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

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:
>
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>
>
>
> > 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:
>
> >>> 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."
>
> --
> "I just flew in from the Land of the Dead
>   and boy are my arms tired."- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

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