Identitifying UFOs

US Air Force video of a UFO

 UFOs, unidentified flying objects, or as the military calls them UAO's (unidentified ARIAL objects). What are they? By definition they are UNIDENTIFIED, but there are only a handful of things they COULD be (assuming the most common explanations - planes, balloons, weather, birds, etc - have been eliminated).

In order of least to most likely:

• Optical Illusions
• Aliens
• Human technology
  
• Sensory Mirages
  

Illusions

The least likely, but still possible explanation, is that they are some sort of reflection and/or distortion of light. The atmosphere is not simply an empty clear box of air. There are many different molecular gasses present and many different densities of those gasses in the air. A distortion in the air, just like a wave breaking on the shore, can move much faster than an object in the air. If a wave of density happens to reflect or refract light in a certain way it might look like a ball of light moving quickly through the air. 

This explanation also explains why UFOs might seem to "follow" airplanes. If the reflection is coming from the plane, or is changing in proportion to how they are moving through the air it would appear to be following them. What would be most helpful in these situations would be if there was another observer (such as another plane) and the two views could be triangulated with the phenomenon. Obviously this would give a great deal more information and could reveal if the visual phenomenon has a three-dimensional shape that is consistent from all sides, or if it is a two-dimensional reflection of observer.

I mostly assume this is the least possible explanation because it is something that engineers and scientists would probably look into first, but most of the phenomenon seem to be reported by pilots, not engineers or scientists who would know enough about how light moves in dielectric materials to have a good sense of what is actually strange or simply unusual.

Aliens

Despite what it may sound like, the idea that it could be some sort of alien aircraft is not odd at all. In fact, it would be very weird if there WEREN'T a bunch of alien probes buzzing around the Earth's atmosphere. There are billions and billions of planets out there, many surrounding suns that are much older than ours. Even if evolution happened to move slightly faster on another planet by a few million years the universe should be teaming with automated robotic probes - even if a single other alien civilization existed a few million years before us. 

If there ARE alien civilizations in our galaxy it is possible they are not only aware of each other, but also of us. It would certainly behoove any alien civilization to get as much information as possible about other life in the universe. Not only to keep an eye on our civilization, but - more invaluably - to learn about how life evolved on our planet. Taking detailed long-term readings of the atmosphere, surface, and oceans could give them important information about the universal properties of life, and possibly give them insight into both how to use any evolutionary advantages Earth might have for their own benefit, but also how to negate any harms life on Earth might pose to their own form of life if we ever are able to venture beyond our solar system.

Currently the most likely way we would interact with another star system would be by sending automated/robotic probes. We are only a few decades away from being able to send a probe to Alpha Centauri that could get there in twenty years. The problem, of course, is the increasing capabilities any civilization has for interstellar travel comes with the increasing power to completely destroy all life on our planet. We could just as easily destroy ourselves as ever establish a non-Earth colony for Earth life. 

This is all to say that it is completely possible UFO's are from aliens, however the one reason they are most likely NOT alien related convinces me they are not: the fact they seem to be "hiding" from us. If UFO's were actually from an alien species they would not be so difficult to pin down. 

The fact that these things are constantly moving at high speeds to conveniently stay out of focus for our cameras is one thing, but that we haven't seen anyone post clear photos of an encounter on Instagram or TikTok is silly. We are not hiding ourselves from monkeys. We are not concerned we might upset "bee society" by taking a hike in the mountains. Aliens are not going to spend all their time and effort just to hide from us. Maybe they don't want us to discover their technology (by perhaps having some sort of self-destruct mechanism if the craft failed), but they wouldn't care if we took a photograph of their craft. That is just silly.

 

Human Technology

It is definitely possible that some of the UFO's represent some new high tech airplane or drone. However, I would argue that most of the maneuvers performed by the UFO's on the tapes released by the Air Force would represent technology so advanced that the economy and society that incorporated them into their everyday infrastructure would benefit MUCH more than simply using the technology for spy planes. 

I would say there is a limited sort of human technologies that could be responsible for the UFOs, and if they ARE responsible for most of the UFO's it would be in combination with optical illusions. The ONLY way that a government could develop leap-frog technologies that other scientists and engineers would be unaware of is if they discovered some sort of alien technology and reverse-engineered it somehow. Otherwise the US government (or whatever government) must have whole branches of scientific knowledge (requiring four or eight year degrees to comprehend) that have somehow stayed under wraps for decades. No way.

Complex Mirages

While a mirage is technically another kind of optical illusion, what I mean by "mirage" here is a bit different. When you see a mirage in the desert you see light bounce off moving air in a way that mimics how light bounces off water. This can give the illusion that there is water on the road near the horizon. What I mean when I say "complex mirage" is the possibility that what we are seeing is aspects of phenomenon we are completely unaware of but which we attribute to flying objects simply because we lack the understanding of what is actually going on.

This is different from illusions which we might have the knowledge and understanding to explain if we have all the facts. What I am talking about is completely unknown properties of the atmosphere, space, and the universe itself. 

We hear scientists talk about "dark matter" and "dark energy" all the time. The stats that dark energy is about 67% of the universe and dark matter is 27% (normal energy and matter making only 5%) seems to just wash over us most of the time. However, the fact of the matter (Ha!) is that we have almost no idea how dark matter might interact with normal matter, how it would move, if it would distort air enough to cause a visible phenomena or if it would  couple with other matter and energy nearby. It is not even that it is likely or unlikely it is literally that we have no idea what dark matter and energy is. And those are just two things that we KNOW we don't know about - imagine what else we might find out about the universe.

 

So What Are They?

I highly doubt most, if not all, of the UFO sightings have anything to do with alien life forms (or angels or magic), but I suspect they DO represent somethings which we don't have any sense about in our universe. I think it is something that we are only seeing one aspect of. I think it is MUCH more likely that UFOs simply represent some aspect of the universe we don't understand than they are some sort of flying craft of any sort or are simply illusions.

There is almost certainly life on other planets, but any probe they send to Earth is going to either be completely undetectable or is not going to be "hiding" from us. UFO's are almost certainly not aliens.

I hope that the government widens the scope of their UFO research. They need to bring in actual scientists and engineers who can perform rigorous scientific tests and develop instruments specifically designed to learn more about them. The nice thing about things we don't understand is that it represents the possibility to obtain new knowledge. Who knows what we might learn if we looked into them properly!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How the "Life is a Test" Theological Hypothosis Disproves Religion

 

photo by Kaboompics.com from Pexels

Many religions claim that this life on Earth is not "real" but simply a test by God to see if we would do all the correct rituals, say all the right words and prayers, and be obedient to God. (I.e., to do what they say God says.) However, there is a fundamental and fatal flaw with this assertion, namely:

If this life is a test, why would God give anyone answers before it's all over?

 If we assume, for a moment, they are right and God did set up the Earth, all life on this planet, and all of human history for all time simply as a VR test of faith, why then would it make any sense for God to give some people the answers. Many zealots would claim that God simply selects "chosen ones" to get an easy ride into heaven because of some inherent goodness in the person, but all this proves is that God is UNJUST and is undermining his own scheme.

If there is some other way for God to decide that his "chosen people" get to have all the answers that will get them into heaven, what is the point in even having them on Earth at all? 

If it this life is a test to see how "good" of a person you are, how is showing you exactly what God wants you to do fair to our fellow test-takers? How does this not destroy the whole reason for testing us in the first place? If there really are "answers" or "hints" God wanted to give us, why doesn't he just give them to all of us? Wouldn't it make much more sense that a just and loving god would give all of humanity an equal chance?  Claiming that God is giving YOU answers that no other group has is tantamount to calling God "unjust" and "unfair."

Surely if God has any power at all, let alone omnipotence, he could easily find a way to unambiguously give all of humanity the same information and chance at heaven. 

The obvious answer is it is a scam.

Religions promise that God has told them to give you all the answers. That if you just follow what THEY tell you to do, you will easily pass the test God has given us all in this life. Isn't it CONVENIENT that all the money they ask from you is given to them NOW but the blessing they promise are only given AFTER YOU ARE DEAD? It will be pretty impossible for you to call them out on it if they do screw you over. The perfect scam! And one that has been run on millions, if not billions, of people throughout human history.

As an atheist it is these many, MANY, instances of theistic religions attributing to God so many despicably unjust, unfair, cruel, and evil motives and actions which proves themselves false. If there is a God, it is blatantly obvious that organized religion does not know Him, or they would not go to so extreme lengths to paint Him as such a cruel, unjust, petty, and hypocritical tyrant.

What is Human Consciousness? (THIS IS NOT KEANU REEVES)

The above image is not Keanu Reeves. With this statement I don't mean that the photo above is actually the late 19th century actor, Paul Mounet. (Or IS it?!?) I mean that Keanu Reeves is a human man who lives in Los Angeles, while the image above is simply a photograph of him. 

However, you may argue that it is a photo of Keanu Reeves, so in a sense it IS Keanu Reeves, and you would also be correct.

How can the image both NOT BE Keanu Reeves, and yet BE Keanu Reeves at the same time?!? Has the camera somehow imprinted a small piece of Keanu Reeves' soul onto the photo? No, because detailed drawing of Keanu Reeves could be just as much "Keanu Reeves" as the photo above. I could even DESCRIBE his face to a talented enough police sketch artist and she could produce a drawing that would ALSO be "Keanu Reeves" despite perhaps never seeing him in her life.

The thing the human man named Keanu Reeves and the photograph/drawings share is the same likeness. A "likeness" is another way to say that the sizes of his features and their location in relation to each other produces a quite unique and complex pattern. This pattern of Keanu Reeves's face is present both the human man's Keanu Reeves face AND the photograph's Keanu Reeves face. So they are both Keanu Reeves. 

 This idea, that a generalized object, such as "an apple", or "red", or "a pipe", goes back to ancient times with Plato's Theory of Forms, where he postulates that there is a idealized version of everything in the world (called "Forms") which things in the real world are simply imperfect versions of. What he was referring to is the way we can have an idea in our heads of something like "red" but then recognize many things that are "red" but that may have slightly different tint or shades as each other but still represent the idea of "red" in our minds. 

The artist René Magritte famously made this point in his painting, The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) in 1929.

Magritte beautifully and simply illustrated the difference between a thing and it's likeness. There is no pipe anywhere in the painting. It is not made from pieces or quanta of pipe. There is absolutely nothing that is "a pipe" anywhere on the canvas. Getting closer to the painting, touching it, smelling it, will give you NO further information about the "pipe." In fact, if you look too closely there is no pipe at all. It is only when looking upon the full piece that you can see the pipe. And notice that it doesn't matter if this is the original painting, a photo of if, or some other reproduction. You could make a cope of this on wood, or etch it in glass; you could arrange single electrons to reproduce the photo or you could re-arrange all the galaxies in the universe to reproduce it - and never would you get any more or less information about "the pipe." Because the medium doesn't matter, it is the pattern.

This is the same as human consciousness. There is no "divine material" that makes up our minds, no incorporeal specter residing inside us giving vigor to our bodies. Our brains are made from atoms, molecules, and proteins. The synapses of our neurons fire across voltage differentials a thousand times a second processing inputs from our senses, thoughts in our consciousness, and reductions of incredibly complex coordinated motions of nervous impulses and muscle movements for us to understand and interact with the world around us.

It is this complex and ethereal pattern, made of physical matter AND electrochemical interactions, which makes up our conscious mind. Not only a pattern in space, but in time as the electric signals our brain constantly emanates as it manages inputs and thoughts, formulates movements and speech, and retrieves and saves memories. 

This pattern is complex, but recognizable. We don't just recognize our family, friends, and acquaintances by their faces and voices alone, but the manner of speaking, the subjects they talk about, and the way they convey their thoughts. 

If your best friend or significant other had their mind transferred to a complex virtual mind inside an interactive robot or a computer simulation and the contacted you, it would be relatively easy for them to convince you it was them. They could simply tell you a piece of information that only you and them would know, but you could also simply have a conversation with them and you would recognize it was them after a short time.

Human consciousness is a pattern made of changing electric fields, chemical reactions, and protein filaments. Consciousness is not the brain any more than Magritte's pipe is flecks of paint or Keanu Reeves face is pixels on a computer screen; but it is also not an otherworldly construct of quintessence. It is something that we can detect and record, and someday it will be something we can copy and preserve. 

There is no reason the pattern of human consciousness cannot be transferred to another medium - such as silicon or qubits and to exist in an artificial or virtual body. It probably won't happen in my lifetime - scientist have to decode the pattern and engineers need to build computers several magnitudes more complex to adequately reproduce it - but it will happen someday and we need to start preparing for how this will change human society, and affect how we think of ourselves in the universe.

We Need a Name for Einstien's "Mass Force" - the "Exigency Force"

 

 (Image from video - What is General Relativity? by ScienceClic)

It seems like we might be missing something ever since Einstein's General Relativity showed that gravity doesn't work the way Newton thought it did.  While we all learn about gravity as a "force" in physics class, physicists tell us that gravity isn't actually a real force. Instead, what is really happening is mass is warping space-time and while it appears gravity is accelerating masses towards the center it is is merely a pseudo force - a la the magnetic force or the centrifugal force.

If the world was quicker to accept Einstein's theory we should have simply changed the way we talk about gravity. We should have said, "no, actually gravity is not "pulling" things down, gravity is actually warping space and time near mass and the resulting downward vector is an simply an emergent pseudo force. Then perhaps we could have a called Newton's "old gravity" something cool like the "captivating" or "alluring" pseudo force.

Unfortunately, it seems like most physicists are fine letting the Newtonian concept of gravity keep the name "gravity" and just calling this real space-time warping force "mass", or worse - not even naming it at all. It seems silly to not have a name for something so fundamentally important to the universe. Mass already has other very similar meanings, and the space-time warping force should really have it's own name.

I humbly propose a few: My favorite is the "exigency force", exigency means essential but also urgent conveying the existential nature of the force and also including a time factor. The runner is the "proclivity force", proclivity means to have a predisposition toward but also includes "clivity" which is a root word for acclivity and declivity which mean an "upward slope" and "downward slope" respectively. My third place entry is  the "clinare force" which is a Latin word that means "to bend" and is the root of incline and decline.

Do you have a good name for the force mass exerts to warp space-time?

Why the Simulation Argument Is False

What if I told you that, despite what you may have been led to believe, the entire world was simply a highly detailed simulation. You may say that sounds preposterous, and you would be right, but it is still helpful to look at why it's wrong. (No, it is not because we don't all have Tron suits under our skin.)

The Simulation Argument, by philosopher Nick Bostrom, is a proposition based on the near certainty of a future where computers are capable of physics simulations which would allow high-fidelity simulations It postulates that one of three things MUST be true

1. The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a stage capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations is very close to zero
2. The fraction of civilizations that are interested in running high-fidelity simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero
3. The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

I happen to agree with the premise of the argument. There most certainly will be ample refined and dense computational power in the near future where we can make artificial worlds that are almost indistinguishable from reality.While it may never been perfect enough to fool someone who has actually experienced the real world, it would almost certainly be possible to fool a human mind which has known nothing else.

If you include the entire past and future of the universe (which Bostrom does), then there is almost zero chance that the first two postulates are true. The fact that human society on Earth has almost reached this level of technology means it is almost certainly "reachable" by some civilization, and the idea that a significant fraction of civilizations who wouldn't want to run simulations in these artificial environments seems also very close to zero. 

Unfortunately the third postulate is not only fatally flawed but there are many other postulations that can replace it in this trilemma. Let's take a closer look at the third, and most discussed postulate.

The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

While the first two postulates are rather obvious, the final one hinges on several fatally flawed assumptions:

1. That there is some benefit in running these highly detailed simulations, so detailed that we each have (what appears to be at least) detailed consciousness, complex emotions, and also feel very detailed and traumatizing pain.
2. That there is some overriding benefit in the vast majority of these simulations to hide the fact that the participants (you and me) are in fact in a simulation.
3. The ethics of deceiving self-aware artificial intelligences into believing they are humans and that they are really living not only on the real planet Earth, but in the real universe, must be vastly different from what we currently think of as acceptable scientific experimentation.
   
4. That if simulation technology is possible, and allowed, that the number of simulated humans would be much HIGHER than all the human beings that have ever existed.
   

While many of us have been to a play or seen a movie where the actors have went through very emotional states, even putting themselves through physical pain in the quest for an "authentic" performance, it is a quite difficult position to defend to say that a director must actually harm her actors in order to get a meaningful performance from them. If future civilizations are running "simulations" why do they need to include such visceral pain and anguish in our "simulated" existence. If you say, "Well, it's only SIMULATED pain and anguish" I think most people would be hard-pressed to imagine how "simulated pain" would be different from real pain. Even if pain doesn't harm us physically it is still just as real. What possible information can be gained by torturing a bunch of AI in a computer?

Why would the simulation need to include a deception about the reality of the simulation? Many people live their whole lives with the belief that their is some sort of unseen "spirit world" or some other form of life after death. It would be simple enough to avoid much of the ethical conundrum to simply let everyone know that the world we are living in is a simulation and it could be escaped at any time by "death."

What benefit would be lost if one of us, or all of us, discovered we were in a simulation? Most of us would be quite terrified to discover we were not real humans and our world was just a simulation. Why not simply program the simulated humans to not worry about that? Why not remove the ability for us to even think about it? While it doesn't prove we are not in a simulation that we can both think quite rationally about it, as well as be terrified at the thought of it being real, surely indicates that the chances of us being in a simulation are far from 1/1.

It seems an ethical simulation would simply allow all the simulated humans to privately know they could exit the simulation at any time. The fact that most governments consider suicide a crime on the level of murder, and most religions in the world consider suicide to be a sin, indicate that either the creators of these simulations are monstrously immoral, or else we can be relatively assured we are not in a simulation. Either way, it certainly doesn't indicate a simulation is MORE likely given the circumstances of the human condition we are living with in this world.

Finally, probably the most objectively disqualifying argument against the Simulation Argument comes from how models and simulations usually work. Statistically speaking there is a limit to the sample size that is necessary to accurately model a population. It would be orders of magnitude smaller. 

For instance, if some civilization wanted to run a model on how humans thought in the 2020's for instance, the model they would make would be SIGNIFICANTLY smaller in population than the 7 billion people in the world. For accuracy of accuracy of as high as 99.9% they would actually only need a sample population of less than one million people. In fact, even if they simulated a population a large as the entire population of the human race throughout the 50,000 of our existence (about 110 billion humans) a sample population of one million people would suffice for the same 99.9% accuracy.

(Here is a sample size calculator from Survey Monkey if you want to look into this yourself.)

In other words, it would actually be MUCH less likely that you were a part of such a simulation. The odds would be more like 1 million/110 billion, which is 0.0009%

Even if they decided to run a trillion iterations of history, they would STILL only need to use the same 1 million artificial humans. What would be the point of making more? What would it even mean to add another? Would they just be a copy of another one or would the Simulation Gods create a unique person from scratch even if it wouldn't add significantly to the accuracy of their simulation? Would that mean it was just the same artificial human copied or is the entire million simply copies of some simulated Adam and Eve?

While there will almost certainly be a day when artificial intelligences inhabit simulated worlds, there is no reason to suspect they will be lied to and fooled into thinking they are somewhere they are not. The expense, trouble, and moral transgression are not worth the negligible increase in accuracy that would warrent using the number of simulated humans in ANY future simulation that would even come close to making the odds of us currently being in a simulation anywhere near 1/1. 

So rest easy knowing you are definitely in the real world, but cherish the time you have. No resets available!

Is Vision Alive?

In the fourth episode of WandaVision we see Wanda looking at Vision after using her powers to send Monica back to the outside world and he looks just like he did right after he died five years ago (which was about three weeks ago from Wanda's perspective). 

This brings the question to the forefront we have all been asking since the show started, "Is Vision really alive?" I think there are three possibilities:

1. He is alive but his animating energy is coming from Wanda, not the Mind Stone
2. He is alive and has a new power source (arc reactor?) or stone (in the comics he has the Sun Stone in his forehead).
3. He is dead and Scarlet Witch is just imagining him as alive

It seems that #3 is not true because Vision seems to have a mind and personality all his own as he is seen questioning the strangeness of Wanda's reality several times until Wanda asserts control again. So most likely either he has truly been brought back to life by Wanda (perhaps as her powers come from the Mind Stone she can create a reasonable facsimile to resurrect him), or somehow he was brought back to life in the five years since the Snap.

As Vision did not appear in Avengers Endgame it seems that he was NOT brought back to life by Bruce Banner or Tony Stark, but there doesn't seem to be a good reason WHY they didn't bring him back. It is weird that Vision just stayed "dead" after the Mind Stone was pulled from his head. I mean it's just basically like if you took the battery out of your toy, right? Couldn't Tony have just made a new arc reactor for him? It doesn't make sense that Shuri, Bruce, or Tony wouldn't have fixed him, but I guess Shuri was blipped out and Bruce and Tony were traumatized so they didn't think to resurrect him.  

I know part of his personality was from the stone, but he should still have his Jarvis personality, he would just not have emotions. (A similar thing happened to him in the comics.) It's not like a robot has to have their brain in their head. (It wouldn't make any sense actually; you would want his brain to be in like a bullet-proof black box deep inside his chest cavity or something, right?)  

So it makes sense that he could be back alive, it's kinda weird that Wanda didn't just . I hope we see the scene where Scarlet Witch goes to the warehouse with his body. Perhaps she is so overcome with grief she goes nuts. Maybe since she is not a tech person she didn't think about calling Shuri and having her fix him. It has only been three weeks (for Wanda) that she was in Wakanda and talking to Shuri who was sure she could remove the stone and save Vision's brain.  

 

 

 

 

In Infinity War Shuri says the Mind Stone is attached to "3 trillion neurons" in Vision's body (but it could be that the Mind Stone itself has the "3 trillion neurons" but that doesn't really make sense). Shuri says that any slight miscalculation when removing the stone could be catastrophic. It seems the obvious thing to do would be to make a backup of Vison's mind before she started to try to disconnect the stone safely. (If you were going upgrading your PC you should backup your data first, right?)

If Vision is not "really" back alive from Scarlet Witch's magic, then hopefully they contact Shuri and she can help make a new stone (Sun Stone?) for his power source and restore the backup she made before she started her procedure.

Does a Sand Castle Have a Soul?

 

 

Where does the soul go when we die? Not it's final destination of Heaven or Hell, but where has it gone from the human body? Assuming any small changes in weight of a dead body from a live being are accurately described by the out-gassing of a body no longer engaging in live biological activities (such as breathing) a dead body seems to be the exact same thing as a sleeping being.

Of course there have been many explanations of what and where the "animating force" of a living being goes when we die, but none have any scientific basis. Many religious dreamers and philosophical thinkers say there is no scientific explanation, but this is not correct.

Think of the model of a sand castle on the beach. Before you built it with your sand pail and molds, and shaped it with your shovel and sticks, the sand was part of the beach. After you take your photo for family and instagram, if a stray dog or child runs through your castle, destroying it's walls you may abandon it to the elements, or you may decide to tear the whole thing down yourself. Either way, eventually the sand castle returns to the beach. However, the sand making the castle is still there, but where did the castle go?

Of course we don't think if this process as the loss of the "essence" of a castle from the sand. There is no "spiritual castle" which floats up to heaven after it's sandy ramparts are leveled to the ground. It is simply that the sand is no longer organized into the pattern it was in. It is this pattern where the answer lies.

While it may like the human mind is nothing like a sand castle, it IS also a pattern, albeit a much more complex one closer to an intricate tapestry or computer program. It is in the dissolution of the patterns in our brains when we die where the mind and soul is lost. The brains in our skulls may still there, but without oxygen to keep the cells alive, they quickly loose their cohesion and the delicate and complex pattern of our brain is lost to time. 

Someday science may find a way to fully capture the intricate patterns in our minds, or perhaps simply a reasonable facsimile of it, like a photograph captures a moment in time. We may be able to save the essence of what makes us unique humans into a synthetic virtual world, or even a fully artificial robotic body. 

In the meantime, we live on in the impressions the patterns in our head leave on the world around us. In our correspondence, our collections, our art, our careers, and our friends and family we leave behind. At the moment of death the memories and emotions our fellow humans hold for us are more closely related to the pattern of our minds than the disordered decomposing cells in our skulls. Though we may not have any further thoughts, the thoughts and deeds we leave behind have can attain a modicum of immortality. 

The time for the uniquely complex patterns that are our minds is fleeting, so use it well; and may we all find much happiness and at least a small quantum of immortality.