Schuyler
Misanthrope
Actually there are three ‘origin hypotheses’ about ‘UFOs’ The first and oldest is the ‘Extra-terrestrial Hypothesis’ that UFOs/Aliens come, literally from other planets in other solar systems. The second is the ‘Inter-Dimensional Hypothesis’ which suggests that somehow there are more the three/four dimensions and that UFOs/Aliens are able to traverse from another dimension that more or less inhabits the same space as we do, perhaps at a different vibrationary level. The third is the ‘Crypto-terrestrial Hypothesis that suggests UFOs/Aliens are actually from right here on Earth, somehow co-existing with us while remaining elusive.
The fourth hypothesis is the DBH: The Data Base Hypothesis. I do not know if this is entirely new in all respects. It is certainly not based on any hard evidence and must remain in the realm of abject speculation. I stumbled across the skeleton of this idea when my Spousal Unit and I agreed to host an author dinner for our local Library Foundation as a fund raiser. The idea was that people would pay $75.00 apiece to have dinner at our house with a ‘famous author’ in attendance. We got Greg Bear.
In preparation for this I figured I’d better read a Greg Bear book fast! I’d heard of him and knew he had a great reputation, but I’d just never got around to reading his books. So I picked “Moving Mars,” published by Tor Books in 1993. A very short synopsis: It’s 2171. Mars has been colonized for 53 years. The ‘Triple” (Earth, Moon, Mars, and a few asteroids) is dominated by Earth. Earth is being a bully. Mars wants to become independent. Mars has a new secret weapon. Earth freaks out and tries to destroy Mars, so the Martians, i.e.: Humans who colonized Mars, move Mars to a distant solar system to escape. That’s about it.
The physics of the move is what is important to the DBH. It’s been a couple hundred years since Super String Theory has been center-stage, and the cutting edge of physics is something quite different. It hypothesizes that below String Theory is something else entirely. Everything in the Universe is categorized by descriptors like in a database.
Now, what is a database? Here is a short primer. Think of your driver’s license as a record of what the State knows about you vis-à-vis your driving. It states your name, address, height, weight, age, eye-color, license number, and codes about your type of license, whether you are authorized to drive a motorcycle or an 18-wheeler. That sort of thing. Each bit of information above is a ‘field’ in the license itself, which is a ‘record.’ All the records put together for your state constitute a ‘database.’
I just described a ‘flat file’ database, which is pretty simple. But, of course, it’s not that simple. Any large database is ‘relational’ in nature. In this kind of database the file of driver’s license records I called a ‘database’ above becomes a ‘table’ in a relational database and the ‘fields’ of information become ‘data elements’ in the table. But there are other tables in the database. Perhaps there’s one of medical information, another of your tax data, another of your police record. Each one of these tables contains different information about you that is ‘related’ by a common data element. This might be your name or your social security number, or a combination that uniquely identifies you. Together all these tables contain records of data elements belonging to you. Programmers write programs to extract data by composing indices based on whatever data elements interest them, pointer files tying tables together, and reporting programs that provide useful information. The data and the programs can become quite complex.
Add to this the basic structure of the records themselves. A database can be ‘fixed field’ or ‘compressed.’ A ‘fixed field’ system has a certain number of characters allocated for each data element, Your last name might be allocated 20 characters maximum. Your year of birth might have been allocated two characters (and THERE’S Y2K in a nutshell), hopefully four. But inevitably, a fixed field structure leads to a lot of ‘air’ in the records with allocate spaces which have not been utilized. The advantage of a fixed field system (such as dBase and its clones) is that you always know where you are. If a record is 1000 characters long you know without a doubt that a new record starts in 1000+1 characters.
The other way of doing this is to save space by creating a variable-length record, so if your name is “Doe” it takes three characters and if your name is “Steinberg” it takes nine characters. So instead of taking 40 spaces for two names you take up 12 spaces for two names. This saves a huge amount of space, but it increases complexity because now you don’t know where the new record starts. So you have to set up ‘special’ characters as sign posts to tell you the start and stop of each data element and each record.
Now imagine that everything in the Universe, including every grain of sand and every planet, has records in a multi-table relational database and that if you know how to manipulate these data elements, using advanced artificial intelligence and super fast computers, you can change space and time. In order to change the position of Mars in the Universe, you first locate all records pertaining to Mars, change the position coordinates in the database records, click on save, and Mars now exists somewhere else. It does not ‘travel’ from one place to another. It does not ‘traverse space.’ Its positional coordinates simply change. Rather than being the fourth planet of the Sol System, it is now the third planet of a remote star on the other side of the Galaxy far away from the interference of the powers on Earth.
It would be kind of like looking up Gene Steinberg in the driver’s license database, changing his year of birth from 1949 to 1969, clicking on ‘save’ and having all the data elements in all the records in all the tables of the database update themselves, and suddenly Gene would be twenty years younger.
That’s the basic idea in Moving Mars. I ran this interpretation by Greg Bear, and he said I was being too simplistic, that he had a deeper idea in mind, but agreed with the basic idea. His idea is that Mars was moved temporarily out of the scheme of existence and plugged back in at a new location, kind of out of reality into the aether and back out into reality again, creating a little human drama along the way.
The DBH could explain a lot. It could explain how UFOs wink in and out of existence on or near Earth. It could explain why no Faster than Light travel is necessary because you don’t actually travel at all. It could explain the multiplicity of sightings. It could explain a truly alien presence. And it could explain the economics. Just as communications costs have plummeted to near zero, making it cost-effective to move Call Centers to India, such a scheme in transportation would move travel costs to near zero, erasing all inhibitions caused by distance.
This is actually a combination of the ETH and IDH, allowing for both, but needing neither one.
Just an idea......
The fourth hypothesis is the DBH: The Data Base Hypothesis. I do not know if this is entirely new in all respects. It is certainly not based on any hard evidence and must remain in the realm of abject speculation. I stumbled across the skeleton of this idea when my Spousal Unit and I agreed to host an author dinner for our local Library Foundation as a fund raiser. The idea was that people would pay $75.00 apiece to have dinner at our house with a ‘famous author’ in attendance. We got Greg Bear.
In preparation for this I figured I’d better read a Greg Bear book fast! I’d heard of him and knew he had a great reputation, but I’d just never got around to reading his books. So I picked “Moving Mars,” published by Tor Books in 1993. A very short synopsis: It’s 2171. Mars has been colonized for 53 years. The ‘Triple” (Earth, Moon, Mars, and a few asteroids) is dominated by Earth. Earth is being a bully. Mars wants to become independent. Mars has a new secret weapon. Earth freaks out and tries to destroy Mars, so the Martians, i.e.: Humans who colonized Mars, move Mars to a distant solar system to escape. That’s about it.
The physics of the move is what is important to the DBH. It’s been a couple hundred years since Super String Theory has been center-stage, and the cutting edge of physics is something quite different. It hypothesizes that below String Theory is something else entirely. Everything in the Universe is categorized by descriptors like in a database.
Now, what is a database? Here is a short primer. Think of your driver’s license as a record of what the State knows about you vis-à-vis your driving. It states your name, address, height, weight, age, eye-color, license number, and codes about your type of license, whether you are authorized to drive a motorcycle or an 18-wheeler. That sort of thing. Each bit of information above is a ‘field’ in the license itself, which is a ‘record.’ All the records put together for your state constitute a ‘database.’
I just described a ‘flat file’ database, which is pretty simple. But, of course, it’s not that simple. Any large database is ‘relational’ in nature. In this kind of database the file of driver’s license records I called a ‘database’ above becomes a ‘table’ in a relational database and the ‘fields’ of information become ‘data elements’ in the table. But there are other tables in the database. Perhaps there’s one of medical information, another of your tax data, another of your police record. Each one of these tables contains different information about you that is ‘related’ by a common data element. This might be your name or your social security number, or a combination that uniquely identifies you. Together all these tables contain records of data elements belonging to you. Programmers write programs to extract data by composing indices based on whatever data elements interest them, pointer files tying tables together, and reporting programs that provide useful information. The data and the programs can become quite complex.
Add to this the basic structure of the records themselves. A database can be ‘fixed field’ or ‘compressed.’ A ‘fixed field’ system has a certain number of characters allocated for each data element, Your last name might be allocated 20 characters maximum. Your year of birth might have been allocated two characters (and THERE’S Y2K in a nutshell), hopefully four. But inevitably, a fixed field structure leads to a lot of ‘air’ in the records with allocate spaces which have not been utilized. The advantage of a fixed field system (such as dBase and its clones) is that you always know where you are. If a record is 1000 characters long you know without a doubt that a new record starts in 1000+1 characters.
The other way of doing this is to save space by creating a variable-length record, so if your name is “Doe” it takes three characters and if your name is “Steinberg” it takes nine characters. So instead of taking 40 spaces for two names you take up 12 spaces for two names. This saves a huge amount of space, but it increases complexity because now you don’t know where the new record starts. So you have to set up ‘special’ characters as sign posts to tell you the start and stop of each data element and each record.
Now imagine that everything in the Universe, including every grain of sand and every planet, has records in a multi-table relational database and that if you know how to manipulate these data elements, using advanced artificial intelligence and super fast computers, you can change space and time. In order to change the position of Mars in the Universe, you first locate all records pertaining to Mars, change the position coordinates in the database records, click on save, and Mars now exists somewhere else. It does not ‘travel’ from one place to another. It does not ‘traverse space.’ Its positional coordinates simply change. Rather than being the fourth planet of the Sol System, it is now the third planet of a remote star on the other side of the Galaxy far away from the interference of the powers on Earth.
It would be kind of like looking up Gene Steinberg in the driver’s license database, changing his year of birth from 1949 to 1969, clicking on ‘save’ and having all the data elements in all the records in all the tables of the database update themselves, and suddenly Gene would be twenty years younger.
That’s the basic idea in Moving Mars. I ran this interpretation by Greg Bear, and he said I was being too simplistic, that he had a deeper idea in mind, but agreed with the basic idea. His idea is that Mars was moved temporarily out of the scheme of existence and plugged back in at a new location, kind of out of reality into the aether and back out into reality again, creating a little human drama along the way.
The DBH could explain a lot. It could explain how UFOs wink in and out of existence on or near Earth. It could explain why no Faster than Light travel is necessary because you don’t actually travel at all. It could explain the multiplicity of sightings. It could explain a truly alien presence. And it could explain the economics. Just as communications costs have plummeted to near zero, making it cost-effective to move Call Centers to India, such a scheme in transportation would move travel costs to near zero, erasing all inhibitions caused by distance.
This is actually a combination of the ETH and IDH, allowing for both, but needing neither one.
Just an idea......
). Too bad I didn't think of this as we had to design a database for our final assignment, and I could freaked the lecturer out.
