NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, nicknamed “Curiosity,” is scheduled for launch Nov. 26 with a mission to Mars that’s aimed at using a nuclear powered Curiosity robot rover vehicle to “find Martian life.” In turn, a new book – with a cover page endorsement from former President Bill Clinton – by famed scientist Lisa Randall, titled “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World,” is telling it straight about the No. 1 goal of man’s space exploration, and that’s “finding life outside our planet.” Thus, this quest for making contact with aliens continues to be a trillion-dollar industry for America, Russia, China, the European Union and other countries who too see the value of knocking on heaven’s door until aliens make First Contact; while many here at Bray’s Point say “first contact is moot, since they’re here now.”
Why is the Obama Administration still searching in space in a time of recession?
The Mars Science Laboratory is costing the U.S. billions in a time of deep recession. This move to send robot vehicles to Mars is focused on one goal, states NASA scientists, and that is to “see if there was life on Mars.” The Mars mission, that blasts off Saturday, is part of a sweeping post-Space Shuttle change of direction for NASA that’s not so much aimed at saving money; but to “put more rockets and other spacecraft out there in our desperate goal to touch the heavens and find that alien life,” said a visiting scientist and ufologist here at Bray’s Point, who also noted how President George W. Bush “was also into finding alien life with the Constellation moon program.”
“What the American public doesn’t understand is the quest for life out there creates ‘spinoff’ technology that can be adapted for other uses here on Earth. Sending a nuke-powered robot vehicle to Mars may sound crazy just to see if there is or was life on Mars, but it’s also about scientific exploration that stretches the bounds of today’s technology and, in turn, creates new tech ways of doing things in space; such as space-based weapons platforms,” adds the Bray’s Point ufologist.
In turn, Professor Lisa Randall’s new book: “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World,” has been praised by former President Bill Clinton because, he says: “Her book presents the latest physics developments with excursions into culture and public policy, explaining science in ways that must might make you think differently – and encourage you to make smarter decisions about the world.”
Professor Randall, who studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University – where she is the Frank J. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science — says it’s clear that alien life is out there.
However, such views about ET are greeted as rubbish by many people today “who want all the facts put at their feet in a neat pile,” says the Bray’s Point ufologist who also notes how he’s spent “the past few months chasing down the tens of thousands of links and associated UFO files,” that he says are part of the massive hoard of recently released British government.
In turn, these once top secret UFO documents – that number 8,500 UFO sighting and feature details about alien contact and abductions — are more importantly linked to thousands of other reports that help explain that “were are not alone.”
Finding clues to alien life in space from religious views
Professor Randall’s new book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” appeals to former President Clinton, local Bray’s Point ufologists and others because, in part, it’s based on “Galileo’s evidence for the Copernican heliocentric theory,” that Randall says, “contradicts the Catholic Church’s claims about the heavens” both back in the time of Galileo and today with UFO skeptics believing in God, but not the view that God created “other life outside Earth.”
“More recent history has provided numerous instances of conflict between science and religion. The second law of thermodynamics, which says that the world is moving toward increasing disorder, can dismay people who believe that God created an ideal world.”
For instance, in the fifth century, Professor Randall writes how “Augustine made this viewpoint explicit: ‘Often a non-Christian knows something about the Earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, and this knowledge he holds with certainly from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.’
Professor Randall also writes that “Augustine, in his subtlety, went even further. He explained that God deliberately introduced riddles into scripture to give people the pleasure of figuring them out.”
In turn, the professor note how questions about alien life mirrors this view with many ufologists who are also trying to figure out the “riddles” of why there’s been tens of thousands of UFO sightings by people from all walks of life and from around the planet, and yet there’s no one proof that satisfies the skeptics who simply want more and more details when ancient religion noted that “it’s all a mystery.”
String theory and why explaining UFO sightings is not so easy
“Over time, we build a consistent picture of how one layer of reality proceeds from the next. The basic elements are essential to reality, but good scientists don’t assert that knowledge of them in itself explains everything. Explanations call for further research,” writes Professor Randall in her new book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” while also referencing her work on exploring life outside Earth in her bestselling book “Warped Passages.”
For instance, Professor Randall writes that even if scientists can’t point to a perfect example of a UFO or alien encounter, there’s science that can tackle the problem, even, for example, “if string theory turns out to explain quantum gravity, the ‘theory of everything’ will remain a horrible misnomer.”
“In the unlikely event that physicists arrive at such an all-embracing fundamental theory, we would still have to face lots of questions about alien phenomena on larger scales that won’t be answered simply by knowing the basic components. Only when scientists understand collective phenomena that arise on larger scales that those described by elementary strings will we hope to explain superconducting materials, monster waves in the ocean and life. In the process of doing science, we’ll address alien phenomena scale by scale.”
Moreover, Professor Randall thinks the alternative to getting everybody on the same page with the goal of science to discover alien life (including NASA’s multi-billion dollar gamble with its new mission to Mars on Nov. 26) is a bottom-up approach with gradual reform from below at the ufologist level.
For instance, The New York Times review of Professor Randall’s new book says “she knows as well as her string-theorist colleagues do that the Standard Model can’t be the whole story. At best, it’s a low-energy approximation of the Truth. But she prefers to hew closely to the available experimental data, using those data to resolve puzzling features of the Standard Model and to guess how it might be extended to energies just beyond its ken — the sort of energies that, she hopes, will be attainable soon in the Large Hadron Collider.”
“This is not to say that Randall has no truck with string theory,” adds The New York Times review, “but, indeed, she has exploited one of its central ideas — that space might have extra, hidden dimensions — as part of an ingenious bottom-up proposal (worked out with Raman Sundrum) to resolve a longstanding mystery about the Standard Model, known as the hierarchy problem: Why do the elementary particles it describes have such wildly arbitrary masses? Related to this is a second mystery: Why do these particles have any mass at all?”
And, thus, science takes the next steps as trying to figure out why so many UFO sightings and how the study of UFOs can “prompt science to keep knocking on heaven’s door for alien life.”
Looking for answers by knocking on heaven’s door
“I first heard the phrase ‘knockin’ on heaven’s door’ when listening to the Bob Dylan song at his 1987 concert with the Grateful Dead in Oakland, California. Needless to say, the title of my book is intended differently than the song’s lyrics, which I still hear Dylan and Jerry Garcia singing in my head. The phrase differs from its biblical origin as well, though my title does toy with this interpretation. In Matthew, the Bible says, ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receivth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”
In turn, Professor Randall writes that “nothing can escape a black hole.” While, it’s interesting to note that “black holes” are often linked in some way to UFO sightings, states one of the British government UFO documents that explore physics and scientific thinking about “answers to the vast amount of UFO’s being spotted around the world since written records were put down and kept.”
“A Trekkie friend jokes that they are the ‘perfect Borgs,’” explains Professor Randall in her new book. “Any object that encounters a black hole gets assimilated, since the laws of gravity dictate that ‘resistance is futile.’”
Image source of the 2000 science fiction film “Mission to Mars,” that details a fictional portrayal of a manned Mars exploration mission gone awry in the year 2020. In turn, the NASA Mars Science Laboratory mission, that is set to launch on Nov. 26, strangely mirrors this fiction with a real life effort to find alien life on Mars. Photo courtesy Wikipedia
The New York Times' A.O. Scott writes that Baron Cohen's comedic potential "is mostly squandered in 'The Dictator,' which gestures half-heartedly toward topicality and, with equal lack of conviction, toward pure, anarchic silliness." In other words, the stakes aren't high enough ("There is nothing especially outrageous here," Scott writes), and the jokes aren't funny enough ("There are a few good ones, but many more that feel half-baked and rehashed").
Story by Lance Williams
