Seth Shostak at SETI: Aliens will be Machines

True believers in ET (extraterrestrial alien) contact think that SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence --  is a waste of money, since the anomalous evidence says ET is already here.

Without an official disclosure of the alleged extraterrestrial presence (see my new series "Knowing the Future: 9/11, CIA, UFOs, and the Extraterrestrial Presence" for details) SETI may offer the best chance for making contact with something "out there."

SETI's search is based on conventional communication technology (radio telescopes) so any contact will probably involve technology not too much more advanced than our present day civilization.

There's plenty of debate going on about future means of communication beyond radio: gravity waves, propagating torsion (spin) fields, and sub-quantum telepathy, to name a few.

Most of these ideas are "way out" and probably "not even wrong"  but it is worth recalling that gaps exist in our understanding of the unification of the physics of the very large with the very small. There is potentially a "breakthrough physics" waiting to be discovered that might lead to radical new means of communication.

ABC NEWS has an interesting article about SETI, where Seth Shostak discusses what he believes we will find when our radio telescopes finally make contact with ET.

The article quotes Shostak:

"I think that if there's a conscious intelligence out there, it's synthetic."

There are plenty of reasons to believe that Shostak is correct. ET may very well be synthetic.

The problem faced by human EBEs -- not "Extraterrestrial Biological Entities" but "Earth-bound Biological Entities" --  is the vast gulf in technical knowledge between the human race and "synthetics" which may be millions or billions of years more advanced.

"Synthetics" will probably use some form of "telepathic Internet" for communication. One might even imagine a vast super-cosmic Internet shared by vastly differing "synthetics" with varying levels or hierarchies of access. 

A cosmic Internet may require highly exotic solutions for "superluminal faster-than-light-speed" communication -- perhaps involving a radical new understanding of quantum theory.

One idea for how this might be possible comes from Antony Valentini's version of quantum pilot wave theory. If Valentini's hunch is correct, "synthetics" might utilize "non-quantum"matter to build their cosmic Internet infrastructure. 

The situation here on Earth might evolve rather quickly if one of the "Synthetics" decided  to experiment with EBEs, such as human brains, by interfacing them with access to a limited level of the "Cosmic Internet."

Joy Christian's Quest to Kill "Spooky Action at a Distance"

Einstein never liked the spooky "action at a distance" of quantum nonlocality. 

And he was not alone.

Many have tried. And failed.

The ghostliness of the quantum for all practical purposes appears to be a fundamental feature of the natural world.

Or maybe not?

Oxford's Joy Christian is making bold claims with a new paper that purports to show that "quantum entanglement is best understood as an illusion."

The paper is available at the www.arXiv.org website for downloading in PDF format.

An elementary topological error in Bell's representation of the EPR elements of reality is identified. Once recognized, it leads to a topologically correct local-realistic framework that provides exact, deterministic, and local underpinning of at least the Bell, GHZ-3, GHZ-4, and Hardy states. The correlations exhibited by these states are shown to be exactly the classical correlations among the points of a 3 or 7-sphere, both of which are closed under multiplication, and hence preserve the locality condition of Bell. The alleged non-localities of these states are thus shown to result from misidentified topologies of the EPR elements of reality. When topologies are correctly identified, local-realistic completion of any arbitrary entangled state is always guaranteed in our framework. This vindicates EPR, and entails that quantum entanglement is best understood as an illusion.

CNN: Our Galaxy "May Be Full of Earths, Alien Life"

CNN is reporting that our galaxy many be "full of Earths" ... and alien life.

According to the CNN report, "As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there's new buzz that "Star Trek's" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched."

An unnamed source to STARstream Research, with an extensive background providing intelligence to the US government, previously confirmed "three contacts" between the government and "extraterrestrial biological" beings from other worlds, beginning shortly after World War Two and returning during the 1980s and 1990s. The source did not offer to provide any substantiating evidence to support the claim of alien life visiting the Earth.

CNN also reported:

There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets."

It is interesting that the present population of human beings on our planet is roughly 1/17 of the number of Earth-like worlds postulated by Boss.

Quantum Mind: The Next Generation

Although I am not quite prepared to reveal the details, sources in the U.S. and China have confirmed interest in a "next-generation" of experiments intended to test quantum mind: the idea that human consciousness is affected by quantum weirdness.

Meanwhile, Michael B. Mensky at the P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, has been working on an idea that turns the old Penrose-Hameroff quantum mind idea on its head:

Extended Everett's Concept (EEC) recently developed by the author to explain the phenomenon of consciousness is considered. A mathematical model is proposed for the principal feature of consciousness assumed in EEC, namely its ability (in the state of sleep, trance or meditation, when the explicit consciousness is disabled) to obtain information from all alternative classical realities (Everett's worlds) and select the favorable realities.

Rather than explaining how an individual "world" of the "many worlds" in the "multiverse" maintains quantum coherence in the human brain, Mensky suggests that the mind is a "trans-universe" phenomenon (an emergent property of the many worlds?) that narrows the vast alternatives to select desirable worlds.

As Mensky explains in his abstract, "The brain serves as an interface between the body and consciousness, but the most profound level of consciousness is not a function of brain."

I can already hear Max Tegmark and David Deutsch rolling in their graves (in an alternative universe we call the future, if they are right about the structure of the multiverse and the many worlds!).

Mensky's idea fits rather neatly into the metaphysical world view of psychic remote viewing and Dan T. Smith's favorite, "The Best of All Possible Worlds."

Mensky writes:

According to EEC, the principal feature of consciousness (of human and, more generally, of any living being) is its ability, overcoming the separation of the alternatives, to follow each of them up to the distant time moment in the future, find what alternatives provide survival and choose these alternatives excluding the rest. The evolution of living matter is thus determined not only by causes, but also by the goals, first of all by the goals of survival and
improvement of the quality of life.

This, of course, is the same idea I expressed in the "Minds, Machines, and Madness" series on "human time machines."

Is the government still using psychic spies to "find what alternatives provide survival and choose these alternatives excluding the rest?"

Check out "Spies, Lies, and Polygraph Tape" where I will update the latest information on the quantum mind telepathy experiment (as it becomes releasable).

NASA: Don't be Afraid of the Dark

It's been roughly ten years since astronomers and physicists were forced to face the reality of an invisible "dark energy" driving an acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Previous they had determined the existence of another dark force dubbed "dark matter," thought to hold the galaxies together.

Now, according to this release from NASA, they have a new problem to contend with:


Using data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), scientists have identified an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters.

"The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase," says lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We never expected to find anything like this."

The source for this latest mysterious motion of matter in the cosmos may come from "gravitational attraction of matter that lies beyond the observable universe."

Kashlinsky calls this collective motion a "dark flow" in the vein of more familiar cosmological mysteries: dark energy and dark matter. "The distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for this motion," he says.

The finding flies in the face of predictions from standard cosmological models, which describe such motions as decreasing at ever greater distances.

Kashlinsky and his team suggest that their clusters are responding to the gravitational attraction of matter that was pushed far beyond the observable universe by inflation. "This measurement may give us a way to explore the state of the cosmos before inflation occurred," he says.

Inflation refers to the expansion of the universe, which is now know to be accelerating due to the mysterious dark energy.

Dark energy acts like an antigravity force. Some have proposed that a similar effect might be accessible at the scale of everyday experience, and account for the alleged antigravity observations of Podkletnov and others.

Unreality Recovered: The Physics of the Impossible

I haven't had a chance to read Dr. Michio Kaku's new book, which is currently sitting at the number 12 spot on the New York Times non-fiction best seller's list.

Here are a few excerpts from reviews of Kaku's book, that link back to the original review:

Teleportation and forcefields could become scientific realities within decades, and time travel will also be possible in the future, according to one of the world's leading physicists.

In fact, one of the world's foremost physicists, Michio Kaku, has put his academic mind to some of science fiction's other concepts, such as teleportation and force fields, and is convinced that they, too, can become reality.

Impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Might be possible this century or the next: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes.

The most precious substance on Earth isn't gold or platinum. It's antimatter, valued by physicist Michio Kaku at $62.5 trillion a gram.

Kaku spoke about teleportation, pointing out that researchers have already teleported a photon from one Canary Island to another over a distance of 100 miles. In the next decade, he theorized, water molecules will be teleported and then complex molecules like DNA.

Arthur C. Clarke: Visionary Writer, Dead at Age 90

Arthur C. Clarke, the visionary author whose work inspired Stanley Kubrick's cinema epic "2001: A Space Odyssey," has passed away:

From the New York Times:

Published: March 19, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

Rohan de Silva, an aide, confirmed the death and said Mr. Clarke had been experiencing breathing problems, The Associated Press reported. He had suffered from post-polio syndrome for the last two decades.