Let me say at the outset that there are no UFO’s, and interstellar visitors cannot exist. The distances are too great, and even if such travel were possible, there would be no reason to visit here. At the outset of such a journey, no intelligent life would have existed here, and so there would be no reason for this destination.

I do suspect that intelligent life abounds in the galaxy and universe. But it’s a frustration, as I will never know for sure, as there will be no “Contact.”

I am curious about ‘seeding’ – the idea that life on one planet can seed life on another. So a scientist finding a rock in Antarctica showing evidence of microscopic life on Mars is intriguing, to say the least. But there is not enough evidence to test the hypothesis at this time, so it is idle speculation for sci-fi buffs. And fun.

All that said, there is an “Area 51” in Nevada, and top secret programs were run from there. They did reverse engineering of foreign technology (other countries – not planets), and developed high-speed aircraft that looked like flying saucers at certain angles. They had tunnels through which they transported rockets. Aircraft crashed, and civilians coming upon the crashed aircraft had to be bought off to keep them quiet. The U.S. government never officially acknowledged the existence of the facility, and its airspace was off-limits, all the way to outer space.

We know this now because parts of what went on there have been declassified and some of the men who participated are now allowed to talk. And they have.

A while back Bill O’Reilly got his panties in a twist when he found out that the vast majority of social studies teachers at an Oregon college were Democrats. He assumed hiring bias, and did one of his patented ambush interviews with the department head to make his point.

I suspect that if they did a study of the business school at the same college, they would find a preponderance of Republicans. There’s no bias involved – just an attraction of certain types of people to certain professions. I am a CPA, and a European-style socialist. But the vast majority of accountants and CPA’s are conservative and Republican. The profession does not attract many socialists, and tends to favor black/white thinking – hence, conservatives.

Pew Research did a study that gave me pause for thought – I never would have guessed this. Among the general public, 23% consider themselves Republican, 35% Democrat. Among scientists, the numbers are wildly skewed – only 6% Republican, and 55% Democrat. When pressed as to which party they “lean” to, it gets even wilder: 12% Republican, 81% Democrat.

There have been some self-selected and non-scientific polls showing that in journalism, most reporters are Democrats. Conservatives assume hiring bias, but a more likely explanation is that more Democrats are drawn to journalism than Republicans. I might even take it a step further – given their exposure to a wide variety of issues and people, and the need to examine all sides, journalists develop a more open and questioning thought processes (or had that tendency to begin with), and end up as Democrats because the party is less doctrinaire than the other.

But that’s just a guess. Regarding the wild skew in the number of Democratic scientists, I’m both surprised and at a loss. Hard scientists are trained in hard science, and would, in my mind, tend to be apolitical. There is no political indoctrination going on in science classrooms … maybe I’ve hit on something there.

Maybe not. I’m stumped.

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The above video is part of a larger series which you can access by Googling its title. I thought it would be four of five parts, but then started seeing “Part 28”, and realized that there are more parts to it than I will ever see. Part four is notable because of the magnitude of the error made by “Dr.” Kent Hovind in estimating the amount of water it would take to cover the earth to a depth of one molecule. Almost as large as the magnitude of fraud behind his “doctorate” degree.

This is way too big to be a blog post, though Dr. Peter Rost did it – it takes up the whole screen. Nonetheless, it is fascinating – for those of you into size comparisons, it’s priceless.

Check it out here. When the web page opens, there will be a small vertical bar on the left side. Click on it and the pictures will expand.

This is a fascinating visual graph of our fresh water supplies, from Buzz Feed.

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In the above scene, Dr. Emmett Brown is transporting his dog, Einstein, one minute into the future. Einstein arrives shortly after this cut ends.

Not so fast! Schechner at the blog Overthinking It has a few questions. He is troubled by the fact that Einstein arrives in exactly the same place as he departed from. Making a few rudimentary calculations, he figures that the earth would have moved 1,123.17 miles in space – this taking into account only the rotation of the earth on its axis and its orbit around the sun, with no mention of the distance traveled by the solar system itself, or the galaxy.

He arrives back at the parking lot exactly one minute in the future – well, not exactly. Schechner calculates that the departure and arrival watches might be off just a tad, say ~1 millisecond. For a dog to travel 1,122.17 miles in one millisecond, he would have to travel six times the speed of light in a vacuum – backward. Since we all know that is impossible (at the very least, he’d be traveling backward in time – not forward), there is only one conclusion to be drawn:

The movie is a hoax!

And the two sequels as well. Another government lie.

Will computers and human beings merge?

I actually have a slide in my talk that showed a computer that interfaces with us as a genetically designed species. If we can capture how diatoms lay down their silica circuits, we should be able to write a genetic code for making a computer chip – one that has nice interfaces for us as a species.

What do you mean – nice interfaces?

We can expand the power of the human mind by having plug-in modules. If you want to learn to speak French, you use your silica-based computer that is genetically driven – whether it’s a small, add-on chip that gets planted in the back of our skulls, or it’s something engineered into us. Our biggest limitation is mental. I would be happy to have five times the brain capacity I have. As I get older, any increase would be nice. If we came up with a magic pill to increase our memory, people would take it. And if there is some genetic engineering that would work, I think most people would do it. That is the direction that humanity will ultimately go, for sure.

But that’s still the future. In the near term, most of the focus will be on things like limb regeneration and eliminating late-onset dementia.

Limb regeneration?

Yes, A lot of other species do it, and a lot of these processes are based on stem cells. If we don’t understand stem cells, which are the translators of the genetic code, then we are wasting our time trying to understand the genetic code. There is probably nothing more important to study about human biology than stem cells. The fact that it has been blocked by the Bush Administration on religious grounds is one of the intellectual tragedies of the century.

From an interview with Craig Venter, genetics pioneer, Rolling Stone Magazine, 11/15/2007