tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78517392986294057472024-03-05T17:13:58.061-08:00Standing in Front of the UniverseThrough the event horizon, and what we've found thereMortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-9585705952707791512011-08-09T23:34:00.000-07:002011-08-09T23:34:46.701-07:00Time<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Time, one of the most mysterious yet fundamental parts of the universe. The universe would be static and unchanging, stuck in the state the instant it was created. However, scientists don't really know why it exists in the first place, there appears to be no mathematical necessity for causes to happen before effects and why certain events have to happen in a certain order or direction.<br />
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There is nothing that says, in the laws of physics, that the pieces of a broken tea cup will come together and jump on to a table to form a flawless tea cup, or that a perfect tea cup should fall off of a table and shatter, and yet only one of these two events have been observed.<br />
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One answer to this question is the idea of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Originally used to explain how heat flows through bodies, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that in an isolated system the collective heat in a system will spread out towards equilibrium. This means that heat always flows from points of high heat to points of low heat. This can be easily observed in a glass of room temperature water and a couple of ice cubes, the heat flows from the warmer water to the colder ice, cooling the water but eventually warming the ice and causing it to melt. Entropy is the measurement of heat or unusable energy in the system. With the Second Law of Thermodynamics we find that the total entropy of a system cannot decrease, only remain constant or increase. As work is done even though local entropy could decrease the work moves some entropy to another part of the system and turns some of the energy done in the work into heat increasing the total entropy in the system.<br />
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This increase of entropy might explain why exactly things happen in the order that they do. They arrow of time might have to follow the sequence of events that cause the increase of order entropy. Sequences of events that cause cause entropy to decrease simply are outlawed by this rule which explains why ice melts instead of the ice becoming colder and colder and the water eventually reaching boiling point. Entropy can also measure the amount of chaos in a system so chaos will always increase as well. A quick example of this is if you don't spend the energy to take care of your house, which will cause waste heat to be made increasing entropy, and you will see that messes quickly take occur, dust will collect and cupboards will decay and furniture will fall apart. Also order cannot spontaneously come on its own, if you take all the pieces of a car and put them in a box and shake up the box, you'd never open a box to find a new car inside. However if you'd take a new car and shake it up vigorously for a few minutes you'd find a bunch of broken car pieces. <br />
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I don't really like the idea of entropy when applied to the concepts of order and chaos. I understand how it works in temperature and accept that but I still don't like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Since it says that Entropy <i>tends</i> increase over time. Even though the chances of entropy decreasing is very small and it happens at only small level it still not 100% true. With the law of gravity there is no chance that matter would be repelled on the gravitational level ever, even on the microscopic level. However the Second Law isn't always 100% true. Rather than a law I just see it as an observation of the how the world tends to act.<br />
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I think a decent analogy is a casino. Even though on an individual level their is a chanced of making a profit, the probability of winning is allot smaller than losing to the casino. So on a large scale the money tends to flow from gamblers to the casino. There is no law of the universe, though, that says that money has to flow in that direction. And I don't think that the flow of time is based off of the flow of money in this relationship. And if someone knows the system, such as card counters, that can make off with a decent amount of profit at the expense of the casino. It's my hope that one day that we will be able to understand the universe in a way that we can make use of its own rules to beat it self at its own game and reduce chaotic entropy.<br />
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A few days ago I saw a movie that gave me an odd idea about time. I don't want to say what the movie is or exactly what happened in the movie since it might give away the story for any one who didn't see it, and most might not have seen it since it came out not to long ago. So in this movie a guy made a quantum device that allowed a person to go back in time but didn't effect the present. Instead it made a new world with a different timeline separate from the "real" one. In the new world the events in it are a slightly different but, since the device existed in that world too, it was also able to create different time lines. But since that world was slightly different from the original world the world it made would be slightly different from the second one based off of the second worlds differences. And this pattern could go on indefinitely.<br />
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As I was thinking about it, I thought it was such a weird situation. Each universe makes another universe based on its current state. If one could accurately predict human behavior then one could predict how all of the other worlds would be like. So then I thought maybe that is how the universe acts and what causes time to flow in one direction.<br />
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So the original universe would some how be created. But in this universe there is only three spatial dimensions, but no time dimension. So this universe would be in the initial state and stay in this state for as long as it exists, each particle static, never moving. However this universe makes another one, somehow. The state that this universe us in is based off of the state its creating universe is in. This universe makes a new universe using the same rules the previous one used. This chain of events would continue on forever. So there would be an uncountable amounts of universes, unchanging but the newest one making more and more universes.<br />
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This could explain why effects would have to have causes and why, even though time doesn't exist in the way that we imagine or experience it, time seems to flow continuously. As I type this there might be trillions and trillions of me's frozen in front of a computer and watching [adult swim]. Each state of the me's has affected the current me which allows me to remember the states of the universes that came before.<br />
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The universe could then be seen as a film reel, each frame is doesn't change but each sequential frame is slightly different from the one before it (unless the camera angle changes, or scene changes, but you get me). As each one is experienced one at a time time seems to flow almost exactly like how we see time. This view gives us a single timeline but possibly each universe makes multiple universe based off of quantum uncertainty, so if a quantum event has a 70% chance of happening than out of the 70% of the universes that that one made will have that event happen and in the others something happened. This picture of the universe is more akin to asexual bacteria. Each bacteria has multiple children each one slightly different in a slightly different way. So after many generations there could be a great degree of variation in the bacteria arising in speciation. This view allows multiple alternate histories to exist that many science fiction authors like to play with.<br />
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Now I don't truly believe this is true, I just thought it was was an interesting idea and thought it would be cool to put it up in here.To find out if this might be true could be decently easy. As with my first analogy if one looks hard enough they will notice that there is a frame rate and instead of characters moving smoothly throughhout the film they continuously make small little instantaneous jumps. Maybe, as our measuring devices become more and more precise, we will be able to notice the frame rate of time. This might not entirely prove this hypotheses but could show that it is feasible. I guess this is one of those hypotheses where people go "So?" and I can't really answer. I don't know how this view of the universe affects our lives and be used to make future predictions. I figure the most important view is that the universe has a "frame rate" and that time can be quantized, much like how energy has. It would be cool to see in the future that this idea is being seriously considered but I'll continue just watching the physics world and see what those crazy physicists come up with. </div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-39638885721761854822011-07-29T22:53:00.000-07:002011-07-29T22:53:19.490-07:00Schrodinger's Cat<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Time for the much anticipated sequel to The Double Slit Paradox post! Here is the link to it if you haven't read it: <a href="http://standinginfrontoftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/06/double-slit-paradox.html">http://standinginfrontoftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/06/double-slit-paradox.html</a>.<div><br />
</div><div>So as you can guess the Schrodinger's Cat thought experimented by Erwin Schrodinger. At first he was trying to show how preposterous certain interpretations of the Uncertainty Principle to be used on more macroscopic scenarios. The Uncertainty Principle was created by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. He came up with this when he thought of a theoretical measuring device that could give scientists the precise velocity and position of a subatomic particle, e.g. an electron. This device shoots a single photon at an electron. The more precise of a location we want the smaller wavelength of the photon needs to be. However the shorter the frequency the more energy the photon has causing the unknown bounce of the photon off of the electron would have a larger effect (since we don't know where the electron exactly is we don't know where the photon is going to hit the electron so we won't know how electron is going to bounce off when the two collide). So the more we know the electron's position the less we are sure about its velocity and the more we know about its velocity the more uncertain we are about its position. So we have an inverse ratio between the electrons position and velocity. Now this isn't just faults in this hypothetical device. As it turns out its part of nature, for some reason, for us to be completely certain about multiple states of a particle, not with just position and velocity but other quantum states as well. </div><div><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Hydrogen_Density_Plots.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="290" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Hydrogen_Density_Plots.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The wave functions of the some of the orbits an electron of<br />
a hydrogen atom. The whiter it is the more likely an electron<br />
will be there when observed.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div>Somehow this led some physicists to the idea that when not observed particles expand to a wave function. This function gives us the probability of a particles state e.g. position. When the particle is observed the wave function will "collapse" to a random point in the wave function. The function of a particle will tell us the likely hood the particle will be there when it collapses. So now when physicists thought only photons had a wave/particle duality it turns out every particle can be either a particle or a wave. This electrons, protons, atoms, molecules and even.... you! *gasp*</div><div><br />
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</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OeBCraaSPHc/Thitwrz4gDI/AAAAAAAAAjU/4zILLbPwcJU/s640/Schrodingers+Cat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="258" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OeBCraaSPHc/Thitwrz4gDI/AAAAAAAAAjU/4zILLbPwcJU/s320/Schrodingers+Cat.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That cat is asleep not dead! <br />
But I guess people don't like pics of dead cats</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div>So when this idea came out Schrodinger found this a little odd. This wave function meant that an unobserved particle could hold two states and be in two, or more, places at once. In a way to show how preposterous this could mean, Schrodinger came up with a little thought experiment. He got a completely sound proof and opaque box. In this box he put a cat and a quite devilish little device. This device has an unstable atom and a can detect when it decays. When it does so it unleashes a poison gas easily able to kill a small mammal such as a cat, especially when there is no circulation. When the cat and this device is placed in the box and sealed off there is no way to detect what is going on in the box. The decay of atoms and subatomic particles is governed by the Uncertainty Principle and is completely random when it does decay. However the rate at which this type of theoretical atom decays is known and after an hour there is a fifty/fifty chance that the atom decayed and didn't decay. </div><div><br />
</div><div>So according to the current idea of quantum physics the atom decayed and is still intact simultaneously. This means that this device activated and did not activate and that the defenseless cat is still alive AND dead at the same time. However once someone opens the box than one of the two states is chosen and we would either see a non-conflicting alive OR dead cat. No one knows why Schrodinger picked a sort of morbid thought experiment (because no physicists wants to needlessly kill cats, maybe the device can feed the cat so the cat would be a bit peckish or well fed simultaneously instead of dead or alive), but I guess he just wanted to show how weird this new theory could be. </div><div><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/12500000/Schrodinger-s-Cat-the-big-bang-theory-12516974-1440-900.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/12500000/Schrodinger-s-Cat-the-big-bang-theory-12516974-1440-900.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br />
</div><div>However instead of debunking this new idea this thought experiment was taken honestly and many physicists think that the cat would indeed be alive and dead at the same time. Some people I think went a little crazy with this idea of observation itself being able to change the world around us. Some people thinks that consciousness, which is what makes us able to "observe" the world, is a fundamental part of the universe, maybe as some fundamental particle which is necessary for life or evidence as a universal consciousness that we are just part of which religions have called God. </div><div><br />
</div><div>One guy I saw on "Through the wormhole" (and yes in hindsight I realized that's very similar to my subtitle thing and I did make mine later, but whatever I like mine and I'm sticking to it) actually saw this as a evidence that we are in some simulation or game since in video games it doesn't render anything the player isn't looking at or doesn't update objects that are decently far from an the player to increase the speed of the game. However there is a huge difference between rendering objects to a screen for a human to understand and the how objects need to be perceived to objects in the simulation it self. In video games points of the model a translated from the position on the model in respect to the objects position in the world, then translated in relative to the camera's position in the world, then projected to a 2d plane which is then rendered onto your screen (there's a few more steps from camera to the screen but there more technical and unnecessary for me to tell you, but that's right I'm learning stuff in video game school XD). This is required for objects to be seen and takes up allot of processing time which is why we don't do that for objects behind you or out of your field of view in a game or simulation. In real life, photons bounce off of objects and certain frequencies are absorbed, the rest go into your eye and hit certain light sensitive cells depending on their relative position to the eye. The entire frequency of white light, usually sunlight, minus the color absorbed by the object gives the incoming light the opposite color which we observe. This happens all the time in a light filled environment whether someone is looking at an object or not. For more reasons why I don't think this world is not a simulation observe this post: <a href="http://standinginfrontoftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/05/are-we-in-matrix.html">http://standinginfrontoftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/05/are-we-in-matrix.html</a></div><div><br />
</div><div>I, being a skeptic atheist, don't believe in anything special about us and do not think there is some sort of ethereal or physical "thing" that is consciousness. As I've said before nothing special happened when three to four billion years ago when life originated. The universe didn't go "These bags of chemicals shall be able to observe and collapse wave functions when these other organic chemicals have no such power!" However I do believe that particles can exist as a wave and have all the implications that come with it, especially since experiments, such as the Double Slit Experiment, prove it. I just think that the definition of "Observation" is misconstrued by some people. When I first heard about the Double Slit Experiment I was like "Whoa! If I open and close my eyes it changes how electrons behave!?" But then reading it up some more I realized that by observing the electrons it something more like Heisenberg's theoretical measuring device. They hit the passing electrons with photons to see which slit it went through (I'm assuming you've read the post I linked at the top so read that first plox). And it was this bombardment that affected the particle and wave like patterns. So looking at something start up doesn't really affect the actions of the observed object since photons are constantly hitting you any ways. However if it's pitch dark, using a flash light to look at the world around you will affect it, not because you're looking at it but because you're hitting it with a flash light, or the photons from the flashlight rather. </div><div><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://web.media.mit.edu/~jieqi/images/works/schrodingerscat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://web.media.mit.edu/~jieqi/images/works/schrodingerscat.jpg" width="299" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Picture related, but also pretty trippy. </td></tr>
</tbody></table><div>So now looking at the Schrodinger's Cat experiment with this mentality the answer, to me at least, but what do I know, is that the act of the device that is measuring the unstable atom causes the atom to collapse to the a single decayed/not decayed state. This means that no matter how much the box is sealed off it is still being observed by the device it self not some scientist. So the cat would remain in one state at all time, box being opened or closed regardless. Also I would like to think that the cat would be able to look at itself and decide if it's dead or not, but I guess that brings up other things. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Once again I'm a 20 year old in a gaming school and not taking any quantum physics and am mostly self taught so I could be completely wrong and it would be awesome if some Ph.D in physics came up and told me some awesomeness and correct any mistakes or misinterpretations I made. However I stand in my "This world is not a computer simulation" claim. And of course having a Ph.D or anything is not a prerequisite to leaving comments on my blog (well I guess a computer and hands are but that's more of a physical than a rules thing), so fill free to comment cause, you know, it'll be cool 'n' junk. </div></div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-15531422436032446892011-07-25T00:59:00.000-07:002011-07-25T00:59:24.122-07:00NASA Blue Beam Project<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Sorry about not updating in the past couple of weeks. I've been on vacation so I was not able/not willing to post stuff.<br />
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So during this break anonymous put a link in the comments to my 2012 post, <a href="http://educate-yourself.org/cn/projectbluebeam25jul05.shtml">http://educate-yourself.org/cn/projectbluebeam25jul05.shtml</a>. This led to a website talking the NASA Blue Beam Project. To be honest I don't believe a lick of it and most of it I don't think even an anaconda could swallow, but I'll give anything someone links or posts in the comments. I might not make a post about it but I will read up a bit of it. So the Blue Beam Project is a NASA/UN joint operation (I'm not really sure, everything says the whole thing is orchestrated by the United Nations and I never hear anything about how NASA is involved but it's always referred to as the NASA Blue Beam Project so I don't know) that's supposed set up the world's populace to accept the a single "Satanic" New Age religion which is required for their New World Order, which is a single global dictatorship, why a single new religion is required for the New World Order I have no idea.<br />
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The Blue Beam Project (I also have no idea why it's called that) comes in four steps;<br />
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1. The architects of the Blue Beam Project will plant false evidence in certain areas, and then cause earthquakes in those areas, leading people to "uncover" the evidence. These objects will prove that either the teachings and meanings of all the major world religions were misinterpreted or disprove religions completely.<br />
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2. The next step is to use satellites to make holographic images all over the world. Each region's messiah, such as Jesus in Europe and the Americas and Muhammad in the Middle East, saying how the everyone has been misinterpreting their religions.<br />
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3. The third step is to have messages reach into the minds of every human on the planet, making them feel as if God is talking to them from within their soul. God says to them again that everyone has been misinterpreting all the holy scriptures.<br />
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4. The final step comes in three parts:<br />
a. They'll make holograms in the sky (presumably the same technology used in step two) making it seem that aliens are invading the Earth. In a desperate attempt to survive the attack all the nuclear nations of the world will then use their nuclear arsenals on the holograms, leaving them defenseless.<br />
b. Then a race of good aliens, still all holograms, will come in and destroy the invading aliens.<br />
c. Now this is the most confusing part of the Blue Beam Project. Supernatural forces will then travel through wires and possess all electric devices (that will by this time have all have microchips in them) and will push people to suicide or permanent psychological damage).<br />
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After these four steps the UN (or whoever) will then believe that the world is ready for any new messiah so when they present this to the world they plan the world will grasp for any kind of security and will convert to their new religion and accept a world dictatorship. <br />
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I apologize to any one who reads these and does believe in this but I don't think I even have to say anymore about the Blue Beam Project and any normal sane person wouldn't believe this at all. I have no idea why a whole world religion is necessary for a world government. And the first three steps where all essentially accomplish the same thing. Also as an atheist I know hard it is to convince most religious people. Given the tons of geological biological and experimental evidence for evolution millions of people in the United States still don't believe in it. I can't imagine what proof they could uncover after step one that could make everyone in the world question their beliefs that their ancestors have been following for thousands of years. Also if I was christian having a giant image of Jesus Christ in the sky making me think it is actually him talking to me from heaven would make me believe in Christianity even more, hell if I saw that I might just believe in it right then and there rather than question Christianity, and I feel that would go for all religions.<br />
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To implement step three one of the sites talked about LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) which is essentially a laser for sound. The sound emitted from LRAD does not dissipate in three dimensions like normal sound but all the sound waves travel down a single path directed by the device. This allows three cool things; it allows you to send sounds long distances without the sound dissipating and getting quieter, it makes sound appear to come from what your pointing at rather than the device itself and for military purposes you can have the device deafeningly loud to nonletahly cripple any opponents but only people in the direction of the device will be affected while the friendlies can stand a few feet away and not hear it any where as loud.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/myWxwNQfo-8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br />
So this technology is supposed to be used in step two allowing the various messiahs to talk to everyone in the world. However this technology is uses normal audio, just fashioned in a way to not spread out. So satellites would not be able to send audio signal through the vacuum of space. Even if that was possible I can't imagine how satellites will be able to send messages to the six billion plus people of the world.<br />
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For their third step they planed to use LF (Low Frequency), VLF (Very Low Frequency), and ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) electromagnetic waves bursted at the same frequency as the human brain. This supposedly makes it seem as if voices are coming from the inside your head. LF and ELF waves range from microwave and radio waves frequency. And the their are two common household devices that uses these electromagnetic waves, you guessed it: Radios and Microwaves! If you live in any decently sized town Radio waves constantly travel through your head and yet nobody can tune into a radio station with their head (I did hear a story where this female comedian heard radio stations through her teeth fillings). Cell phones also use microwaves to send signals and I hope no one picks up my cell phone calls without my consent.<br />
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Step four is well... I mean the UN wants to fake an alien invasion just to make the countries of the world use up their nuclear arsenal leaving them unable to defend them selves against the UN's nukes, which is comprised of those same nations.... Then then a second alien race comes in to destroy the bad aliens and just as quickly disappear as fast as the whole world is supposed to forget about them. Then the websites literally say supernatural forces are supposed to travel down fiber optic cables, coaxial cables and other wires to some how scare the worlds population to suicide. TV's and hairdryers have to do some scary pretty scary shit to make me want to kill my self. An interesting sentence was that they said that step four was very similar to how the Soviets spread communism. So they made huge realistic holograms convincing the peasants that aliens where invading the Earth so the peasants of 1917 Russia and the third world countries of 1940s and 1950s would use their nuclear arsenals. When this retaliation would ultimately fail friendly aliens came, destroyed the bad aliens and left without a trace. Then the Soviets possessed the electrical appliances of the poorest people of the first half of the 20th century, with all their TVs, smart phones and iPad2's. Look it up in any history book it's in there, trust me.<br />
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Once this New World Order is established they require that everyone is a part of this. To track down any humans who run into the wild to live off of wild animals and fish, the conspirers plan to put microchips in every single fish and edible animal. So they plan to go everywhere and put trackers in the billion of billions of edible animals of the world. And of course they know exactly when every animal gives birth so they can put the trackers in the day their born. And somehow they're going to know based on the movements of the billions of blips on the world map when an animal is captured by a human not just a normal carnivore.<br />
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I would like to hope it's just a troll to mess with me because I would feel bad for humanity if some of us believe this is real. However there are multiple websites about this and some are pretty old so that would seem to be a pretty deep troll. And I've seen some crazy things that people believe in. Two of the websites where I got most of the information from where based off of a French Canadian where English is definitely not his first language, so if someone knows more about this and can answer some questions I had and fix any things that I may have misinterpreted (I'm looking at you Mr. Anonymous who put up that link).<br />
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If you were wondering these are the three sites that I looked up this stuff on:<br />
<a href="http://educate-yourself.org/cn/projectbluebeam25jul05.shtml">http://educate-yourself.org/cn/projectbluebeam25jul05.shtml</a><br />
<a href="http://www.truinsight.com/BLUEBEAM%20PROJECT%20DISCLOSURE%20PART%20TWO.htm">http://www.truinsight.com/BLUEBEAM%20PROJECT%20DISCLOSURE%20PART%20TWO.htm</a><br />
<a href="http://2012poleshift.wetpaint.com/page/NWO+Project+Blue+Beam%3A+False+Holographic+Second+Coming">http://2012poleshift.wetpaint.com/page/NWO+Project+Blue+Beam%3A+False+Holographic+Second+Coming</a><br />
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</div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-67712438914973259182011-07-05T22:19:00.000-07:002011-07-05T22:19:43.838-07:00Burden<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Time for a new game concept! "Burden" (working title) is my oldest and my detailed concept, so I might be able to spread this out in two or three posts, hehehhe. So the setting takes place in this universe about 500 years into the future. Earth's diplomacy has changed allot. A century into the future China is one of the most powerful powers in the world rivaling the US and growing whilst American economies and strength has stagnated. China begins to flex its muscles and begins territorial expansion. Starting the Imperial war China conquers all of Asia up to the end of Turkey and Ural Mountains. After the war Europe was completely ravaged and all most every government lost power relative to the chaos in modern Africa. The American economy finally collapses and fuses together with Mexico and Canada to synergistically support the government and forms the United Nations of North America, or UNNA. After years of recovery Europe is joined together again under one flag as the Roman Republic, harkening back to the original rise of Europe, and eventually becomes one of the most advanced Superpower. By the 26th century the "Universal Engine" (working name), which allows ships to open a portal to another dimension, dubbed the "Jump Dimension", and then jump back to this dimension at any point in this universe so the distances of any point is irrelevant in respect of travel time (I know this interferes with relativity and could possibly allow travel back in time, but shut up it's a video game).<br />
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Eventually a colonizable binary planet system is discovered (instead of a moon orbiting a planet it's two equally massive planets orbiting each other), called Pollox and Castor. The sentient species is quite humanoid but with a few distinctive features, I actually havn't figured out what these features would be yet. The technological level of the Descourian species is at the level humanity was at in the 14th-15th century, high middle ages. The Descourians have the ability to shape energy into different forms allowing them to appear to be able to do magic (cause lets face it if the don't have any biological advantage humans would completely decimate them, being a mellenia more advanced). They also have a naturally occurring alloy that's harder than any metal on Earth allowing them to make almost indestructible armour and Weapons that can pierce through a inches of steel (again more balancing). The planets are also tidally linked so the same faces are always facing each other. And the sides that face each other have points where the energy that powers the Descourian abilities pools together and allows the inhabitants to travel between its surfaces.<br />
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Their are three main powers on the Descourian planets; Ledia, Avor, and Doraia. Etymology time! Ledia came from lead, I'm not sure why I just remember that it is. Avor came from the good god of Fable "Avo" and I just put an 'r' in the back, and Avor is a theocracy. And Doraia came from the word Doric which is a type of Greek column, mostly cause they are based off of Roman and Greek civilizations. Also Pollux and Castor are twins that came from either Greek or Roman mythology. Descouria, I actually don't remember how I came up with that name.<br />
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Anyways, The largest of the three, Doraia is the most Isolated and the other two Ledia and Avor are religiously uncomfortable with each other as the Ledian kicked the Avorian converts out of their lands and banished them to the nearby continent (I do have a map for both planets but not on this computer, I might remake it for another post). Recently (past hundred years or so) the Descourians began colonizing the opposite planet, Pollux.<br />
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So the UNNA and the Roman Republic decided to split the Planet of Castor, UNNA would get the two smaller continents which ended up being populated with the Descourians and quickly allies with the Avorians who see the UNNA military as the angelic army of their god. The Romans colonize the larger uninhabited continent but then begins having trouble dealing with the deadly wildlife. Soon the Chinese Empire (before the Imperial war China had a regime change giving rise to the now called Chinese Empire giving the war its name) colonizes the unclaimed planet of Pollux. To counter American diplomacy, the ally with the Ledians.<br />
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Eventually the Avorians see the coming of humanity as a sign from their god to begin their long planned crusade to reclaim their homeland from the Ledians and launches an attack against them. Quickly China helps their new allies and fights the Avorians. Since tensions where building due to colonization claims and no one in the west has yet to forgive China the UNNA declares war on both Ledia and the Chinese Empire. As this war is going on Eventually an new Alien Civilization lands on Pollux called the Third Race, Humanity being the first race and the Descourians being the second (at first me and my friend didn't have a name for them just referring them as that and then it just stuck). A completely organic race they alter the genes of its members to form different classes and even technologies such as ships and mounted guns and creatures that would serve the purpose of vacuums and stuff like that. They travel the galaxy in huge ships that travel at sub-light speed slowly but patiently wiping any sentient civilization out that uses mechanical technology, they have reasons for which I'll explain another time. Quickly they become a force to great to ignore and the Humans and the Descourians declare a temporary alliance to fight this force. Eventually the Third Race finds one of the largest pools of energy and use it to increase the speed they can produce troops tenfold. Eventually they completely over run Pollux.<br />
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The UNNA is forced to play its hand and use the Anti-Matter Bomb, a weapon they where producing to finish off the Chinese. It opens another gateway to a different dimension which if very chaotic and filled with antimatter and when it pours out of the bomb and comes in contact with normal matter it explodes with exponentially more power than a Hydrogen Bomb. When they drop the bomb on the overran planet it is even more powerful than expected and rips the planet apart. While the threat of the Third Race is over a meteor shower decimates the Descourian population on Castor and a small asteroid belt forms a ring around the planet. The Descourians universally banish the Humans off of their last planet blaming them for the most deadly war in their history.<br />
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And that is pretty much the end of the first Game, I do have some general ideas for a trilogy if I do make this game and it becomes popular enough to have sequels. I plan to have this to be an RTS, mostly similar to the Total War series (which is my favorite RTS series ever, I highly recommend it). I was thinking of having it as a FPS/RTS mix, but I feel it would be to clunky so I dropped the FPS part. There are, obviously, three Races; Humans, Descourians, and the Third Race. And each race is split into three factions. Humanity has the UNNA, Roman Republic, and Chinese Empire. Descouria has Ledia, Avor and Doraia. And the Third race has the Bubonians (from the Bubonic plague), Stygia (from the word Stygian), and the Kroatoans (from the Roanoke colony).<br />
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The campaign would be split up into three campaigns. Starting off as the Humans, the player chooses to play as one of the Human factions and each faction's story happens simultaneously. Act two begins when the Third Race lands on the Descourian planets, where the player plays as one of the Three Third Race factions. The end of Act two is when the Third Race takes over the energy pool. After that the player chooses a Descourian faction and obviously ends when the bomb is dropped on Pollux.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/images/victorian/burden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/images/victorian/burden.jpg" width="211" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Good example of this point of view. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>The name "Burden" comes from the 19th century term "The white man's burden," where Europeans, mainly the British, felt that they were "obviously" "superior" to the other races of the world and that is was their responsibility to help lift up the other races of the world to be civilized. While from there point of view it was a nice thing to do, but since they felt they were superior in every way it ended up in the spread of Western culture at the cost of native culture and ended up being detrimental on a global scale.<br />
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Even though I did used to do art in high school I can only do well when I can see the what I'm drawing and I'm quite Horrendous when it comes to drawing from purely from my head including concept art, so even in future posts I probably won't have much pictures for Burden, which I apologize for, cause I know it's nice to have pictures to break up text.<br />
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I'm pretty good with this overall story for Burden. Later I could do posts on the pregame history of Humanity, Descouria and the Third Race and go more in depth into Campaign story. I could also go into more depth about human technology, and Descourian lifestyles. So if y'all like it I shall keep on posting stuff about Burden. And as always if you guys have any opinions or think something should be changed or tweaked leave a comment in the comment section and I shall decide whether I approve or not. And my current plan for the the next couple of posts is to talk about Schrodinger's cat and then finish my Western Hegemony by talking about the rise of America and compare its rule over the world over European's reign. </div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-15765150719005637042011-06-30T10:15:00.000-07:002011-06-30T11:33:57.730-07:00Western Hegemony<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">So today's post is about the West's and then America's dominance over the world and what could possibly happen in the future. I feel like talking about this because this topic came up as me and a friend, who actually has his own blog: <a href="http://acidflaw.blogspot.com/">http://acidflaw.blogspot.com/</a>, which has some pretty cool alternate art stuff that has the awesomeness of the internet in one place, (kay back to the story) were in the car and the topic came up on it's own. As we were talking I realized "Yo, this is somthing I could post in my blog and I do want to do some more history stuff!" (Yes I do say "Yo" in my head). So I wrote this.<br />
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During the renaissance in Europe the west was finally getting out of the Dark Ages, where centralized nations where finally taking hold and science and art became more important than being dedicated to live a completely pious life. However this mellenia of uncivilized barbarism was not world wide. China continued to being one of the most civilizations of its time. The Aztecs in central america were on the rise and nearby in the Middle East the Ottomans Empire finally took over the last vestiges of the Roman empire known as the Byzantine Empire conquering Constantinople in 1453 which was the final stronghold of the Greco-Roman culture. So why in the 16th century was it Europe the began conquering and dominating the world?<br />
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During the 12th century the nations of Europe were invading the Middle East and the holy lands. Luckily at this time the Abbasid Caliphate ruling the Middle East and North Africa was not completly united and could not stand against the United Christian forces. For a hundred years the Europeans held the small crusader states they made in the holy land until Saladin was able to rally the power of the Muslims and kick the Westerners out. Even though in the end Europe did not spread Christianity and did not win territorial gains they got allot of interactions with the much more advanced Abbasid Civilization. The crusades spread the ideas, sciences and mathematics created in the Middle East where learning and discovery was at the fore front of its priorities which they learned from the Greeks that spread there ideas across the Middle East during the Conquering of Alexander the great creating the short lived Hellenistic Empire and making Alexandria in Egypt which became the center for learning in the Ancient world, and in the peace of the Roman Empire that let ideas quickly spread across its vast empire (Roman and Greek ideas went east just as Christianity went west during these times). By the time of the Renaissance the Europeans relearned the importance of scientific discovery and the encouragement of making ideas, unfortunately the Muslims forgot this later and became lost in Religious Ideology making it the back water it is now and caused it to be controlled by Britain at the end of World War One.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Sanzio_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="248" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Sanzio_01.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">School of Athens; Raphael 1509-1510</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Luckily for Italy, at the end of the Crusades where they started to open there eyes to the glories of the Ancients, the Church held most of the documents written during Antiquity and let the Italians see the ideas of Pythagoras, Sophocles, Euclid, and the other great minds of Greece. During this period we see the art of Italy change from being solely being centered around Christianity and move to Greek and Roman mythology. One of my favorite paintings is the "School of Athens" by Raphael in 1509-1510. In the middle can be seen Plato and Aristotle arguing with each other. This painting strikes both the Artist and Scientist in me (Yes I used to do art, it was high school, things were different back then, things change). Soon Italy was the richest nation (well not a nation yet) in Europe opening trade across the Mediterranean coming into more contact with the Byzantines and there ancient history and the still thriving Muslims.<br />
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Soon this philosophy of humanism, concentrating more on human values and concerns rather than God's spread across Europe. Spain and Portugal started the Reconquista during the Crusades and began to claim all of Iberia for Christendom (the idea of a unified Christian kingdom, much like how the Islam empires were like but never really happened due to each nations will to not be associated with its neighbors). They saw Italy's wealth with envious eyes and knew that international trade was necessary to become rich. However Italy, most notably Venice, already owned the entire Mediterranean trade network very smartly took advantage of the Geographic advantage of being on the edge of the Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Due to the Exploits of a very adventurous Marco Polo Europe heard fantastical stories of China's Yuan Dynasty. However at the time the only trade route to China was the overland Silk Road. In the times of Man and animal power going by sea being pushed by the winds was by far the fastest way to travel, trade, and make money. But unfortunately the entire continent of Africa was in the way and even though the Mediterranean was only a few miles from the Red Sea no canal existed then to let ships cross. Muslims had control over the Silk Road forcing the Europeans to pay taxes for everything that came from China or India, so they just wanted a cheaper way too. At this time a new ship was designed, the Carrack, this was the world's first ocean going ship. Soon Portugal began going south Africa's western coast. By 1499 Vasco da Gama was the first European to circumnavigate Africa and reach India by the sea.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.wikia.com/forgottenrealms/images/0/03/Carrack3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="237" src="http://images.wikia.com/forgottenrealms/images/0/03/Carrack3.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Carrack</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Portugal monopolized the African trade route to Asia and when all of Spain was united in 1492 Spain had only one direction to go, West. Funding a crazy Italian merchant Spain sent three ships across the Atlantic hoping to reach Asia from the opposite end, letting Christopher Columbus to be the first westerner to discover the Americas (if you don't count the Norwegian Vikings around the year 1000). Before the rest of Europe realized what happened Spain and Portugal spit these new continents between themselves. In the 1994 Treaty of Tordesillas, the pope drew a line down the middle of South America, where they currently thought the middle was, where Portugal got the East Side, mainly modern Brazil, and Spain, luckily for them go everything in the West. These lands along with the trade in the East made Portugal and Spain the strongest and richest nations in Europe.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://regentsprep.org/Regents/global/themes/imperialism/images/spheres2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="283" src="http://regentsprep.org/Regents/global/themes/imperialism/images/spheres2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Soon Europe the rest of Europe joined in. The 1600's saw the golden age of the Netherlands and after the Defeat of the Spanish Armada England proved to be the new uncontested naval power of Europe. Since the 1700's England was on the Rise claiming North America (which according to the Pope was Spain's but they couldn't do anything about it and where happy with what they had already). Eventually Europe wasn't quite satisfied with just trading with India and China but wanted direct control over their lands. After a decisive victory against the French, Britain claimed all of India as one of it's most treasured colonies. France had to settle with Indochina, which was the peninsula of South East Asia what is now Modern Day Vietnam (which stayed french until the Vietnam war). The Netherlands claimed many islands in Indonesia. And England claimed Australia and New Zealand. Even though the Western Powers never directly conquered China Each major power by 1900's carved it's own sphere of influence where China could do barely anything except comply with the "Barbarians". And by in two decades, the 1880's and the 1890's Europe caught Africa fever and each nation quickly tried to claim it's own slice of the poor Continent known as the "Scramble for Africa". If it wasn't for Germany's colony of Tanzania Britain would have had a strip of Africa that would have gone from "Cape to Cairo", reaching from Egypt all the way down to South Africa. Russia as well was beginning it's Empirical Conquest and while not overseas territories, Russia went non stop from its startings in Moscow to Northern Asia and Almost continued going into North America with it's conquest of Alaska but then sold it to the new nation of the United States for two pennies an acre!<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://historiesofcatastrophicdreaming.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/post-scramble-for-africa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://historiesofcatastrophicdreaming.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/post-scramble-for-africa.jpg" width="287" /></a></div><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.hill-interiors.com/images/giant/G1274.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.hill-interiors.com/images/giant/G1274.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matchlock Musket</td></tr>
</tbody></table>One of the main reasons that Europe was so successful at conquering the rest of the world was it love affair with gun powder. While invented in China while looking for a potion of immortality a Chinese Alchemist created a powder that would violently burn. While only militarily used to shoot flaming arrows and for crude guns, if they could be called that, the main use for gun powder was for fireworks. However when brought to the Middle East and Europe it's true potential was found. In the Middle east the united Muslim Empire was split into three states; The Ottomon Empire (Iraq, Turkey, Balkans, Egypt, North Africa) , the Safavid Empire (Iran) and the Mughal Empire (India) which where known as the three "Gunpowder Nations" due to their avid use of Gunpowder. As Europe continued its rise of scientific and technological prowess it quickly used gunpowder in its own armies. With the European process of corning (wetting gunpowder and letting it dry letting it form is larger chunks rather than a superfine powder) increased the power of black powder many times. Soon refined match lock muskets replaced the old Arquebus, allowing them too be full fledged military weapons. This allowed Spain and Portugal to wipe out the Native American empires of the Aztecs and Incas with just a few hundred men. Innovations in cannon design also let Europeans put cannons on a ship. This what allowed the West to become a global force, the power to bring the power of an army to any shore where the native people are no where near as advanced allowed Europe to spread their power unquestionably across the world. In China even though it was impossible to conquer it with a land army, the Nations of Europe forced open its harbors with the sound of cannon fire.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.colours-art-publishers.com/images/the_french_ship_of_the_line_le_wagram_by_ange_joseph_antoine_roux.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="214" src="http://www.colours-art-publishers.com/images/the_french_ship_of_the_line_le_wagram_by_ange_joseph_antoine_roux.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The epitome of European naval power: A Ship of the Line</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
But why where they the first to conquer the world? Well if you truly look at it, they got lucky. The fact is was that they where just the first to explore the world and to first to properly use cannon and guns. China at the time was starting to send exploratory ships out at the time but stopped for some reason. Honestly if just a few things where different, if Columbus and da Gama wasn't born and the children of China where as itchy to explore as they where I would be explaining right now why the world is currently dominated by China in Mandarin. However once Europe began tasting the riches that came with colonization that would not stop and with an positive attitude of questioning the world and testing new ideas Europe would continue to advance and grow richer while the rest of the world is trying to catch up.<br />
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Now it turns out that this post is ALLOT longer than I meant for it to be which is cool, it just lets me get one more post before my queue of ideas to post about runs out. So I shall continue this subject later, talking about the rise of the United States and the fall of Europe and how America might get over shadowed soon by a nation from across the ocean! OOOOOHH!</div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-78813590424147875112011-06-25T23:50:00.000-07:002011-06-25T23:50:26.119-07:00The Double Slit Paradox<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">So the double slit paradox experiment is good introduction to the weirdness of quantum physics.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkF9D43qLrGdOxZ84tSGg2WGZPdn88JlQI7U6NNDZPZ_YOWOTJOUfaUKjJWQkoMTWqCIwKTP4Gg025vZt5QRnMDKA7Y7bLYV20eQqc73Z5g19ZgK2iin3TBMeOwCst4UyxzJ6bYGE3JEc/s1600/GunNoBarrier.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkF9D43qLrGdOxZ84tSGg2WGZPdn88JlQI7U6NNDZPZ_YOWOTJOUfaUKjJWQkoMTWqCIwKTP4Gg025vZt5QRnMDKA7Y7bLYV20eQqc73Z5g19ZgK2iin3TBMeOwCst4UyxzJ6bYGE3JEc/s1600/GunNoBarrier.jpg" /></a>So lets start this explanation off with things we can all understand. Imagine there is a guy with a machine gun and was shooting a wall in front of him. The gunner is not aiming at all so when he shoots a spray the spread of all the bullets would hit the entire wall so each point on the wall has the same chance of being hit by a bullet.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhDSrpEvzT7PVzPrGQzFs1AgsiqxPeCx06RUQlP5BZGZa2aDRnMVsnGa-dhs7yVF-h2xYOgGOvE4WNcX6w1ZfZzbcPJzeDmbZjQFe52AXG-qJeq-w6GibcCmqLFEZT8LnJ4y6lUjM_Lew/s1600/GunOneSlit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhDSrpEvzT7PVzPrGQzFs1AgsiqxPeCx06RUQlP5BZGZa2aDRnMVsnGa-dhs7yVF-h2xYOgGOvE4WNcX6w1ZfZzbcPJzeDmbZjQFe52AXG-qJeq-w6GibcCmqLFEZT8LnJ4y6lUjM_Lew/s1600/GunOneSlit.jpg" /></a>Now we put a metal wall in front of the wall with one vertical slit allowing the bullets to travel through. Now when he shoots his gun bullets would concentrate right behind the slit and barely hit any where else. If we were to put two side by side slits, like anyone would expect, there would be only two similar sized areas as the slits on the wall. Since the bullets don't interact with each other nothing spectacular happens.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_EAjIUbUbrzXFb4P8Nd1sxQH71bOzir18HXEMc5ekB3vo-vMDa1FDogtm-05vEQQdOjz2NsLeBECDUag-LCOBzJ7vvuckeIcJLugCab3ue7nOfjlmZ3opEIAFx-a8I4CfgXRlyXRtQos/s1600/GunTwoSlit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_EAjIUbUbrzXFb4P8Nd1sxQH71bOzir18HXEMc5ekB3vo-vMDa1FDogtm-05vEQQdOjz2NsLeBECDUag-LCOBzJ7vvuckeIcJLugCab3ue7nOfjlmZ3opEIAFx-a8I4CfgXRlyXRtQos/s1600/GunTwoSlit.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Actually made these first three images believe it or not</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1urexe6i6_hWInxx-FruADX1yBH2BMNjOuGcUZxBXR0Wq0dtNDh9yK58l5KtohMCD8W3JhbQdmQvrXQpYOQzTQQeQqTNc_11tgVbKWvk2dETiCVmJ2luSMBE3RDfLG6yp9f9SU96_m6A/s1600/WaterOneSlit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1urexe6i6_hWInxx-FruADX1yBH2BMNjOuGcUZxBXR0Wq0dtNDh9yK58l5KtohMCD8W3JhbQdmQvrXQpYOQzTQQeQqTNc_11tgVbKWvk2dETiCVmJ2luSMBE3RDfLG6yp9f9SU96_m6A/s320/WaterOneSlit.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The white levels on the back wall shows the intensity of the wave</td></tr>
</tbody></table>So now we can more away from solid objects and move to waves. The most common and visible type of wave is water waves like in the ocean or like ripples. For this example we'll have a ripple tank, which is just a tank with water in it and has a wall that comes out of the surface and has slits in it to let the water waves through. So when we have one slot the maximum height of the waves is right behind the slot and spreads out away.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRrQ9jcNAskBH378a-yx35tdliXRedbvNFoM7WxhwqB2jsZ5YSoP-11bXe-WVPhyUggV4RrTOUlSGy_ivUyCTC68kb-8WFhE-IYcYqTUssBA60jNauxDNMh8FmrCDFhZAi5wvsm3X5PIk/s1600/WaterTwoSlit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRrQ9jcNAskBH378a-yx35tdliXRedbvNFoM7WxhwqB2jsZ5YSoP-11bXe-WVPhyUggV4RrTOUlSGy_ivUyCTC68kb-8WFhE-IYcYqTUssBA60jNauxDNMh8FmrCDFhZAi5wvsm3X5PIk/s320/WaterTwoSlit.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Notice the interference pattern in the back. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>When we add two slots something more interesting happens. The wave splits into two waves and these two waves interact with each other in a pattern known as the interference pattern. When two crests meet together they add up and get twice as high as the normal wave but when a crest and a trough meet they cancel each other out and the intensity of the waves at that point becomes nearly zero.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://physics.okstate.edu/hauenst/class/ph2414/suppl/waves2/2slit_dens.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://physics.okstate.edu/hauenst/class/ph2414/suppl/waves2/2slit_dens.gif" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nice top down .gif of how the interference works</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<div>So now we under stand how particles and waves react when going through one and two slits. When particles are shot through two slits we see two similar slits in the back, and when waves are shot through two slits we see an interference pattern. So now we go to the quantum level!</div><div><br />
</div><div>So lets imagine we have us an electron gun that shoots electrons out towards a surface that can detect electron collisions. So when there is nothing in the way every spot in the wall has an equal chance of being hit by the electron. When we have a barrier with one slit we see the similar vertical slit that happens in both both particles and waves. So that doesn't help us to see if electrons are true particles or behave like waves. So let us put two slits in this barrier. When scientists first did this they were surprised to see an interference pattern like with waves. They figured that the electrons near each other when they're are shot interfere with each other so they decided to configure the electron gun to shoot another electron when the last one hit the back so only one electron would be in the air at a time. When they did this the same interference pattern came up. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Scientists figured that the electron has a 50% chance of going through slot one and a 50% chance of going through slot to so if it has the possibility of doing something something on the quantum level will do it, meaning that the electron goes through both and none of the slots at the same time!</div><div><br />
</div><div>To see what was really going on down there scientists set up detector to see exactly which slot an electron goes through or what it could possibly mean to go through two slots at once. However once they set up the detector the electrons acted like particles and two vertical slits appeared in the back. </div><div><br />
</div><div>This means that particles on the sub atomic level objects act like particles and waves. When particles are not observed they exist in every possible position and take every possible path they could given by the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle and the Planck constant forming a wave function. But when a particle becomes observed (whatever that really means) the wave function that holds all the possible positions and states "collapses" into one of it's possible state and that is when we say "There it is" but once we stop looking at it it expands into all of its possibilities again!</div><div><br />
</div><div>So that's it for now. Eventually I will post about the other introductory quantum paradox "Schrodinger's Cat", go into more depth about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and other quantum funkiness. </div><div><br />
</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2010/04/500x_schrodingers-lolcat1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2010/04/500x_schrodingers-lolcat1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Here is a cat until the mean time</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div><br />
</div></div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-88045762583048675192011-06-22T00:14:00.000-07:002011-08-02T14:58:07.918-07:00Game Concept: Heaven and Hell<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">So as you can tell I've been a little dry in the coming up with posts department and haven't posted anything in I think about a week. So to post something up until I can do something more in tuned with my blog I shall talk about a game concept I have. As planning to work in the video game industry I actually have a bunch of ideas for video games. This one has to do with the forces of Heaven and Hell fighting each other. Even though the story is based off of the concepts of Christianity; Heaven, Hell, God, and the main characters of each side, it's not supposed to be the same Christian, Islamic, or Jewish god, or a retelling of those religions, so if you are heavily religious I'm not trying to anything, good or bad, about any religion.<br />
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So this would be the pregame story:<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1zJwLNoANePn_qy3YMpn1w1tIA1rv85YazQOOUU5s4cLhojCvWcPlPEr-Uz-ZisA3MHaI2DevJ-l-sNAOYLpqe_bTqZAHSXzEuBAaq_1AFIIp9hnyPvGH1VLkK3gwDkKp3Dyy4u5Z-xE/s1600/sedmitza.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1zJwLNoANePn_qy3YMpn1w1tIA1rv85YazQOOUU5s4cLhojCvWcPlPEr-Uz-ZisA3MHaI2DevJ-l-sNAOYLpqe_bTqZAHSXzEuBAaq_1AFIIp9hnyPvGH1VLkK3gwDkKp3Dyy4u5Z-xE/s1600/sedmitza.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Seven Archangels</td></tr>
</tbody></table>In the beginning god created Heaven and the seven archangels; Micheal, Gabriel, Raphael, Suriel, Zadakiel, Sarathiel, Aniel. The archangels were perfect, immortal, and lived only to serve and praise their creator. In return for their loyalty lived a perfectly happy life in heaven free of suffering and had Heaven provide for all their needs and wants. However over mellenia god grew bored of the predictable love offered by the archangels.<br />
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So God preceded to make Terra, an imperfect finite land where its flawed inhabitants, the humans, would have to struggle just for their personal survival. God revealed to the humans that they may enjoy the endless bounties of Heaven, but only if they served Him and followed His rules. The humans, however, were given free will and were not forced to follow the rules of God. The humans had to choose between to suffer temporarily following His rules, and then live in paradise forever, or choose to take advantage of mortal sins and be denied the in front of the Gates of Heaven.<br />
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For those humans who fell under the influence of sins, God made a third world, Hell, where every selfish human would suffer for eternity. To rule and manage these lands God took what was left of the clay he made from the seven archangels and created the seven archdemons; Lucifer, Mammon, Asmodeus, Satan, Baal, Leviathan, and Belphegor. Being the opposite of the archangels, the Archdemons where unpredictable selfish and had an unending loathing for their creator, whom forced them to suffer for their eternal lives. They punished the immoral humans, just as God planned, as the archdemons wanted to hurt God's favored creation.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Vank_Cathedral_-_Heaven-Earth-Hell_fresco.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Vank_Cathedral_-_Heaven-Earth-Hell_fresco.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A painting of Heaven, Earth, and Hell</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.picknettprince.com/books/secrethistoryoflucifer/lucifer-lucifer-web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.picknettprince.com/books/secrethistoryoflucifer/lucifer-lucifer-web.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lucifer, that clever devil</td></tr>
</tbody></table>After thousands of years the cleverest Archdemon, Lucifer, found a way out of Hell into Terra which meant a path to Heaven. Wanting to invade and live blissfully in paradise the Archdemons, indirectly spread their influence around Terra, causing Humans to sin, spreading plagues and starting wars, sending many Humans to Hell. The Archdemons corrupted the Human souls turning them into demonic warriors. When the time was right the demon army led by the seven Archdemons charged out of the Gates of Hell into Terra. Soon the Archangels made an angelic army out of the pious humans who stayed loyal to God to combat the forces of Hell and prevent them from entering paradise.<br />
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And as this pleasantly unexpected turn of events occurred god patiently watched.<br />
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As for the story of the game itself I haven't thought about it too much. I might have a full linear story that has a definite ending, or have it like End War where both sides fight an open ended ended story where it plays a cinematic saying what happens depending which side wins, or be like Sins of a Solar Empire where there is just a intro story and game play only through skirmishes. I plan to have the genre be an RTS like Rome Total War or like Age of Empires, where the two armies are completely different where generally angels have fewer stronger creatures and the demons have more weaker creatures and could sacrifice them. Players will play as a sub-faction when they choose each Archangel or Archdemon to be there general. The generals will be a Unique unit semi-immortal (where you can temporarily kill it) with crazy abilities. The Generals would also unlock units and abilities unique to that general. Each Archdemon has one of the seven deadly sins associated with it and each Archangel has one of the seven holy virtues, which would affect what abilities and units each general would have. I've always liked RTS's that had factions that had similar armies but subtle unique skills or units which affect game play allot, such as in Age of Empires III.<br />
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Another game play aspect that I think could be cool is using humans as a resource to make units. As the two sides fight for control over territory over lands in Terra, they will try to convert the humans there to add them into their respective armies. I just think it would be cool to use morally gray humans as a resource. I'm not sure how exactly it would work but as I work the game play ideas in I'll figure out how they'll fit in later.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Ottheinrich_Folio287r_Rev4-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="267" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Ottheinrich_Folio287r_Rev4-5.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The lamb on the right side of God Opening the Seven Seals</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I'm not sure how I'll do this either but I want to fit in the scroll of that's sealed with the seven seals of the Apocalypse. As each sealed is broken after the prophecies occur the seven signs of the apocalypse happen on Earth. The first four are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse; War, Conquest (Wikipedia says it's not pestilence apparently), Famine and Death, the fifth is "reveals the cries of those who had been slain because of the 'Word of God'"(Wikipedia) the sixth seal releases natural disasters all over the world and the seventh releases fires and the trumpets of the angels. These seven seals would probably seven super weapons that can be reached by both sides.<br />
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So as I stress this is not Earth, there is no Jesus, Moses, Abraham or Muhammad, and this God is not supposed to be the God billions of people believe in and is not to have any messages about peoples beliefs. I just think that it would be an awesome story that could possibly make a cool game. I'm not sure if putting my untrademarked intellectual property up on the internet where anyone can say that they came up with this idea before I did. Well I trust you guys with my ideas and I can use this as proof that I had this idea at least by June 22nd 2011 A.D. Also I want to get you guys's opinions and see what you think, what I can add, or what I can change. Since I do have about five or so game ideas I might put more of these up on another slow posting week.<br />
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Also, to prevent me running out of Ideas, I ask you followers and you Annon to ask me any questions you've had about Science, history, and philosophies. I'll be glad to answer any questions I know and am willing to spend time to look up some stuff if you ask a question I've never thought about or just plain don't know. Right now I am looking up some stuff about this New Age religion thing, I'm not sure about its name, that believes that Atlantis was real and was an advanced civilization that ruled a continent in the Atlantic Ocean thousands of years before sumerian towns came about, believe that Aliens gave this civilization and other people information and ideas, and believe in higher and lower dimensions that exists on different frequencies (frequency of what, i don't know, also supposedly the wavelength of our universe is 7.23 centimeters, it's proven, trust me). Yeah it's a little hard to swallow and I straight up don't buy any of it but I still give it my time and tell you guys my exact opinion on it and show you what I looked up.</div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-18221322157455130592011-06-14T23:32:00.000-07:002011-06-21T23:50:48.773-07:002012 APOCALYPSE!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Yeah! I figured since we're two and a half years from the date prophesied by the Mayans, Decemember 21st 2012, and since the discovery channel seems obsessed with the Apocalypse I guess I'll jump on the band wagon. As a human who relishes logic and the scientific process you can guess I don't believe in any superstitions prediction made by a stone age civilization thousands of years ago. I actually read a book a few years ago before the 2012 craze that was about the Apocalypse, what the Mayan prediction meant and how the Apocalypse might happen. The book is "Apocalypse 2012; An Investigation Into Civilization's End" by Lawrence E. Joseph if you feel like reading up on it, it's pretty good.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuhsp6u5cVxyLvaJOXqLahe_qr9eLNHtlv1Un4N6ICIA3z1nSeKjUXAaZ17PqReE61U4Uk5bdFBzTOfswTqvYBpHoVPcLdkMTs3ksiD-D2adpq2gjYFjMc8Hp9jLShsSzBMpoXQrlpm5g/s1600/bz+MAYAN12-21-09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuhsp6u5cVxyLvaJOXqLahe_qr9eLNHtlv1Un4N6ICIA3z1nSeKjUXAaZ17PqReE61U4Uk5bdFBzTOfswTqvYBpHoVPcLdkMTs3ksiD-D2adpq2gjYFjMc8Hp9jLShsSzBMpoXQrlpm5g/s320/bz+MAYAN12-21-09.jpg" width="269" /></a>The Mayans more than any other civilization was captivated by the sky and stars. As far as archaeology can tell us they where building calanders and buildings to measure and track the movements of celestial bodies. They built calenders that predicted the cycles of the moon Sun and planets with precision far beyond their time. The calendar that tracked the Sun predicted it's movements from it's daily movement to the observable effect from the wobbling axis of the earth that cycles of thousands of years. It foretold the movements of the Sun for thousands of years but abruptly ends on the date 12/21/2012 in our calendar. Now many westerners interpreted that the Mayans meant that this was the end of world, if there is no one around to care what date it is than there would be no reason to make calendars past that point. Of course one could see it that the Mayans can't make stone calendars that go on forever and decided to stop there and make more calendars when they got to that point. Now that day isn't some date that the Mayans chose at random, December 21st will be the winter solstice for the year 2012, which is they shortest and coldest day of the year (at least for the Northern Hemisphere). This is also the time that the Sun ends up in between the Earth and the center of the Galaxy (yeah some how the Mayans figured that out, lolwut?) which happens every 26,000 years. So this 26,000 year period is a Mayan time frame that one could call an epoch. So the solar calendar they made was supposed to last till the end of the current epoch. Even though westerners went a bit wild with the Mayan Apocalypse, this date was not just some end of the year celebration for the Mayans either. They consider the contact the earth has with the center of the Galaxy as a good thing since they believed that's where everything came from (seriously the Mayans knew about the Galaxy while Europe thought the Earth was in the middle of concentric spheres and each heavenly body was connected to each one!) and that the loss of contact by the Sun's interference could have negative effects for the life on Earth. This date will bring the birth of a new Epoch but just as a birth of a human brings much pain and possibly death so could this date the Mayans believed.<br />
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Now I'm pretty sure the likely hood of civilization as we know it ending on that date is just as likely as any other day. However as it turns out, there is still a chance that mother nature could could end us at any moment with nary a warning. The rest of this post will talk about the possible ways humanity could come to a swift and painful end.<br />
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1. Sunspots<br />
The Sun is not just a featureless ball of fire hanging in the sky. At such high temperatures and pressures the ball of hydrogen constantly fuses atoms together producing it's light and energy. In the past century scientists have found out the Sun is far more complex than anyone could imagine, with separate charateristic layers, a plasma surface that constantly moves and shifts and solar flares and storms many times larger than the earth, the Sun is definitely the most complicated system in our solar system. On the surface of the Sun's surface are sunspots that are essentially electromagnetic storm flinging massive amounts of radiation out into space. The number of spots on the Sun correspond with how turbulent the Sun is and how much solar radiation it spews into space. The Sun shoots out much more radiation than light and UV rays. This radiation would kill and harm most complex life on Earth. However, luckily for us, the Earth has a magnetic shield around it created by the molten iron core of the Earth that deflects the deadly radiation away from Earth.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/03/magnetic_field_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/03/magnetic_field_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>This shield can only take so much energy from the Sun. When it becomes to much for it some of this radiation gets deflected towards the magnetic poles causing the Aurora Borealis. As it turns out though the Sun goes through cycles of allot of sunspots and few sunspots known as Solar Maximum and Solar Minimum. The time between each Maximum is eleven years. At this maximum the Sun shoots off more radiation than normal. Normally this wouldn't affect us since we're protected by the magnetic shield, however our satellites are not and can be stop functioning during this period or even permanently damaged. Most electronics are also more sensitive to sunspot activity than we are so now as we become more dependent on these technologies we need to pay more and more attention to sunspots especially during Solar Maximums. And when does the next solar Maximum occur? TWENTY TWELVE! And this article, <a href="http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10mar_stormwarning/">http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10mar_stormwarning/</a> says that this could be the worst Solar Maximum since 1958, but will have a much more heavy impact on us than fifty years ago as the global economy and infrastructure could easily be crippled by heavy solar activity that year.<br />
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2. Flipping of Earth's Magnetic Poles<br />
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/Geomagnetic_polarity_late_Cenozoic.svg/285px-Geomagnetic_polarity_late_Cenozoic.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/Geomagnetic_polarity_late_Cenozoic.svg/285px-Geomagnetic_polarity_late_Cenozoic.svg.png" width="105" /></a>As I've said the only protection we have from the Sun's solar radiation is Earth's magnetic shield. Without this our atmosphere could burn up and be blown away thinning it past human living conditions. Temperatures would sky rocket, Imagine global warming on steroids, we could not stand out side in sunlight for more than minutes at a time without receiving serious skin damage and cancer rates would sky rocket. Scientists have noticed that within the past decades the strength of the fields have noticeably weakened and have detected huge holes the size of countries in the shield, most of the time over oceans. Geologists also notice that iron deposits, which act as molecular magnets, line them selves with the poles when the rock was formed. They also notice the pattern that they suddenly point in the opposite directions. This leads to the conclusion that about every 100,000-1,000,000 years the poles shift while having a brief period of no shield cover. While it wouldn't be long enough to ebb away our atmosphere it would render almost every modern convenience pointless. No computer or electronical device would work while the poles are busy shifting. Many developed and developing nations would be sent back a century, and many would likely die in the sudden change. Scientists cannot predict when the next pole shift will occur or what causes this to happen in the first place. All we know that any one would call it a disaster on a global scale if this where to occur in modern times.<br />
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3. Yellowstone Super Volcano<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Yellowstone_River_in_Hayden_Valley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="210" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Yellowstone_River_in_Hayden_Valley.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>An unexpected end to the humanity comes from the beautiful tranquil scenery of Yellowstone national park in Wyoming. As it turns out the entire park is actually the caldera of the largest volcano on Earth. Imagine a volcano with the trademark smoking crater on top. Yellowstone park is actually that crater which is 34 by 45 miles and the rest of the volcano sits beneath the surface. The famous geysers in Yellowstone is powered by the largest magma chamber in the world. If the supervolcano exploded it would not be like the volcanos in Hawaii that oozes out but akin to Mt. St. Helens but thousands if not millions times more powerful. The explosion would turn the land to molten slag in all of Wyoming and it's neighboring states, the explosion traveling faster than sound and within an hour millions would die. The surrounding ground in Yellowstone actually has some of the largest deposits of Uranium and would spread fallout all across the North American Continent causing cancer and deaths in many more. Most of the landmass and population of the world lives in the Northern hemisphere and all of it would be covered in ash that would blot out the sun for years killing crops and wildlife and leading to the starvation of much more people than the initial explosion and fallout. This would be a nuclear winter much colder and longer than anything The world's nuclear arsenal could produce. The Yellowstone super volcano luckily, according to geological records blows its cap every 600,000 to 700,000 years. Unfortunately the last time it did erupt was 640,000 years ago and rangers and geologists at Yellowstone have noticed that mountain ranges and valleys are bulging up due to the pressures of the volcanic gases and lava building up in the magma chamber. Bulges that have never been seen before since its making as a park in 1872.<br />
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4. Gamma Ray Burst<br />
<a href="http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/2007-0523burst.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="215" src="http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/2007-0523burst.jpg" width="320" /></a>A more interesting scenario, at least in my opinion, is the Earth getting hit by a gamma ray burst. Aside from the Big Bang the most energetic and destructive (well I guess the Big Bang wasn't destructive but it was a BIG Bang) event in the universe is a super nova. When a star more massive than our sun dies, rather than inflating into a red giant than dying down into a brown dwarf till the end of time, it explodes violently releasing more energy in that one explosion than our Sun during its whole life. During this explosion it launches two beams of intense energy called gamma ray bursts along the rotational poles of the star. While most of the energy dies down logarithmically over space, these bursts are essentially directed gamma lasers that that send directed energy to the ends of the galaxy. Any planet that dares stand in its way will have no idea what happened to hit. If a gamma ray burst where headed towards us there would be no way of telling since the burst travels as fast as light so the instant we see the nova it will have hit Earth. Within seconds the entire atmosphere will burn up and possibly blown away into space. The surface of the Earth will heat up to thousands of degrees vaporizing all life except for the lucky and hardy single celled organisms. There would simply be no way to predict or prevent such a catastrophe. Scientists predict that supernovae along with their gamma ray burst happens in the milky way every fifty years or so, however for a burst to hit us straight on the accuracy it would need to hit us at the distances of light years is so extraordinary that we shan't need to worry about it. But the chance of such an incident happening is completely random and unpredictable.<br />
ARTICLE: <a href="http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20040108&slug=extinct08">http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20040108&slug=extinct08</a><br />
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5. Galactic Cloud<br />
Another quite unexpected possible cause for the Apocalypse is that our solar system is going through an energetic section of the galaxy. This cloud is most likely made from the debris of a nova or supernova and is made out of hydrogen and left over radiation. As our solar system flies through this cloud the solar winds emanating from the sun pushes the cloud out of the way much in the way a boat pushes the water away at its bow. And like a ship plowing through water the gases are cresting up and the "bow" of the solar system and are beginning to push through and leak into the solar system. These gases and radiation are adding more and more energy to the planetary systems and in the past couple of decades uncharacteristic patterns in planetary weather are being detected, a frozen moon on Saturn has had geysers on its surface that have not been seen since its discovery and a new red spot has been detected on Jupiter that may become as big as the first big red spot that's an electromagnetic storm larger than the planet Earth. As this energy reaches Earth it could increase the effects of global warming and puts more pressure on Earth's magnetic shield. When this energy reaches the Sun it could easily unbalance and energize the complicated systems in the Sun. If it reaches the sun at solar maximum, which is already supposed to be really strong the extra energy could make the this solar maximum the largest sunspot storm in human history. If the shield weakens due to the polar shift or the energy cloud at the same time we have an unprecedented solar maximum the consequences to human civilization on 2012 could be unimaginable.<br />
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6. Meteor<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.waltsense.com/storage/articles/20090623_Asteroid_impact.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1245776242462" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="197" src="http://www.waltsense.com/storage/articles/20090623_Asteroid_impact.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1245776242462" width="320" /></a></div>Probably the most famous way to bring about the Apocalypse would have to be a meteor colliding with the Earth. Popularized in many movies and brought the end to the most famous family of animals, the Dinosaurs, 65 million years ago the threat of a meteor is a serious threat. According to this chart: <a href="http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/">http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/</a> there are only two known asteroids that threaten Earth, 2011 AG5 and 2007 VK184 which might hit us by 2040-2047 and 2048-2057 respectively. Luckily they only measure a 1 on the Torino scale where 0 is absolutely non-threatening and 10 is the most dangerous, so they are the most non-threatening while still being a threat. However there are many unknown asteroids and comets which could hit us at any moment. Threats come from three main areas; the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter has 700,000 to 1.7 million asteroids with a diameter of a kilometer or more. This is the most likely place for an apocalyptic object to come from but also the most observed, although an unexpected collision among two large asteroid could send one towards us. Another place is the Kupier belt reaching from the orbit of Neptune past Pluto which are estimated to hold 70,000 objects with a diameter larger than 100 kilometers while only over a thousand are known about. The last and most unknown source of dangerous objects is the Oort cloud which is about a light year away from the Sun. The Oort cloud is most believed to be the source of the 200 year comets that have highly elliptical orbits. As these comets head almost directly into the sun these icy comets could easily careen into the Earth.<br />
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As always the question of the Apocalypse is not how but when. As Godwin's law says that the longer a conversation continues the probability of Hitler being brought up approaches 100%, the longer Humanity lives on the probability of an Apocalyptic event destroying us approaches 100%. One day a catastrophic event will happen that will change what life will be like on the planet Earth. According to geological records of animal fossils major extinctions the scale of the fall of the Dinosaurs and greater happens 62-65 million years and the last major extinction was 65 million years ago. Hopefully this post shows the importance of Human colonization of other planets. In the future humanity needs to have other places to live so we would be able to evacuate any planet that is threatened and be able to reterramorph the planet and repopulate it. This would be the only way to ensure our survival until the end of the Universe or the end of time.</div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-28103563765682486272011-06-11T00:38:00.000-07:002011-06-21T23:51:16.545-07:00What exactly is fire?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Here is a quick little post that people might enjoy knowing about. Ever since I was a wee little child, I wondered to myself "What exactly is fire?" I knew it wasn't matter, nor could it be pure energy, something was going on that educational books and shows where not telling me. With out any answers, Internet wasn't as big at the time nor as helpful, I eventually forgot about that question but every time I saw that dancing flame blackening contorting and vaporizing what ever its fuel source was that question still beckoned int the back of my head (and yes I think I'm a bit of a pyro, but I love me some fire).<br />
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Now many years later with an enhanced knowledge of science and physics, at least more enhanced than an eight year old, I pieced together the various clues until I came to the answer! The answer lies in the physical structure of the atom itself! *Crash of Lightning* Of course the shown model of the atom is wrong, electrons orbiting around a nucleus like planets around a sun is easier to imagine than an "electron cloud" that shows the probability of an electrons position which can change based off of observation due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.safetyoffice.uwaterloo.ca/hse/radiation/rad_sealed/matter/graphic/atom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://www.safetyoffice.uwaterloo.ca/hse/radiation/rad_sealed/matter/graphic/atom.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">A non-ionized lithium atom. Why lithium? Because Google Images say so!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So you here you can see the different shells that surround the atom. The lowest shell can only have two electrons in it at a time and the second can have eight and so on. In the non excited state all the electrons go to the lowest shell they can and fill up the next shell until all the electrons are accommodated for. How ever an electron can become "excited" and rise to a higher shell. Since this is moving away from the oppositely charged nucleus it requires energy to move away from it, much like how it takes energy to move away from the Earth. Purely randomly (I say this cautiously) an electron can settle back down from it's excited state down to it's normal state in a lower shell. This causes a release of energy which then turns into a photon. The frequency of the photon depends on how many shells the electron dropped down to, the more shells it fell the higher the frequency. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So now what can add energy to an atom causing its electron to become excited? Heat. And the hotter a body the higher the electrons will jump when they become excited. So even in space a warm body without any other matter for the body to leak heat to through conduction, it will still cool down since it has excited electrons which throw away energy in the form of photons. So right now every object that you are seeing is releasing light constantly. So why can't we see in the dark? As I said the warmer an object is the higher an electron jumps and than when it falls the higher the maximum frequency of light it emits. At normal Earth temperatures objects radiate light in the infrared spectrum which is invisible to the human eye. And yes this is exactly how night vision infrared goggles work, they have detectors which can pick up the heat radiated by bodies in Earth like temperatures (that always confused me, I was like wait infrared is heat? But it's just a small spectrum of all light! How can it be heat?). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.kollewin.com/EX/09-15-03/electromagnetic-spectrum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="221" src="http://www.kollewin.com/EX/09-15-03/electromagnetic-spectrum.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The electromagnetic (light) spectrum, in case you were curious </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So now we can understand what happens when metal becomes really warm. As an electron stove turns on it's maximum frequency starts entering the lowest frequency of visible light, red, and now we see it glowing a nice red. If we continue to warm up the metal it goes through the entire spectrum and starts emitting frequencies at all visible levels which our eyes detect as white, so it's now burning white hot. If we keep on raising the temperature it will eventually start emitting ultraviolet rays, but I don't think any stoves get that hot. This is exactly how light bulbs work. You take tungsten, which is a good conductor and has a high melting point, put it in a vacuumed environment which light can still penetrate so that it doesn't burn the air and destroy itself, and than run electricity though it which warms the filament to very high temperatures therefore causing it to emit visible light. This also happens on the sun since the nuclear fission of hydrogen realeases allot of energy and heat but since it is at such high temperatures it releases light at all frequencies all the way up to gamma rays. So the sun isn't fire but is much more complicated and I'm not going to go into that in this post. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So what exactly is fire? Well it is an an exothermic reaction between two chemicals, one is most of the time oxygen, that in order to start the reaction the fuel sources need a certain level of heat to start the process but the chemical reaction releases enough or more heat in the process to keep the chemical reaction going given that there is enough of both fuel sources to keep it up. The reactions most of the time give enough heat to radiate light at frequencies that we can see, most commonly from red to yellow. This chemical reaction also heats up the nearby air and as the heated air's density lowers due to the increased heat, it rises since the gravitational pull of the earth pulls more on the denser colder air. As the heated air makes contact with the colder air the lose heat through convection and begin to radiate heat at levels our eyes can not detect. Fluctuations in the density of air due to movement and other factors also cause the rising heated air to not go in a straight path but move around unpredictably (I heard that a super computer can not predict the movement of the flame and smoke of a match). So essentially at it's base, fire is pretty much hot air. So I hope you actually found this post helpful since fire is a pretty integral part of human life.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwQvnm4uaERUUmM-1DXdeBDPt1oo-WUr1M7rrV3Crs__Tcw1gJQfuzv9qeXeIMBCsTMIIX6czyvsGUL3JG1vd_bDFNkDxDMq13X-FXl7s5KSIhkLa0e4uq6VnTvnOcj-_6uAcjVNAC0K4/s1600/05BFRL002_FireWhirl_HR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwQvnm4uaERUUmM-1DXdeBDPt1oo-WUr1M7rrV3Crs__Tcw1gJQfuzv9qeXeIMBCsTMIIX6czyvsGUL3JG1vd_bDFNkDxDMq13X-FXl7s5KSIhkLa0e4uq6VnTvnOcj-_6uAcjVNAC0K4/s320/05BFRL002_FireWhirl_HR.jpg" width="255" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">YAY fire in a bottle cap!</div><br />
Also any questions and corrections be welcome by anyone, including you shady anons who randomly stumble upon this page. </div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-73580866583857183822011-06-06T22:37:00.000-07:002011-06-21T23:51:31.561-07:00Technological Singularity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">2.6 million years ago our human ancestors created the first stone tool starting the tool revolution, which helped us in our quest to kill animals for food and eventually many other helpful jobs, such as skinning animals for their furs and making temporary shelters. This allowed us to get an advantage over other predators and let us defend our selves and kill and eat larger animals, allowing our species to spread all over the planet. 10,000 years ago we began the agricultural revolution starting the fertile crescent int the middle east, the Indus river valley in Pakistan/India, and in the Yangtze river in China as well as in the America's. This allowed us to settle down and stay in one place. This allowed support for larger populations and let larger groups of people together letting larger amounts of people to share a language and cultures. And not everybody needed to work to make food so where able to spend their time making pottery, clothes, buildings, art and have certain people think about laws and philosophy giving rise to governments and religions, culminating into what we now call civilizations. About three to two centuries ago the power of non-human and non-animal sources of energy came to the full realization as people took full advantage of water and wind power as well as taking advantage of new sources such as steam, coal, gas and eventually oil. This lead to the industrial revolution as mechanizing the process of creating goods allowed for mass-production and mass-power as steam powered boats paddled against the wind, trains brought people and goods across continents within days, automobiles brought people into the city while living comfortably away in the suburbs, and planes took people into the skies and across the world. And in the last fifty years we've been through the digital revolutions where since there inception at the end of WWII computers have been getting faster and faster while getting smaller and smaller and in the 90's the internet brought the entire world to the entire world, where anywhere there was an internet connection (which now with satellites, WiFi and 4G seems to be everywhere) anyone can connect to every other computer and learn ideas impossibly much faster than what could be imagined even a century before, and those same people can but their ideas out to the world (much like I am) and anyone can discuss their thoughts and findings.<br />
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As you can see in the previous paragraph a definite pattern emerges throughout human history. Each point I mentioned brought forth a new technological revolution having unbelievably more benefits than the last forever changing humanity as we knew it. But there is another as important piece of this pattern each time between the next revolution and the before it is much smaller by a magnitude of ten or more. If one extrapolates, if the last time frame between this revolution and the one before it was measured in a matter of centuries, then the next revolution should come within a matter of decades. But the question is what is the next revolution going to be and what would it be like?<br />
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Of course no one can know the details of the revolution before us (try imagining Napoleon trying to imagine a smart phone, or a Sumerian farmer trying to imagine a tractor) but of course many people can't help to imagine what the future might bring. Many scientists, mostly computer scientists imagine a Technological Singularity. Now what that means is that, if the rate of progress continues the path it is than within a century change would happen so quickly that a technological revolution would happen every year, than month, than, day, than hour, than minute, than second etc. Change would happen so quickly so fast that it would be impossible to predict what would happen after the singularity much like it's impossible to predict, with our current laws of physics, what would happen past the event horizon of a black hole singularity.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events.svg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="248" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events.svg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Kinda confusing but it's just saying as time goes by important events happen quicker and quicker. Also it's on a logarithmic scale, not a constant one, so this trend is happening at an exponential rate.</div><br />
And now what would cause us to go past this metaphorical "event horizon"? Well as we advance to day we just use our intelligence plus the measuring tools we made before to make new discoveries allowing us to make better tools, which is why technological advancement accelerates the way it does now. The significant thing about the next revolution is that soon we will have the tools to make greater intelligences, which could make more discoveries allowing them to make better tools <i>and </i>better intelligences which would increase the rate of advancement even more exponential-er, which would be allot. There are many ideas hat what these super intelligent beings could be. They could be robots with AI, that either make improvements on themselves or make AI's that are smarter than them. They could be humans that change their genetic make up to increase ther intelligence allong with some other attributes, which could also carry the wave of perfecting genetic altering make even smarter children which at one point would diverge from the species we call human. Or it could be a mix where humans alter the size of there brain though genetics and have robotic implants for extra storage increased speed, establishing human to human connections and increase human sensory input. I prefer the last mostly because such human and robotic merging is taking place right now and that would be awesome (never forget the awesome factor when it comes to exploring scientific frontiers! Why did we go to the moon? Because it's there? Because it's hard? No, because it was awesome, and no one can disagree with me on that).<br />
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There are many cases of human and machine joining together as the date of this post. Obviously there are prosthetic limbs for amputees which get more complicated and elaborate (a person with a fake leg could walk right by you and you wouldn't know if they were wearing pants over their leg). But other more advanced technologies are around to. Some paralyzed people have wires attached to there brain and thourgh the pure power of thought a man could move a mouse across a computer screen and play simple games. A blind lady had a camera replace her eye which was connected to a small computer in the back of her head which electrified certain parts of her visual section of the brain when the camera saw lights in certain corresponding areas and soon she was able to see fuzzy black and white images of her surroundings and was even able to identify things like a sailboat. That may seem small now but soon maybe she could see in 1080i or even resolutions higher than the eye can see now.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/gnWSah4RD2E?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">And of course, here is a monkey with a robot arm.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">A computer attached to the monkey's brain controls the arms movements. At first the monkey doesn't know at all how to move it but as it's brain learns it finds out that the only way to eat the marsh mellow in front of it is to use it's new arm and grab the sweet treat and put the arm right in front of it's mouth. At one point (not shown in this video) the monkey starts to lick the marsh mellow residue on the robo-arm rather than grab a new marsh mellow which they said that meant the monkey was starting to accept the fact that the robo-arm is actually part of him/her. Even in the military is starting to fuse man and machine making a Iron Man suit/ Mjolnir Powered Assault Armour like suit that increases the soldiers strength incredibly allowing to carry a hundred pounds of equipment or more for hours without breaking a sweat or even feel like he's in a robotic suit. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/zwaD5-GlHXg?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">Because people <3 visual stimulation. I can't help but say "That's so F**king cool!!"</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">There are also ideas to make glasses or goggles with built in computer's that can overlay images onto what you see. If they are able to connect to the internet the second you look at somebody it can Google them and look up their Facebook profile and give you everything you may need to know. It can overlay GPS directions on the very road you're looking at and looking at a building could give you it's street address. Looking at anything these devices could give us any amount of knowledge there is about that thing increasing the knowledge of any human being with them. Eventually they may even be set down to the size of contacts to essentially invisibly become a part of you. One day we'll think how we ever got around without these devices.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">We could also implant computers into our brain, letting us save videos with taken with our contacts and saving them to a 20 terrabyte hardrive (probably under estimating) so we can do what I always dreamed of. Living in a world where we can rewind experiences and memories much like we can do now with TiVo or Forge in Halo (thats two references to that game now, (the MJONIR armor for those unaware) and yet I'm not a fan of that game hmm.....), so if you forgot where you left your keys rewind to where you came back home drunk last night and find that you left them in the fridge?? Weird.... Anyways, certain CPU could be added into our brain to help us with things that human brains are atrocious at, mostly math skills. Imagine being able to do 238,432.234234 times 342.3672291 in your head in less than a 60th of a second, you're brain will send it to the robo CPU it'll crunch the number and the numbers appear magically in your mind like you did it yourself, and you could say you didn't. And once we find out how to program intuition, creativity and problem solving skills we can improve upon that. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Eventually we would find out how to do better things through mechanical means than biological and slowly making our selves completely mechanical beings, much like the movie "Bicentennial Man" but in reverse. We couldn't exactly say when the exact moment of being a being of flesh to a being of machine. And to further extrapolate as computers become ever more connected becoming faster as computer farms work together to solve a single problem, our robotic heirs might eventually come together into one sentient being controlling several bodies, much like a hive mind or something, where all of humanity become one being constantly discovering more secrets, recording more facts, and further improving itself until maybe it encapsulates the entire Universe and it becomes one sentient being and from there I don't know, nor do I have any Idea when these things can happen. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">And so we stand at an important crucible of humanity where we forever and indelibly change what it means forever as we pass through the Technological Singularity. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">P.S.</div><div style="text-align: left;">If you wanna look up the guy who thought about this allot more than I did here's a link to a site that was written by Vernor Vinge in 1993 and how he predicts that the Technological Singularity will happen before 2030 oooohOOOOHohOOOOHoohOHohOHHhhoohOO!!!!!!!!!!<br />
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P.P.S.<br />
Wow just realized 3 hours after I uploaded this post that I actually didn't put the link so here you go:<a href="http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html">http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html</a></div></div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-40321133228865744612011-06-03T00:56:00.000-07:002011-06-21T23:52:53.490-07:00How close we came to the End of the World.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">No I'm not talking about the Rapture or 2012, but in my little sub comment thing it talks about history and so I guess I should be talking about it then. So whats something historical that is decently interesting to most people? How about talking about how close the earth was to being engulfed in radioactive flames during the cold war! Thats pretty cool (At least I think so).<br />
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I think everyone knows a certain amount of the cold war but let's dive into that a bit. So after six years of fighting Nazi Germany, England, France (even though everybody knows they did nothing), the USA, and the USSR finally reached and took down the capital, Berlin. Now after starting two world wars (maybe not the first one entirely but definitely the second one), no European nation trusted Germany so they split apart the country in two, the East side for Russia and the West side for the Western allies, England, France and America (But mostly America). After two world wars destroying their economy, infrastructure, and landscape Europe was not ready to support it self, leaving the two nations that where relatively unhurt (Russia was hurt allot more son than it put on but did not want to seem inferior to the Americans) the two countries quickly filled the gap left by the war. With both countries having modern industrial capabilities (America quickly became an industrial power house since the 1880's and have made many pioneering efforts to the mechanization of everything, and Stalins five year plan was effective in forcing people from the farms to the factories and was in five years made a nation with the industrial output rivaling the US) they quickly became known as superpowers, countries with international power never before seen on this planet on a global scale. With only one real opponent and vastly different forms of government, any similarity the saw in fighting a common enemy quickly vanished and they pointed the gun barrels at each other. With NATO formed in 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a blatant sign of Western Europe siding with America and the USSR responding in kind with forming a Soviet Bloc of most of the countries in Eastern Europe placing puppet communist leaders that were allied with the USSR, and an Iron Curtain Fell upon Europe running north and south from the border of East and West Germany, clearly defining the American and Russian Spheres of influence. Quickly the search for more allies reached out of Europe as both super powers went into Central and South America, Africa, and Asia and funded rebellions, staged coups, and on many occasions invaded countries to make their they where on their side, or at least not on the enemy's side. With German scientists going to each side after the war each superpower was matched for scientific advancements and in 1949 the USSR had atomic capabilities. So for the next 40 years the world was split into two camps and the two schizophrenic superpowers were sitting on a stock pile of nuclear weapons able to destroy the world many times over waiting for the smallest signal of attack it is quite a miracle we are all still living here to day.<br />
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Definitely the most famous event that almost caused nuclear holocaust is the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. When the Cuban revolution put Fidel Castro in control of Cuba in 1959, the US felt very uncomfortable having a communist ninety miles from it's closest shore in South Florida and having the capital well within the range of short range nuclear ICBMs if they were put into Cuba. In 1961 the US tried to start a new revolution in Cuba by backing up an invasion force of Cubans who were exiled from their home country in the Bay of Pigs. However the invasion force was quickly defeated and the Island remained staunchly communist. Later a U2 spy plane flying over Cuba noticed what looked to be nuclear ICBMs. Even though America had Missiles in Turkey that where as close to Moscow as Cuba was to Washington D.C. the US demanded that no more armaments where allowed to enter the country and the Current weapons there to be dismantled and set up a blockade around Cuba preventing Russian ships to pass through. The US contemplated invading the island but held back due to the threat of M.A.D., or Mutually Assured Destruction that any military action from any Superpower would be met by the other ending of the destruction of both (get it? Because the would be "MAD" to attack ;D). At one point Russian ships where on their way to Cuba past the American ships with the Directives to Shoot any ship that attempts to cross the blockade. With the quick diplomacy of both JFK and Khrushnev the ships stopped and turned around and eventually America agreed to take down the missiles in Turkey if the Russians took back the missiles in Cuba.<br />
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A couple of other close calls came during the Cuban Missile Crisis when a U2 spy plane, which where ordered not to fly over Russian soil as to not antagonize the Soviets during this crisis, accidentally flew over the Chukotski Peninsula in Eastern Russia when the Aurora Borealis affected his readings and made him fly of course. Quickly Russian MiG fighters where sent to take down the plane. The US responded quickly and sent in F-102A planes armed with nuclear missiles to escort the plane rather than just let the Russians shoot it down and let the matter be over with. The pilots of the F-102A also had clearance to fire their payload if they thought the situation required it. Luckily the Russian MiG's backed off and the U2 pilot made it back safely. Also during this crisis, in Minnesota a guard at an airbase saw someone climbing the fence into the base. The guard quickly shot the intruder and launched an intruder alert. The alert, as supposed to, spreads to a few nearby military bases but at one air base the wrong alarm was launched indicating full scale war was beginning and F-106A planes with Nuclear weapons were about to leave the runway before a truck had to chase them down to tell them it was a false alarm.<br />
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Another close call came in 1961 (I guess the early 60's were scary times), with the Berlin Crisis. Even though Allied troops and diplomats had full access to the whole city of Berlin, which even though was in East Germany it was still managed by the "Big Four", USA, USSR, UK, and France. But to prevent East German citizens from emigrating to the West the Soviets put up the infamous Berlin Wall, the most literal symbol of the split of the world during the Cold War. But as E. Allan Lightner, the US Chief of Mission, crossed Checkpoint Charlie he was stopped by East German police. To show Berlin the the US was not to be messed with American Diplomat, Albert Hemsing, tried crossing the border and was stopped again. But Soon American military police came in to escort Hemsing and eventually went back to West Berlin. When Hemsing tried crossing the border again US tanks where sent nearby not knowing how the USSR would react but as the same result happened the tanks left. Soon Russian Tanks showed up on the border at Checkpoint Charlie some only 50 to 100 meters from West Berlin. The American Tanks quickly turned around and came as equally close to the border pointing their guns at the Russian Tanks. So here are two squadrons of American and Russian tanks 100-200 meters from each other both having the orders to return fire if fired upon. One small mistake, one backfire of a car engine could have American and Russian troops shooting at each other quickly escalating to full scale war. How ever John F. Kennedy and Khrushnev talked to each other again and agreed to have each tank back up 50 meters at a time until both sides left the border.<br />
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In the 50's the US, along with Canada, created NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command (Where the acronym NORAD comes from I do not know), which was a system of radar stations used to detect ICBMs that come across the Arctic, which was the shortest distance between the USSR and the USA. In 1961, again not a good time, three Early warning stations in Alaska, Greenland, and England simultaneously went down. Operators and engineers at NORAD knew that this was most likely not a coincidence since NORAD was built with numerous redundant systems and having them all fail at the same time could not just be bad luck. If the Russians did plan to invade the United States the first thing they would do is take out their early warning system and then launch their missiles. During the cold war the US had a fleet of B-52 bombers constantly flying around the borders of Russian radar detection just in the off chance that the USSR attacked first the B-52s would than quickly fly into Russian territory and bomb several strategic military bases with their nuclear payload. These planes got the orders to get ready to fly in and bomb Russia and where just ready for the final confirmation. However the problem was found, and as it turned out all those three radar systems went through one junction in Colorado and that a motor overheated and broke causing the entire system to fall. Also one day in 1979 a technician at NORAD put in a test tape to make sure everyone new what to do when the real thing happened however the technician failed to turn the "Test" status on and everyone thought it was the real deal. And then twice during 1980, three days within each other, NORAD falsely detected phantom missiles coming from allover it's area of detection. Once again the fleet of bombers around Russia got ready to fly in and drop their bombs but before the final confirmation was given technicians figured out it was a false alarm and called the bombers back. After the second event it was found that a single faulty microchip was the cause of the false detections and quickly replaced.<br />
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The last time we came within inches of Apocalypse was actually after the cold war, after the USSR fell and the Russian federation took its place. An american rocket was launched over the arctic filled with measuring devices to study the Aurora Borealis and other phenomena that takes at the North Pole. However Russian early warning radar systems detected the missile and could not distinguish it from an nuclear armed missile. The group originally launching the missile tried to tell the Russian government of the experiment but did not know the message did not get through. The Russian government knew that if the US was to launch a surprise missile attack at Moscow the scientific missile's trajectory would be the one they would use and the higher ups in the Russian government actually stepped into the Russian president's office with the button to authorize the Russian military to launch it's remaining armed missiles at the US. Luckily the president didn't feel like the Americans would do such a thing at this time and contacted the US government to confirm they where not attacking them. And eventually the scientific missile did it's thing and ended its flight short and landed safely in the Arctic.<br />
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To think that in fifty years how closely, within a hairs breadth, we've been to world war three and the eventual end of civilization as we know it as the massive payloads of nuclear weapons each side stockpiled during the arms race. We should definitely be thankful that we are still here to day and that the cold war finally began to thaw leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (you thought the R stood for Russia didn't you? Well you're wrong!) in 1991. Now instead of two superpowers willing to kill each other at the snap of a twig we just have to worry about the very insane and militant groups stealing, buying or making, a nuclear weapon, which is becoming much easier as more and more nation get the secret of nuclear power as time passes by and the fall of the Soviet Union saw the loss of much Uranium and Plutonium on the black market, then smuggling it into the United States and setting a few bombs off simultaneously in major cities all across the country. Aaahhh, what a peacefull time we live in (Maybe I should talk about 2012....?).</div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-237222906972121992011-05-30T16:09:00.000-07:002011-06-21T23:51:51.589-07:00My spiritual views<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I guess if I have me a blog about life I should probably eventually talk about my own personal views on religion and the afterlife. So lets get it with now right off the bat, I am an atheist, not really believing in any sort of higher power, and I believe that death is just exactly like what it was before we were born, absolute non-existence. Now I'm not one of those atheist that think we are better for the rest for not being "delusional" and see religious people as being mentally inferior in any way. I'm perfectly respectful to any belief, from Agnosticism to Christianity, from Judaism to Islam, and from Taoism to Buddhism. My opinion of a person's religious views is not based in what they believe in but rather how the express it to others. If you have seriously thought about what your opinions are about such important things and only discuss it during an interesting friendly argument about philosophies than no matter what you think you're good in my book. However if you blindly follow what people tell you to believe with out truly thinking about it and if you truly believe than I feel I might question your full intelligence and or if you constantly bring up your beliefs and harshly argue with anyone who disagrees with your opinions even if they don't want to like extremist Muslims, born again Evangelists, and even some Atheists than you'd be some one I would not want to hang around with.<br />
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To me each religion has three main points (if you disagree be free to explain (I hope comments aren't restricted...)), an origin story: how the universe and world came into being, rules about how we should live our life (which no one ever really follows, well not nobody but few do), and what happens to the soul after death.<br />
So this is how I shall split up the rest of this blog!<br />
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First: Origin of the Universe.<br />
In most religions the Universe is made by a sentient being. Now since I grew up in a mainly Christian nation (little bit too Christian for my taste...) so the stories of Christianity is what I know best. Since Judaism and Islam is in the same religious family as Christianity I'm decently familiar for them. Unfortunately I don't know to much about other mainly Eastern religions, so most of my examples will be Christian, but I'm not explicitly attacking them just as a heads up. Being an atheist probably more interested than most in science and the Universe I believe in the Big Bang theory that almost the entire scientific community agrees with. Of course many Christians also believe in the big bang (don't quote me but I do believe the pope accepted the big bang theory) and believe that it was God that made the big bang, which is completely reasonable given the evidence but I still don't buy in the fact that this world was made by a conscious force. But according to the heavy Christians the world was made 6000 to 10,000 years ago by God in about six days (some say by days they mean 1000 years or maybe more but not really relevant). In the past century much evidence has made it seem that the Universe is about 13 trillion years old. To combat this I actually met a Christian that believes in the bible completely and says if God can make Adam and Eve already aged than of course he has the power to make the Universe already aged. Making the earth with rocks that have appeared to be decaying for millions of years, already extinct animals in the ground, orbiting around a sun that appears to be a third generation star, and light from stars thousands of light years away all ready on it's way to the earth for humans to have something pretty to look at at night. This is one of the reasons why I dislike arguing against Religions mostly since a God that has complete power over the Universe can do anything he wants for reasons humans can't possibly know, which I find quite convenient. My reasons for thinking that the Universe began billions of years of ago starting at a infinitely dense singularity and rapidly and violently exploded is that when I see evidence all over the Universe that points all to one thing I tend to believe that rather than a being made the Universe one way but made it look like it was formed some other way, call me crazy.<br />
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Second: How we should live our lives.<br />
This should go pretty fast since I kind of went over this in a previous blog: <a href="http://standinginfrontoftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/02/definitions-nothing-is-true-everything.html">http://standinginfrontoftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/02/definitions-nothing-is-true-everything.html</a>. I do not believe there is a certain way we should live our lives, no special law in the physics of the Universe that says what actions are "good" or "evil", and that there is no super being that judges our every action. In Christianity and the other Judea religions try to follow the ten commandments told to moses by God that every follower of God should follow if they want to enter God's kingdom. Of course there are also the seven deadly sins which if we commit them we will pay with eternal suffering. But in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve commited the sin of eating a fruit damning all of humanity and all humans are born with sin already and as long as you accept Christ, who died for our sins, than God will forgive you and you can go to heaven (in which I say than what's the point of sinning?). So you can see why some people get a little confused. With no set definitions of right and wrong I then ask does it really exist? Of course now I'm an Atheist not an Anarchist and I treasure humanities civilization that we have been working on quite diligently for about a few thousand years now. How I base my actions around people mostly tend to try to make people like me more or help society in some manner. Most actions that we see as "good" tend to make our relationship with others better and help the group of humans we live in work better and have more comfortable lives which is necessary in a small group of weak tribal mammals who's only advantage they have over the rest of nature is there intelligence where numbers is power. Any action seen as good tends to help other people and bringing them together forming tighter connections and bad actions tend are seen as actions that hurt people and pushes other's away. To me the people that decide what helps a society is the government that knows it's own people and their values and not people who lived thousands of years age and who didn't know about current world conditions and modern knowledge. Of course the governments need to change it's laws as society and world conditions change instead of sticking to laws that worked a few years ago.<br />
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Third: The after life and journey of the soul.<br />
Probably the most important part of a religion and why many people turn to it, especially in dire circumstances, is the promise of an afterlife. The two largest concepts for an afterlife is the Indian idea of reincarnation where the spirit is put into another body after the original one dies. Depending if that person follows the rules of their religion (part two), than they either go up another level from an insect to a mammal or up the caste system from a slave to a high priest. This is prevalent in Hinduism and some of India's smaller religions. Reincarnation is also in Buddhism but when one reaches the highest mortal level and ascends again their soul joins all the other souls that have been through the same process in the river of life, or something like that (if you are Buddhist or know this better than me feel free to correct me or go into more depth). In the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, they believe that the soul enters paradise in the kingdom of heaven. In Christianity (I'm pretty sure Judaism doesn't and I have know Idea about Islam) they also believe in eternal damnation where you don't accept Christ as your god and live according to the commandments. This is mainly the reason why Christianity spread so quickly during the Roman ages because it was one of the first that if you didn't follow it you'll pay the ultimate price of unimaginable torture for eternity and if you did you live the rest of your life in paradise, so all the Christians were militant on saving the world and other's where like "I guess I should play it on the safe side, I'll keep practicing my old rituals but say I'm doing it for Jesus Christ" (this is really condensed and not the full story but that's not part of this post). I believe, as I said earlier that death for anybody in the world is just like it was before you were born. For you nothing absolutely nothing would exist no Earth, no Universe, no Multiverse (if that exists in the first place), not even you to ponder why nothing else exists or to think "So this is what it's like", there's not even darkness since that doesn't exist. I've always kind of thought this (at least for a while now, I do remember thinking that reincarnation was real but I was like 10 or something), but I thought about it a bit more when I learned about computer programing in college. In a program I tell it how to act and how to behave and in video games I tell it how to react to outside stimuli such as someone touching the keyboard. It may not have much intelligence but aside from not being able to reproduce one could say it's... it's.... alive!!! I even tried to make a little simulation with little letters that got hungry and thirsty and fell in love with other letters to make baby letters. Even though these are extremely simple things many things we consider alive are almost as equal such as germs and other microbes. With no brain they just automatically react to things around them, yet we call them alive. And eventually as time passes on I'm sure we'll make programs with the same cognitive levels as us that can make emotional connections with us and may be programmed for self preservation. But if we turn them off do they die and their robotic spirit go to heaven if they have been deemed honorable? Every time I turn off my lab top do thousands of background programs die and then reborn as my OS boots up? Methinks thats a little preposterous and if so I think catholics have a little more to be angry about than abortions. As I've said in the previous post about definitions the definition of a spirit is just something to make feel better and special than just a rock or Watson, the computer that won a Jeopardy show. Life arose on this planet a billion years ago or so nothing changed in the universe. The atoms that make up you and me are just as dead as a nebula or an asteroid. It's just that in us they form an amazing dance of chemical reactions that can save and process data from the outside world, think about the past and decide actions about the future, and look down at ourselves and figure out how we and the rest of the Universe works. Some people say that being an atheist is most be one of the most depressing beliefs in the world (yeah, I consider it a belief but I won't go as far as religion, but you may call it whatever you want), but I would have to agree with the most famous self proclaimed atheist, Richard Dawkins, in that looking through the world and seeing how amazing the universe is through a scientific perspective, the ballet of stars and galaxies and planets forever spinning and forming sights more spectacular than any artist could create, than looking at nature and marveling the near perfect designs of life that arose of it's own power and than looking at the human civilization, the wonders we have created, the knowledge we have accumulated and the potential that we have is some of the most satisfying things one could see in one's life past the levels that many can feel with their connection with the religion.<br />
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P.S.<br />
If you are religious and wish to express why you believe what you do or wish to present me a problem to talk about in another post please do. I would like to talk to other people about things because philosophy is pointless when one doesn't have other points of view to see from and a proving ground to test ones ideas and also I'd like to not seem like I'm just typing into my lab top like a lunatic talking to himself. </div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-58275422307750150282011-05-25T23:58:00.000-07:002011-06-21T23:52:07.666-07:00Do aliens exist?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">This simple question is not so easy to answer and has a lot of implications to how we should act as a species. To answer this question I'ma split up into three parts. Does life exist at all outside of the planet? If so do intelligent life forms exist possibly with their own civilizations? And if that is so as well does have aliens visited our planet?<br />
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Question one: Does life exist at all outside of the planet?<br />
Well given the fact that I even propose the other two questions you can assume that my assumption is yes. Why I think that is due to the laws of probability. Let's do some math now similar to what was done in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" called the drake equation. Lets try to see how many stars in our very own galaxy could harbor life. So given the estimation that their are 100 billion stars in our galaxy we will apply some factors (mostly estimated) to this number and the result will give us a rough estimation of how abundant life is in the galaxy. So starting with a number of 100 billion we guess the percentage of stars that have planets and multiply these numbers together. So about a quarter of stars have their own planets so 100 billion times 0.25 gives us 25 billion stars that have planets. So now we times that by the average number of planets per solar system, five. So 25 billion times 5 gives us 125 billion planets in the galaxy. So lets times that number by the percentage of hospitable planets. Using our solar system as a guide lets say one out of eight planets has the potential of life. So 125 billion time 1/8 (or 125 billion divided by eight) gives us 15.625 billion planets that can harbor life potentially. So even given a very small percentage of the chance of life arising although it might be very big, since life came very quickly on earth even when is was still cooling down from being a giant ball of lava, the chances of life existing outside of our solar system is too huge to ignore. Theres even a chance that life could be on planets or moons in our solar system. With evidence of water and a much thicker atmosphere on mars life, at least on a microbial scale, could have existed. And on the moon of Jupiter, Europa, life could exist miles beneath it's ice surface. As it orbits Jupiter the gravitational pull of the gas giant pulls on the solid core, akin to how the moon pulls on the oceans to make tides, making enough friction to raise the temperature for liquid water to exist and with the miles of ice to protect the environment there from solar radiation life could easily occur there.<br />
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Question two: Does intelligent life or extrasolar civilizations exist?<br />
My answer to this is a definite maybe. This comes from the logical stand point and further extension of the Drake equation and that would be totally awesome! So lets say that life occurs on 50% of all the planets that could harbor life half of 15.625 billion would be 7.8125 billion (lets round to 8 billion since these are all estimations anyway) planets that have life. Now we fraction in how many of these planets have intelligent life to get to at least mammalian levels of intelligence. Lets be a bit harsh and say only 1% of these planets have life that evolve to this point and 99% of the other planets have life that stays at the microbial scale. So that would give us 80 million planets with divers and complicated life forms. Now which of these have species that reach around human intelligence or greater and manage to build advanced civilizations. I think planets that have such high life forms it would be pretty likely that one species would walk down the evolutionary path of advanced cognitive development and realize that there is allot more you can do with intelligence than make spears and slings but lets say 50% of planets that have complicated life forms gets a species capable of forming a civilization. So using these estimations we get that 40 million planets in the galaxy alone (not to mention there are an unknown amount of galaxies in the universe) that have had civilizations grace them at one point of the galaxies history. The last and more somber part of the Drake equation is the faction of civilizations that manage to not kill themselves. Within a few thousand years of human civilization (~0.00001% of the age of the universe) humanity has lately become a hairs width of complete annihilation on multiple equations, with the possibility still ahead in the future. Since we are the only civilization we know of we have know way of knowing how often a civilization can get past the point of being able to destroy it's entire home planet to the point of establishing multiple colonies on multiple planets and stars (which would be the point of permanence where the civilization could quit possibly live on until the end of creation. But even with quite low numbers 40 million civilizations in total is a large number some I would place my bets that there are several inter solar civilizations as I type this blog of mine.<br />
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Question three: Have alien civilizations ever been to Earth?<br />
This I think would be the most important question out of the three because it could be integral to how we are as a species and as a civilization now. My assumption right now is no, I don't think aliens have ever in the history of out planet visited it. Even with all the sightings and testimonies of sane people about UFOs and alien encounters I'm not convinced that aliens would ever just come and look for a few seconds than disappear. I try to think of this situation from a human perspective (just as any self centered human that's never met an alien civilization would). If thousands of years from now we could had the ability to quickly and cheaply travel between the stars and the stretches of the milky way and we noticed a planet of reasonable size, in the Goldilocks zone of temperature where liquid water could be achieved, had a metallic core that could form a magnetic shield to protect life and was made up of just the right elements for life to occur we would definitely check it out for our quest for extraterrestrial life. But if we found a civilization just past the industrial age (given that all civilizations roughly follow the same pattern ours did) we wouldn't just hover for a bit never actually making contact, or just experimenting on random civilians that no one would believe. We would be like "Yo dawg! whats up? We Humans and we think we tight as shit and wanna rap with ya'll mutha aliens" (this is the future where all the upper class people talk like this and you wouldn't even want to know how future gangsters talk like). We'd be too curious to stand idly by and curiosity would be the pillar of any space faring civilization as well if they want to know the secrets of the universe to bend it to their will.<br />
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If aliens did make contact I would guess four outcomes would happen.<br />
1. The most likely is that they would be friendly and curious just like I imagine we would act. They would come down and make there presence known trying to learn our history and teach us what they know and try to ascend us to their level of technology and hopefully we would begin a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with them and any other civilizations that they know about. Much like the situation in Mass Effect and end up in a diverse galaxy like in Star Trek or Star Wars (I might be a little to optimistic about this situation than I should but I think the nerd in me wants this possibility to become true too much).<br />
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2. The next most likely scenario (or maybe the most likely according to some) is a situation more like the European exploits of the Americas. Where the space faring civilization simply doesn't care about us at all and only kills us if we get in there way. They would come to earth seeking resources or land for a new colony and most likely hurting us due to their damage to our environment, and could and would easily destroy any military power if we would try to stand up (imagine an apache helicopter fighting off a tribe off Apache Native Americans but even more one sided). Also if life is even more common than we think they might not care about losing our biodiversity since we would only be one of thousands or billions of known planets with life. Due to the fact that the closest example we can get to alien civilizations colliding is the western exploration of the Native American populace things might not look to good for us given that situation.<br />
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3. The not so likely but would explain the UFO situation is that life could be quite rare in the galaxy and an alien civilization might see us as promising and wants to leave us alone for us to develop us on our own. Or we could be seen as some sort of zoo that would help contain galactic biodiversity and they only come to study us and to gawk at our silly exploits as scientists and tourists. This could be the case but I just couldn't Imagine that as being a more likely case than the previous two.<br />
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4. The least likely but weirdest situation is the "Ancient Astronaut" theory. This is the theory that at some point during our evolution an alien civilization came down to help us along the way. Either turning us from apes to humans or just giving us the basic knowledge of civilization. A possible example is the movie "2001 Space Odyssey" (possible as in the entire movie is up for interpretation) where the tribe of apes that got kicked out of a watering hole by a rival tribe encountered an alien obelisk that seem to either enhance their intelligence or impart the knowledge of tools and let the tribe take back the watering hole by using animal bones as weapons and from there on out continue the making of tools improving their quality of life up till today. Many people who believe in this theory say there is evidence in the art of ancient civilizations. In an Egyptian tomb is a rendering of what could possibly be a light bulb and in Mayan drawings there is what could be interpreted as an astronaut on a rocket ship that is about to take off, both of these civilizations where very advanced for there day and possibly explains how they built such huge stone structures with apparently only human of animal power and how many civilizations have many uncanny similarities in patterns or architecture. Even cave paintings of aboriginals in Australia have figures that look like astronauts with an aura around there head that look like space helmets. This is also the explanation for what they ancients got there ideas from gods from that they were accentually the aliens that descended from the sky and gave humanity the gift of fire, language, the written word, and many other integral parts of any civilization (much like the story of Assassin's Creed, that silly game).<br />
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All of these possibilities are, well, possible and I definitely can't say which is right or wrong, I'm just saying which I think are most likely. The main reason why I think aliens have never come to Earth and why I don't think they even know about Earth is, once again, the matter of probabilities. As I said there are about 100 billion stars in this galaxy and it's around 100,000 light years in diameter. Our sun is completely average and unexceptional and the earth is nearly impossible to detect from more than a light year away so there is no reason why an advanced space faring civilization would spend any particular attention to this sector of the galaxy and even though we have been constantly sending signals out past the solar system for the past century now our signals would only fill the smallest fraction of the universe and most likely not have reached the ears of any civilization able to detect such signals so they would have no idea that there is a prospering civilization well on it's way to leaving it's home planet ready to explore.<br />
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If, thousands of years from now, we explore our galaxy and find that there is no other hint of life, then we must appreciate the honor and luck we have to exist as a life form, as a species, and as an advanced civilization. We must make sure that we accept the honor and duty of being the sole protector of life and make sure that it prospers through out the galaxy as our son will inevitably blow up and destroy the Earth. However, I'm not a betting man but I would safely put my life savings on the fact that there is at least one advanced civilization out there wondering there same perplexing thought we do. </div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-75762806578333377992011-05-18T22:22:00.000-07:002011-06-21T23:52:25.884-07:00Are we in the Matrix?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">A while ago one of my friends recommended this for a topic for one of my posts and since it's my only request to date I wouldn't I oblige?<br />
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Well, he asked me to try to prove that the world that we all live in is not some complex computer simulation without our knowledge. I'm not going to say that this question includes the same history as the movies with a civil war between humanity and machine with the eventual victory and complete domination of the machines and using us as a power source to replace the sun, then creating a simulation for our minds to meander in and the eventual rise of a human rebel army using a chosen one to bring the end of the machines. The question is not about the history our current state of the real world if this situation were to be true, just that the world we see around is not the "real" world but just a computer simulation built by an intelligent civilization (one could say the "real" universe is just a simulation as well by some paranormal force, maybe some sort of god figure).<br />
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Although computers have decreased in size unimaginably in the past decades, where computers the size of a room are thousands of times less powerful than any standard smartphone today, and the trend still continues to this day and computer simulations become ever more realistic and graphics and physics become better each year, I do not think computers will ever become powerful enough to simulate the world to such detail that such an inquisitive species with such advanced technology would not be able to detect such a major detail of the universe.<br />
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If this would be a simulation than it would be an extremely detailed one as scientists can detect events that occur on the extremely microscopic scale and have not seen any "pixels" as of yet. This simulation would have to calculate the position of every subatomic particle that makes up every atom of the known universe, which I hope I won't have to say how many atoms make up the known universe. Plus every subatomic particle the buzzes around space randomly which are probably even more numerous. Well maybe this simulation only works down to such details on earth and in space there are "efficiencies" where there the rules aren't so complex. So how big of a computer would be needed to simulate the Earth?<br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">Well lets start about how much we would need to compute an atom. In modern computers computers store the state of all of it's data in transistors that holds a charge or not, the 1's and 0's of binary. The decreasing size of computers is the decreases in the size of transistors. Now matter how small transistors get they will always be made out of multiple atoms (I'm not willing to say how small because I'm sure scientists from the fifties would never believe how small computers have gotten today), and can only only hold two states. An atom however can be in multiple states with each subatomic particle storing a lot of information. To accommodate more than two states computers string up eight bits (a one or zero) into a byte. A byte could store one of 256 states (two to the power of eight) and x bytes linked up can store 256 to the power of x states. So if it takes (ARBITRARY NUMBER WARNING) one megabyte, 8,388,608 bits, would take up that many transistors and that number times each atom in a transistor, lets say 1,000, gives you how many atoms it would calculate the state of an atom, more than eight billion. So a hard drive that would store the single state of the earth would be more than 6000 times the volume of the sun and I'm giving plenty of leeway because I think an atom holds a lot more information then that and transistors will never get that small.<br />
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In the future we might be able to make quantum computers which instead storing the two states of an electron it can hold thirty two quantum states so one transistor could hold five bits of info dividing the size of our Earth hard drive by five. So if we are using the same numbers as above the Earth hard drive would be 1200 times the volume of the sun. Well that is progress so maybe we can keep going forward. Maybe we could keep making a single transistor hold more and more states and decreasing the size of hard drives this way. Lets say we check the state of an atom itself in a transistor rather than an electron if thats even possible. So if we can have a transistor hold every state an atom can hold than we just need one transistor per atom of the Earth, well we're down to 1000 times the volume of the Earth if we have our 1000 atoms per transistor ratio. If we can keep shrinking down the resistor to one atom for each transistor than we have a hard drive the size of the earth and that is with out wires, casings, or any other components.<br />
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A good logical way to see this problem is how can we get anymore information from an atom than how much an atom contains. So the smallest a hard drive can be for the Earth is the size of the Earth and the smallest a computer that can store the data of the of the Universe would be the size of the Universe and thats just to store the data not to mention the actual CPU that will actually change the data stored over time and I don't even want to understand how many calculations a computer would need to do per second to run at real time (I guess the computer could go extremely slow and could alter the way the brain perceives time to make it seem to go normally but I don't think it would because the lifetime would be significantly decreased).<br />
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So you can see why I find it a little hard for this entire complex, beautiful and flawless world could be a simulation. Thousands of years of scrutiny of the human civilization has not found a single glitch, bug, or short cut and modern telescopes peer thousands a millions and billions of light years into the Universe completely fitting perfectly with our understanding of the Universe and our findings here on Earth. With the vastness and complexity of the observed Universe there is no way a mortal civilization can make a computer simulation of what we observe around us. </div></div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-6175197782120468042011-05-13T23:51:00.000-07:002011-06-21T23:53:12.174-07:00Future of Human Exploration II<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">So let's finish this topic of human space flight. I'm definitely sure that we'd be able to colonize the rest the solar system specifically the moon, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. A new engine has actually been designed that could be much faster than conventional rocket engines now. Called the VASIMR (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;">Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket), this new engine creates ionized superheated plasma which it ejects from the rear of the ship pushing it forward. Although it gives less oomph than solid fuel rockets it is much more energy efficient and the vacuum of space lets the engine build up speed over time. To prevent the plasma from touching the engine VASIMR uses electro-magnets to create and maneuver the plasma out of the engine. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;">The engine is estimated to be able to get a manned ship to mars in forty days given a power source of 200 megawatt source which a VASIMR engine with such a power source has not been prototyped but should be able to be made within a reasonable amount of time. With this technology perfected interplanetary trade will definitely be feasible. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;">As for extra solar travel one interesting design I saw was in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos". When hydrogen fusion is perfected the ship will use stocked up hydrogen for nuclear fusion to accelerate it to a descent fraction of the speed of light at that point the front of the ship will have a huge funnel multiple square miles in size will collect the few hydrogen atoms that float out in the deep space. At such high speeds even the fact that there a barely any hydrogen items the speed at which the ship goes it will collect enough to keep the hydrogen fusion going allowing the ship to carry less than enough fuel to travel such distances but the constant acceleration will still allow the ship to go around 90% the speed of light or maybe even past that. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;">Even though habitable planets outside the solar system could be many light years causing the trip to last even more years than that but thats only relative to the earth and other "stationary" colonies. To the pilots and passengers on the ship time will pass by differently, the closer to the speed of light the less amount of time the trip seems to take (where to a photon the trip across galaxy takes instantly, also the distance between any to points to a photon is always zero, think about it), so a round trip to could take years on earth will seem like only a few months for the passenger (or even less depending on how fast the ship goes) giving you the twins paradox where to twins will end up different ages when one returns from a near light space trip (don't ask or me to explain exactly how the twin paradox works cause it's crazy cuz to the twin on the ship the twin on earth travels near the speed of light and should be younger than the pilot, it's got sumthing to do with the fact that it's the space twin that does the acceleration). While traveling between colonies would take a descent delay it's definitely possible once we can get near light speed travel. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;">If we can somehow learn how to bend space and time itself and teleport across the universe faster than light other weird things can happen. Where the twin paradox occurs with near light speed and time stops when an observer travels at the speed of light well guess what one can actually travel back in time if one can travel faster than light. As far as I can tell our technology is nowhere near that point if that is even possible and I have no idea what consequences would happen if such technology is possible and how we could get around it.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;">Well thats pretty much what I have on my mind about space travel and "The Future of Human Exploration." Colonizing other planets and exploring the galaxy is important and necessary to our survival and development as a species and to our civilization. I aint no promising Star Wars (I'm an English guru!) but I think reasonable colonization and trade is possible within a mellenia.</span></span></div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-47929983688470402932011-05-09T00:12:00.000-07:002011-06-21T23:53:23.452-07:00Future of Human Exploration<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The story of humanity has always been one of exploration, colonization and adapting to meet any environmental obstacles that stand in their way. Ever since we evolved we have felt a need to leave our cradle in Africa and explore the continent. Eventually crossed into the Middle East eventually going into Europe and Asia having to adapt to the extreme colds of the north during the Ice Age having to make clothes and master the art of fire. Some humans even made their way into the Americas populating the entire length of both north and south continents. As technology developed and ocean going ship designs became more sophisticated Europeans began a new wave of exploration, reaching India by sea by going around Africa and Christopher's famous voyage lead to the western colonization of the America's and soon they circumnavigate the world. Even the frozen wastes of the poles and the depths of the oceans were explored even if they were not colonized. <br />
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Once the west colonized many parts of the world and global trade began to connect the entire planet a new wave of exploration began as a competition between the two major powers of the globe. After a few years the USSR sent Sputnik into orbit and made Yuri Gagarin the first man into space the USA became the first nation to put men onto another heavenly body besides Earth. In no time at all humanity took advantage of the technology to reach space by setting up numerous satellites furthering connecting our world.<br />
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Unfortunately it seems we have stopped there. Although many probes have landed on Mars and passed by Pluto and our telescopes peer farther and farther into the Universe and its past it seems that we don't have any plans to go farther. If humanity wished to grow and develop we need to continue to explore and colonize the Universe. And now that we have weapons that have the power to destroy all life on Earth and other galactic catastrophes that are even more destructive leaving the earth permanently becomes a matter of survival for our species and our greatly coveted civilization.<br />
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One piece of technology that will greatly help us get into space is the space elevator. These will be stations that are in geosynchronous orbit around the planet so that it will naturally stay over the same spot on the Earth. They would be connected onto the Earth through extremely long cables. Elevators would be able to travel up and down these cables, powered by lasers shot from the base on the ground it would not need to carry it's own fuel with it as it leaves the Earth's gravitational pull. With traditional rockets fuel makes up a huge fraction of the weight as vast amount of fuel needed to lift a pound into orbit which needs more fuel to lift the weight of the fuel and more fuel to lift that fuel, et cetera. This will make it immensely cheaper to launch people into orbital altitudes. Space elevators can also be used to quickly and cheaply bring up pieces of space ships which could be assembled in space. These ships can be optimized for space travel since they won't have to deal with the stresses of leaving and entering the Earth's atmosphere.<br />
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Once space elevators become well established on Earth at least going onto the moon and other planets will become much easier and if we establish permanent colonies onto those bodies space elevators could be built there as well and and interplanetary trade can be established and humanity will continue it's legacy of exploration and expansion.<br />
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And now I'm tired so I guess I'll put what I have up now so I can update some what regularly and I shall continue this blog later on another day. Well as always feel free to ask any questions who may want me to expand upon in this blog or request a new topic for me talk about entirely!!!<br />
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Some pictures of what space elevators might look like (via Google images):<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivV8DFB-BQbQAgyVmWbzr-URpPwQSKsGJymqKcaqYTRl6jGTPAiV_PLOJyR-RyU9uAWVaDLfeu81bVDsKQlJ8wVXCV7l6KouFUmiUFHX7RzkMWJHFdXzEldCNvBxhYQvCRNmsqpkGu8ZA/s1600/31282.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivV8DFB-BQbQAgyVmWbzr-URpPwQSKsGJymqKcaqYTRl6jGTPAiV_PLOJyR-RyU9uAWVaDLfeu81bVDsKQlJ8wVXCV7l6KouFUmiUFHX7RzkMWJHFdXzEldCNvBxhYQvCRNmsqpkGu8ZA/s320/31282.gif" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Space elevator itself</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7jIPPEHH0MmfN0QwLthzuXlsDk9qtoDa8lB7jgLIWAj6BSEAT_VRxk7-hfsruSaLwRqM2CaHu-xPUwzUaS8AhVBu8OBtaQ5zGtDxtgVvXHOKFZI-mgCUCBm4e51NmXxRhVo0KxO8QM9E/s1600/02-why-lowtech.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7jIPPEHH0MmfN0QwLthzuXlsDk9qtoDa8lB7jgLIWAj6BSEAT_VRxk7-hfsruSaLwRqM2CaHu-xPUwzUaS8AhVBu8OBtaQ5zGtDxtgVvXHOKFZI-mgCUCBm4e51NmXxRhVo0KxO8QM9E/s320/02-why-lowtech.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The base of the elevator on the surface of the Earth</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVQQ8wECLKpNASMYGOKX8l9WLgG2nPnXRAEAPBOoTDHzLHw8S5AryIzf5NIHOTInl8Pw8ChZTpQYARuvO7aNKzfY4keXW5VfGgvJFM-A0legz6w1dnmXFpRMM5UZLXMdfLhCfWbwMQaU4/s1600/06_SpaceElevator.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVQQ8wECLKpNASMYGOKX8l9WLgG2nPnXRAEAPBOoTDHzLHw8S5AryIzf5NIHOTInl8Pw8ChZTpQYARuvO7aNKzfY4keXW5VfGgvJFM-A0legz6w1dnmXFpRMM5UZLXMdfLhCfWbwMQaU4/s320/06_SpaceElevator.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Cool looking angle seen from space</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">(Oh, I hope if I make it big I get sued for taking peeps images off of Google without giving credit.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">It's called the internet! All the cool kids pirate stuff!)</div></div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-78692106542776034032011-05-05T00:50:00.000-07:002011-05-05T00:50:29.540-07:00Summer's here and I'm back HAHAHAHA<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">As promised, with the end of April came the end of my fourth and (hopefully) hardest semester at college. So from now until September I got plenty of free time. As I said in my last post I will now continue with my blogs about science history and life. Hopefully I shall get into the habit of writing entries and managing my blogs that I'll check on it as often one would a FaceBook account. With a three hour time delay of going from Seattle to Miami I find myself staying up later than usual and have decided to spend this empty time with blog writing which would help with a consistent amount of updates at least for the next few months.<br />
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Also with the help of my friend. who has a decently successful blog (<a href="http://spiderflaw.blogspot.com/">http://spiderflaw.blogspot.com</a>), I should hopefully get more followers which would actually make me encouraged to do this.<br />
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For now I plan to do some more normal updates of my own, probably finish up that special relativity post I did. But once (or if) this blog catches on I'll encourage you, my followers, to ask me questions about mostly anything, from ethics to technology to religion to history to physics to the future to anything in between (that means you four of my current followers).<br />
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So thats pretty much it for this post. No kinda information about humanity or the universe today. Just an update about how my Blog is actually going to be updated. </div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-63152668380138464442011-03-22T20:03:00.000-07:002011-03-22T20:03:05.718-07:00DelayedI'm sorry bout not posting anything for a while but school work has just been overloading me right now, and i spend more time writing a post than I originally anticipated. Hopefully over the summer I'll post stuff weekly then it'll get into my routine and I'll feel more inticed(can't find word I'm looking for), and maybe by then I'll have more followers than just 5 ppl who are friends and family. Also this is the hardest semester of DigiPen so hopefully my workload will be less intense from then on, and I'll have more free time. KTHNXBAIMortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-74980504155284453242011-02-21T23:53:00.000-08:002011-06-21T23:53:46.793-07:00Special Relativity I<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Before I talk any more in the science department I guess I should talk about relativity. I'm going to skip over Newtonian physics because it's pretty basic and obvious to grasp in most casses, but I will probably go back and talk about it during this post if it requires it. Relativity is a very strange and non obvious way to see the world, and i admit I still have trouble understanding everything about it (this post is also a test to see how my relativistic skills are, cuz the best way to learn something is to teach it(or blog it in this case)). I might not go into some aspects to deeply and completely explain relativity in this post but whatever, if I can perfectly explain relativity to people on the internet in one post i think i deserve a Nobel prize. Once again if someone here actually has a PHD or something in anything I'm talking about and notices i say something wrong PLZ comment saying something.<br />
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Any ways as probably anyone knows the person who came up with relativity was Albert Einstein. And as you know he came up with this stuff in a patent office, not that he was not educated though. He did go to college to learn about physics so he's not some guy who knew nothing. He started thinking about what a wave of light would look like if you were speeding along side it. He thought that that was such a silly thing to imagine, but soon he realized that it would be physically impossible to go at the speed of light, that no matter how fast you're moving light would always appear at the same speed.<br />
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Pretty much just with this assumption came all of his theories of Special Relativity. It's pretty trippy. One of the implications of this is the distortion of time. For this we shall set up the classic thought experiment, The Light Clock! Pictures would be helpful for this, TO GOOGLE IMAGES!<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHEJsMiYGYxiDbqcKrkqC0dH5qmFb_XixxlsDFL6kO-hCuFMLH2xT7sayWXHeOKZHFNCbaSRmizO8e31VqzxlFHjabQFBmdpoVV2bZte6IQKCNmns0fppmfThIOTOOnOa2uF1yP70BHRI/s1600/lightclock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHEJsMiYGYxiDbqcKrkqC0dH5qmFb_XixxlsDFL6kO-hCuFMLH2xT7sayWXHeOKZHFNCbaSRmizO8e31VqzxlFHjabQFBmdpoVV2bZte6IQKCNmns0fppmfThIOTOOnOa2uF1yP70BHRI/s320/lightclock.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Excellent. So how the light clock will work is that it will send a photon from the source and it will hit the mirror and bounce back and hit the sensor, then the number of ticks will increase and then it will instantly send out another photon. Well say you're chillin in a train station with this light clock the size of a grandfather clock for no reason. Well you know the train is going to come in exactly 15 minutes and since you know the speed of light and the distance between the the the mirror and the sensor you know how long the photon will take to travel from the source back to the sensor. So you know exactly how many ticks it will take for the train to come. Every fifteen minutes the number of ticks will increase by the same amount. So know you understand how the clock works right?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Well since that explanation took fifteen minutes the train's coming down the track now! But NO! The conductor is drunk at the wheel or whatever and the train barrels by without slowing down at all(yes this is how relativity is taught every where). But some passerby notices your clock and takes a gander at it. To him the clock is moving as the same speed the train looks like it is moving to you. So by the time the photon is shot out and hits the mirror the mirror has moved the by some amount and it appears that the light is moving at some diagonal angle as shown in the picture above (b). So the distance the light has to travel is longer when you are moving than when it is still. However the photon to the passenger still looks like it is moving at the same speed. So it will take more time for it to travel this distance so that each tick will, to the passenger, take longer than the ticks for you. There fore time looks like it is going the slower outside of the train than inside for the passenger.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">However if he perchanced to have his own light clock to you it would appear to move slower than your clock, so to you everything happening in the train would appear to move slower than outside even though the passenger is experiencing quite the opposite!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">See relativiety is quite trippy indeed. Now Ima let that sink into your heads and also I'm tired of writing so I shall pick this up in my next post, good bye Nobel prize :'(</div></div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-47424735103081275912011-02-17T01:43:00.000-08:002011-06-21T23:54:00.124-07:00Definitions: Nothing Is True, Everything is permitted<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Sorry for the video game quote, but even before I played assassin's creed I've always had an idea similar to that. What this post is about is something that's important and that I think allot of people should understand. In a way it's the definition of definition.<br />
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When the universe was created it was just a pile of particles and energy. Everything was just guided by mathematics, maybe just a handful of equations, or maybe just one. Nothing really meant anything particles whizing about doing their thing. Eventually the universe cooled allowing particles to come together to form subatomic particles, electron, protons, etc. Then they came together forming hydrogen atoms, and then they in turn came together form stars allowing heavier atoms to form (I'm pretty sure I know where I'm going with this). After a few generations enough heavy elements where made to form rocky planets around the stars. At least on one of these planets molecules came together in such a way that they could make reproductions of themselves. Sometimes the molecules would make a mistake when copying themselves often making the molecule to be unable to continue on it's path, but ever so rarely the mistakes allowed it to have more complexity and reproduce it self better(trust me just hold tight). Eventually molecules banded together forming single cell bacteria, and as they evolved bacteria came together each one performing a specific job to help the whole. After millions of years later the complexity kept on building on it self and a plethora of different types of species formed. One of the species found it's evolutionary edge being intelligence, having excellent memory, problem solving skills, and creativity. Eventually this species found it helpful and necessary to pass it's ideas, tricks, skills to live. Luckily enough they had a dexterous mouth able to form many types of sounds. Soon they started linking certain sounds to certain objects, "la" means sky, "hui" means ground, "jup" means sun, so on and so forth(this is actually what the first humans spoke, trust me). In a parallel with the evolution of life language also evolved in complexity and over different geographical areas into different languages, not necessarily evolving onto the one path to perfection or that there even is a perfect language, but just in random unique paths like life.<br />
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So why the whole universe's life history just to lead up to that. Well I guess I just want to emphasize that as life, consciousness, humans, or languages, came to be nothing really changed in the universe. Some heap of plasma didn't suddenly become "STAR" some positively charged particles didn't become "PROTON", the universe is still just some unknown stuff that follows the laws of physics.<br />
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The laws of the universe doesn't state anywhere that a pattern of vibrations in the air means a set of matter composed in some way, or that the squiggles on your screen mean anything. Words, letters, and language is just an attempt to bring one human's ideas to another's. All these patterns that we are trained to recognize don't really mean anything just what each human has associated to those words. And a key feature is that what each human associates with those words. A language is just an attempt to regulate the meaning and the association of words but any one can see that languages are truly true. If I'm talking to someone who doesn't understand English he won't get my Ideas and meanings even though I'm speaking perfectly clear. He doesn't have any associations of the patterns I'm giving him. And even in the same language I have some trouble trying to understand what British people mean (those buggers). Slang comes up, words die away, definitions change, languages are far from perfect.<br />
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Each person has there own definition to a word. To some "a couple" could mean 2-4 while to others it's just two. Each person doesn't necessarily have the same exact definition to each word. And of course with metaphors, similes, innuendos, and other literary devices languages get even more complicated. Everybody interprets every word uniquely, especially when it comes to sentences and story's. Two people can read a book and come up with two completely different meanings. What a book means is nowhere defined in the universe, and if there was a definition made by humans then that would also be up to interpretation it self.<br />
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I guess that was a simple concept but I come up against a few problems with other people where that wouldn't have if more people would understand what I'm trying to say now, can't think of any examples now but trust me. Oh I got one although it's not really a problem. When I talk to somebody sometimes I skip a word or miss pronounce one and people annoy me about that even though they know what I'm trying to say and in that case since I was saying earlier there is no perfect way to explain something with arbitrary patterns, it doesn't really matter how I say it as long as my point gets across (logic can also be applied to Grammer Nazi's not needed to being so Grammer Nazi-ish(not real english but you get my point (get it?)) and why I don't really care to spell check my blogs).<br />
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An a similar note, just like how the words don't really exist but neither there definitions. To elaborate if you get the color yellow, most everybody would call it yellow. Now add a little bit of blue so that you cant humanly notice, most people will still call it yellow. But if you keep on adding blue eventually it will be green. Where is the magic line between yellow and green? Answer there is none just a matter of opinion. A solution however could be to add more classifications to colors. Add a yellow-green between yellow and green, but then when is it no longer yellow and now yellow-green, well we'll add yellow-yellow-green and so fourth. The letters Y,E,L,L,O,W in that sequence don't truly mean yellow, and there is no such thing as yellow. And this can really be applied to much any term in the world. First off lets agree that a proton is not a pancake right, come on just agree with me for now, if you want to you can but lets stay within the Webster's definitions for now. Well what if I split a pancake into to two? If a half a pancake still a pancake, well no one's really determined that, much less what the size or volume a full pancake is. Well if we keep splitting a pancake it'll be a crumb, is that still a pancake, I can so yes it is you can say no, neither are right nor wrong. Well either way if you keep splitting a crumb you come down to a molecule, maybe water, maybe sugar, i don't know, is that still a pancake? Well if you split that you get atoms and then a proton. But earlier we agreed that that is not a pancake? Well where is the line? Well hopefully no more examples are needed and I hope you get the point. Everything description made by human's is just some made up thing, maybe at the fundamental level there are fundamental particles, but even protons and neutrons are things we made up to describe something, but they don't truly exist.<br />
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The biggest point I'll make in this post which is just a special case of my above point is the non-existence of good and evil. I first realized this pretty early whilst watching cartoons and movies of good guys versus the bad guys and realized it's really us versus them. Good and evil in this scenario was dependent on what side your on. Then I switched my definitions of good to someone who helps others without helping themselves and evil as someone who hurts others without helping them selves. But then later I looked at human interactions in another way. No one in the world does anything without good reason. Every person acts on their personal definitions of good or evil, maybe they don't do things they think are good, but no one does anything they truly think is evil. The people we consider evil either have a completely different definitions of good or evil, like in the movie "Rampage" where a guy kills everybody in this small American town to lower population levels, or we don't truly understand the situation like in "Fable III" where the king oppressed the people through taxes and child labor to make an army to defend his people from an unknown imminent attack. Even the Nazi's (not that I'm defending anyone and I'm sorry if I'm offending anyone, but they are history's de facto evil) thought they were helping the world by spreading the German glory and eliminating what they though were lesser humans weighing the rest of the world down. Any act that can be considered evil can be broken down into lesser neutral parts. No one can consider my finger muscles contracting muscles contracting evil, nor a small gunpowder exploding, nor a piece of lead flying at several hundred meters per second, body tissues being torn evil. The appearance of evil only appears in complicated circuits.<br />
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Another way of thinking of things is again just pieces of matter and energy obeying the laws of physics. Some rock falling because of gravity onto a person isn't evil by anyones standards(I hope) since it has no control over how it falls it's just falling due to it's attraction to the earth, even a lion eating a person because it's its nature to kill and eat for survival. So why a human killing another evil? Because humans have intelligence choice, and consciousness? Once again evil appears out of a complicated system. The mans decisions come out of a neural network of a billion braincells. Which cell is sending evil signals to other ones and to muscles out of pure malice, which electron is evil as it fly's down the nerves to signal the muscles? The brain is just full of particles whizzing about with no control on their own. Decision and choice is just an illusion we see. I, in fact, have to type this blog right now due to chemical reactions in my brain that no one can predict.<br />
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All actions in the world are just between bits of matter interacting with each other, no one can be seen as evil or good, only their collection of actions that we so loosely try to term.<br />
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However I myself have my one perception of good and evil which I try to follow when it doesn't harm myself interests to much (one can be good to ones self!). Humanity has worked hard on our civilization and I liked what we have done as a whole so far, not that I like every single aspect of human civilization. So my definitions of good and evil a based around what would best help or hurt my community as a whole in the longterm, which will hopefully help progress our civilization to wherever it may go.<br />
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You may not agree with my opinions of definitions, but I at least hope that you understand my view and maybe open your mind with some possibilities of the world. I've always wanted to say these things to somebody for most of my life so it's really nice to finally have a place to voice my mind about these sort of things that I've been thinking about for years by myself. Of course don't hesitate to leave any comments or opinions in the comments section once some people start following me!</div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-44828930024138409862011-02-12T18:41:00.000-08:002011-06-21T23:54:12.511-07:00The Shape of the Universe<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Well since this blog is called "Standing in Front of the Universe" I guess it should be appropriate to start it off by talking about that.<br />
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But before that let me explain my knowledge of these subjects. If you read my profile thing I have said that I am a college student, at the current age of 19. However this college is DigiPen which is a small school dedicated to video games. So all my knowledge about basic rudimentary physics like kinematics and circuits and stuff like that came from high school, the more higher level stuff I just learned about from reading books mostly. So I'm not some kid at Havard learning from one of the founders of string theory or something and allot of the stuff I might talk about is my own opinions or theories. So if you disagree with something I say or think I'm wrong just say something cause either I can explain what I meant or learn something new which is always fun.<br />
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Kay lets start this... I guess I can start explaining the dimensions of the universe and it's shape n stuff. I think everybody in the world can understand that there are three spatial dimensions, you know the directions that we can move our selves physically, Up-Down, Left-Right, and Frontwards-Backwards. Now these three axis' don't point in a particular direction, it's just that three spatial coordinates are needed to define a unique point in space. If I want to say where my house was I would give you the longitude, latitude and the altitude, and you would know exactly where my house is (not that I am going to). And using these coordinates one could get the unique location anywhere in the universe theoretically. But of course there is nothing special about the earth, which took us humans a decent amount of time to find out, so there is no reason to make the center of the earth the origin, the point where the three coordinates would be 0, 0, 0 which actually wouldn't be the center of the earth since 0 altitude is sea level but u get my point, of the universe. This brings me to my next point that took humanity a while to realize as well, that spatial coordinates are essentially relative to what you measuring.<br />
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So anyone can can essentially make any coordinate system they would like. I could make my house the origin of my coordinate system and set my three axis' to be East-West, North-South, and Up-Down, so I can say my house would be (0,0,0) (0 feet East of my house, 0 feet North of my House and 0 feet above my house) while my friends house would be (100, -200, 10) (100 feet East, of my house, 200 feet south of my house, and 10 feet above my house) and no one could argue with me. At a single point there is no magic coordinate number that describes it it's only this far away relative from some other object that you're measuring.<br />
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So now we move to the next dimension, time. Hopefully now in our modern age almost one hundred years after Einstein's discovery of time as another dimension most of us can see how time can be a dimension. An easy way to explain is if I want to meet some one and I just give them the spatial coordinates (most normally given as an address) the will come only to get frustrated by the fact that I was not there since I came an hour later since I forgot to give them the time that I would be there. So to give someone a proper position I would be I need to give them four coordinates, three spatial and one time-al (itza word). So now we know that the world is four dimensional. What is the differences between space and time? Are theres more spatial and more time dimensions? Are there even other types of dimensions? Ah-ah-ah little ones. I shall explain, or hope to explain that later.<br />
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Now that we know that time is a dimension we can see that it also applies to the same rules as space. In respect to aligning our axis there is not much room since time is one dimensional, forwards in time and backwards in time. But the position of our origin can be moved to any when we want it. Most people describe time as the years starting 2011 years 43 days days ago because some really nice guy was lived at that time. But as I said there is nothing special about that time(although I'm sure many would disagree but ima not go into that kinda stuff (at least not in this post)). No one can argue about the Jewish calender that sets it's origin many thousands ( about 3 ) before the Christian one. But no one can argue with them and there are many calenders used by numerous civilizations across the earth. Once again it's just a nice point that many people can use reference against. Any one can say that they just ate breakfast about 4 minutes ago or that they got married 3 years after meeting each other.<br />
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With just these rules (and a few others that I'll talk about later) Einstein and some other scientists that you wouldn't remember ( cause you know, I totally remember there names) came up with special relativity, general relativity, subatomic physics, and string theory. So if you're going in your bed going "well this is all obvious" i just want you to know that time it took for humanity to realize these truths and the implications they eventually brought with them.<br />
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Now Ima go talk about something a little less obvious and something I heard on TV allot but they never really explained it well and I had to think about it for a while to understand what they where trying to say. For thousands of years ever since the dawn of humanity trying to figure out what was up above beyond our reach, we always thought that the earth was the center of the Universe. I mean, given the times it's undoubtable that even the most wise being then would come to that assumption. But over time Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo showed that we are definitely not the center of the solar system, then we saw that we wear no where near the center of the galaxy, and now we know that there are numerous amounts galaxies in the Universe. AND some scientists theorize there might be an infinite amount of Universes!?!? Where will it end!?<br />
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Any ways, well if the earth isn't there center of the universe that doesn't mean there isn't one, I mean the universe started out as a single point in space so why can't we go there and just call that the center, if everything blew up in equal directions from that point the only logical thing is that that is the center right? Well in a way yes but kinda no? What? Exactly!<br />
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This is where the people on the tube and in some books try to explain the exact shape of the universe but didn't completely explain what they meant. According to Einsteins theory of relativity the math showed that the universe should be continuously expanding in all directions and even though Einstein didn't like that idea Hubble showed that the universe really was expanding (I won't go into how he showed that now since it's not really integral to my story but if some one wants to I can explain in the comments). Hubble showed that that every galaxy was moving away from us in every direction and the farther the galaxy was from us the farther it was moving away. AHA! So our galaxy is at least the center galaxy! Booyah! MILKY WAY! MILKY WAY! Hey now don't get carried away. To explain whats happening the balloon analogy works well. If you take a balloon and draw a bunch of dots on a balloon and blow it up(with your breath preferably not explosives) you'll see that each dot is moving away from each other as the "Space"(balloon) expands and the farther away two dots are the faster they move away from each other.<br />
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And here is where the people on the TV always stopped explaining. Every time I saw this I'm like "But the balloon has a center!!!" But how I imagined is that the balloon was some filled thing that there where stars n galaxies inside of it since we live in a 3d space and balloon s are 3d but the tricky thing is is that the Universe isn't a 3D balloon but a four dimensional balloon and all of the galaxies and stars and planets and us are stuck on the out side of it. Just like how a 3 dimensional balloon has a 2D surface the Universal Balloon has a 3dimensional balloon on it. I know it's tricky to imagine but once again our aged ancestors thought the world to be a 2dimensional plane with edges that you can fall off of the we thought that the universe was just 3 dimensional with boundaries that we have know idea what could be beyond.<br />
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So techniquely there is a center of the universe but since we are stuck on the edge of the universe we can't go up or down. Imagine it like the earth if it had no mountains or valleys, perfectly flat. It is a 3 dimensional object but every point that we can go to (the surface of the earth) can be described by 2 points (essentially longitude and latitude). What this means is that we live in a 3D world with no boundaries, just like if you went straight west for a long time and you tried your best not to turn in any direction you would end up in the same point even though all your measurement s said you went in a perfectly straight line. This also implies to our 4 dimensional balloon if I went straight and didn't turn up-down, or left-right, in the slightest possible way no matter what space wont end and I would come back to the same point as when I left.<br />
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However the is an edge of universe and there is a center of the universe it's just perpendicular to all the three axis'; left-right, up-down, and forwards-backwards(i said frontwards before right? that was weird), so we will never be able to go past the edge or towards the center, at least with our understanding of the universe. And we would have no Idea what it would mean to do such a thing. If you saw someone go one of these directions you would just see them disappear in front of your very eyes! But now this leads to more questions: is this other dimension time? Is it another space dimension? IS IT A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TYPE OF DIMENSION?!?!?! For that you will have to subscribe to my blog! Or just wait until i can actually answer that question myself or most likely when I have a weird discussion about it to myself and i just put my thoughts onto this blog.<br />
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And hopefully this gives me a bit of credibility to my blog since as of current I only have to followers, my friend and my self and this is my first actual post.</div>Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7851739298629405747.post-81377410918671070402011-02-10T20:34:00.000-08:002011-02-10T20:34:56.701-08:00First Post!Hello everybody, this is my first time blogging anything at all, and so far I like it.<br />
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What this blog is about: Uhhmmm... I guess me just talking to my self as I engage in conversations about a varied amount of subjects or things and you can come in and listen if you want. I often find myself talking to my self about sometimes interesting things and since everybody on the internet already likes telling the world who they are I figured it couldn't hurt to give it a go.<br />
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I'll try to make this a kinda intelligent place to put idea's into people thoughts. And of course I'm not going to know everything so if someone thinks I'm wrong, has a different opinion than me or just wants to add to the conversation just comment whatever who feel like. I'm a probably won't talk to formally and try to more free ball it so I can type my ideas faster and keep on a train of thought, cause that tends to happen allot when I'm typing, including multiple times in this post alone.<br />
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I think the subjects that the posts will be about are mostly going to be history, philosophy, and physics, cause a like thinking about those things and I don't want to talk about anything I don't wanna talk about. If anyone wants to suggest a topic for the next blog you can go ahead if you want.<br />
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So just so you know I is a college student so I will have a lot of work to do and might not be able to blog all the time, 'specially around midterms and finals. I guess summers would be good for me since I won't have anything to do. Also all grammatical errors will either be on purpose cuz i feel liek it, or I just don't care enough, I've actually been contemplating about whether I should capitalize my i's cuz it's taking to long to press shift!<br />
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Well ne-ways hopefully this will be an interesting blog with a descent amount of ppl following where y'all can think and ponder bout stuff. But who knows cause even if we lived in a deterministic (spelled it right first try!)<br />
universe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle does not allow us to gather enough information to make such a precise prediction about the future. BAM!Mortal Flawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16401442212323472603noreply@blogger.com1