Are we alone in the universe?

[Dalo Harkin]

Right - was watching Independence Day last night............

peoples opinions on whether we are alone in the universe?

 

I think we are not - but as I am a sci-fi geek there could be many reasons for this:-

 

Stargate - wormholes to other universes - no one wants to come to ours:(

Star Trek - ships would take forever to get here even on warp 10 :D

 

And more importantly I remember seeing a program on discovery I think on Mars saying that its core was made from Ice - life at one point??

and before WOLFEY or MAYNARD jump in no I didn't fall asleep watching Total Recall lol :D

[Guest Wolfeymole]

I agree Dave on the "are we alone", no chance.

 

My old man once said to me that the Universe is so vast that the human mind cannot comprehend it.

 

Without doubt we are not alone, that is my firm belief and the sun may expire and we all turn into dried ****aki mushrooms before we are ever contacted but I reckon there is definitely life out there.

[Goku]

I too think that we are not alone in the universe. I think the reason they are not able to get to us is that they too might not have the resources or tools to come to our solar system which could be virtually light years away from them.

 

What I don't understand is that why people imagine that aliens will be more sophisticated, advanced or will possess supernatural powers. It might be the opposite too but few people try to imagine them that way. Anyways, I hope we will be the one to "make the first move". :)

 

It might be that we may find our own "unearthly" brethren in some other far-away galaxy! :)

 

-- Goku

[DSTM]

I don't think there are any other life Forms,on other Planets.The Temps on other Planets would not sustain life.IMO.

We can allways let our imagination,get the best of us.:)

[Dalo Harkin]

And how about other galaxies or universes DSTM?

[Guest Wolfeymole]

There are literally billions of suns out there Dougie and it doesn't come down to temperature but the presence of water.

[RandyL]

Actually there are probably billions of suns in just the milkyway galaxy. Add to that billions of galaxys.

 

10 billion times 10 billion

[Goku]

Is it necessary that other forms of life may evolve in the same temperature or conditions we sustain our existence?

 

-- Goku

[DSTM]

I meant in our Planetary System.I realize there are probably millions of Suns and other Galaxies,and they are so many light years away,I don't think contact will ever be made.:)

[Guest Wolfeymole]

A theory put forward by Albert Einstein in 1905 that is based on two postulates:

• 
  
• The laws of physics are the same in any inertial reference frame (i.e. any non-accelerated reference frame).
   
   
  
• The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, no matter how they are moving.
  

As in Newtonian mechanics, there is a set of mathematical transformations that relate the spacetime coordinates used by different observers in such a way that the laws of nature appear the same to all observers. In special relativity however, the spacetime transformations have the essential property of leaving the speed of light unchanged, irrespective of the velocity of the observer. These transformations result in a number of surprising relativistic effects.

 

Among the predictions of the special theory is that no material object can be accelerated to reach light-speed – a result which appears to rule out practical interstellar travel for all but the nearest stars. However, the special theory provides an escape clause in that for objects (such as a very fast spacecraft and its crew) moving at significant fractions of the speed of light, time slows down. In principle, this time dilation would allow astronauts to travel as far as they liked within as short a period as they liked, simply by moving at a sufficiently high speed. The problem is that the time dilation effect does not operate for those who stay at home, so that the star-hopping astronauts would suffer the disturbing phenomenon of time dislocation.

 

 

How Einstein was led to special relativity

 

As a sixteen-year-old Einstein started pondering the kind of thought experiments that would become a hallmark of his career. What would you see, he wondered, if you rode astride a beam of light or held a mirror and looked into it while traveling at the speed of light? Over the next ten years, he continued to question the nature of space, time, and light, and to ask how physics would need to change if it were to address all circumstances in which objects are moving relative to one another. Amazingly he brought about a revolution in physics while working as a technical expert third class at the Berne patent office. Isolated from academe, unheard of by eminent professors at the venerable universities of Europe, he whiled away his spare hours rethinking the notion of time and mulling over the relationship between the speed of light and the speed of an observer. During this period of anonymity, his closest confidante was Michele Besso, a fellow patent clerk, whom he’d first met at a musical evening in 1896, both being keen violinists. Of Besso, Einstein said: "I could not have got a better sounding board in the whole of Europe."

 

For over a year, Einstein had been stymied by a problem he couldn’t see a way around. It was simply this: if the speed of light is a universal constant, as he guessed it was, then the usual “Galilean” addition of velocities doesn’t work. According to the physics of Galileo and Newton, if you walk down the aisle of a train that's moving along the track, then your speed relative to the ground equals the train's speed plus your walking speed. This seems like perfectly good commonsense and is what you'd actually find if you took measurements, unless you could measure with atomic precision, in which case you'd notice a puzzling discrepancy. In the same way, if the train has a lamp at the front then, according to Newtonian science, the speed of the rays leaving the lamp ought to equal the train's speed plus the speed of light. But if the speed of light doesn't depend on how the source is moving, as Einstein believed, this simple addition can't be right, otherwise you could easily break the light barrier. Then, "one momentous day in May," recalled Einstein, inspiration dawned. He visited Besso and explained what was on his mind: "Today I come here," he said, "to battle against that problem with you." Together they looked at the question from every angle, until suddenly Einstein saw the answer to his difficulty: if the speed of light is always the same, then space and time must be changeable. The notion that space and time formed a fixed ?backdrop against which the drama of the universe played out – Newton's viewpoint – was wrong. Space and time, length and duration, would be measured differently depending on the relative motion of the observer.

 

On June 30, 1905, Einstein’s paper that formed the basis of what would eventually be called the special theory of relativity was published. Modestly titled (translated from German) "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," it was very unusual as scientific papers go.1 No references appeared in it to any other papers or to the work of any other researcher, merely an acknowledgment of the "loyal assistance of my friend M. Besso." Of it, C. P. Snow has said:2

There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.

There's a directness about the June '05 paper, a clarity, that comes across without the need for advanced math. The seemingly ad hoc transformations of Lorentz and Fitzgerald follow naturally and inevitably, in Einstein's hands, from simple geometry and the well-known theorem of Pythagoras. And all of this simplicity and clarity – in fact, the whole theory of special relativity – stems from just two basic postulates that Einstein lays down early on. The first is that the laws of physics are identical in all inertial frames: that is, to all observers who are at a rest or traveling with constant velocity relative to one another. The second is that the speed of light is the same in any inertial frame, whether the light is given off by a body at rest or in a state of uniform motion.

 

Right at the start of his paper, Einstein does some impressive spring-cleaning – dispensing with the ether along with any lingering notions of absolute space and an absolute state of rest:

[T]he introduction of a light-ether will prove to be superfluous since, according to the view to be developed here, neither will a space in absolute rest endowed with special properties be introduced nor will a velocity vector be associated with a point of empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place.

Einstein restores the principle of relativity to physics because he insists that physical laws have to look the same to all observers traveling at constant velocity – exactly as Galileo and Newton had done. But the only way he could do this and keep the speed of light constant in his theory, no matter what the motion of the source, was to allow space and time to be flexible. From Einstein’s postulates the Lorentz transformation flows as a matter of course: time and length really do shrink along the direction of movement, although these "relativistic" effects only kick in at velocities that are a significant fraction of that of light itself.

 

Oddly enough, Einstein never talked about the Michelson-Morley experiment even though his seminal paper gave a complete explanation of its null results. Despite being the main reason that other scientists, such as Poincaré and Lorentz, were questioning the established notions about space and time, the experiment was never acknowledged by Einstein as having any influence on his thinking. Even more strangely, Poincaré and Einstein seemed to go out of their way to avoid crediting each other. Poincaré was closing in on relativity theory himself at the time Einstein achieved his breakthrough and, perhaps with the help of others, would have come to similar conclusions, sooner rather than later. Yet Einstein mentions him only once in all of his papers, while Poincaré never wrote a word on relativity in which he refers to Einstein. Lorentz, on the other hand, was praised by both and often cited by them, even though Lorentz never fully accepted relativity. Here is the man after whom the transformation equations at the heart of special relativity are named speaking in 1913:

As far as this lecturer is concerned he finds a certain satisfaction in the older interpretation according to which the ether possesses at least some substantiality, space and time can be sharply separated, and simultaneity without further specification can be spoken of. Finally it should be noted that the daring assertion that one can never observe velocities larger than the velocity of light contains a hypothetical restriction of what is accessible to us, a restriction which cannot be accepted without some reservation.

Long before he uttered these words, however, Lorentz had found himself in a minority as acceptance of the special theory of relativity grew, especially following Max Planck's endorsement of it.

 

On September 27, 1905, Einstein sent out a sequel to his June paper in which he proved what's become the most famous formula in all of science.3 Previously, it had been thought that energy couldn't be created or destroyed, a claim known as the law of conservation of energy. A similar conservation law was believed to hold true for mass. But what Einstein showed, again starting from his two basic postulates, is that energy and mass are interrelated – the one can turn into the other. How much energy you get for a given investment of mass is decided by the equation E = mc2, where c is the speed of light. Because c2 (c times c) is, when measured in conventional units, is a very large number, a tiny amount of mass yields a vast outpouring of energy. In time this relationship would prove to be the secret behind the energy production of stars and the key to the most destructive weapons ever conceived by humankind. And it would play a part too in Einstein's formulation of a new theory of gravity.

 

Einstein melded energy and mass with his E = mc2. But it was one of his old university professors, the Lithuanian-born mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who showed that space and time were also inextricably connected. When Einstein was an undergraduate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (also known as the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or ETH) in the late 1890s, Minkowski was less than impressed by him. "A lazy dog," he called him, because of his apathy toward work. So, no one was more surprised than Minkowski when his miscreant of a student made good: "Oh, that Einstein, always cutting lectures – I really would not have thought him capable of it." But it didn't take Minkowski long to grasp the importance of relativity theory and to plunge into it with whole-hearted enthusiasm.

 

According to the Lorentz transformation, length contracts as time slows down or "dilates," suggesting a complementary relationship between the two. Minkowski took this idea to its natural conclusion: time (t) is just another coordinate like the three coordinates of space (x, y, z), so that every happening or “event” can be uniquely pinpointed in space and time by a quartet of values – its coordinates (x, y, z, t) in the continuum of spacetime. Minkowski summed up these ideas in a lecture he gave in September 1908:

Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

In this strange but elegant new world of Minkowski spacetime, we’re each travelers in a four-dimensional realm. At each moment you exist at a specific point in spacetime, and your life, from birth to death, can be charted as a unique trajectory through spacetime – a complicated twisting path that Minkowski called a world-line. If you move relative to others, space and time change for you as determined by the Lorentz transformation. Move very quickly indeed, at speeds that are a sizable fraction of the speed of light, and these changes become marked: space is effectively traded for time – length contracting as time dilates, while energy of motion turns into increased mass. The mathematician sees these effects in terms of symmetry operations: the Lorentz transformation is equivalent to rotations and translations in the multi-dimensionality of spacetime.

[maynardvdm]

I will just say one thing: http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll57/mjsmileys/that20was20close.gif

 

Very interesting read Wolfey. ;)

[petef]

Right - was watching Independence Day last night............

peoples opinions on whether we are alone in the universe?

 

 

I think it boils down to one basic concept. Is there a single God that

created the universe and is the story of creation told in the Holy Bible true?

 

If that's all true, then it is indeed possible that the entire universe was

created solely for man. If it's not true, then it's likely that man and life

on earth happened by sheer accident and that the same could occur

elsewhere in the universe.

 

I also believe that if we begin findiing evidence of life similar to humans

throughout the universe it would have the power to collapse religions

as we know them today.

 

I'm not a particularly religious person, but I do recall reading something

in the bible that predicted a time when man would worship the "created"

(earth, animals & universe?) more than the creator (God). I just did some

research to locate that chapter in the bible and came across these few

passages listed below. If this is indeed a predition of the future written in

biblical times, I find it quite fasinating.

 

From the book of Romans in the Bible, chapter 1:

 

22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

 

23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to

corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping

things.

 

24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their

own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

 

25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the

creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

 

26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their

women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

 

27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned

in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is

unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error

which was meet.

 

 

---pete---

[petef]

Check this out. Breaking news from a credible source.

Listen to the interview at the website below.

---pete---

 

 

Source:

LiveLeak.com - Moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell Claims Alien Contact Cover-up

 

Moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell Claims Alien Contact Cover-up

Featured

 

"there has been visitation"

July 24, 2008 12:01am

 

FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens exist.

 

And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

[DSTM]

Dr Mitchell makes some wild claims,and no proof, to back it up.

Heard all this many times. Will believe it,when I see it.:)

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Yes and people thought we were at the center of the universe until Copernicus put em straight Doug.

 

Ya just never know mate.

[petef]

Dr Mitchell makes some wild claims,and no proof, to back it up.

Heard all this many times. Will believe it,when I see it.:)

 

Good point, because all of Mitchell's knowledge on the alien topic comes from second hand information. What this news does do is give some credibility to the notion of a goverment cover up. It does not prove that aliens exist but it does say that that the government has had knowledge of the topic and was not forthcoming with that knowledge and also trying to silence people from telling what they know.

 

Has anyone here ever heard of Bill Cooper?

 

Bill was an amazing guy and claimed to have seen a UFO as well as reports on this topic as a member of the Intelligence Briefing Team of the Commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet. Over the years his opinions changed as to what the objective was behind the entire concept of alien visitors. In the beginning he was a believer that they existed and he wrote about it (see link below for that amazing story), but over time he grew to believe that it was actually a contrived concept with global political motives behind it. Bill had only one leg as a result of being run off the road. He claimed it was by people in government trying to intimidate him from speaking out on a variety of issues. Bill was eventually killed in Arizona a gun fight with law enforcement in year 2001.

 

On this topic of Aliens you can read some of Bill's writings at the links below. I followed the writings and shortwave broadcasts of this guy during the years 1992 to his death in 2001, so I know a good deal about him, in case anyone wants to discuss him and his theories or stories. Even if you don't believe what he writes about it is a fantastic story that is now somwhat validated with the statements made publicly by FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell.

 

WILLIAM COOPER

 

The Secret Government

[DSTM]

Thanks for the info,and the links,Pete.Will read with interest.

We will probably never know, what our Governments are really covering up.Everything is top secret.Here are links, to Area 51,which I find a good read.:)

 

area 51 - Google Search