Re: Mind's Eye UFO's: Fact or Fantasy?

I haven't seen any UFOs and tend not to be much interested in people
who claim to have - at least without Bill's sensible provisos. The
speed of thought as a brain process is slower than light-speed - but
then I'm basically a tropical fish realist. I'd have a bet that no
one in this group would really have much of a definition of light-
speed and the Ricel curvature tensor, Euler Langrangian and the rest
of Einstein's field equations. I mean no offence and don't do much of
this science myself.

If you point out to a physicist that the people from the future who
have invented the time machine are in extraordinarily short supply in
our present he may come up with some mathematical guff on the shape of
the universe that explains this or makes time travel only possible to
the future. I have seen demons - plodding back to camp after a week's
endurance exercise with no food for two days I was visually convinced
the sentries were vampires but still asked them where the Naffi was.

My guess is that we travel through space as primitive life-forms with
evolution built-in and waiting to unfold. We may thus have come from
a much more advanced civilisation than ours bound by the speed of
light, capable of the biological engineering but not space-flight much
more advanced than our own. Calculations give 28 years as the time to
reach the edge of the known universe - but this is the time inside the
ship accelerating to near light speed fairly slowly. Space is not
friction free and it's doubtful we or our instruments could take the
radiation of light-speed flight.

I rather hope there are some nice, genuinely civilised aliens thinking
of coming here. In my speculation, intelligent life tends to worry
about food chains led by apes as these have been notoriously war-like.

I'm into bees and ants rather than UFOs at the moment. Bees use
'pharma' to combat fungal infections. Ants take slaves - killing the
adults of another species and taking the larvae. These slaves then
raise the slaver brood. Interestingly, the ant slaves rebel and kill
the pupae of their masters - an act that does not favour the
individuals a they will die, but does seem to be altruistic in favour
of other colonies of the enslaved species. I mention this to suggest
science is not a human invention, just something in evolution we are
expanding.

UFOs remind me of religion generally - people seem to bond around
ludic claims about golden salamanders and what cannot be proved. I
guess we will find life or past life-sign on Mars. Salvation may come
from a mother-ship, but my own feeling is that our inability to
develop science as we could is a more important thought experiment.

In respect of this problem I recommend 'Bad Pharma' by Ben
Goldacre, He finds a ¢600 billion industry in which more money is
spent on marketing than on research and development, where the results
of clinical trials of new drugs are massaged, and in which regulators
fail to regulate. Papers supposedly by respected academics are
ghostwritten by drug companies, and patients' pressure groups are
covertly sponsored by pill manufacturers.

I can't for the life of me work out why we aren't directing our
collective towards tapping into the asteroid belt and beyond instead
of ADMASS.

On 24 Sep, 20:15, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm placing my bet on thoughtspeed.  It's a great concept and it's a
> great word.  How could I do any better than that?
>
> --Bill
>
> On 9/24/2012 7:17 AM, Don Johnson wrote:
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> > I agree with Allan the distance challenge is daunting. In an endless
> > universe there's also no doubt in my mind there are other inhabitable
> > planets out there but very unlikely any "aliens" will be visiting us.
>
> > But there is hope....
>
> >http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw81.html
>
> > It's fun to speculate. The ball is in your court.
>
> > dj
>
> > On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 4:51 PM, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> I've been around for a while now, so I thought I'd put in a topic for
> >> discussion.  I'm very interested in the UFO phenomenon and wonder what the
> >> singing minds here have to say about it.  As for me, I don't have a dog in
> >> this fight --I tend to think that there's something to them, something very
> >> unusual, but I'm not at all certain that they're even piloted.  Jacques
> >> Valee, one of the more interesting theorists on the subject, says that
> >> they're something like external dreams.  Well, he doesn't say that exactly,
> >> but that's how I interpret him. Carl Jung, who was also very interested in
> >> the topic, says something very similar.
>
> >> I have an experience to relate, too.  About fifteen or sixteen years ago, I
> >> was flying down to Las Vegas on Southwest.  Looking out of my window I saw,
> >> perhaps 20,000 feet below us, a disc-shaped object. It was featureless and,
> >> in the bright sun and from this angle, almost perfectly white.  It wasn't
> >> particularly fast and other than the fact that it was round, it wasn't all
> >> that interesting. I told my three travel mates, and they all basically
> >> called me a liar.  (I was very interested in occult topics in those days, so
> >> my judgment was highly suspect.)  I'm not convinced that it wasn't something
> >> like a military test craft or something like that, but it was a UFO both in
> >> the high woo woo sense and in the sense that it was an unfamiliar flying
> >> object.  Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
>
> >> Tennis, anyone?
>
> >> --Bill
>
> >> -- "I just flew in from the Land of the Dead and boy are my arms tired."
>
> >> --
>
> --
> "I just flew in from the Land of the Dead
>   and boy are my arms tired."

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