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

It strikes me Bill that UFO stories and thinking about the future and
better places (heaven etc) can be part of science. We have no answers
to what we are doing here other than speculation. I tend to think the
economic world is religiously organised as a control fraud - this
aspect of religion bothers me a lot and the spiritual does not.
Reporting in UFOs (and such matters as spontaneous human combustion)
is so naff I can't get interested.

We would generally wonder why we don't know human and cosmic purpose
and consider this a disadvantage hard to imagine a benevolent creator
giving us. The Spartans, at least in myth, sent their male kids out
to cope in the wild. It would be good if mum and dad turned up in a
space-ship with an explanation.

On 28 Sep, 22:33, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We live on a hill between two rivers Allan.  The town here floods, but
> its such a dump now we don't go there.  The weather in NW England is
> pretty bad generally, but this has been a very bad summer as opposed
> to standardly bad.  I'm off to the dog track at Belle Vue on Saturday
> night - just for a daft night out.  I expect a few 'alien runners'
> there!
>
> If there is intelligent life elsewhere I expect they won't be animal
> like us.  Evolution is red in tooth and claw in part, but also about
> cooperation and Borg-like integration of species.  Whilst I see mind
> as a lot to do with brain processing, evidence mounts that this is
> only part of the story - some ants that are enslaved now act in
> rebellion against there masters with no 'hope' of improving their own
> individual condition, presumably on behalf of the rest of their
> species. I expect aliens to be able to be able to do the Borg thing
> and make use of what is biologically and technically available to make
> themselves and not be stuck with our lusts for reproduction.  My guess
> is such assimilation would not be to dominate or produce 'drones'.
>
> On he speed of light we know it depends on the medium it is travelling
> in, slowing to about bicycle speed in a Bose-Einstein condensate,
> almost stopping in such and emerging as a matter wave.  If gravity
> exists we don't know how fast it travels or how fast space expands.
> The issue of quantum stuff like instantaneous knowing in wave equation
> systems in which the bits 'know' each other remains.
>
> Other species are nw only with us in assimilation or history and our
> fate may be little more.  We are only special in made-up stories of
> god, origin and heroes we know are trash.  One of my questions about
> robot heaven or advanced inter-galactic society is why anyone would
> risk human beings spoiling it!
>
> On 28 Sep, 13:28, rigsy03 <rigs...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
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> > What about the Elysian Fields for fallen heroes and the blessed-
> > mentioned in the Odyssey and Aeneid? I worry about the non-heroes and
> > esp. those who are massacred and dumped in a pit or potter's grave
> > with no ceremony. But I do agree, we dabble in heaven and hell during
> > our lifetimes. For instance, a bad marriage is compared to Hell-
> > true! :-) A sensory delight of the flesh or palate is compared to
> > Heaven. The afterlife was popular in early Christianity to give the
> > poor hope but later you could buy your way into heaven with
> > indulgences and the guilt remains, perhaps, with charities and
> > volunteerism. I have a more practical view but let's face it- people
> > want easy answers, easy fixes/exits.
>
> > On Sep 28, 12:17 am, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > I wonder if humans do dream of uncorrupted worlds, in general. You'd
> > > think that would be universal, and it does seem to be borne out by
> > > Western mythologies, with some exceptions.  For instance, the Greeks had
> > > Olympus, but except for Heracles no one got to go there; everyone else
> > > went to Hades, which was gloomy and boring if you were lucky enough to
> > > land there in general population, and terrifying if the gods put you in
> > > Tartarus.  And the Romans didn't seem to place faith in any sort of
> > > afterlife at all, which is one of the main reasons whyChristianity sold
> > > like hotcakes.  Eastern religions such as Buddhism had various hells and
> > > heavens, but they were sort of besides the point:  your karma is / was
> > > supposed to boil down to nothing and liberate you from the Wheel of
> > > Rebirth, which was supposed to put you  in Nirvana, which was less a
> > > Heaven than it was a Nowhere. And Taoism doesn't have much to say about
> > > heavenly afterworlds;  its whole point is to make this world more just
> > > and balanced and leaves heavens to the individual to figure out.
>
> > > But as to your question of whether humans long for uncorrupted worlds, I
> > > think that besides the Abrahamic religions noone takes them very
> > > seriously.  And I think they've got a point:  I mean, if you're taking
> > > your present existence at all seriously, then just what is an afterlife
> > > supposed to be about?  Are we supposed to be eating bonbons all day and
> > > living in some version of American luxury?  I'd like to believe in
> > > Heaven  --which for me looks like a kind of liberal college town, with
> > > libraries and funky old cinema houses-- but all of that seems kind of
> > > empty if there's no gravitas, no seriousness.   Without death, without a
> > > final marker which howls at us, Do what you must do NOW and die knowing
> > > that you've used your life well--without that, I think heaven would
> > > become kind of slouchy and boring, or worse.  Unless, of course, what's
> > > waiting for us on the other side is something superrational but
> > > beautiful, like being absorbed into the godhead, if such there be.
>
> > > So in answer to your question, I think we do dream of uncorrupt worlds,
> > > but if we examine them too closely, they tend to be bustable soap
> > > bubbles. And maybe I lack imagination, but I wonder, how could it be any
> > > other way?  Frankly, I'd like to be told how. I sound sensible about all
> > > of this if a little pessimistic, but in reality I'm a scared ex-Catholic
> > > who is terrified  of death and wants to solve the Big Question before
> > > they're performing Last Rites on his sorry ass.
>
> > > --Bill
>
> > > On 9/27/2012 7:20 PM, rigsy03 wrote:
>
> > > > I wonder where you put the mythological and religious other-worldlies-
> > > > from gods to guardian angels, etc.? Or the construct of Dante's
> > > > "Divine Comedy", for instance. Do humans long for uncorrupted worlds?
>
> > > > On Sep 27, 6:23 pm, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >> I'm with the pragmatists on the question of intelligent alien species.
> > > >> Many scientists who speculate on this sort of thing --though there
> > > >> really aren't that many of them-- say that such species wouldn't
> > > >> resemble anything so comforting as a humanoid physiology, but I think
> > > >> they're partly mistaken.  Surely there would be surprises in the way
> > > >> nature cooks up life on other planets with radically different
> > > >> chemistries than our dear old Mama Earth.  But I think there's reason to
> > > >> suppose that many alien species would resemble us.  After all, any
> > > >> species we might imagine has to cope with gravity as it evolves.  So
> > > >> they're much more likely to evolve some form of locomotion which
> > > >> involves  two, four or six pedal extremities (as Fats Waller calls them)
> > > >> rather than three or five:  even-numbered legs are less wobbly and more
> > > >> amenable to balanced movement which consumes fewer calories. . Also,
> > > >> sense organs like eyes and ears are likely to be located in or close to
> > > >> a head, as there is survival value in having sense organs located close
> > > >> to a brain, or whatever such species might use for brains. Finally,
> > > >> everyone in the cosmos requires energy to get going, so they're either
> > > >> going to evolve photosynthesis and take their energy directly from their
> > > >> sun or suns, or they're going to take their sunbeams indirectly by
> > > >> consuming something lower in the food chain.  I'm sure there are lots of
> > > >> evolution pathways I'm leaving out, seeing as I'm a curious poet rather
> > > >> than a serious scientist type of guy, but I think these notions are, as
> > > >> Allan named other ideas of mine, sensible provisos.
>
> > > >> PS.  I left out centipedes and millipedes with their scores of legs, but
> > > >> I think y'all's get what I'm saying here.
>
> > > >> --Bill
>
> > > >> On 9/27/2012 3:57 PM, archytas wrote:
>
> > > >>> 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
>
> ...
>
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