Stories Behind the News The first thing I want to talk about is how researchers from Wits University have hooked up a human brain directly to the Internet. Some people will say this is a great accomplishment, but others probably won’t like this idea at all. What does it mean? Will all of us just need a tiny device either on our person or planted in our brain to allow this to happen in the future and will our brains be susceptible to hacking? No, I don’t like this idea at all, because I know human nature and there will always be people who will see this as some sort of opportunity to do something which they shouldn’t. If this connection became commonplace I am sure every criminal on the planet with the capability to do so will want to do terrible things to us and nations would want to control us if they could. This capability will probably be the next thing the military will want to develop. Just recently a Russian plane flew over one of our destroyers, it had electronic capabilities that knocked out the sensors on the ship. Can you imagine the same scenario only this time the plane does something to the brains of the people on the ship rendering them useless? As incredible as it sounds one of the implements used to hook the brain to the computer was what is known as a Raspberry Pi computer which can be purchased for about ten dollars or less when on sale. Do the advantages of being hooked up directly to the Internet outweigh the disadvantages and risks? I let you decide this one. We have been very lucky so far in our endeavors in space. I am not talking about accomplishing our goals, what I am talking about is the fact we could have had a lot more deaths. True there was some very sad tragedies especially with the space shuttle where whole crews were wiped out, but even this could have been worse. On the other hand, if NASA would have done the right thing and listened to advice from the people who made the external booster rockets at least one tragedy would have been avoided when they were told not to launch. I am talking about the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The explosion cost the lives of seven people unnecessarily. Anyway, back to what I was going to say, one biologist is claiming if we lose crew members to death in space voyages we should jettison their body into space, because these bodies could be responsible for eventually creating life on another planet since our bodies are full of microbes and some can exist in the harshest of environments. Can life come from death? I have never really given this much thought, but if it is true could life on earth have been wiped out one or more times and reborn again? There is said to be a new theory on fighting wars and it has nothing to do with the traditional way this is done, with armies going against each other. It is a war fought against the financial stability of another country. Who should know more about this than the Russians. When they were the Soviet Union they tried so hard to keep up with the United States and weapons development they bankrupted themselves and the country fell apart. Many believe what Russia is doing today and China to a certain extent, is aimed at destroying the financial stability of the United States. It all started several years ago when Russia made a push to destroy the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. We have to remember there are many countries which are jealous of us and not all of them are considered enemies, many of them are our allies. Russia and China joined together to start their own World Bank and India has joined in the movement. Brazil is also a member. China wants to use the bank to expand its influence at the expense of the United States and Japan in the Asian region. I think Russia has even a grander plan which is perhaps becoming the world’s leading superpower. We all know how things change when allies see each other as threats and eventually even the partnership between Russia and China could become shaky if China decides it no longer needs the Russians, after all China is probably the best funded country in the world and could wield a lot more financial power than Russia ever could. Will the dollar be able to hold out against this assault? It definitely will no longer be the only currency for petroleum deals and other things and with the huge deficits we face in this country, we could be in a lot of trouble as less dollars become used around the world and come home to America. This will eventually drive the price down of the dollar and force our government to stop printing them, because there will be so many dollars in circulation. Unless something is done our government may no longer be able to afford even the social programs it now has. We are a powerful country and we no doubt have financial weapons also, but they are getting weaker. One thing which bothered some people is the fact we want to make our presence known to any aliens which may be out there. The Voyager spacecraft which were sent into space years ago contained our location and symbols to show what we look like and a lot more. We have beamed our location out into space hoping some alien civilization will pick it up. I remember the saying which states be careful what you wish for. It could turn out if there are aliens near enough to receive our signals, they are not friendly. We have been scanning space for years for signals from other civilizations and lately we have received a few mysterious ones, but we can’t be sure they were created by an intelligent race, because they could just be signals which were created by natural means such as a neutron star. Some astronomers at SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence want to put a lot more emphasis on sending out messages rather than trying to receive them. Others at SETI think this is not a good idea. The group that wants to do this is known as METI, which stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligences. Nobody seems to really have gone into this, but in 2003 an article appeared in New Scientist Magazine stating if we could build a super powerful neutrino generator we could in theory use it to instantly destroy nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet. I have said for years we should be putting our resources into developing a way to neutralize nuclear warheads. Here is a quote from one of the scientists mentioned in the article, “It is really quite futuristic,” Alfons Weber, a neutrino scientist at Oxford University, UK, told New Scientist. “But the maths and physics seems to be right.” One can only hope we have been working on this and perhaps have even secretly developed it. |
