Lunar Alien Architecture

Not sure if it's real, but it's very beautiful in it's organic nature and very different from our own style of functional constructs. Very much like one would imagine alien architecture..like H.R.Gigers' Alien movie concepts. Maybe too much like that. This is allegedly a city on the moon taken from a cryptic youtube user that I've mentioned before in previous posts. There are very low resolution versions of these images that are available on the NASA website but they look like mexico from the space-station...just blotches of light were there should be no light...especially those on the dark side...are we supposed to believe that this is some sort of crystalline structure emanating it's own light source? Judge for yourself but more information is coming out that our closest celestial body is a lot more interesting than we ever thought.

The Theory of Everything

This is a great BBC documentary about what is apparently the long-sought-after "Theory of Everything" for theoretical physics.

My Friend, Dr. Michio Kaku

Dr. Michio Kaku is my friend!

Well, on MySpace anyway. I'm still stoked. He's one of my favorite futurists. Hold on to yourself and check out his myspace site and his main site and prepare to have your perception of reality expanded.

No. 1 Lesson Learned From Katrina: Government Failed to Meet Minimum 21st Century Standards of Effectiveness

Our current paper-based bureaucracy has completely failed and Katrina made this fact glaringly obvious. Mayor Nagin has taken quite a bit of heat, but in his defense, he is the first mayor of New Orleans in my lifetime that is not corrupt and he has done a lot to install e-government in what is otherwise a pretty third world city. As a former CEO, he has approached city management with a private-sector management model that emphasises accountablity, convenience and choice. Just have a look a http://www.cityofno.com/. To this end, I would encourage everyone to study the futurist and historian Newt Gingrich's post-Katrina lessons-learned. What follows is a small excerpt...

Government Failed to Meet Minimum 21st Century Standards of Effectiveness

• It is the nature of a science and technology based entrepreneurial free market to provide more choices of higher quality at lower cost.


• Citizen's everyday experience is UPS, Fed-Ex, the Internet, blackberries/treos, camera cellphones, Google, ATMs, Amazon.com, e-ticketing ala Travelocity and Expedia level of knowledge and choice. Citizens expect this same standard from government.


• Government at the Federal, State, and local level totally failed this standard in responding to Katrina.

Download, view, study and advocate THIS PDF if you never want to see this happen again.

This not an issue of party politics in the sense that any particular party is the answer to these problems. Democrate Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi would have us believe that if her party was in charge, everything would be fine -- an excerpt from an article on her website -

The priority of Republicans has been to help their friends at the expense of helping people. They are out of touch with the people of the Gulf Coast region who struggle to find housing, jobs, and schools for their children.

Lousiana politics has historically been democrat-controlled AND infamous for chronyism.

Does Pilosi wake up in the morning and think of how to best serve the American people or how to stick it to Republicans?

It's pretty clear that the problem is systematic and way beyond the scope of any particular party. The federal government should contract Google to develop an open API and set of standards for electronic local and federal government. Private sector software is built to meet ISO 9000 standards...why is it that public sector systems don't have to meet this standard? Anyway...I could go on and on but until we recognize the source of the problem and demand change as a people we'll have more of the same.

Great article on the ultimate future at the UK Daily Telegraph. Linked from the Ray Kurzweil site.
Seems that Frank Tipler's theory of the ultimate future put forth in the Physics of Immortality is becoming the prevailing model for forward thinking theoretical physicists.
Excerpt below.

In the distant future, billions to trillions of years from now, the stars will exhaust their nuclear fuel, the oceans will freeze, the universe will turn dark and temperatures will plunge to almost zero. It appears inevitable that all intelligent life will perish when the universe itself freezes over.

This possibility of "unyielding despair" was explored by the mathematician Bertrand Russell, who wrote, in one of the most depressing passages in the English language, that "no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve a life beyond the grave... all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins..."

Today, we believe that space arks might one day preserve life after the death of the Sun in five billion years. But can you build a space ark to escape the death of the universe itself?

The only possible way to avoid the death of the universe is to leave. Perhaps civilisations billions of years ahead of ours will harness enough energy to punch a hole in space and escape, in a hyper-dimensional space ark, to a new universe.

Although it seems far-fetched, even preposterous, physicists have seriously considered this possibility using the known laws of physics. Einstein's equations, for example, allow for the possibility of "Einstein-Rosen bridges" connecting two parallel universes. (Imagine two horizontal parallel sheets of paper connected by a thin vertical tube.)

The energy necessary to create such a "wormhole" connecting two universes is truly immense - the Planck energy, or 1019 billion electron volts (a quadrillion times the energy of our largest atom smasher).

In desperation, an advanced civilisation might create huge banks of laser beams and atom smashers to create the unbelievably intense temperatures, energy and densities necessary to open up holes in space and leave the universe.

Calculations show that these gigantic machines must be the size of star systems, but this might be possible for civilisations billions of years ahead of ours. Unfortunately, some preliminary calculations show that the wormhole might only be microscopic in size. If so, an advanced civilisation might resort to shooting molecular-sized robots, called "nanobots", through the wormhole.

Once on the other side, these nanobots would then create huge DNA factories to grow clones and replicas of their creators. Since they would contain the entire database of their civilisation, they would use this to resurrect it in another universe.

Although the physical bodies of these individuals will die when the universe freezes over, their genetic twins will live on, so that their civilisation, like a Phoenix, may flourish again.

As incredible as these scenarios are, they are consistent with the known laws of physics and biology.

So, when contemplating the question raised by Huxley in 1863, our true role in the universe might be to spread the precious germ of intelligent life throughout it and, one day, to spread the seed of life by leaving a dying universe for a warmer one.

Complete Article

Ideas That Limit Man's Being

I stumbled on this rather old column at Better Humans.com and thought I'd repeat it here because I think it's a topic that really needs to be discussed, especially given the state of current events.

Here is an excerpt:

Imagine that you're a psychiatrist. A new patient comes to see you and says that he regularly talks to an invisible being who never responds, that he reads excerpts from one ancient book and that he believes wholeheartedly that its contents must be accepted implicitly, if not taken literally.

The patient goes on to say that that the world is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs never existed. He brazenly rejects modern science's observations and conclusions, and subscribes to the notion that after death he will live in eternal bliss in some alternate dimension. And throughout your meeting, he keeps handing you his book and urging you to join him, lest you end up after death in a far less desirable alternate dimension than him.

Read the Article - Ending Biblical Brainwashing

This argument seems to be aimed directly at Christians but it easily applies to any religion that lends itself to fundamentalism. I've found a lot of beauty and wisdom from many different religions from Christ to Krishna but it seems to me that once you ignore science and the incontrovertible reality of things it takes people to an unhealthy place, mentally.

While it is true that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, it should not be forgotten that the Founding Fathers were foremost men of science and reason and truly believed that the only way to know God was through the observation and study of the visible universe.

Mars and Back in 90 Days

Wow..this is cool -

New propulsion concept could make 90-day Mars round trip possible

A new means of propelling spacecraft being developed at the University of Washington could dramatically cut the time needed for astronauts to travel to and from Mars and could make humans a permanent fixture in space.

Read Article | Source: Washington University