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

"Speech has been given to man to hide his thoughts." R.P. Malagrida

On Oct 1, 12:02 pm, gabbydott <gabbyd...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Bill, I noticed that your screen name on the group website is rather
> long. It reads: William L. Houts William L. Houts Lukaeon William L. Houts.
> I was wondering if this was your intention.
>
> Maybe yes. Just so much, I do differentiate between heaven and afterlifeand their individual usability for corruption. Both terms are somehow
> related to the future, but the access is different. Sorry, I forgot to
> introduce myself. My name is Gabby (short for Gabriele), I am a Protestant,
> my first language is German, and I believe in God. I like to listen to
> other people's stories which is why I have learned to keep my own very
> short. Nice meeting you. :)
>
> On Friday, September 28, 2012 7:17:08 AM UTC+2, William L. Houts William L.
> Houts Lukaeon William L. Houts 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 poetrather
> > >> 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-flightmuch
> > >>> 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 insidethe
> > >>> 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
>
> ...
>
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