Conspiracies

It is always intriguing to think that "I know a special secret", but it is so often untrue. Usually, everything I know is pretty boring -- everybody else already knows it, nobody wants to hear it.

So it is with my opinion of conspiracies. Everybody already knows that JFK was killed by [insert villain here], and that UFOs come from [insert planet here], and that [they] are putting fluoride in our water, and that [some international cabal] is controlling the world, etc, etc.

The problem is that I don't really know the truth about any of these things. I suppose the truth of each subject in which conspiracies are proposed is probably pretty boring. There probably was nobody but Oswald who schemed to kill JFK. There probably aren't any aliens from anywhere and there are very few international groups which can effectively control the world, although Lord knows they try.

Yet, even choosing the most boring possibility is no guarantee of throwing cold water on a conspiracy theory. That's the beauty of them -- they are always proposed in such a way that no one can prove anything about the conspiracy -- that is unless the actual villains come out and admit their scheme, complete with proof beyond a shadow of doubt.

No one can disprove the JFK conspiracies, because it is always possible that Oswald had accomplices who got away with it. It may not be proven that any extra bullets were needed, it is possible that just the 3 shots from Oswald's gun was enough. The only other issues would be the motive. It seems nebulous to me as to why Oswald would shoot JFK. Just for the hell of it? For money? As part of the CIA? Who knows?

Aliens are a crazy bunch. They fly around the star systems, looking for poor, unsuspecting sentient beings on various planets -- subjecting them to invasive probes in the most private of areas on their bodies and casting them aside like so many used prostitutes. OK, I suppose that could be chalked up to scholarly pursuits. Kind of creepy really, yet there no proven kidnappings by aliens -- just a kind of speculation about what might have happened to many missing persons.

I won't bore the reader (myself?) with an endless stream of examples. But perhaps I could simply create a conspiracy of my own. I need another person, of course, otherwise it is merely a secret. There must be more than one person in a conspiracy. So I could select my wife as a (possibly) willing co-conspirator. Our subject could be that I know a woman that is selling a house for less than its market value. She will demand a deposit, I will perform a "credit check". Then she disappears with the deposit check, but I actually perform the credit check and determine that his credit is [whatever it is]. I have the person's trust, but my wife has the deposit check.

So, I promise to retrieve the check from this "rogue" woman, but only the portion greater than the credit check (some arbitrary fee which is greater than the fee charged by an Internet credit service.) I return the partial amount of money and pocket the difference. The person is glad to get away with their shirt and the knowledge that their "credit is good."

I do not have the actual courage to do some illegal thing like this -- the payoff would be way too small to risk some kind of long prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy. And certainly I would not want to also risk my wife's freedom too. So the motivation to actually insufficient.

Instead, if the motivation was to hide alien technology from stupid humans that would use it in the least responsible way immediately (as is usually the case in stories about Genies granting wishes...), then a conspiracy of secrecy might actually be in order -- so long as the group truly was responsible and did not simply hog the technology for themselves. That is probably the more likely outcome of such a conspiracy. Yet that very fact is what might make such conspiracy hold together, even over a large, multigenerational group of people.

The Washington Times is a Moonie

About the Moonies that populate our country. I am usually not involved so much with religions, avoiding most like the plague and the rest seem merely unnecessary. But there are some religions that are outright psychotropic propaganda, with much ado about finances in virtual pyramid schemes.

My feelings are usually "Who cares?" Let the nuts whack themselves silly. Yet there are aspects, especially regarding children or people with weak constitutions who may be completely converted into "Moonies", "Devotees" or Scientologists -- whatever they are called or labeled. They leave friends and family, seemingly for good, to devote themselves to whatever "great master", "Father", etc., (usually a male), and hand over all money, belongings and future duty to "His" cult.

But, in the case of Moonies, I really don't like the King Ant of Korea to come milling around in America creating Moon Zombies and right-wing operators for the God-Ordained Republicans. He can only do this by using huge sums of zombie money and the convenience of right wing courts.

And don't bother trying to convert me or pester me with religious tripe. I'm too old to learn any "new tricks." If I am going to Hell -- so be it. At least I will be able to see His Royal Heavenliness, Reverend Moon, every damn day.

Aliens in the Universe

There are few encounters between living creatures that would be as severe as those between aliens from a far distant world and ourselves. Of course there have been fictional stories, fictional movies, and even the so-called "non-fiction" writings of people convinced that such an event has already happened. I don't know for sure, of course, but it does seem rather far-fetched to believe such aliens have visited us already.

There are millions of stars within a few thousands of light years of Earth. Most of those stars are able to be home to many planets, and some of those planets might have some conditions which allow life to either evolve from scratch, or to be colonized by preexisting life forms. So the idea that there might be other beings on some planets is not far-fetched at all.

Not all stars would be as homey as our little Sun, which glows pretty much in a stable, medium simmer. Our world benefits greatly from stellar energy from our Sun, but it would not be such a great thing if the Sun were 100 times brighter or larger, or if our orbit was a hundred times closer. Aliens might be imagined to be able to evolve in very extreme conditions compared to our own, yet there seem to be limits where temperatures are measured in thousands of degrees or more, or where the radiation from the star destroys any organic molecule before a life form could ever make use of them.

Plus there is little hope that the laws of physics can be warped in such a way as to prevent space-time and energy relationships from killing any creatures brave enough to attempt a visit to our neighborhood. This presumes that humans in our current state can derive the true laws of physics and the limitations thereof regarding space travel are true. From what I personally know about particle/energy physics, it does seem pretty hopeless to expect anything like "warp speed" or other science fiction concepts. Yet it is not necessarily utterly hopeless. There may be some glaring mistake in our current scientific knowledge which makes our own understanding of physics like that of a small child.

Aliens might have lived for many thousands or millions of years longer than our civilization. It is not a slam dunk, of course, but there are animals on our own planet that have outlived humans by hundreds of millions of years. Plus, if one counts unicellular life forms, then we have been outlived for billions of years. Those simple life forms have not been so successful as humans at technical feats such as reaching the Moon for a short visit and returning alive. Yet, we owe our very lives to the relentless work of those tiny, ancient living things for converting the Earth into a place which can support animals like us. Likewise, there are many other plants and animals upon which we depend for food. This pyramid of life forms is a package deal, without the base at the bottom, there can be no apex supported at the top.

It may be true that humans on Earth are alone in the Galaxy. If this is true, then there is absolutely no hope that we would be visited by any aliens, even if there are such beings on planets around the stars in other galaxies. The closest major galaxy to our own is the Andromeda Galaxy, some million light years away. And most other galaxies are billions of light years away. I am not very keen to spend a billion years in a space ship traveling at light-speed, just to visit a hellish planet where some bacterial or fungal growth has evolved intelligence.

Before jumping to far off galaxies, we would be better off examining our own first. Even within our home galaxy, the Milky Way Spiral, there is a kind of "pleasure zone" or "Goldilocks Effect". where the density of stars is not too high and not too low. We need a dense enough gas presence from which our Sun could be formed (after possibly 1 or more generations of star death.)

We do not need intense amounts of gamma radiation which occurs in denser "boiling" regions of the galaxy where stars are often being swallowed by other stars or where black holes form from heavier and heavier stars.

We would never have evolved on the planets of slow burning small stars that rarely convert their hydrogen fuel into metals and other heavy elements during supernova explosions. That part of the galaxy is more or less "frozen." The elements of life must, at a minimum, involve carbon and hydrogen, and the carbon element is not easily formed without a supermassive star's alchemical fusion death.

So maybe there is a 1/3rd of the galaxy where we could possibly live in, or at least have naturally formed within. Maybe this is true for other beings in the Universe as well. Perhaps the bands can be mapped onto the selection of stars we examine for life signatures. There would be no need to waste telescope time outside of the "life band" of the galaxy. So our efficiency at finding life planets can be multiplied by 3 or more. Other tricks, such as ignoring stars greater than a certain size or temperature, can increase the chances even more. No significant life forms can evolve around a star that can only exist for a few percent of the time that the Sun has existed.

We can only assume that any "real aliens" out there have already discovered such techniques, and perhaps developed greater refinements and much finer tools for the task of finding living planets. That ability would seem to be a evolution technique in itself -- only those beings who can transcend their home planet might survive some life-ending catastrophe that planets often suffer. If the aliens cannot transcend their dying world, they will die along with it.

Aliens could possibly visit our planet -- using "magic" of course -- but only at very great expense. Unless aliens find some manner of using absolutely limitless and costless energy, then any trips from one part of the galaxy to another will require vast cost. For instance, traveling in a 10 ton spacecraft (hopefully enough food, water and fuel for the trip) from the Sun to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light would cost far more than all the energy we have used since the birth of humanity.

Tricks like sucking up waste hydrogen that atomically zips around through otherwise empty space might help save costs. We would only need to take food and water. If we were satisfied only sending some robots, then the costs could be reduced even more, expelling the need for food and water, however still needing some kind of power sources for the robots. Yet, even after reducing everything down to the minimum, the energy costs would be quite high, far higher than all our currently accumulated space launchings combined. Just communicating with these robots would be difficult, since, while traveling at light speed, they would be like photons themselves, reducing the signals to ultra-low frequency grunts, and while stopped in orbit around the target star, the time for a signal to reach us from that star would take many years.

Worm holes, hyperdrives and other exotic science-fiction concepts might someday become possible, or at least less fantastic, and this would mean that not only us, but the aliens, could benefit. In fact, the aliens may have already discovered such truths.

Linux Continues @ Home

I've been a Unix guy from many years ago, long before any 32 bit OS from Microsoft ever jammed itself into the world. Although when Windows NT came along I was temporarily lulled into putting up with it's massive complexity -- a legacy from a time when Win16 was the ruler of Dinosauria, which when mixed with Win32 NT, produced a Chimera called Windows 95/98 et all.

At least I could use native 32 bit addressing, arrays greater than 64K, and increasingly more full sized arithmetic operands in both integer and floating point right in Intel hardware. Yet, even when writing programs which would run identically on Unix and Windows (for the most part...), it became an increasingly more difficult chore to do this when things like .NET came along, which bastardized the C++ language to be something MS calls "CLI" Common Language Interface.

Now, with the advent of greater numbers of Linux systems that have bloomed into full scale Desktop systems that rival (but don't quite exceed) the experience of Windows XP or Vista. Of course, XP and Vista are not merely advanced forms of Unix GUI systems -- they are totally MS controlled, secret source based complexities beyond any hope of simplification. In fact, MS purposely makes things as complex as possible so there is no possible way for any kind of open source XP or Vista to ever happen. Any pretenders would simply be copies or reverse engineered mutations of XP or Vista.

Unix never had a fixed "look and feel" like Windows that would need to be copied exactly. There were many flavors of Unix -- SunOS, Solaris, Aix, Hpux, ScoUnix, and several others, each very different than the others. Some used Motif, some used straight X, some used the Sun Gui, etc. In those days there was hardly a thought about anything like Gnome or KDE for windowing systems.

However, Windows XP, Vista and Apple's MaxOs, OS-X and Sun's various systems all affected those who would later write the various layers of Linux GUIs. Linux also had to adapt to the same huge number of variations that made Windows so difficult -- a hodge podge of GPUs, CPUs, memory sizes, disk hardware, and so forth. There are still problems with some drivers.

On top of that there are various flavors of Linux -- openSUSE, Devian, RedHat, Ubuntu and Xandros, just to name a few. Each has a few little things different enough from the others that are sometimes nicer or not, sometimes prettier or not. Certainly they make for different documentation.

In some ways this is a good thing. Perhaps Windows XP would have been very much better if there was a Brand-X XP and a Brand-Y XP in addition to MS. Yes, there would have been duplication of efforts, and possible incompatibilities from one to another -- but perhaps XP would be everything that Vista pretends to be -- except about 5 years earlier.

Anyway, that never happened. What did happen, however, is that I have openSUSE and Ubuntu Linux systems on some of my home computers -- complete with Wireless Networking (a weakness in earlier versions...) Also, one of them is a modern Dell with fast hardware, lots of disk, memory. The other is on a older Toshiba with far less capable devices. But the both behave very decently under Linux.

I can mix them into the home Windows XP/Vista network, as well. Everyone can get to everyone else's shared network files.

Linux has made me young again. For this reason, I'm sure Linux will fail, and waste the last good years of my life. Perhaps I should merely step into the Vista brain-smasher and become a Microsoft Weenie for the remainder of my life -- like most good little programmers.

Linux

I have met the enemy and it is not Linux.

It is Microsoft.

Linux is not for the newbie, certainly, but dealing with Microsoft is not for humans.