Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Tag: collective intelligence

Feynman told us clearly: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Check anything from first principles and experience, ignoring no logical holes, and that is science. Cargo Cult Science arises when the opposing arguments aren’t emphasized. Experts then form and pass down firm beliefs that are delusions. Cargo Cult science is like a perfect replica radio made all of wood: it may have all the trappings of degrees and chairs and journals, but it is missing the key ingredient and won’t function.[1][2]

Vaccine science is cargo cult science according to Feynman’s definition. There are a ton of peer reviewed papers demonstrating that vaccine aluminum is damaging, that vaccines are full of contaminants, that they can disrupt brain and immune system development, that the smallpox vaccine was ineffective, the polio vaccine is of questionable utility, other vaccines’ immunity wanes after only a few years. They never rebut as you can easily verify yourself by examining the citation list here for opposition and then searching the vaccine survey pdfs for the cites. They just ignore it.[3][4][5]

Climate science is cargo cult science. Climate “scientists” have been known to “hide” their own most interesting data, the data contradicting the prevailing theory which is what Feynman said a scientist should emphasize most prominently[6][7]. Alternative theories and methodological objections are ignored or white washed. (Search the IPCC reports for discussion of the opposition.) To say a science is cargo cult science is not to say that there are no papers published in it that are science, but it is to say one should repose zero or negative confidence in any pronouncement one has not personally verified from first principles.

http://TruthSift.com supports Feynman’s model of science applied to everything. Just as in mathematical practice, you can post proofs and refutations. But nothing is considered established unless every proposed refutation has an established counter-refutation. No proposed refutation can be ducked, and anybody who believes they have a rational objection may post it (and see the establishment statuses reflect the objection in real time). Try it out. Check out (and please contribute to) the ongoing diagrammings of the vaccine/climate science etc literatures. When they have passed through true logical review, confronting all the opposing arguments, what remains will be a genuine science.

[1] Richard P Feynman, What is Science? (1968) http://www-oc.chemie.uni-regensburg.de/diaz/img_diaz/feynman…nce_68.pdf
[2] Richard P Feynman, CARGO CULT SCIENCE (adapted from Caltech Commencement Address 1974) https://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
[3] Eric Baum The Top Ten Reasons I Believe Vaccine Safety Is an Epic Mass Delusion (2016) https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/06/the-top-ten-reasons-i-beli…s-delusion
[4] TruthSift Topic: Are Vaccines Safe? (2016) http://truthsift.com/search_view?statement=Vaccines-are-Safe…p;nid=4083
[5] TruthSift Topic: The Evidence is Weak Vaccines Have Saved More Lives than They Have Cost (2016), http://truthsift.com/search_view?topic=The-Evidence-Is-Weak-…amp;id=520
[6] Climate data hidden both early (data showing very rapid rise before 1500) and in 20th century (showing decline): https://climateaudit.org/2011/03/21/hide-the-decline-the-other-deletion/
[7] More data contradicting theory hidden. https://climateaudit.org/2011/12/01/hide-the-decline-plus/

“Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real.“
–Gustav LeBon, The Crowd (1895)

I’ve gotten no substantive response to my last post on vaccine safety– neither in the comments, nor the TruthSift diagram, nor anywhere else, nor have the papers I submitted to two medical journals… but I have gotten emails telling me I’m delusional and suggesting I seek psychiatric attention. And this of course is integral to the explanation of how such delusions as vaccine safety persist so widely when it is so demonstrably a delusion: the majority who believe the majority must be right because its the majority are emotionally unwilling to confront the evidence. They assume the experts have done that, and they rely on the experts. But the experts assume other experts have been there. Ask your Pediatrician if he’s personally read Bishop et al and formulated an opinion on vaccine aluminum. Neither has the National Academy, except perhaps their members have and decided, perhaps tacitly, not to review the subject. Their decision not to review the animal literature was not tacit, they said they explicitly decided to omit it, although elsewhere they say they couldn’t find human evidence that addressed the issues. So everybody is trusting somebody else, and nobody has picked up the ball. And can you blame them? Because when I pick up the ball, what I receive in return is hate mail and people’s scorn. The emotional response cuts off any possible inspection of the logic.

On most questions where a majority with authority is facing a minority of dissenters or skeptics, the majority is delusional.
In other words, you are living in the matrix; much of what you and people believe is fundamentlaly wrong.

Reason 1, as above, is that the majority forms its view by circular reasoning, and rejects any attempt at logical discussion without considering it seriously, so it is prone to delusion.
Once the crowd concluded vaccines are safe and effective, for example, the question of whether the aluminum is damaging can apparently no longer be raised (even as more gets added to vaccines). And when I or others try to raise it, we are scorned and hated, and ineffectual in changing the opinion supported by circular reasoning. When new research papers appear that call it into question, they are ignored, neither cited in the safety surveys nor influencing medical practice in any way. This paragraph is all simple reporting of what has repeatedly happened.

Reason 2 is a minority wouldn’t be holding out without a good reason, because they are punished for their opposition with scorn and hatred at least. Except perhaps for explicitly religious issues, the usual reason they are so stubborn is they are defending rational truth.

Reason 3 is there’s often big money to be made or political power to be gained by influencing the majority opinion, and experts given good budgets appear to be pretty good at influencing majority opinion, especially with the aid of mass media, covertly staged stunts, and in many areas time enough to have long ago started from kids and education. On the other hand, rationality and reality don’t usually have press agents or forward looking media strategies, and there’s little or no money in swaying the minority position.

Show me a question with a majority with authority facing a minority where the majority isn’t delusional, and I’ll show you a minority that’s being paid under the table or planted to discredit rationalists in other controversial areas. At least I’ll suggest you strongly consider that as an alternative theory of what you see. The only one I can think of off hand are flat-earthers.

Mass Delusions were famously studied in 19th century first by Charles Mackay in
Popular Mass Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852) but more interestingly IMO in Gustave Le Bon, (1895) The Crowd. This latter was arguably the single book that had the most influence on the shape of the twentieth century. By their own accounts “The Crowd” was on Theodore Roosevelt’s bedside table, and dogeared by Mussolini. Lenin and Stalin took from it, and “Hitler’s indebtedness to Le Bon bordered on plagiarism” in the words of historian and Hitler-biographer Robert G. L. Waite. Sigmund Freud wrote a book discussing Le Bon, and Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, acknowledged his deep debt, as Goebbels did of Bernays’ reflected insights.

Bernays equally isn’t as widely known as he should be. He invented the field of public relations, the “panel of doctors”, the slogan “making the world safe for democracy”, the diamond engagement ring, broke the taboo on women’s smoking and practically doubled sales by recruiting protesters smoking “torches of freedom”, bacon and eggs, and flouridated water, among many other things. There weren’t any decent safety studies on fluoridated water, and some modern studies say its taking multiple IQ points off the population, and nations and regions that don’t fluoridate have just as good teeth today as nations and regions that do, and putting fluoride in mouthwash and toothpaste rather than the drinking water would plainly have made a lot more sense from the point of view of public safety and health, but one thing you can count on: once he put it in the water supply and convinced everybody it was a health measure, you couldn’t sue for damage from fluoride runoff any more, and potentially multi-asbestos scale class action suits against the Government and aluminum manufacturers disappeared. Since Bernays got done, just raising the issue of fluoride gets you branded fruitcake and shunned to this day.

They are also still “making the world safe for democracy”, which he coined for WW1. But is this what they are doing, or is that another widely held delusion?
Bernays also wrote the book Propaganda which begins: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

I’ve quoted from and summarized and discussed Le Bon extensively before so I will give only a brief flavor here.
“It is not necessary that a crowd should be numerous for the faculty of seeing what is taking place before its eyes to be destroyed and for the real facts to be replaced with hallucinations unrelated to them….

“To return to the faculty of observation possessed by crowds, our conclusion is that their collective observations are as erroneous as possible, and that most often they merely represent the illusion of an individual who, by a process of contagion, has suggestioned his fellows.”

“The events with regard to which there exists the most doubt are certainly those which have been observed by the greatest number of persons. To say that a fact has been simultaneously verified by thousands of witnesses is to say, as a rule, that the real fact is very different from the accepted account of it.”…

“By the mere fact that an individual forms part of a crowd, his intellectual standard is immediately and considerably lowered….

“The inferior reasoning of crowds is based, just as is the reasoning of a high order, on the association of ideas, but between the ideas associated by crowds there are only apparent bonds of analogy or succession. The mode of reasoning of crowds resembles that of the Esquimaux who, knowing from experience that ice, a transparent body, melts in the mouth, concludes that glass, also a transparent body, should also melt in the mouth…
The characteristics of the reasoning of crowds are the association of dissimilar things possessing a merely apparent connection between each other, and the immediate generalization of particular cases. It is arguments of this kind that are always presented to crowds by those who know how to manage them. They are the only arguments by which crowds are to be influenced. A chain of logical argumentation is totally incomprehensible to crowds…”

“When these convictions [of crowds] are closely examined,…, it is apparent that they always assume a particular form which I can not better define than giving it the name of a religious sentiment…
Intolerance and fanatacism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardour proceeded from the same source. The convictions of crowds assume those characteristics of blind submission, fierce intolerance, and the need of violent propaganda which are inherent in the religious sentiment, and it is for this reason that it may be said that all their beliefs have a religous form.

Whether the feelings exhibited by a crowd be good or bad, they present the double character of being very simple and very exaggerated… a throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.”

The Red pill

So, now what’s in the red pill? Why, its a placebo. You can use any old red jelly bean. But if you swallow it and believe that the majority may be totally delusional about anything, and start looking into practically any subject with dissenters with an open mind, then I predict if you are skilled at critical thinking, you will shortways find the majority is in fact delusional, that is, you are indeed living in the matrix.

Much more widely than you are likely to imagine. For example, the news is basically propaganda, in lockstep among all the mainstream media, who accept whatever the government and political correctness tells them to believe uncritically. Was the passenger plane over Ukraine brought down by missile or strafing? Did the CDC conspire to hide a vaccine autism connection? Is the congress being run behind the scenes by a uniparty? You won’t find any of those subjects discussed unless to whitewash in the US mainstream media. What you want in a media system is ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity. –Joseph Goebbels The history books are no better, as Le Bon observed. The banking system is all based on smoke and mirrors and a healthy skim. Etc.

I don’t expect TruthSift.com to convince the masses they are delusional, because Le Bon assures me logic will never sway a crowd, but I offer it as a tool to shortcut a lot of work for those who swallow the red pill. Rather than having to study a field in detail for years as I have with vaccines and needing to be able to supply PhD level understanding of what you are reading and needing the confidence of your convictions against the many, you can much more rapidly peruse a diagram and find what the real situation is, assuming the diagram has been created and debated.
So I beg readers here to create such diagrams on TruthSift for any topic you are interested in.
Of course, they are fun and interesting too.

I also commend TruthSift to corporations and others wanting to escape the kind of crowd think delusions so well characterized by Le Bon, and achieve actual rationality in your decisions. Use it on Private Diagrams. Everybody in your organization will be able to contribute to the document, if you invite them, exactly where its pertinent. It will naturally divide and conquer your problems in ways where different people can address different problems, achieving true collaboration. Nobody will be able to get confused or pursue some other agenda without being transparently refereed. The answer will be far more rationally derived and argued for than what you are doing now. You can allow people to contribute under pseudonyms if you want. http://TruthSift.com

Find my first blog post describing TruthSift here.

Its painful to bear views that make many think I’m an imbicile and dislike me. So please, if anybody has a rational argument why any of this is wrong, I beg to be enlightened. I’ve set up a diagram for the purpose that will support you to add your criticism exactly where it is pertinent. https://tssciencecollaboration.com/graphtree/Are%20Vaccines%20Safe/406/4083

(1) The National Academy’s Reviews Of Vaccine Safety
The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has provided several multi-hundred page surveys studying the safety of vaccines, but rather than reassuring, these itemize some iatrogenic conditions being caused, and pronounce the scientific literature inadequate to say whether most others are. The 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) Review[1] looked at 146 vaccine-condition pairs for causality, reporting:

  • 14 for which the evidence is said to convincingly support causality, the vaccine is causing the condition.
  • 4 where the evidence is said to favor acceptance.
  • 5 where the evidence is said to favor rejection, including MMR causing autism.
  • 123 where the evidence is said insufficient to evaluate.

The 2003 IOM Review on multiple vaccines said[2]:
“The committee was unable to address the concern that repeated exposure of a susceptible child to multiple immunizations over the developmental period may also produce atypical or non-specific immune or nervous system injury that could lead to severe disability or death (Fisher, 2001). There are no epidemiological studies that address this.”
and:
“the committee concludes that the epidemiological and clinical evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between multiple immunization and an increased risk of allergic disease, particularly asthma.”

  • None of the IOM Safety Reviews[1][2][3][4] addressed the aluminum (for example whether the aluminum is causing autism), or mentioned contaminants, or discussed animal models although they had concluded as just quoted there is generally no epidemiological or clinical data worth preferring.

(2) The Aluminum.
Alum was added to vaccines back in the 1920’s, with no test of parenteral toxicity until recently[5], because it prods the immature immune system out of its normal operating range.[6] Maybe they figured aluminum is common in the environment, but injection bypasses half a dozen evolved sequential filters that normally keep it out of circulatory flow during development. Vaccines put hundreds of times as much aluminum into infants’ blood as they would otherwise get, and in an unnatural form that is hard for the body to remove.[7][8 (cfsec 4.2)][9]. The published empirical results indicate its highly toxic.

  • Bishop et al in NEJM 97 reported a Randomized Placebo Controlled(RPC) test on preemies.[10][11] Scaling the toxicity they measured to the 4000 mcg in the first six months projects the vaccine series’ aluminum as costing each recipient maybe 15 IQ points and bone density.[12]
  • Animal RPC experiments also show highly toxic[13][14][15][16]
  • The applicable epidemiology suggests its highly toxic.[8][18][19][20][21][22] Discussed more in point 8 below, basically every study that compares more to less finds less much better.
  • Numerous clinical publications, whole special issues, on ASIA (Autoimmune Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants)[23][24][25]
  • Any “placebo” controlled test I’ve ever found of an adjuvanted vaccine, the “placebo” contained an adjuvant.
  • Safety reviews ignore the issue. Search the pdfs. [1][2][3][4]
  • The FDA[26] cites a theory paper[27] that compares a published MRL based on dietary experiments in weaned rodents (thus completely uninformed about toxicity in early development) to a theoretical model of blood aluminum levels from the vaccines, and disdains all the above cited empirical evidence.

(3) The Safety Studies Ignore Confounding Patient Behavior
Since there are no Randomized Placebo Controlled (RPC) trials supporting vaccines, virtually all studies report on the association (or lack thereof) between vaccines and some iatrogenic condition. But parents who believe vaccines made their kids sick, stop vaccinating them, which systematically moves sick or vaccine damaged kids in the studies into the “low vaccine”, “low thimerisol”, or etc. bin. This invalidates most studies supporting safety (and the few remaining ones suck for other reasons). Numerous studies report incredible preventative effects for vaccines, presumably because of this corruption, like having more thimerisol or more MMR’s is strongly preventative of autism and other mental development issues[28][29][30], or like having more vaccines was strongly preventative of atopy, apparently even years before patients got the vaccines[31]. The fact this confounding factor is overlooked demonstrates extreme confirmation bias and is the defining factor of Cargo Cult Science according to R.P. Feynman.[32]

(4) The Animal Models
Animal models reliably and repeatably show in RPC tests (a) that vaccines at the wrong time in development damage the adult brain or behavior [33][34] and (b) that multiple vaccines cause autoimmune disease even in animals bred to be non-autoimmune[35][36]. The effects are said to be robust, and as we’ve already seen there isn’t good human data rebutting them.

(5) The Contaminants
Studies have repeatedly found contaminants such as viruses, retroviruses, circoviruses, and human DNA in vaccines seemingly whenever tested,
and I’ve found no reason to believe off the shelf vaccines are free[37][38][39][40][41]. Reported contaminants have included SV-40 in polio vaccines which were administered even though scientists knew the vaccines were contaminated and already had hunches and experiments indicating SV-40 causes cancer[41][42]. Chimpanzee Coryza Virus became known in humans as RSV and has killed many millions of infants and hospitalizes 100,000/yr in America today[43]. Contaminated polio vaccine is plausibly also the origin of HIV[44][41]. There are discovered viral contaminants in vaccines today[38][39], with unknown long term effects, as well as I expect many undiscovered contaminants.

(6) Studies Ask Whether Some One Vaccine Damages, and Thus Miss That Many Do.
Virtually every study not reporting damage compares kids who got numerous vaccines to kids who got numerous vaccines. Such studies wouldn’t show statistically significant results no matter how much damage the vaccines are doing, unless one vaccine or vector by itself is doing comparable or more damage than the rest put together. The studies more or less test the hypothesis one vaccine is invisibly damaging, the rest are fine, and the studies are all obscured in the presence of multiple problems, much less the kind of timing and interaction effects observed in animal models. The one study[45] often touted as proving “The Risk of Autism is Not Increased by ‘Too Many Vaccines Too Soon’”[46] in fact compares patients based on antigens, and since DTP had more than 3000 antigens and no other vaccine common among the study patients had more than a handful, effectively compared patients who’d had DTP and dozens of vaccines to patients who did not have DTP (many had DTaP instead) and dozens of vaccines. The only counterexamples to this I’ve found are contrived in bizarre ways to avoid reality, such as the study that withheld the 2 month vaccines till 3 months from a group of kids, and asked the mothers, who were terrified enough a bunch insisted on changing back to the early vaccination group, to record symptoms with no doctor even consulted, identifying the placebo effect as vaccine prevention of diseases. The authors wrote it would have been unethical to give a placebo at 2 months to the kids getting the vaccine at 3 months, in order to do the experiment blind, but apparently consider it ethical to inject dozens of vaccines into your kids with zero placebo controlled testing.[47] [48]

(7) The Extensive Evidence Indicating Flu Vaccines Damage Immune Systems, Particularly in Children.

Continue reading “The Top Ten Reasons I Believe Vaccine Safety Is an Epic Mass Delusion” | >

It may be possible one day to use effective biotechnological therapies in order to achieve extreme lifespans. In the meantime, instead of just waiting for these therapies, it may be more fruitful to live a life of constant stimulation, hyper-connection and avoidance of regularity. This is something that everybody can do today, and may have a direct impact upon radical life extension, not only for the individual but also for society.

For some time now I have been advocating the notion that exposure to meaningful information may be one way of achieving radical life extension. By meaningful information I mean anything that requires action, and not just feeding your brain with routine sets of data. Examples of this include being hyper-connected in a digital world, an enriched environment (both in the personal space and in society as a whole), a hormetic lifestyle, behavioural models such as a goal-seeking behaviour, search for excellence, and a bias for action, as well as the pursuit innovation, diversification, creativity and novelty. Most importantly, the avoidance of routine and mediocrity.

This information-rich lifestyle up-regulates the function of the brain and may have an impact upon cell immortalisation. In my latest paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.2734 I provide an explanation of the exact mechanisms. I argue that the relentless exposure to useful information creates new and persisting demands for energy resources in order for this information to be assimilated by the neurons. If this process continues for some time, there will come a point where our biological mechanisms will undergo a phase transition, in effect creating a new biology. Not one based on sex and reproduction but one based on information and somatic survival.

One possible mechanism involves the immortalisation sequences of germ cells. As we know, the DNA in germ cells is essentially immortal because it is somehow able to repair age-related damage effectively. Recent research shows that some of these immortalisation mechanisms do not originate from the germ cells but from the somatic cells! In other words, our bodily cells create biological material such as error-free sequences of DNA and instead of using this themselves for their own survival, they pass it on to the germ cells to assure the survival of the species. This means that the germ-line remains immortal whereas the bodily cells eventually age and die.

The process may be forcibly changed, by overloading the system with high quality actionable information. As explained above, the assimilation of this information demands so much energy and resources from the organism that there will come a point when nature will have to make a choice: is it more economical from the thermodynamic point of view to continue the current cycle of birth, aging and death (with an immortal DNA), or is it better to downgrade this model and favour a new process of somatic survival and improved development in the same individual who would be able to live much longer? The force of evolution in a modern technological, information-laden niche may eventually favour the latter.

Also see here: http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/12/06/the-longevity-of-real-human-avatars/

Christian Astronomers

Posted by Gary Michael Church in asteroid/comet impacts, biological, biotech/medical, business, chemistry, climatology, complex systems, counterterrorism, defense, economics, education, engineering, ethics, events, evolution, existential risks, finance, futurism, geopolitics, habitats, homo sapiens, human trajectories, life extension, lifeboat, media & arts, military, nuclear weapons, open source, physics, policy, space, sustainability, transparencyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments on Christian Astronomers

“The more anxiety one produces, the more the discussion there would be about how real and how possible actual existential threats are.”

John Hunt recently queried me on what steps I might take to form an organization to advocate for survival colonies and planetary defense. His comment on anxiety is quite succinct. In truth the landing on the moon was the product of fear- of the former Soviet Union’s lead in rocket technology. As we as a nation quelled that anxiety the budget for human space flight dwindled. But the fear of a nuclear winter continued to grow along with the size of our arsenals.

Interestingly, at the height of the cold war, evidence of yet another threat to human existence was uncovered in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico in 1981; Chicxulub. But even before the dinosaur killer was discovered, perhaps the greatest threat of all to humanity was born in 1973 when Herb Boyer and Stanley Cohen created the first genetically modified organism. The money to answer both of these threats by going into space continues to be expended by the military industrial complex.

Mile wide rocks in space and microscopic organisms on earth are both threats to our existence, but the third and undoubtedly greatest threat is our own apathy. Why do we expend the tremendous resources of our race on everything BUT keeping it from going extinct?

The answer to this important question is our own fear of death. As I have written previously, we are as individuals in the predicament of a circus freak on death row. It is a bizarre yet accurate characterization. None of us expect to live forever, but then we do not expect to die tomorrow either. We are in limbo between certain death and temporary life and cannot face the reality of the first while obsessing over the banalities of the second.

Examples of our determination to stay distracted can be found in the babbling of gravity modifiers, CERN doomsday prophets, and various other fruit flavored contributors to this blog. We desperately want to believe in UFO’s, conspiracies and fantastical solutions so we do not have to face the disquiet we experience whenever we pass a funeral home or graveyard. I am happy to pummel these idiots with the harsh language they deserve- especially when they destroy the credibility of sites like this which are trying to accomplish something worthwhile.

So I am thinking there is so much anxiety being monopolized that there is little market left for me capitalize on. Something different is required; as Bill Gates advised young entrepreneurs recently, “Don’t do what I did.” It has all been done and no clever marketing or deceptive advertising is going to build cities on other worlds. Space tourism is not going to save us- if anything it is a dangerous waste of time and money.

What is required is a popular culture renaissance that can focus the energy of several generations in a single direction. The uniqueness of this crossroads in history can be found in considering the nearly unbelievable difference in the level of scientific knowledge today compared to a half century ago. There is nothing more evident to the mature members of the western world than it’s age- our standard of living has brought about fewer children while the less fortunate parts of the world have accelerated their reproductive rates. Disparities in wealth and standards of living are stark evidence of the circus freak scenario. Very few of us are aware that there is a possible escape from this death sentence we are all born under. A standby of science fiction for decades has been the freezing of human beings for space travel. To delay death indefinitely and be resurrected when a cure for a disease or old age is found is a familiar concept. The parallels with Christianity are unmistakable.

We, as in my fellow human beings who were born around 1960, are seeing the culture we grew up in fade away as no other generation ever has. We lived through decades of threatened nuclear holocaust only to see our hoped for space age future dismantled by consumerism and profiteering. Personally, I find the presence of skulls everywhere to be the most poignant and disturbing portent of things to come. The veterans who fought in World War II and were everywhere when I was a boy would never have allowed this emblem of the Nazi SS to become so popular. It was the symbol of ruthless and murderous force as being the only meaningful feature of reality. 60 million human beings were killed in the fight against the evil it represents. And now it is back.

To counter to the present lack of vision I would like to introduce an agent of change in the form of a idealized past age. What better ideal than the movement that conquered fascism originally? Christianity did in fact conquer the Roman Empire- and as it is said we are all children of Rome, then we are also children of the carpenter from Nazareth. A technological analogy that can be discerned when considering the original Christianity and the modern world is the Gladius and the Atom Bomb. The Romans learned the fine points of using their infamous short swords by watching gladiators fight to the death- a funerary tradition they inherited from the Etruscans they assimilated. The training of professional gladiators was applied to the military and made “Drill a bloodless Battle and Battle a bloody Drill.”

The sword made the Roman Empire and Christianity inherited this prize. The Atom Bomb has kept modern civilization from World War for over a half century- but so far there is no great social movement that will inherit this mighty construct before it falls into a new dark age. The Fermi Paradox points to the possibility that this empire could well be the last; there will be no more cycles of civilizations rising and falling if we become extinct. If so then this really may be the end of the world- with no need to throw away reason in favor of the Book of Revelation.

What is most curious is that while the sword had no utility outside of murder, the Atomic Bomb holds the power to transcend this arena of earth and allow humankind to populate the galaxy. If this civilization can survive to travel to new worlds then the last empire will have risen- the last because it can never fall again.

So, to form a society of believers in life, in the future of the human race, the goals must be clear and easily understood;

If the human race is to survive, the individual must have some hope of surviving. The immediate need is a way to delay death and that procedure is practically a reality with advances in cryopreservation.

If the human race is to survive, new worlds must be found and colonized. The immediate need is for survival colonies off-world and atomic spaceships to establish those colonies and defend the earth from impact threats.

If the individual and the race as a whole is to survive, action must be taken. The immediate need is an organization to take money in and distribute it to the corporations and politicians that can direct the massive governmental resources necessary to accomplish a great rescue with cryopreservation and to construct spaceships to establish off world colonies and deflect impact threats.

Figuratively, metaphorically, the Christians conquered the old empire and the Astronomers who harness the power of the sun will inherit this empire. Since the more catchy titles have been taken by religious cults, I suggest the organization that will initiate action be called,

The Society of Christian Astronomers

My first call is for the money to copyright the title of the society and a brand I have in mind.

The Truth about Space Travel is Stranger than Fiction

Posted by Gary Michael Church in asteroid/comet impacts, biological, biotech/medical, business, chemistry, climatology, complex systems, cosmology, counterterrorism, defense, economics, education, engineering, ethics, events, evolution, existential risks, finance, futurism, geopolitics, habitats, homo sapiens, human trajectories, life extension, lifeboat, media & arts, military, neuroscience, nuclear weapons, physics, policy, space, sustainability, transparency, treatiesTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments on The Truth about Space Travel is Stranger than Fiction

I have been corresponding with John Hunt and have decided that perhaps it is time to start moving toward forming a group that can accomplish something.

The recent death of Neil Armstrong has people thinking about space. The explosion of a meteor over Britain and the curiosity rover on Mars are also in the news. But there is really nothing new under the sun. There is nothing that will hold people’s attention for very long outside of their own immediate comfort and basic needs. Money is the central idea of our civilization and everything else is soon forgotten. But this idea of money as the center of all activity is a death sentence. Human beings die and species eventually become extinct just as worlds and suns also are destroyed or burn out. Each of us is in the position of a circus freak on death row. Bizarre, self centered, doomed; a cosmic joke. Of all the creatures on this planet, we are the freaks the other creatures would come to mock- if they were like us. If they were supposedly intelligent like us. But are we actually the intelligent ones? The argument can be made that we lack a necessary characteristic to be considered truly intelligent life forms.

Truly intelligent creatures would be struggling with three problems if they found themselves in our situation as human beings on Earth in the first decades of this 21st century;

1. Mortality. With technology possible to delay death and eventually reverse the aging process, intelligent beings would be directing the balance of planetary resources towards conquering “natural” death.

2. Threats. With technology not just possible, but available, to defend the earth from extinction level events, the resources not being used to seek an answer to the first problem would necessarily be directed toward this second danger.

3. Progress. With science advancing and accelerating, the future prospects for engineering humans for greater intelligence and eventually building super intelligent machines are clear. Crystal clear. Not addressing these prospects is a clear warning that we are, as individuals, as a species, and as a living planet, headed not toward a bright future, but in the opposite direction toward a dead and final end.

One engineered pathogen will destroy us forever. One impact larger than average will destroy us forever. The reasoning that death is somehow “natural” which drives us to ignore the subject of destruction will destroy us forever. Earth changes are inevitable and taking place now- despite our faith in television and popular culture that everything is fun and games. Man is not the measure of all things. We think tomorrow will come just like yesterday- but it will not.

The Truth about Space Travel is that there are no stargates or warp drives that will take us across the galaxy like commecial airliners or cruise ships take us across oceans. If we do wake up and change our course, space voyages will take centuries and human expansion will be measured in millenia. We will be frozen when we travel to distant stars. And this survivable freezing will mark the beginning of a new age since being able to delay death by freezing will completely transform life. The first such successful procedure will mean the end of the world as we know it- and the beginning of a new civilization.

Though unknown to the public, the atomic bomb and then the hydrogen bomb marked the true beginning of the Space Age. Hydrogen bombs can push cities in space, hollow moons, to some percentage of the speed of light. These cities can travel to other stars, such as Epsilon Eridani with it’s massive asteroid belt. And there more artificial hollow moons can be mass produced to provide new worlds to live in. This is not fiction I am speaking of but something we could do right now- today. We only lack the procedure to freeze and successfully revive a human being. It is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

In Beam Propulsion we have the answer to bending the rocket equation to our will and allowing millions and eventually billions of human beings to migrate into space. Just as Verne and Wells made accurate predictions of the decades to come, we now are seeing the possible obvious future unfolding before our eyes.

But the most possible and probable obvious future at this moment is destruction. The end of days. Unless we do something.
You and I and everyone you know is involved in this. Let’s get started.

Whether via spintronics or some quantum breakthrough, artificial intelligence and the bizarre idea of intellects far greater than ours will soon have to be faced.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120819153743.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120815131137.htm

One more step has been taken toward making whole body cryopreservation a practical reality. An understanding of the properties of water allows the temperature of the human body to be lowered without damaging cell structures.

Just as the microchip revolution was unforeseen the societal effects of suspending death have been overlooked completely.

The first successful procedure to freeze a human being and then revive that person without damage at a later date will be the most important single event in human history. When that person is revived he or she will awaken to a completely different world.

It will be a mad rush to build storage facilities for the critically ill so their lives can be saved. The very old and those in the terminal stages of disease will be rescued from imminent death. Vast resources will be turned toward the life sciences as the race to repair the effects of old age and cure disease begins. Hundreds of millions may eventually be awakened once aging is reversed. Life will become far more valuable overnight and activities such as automobile and air travel will be viewed in a new light. War will end because no one will desire to hasten the death of another human being.

It will not be immortality, just parole from the death row we all share. Get ready.

AI scientist Hugo de Garis has prophesied the next great historical conflict will be between those who would build gods and those who would stop them.

It seems to be happening before our eyes as the incredible pace of scientific discovery leaves our imaginations behind.

We need only flush the toilet to power the artificial mega mind coming into existence within the next few decades. I am actually not intentionally trying to write anything bizarre- it is just this strange planet we are living on.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120813155525.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120813123034.htm