A View Beyond the Stars

100 Year Starship Program - Leaving a Doomed Earth

2014-10-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

The 100 year starship program has been completed within the last decade - around 2110. Earth's closest star system is finally within reach and none too soon. A comet the size of the state of Alaska has been spotted by deep space monitoring satellites and it is on a collision course with our planet.

We have less than a year to prepare to leave the cradle of humankind. Earth is doomed and we must leave her if we are to survive. Two starships have been completed and they will become arks to transport our race to another star system in the hope of finding a new planet, a new home and a new life.

With only two starships completed, we will have to make some tough choices about who will get to go on the mission to find a new exoplanetary system in the star system of Alpha Centauri, over 4 light years away. Those who stay behind will have to go underground into the the deep cave systems built by the various governments of the world for just such an apocalyptic event - a collision with a planet-buster comet.

You are one of the lucky ones you believe. Under the age of forty, way above average intelligence, a PhD in Astrophysics and Biochemistry, much needed skills aboard a starship and no immediate family to leave behind and perhaps most importantly, you are a fertile female with a positive gnome map. Your jobs, besides that of Astrophysicist and Biochemist, will be to produce healthy progeny, who will in turn also be capable of producing another additional generation of children to continue your mission. It is a little disconcerting to realize your second most important job requirement is being a baby-factory; both bearing them and providing eggs to freeze-dry for later. But you understand the urgency of your mission and accept this vital role as female crew aboard the ark.

It's a one-way journey for you however. You will never see Earth again. Nor will you ever see the sunrise of a new sun. Your children's children might. They will hopefully become the future colonists for a new home for mankind. But you will spend the rest of your life, the next seventy-plus years in the blackness of interstellar space.

As you join your shipmates, lined up in front of the various entry ports to one of the two space-arks, you reflect on the design and layout of the ship - your new home. The ship will house over ten thousand voyagers, who will live, work, play and eventually die aboard her. None of the body parts will go to waste. They will contribute DNA, blood, bone and tissue to culture cloned body parts. Human waste will be reprocessed into fertilizers for the hydroponic farms.

There is several tiers of redundancy in the organizational chart aboard each ship. Everyone will know at least 10 other crew members jobs and can perform them flawlessly should the need arise. There is no turning back. Every possible scenario that might befall the ships and their crews has been simulated, programmed and drilled. You are as ready as you'll ever be.

But as you walk toward the first familiar face among your crew mates, the weight of the challenge and a paralyzing fear of the unknown falls over you like a shroud. You've been trained to handle the psychology of the mission as well. You shake off the feeling of doom and stride forward confidently again. There is no greater, or nobler cause you could undertake for the fate of mankind. It is your destiny.

The ships are large; over 100,000 tons. They are impossible to launch from Earth with conventional propulsion. They will each ride a lev-rail system over 10 miles long that will slowly move the ship from a dead-stop to almost 4 kilometers per second, gradually angling up to over 60 degrees in order to hit pre-orbital velocity. After leaving the lev-rail, huge solid rocket boosters ignite and increase acceleration to the 8 km per second needed to achieve orbital velocity. Once in orbit the solid rocket boosters will be jettisoned and the ships powerful first stage engines will kick in driving each ship along Earth's orbital plane to increase speed to escape velocity.

Read more about it at: NASA's 100-Year Starship Project Sets Sights on Interstellar Travel

What's the Big Rush?

2014-10-14T10:52:00.001-07:00

Have you noticed the blurring pace of things and people around you lately? Everyone is in such a hurry to get to their next "thing", they barely have time to take a breath. People are in your way and seemingly oblivious to your need to get around them. What's the big rush?

In our modern western world, we all share this challenge of maintaining sufficient energy to stay ahead of it all. Millions of people like you and me have to deal with more and more everyday, every year. And time, relative to our perception of it, appears to be speeding up so we have less and less time to deal with it all as well. Grow that out to larger populations and you begin to see the problem. As the sheer mass of population grows by means of technical modernization, creating more efficiency in energy potential of the people propelling it forward, nevertheless, sustaining that acceleration becomes exponentially more demanding on the humans. People are growing more frantic trying to stay up with the pace of their life in a society that seems to be rushing forward like a runaway freight train.

Alvin Toffler described this phenomenon in great detail in his 1970 best seller, Future Shock. In this seminal work Toffler described the growing time compression effect on humans being overwhelmed by transition through a super-industrial society. The practical effect is a greater compression of energy as well as time, resulting in an exponentially growing mass we have to find the energy to push even faster to maintain our forward momentum.

Growth is good, but it requires sustainable positive energy to continue to move things forward. But there is also a byproduct in any energy system referred to as entropy¹, or energy waste as a result of disordered, therefore unusable energy. It is an inevitable and relational effect of energy burn. As an example, when you burn firewood you have to deal with the unburnable ashes once the wood is depleted of its needed heat energy. It is a waste byproduct of anything you use energy for to change something’s condition from one state to another. In a growing society, there are a percentage of disordered people who decide they can’t keep up; feel left out, and “just can’t seem to get ahead in Life like everybody else”. They begin to feel abused and decide at some point to pull away and become counter productive, or a drag on forward momentum; a byproduct of society’s growth forward. Like the wood consumed in the fireplace, they now become the unusable remains – the ashes.

We have many byproducts of growth in our rush to higher civilization and prosperity. Our air and water suffer greater impurity; we create more garbage requiring greater landfill areas in which to bury it. Even relatively clean nuclear energy requires the disposal of spent radioactive fuel. There is some evidence that the sheer heat byproduct of population growth and waste gases is having an adverse effect on planetary weather and atmospheric temperatures. These are just a few of the many waste products, or growing mass we will have to find ways to deal with in order to continue to grow.

And how much growth are we really talking about here? Consider this: in 1000 A.D. the world population was under 1.5 billion and as recent as 2000 A.D. it was well over 6 billion, or currently about 1.19 percent increase annually. In his book The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking states:

“At their current rates, by 2600 the world’s population will be standing shoulder to shoulder, and electricity use will make the Earth glow red-hot.”²

Hopefully Mr. Hawking will be wrong about that as there is now evidence that world population is slowing.

However, the biggest problem to future growth is not as straight forward as maintaining sufficient elbow room, cheap electricity, new landfills or better air and water filtration. It is the enormous and exponentially growing waste of human capital, or human propulsion needed to power the machinery of civilization. People who feel outcast in the growing surge of progress, often turn against society – in effect, they put the brakes on the rest of us and slow momentum by removing their shoulder from that wheel of forward progress.
Sadly, we are developing a socio-economic model that produces more apathy not only in the poor, but in the rich as well.

For the ones who have the means and motivation to stay up with the forward rush of technology, even though they benefit from greater productivity and higher quality Lifestyles afforded them, they are also increasingly impacted by the growing numbers of people without those means. As this gap widens, they will have to support and ultimately protect themselves against a larger body of the population growing angrier with their plight. Moreover, they will also need to deal with their own elevated levels of stress and the frustration of trying to stay ahead of the curve of progress economically. Additionally, they will have to endure an infuriating deterioration of personal freedom, ironically, from thousands of new laws (city, state and federal combined) enacted each year to better protect them from those who try to short-cut and cheat the system to gain an edge in the race to prosperity.

This accumulation of individual trauma on both sides, rich and poor alike, creates a ripple effect in the broader world population where, although we practically live in the 21st Century, our fear for basic survival can be every bit as gnawing as that of our cave dwelling ancestors. Apathy, as a national malaise, is seeping into our mainstream population, growing upward from the roots as a new generation of young people, many of whom now prefer the altered reality of drugs and video games and are increasingly incapable of dealing with the real world pressures of modern Life.

Still, the maw of the economic engine demands to be fed. An incessant marketing and advertising machine works ever more efficiently at crafting messages which compel us to buy and therefore to work harder – individual economic pressure to earn more for fear of being left behind. We are driven to incessantly purchase! Pressure and frustration builds from the allure, ironically, of “more leisure” prescribed in addictive new realities created for us by high-tech marketing, pitted against the “in-your-face” grind of Life in the fast lane. Family values are ransomed, selfless acts of kindness are banished, human interaction becomes conditional and time for self, away from the press of responsibility and obligation, becomes the new Holy Grail. We are becoming a culture addicted to change for the sake of change alone. And like any other junkie, we agonize over getting our next fix almost as soon as we have completed our last purchase.

Add to this the toll being taken by the escalating cost of crime, drugs and the omnipresence of a carnivorous litigation system and you begin to see the uphill struggle of the average individual. We literally have to fight our way through each day, en garde. to real and imagined attack at every turn. Predatory attitudes of survival, supposedly banished through the fruits of modernization, are only intensified by it in fact. We have just become more refined predators – stalking greater economic advantage instead of meat. Those who do not measure up, litter our metropolitan streets, begging the survivors for scraps which they are more grudgingly handing over.

We can empathize with the plight of the homeless. In the back of our minds, we all know any vestige of comfort we have managed to earn could be snatched away at a moment’s notice through various personal misfortunes, or even by poor policy decisions of our leaders, creating a cascading effect of disasters crossing world populations.

Beyond the obvious nuclear war end-game scenario, we could destroy the entire world economic engine we all depend on for our livelihood with a few seemingly innocuous decisions that hide like ticking time bombs in our regulatory process. Witness the recent meltdown of the credit markets, killing off commerce worldwide that stemmed from decisions by the US government to insist banks make home loans available to those who technically couldn’t afford home ownership³. These risky loans were then packaged with premium loans as low risk mortgage backed securities and sold worldwide to unsuspecting institutional investors looking for safety and preservation of capital for reasonable returns. Ultimately they received neither.

The world banking mechanism as well as confidence in American real estate values may take a decade or more to recover and the impact on retirement plans for countless Americans may never be repaired. The policy decisions affecting this debacle originated 13 years before the full effect of the coming financial disaster was realized in 2007.

How have we gotten into this diabolical Catch-22, where such perils of vast proportion can explode upon the scene at any turn and whose frequency only seem to be on the rise? Can we as a human race ever escape this phenomenon of the loss of forward momentum from the increasing drag of a socio-human mass? Are we making reasonable assumptions about how we expect society to improve, given the evolving tendency toward greater complexity and disorder? A better question might be: has society ever proceeded from a correct assumption regarding the human role in civilization on this planet, much less other possibilities in the universe beyond? The accepted answer at present is that we simply can’t know that answer.

In the book, A View Beyond the Stars, revolutionary new answers are revealed, as science begins to look more deeply into the physical structure underpinning our material world and are coming face-to-face with the wonders of the multiverse. What is the multiverse you ask and why do I need to concern myself with it? How does this help me find peace and stability within a frenetic society that tests my will at every turn? All good questions you can find out more about by doing a little research and reading - when you decide to you can afford to spend the time that is.

So, "what's the big rush?" Take a moment and breathe. Ruthlessly, build "me" time into your schedule. Get out into nature periodically, away from the hubbub and press of humanity. Drink in the elixir of solitude, away from family, spouses, kids, pets and especially the lists and expectations of your many obligations. Listen for the wind through the trees, the trickle of a brook and the sounds of birds. Spread your perceptions outward, beyond the inside of your head. Reacquaint yourself with your inner peace that connects to the broader energy in the universe around you - maybe even to a broader multiverse. Relax and consider nothing at all. Ponder nothing. Leave all your thinking apparatus behind you. And above all, just take a personal moment to slooowww dooowwwnnn.

¹ entropy - A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system
² The Universe in a Nutshell, by Stephen Hawking, 2001 Bantam Books, page 158
³ “There is evidence that the Federal government leaned on the mortgage industry, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSE), to lower lending standards.” - Quoted from Wikipedia: Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Surviving Immortality

2012-04-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

Imagine for a moment that you no longer had to worry about your life coming to an end. How dramatically might your consciousness shift, with that nagging dread of impending doom no longer hanging over your head; like the Sword of Damocles? But, like Damocles, you might also realize you would be trading one dilemma for another. Perhaps a much bigger problem than you might believe, until realization of the full implication of immortality truly seeps in.

Humans are understandably anxious and consumed by their mortality. Not only do we have to imagine painfully infinite versions for our demise, but then what?

Oh there are so many possibilities! Maybe you truly just blink out of existence; or perhaps there is a heaven; maybe not, maybe just hell, or worse, just hell for you. You could be relegated to a lonely spirit wandering the Earth aimlessly, or be reincarnated as a Flounder, or just merge into the Multiverse as part of an endless, homogeneous oneness of spirituality; or find yourself trapped in the body of a politician (who is usually a lawyer)...I could go on. So many choices. And confound it all, someday when you're standing at the brink there, with your toes already over the edge, it's too late to ponder your choices any more. You're just along for the ride now; whatever happens, happens.

As Earth bounders, we live in perishable organic vehicles we refer to as human bodies. We assume body death is our greatest threat to existence. Well of course it is. Everybody knows that. But what if that was our least concern? What if we actually lived forever, no longer needing to contemplate any concept of mortality? Our options here are surprisingly few really. Either we live in indestructible bodies, or our spiritual essence and consciousness simply departs our bodies at death, we grab another handy model off the shelf and continue on unfazed in the least. Not unlike a driver abandoning their car by the side of the road, when their engine dies and dropping by the closest dealership to purchase another one. Too far out for you?

As it turns out, you may not be able to put off having to decide where you stand on this issue of perpetual existence for much longer. Man will apparently be forced to face that conundrum in the not too distant future...maybe even less than 30 years or so, according to Ray Kurzweil. Who's Ray Kurzweil? He's best known for the documentary film about his life as an inventor and futurist portrayed in Transcendent Man. In a recent Time Magazine article: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal, he is quoted as predicting man's ascendance to immortality will begin by 2045. That's the year he predicts artificial intelligence will pass up human intelligence. After that, life as we know it now will come to an end.

He calls this the "singularity"; the game changing event which will spell the ultimate end of mankind's supremacy on planet Earth. We'll be replaced by "machine-kind"; cyborgs who will be faster, smarter and infinitely more powerful than their meat-stick creators. And where does that leave us "meat-sticks" in the post-singularity world?

Kurzweil is an artificial intelligence savant. Bill Gates has called him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence" and Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology in 1999. So he has the reputation of knowing a thing or two about the potential for machine intelligence. Kurzweil is, however, more upbeat about the fate of mankind, ardently believing an ultimate merging of machines with humans will create a new genesis for humans, culminating in the big carrot in the sky - an end to man's arch enemy, mortality.

So no matter your philosophical, or religious stance on man's soul, whether we have one or not, that argument may soon become a moot point really. You won't have to worry about where you go after death, you won't be going anywhere.

So back to that hanging chad of a question: would life be better if it never ended? Would life be blissful if you never had to worry about dying? Think about it...in the relatively brief span of your life thus far, have you never been hopelessly bored, or occasionally even just sick to death of living?

Saturn's Mysterious Hexagon Baffles Scientists

2012-02-07T15:16:00.000-08:00

Saturn has always remained one of the most mysterious planets in our solar system. This is probably why space scientists and experts have done a lot of research work on it. However, the mystery hexagon on Saturn still remains a mystery that none of the space experts have been able to explain so far.

In 2007, modern imaging technology revealed that Saturn is much more complicated and mysterious than imagined because it has a hexagon on its pole that has been there for more than 20 years now.

The mystery hexagon on Saturn is one of its kind and it is never seen on any other object or planet in the universe. In 1979, The Voyager showed the same hexagon that sits on top of North Pole of Saturn.

The hexagon is similar to Earth’s polar vortex where the winds blow in circular fashion. Since Saturn is bigger than our planet, its vortex can fit 4 Earth inside it at one given time. The Voyager also came up with images of clouds that circle around this hexagonal vortex at 200 miles per hour which is really bizarre image to see.

Earth's First Star Ship Leaving Our Solar System

2011-12-15T11:35:00.000-08:00

NASA’s Voyager 1 has reached the very fringes of our solar system, and is preparing to leave for good

When NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1977, its primary mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn, the largest planets in our solar system. On November 16, 1980, the spacecraft captured this photograph of Saturn from a distance of just 5.3-million kilometers.

Four days later, Voyager 1's primary mission drew to a close — but its journey was just beginning. For over three decades, the 1600-pound space probe has been putting distance between itself and the Sun at speeds approaching 11 miles per second, in the process becoming the most far-flung object we've ever put in space. And now, at a distance of close to 11 billion miles from the Sun, NASA says Voyager 1 is on the verge of leaving our Solar System forever.

When it does, Voyager 1 will become the first man-made object to soar through what astronomers refer to as the interstellar medium, the matter that makes up the regions of space interspersed between our galaxy's scattered star systems.

"Voyager tells us now that we're in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system," explains Ed Stone, the Voyager project scientist at Caltech. "[It's] showing that what is outside is pushing back. We shouldn't have long to wait to find out what the space between stars is really like."

The bubble that Stone is referring to is what astronomers call the heliosphere, a region dominated by streams of solar wind (charged, subatomic particles emitted by the Sun). The farther from the Sun you get, the weaker these winds blow, allowing high-energy electrons from interstellar space to leak into the heliosphere and "push back," so to speak, on the Sun's solar wind. The point where pressure from the solar wind and the interstellar medium balance is known as the the heliopause, and is the cosmic signpost demarcating where our Solar System ends, and interstellar space begins.

"We've been using the flow of energetic charged particles at Voyager 1 as a kind of wind sock to estimate the solar wind velocity," explained Rob Decker, a co-investigator for Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. "We've found that the wind speeds are low in this region and gust erratically. For the first time, the wind even blows back at us. We are evidently traveling in completely new territory."

Stone says that the transition to the interstellar medium may not be instantaneous, and that it may in fact take months to traverse what he describes as "a rather messy interface" between the two opposing winds. Nevertheless, he's confident that the crossover into interstellar space is indeed imminent — and that's a good thing; NASA suspects that the probe only has enough power to continue with its investigations for another 10—15 years.

"What we're talking about today with all these new developements is simply one more chapter in a scientific inquiry that began over 100 years ago," said Eugene Parker, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Chicago.

"To me, it's been constant [discovery]," Parker said. "I hold my breath as to what's going to happen next."

Article credited to: NASA’s Voyager 1 has reached the very fringes of our solar system, and is preparing to leave for good, at io9.com

Earth's Twin Kepler-22b Discovered "Next Door"!

2011-12-07T15:12:00.000-08:00

Our world felt a little less special on Monday, as NASA's Kepler mission announced the discovery of an "Earth-sized" planet orbiting a "sun-like" star.

Yes, another one.

But this new orb merits special status -- because it's the first planet to be officially confirmed to exist in the so-called "habitable zone." It's an ideal size. It orbits just the right distance from its star, which is a lot like our own sun.

This means that the planet, called Kepler-22b, is the best bet yet to be a place with a thick atmosphere and a wet landscape.

The discovery "is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, visiting Moffett Field's NASA Ames for the five-day First Kepler Science Conference.

If this all sounds a little familiar, it's because we're getting better and better at finding things.

Twice before astronomers have announced near-Earth-size planets in habitable zones, though clear confirmation has proved elusive.

The tally of confirmed and "candidate" planets grows every day. Just a year and a half into Kepler's planet-hunting mission, there are 28 confirmed planets and 2,326 candidate planets -- of which a stunning 1,000 have been found since February.

Of the 54 candidate planets in the "habitable" zone, where liquid water could exist, Kepler-22b is the first to be confirmed. This milestone will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Earthlike candidates

The powerful telescopes are finding other things, too. In another big announcement Monday, using telescopes at the Hawaii-based Keck Observatory and the McDonald Observatory in Texas, astronomers at UC Berkeley announced the discovery of the largest black holes to date -- two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are capable of consuming anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

The $600 million Kepler spacecraft peers at about 150,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, trying to detect any change in star brightness that suggests a passing planet. Three dips, or dimming, must be seen for confirmation.

The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescopes and the Spitzer Space Telescope to review observations on planet candidates that the spacecraft finds, validating their identification.
"The tremendous growth in the number of Earth-size candidates tells us that we're honing in on the planets Kepler was designed to detect: those that are not only Earth-size, but also are potentially habitable," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University.

"The more data we collect, the keener our eye for finding the smallest planets out at longer orbital periods," she said.

The planet, named Kepler-22b, is 2.4 times wider than Earth.

But the true nature of the new planet remains a mystery. No one knows whether it's rocky, gaseous or liquid.

If it has a surface, astronomers estimate temperatures in the comfy 70-degree range -- T-shirt weather.

To better understand the Kepler 22-b's composition, it is first necessary to measure its density and mass -- that is, how heavy it is. The Kepler telescope can't do this, but Keck and other ground-based telescopes can. Scientists hope to try this next summer.

And we don't yet have the tools to detect faraway signs of metabolism, with biological markers like atmospheric oxygen or methane.

But any notion of earthlings settling down on Kepler 22-b has one highly significant challenge: distance. The space shuttle, heading out today at 17,000 mph, would reach our nearest star system -- Alpha Centauri, slightly more than four light years away -- in about 165,000 years. The new planet is 600 light years away -- so that same shuttle would get there in 23 million years.

SETI tunes in
But Kepler-22b seems to have several intriguing similarities with Earth. Its home star, some 600 light years away, is "almost a solar twin," Batalha said. So the light hitting the planet's surface would be almost the same color as the light that illuminates Earth.

And Kepler-22b's year is almost the same length as an Earth year: 290 days instead of 365.

It is a prime target for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, carried out with the dedicated 42-dish Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, said Jill Tarter of Mountain View's SETI Institute.

A preliminary search for radio signals from Kepler-22b is already under way, she said. There are billions of radio channels to be examined.

Discovering all these new planets sounds impressive -- but it's only a prologue to a far larger story, according to SETI Institute's Seth Shostak, in response to Monday's news.

"Extrapolating the results from searches, it's safe to say that the vast majority of stars are ringed by planets," he wrote. "Indeed, the best guess is that the tally of planets in our own galaxy is approximately a trillion."

"It's reasonable to imagine," according to Shostak, "that Kepler-22b has a billion siblings in our galaxy: a billion other Earthlike worlds threading the vast tracts of the Milky Way."

The above post credited entirely to: New planet found in habitable zone where 'Earth's twin' may be found, at MercuryNews.com

See YouTube video at: Kepler-22b Discovery Video

Steve Jobs Gone But Not From Our Lives

2011-10-05T18:29:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs - 1955-2011 Today we lost a true genius, a one of a kind visionary in the world of personal computers, personal consumer electronics, personal communication and entertainment devices; opening up a new era of personal en-lightenment. For under his watch, personal gadgetry did became lighter, smaller, more powerful, elegant and more fun.

The world is at a loss to replace such men when they pass and they always seem to leave us too soon, with so much they wanted to do still left undone. But Jobs, like so many others who stand as icons among inventors, futurists and intrepid entrepreneurs, one in a million who seem to find a way to move the ball of humanity forward, should not and will not vanish into time and space. They will return to us, maybe after resting up a bit, perhaps as Steve Jobs version 2.0.

If Life is immutable, and much scientific evidence now points to that possibility, then only the body passes away, but the spirit of the man will return. While we should mourn him today, because what we know of him has physically left us, we can also be relieved that he is no longer in pain and suffering, with a body that had failed him. Maybe now he can rest up a bit and choose his moment and then return to possibly accomplish even greater things. Maybe not as Steve, per say, but nevertheless as another visionary who takes us beyond Apple. Maybe next time he'll even take us beyond the stars.

Thanks Steve. You made things better for all of us. What better measure is there of a man? In the game of Life, Steve Jobs won.

The following video share: Steve Job's Stanford commencement speech: How to live before you die!

Tatooine-like Planet Discovered

2011-09-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

A planet with two suns may be a familiar sight to fans of the Star Wars film series, but not, until now, to scientists. A team of researchers, including Carnegie's Alan Boss, has discovered a planet that orbits around a pair of stars.

This is the first instance of astronomers finding direct evidence of a so-called circumbinary planet. A few other planets have been suspected of orbiting around both members of a dual-star system, but the transits of the circumbinary planet have never been detected previously.

The team, led by Laurance Doyle from the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, used photometric data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars.

They found the binary star system by detecting a system where the stars eclipsed each other from the perspective of the Kepler spacecraft. These stars have two eclipses: a primary eclipse when the larger star is partially blocked by the smaller star, and a secondary eclipse where the smaller star is fully blocked by the larger star.

But the researchers also noticed other times when the brightness of the two stars dropped, even when they were not in an eclipse position. This pattern suggested that there was likely a third object involved. The fact that these so-called tertiary and quaternary eclipses recurred after varying intervals of time, and of different depths, indicated that the stars were in different positions in their orbit at each instance. This result showed that the tertiary and quaternary eclipses were being caused by something circling both stars, and not an object circling one or the other star.

Measurements of the variations in the timing of all four types of eclipses, resulting from the mutual gravitational interactions of the two stars and the third body, demonstrated that the third object was, indeed, a planet. The astronomers’ work indicates that the planet is less massive than Jupiter, possibly comparable in mass to Saturn, and that the larger of the two binary stars is smaller than our Sun.

"This discovery is stunning," Boss said. "Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality."

This post credited in it's entirety to: Tatooine-like planet discovered, at Astronomy Magazine

Earth's 100 Year Starship Project

2011-06-28T22:11:00.000-07:00

Since January of this year, DARPA and NASA have finally been "publicly" talking about their 100-year starship program.

The scope of a program for such a starship implies just that; it's mission would surpass all interplanetary exploration, pushing far beyond our solar system into the great void of interstellar space.

They’ve held a symposium, put out an official Request for Information (RFI) looking for ideas about how a long-term human mission to boldly go out to the stars could possibly happen, they have an official website and have just put out a request for papers for a public symposium that will be held this fall in Orlando, Florida.

It appears they are serious about this.

However, contrary to what the title of the project might suggest, it’s not so much about actually building a starship that could accomplish such a long distance journey, but more about solving all the various technical, medical, sociological and economic problems; so that one day – perhaps in a 100 years or so – we actually could build one and humanity could head for the stars.

Ultimately though, the broader challenge for such a project would in fact be to launch a new breed of pilgrim on a journey that would span many lifetimes. The biggest initial problem to solve is coming to terms with an acceptable propulsion system. That will determine the time span and all other mission specifications. But, we are not likely to invent a "warp drive" anytime in the next few centuries. Sorry Star Trek fans.

So we won't be approaching anything like light-speed in the foreseeable future. The closest warp speed number might be more like Warp Factor 001. Theoretically, a warp drive might be possible (see the Alcubierre drive in my earlier post) in the distant future, but we would need to also invent technologies far advanced of anything we can currently foresee.

Thus, the closest star, at 4.2 light years away from Earth (a distance of 4.2 years at a speed of 186,000 miles/sec), might be reachable in a few hundred years. Even at a terrific one 10th of light-speed (18,600 miles/sec), it would take nearly a century to bridge interstellar space to the closest star system beyond our Sun.

In fact, we already have two unmanned starships (Voyager 1 and 2 both launched in 1977), already well on their way to entering interstellar space and soon they will be reporting back, for the first time in human history, what lies beyond the heliosphere. That is the bubble of space surrounding our solar system, still influenced by particles from our sun's solar wind and magnetic field.

Both Voyager spacecraft are now traveling at speeds over 3 AU per year, nearly 280 million miles/year (1AU=distance from the Earth to the Sun), or roughly 53 miles/sec in their sprint to cross into the interstellar medium. Voyager 1 is estimated to pass out of the heliosphere anytime between now and 2014. But they are not currently being driven by any propulsion system.

A manned starship would no doubt continue to accelerate, achieving many times the velocity of either Voyager spacecraft. Assuming we could even achieve a 10th of light speed in a manned starship, we would also need to begin decelerating at some point in the journey. That will also add time.

So at the very least, with our highest hope for speed over distance to another star, humans would need to last almost 200 years to fulfill the dream of reaching another potential exoplanetary system, realizing the hope of finding another habitable Earth-like planet.

In my next post, we'll explore what such a starship might look like, what life would be like on board and what sort of people would volunteer to go on a journey where only their children's children might ever see the dawn of a new sun.

How Big Is The Universe?

2011-06-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

The dimensions of our Universe are so gargantuan that human beings cannot possibly grasp the meaning of their numbers. We simply have no basis for comparison that would help us get our minds around the vastness of open intergalactic space surrounding our tiny world.

How big is our Milky Way Galaxy?

If we were to just try and make sense of the distance across our galaxy the Milky Way, we would already surpass all meaningful numbers we can comprehend. But let's try anyway. Imagine that our entire Solar System were the size of a quarter.

On this scale, the edges of the outer perimeter of our Milky Way Galaxy would touch both the Western and Eastern borders of a map of the United States! In terms of actual distance, it is roughly 100,000 light years across. How far is that in understandable terms? It would be the equivalent of traveling at light speed (186,000 miles per second) for 100,000 years. That's a long way.

How far away is the nearest star?

The closest star to Earth is of course our Sun at 93 million miles distant. It takes sunlight roughly 8 minutes to reach us here on Earth. The next closest star is Proxima Centauri, which is one of the 3 stars often referred to as Alpha Centauri. If you were to again use our coin model from above, Proxima Centauri (and any planets orbiting around it that might comprise it's own solar system) would be in the center of another quarter, over two soccer fields away.

So how far away is that in terms of miles? Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years away (4.2 years travel at 186,000 miles per second). This is the typical separation of stars in our part of the galaxy. At last estimate, there are between 200-400 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone.

As you look up into the sky on any clear night, you will see mostly stars within our own galaxy, but surprisingly, many points of light that appear to be stars, are actually other farther distant galaxies. They are so far away they only appear to be single points of light.

The nearest galaxy to Earth is M31, or the Andromeda Galaxy. It is slightly smaller in mass than the Milky Way and about 2.5 million light years from Earth. If you know where to look on a clear night, you can actually see M31 with your naked eye. With a decent telescope, Andromeda is a spectacular sight.

How far is it to the farthest star?

It is impossible to detect the farthest star in our universe. We can't see more than roughly 13 billion light years into the far reaches of space with our most powerful telescopes.

However, the farthest known object in the universe to date was reported in October 2010 as a primitive galaxy, called UDFy-38135539 (UDF stands for Hubble Telescope's Deep Field Identifier). No one can claim that's a very sexy name for a galaxy.

But what has scientists excited, is that it is also the youngest galaxy they have spotted to date. Estimated at only 600 million years old, this would also be the closest object to the time of the "Big Bang" (the theoretical beginning of the universe) we have on record to date. UDFy-38135539 is estimated at over 13 billion light years from Earth.

How big is the Universe?

It is estimated that the observable universe may be more than 93 billion light years across. Even for Star Trek fans, who are comfortable with warp factor 9 (by various estimates over 1000x light speed), that is a mind boggling distance which would be impossible to traverse.

But even if 93 billion light years across sounds big to you, and it is, imagine now that the edge of the universe is still expanding at roughly the speed of light as well - in all directions (it may be, but we calculate expansion of the visable part of the universe closest to us technically using a calculation referred to as the Hubble Constant, which is most recently estimated to be almost 74 kilometers per second and the farther objects are away from us the faster their acceleration).

Not only that, but we've learned that expansion is also accelerating! Our estimates of the distance from one end to the other then, are just that - a pretty good guess. Some might call it a WAG, or wild-ass-guess.

So, the truth is we have no idea how big the universe is. But it's pretty fun to think about how far out there really is, don't you think?

MISSION: One Way Trip To Mars!

2011-06-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

Crisscrossing the galaxy a la Captain Kirk may sound heroic, but would you volunteer for a Star Trek-like voyage if you knew you could never come home?

In a special edition published in October, the Journal of Cosmology detailed how a human mission to Mars could be a reality in as little as 20 years. But the complexity, risk and cost of getting astronauts there and back have kept the idea firmly on the ground.

So a few scientists proposed an unconventional idea: send astronauts -- but simplify the flight by making it a one-way trip. The astronauts would be settlers as well as explorers. A return trip is massively more difficult than the voyage there, partly because the fuel and supplies to get home would have make the round trip from Earth.

It's just a fanciful idea for now -- but the editors say they were stunned when more than 500 e-mail messages came from people around the world, volunteering to be the first.

Students, soldiers, law enforcement officers, nurses, and space enthusiasts young and old wrote in, saying they'd be happy to leave their lives on Earth for the chance to be pioneers. (The response was so great, in fact, that the journal announced Thursday that it would actively seek volunteers and supporters for a Mars mission. It encouraged the public to sign up on the journal's home page or e-mail them.)

"It's going to happen some way or another sometime. It may as well happen now. I don't see any sense in delaying it," said R.J. Musat, a 56-year-old computer operator at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio.

Musat, who was among the hundreds of volunteers to e-mail the journal, said he's been interested in exploring Mars since he read Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" in the 1960s.
Among his self-described credentials: a familiarity with computers, the ability to execute high-tech tasks and a genius-level I.Q.

When asked why he would be willing to leave his son, family and friends behind, he said, "Christopher Columbus did it. It's a pioneering thing. ...Because it's there."

Scientist: Part of the Human Spirit Seeks Exploration, Risk

In an e-mail to the journal, an honorably discharged Navy veteran said he should be a crew member because, aside from his military background, he has never fathered a child and has no commitments on Earth he wouldn't be able to leave behind.

"Sign me up for the adventure of a lifetime!" he said.

Many who claimed no relevant training at all added their names to the list.

"I think I would be a great candidate because I could help people cope with the depression, I'm continuously optimistic and happy," wrote an 18-year-old man from Alaska.

The one-way mission proposal, titled "To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars," is part of a book published by the journal that combines the work of more than 70 NASA scientists. "The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet" is billed as a step-by-step "how-to" series on going to Mars.

"I do think there is still part of the human spirit that is willing to explore new places and take risks," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, professor of earth sciences at Washington State University and co-author of the one-way mission proposal.

Not a Suicide Mission, but an Opportunity to Settle the Red Planet

In the proposal, Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies, a physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University, suggest sending four astronauts to Mars to stake out the first human outpost there.

Lana Tao, the editor of the Journal of Cosmology, said that when it first published the report, the journal did not solicit volunteers in any way, and never expected to receive a single message from a would-be explorer.

"When we first began receiving them, we thought they were not serious, that it was some type of joke," she told ABCNews.com in an e-mail. "Then they kept coming, and coming and it became clear that most of these men were extremely serious."

However, Tao did say that not all of the messages were written in earnest.

"Some were funny. We even received emails from women volunteering their husbands," she said.

This article credited in it's entirety to: One-Way Mars Mission: Would you Boldly Go? at ABC News/Technology

The Greatest Game In The Universe

2011-06-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from the book: A View Beyond the Stars, on Amazon and Lulu.

Anyone who cares to do a little reading, even in the mainstream, will readily come across plenty of material to suggest that reality is often up for grabs. It can be a bit maddening, but we know there is more going on around us than the physical sciences can measure and decipher.

And some people have reported incidents where they knew they were not entirely contained within their bodies; or even in this space-time reality at all. That's what all this Quantum Jumping stuff is all about, which is the current rage all over the Internet - being able to move about freely in other dimensions and possibly even other universes. It's an acquired skill I'm sure (tongue in cheek). Nevertheless, something interesting appears to be going on there.

People who claim to have out-of-body experiences (OBE), or near-death-experiences (NDE), where they are hovering about somewhere else in a room, looking down on their body, are all too familiar with this phenomenon. It can be pretty scary if you suddenly find yourself floating outside your head; and at the same time it can feel somehow strangely familiar.

And somewhere in the deeper recesses of our psyche, we all know we are playing The-Game-of-Life in this universe. We are supposed to show up, act out our part without questioning it and that includes remaining compliant to the laws of physics. Those are the rules and we must follow the rules. After all, if you've been following any of my previous blogs, like: The Game of Past and Present Life Adventures, you know there is evidence that we created all the rules to purposefully dumb-down our abilities in order to have a game in the first place. Why do you think God would create a universe with supposedly only one God? You can't have everybody running around being the supreme being all the time. That's not very sporting.

So when we want to get something done physically, like move a boulder from one place to another, we also know we need to use superior force to that which is causing the boulder to remain at rest. We know we need to estimate the amount of mass of the boulder – its density and the force of gravity being exerted upon it. We estimate our body’s ability to move it through muscle action only and determine that we’ll need to exert even more applied force than our body can muster alone.

So we find a lever and create a fulcrum and move the boulder using our minds, not just our brawn. Problem solved. We also learn that if we want to move boulders without a lever, we need to grow more muscle. So we work out, grow muscles and now we can do more physical work with less effort – and to attract more attention from the opposite sex. That’s another whole blog by the way.

The point to all this is that we have trained ourselves through the use of bodies and other apparatus, to apply more force to problems of moving mass around in a physical world, instead of just shifting reality in our favor – which would sort of be akin to performing magic. There is certainly enough fascination with the subject of magic and sorcery to suggest we've had a bout or two with those abilities in the distant past as well.

Really, when you really boil it all down around here on planet Earth, most of what we are doing is simply making bigger rocks into smaller rocks, moving things from one place to the other, faster and more efficiently, feeding and housing our bodies so we can continue to do physical work longer, procreating to make more bodies so when they wear out we will have more bodies to use when we need them, etc.

Sounds a bit like prison, huh? But here’s what’s missing in this rather dismal picture: pure creation. That’s something we’re doing a lot of every second of the day in between moving boulders around. But its so second nature that we all take it for granted.

Creation is at the essence of everything, from the original creation of the Universe, to the creation of a skyscraper, a new business, a new computer chip, or just a great bull session with friends. It is the fuel of Life, the reward for competing successfully. We create an image of what we want outside reality and then we endeavor to make our creation materialize in the physical world.

It’s why we play The Game at all! Each of us creates obsessively, all the time and it is what we do best. One can create positive or negative things depending on your perspective, but creating anything that interests us is the incessant goal.

There is also a grand scale of good versus evil. Both sides are in competition with each other. Those who represent each side of that dichotomy contribute their energy to provide a unique purpose and definition to the world around them. Good would have no measure without evil to compare it to. Some people like to refer to the ultimate good as God, or to a place, such as heaven – where one can all go an dwell in an idyllic state of blissful existence.

By most religious standards, that is where the winning side gets to go in the big contest of Life on Earth. Their end goal would be to achieve immortality without further contest or strife – forever. Sound sort of familiar? If you’re following the theme in a number of these articles, isn’t that possibly where we already originated from? Perhaps an endless, blissful existence as immortal beings might have already worn thin at some point maybe?

Those that like it and want to rally around our created stuff become our allies. Those that don’t are the opposing team – or merely spectators who enjoy watching others compete. When the opposing team appears more formidable, we endeavor to use more force to convince them they won’t win. We can exert a lot of energy to create that counter-force. As long as we see it as the winning side of The Game, everything is all fun.

Beings love to play games. Competition is great amusement. Look at The Games people love to play and you’ll derive wonderful insight into what we are doing on a massive scale, because we are doing the same things on smaller game fields. Here are a few illustrations - Football: moving a ball from one end of the field to another against opposing players trying to do the same; Baseball: hitting a ball to advance players around the bases on the field against another team; Tennis: hitting a ball back and forth trying to get the other person to miss it for points; Chess: moving pieces around on a small field in an effort to take the other player’s pieces off the board and force them to concede.

Bigger games are fun too: competing in politics to become President over everyone else in the country; pitting businesses against each other, economies of one country against another, even making war against other countries is a game. It’s a pretty deplorable one, but it’s still a contest of one side against another to win. Practically everything we do, everyday, is one form or another of competitive sport.

That’s what we beings do – we compete on a scale from the very minute, at the level of living single cells, to one the size of the Universe itself. And there is every possibility that more than one Universe exists, forming infinite alternate dimensions of space and time; infinite playing fields wherein immortal beings compete in all manner of sports, from the beginning of time and will continue beyond infinity into the future.

From the above, one should deduce that when operating in a force-effort manipulated Universe, the one exerting superior energy-force ability should rule right? True enough, however, that does not account for the interactions of the being itself. There is an interesting interplay between the being and the material world that the grosser wavelengths deployed through the use of force and effort seem to obscure – a sort of pre-alignment of reality as the being determines it should be. Not as it was, but as it shall be.

Drilling down once more to the base level, or quantum level on which the Universe seems to depend for its form and substance, we need to look more closely at what is going on between thought, creation and decisions a being is making in the interlude between imagined reality and that which is ultimately realized. In the fluid edge of reality, consciousness determines the future.

So instead of seeing reality as the walls in which we live, try seeing it more like the clay with which we play.

Excerpted from the book: A View Beyond the Stars, on Amazon, iTunes, Lulu and Barnes & Noble

Is Our World Finally Coming To End Of Days?

2011-05-26T14:05:00.000-07:00

First of all, notwithstanding the recent flurry of concern and many people being all a-Twitter over passing yet another milestone for the end-game scenario, humankind still remains reasonably intact.

Or in this case, we were supposed to be merely judged on May 21st; I guess probably unworthy and our ultimate demise is postponed until later in October of this year. Although this recent "scare", received scant notice by most people, the issue of the-end-of-the-world theme continues to loom over mankind.

Why do we continue to flinch every time someone with any scrap of a credential utters the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded movie house? Hopefully we haven't been reduced to imagining some giant ticking clock somewhere in the heavens, counting down the precious seconds of our remaining existence on Earth - have we?

How about a bit of fresh air?

I propose another possibility entirely. And I welcome the usual backlash from the left and right to offer a startlingly simple alternative to the world coming to an end yet again. Maybe we're thinking about this from the wrong perspective entirely. Certainly we need to give up the idea once and for all that the universe revolves around the plight of one small planet, drifting around in the back alleys of a rather smallish galaxy we lovingly refer to as the Milky Way.

So try this one on for a few minutes and see if this sounds a little more inviting. If Life really is, as many people already believe, a perpetual existence that doesn't really end, why not a universe as a grand stage for entertainment, enrichment; a feast for the senses and an eternity in which to wile away one’s time in various pursuits? Sounds kind of familiar doesn’t it? Isn’t that a passable definition for paradise?

We may someday come to realize that the real mystery of our universe is not so mysterious at all. That it may not even be the first Universe, or the only one. We may find we are merely one in an infinite score of universes bobbing about like bright little soap bubbles amidst the endless blackness of the void beyond.

Perhaps ours is part of a larger evolutionary track; one of a series of universes created in a continuing effort to perfect its form and purpose. And that purpose may be simply to provide an infinite number of possibilities for living beings to play out, adventures to experience, and challenges to overcome.

Aren’t we doing just that on a smaller scale in our small corner of the galaxy? Sometimes we forget in the daily press of earning a living and paying bills, mowing the lawn and changing diapers, that Life is supposed to be a grand adventure. That the real thrill of living is conquering our fears, falling in love, climbing mountains, exploring our dreams and helping others to realize theirs.

We live in a microcosm here on Earth compared to the universe around us. But I propose it is not fundamentally different from what we will one day discover beyond our present perception. There are other planets, other civilizations, some perhaps isolated like ours; while others may dwell in planetary systems teeming with Life.

There are no doubt civilizations much more primitive than that of Earth and others sophisticated beyond our present imagination. And yet someday, we will see that they are doing and living Life much the same as we are (another good reason to make the Universe very large so we can't see over our neighbor's fence perhaps?).

Someday we may scientifically prove this proposition once and for all: that Life, the elemental force and energy that founds our existence as humans, is also the creator of the grand stage, a universe of boundless possibilities in which to act out our fantasies. For we all know that once a stage exists, it begs for a cast of characters in which to enact a story and to bring that story to Life.

The characters and plot, once just a figment of imagination, become a created world that suspends other reality for the duration. This is Life the playwright, the stage builder, the director, actor and even the audience. After all, every play must have an audience. But where is this audience?

It’s time to return to the beginning, for the mystery of the spectators begins there and it is a wondrous story that is as fascinating in its complexity as it is obvious in its simplicity. One of the most amazing things about the history of Life in our Universe, in that horrific span of time that has ensued from the beginning up to the present day, is that Life has been doing the same things all along the way.

For humans, the path from the beginning to present appears inconceivably long. Yet for an immortal being, eternity is less than the blink of an eye. Time is after all, just another consideration of movement within a physical plane. Outside that reference time simply vanishes.

However, the difficulty with pondering eternity is that humans are inherently linear in their thinking. Human bodies are composed of matter and as such they must comply with the laws of the physical universe. Time is one of those laws. Time by its very nature is linear and segmented by regular events.

Life in its native state, when not in contact with the physical universe, has no sense or even concept of time, especially as defined by the Earth moving around the Sun. Therefore the linear passing of time, even from the formation of our universe to its ultimate demise would be virtually imperceptible to an immortal being. So in effect, the time equation would be near zero duration in comparison to time defined within our universe.

Why is this important? Because I believe it is the source of the mythology we know as heaven, in Western religion, “Nirvana” in Eastern Hindu religion, etc. That eventual paradise, which some religions predict will be realized after the “end of days” or “final judgment”; it is supposed to be the net result of Life in the physical plane. It may very well be that Life returns to a state of wholeness, retreating from all the isolated individual identities it has created and inhabited and revels in the combined experiences accumulated over time within our Universe.

At the moment the universe collapses back in on itself (one proposed scenario known as the Big Crunch), ceasing to exist; the physical plane will then disappear. Therefore any individuation of Life ceases to exist at that moment. There may ensue a period of time, figuratively speaking, where Life exists in an exquisite state of rapture brought on by the boundless volume of sensation amassed over eons of time, through the shared experiences of countless individual existences, made whole again at long last.

The idea of some religions describing an eventual return to God and dwelling in a blissful paradise appears to be quite likely, if considered in this new context. So in effect, we would be like actors coming together, feverishly reading our reviews after an exquisite opening night play on Broadway.

As you can see, living various existences has short-term reward paid in adventure, as well as a big payoff at the grand finale. At some point, a new cycle begins, a new Universe is created and Life splits off in a variety of directions once more to assume an infinite number of new roles and existences. It may be essential to have a “Supreme Being” or other such a major-domo in charge of the production.

However, a certain cloaking event is probably a routine part of the re-immersion into the physical plane. In other words, Life must forgo the cognizance of, among other things, its native state of immortality, omnipresence and omnipotence to merely playing The Game of human, or other such lowly Life forms. Otherwise, its not really sporting, is it?

Certainly, it would not be as much fun. For if you have ever read the story of The Prince and the Pauper, you would know the moral of the story was that the Prince yearned to shed the lavish excess of royalty for the simple Life of a pauper. The reverse was of course true for the pauper. Why? Because given enough time any condition of existence can become oppressive – even a most opulent one.

In the final balance, Life is a game that must have challenge, to be a game worth playing. There is no challenge if you always win or lose. In The Game of Life versus the challenges of a physical universe, the role of God is boring without fielding vulnerable lower Life forms as players against each other, with the laws and environment of the universe serving as the rules and the arena.

Or, forget being God, let everyone jump into the action and meet back at the clubhouse to brag and cheer after The Game is over. Either scenario works. And, more than probably, both scenarios have been employed over the course of giga-annums . And, an interesting irony has been the complete full circle of humans now trying to understand God and the puzzle over Life after death. If there is indeed one being devoted to the role of Supreme Being in our Universe, he would surely be amused by that if nothing else.

What Do We Really Know About Life?

2011-05-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from the book: A View Beyond the Stars, on Amazon and Lulu.

We may think we know about Life, but do we really? The greatest irony may be that in spite of the prodigious nature of Life all around us, it is also one of the greatest mysteries of modern science.

Now of course science knows about Life and speculates articulately on its origins here on Earth. We refer to this as Abiogenesis, or the study of how Life may have first begun from the earliest inanimate matter on our planet. However, scientists have never been able to agree on how it could have come into existence spontaneously, nor have they been able to isolate it outside any organic vessel, measure it or even establish that it truly exists as an independent energy, or force. Yet even the smallest child knows that inexplicably we just live.

And there is a growing body of supportive data, suggesting that Life is a lot more powerful and complex than the average human has ever imagined. There are plenty of chronicled events of people witnessing amazing paranormal feats (examples cited in Wikipedia article under “paranormal”) in the split second when they forgot they were mere humans - in essence stepping beyond their purely physical constraints.

Now here’s the problem with that statement. Unfortunately few can replicate their experiences under research conditions leaving them discredited. You could surmise this is because it really didn’t happen, even though credible subjects believed it happened and others may have even witnessed it first hand.

Or perhaps something did happen, but they were not able to reproduce the exact conditions which may have previously initiated a uniquely inexplicable paranormal event. And ironically, as the saying goes, you never expect the truly unexpected, so normal people are rarely standing around with cameras and recorders waiting for strange phenomena to occur.

No matter the scientific community’s usual skepticism – and who can blame them as these things are seldom able to be reproduced on demand – reputable conclusions supporting these paranormal observations are in fact hard to come by. However, the growing field of Parapsychology was created from the recognition that some things classified as paranormal do warrant closer inspection and are providing interesting data through careful and documented research.

Parapsychology could be seen as a natural offshoot from the many divisions of mainstream Psychology, though at present Psychology obviously enjoys greater credibility. However, both share the common root word “psi”, which originates from the Greek word psyche meaning soul or mind. It is remarkable that the Greeks considered the soul and mind to be synonymous, yet that barely discernible division in original concept has in modern times been widened to a gap of monumental proportion.

Today, Psychology and Psychiatry also share that root word, yet neither attempts to understand the possible existence of a soul, or spiritual entity as the source of consciousness in humans, but have opted instead for the more physiological explanation for the mind. Of course neither Psychology nor Psychiatry could be considered exact sciences either. They just have more research data to support their theories and treatments.

Parapsychology essentially attempts to fill the gap in understanding between biological phenomena and those which fall outside a purely scientific means. Parapsychologists apply scientific method to investigate psychic phenomena that fall into two primary categories: psi-gamma (referring generally to activities like extrasensory perception) and psi-kappa (which refers to physical activities that would infer a supernatural ability). Mainstream interest has steadily grown to fund further research into psychic phenomena that appears to support a view of Life as a more spiritual causation and challenges our current explanations for physical reality in general.

In fact, the U.S. Government, and those of foreign countries, have sponsored numerous research programs over the years to study these phenomena - particularly those with potential military, or intelligence agency value like Psychokinesis, Remote Viewing and Precognition to name a few. The Stargate Project is one notable example of military interest in psychic phenomena, particularly Remote Viewing, conducted at the world renowned Stanford Research Institute.

The project researched the possibility of controlled out-of-body excursions, akin to techniques using Astral Projection, to reconnoiter enemy target activity thousands of miles away from the test site. Other research focused on controlling premonitions and precognitions that might be helpful in forecasting important events that could assist our government with intelligence gathering on foreign nations. It’s nice to know that at least our military finds it credible enough to invest our hard earned tax dollars on “spooky science” isn’t it?

Tapping into extrasensory perception through gifted individuals, thereby enabling leaders to gain significant advantage over their rivals has much historical precedent. For example, it was quite common for medieval Kings to employ seers and prophets to the crown. Perhaps the best known example was Merlin the Magician, the mysterious wizard, of the Arthurian Legends.

Of course King Arthur was no slouch in the supernatural department either, in that he came to power supposedly by pulling the magic sword Excalibur from the stone when all others failed, thus fulfilling a prophesy that only the divine and true King could do so. That’s one version of the story anyway.

Merlin and King Arthur might well be fictional characters based on various actual events (no doubt embellished) passed down through the generations. But the frequent reference to magicians, wizards and various shadowy characters apparently generously endowed with psychic abilities, can either be discounted out of hand, or seen for what they were – something was happening. There are records of events of paranormal phenomena attributed to certain individuals in every part of the world and their sheer numbers should at least give one pause for consideration.

Throughout ancient history we find that soothsayers and oracles, or those supposedly endowed with prophetic vision, were quite common throughout the known world. The Oracle at Delphi was a center for psychic revelation from roughly 700 BC to almost 400 AD.

The earliest known oracle however resided in the Egyptian temple of Per-Wadjet roughly 3000 years ago. Closer to present we find famous seers and precognitionists such as French born Nostradamus from the 16th century and the even more recent American psychic Edgar Cayce, who died in 1945. Apparently unexpectedly – bad joke.

Nostradamus wrote hundreds of encoded prophesies in quatrains (to avoid persecution by religious fanatics of his time) about future world events (mainly impending disaster) many scholars are still trying to fully translate to this day. Although Nostradamus was technically more of an astrologer than clairvoyant, many believe he was a gifted prophet and foretold important events with uncanny accuracy. Others consider him vague and mysterious and lump the whole subject of Astrology pretty much in the same category.

Cayce on the other hand, whose self imposed trances were used to “see” the past and future, was a spiritual medium who used channeling for healing and answering questions for those who wished to communicate with their dead family and friends in the spirit world. A recent television program entitled Crossing Over (1999-2004), featured John Edward, a self proclaimed psychic medium, who supposedly channeled the dead for a live audience - no pun intended.

Of course two of the best known and revered prophets of all time were Jesus of Nazareth, who was also a healer and performed numerous well publicized feats of the supernatural and Mohammad who insisted he was a direct messenger from God. And prior to both Christianity and Islam, the most famous prophet of the Old Testament was Abraham, the father of Judaism who paved the way for both Jesus and Mohammad.

So you can see that despite our grounding in science, three of our major world religions were founded by psychics who performed miracles and professed great powers of prophecy. And while there is no proof of their abilities, scientists also cannot disprove their widely acclaimed gifts. Is it any wonder we have problems with this subject?

Reviewing all these cited people and events reveals the typical pattern of advocates versus detractors for any data to hand. Again, we are consistently confronted with a lack of definitive proof either way, leaving one feeling either frustrated or vindicated depending on your persuasion. Indeed, our individual set of beliefs tips the balance one way or the other on the broader subject of Life’s mysteries and their credible source, or the lack of it.

No matter the evidence we may be presented with, there is no final proof as yet, so we are persuaded by our internal preference to lean either toward a calculating science, or tenuous spirituality when weighing evidence. Still, even many scientifically inclined people intuitively believe there are and have been plenty of strange things going on all around us that science really can’t explain either. Life force energy and especially the possibility of the occurrence of Life independent of organic structures, even though as such it would be technically classified as paranormal, is a most intriguing one.

We assume we know about Life because we are all alive. But in fact, we know very little about the native qualities of this energy we can observe as distinctly separate from everything else in the physical world around us. I say “native” qualities, because it appears possible that Life might continue on after the death of the body. We can’t see this energy, measure or detect it outside the body, so of course we jump to the obvious conclusion that it has no post mortem existence. Yet we do know that when Life is in our bodies we live and that in spite of our best attempts at a scientific understanding of this phenomenon, it appears and disappears with equal intrigue. Or does it?

Most doctors believe that when brain waves flat-line on equipment measuring EEG activity, the brain is dead and therefore assume the patient is dead. This follows from the premise that the brain is the source of consciousness. In fact clinical studies of near-death-experiences (NDE’s) suggest otherwise. A long list of prominent researchers have produced a rich body of evidence that proposes brain death is not the end of consciousness, which further implies that body death may not be the end of Life.

Interest in this new field of study was initially spurred in the late 1960’s by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose practice specialized in treating terminally ill patients. In 1975 medical doctor and psychologist Raymond Moody wrote a seminal book entitled Life After Life, that caused much excitement and stimulated even more research into the area of Near-Death-Experience.

Later, renowned NDE authority Bruce Greyson, M.D. and Professor of Psychiatry launched the field of Near Death Studies by developing research tools that could produce defensible results in a clinical setting. He is quoted as reporting:

“A clear sensorium and complex conceptual processes during a period of apparent clinical death challenge the concept that consciousness is localized exclusively in the brain.”

Pim Van Lommel, a cardiologist from the Netherlands conducted the first study of NDE’s in 344 cardiac arrest patients and published his results in The Lancet, the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed medical journal in 2001. He reported approximately 18% experienced "classic" NDE's, which included out-of-body experiences (OBE’s). The patients remembered details of their conditions during their cardiac arrest despite being clinically dead with flat-lined brain stem activity. Van Lommel concluded that his findings supported a theory that consciousness continued despite lack of neuronal activity in the brain

Science can clearly measure the effects of Life within a living organism. Although there is evidence that at the moment of death in humans, there is a sudden minute and inexplicable drop in body weight that produced the 21 gram theory, or otherwise known as “weight of the soul”. This was also referred to in Dan Brown’s recent book: The Lost Symbol, which has been prominently featured on the front page of The Institute of Noetic Sciences’ website.

Noesis has come to define the science of consciousness and The Institute of Noetic Science is an international research facility which has also verified much earlier weight of the soul experiments. Clearly something departs from our bodies at the moment of death. We can deduce that it is Life, some refer to it as the Soul, which leaves when the body ceases to live. Apparently it has substance enough to have weight and that weight seems consistently to be roughly 21 grams.

But we can’t measure a unit of Life as itself outside the body - a bit odd don’t you think? And of course this is the fundamental problem science has always wrestled with in attempting to observe and define Life outside its organic container. It has simply never been done. If you read scientific explanations for Life, you’ll notice they tend to stay closely on point with reference to biological Life, implying evolutionary biology and steer clear of any persuasion that Life can have an existence independent of organics. Can you blame them? After all, scientists measure things. From everything they can detect, there is no evidence of a thing we can point to as Life after death, or any independent Life energy; also referred to as Vitalism.

Perhaps we therefore also jump to an erroneous conclusion that, in humans for example, Life is only passed on by a mother’s living body, initially as a zygote, which is technically two living cells: the male “seed”, or sperm and the now fertilized egg, or ovum, from the female. This subsequently grows into an embryo, then a fetus and is finally born as a complete new living human baby. Analogously, like cavemen coming across fire from a lightning strike in the forest, they were forced to carry a burning branch like an eternal torch, as their only known means to create fire was to transplant it.

What is it really that causes this material stuff of a human body, an animal, reptile, a plant, micro-organism (or even a virus though it is not technically classified as living) to become vitally animated – to live? Might it possibly be a special form of energy potential, that doesn’t originate from the material of the body itself? Could it possibly continue to exist after an organism ceases to be a viable vessel to contain it any longer?

Our failure to measure Life outside the body shouldn’t preclude the possibility, that we simply don’t have the means to measure that kind of energy.

For other interesting information on the subject, look for A View Beyond the Stars, on Amazon and Lulu. You might also want to visit The Immortals website for more interesting videos and interviews on the subject of life force energy.

What Happens Next - When We Die?

2011-04-20T12:51:00.000-07:00

What happens when we die? It is the most profound question humankind has yet to answer after over 12,000 years of civilization on planet Earth.

Just as everyone shares the common experience of birth, we all eventually face the certainty of death. Many believe it is not only the end of life, but the end of their existence as well. But is it?

Science is still gridlocked on the subject because there is no proof of an afterlife. But there is also no proof of a source of life either. Oddly enough, life may not be a thing at all and yet we all live and have a personal experience with this most enigmatic quality of existence.

NBC News sat down with medical doctor and author Deepak Chopra and posed that question to him as well. His book on the subject: Burden of Proof - Chopra's Life After Death, offered some impressive answers from studies and personal experience as a physician.

So is it so much a matter of faith in an afterlife? Do we freely pass from the physical to a disembodied spiritual plane and then back to the physical in a new incarnation? Can we control the process of disengaging from our bodies when we no longer find them useful? Can we pass blissfully into an afterlife without the pain of body death.

I'll continue to explore the research and the people who claim to have the facts in future posts, on not only what life truly is, but what happens next - when we die.

For other interesting information on the subject, look for A View Beyond the Stars on Amazon and Lulu. You might also want to visit The Immortals website for more interesting videos and interviews on the subject of life force energy.

The Game Of Present And Past Life Adventures

2011-04-18T22:29:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from the book: A View Beyond the Stars, on Amazon and Lulu.

Life, however you consider it on the scale of the lowest level of bacteria, all the way up to that of our concept of God, is playing The Game. The Game is that of challenge against known and unknown conditions, which set up opposition to the goals of each of the players.

Those players with similar goals (let’s say the positive team) form alliances with others to better their chances of winning in the face of equal opposition from other players (let’s call them the negative team). Some of the conditions and rules in The Game of Life are obvious. Many are not.

A good example is that of unseen and unknown obsessive compulsions which are considered to arise from the mind; which influence emotions and therefore actions of people pushing them toward unpredictable plus or minus polarity as players in The Game. These are considered to be mental deviation and can swing wildly from the actions of the criminally insane, to those of a woman who tends to be anorexic, or a man who might be an alcoholic.

These compulsions can actually derive from past-suppressed undesirable experiences, which bubble to the surface in present life causing physical unwanted reactions, and less from any real malfunction of the mechanism of the mind.

When you consider the mind’s primary function should be to assist an individual in navigating the best survival course in life, it would necessarily need to be operating properly without damage to its delicate mechanism. Among other things it stores and organizes an unbroken, time-synced record of an individual’s entire existence in order to draw on the accumulation of that experience to solve problems related to a human being’s best course for survival in the face of present environment circumstances. It does so by making instant associations of the current environment, accessed by the body’s sensory organs, with those of any similar moments from the past.

The present experience and the decisions made in the past that aided one’s survival from other similar recorded moments, are quickly compared and new conclusions drawn that cause one to react in the direction of the greatest potential for a new winning solution.

In order for the mind to properly organize and call up needed data for problem solving, that information must remain intact and in sequence according to time and therefore context. In essence, we have a full motion film record, complete with all manner of available sensory data, of our existence up to the present. But more than just a linear sort of memory tape, the mind actually builds a three dimensional model of the world as we have known it.

The myriad individual experiences, whether they be in reference to material objects or conceptual, even purely imaginary contemplations, are all carefully modeled together and stored away chronologically for future use. If the time-sync remains intact, the data is normally readily available when needed, along with all our past conclusions about it, so that we can build on our experience with the past to formulate the best solutions for our present and future.

But an injured or damaged mind can replay past memories of incidents compulsively out of time and therefore out of context, when confronted with stimuli in the present that triggers (frequently) unpleasant reenactment of incidents from the past.

The most dramatic examples of this are people in mental wards walking around who have lost their connection to reality; often totally oblivious to the present. They will also be found (in effect) living in the past somewhere, repeating gestures, talking to themselves (or to a person no longer existing in the present) sometimes incessantly repeating simple daily chores, stuck in time - out of sync with the rest of the world.

If you want to appear crazy, just try walking around naked in public sucking a baby bottle or appear to be talking to somebody no one else can see. It is no secret to Psychiatry that psychotic behavior very often results from a person fighting old enemies, real or imagined, due to an overpowering emotional experience from an incident in the past.

The inability of the mind to return to the present, tracking with the current time stream, is much like a record player with the needle stuck in a groove repeatedly skipping back to replay a previous track. Repairing that ability to resynchronize to present time, in humans suffering mental derangement, and to be able to remain persistently there with confidence is no small goal of Psychiatry and Psychology practices. It would also go a long way toward rehabilitating many apparent “evil doers” who are merely acting out of sync with reality.

Often their actions appear very in-context to them and even appropriate given the circumstances they faced in the original incident they are reliving. In the present however, those actions might not only be out of place, but dangerous to themselves and others.

The mind’s apparent purpose, (as a piece of very efficient mental machinery) is that of an interface between Life and the organic vehicle (body) it controls. The mind uses the organic computer, or brain of the body, to connect and interact with the body’s (delicate and sophisticated) controls and sensory array, which in turn are manipulated by chemical (endocrine system) and electronic (nervous system) impulses.

The human body is a fascinating example of advanced bio-genetic engineering. But it is nevertheless a machine in some ways analogous to a modern automobile. And as such, no matter its complexity, it still requires a driver. The being is that driver and uses the mind to navigate the body through the obstacle course of an Earthly existence.

It’s not unlike the function of a steering wheel in your car really. You can perhaps understand then the irony in the phrase “you’re driving me crazy”? The driver can be under the influence of any manner of emotions and circumstances influencing the “driving skills”. But we only see the body being “driven” around interacting with other bodies.

When we are someday able to reorient any being stably to present, from the source of any time displacement from present reality, no matter how severe or far back in time the source, then we may truly begin to cure insanity. Coincidentally, an even more significant accomplishment will ultimately be the complete restoration of vast stores of knowledge and experience gained from countless Lifetimes, without the pain and emotional barriers that block out important experiential data indiscriminately.

Through various blunt psychological tools, e.g. hypnosis in past Life regression techniques, contact with past lives and restoration of attention locked up in past incidents of pain and trauma have been achieved with limited success. These techniques can also be harmful due to the dangers of post-hypnotic suggestion, which override the person’s awareness of present reality in an effort to condition them (mental rewiring) to change unwanted behavior (bad habits, eating disorders, etc.), or even in an attempt to control psychosis – thereby creating other unwanted side effects.

Better tools are needed to achieve improved and more stable results. But first we must understand what we’re really dealing with as a much broader spectrum of living experience in human beings than modern science has accounted for thus far.

All these “osis” phenomena may simply result from the being playing various roles through countless lives, building up psychic (therefore mental) scar tissue and experiential gaps over a considerable length of time. Much of it could be traced down to times they overwhelmed someone, or were overwhelmed by another, in various physical activities that led to their body being abused or killed off.

People get pretty attached to their bodies, no pun intended, and they don’t appreciate it being whacked by someone else. It’s very disturbing and makes you want to get even, or go into hiding next time, depending on your demeanor. In any case, bodies are one’s chosen identity and carefully accessorized over the course of a single Life. We invest in them, we try to keep them shiny and new and looking their best at all times so that others admire them and thus we are proud of them.

Humans want to be accepted into their group or tribe of choice and yet perceived as special. Think about people just looking at your body and sneering at it or making some verbal insult that causes you to come away feeling stupid or ugly – certainly unappreciated. It’s personal and it feels bad. It can ruin your day and for some, even their Life.

Consider driving your shiny new car off the showroom floor and getting “t-boned” and killed by some drunk driver at the intersection. Now an interesting philosophical question might be, which would you be most disturbed about losing, that gorgeous car or your body?

Now think about implications of your newly developed considerations you may carry with you into your next life about buying new cars (they just get wrecked), or drunks (they kill people and destroy good feelings about owning shiny new cars), spending your hard earned money on something new and shiny (they just don’t last so what’s the use?), or trying to earn enough money to buy the things you like (it just doesn’t work out so why try to make more money?).

You may be compelled to do something about it in your next life like some heroic quest, a crusade against alcoholism, designing more durable cars, or worst case, you succumb to alcohol addiction and become another drunk driver!

Now, relating this back to the example of actors on a stage, we choose a role in Life we want to play early on, taking with us now unconscious self-imposed limitations some might see as color to our personalities. But nevertheless these are merely mental baggage we decide we must drag along with us wherever we go. They become part of our reality.

We do this well before picking up a new body by observing other beings with bodies doing interesting things and having similar limitations we can relate to. In any case, when we decide on our part, or intended track in Life, we establish goals and purpose around an identity in order to gather more experience in the role and unwittingly accept our limitations.

Obviously a being would seek to draw on any earlier accumulated talents and experience to use as an advantage to playing a new role in life. It stands to reason that one should recognize and be true to this purpose they have chosen for their Life as well. Parents should take note of particular interests their children gravitate toward early on.

Beyond obvious cases of child prodigies and other examples of wunderkinds, who play violin, concert piano, or display other genius at an early age, they may just seem to be very passionate about certain things. These are clues to one’s chosen role in Life and should be encouraged. In fact discouragement of preferred Life’s goals might have very negative effects on a child’s further development in other ways.

In any case, beings start a new Life, put on their new costume and get up on stage with the lines they believe will cause the audience to swoon over their superior acting prowess. We crave the great sensation we get from pulling it all off with remarkable talent and persuasion and get the applause we need to keep persevering to the next curtain call.

We look for the spotlight and move to it as beings. We live to entertain, both ourselves and others. How well we do in that endless endeavor, lifetime after lifetime is the ultimate scorecard for us.

Excerpted from the book: A View Beyond the Stars, on Amazon, iTunes, Lulu and Barnes & Noble

Killer Asteroid Near Miss November This Year

2011-04-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

Mark your calendars for an impressive and upcoming flyby of an asteroid that’s one of the larger potentially perilous space rocks in the heavens – in terms of smacking the Earth in the future.

It’s the case of asteroid 2005 YU55, a round mini-world that is about 1,300 feet (400 meters) in diameter. In early November, this asteroid will approach Earth within a scant 0.85 lunar distances.
Due the object’s size and whisking by so close to Earth, an extensive campaign of radar, visual and infrared observations are being planned.

Asteroid 2005 YU55 was discovered by Spacewatch at the University of Arizona, Tucson’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory on Dec. 28, 2005. En route and headed our way, the cosmic wanderer is another reminder about life here on our sitting duck of a planet

Close and big

“The close Earth approach of 2005 YU55 on Nov. 8, is unusual since it is close and big. On average, one wouldn’t expect an object this big to pass this close but every 30 years,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Yeomans said that with new radar capabilities at Goldstone in California — part of NASA’s Deep Space Network — there is a good chance of obtaining radar imaging of 2005 YU55 down to the 5-meter resolution level. Doing so, he said, would mean obtaining higher spatial resolution of the object than that attained by recent spacecraft flyby missions.

“So we like to think of this opportunity as a close flyby mission with Earth as the spacecraft,” Yeomans told SPACE.com. “When combined with ground-based optical and near-infrared observations, the radar data should provide a fairly complete picture of one of the larger potentially hazardous asteroids,” he said.

Photo of Asteroid 2005 YU55

Asteroid 2005 YU55 is a slow rotator. Because of its size and proximity to Earth, the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., has designated the space rock as a “potentially hazardous asteroid.”
Dishing it out

“We’re already preparing for the 2005 YU55 flyby,” said Lance Benner, a research scientist at JPL and a specialist on radar imaging of near-Earth objects. He said part of the plan is to observe the asteroid with radar using both the huge Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico and equipment at Goldstone.

Earth's biggest radar: The Arecibo Observatory dish

“The asteroid will approach from the south, so Goldstone has the first chance to observe it due to its declination coverage,” Benner told SPACE.com.

To help coordinate the observing campaigns, “Radar Observations Planning” websites have been set up for this unusual occasion, Benner said.

“This flyby will be the closest by any near-Earth asteroid with an absolute magnitude this bright since 1976 and until 2028,” Benner added. “Having said that, nobody saw 2010 XC15 during its close flyby within 0.5 lunar distance in 1976,” he said, noting that this asteroid wasn’t discovered until late in 2010.

“Thus, the flyby by 2005 YU55 will be the closest actually observed by something this large, so it represents a unique opportunity,” Benner said. “In a real sense, this will provide imaging resolution comparable to or even better than a spacecraft mission flyby.”

Radar paint

Benner said that because the asteroid is zooming by Earth so very close, radar echoes will be extremely strong. One facility at Goldstone will be used to transmit and “radar paint” the object…another Goldstone dish is on tap to snag the reflected echo of radar data.

What can radar do?

Information collected by this technique, for example, can be transformed into 3-D shapes, with surface features and spin rates identified. The asteroid’s roughness and density can also be assessed. Furthermore, radar can improve the whereabouts of the object. By greatly shrinking uncertainties for newly discovered meandering NEOs, that in turn enables motion prediction for decades to centuries.

As for seeing the asteroid with small telescopes, start getting your gear ready.

Initially, the object will be too close to the sun and too faint for optical observers. But late in the day (Universal Time) on Nov. 8, the solar elongation will grow sufficiently to see it. Early on Nov. 9, the asteroid could reach about 11th magnitude for several hours before it fades as its distance rapidly increases, Benner explained.

Asteroids in Deep Space

This article borrowed from Space.com's Leonard David's April 8, 2011 post: Huge Asteroid to Pass Near Earth in November

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

The God Franchise

2011-04-13T23:02:00.000-07:00

Many people today supplant a healthy thirst for knowledge about deeper meaning in their lives with a packaged set of beliefs their religions espouse.

Because these religions have assumed a license, they can implore people to believe in their brand of explanation as the final authority, so that followers think there is no need to question the subject more deeply.
It is this, for want of a better word, "branding" of religions’ packaged solutions, which presents us with our most fundamental spiritual dilemma. If all religions each profess to represent the essential truth about the source of Life and spirituality, why do those explanations differ so greatly? Why do we need so many distinctly different religious explanations for God, for instance?

Currently, there are something like 4,000 separate brands of religious faith – though 70% of world religions fall into essentially three categories: 33% Christianity, 21% Islam and 14% Hinduism (see pie chart). This represents some 4.2 billion people on this planet who subscribe to the top three "brands".

A closer look at the top three reveals them to be very different in practice as well as origin. Why is this important? This demonstrates that the foundation for human civilization, the root of our growth in consciousness as humanity is significantly divided on the source for belief in our origin as beings. That, which defines us, essentially divides us.

One of the earliest major authorities for religious scripture was known as the Vedas, (also known as Vedic Hymns) and these were formulated into hymns to allow them to be passed from person to person mnemonically in Sanskrit before the language was written.

Later these were inscribed on palm leaves, goat skin and papyrus and emerged from India originally by way of their earlier conquerors, rumored to be the Aryans, somewhere near 1500 BC. These became the foundation of the Hindu religion and co-incidentally, the first major alignment of man and his world to a single, all powerful creator (in the likeness of Vishnu).

This served to significantly sway the more prevalent Pagan populations away from their prehistorically polytheist tendencies. Previously the world abounded with all manner of spirits, nymphs and jinn, major and minor gods for almost every occasion of living and they were accessible to any common person without the need for an intermediary.

Once monotheism gained a foothold however, entitlement was created for a few select people to represent the interests of a single more elusive, perhaps overburdened god. Thus access to the source of spiritual power became more polarized and in a very important sense, consolidated.

Around 525 BC, Buddhism, named after the followers of Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha, emerged as one of the only major non-deity oriented religions – also from India - and was an inspired reform movement refuting some of the more debilitating teachings of Hinduism, like its caste system and the absolute sanctity of the Vedas.

Later still, on the African continent, due to a few of the more famous prophets, the theory of a single God gained more momentum and emerged as the focus of several new religions – Judaism, Christianity and later still, Islam. All were originally passed down generation to generation from those who heard the teachings of the prophets, (the original Hebrew Book of Psalms, were songs written for the harp, no doubt to make them more mnemonically portable to the illiterate masses) finally written down and preserved on scrolls and ultimately to be mass produced in bound books.

Those who were tasked with passing along the teachings of the prophets (none of the prophets wrote down their own words) became bearers of the words of the faith, or scriptures. From merely disciples they became priests and just as the prophet’s words were considered holy, so were they also considered holy as official bearers of those words.

Thus they derived their badge of sacred authority by being the only source of the holy sermons for those weren’t present when they were first spoken. This reaffirmed the ultimate power of the original clergy, as being the only ones who were reliably in-the-know about “authentic” communication from God.

In the case of the historical Council of Laodicea (363-364 A.D) however, we also know that wholesale revisions of previous Christian Holy Scriptures suddenly became less sacred and unholy and passed into antiquity as lost books of the Bible. Some of these would even be considered bizarre; without question unsavory stuff to serve as cannons for the clergy.

One such classic example is a remarkable bit of content from the Book of Enoch describing the fall of the Watchers, or Archangels sent to watch over mankind, some of whom were later punished by God for mating with human women, resulting in an offspring giant race of hybrid non-humans called the Nephilim.

The purpose of the Great Flood, according to Genesis, was to punish man for his wickedness. The Book of Enoch however, elaborates on this theme to explain that in point of fact the flood was created to rid the Earth of these gigantic beasts who were preying on man, as well as to cut off a whole hereditary branch of mankind that had been irreversibly tainted by the Grigori (Watchers) and had become in effect superhumans. See all the fun stuff you weren’t allowed to know about?

These human revisionists of the history of the prophet’s words were no doubt subject to much political and personal bias. Such editing of the canons of church doctrine has taken place in all major religions, not just Christianity. So any real “word of God” has become diluted through time by word of mouth, omissions, deletions, transcription error, translation errors from the original ancient languages, political and personal corruption of the clergy (see the King James Bible translation for example) and so forth all the way to present. So in a real sense, any modern Bible reader is seeing only the highly censored version of this supposed great volume of sacred work.

So what about these prophets, or messengers, who have supposedly acted as intermediaries for God over the ages? Most are familiar with the prophets from two of the three major religions; Christianity and Islam. Hinduism, originating from the Vedic Period (1500-184 B.C.) supposedly had no recognized prophet because it is based on a common experience of being able to hear God’s word in one’s daily Life and as such, it was not founded by an individual like the others.

However, Hinduism originated from a number of Rishis, or inspired sages, to which the content of the Vedas was revealed and they in turn passed these along as holy revelations (Śruti or “what is heard), or messages from God by singing them as hymns. There were seven of these Hindu sages or Rishis – and as such they could also loosely be characterized as prophets, but they did not represent Hinduism as a religion. They saw themselves only as messengers rather than intermediaries of God.

This is an important distinction compared to Christianity (started as a religion around 100 A.D. by Saint Ignatius of Antioch - a student of the Apostle John one of the original twelve apostles).

Jesus of Nazareth was considered to be the Christ or Messiah, whose appearance was foretold by the prophet Abraham, the founder of Judaism (circa 1800 B.C. and one of the oldest major religions).

Jesus was then, not only a prophetic representative of God, but characterized himself as his only mortal son to boot (or so we have been led to believe by many subsequent versions of the words of Jesus).

That issue by the way, comprises one of the chief conflicts with Islam, the most recent major religion on the scene, which recognizes Abraham (the original source of all Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam) as the first prophet and Mohammad as the last (along with some 124,000 other minor prophets – representing Islam to the nations of the world).

But Islam denounces anyone who would claim to be the son of God (see Prophets of Islam). In fact, the Qur'an considers this heresy and under more militant, radicalized interpretations of Islamic law, heresy is punishable by death as an infidel. Islam does recognize Jesus as a legitimate prophet however, so this conflict grows even more convoluted the closer you study it.

These prophets were all self proclaimed, “enlightened” individuals “chosen” by God to represent him to man in the physical plane. Since it isn't my goal to refute any claim by these or any other individuals who may rightfully have had some “communication” (see the root word commune for further insight) with God, let me just say that they may have all been accurate in their beliefs. As such, they deserve the utmost respect for courageously persevering in their determination to speak out about their visions and what they perceived as a unique connection to God.

However, what they may in fact have been “connecting” with is Life as a boundless, conscious spiritual force and intelligence that makes all of us whole again when we return to it as our source of existence.

The prophets of various religions served, on the one hand, to civilize mankind under a common desire to orient men toward higher integrity, decent conduct and civility toward others, while on the other to shape man’s purpose on Earth to one of adherence to their interpretation of God’s will. Their rules carried the severest penalties possible for failure to comply, including eternal damnation and of course eternal bliss for those who decided to fall in line. Certainly weighty choices by anyone’s standard.

As we “re-discover” the true innate properties of Life, we will again perceive that as one vast body of spirituality, Life connects us all in a way that may explain why some individuals could only conclude that they are “spoken to” by a higher power, rather than better understanding this more basic, all pervasive connection. Most of mankind has succumbed to materialism and apparently has difficulty tuning into this higher frequency of non-physical communication. Oddly enough, again as evidence of this spiritual paradox, Life as the prime motive force in this, or any other Universe is that higher omnipresent power.

And just as we know there are lower to higher Life forms on this planet, there are just as likely higher Life forms above and beyond our planet. As much as we like to believe in the geocentric, therefore an anthropocentric, view of the Universe however, their intentions and purpose are probably much less concerned with us here on Earth than our egos would admit.

An ability to commune with Life in the purest sense however, would enable one to potentially be in contact with the highest intellect imaginable anywhere in or outside our Universe. It’s really not hard to see why the prophets were so humbled by such a connection. For rather primitive men, their connection to a god-like consciousness must have been equally frightening and truly awe inspiring.

At some point in the future, religion as a study and practice of spirituality will likely cease to profess the need to subscribe to a divine will from any God and will more probably focus on reacquainting us as spiritual beings with the limitless power of our native state.

As our spiritual maturity continues to grow, we will be able to reorient ourselves to understanding our innate abilities as well - without assigning them to a simply more powerfully endowed being, not unlike ourselves in every other way.

For other information, read: A View Beyond the Stars at Amazon.com.

Scientists Discover Life After Death

2011-04-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

A long list of prominent researchers have produced a rich body of evidence that proposes brain death is not the end of consciousness, which further implies that body death may not be the end of Life. Interest in this new field of study was initially spurred in the late 1960’s by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose practice specialized in treating terminally ill patients.

In 1975 medical doctor and psychologist Raymond Moody wrote a seminal book entitled Life After Life, that caused much excitement and stimulated even more research into the area of Near-Death-Experience.

Later, renowned NDE authority Bruce Greyson, M.D. and Professor of Psychiatry launched the field of Near Death Studies by developing research tools that could produce defensible results in a clinical setting. He is quoted as reporting:

“A clear sensorium and complex conceptual processes during a period of apparent clinical death challenge the concept that consciousness is localized exclusively in the brain.”

Pim Van Lommel, a cardiologist from the Netherlands conducted the first study of NDE’s in 344 cardiac arrest patients and published his results in The Lancet, the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed medical journal in 2001. He reported approximately 18% experienced "classic" NDE's, which included out-of-body experiences (OBE’s).

The patients remembered details of their conditions during their cardiac arrest despite being clinically dead with flat-lined brain stem activity. Van Lommel concluded that his findings supported a theory that consciousness continued despite lack of neuronal activity in the brain

Science can clearly measure the effects of Life within a living organism. Although there is evidence that at the moment of death in humans, there is a sudden minute and inexplicable drop in body weight that produced the 21 gram theory, or otherwise known as “weight of the soul”. This was also referred to in Dan Brown’s recent book: The Lost Symbol, which has been prominently featured on the front page of The Institute of Noetic Sciences’ website.

Noesis has come to define the science of consciousness and The Institute of Noetic Sciences is an international research facility which has also verified much earlier weight of the soul experiments. Clearly something departs from our bodies at the moment of death. We can deduce that it is Life, or as some refer to it as the Soul which leaves when the body ceases to live. Apparently it has substance enough to have weight and that weight seems consistently to be roughly 21 grams.

But we can’t measure a unit of Life as itself outside the body - a bit odd don’t you think? And of course this is the fundamental problem science has always wrestled with in attempting to observe and define Life outside its organic container. It has simply never been done.

If you read scientific explanations for Life, you’ll notice they tend to stay closely on point with reference to biological Life, implying evolutionary biology and steer clear of any persuasion that Life can have an existence independent of organics. Can you blame them? After all, scientists measure things. From everything they can detect, there is no evidence of a thing we can point to as Life after death or any independent Life energy also referred to as Vitalism.

Perhaps we therefore also jump to an erroneous conclusion that, in humans for example, Life is only passed on by a mother’s living body initially as a zygote, which is technically two living cells: the male “seed” or sperm and the now fertilized egg, or ovum, from the female. This subsequently grows into an embryo, then a fetus and is finally born as a complete new living human baby. Analogously, like cavemen coming across fire from a lightning strike in the forest they were forced to carry a burning branch like an eternal torch – as their only known means to create fire was to transplant it.

What is it really that causes this material stuff of a human body, an animal, reptile, a plant, micro-organism (or even a virus though it is not technically classified as living) to become vitally animated – to live? Might it possibly be a special form of energy potential that doesn’t originate from the material of the body itself? Could it possibly continue to exist after an organism ceases to be a viable vessel to contain it any longer? Our failure to measure Life outside the body shouldn’t preclude the possibility, that we simply don’t have the means to measure that kind of energy.

There are other energies and forces science cannot isolate and are yet commonly known about and their effects on matter around us accepted as proof of their existence. The rather recent discovery of a mysterious Dark Energy (see Hubblesite.com video on dark energy for a fun visual explanation) and the more obvious force of Gravity are such examples. Gravity for instance, cannot be isolated or measured other than by it’s interaction with mass, e.g., when you drop an apple, it falls.

You’ll recall that Sir Isaac Newton significantly advanced our understanding of our physical world from that simple observation in his definition of the Laws of Motion. The force and therefore energy potentiality of gravity always exists, whether or not you choose to drop that apple. You cannot see gravity or measure it as an independent force either. Yet your body would just float into space if it were not always in effect around you.

It is at least possible that Life is another such independently unquantifiable energy or force. You can observe and measure the evidence of Life within organisms, but once it leaves them, like gravity without the apple, it may only appear to vanish. If this is true, then it would follow that Life might not need a body to exist, and in fact may have never needed physical organisms to exist at all.

Does gravity require the apple?

Want to read more on this fascinating subject of the mysteries of Life force energy and other normal activity unfortunately classified as paranormal?

For more information, read: A View Beyond the Stars at Amazon.com.

Are You A Martian?

2011-03-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

Are we all Martians? According to many planetary scientists, it's conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that's the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence.

In order to detect signs of past or present life on Mars — if it is in fact true that we're related — then a promising strategy would be to search for DNA or RNA, and specifically for particular sequences of these molecules that are nearly universal in all forms of terrestrial life. That's the strategy being pursued by MIT research scientist Christopher Carr and postdoctoral associate Clarissa Lui, working with Maria Zuber, head of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and Gary Ruvkun, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, who came up with the instrument concept and put together the initial team. Lui presented a summary of their proposed instrument, called the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes (SETG), at the IEEE Aerospace Conference this month in Big Sky, Montana.

The idea is based on several facts that have now been well established. First, in the early days of the solar system, the climates on Mars and the Earth were much more similar than they are now, so life that took hold on one planet could presumably have survived on the other. Second, an estimated one billion tons of rock have traveled from Mars to Earth, blasted loose by asteroid impacts and then traveling through interplanetary space before striking Earth's surface. Third, microbes have been shown to be capable of surviving the initial shock of such an impact, and there is some evidence they could also survive the thousands of years of transit through space before arriving at another planet.

So the various steps needed for life to have started on one planet and spread to another are all plausible. Additionally, orbital dynamics show that it's about 100 times easier for rocks to travel from Mars to Earth than the other way. So if life got started there first, microbes could have been carried here and we might all be its descendants.

So what?

If we are descendants from Mars, there might be important lessons to be learned about our own biological origins by studying biochemistry on our neighbor planet, where biological traces erased long ago here on Earth might have been preserved in the Martian deep freeze.

The MIT researchers' device would take samples of Martian soil and isolate any living microbes that might be present, or microbial remnants (which can be preserved for about up to a million years and still contain viable DNA), and separate out the genetic material in order to use standard biochemical techniques to analyze their genetic sequences.

"It's a long shot," Carr concedes, "but if we go to Mars and find life that's related to us, we could have originated on Mars. Or if it started here, it could have been transferred to Mars." Either way, "we could be related to life on Mars. So we should at least be looking for life on Mars that's related to us."

Even a few years ago, that might have seemed like more of a long shot, but recent Mars orbiter and rover missions have clearly shown that Mars once had abundant water, and many of the conditions thought to be needed to support life. And although the surface of Mars today is too cold and dry to support known life forms, there is evidence that liquid water may exist not far below the surface. "On Mars today, the best place to look for life is in the subsurface," Carr says.

So the team has been developing a device that could take a sample of Martian soil from below the surface — perhaps dredged up by a rover equipped with a deep drill — and process it to separate out any possible organisms, amplify their DNA or RNA using the same techniques used for forensic DNA testing on Earth, and then use biochemical markers to search for signs of particular, genetic sequences that are nearly universal among all known life forms.

The researchers estimate that it could take two more years to complete the design and testing of a prototype SETG device. Although the proposed device has not yet been selected for any upcoming Mars mission, a future mission with a lander or rover equipped with a drill could potentially carry this life-detection instrument.

No instrument has been sent to Mars specifically to look for evidence of life since NASA's twin Viking landers in 1976, which produced tantalizing but ambiguous results. An instrument on the Mars Science Lander to be launched in the fall will investigate chemistry relevant to life. The instrument from the MIT-Harvard team directly addresses Earth-like molecular biology.

Christopher McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA-Ames Research Center in California who specializes in research related to the possibility of life on Mars, says this work is "very interesting and important." He says, "it is not implausible that life on Mars will be related to life on Earth and therefore share a common genetics. In any case it would be important to test this hypothesis." But he adds that there is another motive for doing this research as well: "From an astronaut health and safety point of view and from a return-sample point of view, there is more to worry about" if there are organisms closely related to us on Mars, since a microbe that is similar is much more likely to be infectious to terrestrial life forms than would a totally alien microbe — so it is very important to be able to detect such life forms if they are present on Mars. In addition, this method could also detect any biological contamination on Mars that has been brought by spacecraft from Earth.

This kind of test is something we have the ability to do, he says, and therefore, although such an experiment has not yet been formally approved, "it seems improbable to me that we will do a serious search for life on Mars and not do this test."
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This article credited to: Are You A Martian, 23 March 2011, by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

Doomsday 65 Million B.C.

2011-03-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

It was a warm, typical tropical day in the Yucatan Peninsula. Giant ferns and palm fronds swayed gently with the ocean breeze. Waves lapped lazily against the beach and wildlife was going about their daily business of finding food, or being food.

Suddenly, all eyes looked to the heavens to catch a horrifying glimpse of a blazing fireball, blotting out the sun and streaking down toward the ocean. An instant later, a white hot flash of superheated gasses scoured the Earth with temperatures near the heat of the sun in every direction for over 200 miles.

A Tsunami wave over 100 feet high thundered over the land wiping away all traces of life and transformed the landscape into a featureless mud zone miles across the Yucatan peninsula and inland into mainland Mexico.

A gigantic mushroom cloud of ejected debris and ash formed overhead and spread across the globe obscuring the sun and within weeks it had eradicated life giving photosynthesis everywhere.

Temperatures dropped to freezing, plant life withered worldwide. Even plankton in the oceans died. The basic building blocks of the food chain on Earth were destroyed. Doomsday 65 million B.C. had begun.

Today, archaeologists have plotted this event using the K-T boundary, a persistent worldwide chalk like layer of sedimentary material, that circles the Earth like a ribbon, running through rock striations at a specific depth on every continent.

This is the historical remnant of billions of tons of material ejected thousands of feet into the atmosphere, eventually settling back to Earth, smothering what might have survived the loss of sunlight and freezing temperatures, like blanket.

It is predicted that once every 100 million years, our planet may again find itself in the path of a killer meteorite such as the one that created the Chicxulub crater offshore of the Yucatan Peninsula over 65 million years ago. There are other such impact sites elsewhere across the globe. There will be more in the future.

Earth does not guarantee life. But it does manage to replant itself again, despite the worst catastrophes in history. If doomsday repeats itself in 2012, which is unlikely by virtue of a specific date alone, we will surely arise again.

Angels Demons Or Just Aliens?

2011-02-19T13:20:00.000-08:00

In 1998, William H. Keith, Jr., aka Ian Douglas, published the first book in his sci-fi Heritage Trilogy Series entitled: Sempar Mars.

The lead-in on Amazon.com reads: "The Year is 2040. The Marines have landed on Mars to guard the unearthed secrets of an ancient and dangerous alien race: Ourselves". He expands upon a gigantic "what-if" concerning "the face on Mars" in the region of Cydonia and the discovery of alien archaeological sites and technology exposed on the outlying planets.

This tightly written, hard-science-fiction novel series, shines a laser light on the growing controversy brewing, not only amongst new-age spiritualists, but hard core scientists now as well. The notion that we are alone in the Universe, much less even in our one small galaxy, is becoming increasingly unsupportable given the growing knowledge base to the contrary. And the book further suggests that though our accepted human history is rife with legends about superhumans, angels and demons, we might actually be viewing persistent evidence of alien visitations throughout Earth's early recorded history.

What evidence you might rightly ask? Well, nothing like a neon sign blinking: Here We Are Stupid! But certainly ample circumstantial evidence in all sacred religious texts, paintings, strange archaeological finds, OOPArt and scores of unexplained technology advances well beyond the capabilities of the locals. Taken individually, many can be explained away, but as a greater body of accumulated data, it may be enough to convict us of being utterly naive should we insist on discounting it all out of hand. We might want to at least consider the possibilities - in lieu of holding out for that alien spaceship landing on the White House lawn as the only acceptable "smoking gun".

There is in fact a considerable catalog of material being amassed worldwide, that points directly to extraterrestrial visitations to Earth, not once but historically frequent, that if fully appreciated would cause even the most sceptical among us to blush. And of course, as we move out into the Solar System, we may find even greater evidence of intergalactic visitation, as strongly suggested by Ian Douglas' books. Just last year, an article entitled: Are Alien Artifacts in our Solar System? from DiscoveryNews.com by science author Ray Villard, tantalizes us with similar dangling possibilities.

Ian Douglas refers to the Fermi Paradox in framing the corollary to the old dog-eared question of "are we alone?" to include, "if we aren't, where the heck are they?". The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), was created as a NASA funded project in 1992 (that's your tax dollars at work), using distant listening radio telescopes, they hoped might overhear alien transmissions from deep space, in an effort to answer that question. Today, though privately funded, the SETI Institute has expanded their resources considerably around the world. But still, after all these years of trying to find them, we keep asking ourselves: where are the aliens?

If you read the Heritage Trilogy Series, you will find some surprising, yet logically crafted suppositions that point the finger right back to ourselves. Where are the aliens? Were they somehow marooned here in this backwater Solar System...are they us?

What Is The Law Of Attraction Really?

2011-02-01T20:32:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has read the book or seen the movie entitled: The Secret, knows that the Law of Attraction is no secret. But is it really even a law?

There are a number of forces in the universe that act to attract things to each other that science already accepts as laws, or forces of attraction. We mostly think of gravity; unless of course you are able to recall some of your basic high school science classes that refer to the four fundamental interactions, or forces at work in the universe around us. Don't worry, I won't be boring you with any of that and if you want to know more just click on the enclosed hyperlink to research more information on those to your heart's content.

But back to our basic question here about a force of attraction that supposedly responds to thought and is capable of redefining reality to any individuals personal preference; which is the focus of claims made by The Secret. Does this have any scientific basis, or is it merely a fond desire and hope inspired belief that we can control the future with just our minds?

Certainly you will get two distinctly different reactions if you speak to a scientist about the laws of attraction compared to someone who embraces a more metaphysical view of the universe. The scientist will tell you about clumping forces that have created all the galaxies, their stars and the planets that orbit them; held together by the force of gravity. But they will scoff at anything that might suggest our mind has any influence on the scale of the broader cosmos.

But you might be asking them the wrong question. If you instead asked them exactly "how" and "why" gravity acts as the universal force of attraction, they can only mutter under their breath. For they would dearly love to know the answer to that question; while visions of Nobel prizes dance in their heads. So they don't really know why things are attracted to each other, or if there is another, perhaps even more basic force of attraction at work around us. Matter in fact attracts other matter (clumping) to itself from the magnitude stars, all the way down to the quantum level of subatomic particles.

The other fundamental interactions come more into play at the subatomic levels. And since we know all matter is really just super-condensed energy (Einstein's famous E = mc² proof), we also know that condensed energy is actually just attracting other condensed energy. So can we make the stretch to suggest that concentrated mental energy can attract other energy that is otherwise unassociated with thought? Tougher sell right? But is it?

What the metaphysical view of the universe is really suggesting is that our combined influence of thought on the energy field in the universe around us is what brings our perception of reality into being. We use the mental energy of our minds to visualize what we want to have, or have happen, and this acts against the energy background around us to reformulate it into the form and shapes that manifests our desires.

It's like a big movie we all create together. And then we decide to live inside that movie to experience the adventure we created for each other. The back lot for this movie set is the physical universe, as we all agree to experience it and each act in the movie is created scene by scene in our own individual episodes of life.

Science is out there inspecting the results of our movie building project to make sure it all conforms to the approved standards of physics and so forth. And then they report back to the rest of us that: "yep, it's all authentic and you can trust it to persist indefinitely". That's good news for all of us who own real estate. Now what about making the leap from unmeasurable mental energy having the desired effect on measurable external energy that creates the physical stuff we want to bend into our preferred future vision of reality? Well, the thing to remember is that energy is largely just a big potentiality until it is employed to do something special. It's all around us constantly, but isn't energy in the classic sense. It isn't even measurable until we decide to channel it's potential to do something with it - when we complete the circuit so to speak.

For example, we can build an electrical circuit to make a light bulb go on, or to power the lights of an entire city. It's the same energy used to light a single bulb using 100 watts, as it is to power the city using millions of watts. But until we turn on the lights - there is zero energy in the wires. And, someone had to originally mentally "decide" they wanted to harness (attract) and redirect that energy to light the lights. Whether the mind is employed to physically build the circuit, or to mentally "attract" it's potential from the same energy field in order to reshape it into a future reality - isn't it still just a matter of redirecting the same energy?

Think about it from this perspective. Our universe, at the core of it's matrix, is just a simple set of fundamental forces of attraction that react in predictable ways when influenced by something else. And that "something else" is always energy in one state or another, as part of a much larger field of energy potential. We continually reshape and re-purpose that energy field with our minds every day to physically create and reshape the world around us to suit our needs. So can directed thought energy alone attract and formulate our desired reality? What do you think?

For more information, read: A View Beyond the Stars on Amazon.com.

The Conscious Universe

2011-01-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

The average guy on the street doesn’t think about the “Big Bang”, quantum physics, or what twisted mood the Creator must have been in to whip up the warped little Universe we live in. Frankly, most of us are busy trying to keep enough money in the bank, the government out of our pockets and figuring out why our kid just has to have a nose ring. We haven’t got the time or inclination to speculate technically on why the Universe is the way it is.

Most reason such mental exercise should be reserved for those guys with the huge heads and squinty eyes with coke bottle lens glasses. They get paid to think about "Black Holes", why the dinosaurs disappeared and where God might hang out in his spare time. What we do know is that we have a lot of problems, most of our friends have a lot of problems and nobody really has time to hear about ours because they’re too busy worrying about their own.

So why should anyone care whether the Universe might be conscious, or just a big space with a lot of stuff in it that's too far away to worry about? But what if you were to learn that the Universe is actually only as big as the picture you have of it in your mind? Too crazy you say? And again, why should that matter even if it's true?

Well try this as an example that's a little closer to home. Imagine your entire life, which may end up being more than eighty or so years as an average lifespan, being like a feature length movie you could watch from start to finish in less than a minute? In fact, you could speed it up and view your whole life of experience in less time than it takes to finish this sentence. More interesting, but why is that important?

Well to understand what difference that might make in your quality of life, consider this recent scientific theory that is getting scientists very excited. The Universe and everything we see, or experience around us, might just be a holographic illusion our minds are tuned into and all that space really isn't very big at all. In fact, you could hold it all in the palm of your hand if you could dial your mind to another frequency that allows you to see past the illusion and view the Universe from outside looking in, instead of from inside looking out. Fantastic you say? There is evidence now to suggest we could all simply be inside a big 3D movie of our own making!

"In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science. " -- Michael Talbot, from The Universe as a Hologram

What Aspect and his team discovered was that the underlying subatomic particles that make up all the components of our Universe, such as electrons, could communicate with each other instantaneously across any amount of distance separating them. So whether or not they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart, what happens to one particle is known about instantly by all other particles everywhere!

This suggests science has finally discovered a unifying field of some sort, or a pervasive consciousness interacting with the basic fabric of everything we experience as reality in the Universe around us. And that it all just might be an extension of our own consciousness we internalize as our individual perspective, or viewpoint.

Bill Harris, one of the consultants starring in the movie "The Secret" is the CEO of Centerpointe Research. He refers to this phenomenon as our internal representation of the world around us, or our "map of reality". He developed his Holosync® technology to help people become more aware of how they are creating their own personal conceptualization of reality on auto-pilot; so that they can regain control of their lives.

"...your Map of Reality was created for you by outside forces and now simply runs automatically, creating an experience of life that seems like it's happening TO you as a result of those outside forces beyond your control. -- Thresholds of the Mind, by Bill Harris

As science and the metaphysical continue to converge in the future, we may finally learn that the Universe is simply a creation of our own design as living beings through an infinite existence we customize to our own personal taste and preference. Perhaps it is all a grand adventure series we produce and star in for eons to come.

"We were here before the stars began to burn and we will be here yet when they grow dim and leave all the glittering machinery we have created, to the dark and bitter cold of endless space. Many journeys, many lives but always aware at the center of our being that we are uniquely one and still part of a magnificent story of creation far beyond the cosmos." -- A View Beyond the Stars, by DC Musgrove

Spaceport America In New Mexico To Open 2011

2011-01-19T11:23:00.000-08:00

Governor Bill Richardson and Virgin
Galactic CEO Richard Branson

Welcome to Spaceport America fellow intrepid voyagers. Located near White Sands New Mexico, this world class, dare I say out of this world class facility, is slated to open for business sometime later this year. What kind of business? Space business.

Touted as "the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport", Spaceport America will provide launch facilities to support for-profit space enterprises, sub orbit (planning on low-orbit) tourism and hospitality. Wow. In our lifetime.

The initial construction ground breaking ceremony took place on June 19, 2009, culminating almost two decades of work to promote the commercialization of space by building a government licensed, but private launch facility outside of the provincial confines of NASA's Cape Canaveral located on the Florida coast.

Construction is due for completion in 2011

The initial proposal for a commercial space facility was submitted by Dr. Burton Lee, of Stanford University back in 1990. He also wrote the initial business and strategic plans to obtain a 1.4 million dollar congressional earmark as seed money for studying and subsequently stumping for a federal land grant located in New Mexico near the US Army's White Sands Missile Test Range. Which is a mere 130 or so miles from the infamous alien spaceship crash site at Roswell New Mexico. Coincidence? I think not!

Governor Bill Richardson soon after convinced the X-Prize Foundation to move to New Mexico and shortly after landed the real prize by getting entertainment and airline mogul Richard Branson to relocate his Virgin Galactic company headquarters to the facility as well.

Proposed Spaceport Passenger Terminal

The finished site will rest on approximately 27 square miles of federal land, with almost 15 acres of combined facilities space: terminal and smaller aircraft hangars, support along with administrative offices for Virgin Galactic and the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, a double-height hangar for housing the WhiteKnight Two and SpaceShipTwo crafts.

In addition, they will provide a primary operational training area, departure lounge, spacesuit dressing rooms, and celebration areas, on site restaurant and a mission control room with commanding views across the concrete apron and the 10,000 runway beyond.

SpaceShip Two in low orbit

Thus far, Virgin Galactic has accepted 370 reservations for suborbital trips, and collected $50 million in deposits. The company is planning on the maiden launch of its first flight in 2011 from Spaceport America. Book your tickets on Virgin Galactic's ticketing page!

And if $200,000 per ticket sounds a little steep to you, compare that to NASA's current ticket price of $20M. But after all, NASA gives you the full shuttle experience, multiple Earth orbits and spacefood! Whereas the Virgin Galactic experience would be more like the ultimate roller coaster ride into low Earth orbit and back. But, good news! They might be serving Tang as their in flight beverage!

X-Prize

Virgin Galactic

Spaceport America