NO ET according to Peter Ward - NASA News

[Robert Baird]

Today's news is an update on an article from the current superstar astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson who is on shows like The Big Bang Theory and others where he answers questions about life in universe such as he did in this article. There are many excellent articles in case anyone is actually interested in learning - a rare thing is common sense.

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-n...distant-worlds

Neil has a friendly debate with paleontologist Peter Ward at the NOVA site. I would propose that Earth is no where near the age of many other solar systems and that if life had two times the time to evolve there would be many more sentient beings than you can create in an hour of typing zeros after the number nine. The number of solar systems is that huge and we now can speak with some assurance that other lifeforms have or currently do exist outside our own little planet in just this solar system. Peter thinks we are special and that is true but I think we are less special than we might want to believe and that there are millions or more species which exceed our specialness. Carl Sagan is no free-thinker and he said there were likely to be a million civilizations on planets in just our galaxy. There are billions of galaxies in the known universe and how many universes are there?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/are-we-alone.html

You and I both will probably never get inside the jargon which follows and yet something makes sense in it. I am wondering if the "cosmic microwave background" it mentions; is what eluded Michael Faraday and Crookes, or if they knew it; but merely could not prove it given the technological limitations of their era.

In my study of Yoga and the Tao I have seen and sensed what the ancients knew and which we now are coming close to proving. Yogananda's small book called The Science of Religion is a necessary read for any ecumenicist or person seeking for truth which is not in any one system or religion but rather in every one of them. Based on ancient teachings and eternal realities, Yogananda explains that the whole physical universe, including man, is surrounded by, and made of cosmic energy. We can, through the act of our will, release tension that blocks the energy flow to our body and mind, and draw on this infinite storehouse of life-force all around us. That life-force or Pranha and chhi (qi and other words in varied languages) allows pneumatology and Therapeutae since Pythagoras and the DNN if not before, to perform miracles.

"Inflationary gravitational waves in the effective field theory of modified gravity

Antonio De Felice, Shinji Tsujikawa

(Submitted on 3 Nov 2014 (v1), last revised 12 May 2015 (this version, v2))

In the approach of the effective field theory of modified gravity, we derive the second-order action and the equation of motion for tensor perturbations on the flat isotropic cosmological background. This analysis accommodates a wide range of gravitational theories including Horndeski theories, its generalization, and the theories with spatial derivatives higher than second order (e.g., Horava-Lifshitz gravity). We obtain the inflationary power spectrum of tensor modes by taking into account corrections induced by higher-order spatial derivatives and slow-roll corrections to the de Sitter background. We also show that the leading-order spectrum in concrete modified gravitational theories can be mapped on to that in General Relativity under a disformal transformation. Our general formula will be useful to constrain inflationary models from the future precise measurement of the B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background."

http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.0736

We are still limited by our insufficient technology but soon we will have a better idea of what humans have struggled to explain throughout time. Metaphysics is a realm which philosophy eschewed in favor of a science that felt it was able to grasp all of what we saw - that science was definitely wrong as we now know. Relativity was a quantum leap through curved space but gravitational wave theory is taking us way back to shamanistic or alchemical attunements.

"The Big Bang: When the Universe was very young it underwent a period of very rapid expansion. Tiny fluctuations in spacetime would have been greatly stretched during this period and could still exist today as a background of gravitational waves. This could be detected by studying the polarisation patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). With current instruments it is unlikely, but not impossible that we shall be able to measure the background. However, a positive detection would allow us to better understand the mechanism that drove early inflation of the Universe and probe extremely high energy physics. The gravitational wave background would allow us to see right back to the Big Bang, much further than we can see using EM radiation."

Can we hope to grasp how thought impacts the formation of water crystals such as Masaro Emotu demonstrated? Will our probing of space and it's vastness bring us to an understanding of what is within each molecule interacting with consciousness smaller than the god particle?

"Phase transitions: As the Universe evolves from its early state it goes through a number of phase transitions which can be associated with symmetry breaking or decoupling of forces. These transitions can create lead to several different types of gravitational radiation. As an analogy, imagine cooling water so that it begins to form ice. This is a phase transition too. Ice begins to form as small crystals that grow outwards. The same can happen in the Universe, small pockets undergo the transition and these expand out as a bubble. For certain types of transitions, gravitational waves would be emitted when bubbles collide. In other cases, topological defects are created following the transition. The analogy would be when two crystals of ice grow together, but their structures are not quite aligned, so that that there is a clear boundary, a defect or domain wall. For spacetime, two examples of topological defects are cosmic strings and domain walls; the former are 1D strings of cosmic length, whereas domain walls are 2D. Such defects are expected to be rare as they have been diluted in space by the expansion of the Universe. However, they have a unique gravitational wave signal, which should make them easy to identify. Such a detection would be an exciting discovery of exotic physics"

http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/research/co...tational.waves

 

[Burnt State]

That's a lot of good reading up there in those links and ideas to respond to later, but please pardon me as i casually mention, that more than a Bard, you sir, are a many-tenacled Thread Demon:

 

[Robert Baird]

TY - Burnt

I am that but I also am a person who could take this one thread and make it into a hundred threads with no difficulty. Most people are trained to think in linear logical ways. I am a linear logical brain type so school never challenged me and I learned things most people would think makes me an ALIEN. Have you heard of Bibliomancy? When I was writing I could ask a question of the library. Books almost fell off shelves and I might go through ten books in a few hours and be back for more before the Library closed.

It was the same Library but newer building that my father read almost every book in while he was growing up after his mom died and his step mom moved in with kids she favored so much she fed him Ex-Lax. He became a member of the Argonaut Rowing team at the Boulevard Club (You probably have seen). Many things he learned I never had a chance to learn. He performed on the violin at Massey Hall. He was known as Twinkletoes at the Palace Pier and spent a night with Billy Holliday. He knew the Purple Gang and the best Jazz musicians. He tried to teach me the Pixie Mind and somehow I got it - I don't know how, cause words cannot convey. When I met my Ogham mentor around age 40 he saw much in me, maybe because I am a Baird. But I really did not know more than most people know about Bards at that time. A Quantum Leap occurred and my life became such a maelstrom of miraculous things. I met an adept who could De-Materialize and saw my Ogham mentor do a little of it, after I told him.

My grandfather was a top union man who fed a whole street during the Depression. We picked berries, had no indoor plumbing etc.. I used to entertain the weed freak friends of mine with stories about growing up in the boonies. One day we were at the house of someone who could verify one of the more exotic stories. It was about a sixteen year old in my grade one class who f*cked a cow when it was sick. They all wanted to hear them again - never told any of them those stories ever again. You might know such things where you come from in Northern Ontario.

 

[Robert Baird]

Unfortunately there was no vote amongst people on Earth when they sent the Von Neumann probes into outer space to spread Earth Genetic material and pollute what might be a far better place. But that is a reasonable risk to take if you believe humans have greater moral sentience than far older cultures elsewhere in universe.

NASA’s NExSS Coalition to Lead Search for Life on Distant Worlds | NASA

The NASA folk tell us they are searching vigorously for a planet that will sustain humanity. We do need another planet and I guess they have ruled out the third planet away from Alpha Centauri just eight light years away. That planet would only take 15 years to get to if we find a way to deal with the inevitable space debris and small cosmic particles that have weight of astronomical magnitude because they are collapsed into the nucleus. Some of these particles hit earth and go deep into the crust. Thus we will need a shield with a charge or a charging potential, or a dimensional shifting pulse, or a computer operated beam to clear a path at beyond light speed. Ram Jet or Ion Propulsion can build up past warp speed but it takes time. The black hole propulsion I have mentioned elsewhere is probably too dangerous to discuss with much credibility. Maybe one of the Contactees can elucidate their observed method of propulsion. Wormholes might work for a small craft but creating wormholes for large bodies by folded space is not likely - robots yes.

The above link has this to say about the one and only candidate for us to live on that has been found (Mars is a great place to terraform. However, there are so many on Earth already headed there I doubt it will survive human management either.)

"We know of just one planet where life exists -- Earth. When we search for life outside our solar system we focus on finding planets with characteristics that mimic that of Earth," said Elisa Quintana, research scientist at the SETI Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science. "Finding a habitable zone planet comparable to Earth in size is a major step forward."

Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The system is also home to four companion planets, which orbit a star half the size and mass of our sun. The star is classified as an M dwarf, or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

"M dwarfs are the most numerous stars," said Quintana. "The first signs of other life in the galaxy may well come from planets orbiting an M dwarf."

Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130-days and receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset.