StarHeart.US/ZOX.html - ZoX - UFOs, Aliens, Mars, Moon, Eos, NASA, Space Travel, Hyperdimensional Physics, Astronomy

LONDON (Reuters) - Imagine an ultra expensive holiday with nothing to do but stare into space.

Though that prospect may do little to lure you to rush out and book, the World Tourism Organization predicts it will soon be a popular choice and that space travel will be commonplace by 2020 -- low orbit trips may even take off within three years.

And as companies trip over each other building crafts to whisk adventurous tourists there first, an international design firm is concentrating on building a place for them to stay.

Architects Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo (WAT&G), creators of the Legoland Theme Park in Windsor, southern England, are hoping to solve the outer space hotel dilemma.

Their space resort, part cruise ship and part theme park, will accommodate 100 people as they orbit the Earth 186 miles up, dining on hydroponically grown food.

Still in its conceptual stage, the space hotel will be like a spinning bicycle wheel with spokes
that will simulate normal earth gravity in some parts and have zero gravity in others, allowing for weightless sport and entertainment.

Howard Wolff, vice president of WAT&G, expects to have the space resort up and
running by 2017.

"A flight up to the resort will be quicker than flying from Hong Kong to Singapore," he told
Reuters.

Evidence that there is an AREA 51

Why is the English translation of the word "Cairo" translated into the word "Mars"?

by Michael Miller, Sept 23, 1999

PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - An unmanned $125 million spacecraft, intended to be the first interplanetary weather station, went missing Thursday and NASA scientists said they feared it had broken up just as it was starting to circle Mars.

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said there also was a possibility that the Mars Climate Orbiter may have crashed into the Martian surface.

Scientists lost communication with the unmanned orbiter after it circled behind the Red Planet at about 5:30 AM EDT.

Project manager Richard Cook told a news conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
"We believe the spacecraft came in at a lower altitude than we thought it would and that
potentially resulted in the loss of the mission."

The most likely scenario, he said, was that it had broken up.

"There is a possibility that it impacted the surface, but that is a remote possibility," Cook
said.

The climate orbiter was launched in December 1998 with NASA hoping that it would gather data on atmospheric conditions on Mars through each of its seasons and learn about past and future weather conditions.

It aimed to study Martian weather for one Mars year -- about two Earth years -- to glean
information on the cycles of water, carbon dioxide and dust on Earth's neighbor.

Cook said that NASA scientists had expected that the orbiter would approach Mars at an altitude of between 87 and 93 miles when it fact it came in at 37 miles above the surface of the planet. He said the minimum survival altitude was 53 miles.

The project's development manager, John McNamee, said, "We don't believe that (37 miles) is survivable."

Cook said there was a "significant drop" in altitude in the last few hours of the approach to Mars, but the reason for that had not yet been determined.

Asked if human error, software or mechanical problems were to blame, Cook said, "We are essentially ruling out spacecraft (mechanical) error and we are looking at the other two."

But both Cook and McNamee stressed that their ground crews were not suffering from "burnout."

Cook added, "Deep space navigation is very complex. We are pushing the state of the art to its limits. Yesterday we believed that we knew where the spacecraft was but we were out by about 100 kilometers (62 miles). This is a very significant change in altitude and that is why were are so shocked."

Cook said scientists still were looking for the craft by sending signals into space over a broad wave band, but had been unable to locate it.

The apparent loss of the climate orbiter follows a dazzling string of successes for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's "better, cheaper, faster" program.

NASA has launched successfully 20 unmanned deep-space probes in the last two years, including the Mars Pathfinder mission that grabbed the attention and imagination of the world with its little Mars Rover, which sent back thousands of pictures and millions of pieces of information as it examined the surface of the Red Planet.

Carl Pilcher, the mission's science director, said with such a launch rate it was inevitable that something eventually would go wrong.

"It is an inevitable part of pushing the envelope. There will be failures. I would like to say we would be successful 100 percent of the time but that won't happen, but we will be successful most of the time," he said.

Mars Climate Orbiter also was intended as a vital link in the Mars Polar Lander mission. That craft is due to land on Mars on Dec. 3 and the climate orbiter would have acted as a relay station between the lander and scientists on earth.

Cook said the probable loss of the climate orbiter would complicate the lander mission, but contingency plans were already in place for the lander to transmit data directly to Earth through the Deep Space Network and via the Mars Global Surveyor.
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Recently three people at NASA have died. One was attacked by two men. All 3 had significant roles with the recent Mars Pathfinder mission.

Mars Pathfinder LANDED on the Red planet on July 4th, 1998, go to mystic Mars. Also, check Mars Pathfinder Mission and more cool stuff. Learn all about the depleting Ozone in the atmosphere at NASA Observatorium OZONE.

Did I mention heavy web links? Would you like to see two galaxies collide? Visit NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory & NASA Observatorium. I suggest you ask the Curator, Dr. Brown, a few questions when you sign their guessbook. Why does the Vatican have a link-up to the Hubble camera? Why are there no photos in their gallery of the UFOs seen from the space shuttle? Why have they chosen not to send a probe into the water on Europa?

See photos of the structures on Mars that NASA yanked off of their Pathfinder web site after just a few hours. See Richard Hoagland's The Enterprise Mission.

Related story: Six months ago Richard Hoagland, of Enterprise Mission, predicted that the Mars Probe would be "reported" as being inoperable once it got near Mars.

Campaigning for the Presidency, Jimmy Carter promised to reveal the truth about UFOs. He didn't follow through. After he left office, a journalist reminded Carter of his pledge. He said nothing, choked up and walked away crying.

Roswell Crash
Shortly after we got the CIA, the Air Force splitting off from tha Army, the National Security Agency, and Project Blue Book.

"The artificial structures on Mars, in the Cydonia region, were inhabited by 12-feet tall humanoids about a million years ago. They may have been our ancestors. Yes, Virginia, we too are aliens." - Joe Monagle

Since NASA has violated its 1958 charter from Congress to provide space technology for commercial use, Robert Bigelow, of Las Vegas, Nevada, is taking matters into his own hands. The billionaire Bigelow announced on Art Bell's Coast-to-Coast Radio Show that he will be financing the construction of a luxury hotel cruise ship for space flight around the moon. While looking for business partners, Bigelow is committing $500 million over the next 15-years.

National Institute for Discovery Science
To report anomolous sightings (UFOs, fireballs, cattle mutilations, etc.) which just occurred, call NIDS at 702-798-1700.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - December 3, 1999 - Shanghai appeared convinced on Friday that an unidentified flying object had visited China's commercial capital.

Usually staid official newspapers insisted Thursday's sighting was no vision.

"UFO darts across the city's skyline," screamed a headline in the official Shanghai Daily.

"UFO appears in the sky over Shanghai," the Wenhui Daily said in a front page story with color photographs.

Nearly 100 people claimed to have seen a cylindrical object with a flaming orange tail moving over the western part of the city for about an hour Thursday afternoon, the newspapers said. They offered no theories on what it might have been.

But the Shanghai Daily ran the story on the same page as an advertisement for "The X Files Movie," based on the popular television series about two U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who probe unexplained phenomena.

The spaceship comes down in your backyard, crushing a bed of petunias, and out steps the alien. This is always an awkward social moment. What, exactly, do you say to someone who may hold the secrets to the universe? After, that is, you finish quivering and quaking and wondering if he (she? it?) is going to suck you down like a raw oyster?

Obviously you would want to get some consideration out of the alien--no easy trick, to judge from most alien-encounter narratives. The aliens who show up in the middle of the night and abduct people are notoriously stingy with information. They never solve any mathematical equations. They don't offer up the long-sought simple and "elegant" proof of Fermat's LastTheorem. They don't tell us where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.

Then aliens do communicate with humans, they're always a bit like the Michael Rennie alien in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still: They tell us to behave. They say we need to get our act together. They're self-help gurus. A fellow named Darryl Anka channeled an alien named Bashar for many years, and Bashar, though wise, didn't really have much data to offer, just advice on how to live a better life. (Anka, when I last spoke to him, said he'd given up channeling Bashar and was working on designing a UFO theme park.)

There's a scene in Carl Sagan's excellent novel Contact when Ellie Arroway, his protagonist, whooshes down some kind of intragalactic "wormhole" and winds up on a sunny beach, face to face with an alien. The alien, annoyingly, doesn't seem to know who built that wormhole subway system. Eventually Arroway gets around to asking what is no doubt her most urgent question: "I want to know what you think of us, what you really think."

How. That's really the wrong question there. That's blowing it big time. This gal crosses half the galaxy and is tossed and rattled around to within an inch of her life, and when it's over she starts fishing for a compliment! No, a better question to an alien would be: What are you made of? Are you based on carbon and liquid water? Do you have DNA as your information-bearing molecule or something like it?

Stephen Jay Gould put it this way, on Timothy Ferris' recent PBS program Life Beyond Earth: "What's your biochemistry?" Some people may argue that other questions should precede the biological ones. They might, for example, choose a political question, asking who, exactly, is in charge of this universe. Or they may skew theological, and ask if there's a God and what exactly he's got on his mind.

A good argument could be made that a physicist should pose the first batch of questions to an alien, asking whether it's possible to go faster than the speed of light and whether there are other universes outside our own. The physicist and the alien would no doubt get embroiled in a discussion of string theory, and soon they'd be jotting down incomprehensible equations about 10-dimensional vibrating loops. Maybe at the end of the encounter we'd figure out how to yank free energy out of the quantum vacuum. We'd have a new trick for cooking a hot dog.

My feeling is that the biology questions trump everything else. We know essentially nothing about life beyond Earth. Because we are ignorant of other biological systems, we have no context for understanding Earth life, for knowing to what extent the life we see around us is, on the cosmic scale, relatively ordinary or totally freakish. We don't know, for example, if Earthlike planets are common. We look around our own solar system, and what appears to be common are planets that have no life whatsoever.

We also see signs that Venus and Mars were once more hospitable to life and over many hundreds of millions of years became inhospitable. Bad stuff happens to good planets. It'd be nice to know more about that trend.

He also don't know how life originates and to what extent it evolves in an orderly pattern. The debate in Kansas over the teaching of evolution misses the real debates within the field. There are those who argue passionately that life originated with a single replicated molecule. Another camp favors the notion that it began with a kind of garbage bag of molecules that more or less eased its way from nonlife to life. And the biggest question may be to what extent evolution is divergent or convergent.

Divergence gives us a bewildering variety of life; convergence gives rise, repeatedly, to certain anatomical features, like wings and eyeballs. You can make an argument that intelligence is an extremely unlikely, random, quirky event in terrestrial biology, or you can make the counter-argument that you can see intelligence coming down the pike from many millions of years in advance. On that issue hinges the abundance of intelligent life in the universe. How likely is it that life elsewhere will go through the same evolutionary leaps as life on Earth? To take one obscure but critical example: Life on Earth remained entirely one-celled for 3 billion years. For at least half of that time, those cells didn't have a nucleus. They couldn't use oxygen in their metabolism. They were pitiful even by microbial standards.

So, how lucky was the evolutionary leap from prokaryotes (non-nucleated microbes) to eukaryotes (nucleated, and using oxygen)? It happened here about 2.1 billion years ago. Was that our lucky break? Or does life, in general, figure out the trick of using oxygen and growing big and brawny?

And, of course, we don't really know what we're talking about when we talk about "intelligence." We tend to think of creatures that use technology and language. But that could be shortsighted. Maybe most intelligent creatures are dolphinoids, blissfully swimming in an alien ocean with little interest in building spaceships.

Imagine for a moment that we could see the universe through the eyes of an alien creature. Would the universe look more or less the same? Or would we be confused, dazzled, and feel as though we were hallucinating?

Are the aliens interested in the same things that interest us? Could we carry on a meaningful conversation? We should prepare ourselves for finding something out there that's totally unexpected. And we have to prepare for bad news, or at least bad news in the context of our Star Trek fantasy. We may have wildly overestimated the abundance of extraterrestrial civilizations.

Carl Sagan thought there were millions such civilizations in existence right now in our own galaxy. The actual number may be a handful. Or we could be, as Sagan's old collaborator I.S. Shklovskii argued, "functionally alone." Not literally alone, just so isolated that there's no practical way to make contact of any kind with another intelligent species.

Whatever we do, we shouldn't take ourselves for granted. There may be something extremely rare and wonderful about a world in which water splashes on the surface, and where life survives for nearly 4 billion years, where it has the leisure to evolve and, through natural selection, explore the possibilities of complexity.

The search for life beyond Earth always doubles back to our own existence. Why are we this way? How did we come about? How special is it to be a thinking organism? This is the kind of stuff you'd want to discuss with the aliens. And remember, they like it when you compliment them on the really cool spaceship.

Related in Slate - Upon the 1996 release of Independence Day, Robert Wright pondered how humankind would respond to an alien invasion and speculated about the lessons civilizations might learn.

Related on the Web - Although Darryl Anka has stopped channeling Bashar, he continues to market tapes of the alien's life lessons on the Bashar home page. On one tape, disciples learn the relationship between "personality and [one's] spiritual nature" and "how to get pregnant." Click here to buy Carl Sagan's Contact. PBS has posted much of the information from its series Life Beyond Earth on an excellent Web site, including an archive of interviews with scientists on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. If you want to read a less conflicted view of the subject, visit this page, which outlines the locations of alien bases on Earth. And if you encounter aliens yourself, pass on word to the National UFO Reporting Center, which keeps a comprehensive database of all sightings.

Sounds like you're a science historian rather than a speculating researcher. Yes, we each know what we know. But we don't know what we don't know.

The ETs sighted may not be extraterrestial, but could be time travelers or may come from a parallel universe. Either way, human science is so young and advanced beings could be so old ...

I concede you're a noble historian. I'll conjecture. I'll keep the Patent Office open.

You wrote: "As for UFOs and the like, I am one who would only consider these prospects if an ET were gnawing on my arm."

I'm afraid if you made such a report that the Larry Crowells of this world wouldn't believe you.

If they really bit then they would leave behind DNA that could be sequenced and not identified with existent terristrial animals. So far as I know not one strand of alien DNA has been amplified in a PCR.

Did you know that Enrico Fermi used falling pieces of paper to measure the strength of the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site?

Anyway the file I sent you involves new physics that gives a fundamental reason for the Planck scale cut off for quantum gravity. This is new physics, not history. This cut off was first advanced by Andre Sakharov in 1969. Andre Sakharov developed the hydrogen bomb for the Soviet Union, and became a dissident after being disturbed by the deaths of eagles at the Novya Zemlya test sight.

The problem is that there is utterly zero data for the existence or nature of ETs, whether they are space travelers or time travelers. I am rather skeptical about time travel, for while the Einstein field equations will allow for such, as seen with the Godel universe (an exact solution to the differential equations of general relativity), the problem is that the matter-fields required to generate such a spacetime do not give stability when they are considered as quantum fields. Time travel involves closed timelike geodesics that enclose a two cocyle determined by a nontrivial spacetime topology. The problem is that there is a dichotomy between the classical solutions and those that involve quantum mechanics.

There are a couple of papers by Ford and Pfenning in 1994 and 1996 in Physical Review D on the subject. In order to travel in time one needs to violate the Hawking-Penrose stress-energy conditions (Hawking, Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime, Cambridge University Press 1973). Essentially the expansion of the fields in harmonic oscillator modes results in enormous stochastic fluctuations for violations of the Hawking-Penrose stress-energy conditions, so that in order to travel backwards in time one would need to use as much energy as there is mass-energy available within the observable universe. One can also look at this according to general causal principles, such as what Robert Wald has done. If there are time travelers then they must have some sort of causal influence upon our current world and its state of affairs.

In my book that is being published by World Scientific Publishers I have examined the conformal structure of spacetime with these types of solutions. I have found that nontrivial topologies only appear to exist where spacetime itself is quantized, but that where spacetime is classical one arrives at the same rather negative result above. It would appear that wormholes, warpdrives and time travel are only the province of quantum gravity where there does not appear to exist a unitary equivalence between Hilbert spaces of quantum states.

While the results may appear negative, the reality of science is in fact a lot more interesting than those of pseudoscience.

A nascent cosmology may be generated by the gravitational self squeezing of quantum spacetime fluctuations and their operators, and the subsequent tunneling of modes. As the Hamiltonian and momentum constraints for the quantum gravity vacuum NH = 0, N^iH_i = 0 are maintained through the process this is effectively "creation without creation," and creation from nothing.

What Feinstein, Sebastian, and I have demonstrated is that the universe spontaneously tunnels out of the quantum gravity vacuum. Last year I published a paper where I demonstrated that quantum gravity operators exhibit something called self-squeezing. Squeezing is a process in quantum optics where the quantum uncertainty in one variable is reduced to zero while the uncertainty in its dual variable becomes utterly uncertain. I mathematically demonstrated that quantum gravity operators squeeze themselves and the vacuum they mathematically operate on. Feinstein and Sebastian published a paper earlier this year where they demonstrate that IF this squeezing occurs that the universe can tunnel out of the vacuum. So we put our results together in an obvious manner.

In effect this means that the universe emerges out of a purely chaotic quantum gravity vacuum through the self-squeezing of the vacuum modes. Also, it is a sort of creation without creation where the universe emerges in a completely uncaused manner. It actually means that there is no need for the ad hoc assumption of a God or creating spirit-agency. - Lawrence B. Crowell

Larry: "This tunneling involes quantum mechanical transitions. Wormholes are a particular solution to Einstein's field equations. So the two are not related. Wormholes and other related solutions appear physically unrealistic if not impossible."

Andrew: "Could an advanced civilization use this physical mechanism for interstellar travel?"

Larry: "This is even more problematic or improbable than with the first question.

Basically the reason #1 is most likely not realistic is due to a couple of things. These solutions involve negative energy densities. Hawking and Penrose proved many things using positive energy conditions, such as black holes. Postive energy causes paths in spacetime to focus, which is why gravity involes the attraction of masses. With negative energy you have a sort of repulsion or hyperbolicity to spacetime paths. Ford, Roman and Pfennig have illustrated that negative energy can not be contained in a region of spacetime without compensating positive energy that is equal or larger in magnitude than the negative energy. This is called the quantum interest problem.

Further my work eliminates these solutions to the Einstein field equations. Essentially quantum gravity eliminates certain classical solutions. Basically since my generalized operators involve finite temperatures, a negative energy solution would involve negative temperatures with highly unphysical consequences.

The consensus that appears to be emerging is that wormholes, Alcubierre warpdrives, Krasnykov tubes are mathematical artifacts that emerge from Einstein's field equations. However, general relativity is a classical field theory, where quantum mechanics does not enter. Increasingly it appears that quantum theory when merged with general relativity eliminates these types of spacetime solutions.

As for the second, if these spacetime solutions are unphysical then no extraterrestrial life form has jumped to our planet with them."

3 Nov 2001 - I neither believe or disbelieve in extraterrestrial life. My results simply indicate that the statistical sample space of solar systems observed indicates that very few of them are configured in a way that could support the orbit of a planet similar to Earth. If there is only an upper bound of around 100 solar systems with an Earth-like planet, then at any given time it is highly unlikely that any number of them concurrently have intelligent life.

I am only calling the cards as I read them. The people who are avid UFO advocates with connections to the military and intelligence community are politically only to the left of Gengis Khan. I have frankly only scratched the surface of this, but things do not "smell right." It is impossible for me to penetrate any deeper, for there are various claims about classified information and the rest. I will say that this is potentially a journalistic frontier.