of message being sent that we are unaware of? Another thing we might do is to make a computer simulation of all the different particles bombarding the earth and see if any are unnatural, or can not be accounted for by the standard model. Wouldn't that be the height of it, if we were being bombarded with messages and yet were completely unaware of the fact?

I know that some people might find my way of thinking about things unusual, but I have always believed in keeping an open mind about things. I have also found that over the years some of my ideas that have appeared in articles have been picked up by some of the tabloids. I regret this since I am a serious person and some of those papers tend to hold up different ideas to mockery. The time has come for us to think out of the box.