---BREAKAWAY CIVILIZATION ---ALTERNATIVE HISTORY---NEW BUSINESS MODELS--- ROCK & ROLL 'S STRANGE BEGINNINGS---SERIAL KILLERS---YEA AND THAT BAD WORD "CONSPIRACY"--- AMERICANS DON'T EXPLORE ANYTHING ANYMORE.WE JUST CONSUME AND DIE.---
Topics broached included the curious history of Resorts International, a gaming interest with extensive ties to the US intelligence community and organized crime that Donald J. Trump became CEO of in 1986; Trump's sinister political mentor, attorney Roy Cohn; Cohn's links to the Profumo Affair and how this scandal disgraced globalist elements of the Tories while sparing those eventually linked to the Pinay Circle/Le Cercle; the presence of so many descendants of key figures of the Round Table movement figures, especially those linked to the Cliveden Set, in Le Cercle; Roy Cohn's links to the long reputed Son of Sam cult; the overlap between said cult and various Christian Identity terrorists; the possibility Manson was a follower of identity "theology"; the far right connections of the Process Church of the Final Judgment; the credibility of Maury Terry; the many sex scandals Cohn's longtime private detective Thomas Corbally appears in; the Mueller probe as an instrument to silence Cohn's former associates; Roger Stone and NXIVM; and of course the Company and Kentucky Derby days. In other words, its quite an epic chat that Ed and I have.
Doors song The End full and uncensored https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqFRt...
The lyrics are, as followin,
This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes, again
Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free
Desperately in need, of some, stranger's hand
In a, desperate land
Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane, all the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake, he's old, and his skin is cold
The west is the best, the west is the best
Get here, and we'll do the rest
The blue bus is callin' us, the blue bus is callin' us
Driver, where you taken us
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and, then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door, and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother, I want to...
C'mon baby, take a chance with us
C'mon baby, take a chance with us
C'mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin' a blue rock, on a blue bus
Doin' a blue rock, c'mon, yeah
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill
This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you'll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end
A broad and detailed report from piracy tracking
outfit MUSO shows that visits to pirate sites went up last year. The
company recorded more than 300 billion visits in 2017, which suggests
that "piracy is more popular than ever." TV remained the most popular
category and most pirates prefer streaming over torrents or direct
downloading.
Despite
the growing availability of legal options, online piracy remains
rampant. Every day pirate sites are visited hundreds of millions of
times. Piracy tracking outfit MUSO has documented the piracy landscape with data from tens of thousands of the largest global piracy sites. In its latest report,
the company recorded more than 300 billion visits to pirate sites last
year alone. This is an increase of 1.6 percent compared to 2016. More than half of all these visits (53%) are going to streaming
sites, making that the most popular piracy tool. Torrent sites and
direct download portals still have a significant user base, but follow
at a respectable distance. Most of the pirate visits came from the United States, followed by
India and Brazil. Despite the various pirate site blockades, the UK also
secured a spot in the top ten, ranked at the bottom with nine billion
visits. The top ten list favors large countries and with this in mind, there
is a large player missing. China, which is often portrayed as a country
where piracy is rampant, ended up in 18th place with ‘only’ 4.6 billion
visits.
Visits per country
#
Country
Billion visits
Data from Muso
1
United States
27.9
2
Russia
20.6
3
India
17.0
4
Brazil
12.7
5
Turkey
11.1
6
Japan
10.6
7
France
10.5
8
Indonesia
10.4
9
Germany
10.2
10
United kingdom
9.0
Muso tracks piracy trends across various media categories and has
spotted some interesting trends. TV-shows remain the most popular among
pirates with 106.9 billion visits last year, followed by music (73.9
billion) and film (53.2 billion). Mobile piracy is on the rise as well. For the first time, more people
were accessing pirated TV content via mobile devices (52%) where
desktops used to be the favorite device. In the music category, this
difference is even more pronounced, with 87% using mobile devices. Last year desktops were still preferred among movie pirates, but MUSO expects this will change in 2018. According to MUSO co-founder and CEO Andy Chatterley, these data show that piracy remains a sizable threat, something we also hinted at in the recent past. “There is a belief that the rise in popularity of on-demand services –
such as Netflix and Spotify – have solved piracy, but that theory
simply doesn’t stack up. Our data suggest that piracy is more popular
than ever,” Chatterley says. While it’s hard to make historical comparisons without good data,
it’s clear that piracy is still rampant. And with more people coming
online year after year, the potential audience keeps growing. Also, it is worth noting that the total piracy landscape is even
larger than MUSO shows. In recent years many people have switched to
pirate streaming boxes. These are not included in MUSO’s dataset, which
relies on data provided by SimilarWeb, among other sources. That said, the overall conclusion that the piracy audience is massive, and not to be ignored, remains the same. “The piracy audience is huge and yet for the most part, it’s an opportunity that’s completely ignored,” Chatterley says. “It’s important that the content industries embrace the trends
emerging from this data, not only in strategic content protection, but
also in understanding the profile of the piracy ‘consumer’ for better
business insight and monetizing these audiences,“ MUSO’s CEO adds.
Remember
that Dark Overlord hack of emails claiming information about 9/11? The
hacking group claims to have uncovered a "treasure trove" of information
about insurance company lawsuits regarding 9/11, which it would release
to people paying the ransom (in Bitcoins). Well, a second tranche of
emails has been released, and Russia, it seems (if no one else), is
paying attention. Mr. V.T., Mr. T.H., and Mr. G.B. found these articles:
When I first blogged about this emerging
story, I held out the view that this could be a significant development,
in spite of the fact that the information in the first layer of
releases did not seem all that significant. A peculiarity of the story
is that while the hack seems to have been done by "professionals," the
platform - Windows - left many cyber-security people mystified. What I
find intriguing is that Russian media, as exemplified by the Sputnik and RT articles linked above, seems to be the only major media still paying attention. The question is, why? We'll get back to that.
But first, consider the interesting interpretation offered by Gary Miliefsky in the Sputnik interview:
Sputnik: Some guests
have been saying that the fact that it is insurance companies might make
it interesting, in that they tend to ask questions, that the lawyers
ask questions that might be rather interesting.
Gary Miliefsky: Yes, you
see the insurance companies who paid out claims, then filed these
alternative lawsuits where they're saying we want to get paid back.
Let's say there was a manufacturing defect in a car and your insurance
company covered it for you, they may go after the car manufacturer. So
these documents are very similar in that they're showing insurance
companies trying to recoup their losses for payments for 9/11, and
in the recouping of their losses, the questions that will be uncovered
are "who did they sue?", "why did they sue them?", "what information was
uncovered in these lawsuits?", "did they get their money back and who
paid them?".
Sputnik: How valuable is the data released by the hackers?
Gary Miliefsky:It
seems extremely valuable and I think that if continued layers come out,
it will start to paint a post-9/11 picture of how huge claims are paid
and reimbursed, and what parties are involved, there're a lot of big
names in these documents.
Sputnik: Will it provide the public with more information that will differ from what we know about 9/11?
Gary Miliefsky:It
might paint a bigger picture and it may provide some alternative
information or some newer pieces of data that was (sic) never
before made public, for whatever reason. (Italicized emphasis added)
So what's the message, if indeed there is
one? This is where it gets interesting, and it may shed some light on
why Russia is covering this story, when no one else seems interested
(or, if they are interested, why they might be "prohibited" from doing
so). Russia, as I outlined in my 9/11 book, Hidden Finance, Rogue Networks, and Secret Sorcery,
was one of those nations - along with Germany, Israel, Jordan, &c -
that was passing warnings to the USA that something drastic was about
to happen on American soil. In fact, it was Russia that not only passed
along confidential warnings, but wrote openly about the possibility prior to the attacks. In July of 2001, Pravda
ran an article by the Russian economist Dr. Tatyana Koriagina, who
stated that America would be attacked on its own soil, but that the
attack would come from a "network" of a very few people with assets in
the trillions of dollars. That information was first uncovered
by the late Jim Marrs, who duly reported it in his books about 9/11.
Again, Russian Federation President Putin was the one world leader that
G.H. Bush contacted that day. Since that event, Russia has sent other
messages which few are paying attention to, like Sergei Glazyev's
warning that Russia's problems weren't really the "Nazis in Kiev, but
the Nazis in Washington."
The mere fact that Russia was warning of
the attacks prior to their occurrence means that Russia is watching Dr.
Koriagina's "group" closely; and that means, quite simply, that Russia
"knows something" which, for whatever reason, it is not saying, but
rather, dropping "hints" and "clues" from time to time, not the least of
which in my opinion are Mr. Putin's constant challenges to the dogmas
of globaloneyism and his constant use of the word "partners" in
reference to the Western Powers, a word for which he is often challenged
in Russia for being "too weak" and "appeasing" to the West. But Mr.
Putin's choice of this word is, if nothing else, an assertion of his
central point: Russia will not be a subsidiary or a franchise of the
western financial hustlers; it will be a full and sovereign equal. In
the context of the remarks in Sputnik, another message is being sent:there is real information in those documents capable of painting a "bigger picture" and of providing "alternative information or newer pieces of data," with the added tidbit that "there're a lot of big names in these documents."
So what's my high octane best speculative
guess? Russia already knows what's in those documents, and it does not
want the story to die in the hopes that that information will come out,
which saves it the difficulty of having to reveal it itself. And of
course, there's always the possibility that there is some sort of
connection between Russia and the Dark Overlord hackers.
“It is in the admission of
ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the
continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get
confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various
periods in the history of man.” Richard P. Feynman
When studying about the most notable scientific stories of the XXIst
century, future students will probably giggle when trying to memorize a
peculiar word found in their books: Oumuamua. Recognized as the first object of unquestionable interstellar origin
to ever intrude into our solar system –we know this because of the
highly eccentric orbit it displayed in contrast to the ecliptic plane
that most bodies in the system follow when orbiting around the Sun–
Oumuamua was discovered in October of 2017 by Robert Weryk at the
Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii, and ever since it has continued to
puzzle scientists because its shape and behavior was even weirder than
the name it was assigned to (it means “first distant messenger” in Hawaiian).
Oumuamua moved like a comet, and yet it didn’t produce the
characteristic tail of these icy bodies. To make things even more
confusing, the varying light emitted by this not-comet suggested Oumuamua was at least 10 times as long as it was thick. How could this ‘interstellar baton’ retain its fragile form for so long? And then there was the final insult to our knowledge about errant
astronomical bodies, observed in June of last year: new data from the
Hubble telescope confirmed Oumuamua’s velocity had increased during
its rendezvous with the inner solar system, in ways that could not be
explained by simple celestial mechanics and gravitational influences. Astronomers paused their collective hand from scratching their
collective head only to make that hand into an angry fist when they read
a truly bold and controversial paper
co-written in November of last year by Abraham Loeb, chairman of
Harvard University’s astronomy department, and his postdoctoral student
Shmuel Bialy. The paper was very rigorous in its math and the scientific
assertions it proposed, and at the same time it did something no-one
else in the scientific community dared to do: Suggest Oumuamua was in
fact an ancient solar sail built by an extraterrestrial civilization and deliberately sent to intercept our solar neighborhood. American-Israeli theoretical physicist Abraham (Avy) LoebLast week the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an excellent interview with Loeb,
which not only helps to explain in layman terms why Oumuamua is a true
anomaly, but also highlights the many problems arising from the way the
academic community tends to behave when confronted by a scientific
mystery: with an a-priori contempt for any kind of novel ideas,
especially when it comes to the possibility about alien life. An
arrogant ‘it can’t be therefore it isn’t’ attitude that is even
more prevalent –ironically enough– among the scientists more directly
involved with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). It’s
almost as if we are so certain there’s no one else out there, we keep on
looking for signs we’re not alone without really expecting to find any. Not only that, but Loeb points out the kind of fear prevalent among
his colleagues of making their ideas public, if they happen to be too
‘heretical’:
“The article I published was
written, in part, on the basis of conversations I had with colleagues
whom I respect scientifically. Scientists of senior status said
themselves that this object was peculiar but were apprehensive about
making their thoughts public. I don’t understand that. After all,
academic tenure is intended to give scientists the freedom to take risks
without having to worry about their jobs. Unfortunately, most
scientists achieve tenure – and go on tending to their image. As
children we ask ourselves about the world, we allow ourselves to err.
Ego doesn’t play a part. We learn about the world with innocence and
honesty. As a scientist, you’re supposed to enjoy the privilege of being
able to continue your childhood. Not to worry about the ego, but about
uncovering the truth. Especially after you get tenure.”
In the interview, Loeb explains to the Haaretz reporter that Oumuamua
is probably shaped like a flat pancake instead of a cigar. Not only
that, but its relative velocity compared to the average speed of all the
stars in the region suggests this ‘distant messenger’ was at ‘relative
rest’ until the solar system reached its position while traveling around the center of the Milky Way. Read that last sentence again until it sinks in. But how to explain the biggest mystery of all –Oumuamua’s sudden and
inexplicable acceleration once it entered the inner solar system? “The only hypothesis I could think of,” Loeb says, “is
a push from solar radiation pressure. For that to work, the object
would have to be very thin, less than a millimeter thick, in other words
a type of pancake. In addition, the Spitzer Space Telescope found no
evidence of heat emission from the object, and that means that it is at
least 10 times more reflective than a typical comet or asteroid. What we
have, then, is a thin, flat, shiny object. So I arrived at the idea of a
solar sail: A solar sail is a spaceship that uses the sun for
propulsion. Instead of using fuel, it is propelled ahead by reflecting
light. In fact, it’s a technology that our civilization is developing at
this very time.” I urge you to read the interview in its entirety. In the end, I feel
whether Loeb is correct or not about Oumuamua, and it was not in fact
an ancient probe sent by an advanced civilization tens of thousands of
years ago, is not the most important thing about the paper he and his student wrote. As the scientific director of Project Starshot
which studied the possibility of deploying solar sails traveling at
one-fifth the speed of light, critics could very well argue he’s falling
into an ‘anthropomorphization’ of this astronomical anomaly,
attributing aliens with the same kind of technology we’re currently
trying to develop –then again, SETI is also guilty of the exact same thing, insisting our hypothetical galactic neighbors would only bother to communicate with us using radio transmissions. No, the value in Loeb’s hypothesis is that it helped to highlight how
in the cutting-edge areas of Science, we tend to punish innovative
thinking instead of encouraging it. Scientists are being conditioned to
stick to what is accepted by the status quo in order to protect their
careers. Only the older scientists who are sufficiently shielded from
professional suicide by having already achieved enough recognition, or
won enough prizes and medals, are the ones brave enough to dare to say “what if” out loud. With that kind of rationale, we are less likely to make any major breakthroughs.
“If you’re not ready to find
exceptional things, you won’t discover them. Of course, every argument
needs to be based on evidence, but if the evidence points to an anomaly,
we need to talk about an anomaly. Who cares if this anomaly appeared or
did not appear in science-fiction books? I don’t even like science
fiction.”
Loeb’s colleagues are still detecting mysterious fast radio bursts
(FRBs) coming from the deepest reaches of the Universe. Nobody knows
what originates them, but suggesting they could be actual transmissions of artificial origin is not considered kosher among
‘serious’ researchers. Likewise, NASA is getting prepared to probe the
surface of Mars in search of microbial fossils, and yet the debate
involving meteorite ALH 84001,
discovered in Antarctica more than 20 years ago, rages on. The findings
of the scientists who suggested the microscopic structures found inside
the meteorite were signs of Martian life were flat-out rejected by most
of the scientific community –this at a time when even considering the
possibility that Mars had had water in its ancient past was simply
preposterous. Meteorite ALH 84001. Signs of Martian fossils? Perhaps schools should teach the future generations of scientists and thinkers to dare to be wrong more often. Instead of waiting ’til they get tenure and secure retirement.
An
artist’s rendering of Oumuamua. “It waited in place, like a buoy in the
ocean, until the ‘ship’ of the solar system ran into it.”
ESO / M. Kornmesser
If True, This Could Be One of the Greatest Discoveries in Human History
The
head of Harvard's astronomy department says what others are afraid to
say about a peculiar object that entered the solar system
“I
don’t care what people say,” asserts Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard
University’s astronomy department and author of one of the most
controversial articles in the realm of science last year (and also one
of the most popular in the general media). “It doesn’t matter to me,” he
continues. “I say what I think, and if the broad public takes an
interest in what I say, that’s a welcome result as far as I’m concerned,
but an indirect result. Science isn’t like politics: It is not based on
popularity polls.”
Prof.
Abraham Loeb, 56, was born in Beit Hanan, a moshav in central Israel,
and studied physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of the
Israel Defense Forces’ Talpiot program for recruits who demonstrate
outstanding academic ability. Freeman Dyson, the theoretical physicist,
and the late astrophysicist John Bahcall admitted Loeb to the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, whose past faculty members included
Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 2012, Time magazine named
Loeb one of the 25 most influential people in the field of space. He has
won prizes, written books and published 700 articles in the world’s
leading scientific journals. Last October, Loeb and his postdoctoral
student Shmuel Bialy, also an Israeli, published an article in the
scientific outlet “The Astrophysical Journal Letters,” which seriously
raised the possibility that an intelligent species of aliens had sent a
spaceship to Earth.
The “spaceship” in question is called Oumuamua.
For those who don’t keep up with space news, Oumuamua is the first
object in history to pass through the solar system and be identified as
definitely originating outside of it. The first interstellar guest came
to us from the direction of Vega, the brightest star in the Lyra
constellation, which is 26 light-years from us. In the 1997 film
“Contact,” it’s the star from which the radio signal is sent to Jodie
Foster.
Oumuamua
was actually discovered by a Canadian astronomer, Robert Weryk, using
the Pan-STARRS telescope at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii.
“Oumuamua” is Hawaiian for “first distant messenger” – in a word,
“scout.” It was discovered on October 19, 2017, suspiciously close to
Earth (relatively speaking, of course: Oumuamua was 33 million
kilometers away from us when it was sighted – 85 times farther than the
moon is from Earth).
Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department.
Moti Milrod
Whereas
all the planets, asteroids and meteors that originate within the solar
system more or less circle what is called the Ecliptic plane, that of
our sun, since they were formed from the same disc of gas and dust that
rotated around itself, Oumuamua entered the solar system north of the
plane, in an extreme hyperbolic orbit and at a speed of 26.3 kilometers
per second faster relative to the motion of the sun.
A
reconstruction of its trajectory shows that Oumuamua traversed the
ecliptic plane on September 6, 2017, when the sun’s gravity accelerated
the object to a velocity of 87.8 kilometers per second. On September 9,
the object passed closer to the sun than the orbit of Mercury. And on
October 14, five days before it was discovered in Hawaii, the object
passed 24.18 million kilometers away from Earth, or 62 times the
distance from here to the moon.
What
does it feel like to sit next to colleagues in a university lunchroom a
day after publishing an article arguing that Oumuamua may actually be a
reconnaissance spaceship?
Loeb:
“The article I published was written, in part, on the basis of
conversations I had with colleagues whom I respect scientifically.
Scientists of senior status said themselves that this object was
peculiar but were apprehensive about making their thoughts public. I
don’t understand that. After all, academic tenure is intended to give
scientists the freedom to take risks without having to worry about their
jobs. Unfortunately, most scientists achieve tenure – and go on tending
to their image. As children we ask ourselves about the world, we allow
ourselves to err. Ego doesn’t play a part. We learn about the world with
innocence and honesty. As a scientist, you’re supposed to enjoy the
privilege of being able to continue your childhood. Not to worry about
the ego, but about uncovering the truth. Especially after you get
tenure.”
Without tenure you wouldn’t have published the article?
“I
suppose not. It’s not just the tenure. I’m head of the astronomy
department, and founding director of the Black Hole Initiative [an
interdisciplinary center at Harvard dedicated to the study of black
holes]. In addition, I’m director of the Board on Physics and Astronomy
of the National Academies. So it could be that I’m committing image
suicide, if this turns out to be incorrect. On the other hand, if it
turns out to be correct, it’s one of the greatest discoveries in human
history. For us to make progress in understanding the universe, we need
to be credible, and the only way to be credible is to follow what you
see, not yourself. Besides, what’s the worst thing that can happen to
me? I’ll be relieved of my administrative duties? This will bring the
benefit that I’ll have more time for science.”
‘Gravitational pushes’
The
first friend from another solar system stirred great excitement among
scientists, but its form and behavior also raised multiple questions.
“It
was subjected to observation, but not enough,” Loeb told me with
disappointment, when I met with him in Tel Aviv at the end of December.
“It was only under consecutive observation for six days, from October 25
to 31 – namely, a week after its discovery. At first they said, Okay,
it’s a comet – but no comet tail was visible. Comets are made of ice,
which evaporates as the comet approaches the sun. But we didn’t see a
trail of gas or dust in Oumuamua. So the thinking was that it must be an
asteroid – simply a chunk of stone. But the object rotated on its axis
for eight hours, and during that time its brightness changed by a factor
of 10, whereas the brightness of all the asteroids that we’re familiar
with changes, at most, by a factor of three. If we assume that the light
reflection is constant, that means its length is at least 10 times
greater than its thickness.
“There
are two possibilities in regard to this extreme geometry,” Loeb
continues. “One is that it’s in the shape of a cigar, the other than it
has the shape of a pancake. The truth is that the same observers who
examined Oumuamua’s light variation reached the conclusion that if it
receives a lot of gravitational pushes during the voyage – which is
reasonable, because it spent a lot of time in interstellar space – its
shape is pancake-flat. Subsequently additional qualities were
discovered, such as its origin.”
I
wrote above that Oumuamua originated at Vega, but that’s not completely
accurate: The universe is a vast place, and even at Oumuamua’s velocity
– a velocity that no human spaceship has achieved – a voyage from Vega
to the solar system would take 600,000 years. But in the meantime, Vega
is orbiting the center of the Milky Way, like the sun and all the other
stars, and it wasn’t in that region of the heavens 600,000 years ago.
“If
you average the velocities of all the stars in the region,” Loeb
explains, “you get a system that’s called the ‘local standard of rest.’
Oumuamua was at rest relative to that system. It didn’t come to us. It
waited in place, like a buoy on the surface of the ocean, until the
‘ship’ of the solar system ran into it. To make things clear, only one
of 500 stars in the system is as much at rest as Oumuamua. The
probability of that is very low. After all, if it were a stone that was
simply hurled from a different solar system, we would expect it to have
the velocity of its star system, not the average velocity of all the
thousands of stars in the vicinity.”
However,
the biggest surprise came last June, when new data from the Hubble
Space Telescope showed that the mysterious object had accelerated during
its visit to the inner solar system in 2017 – an acceleration that is
not explained by the sun’s force of gravity.
Acceleration
of that sort can be explained by the rocket effect of comets: The comet
approaches the sun, the sun warms the ice of the comet and the ice
escapes into space in the form of gas, an emission that makes the comet
accelerate like a rocket. But the observations did not reveal a comet
tail behind Oumuamua. Moreover, gas emission would have brought about a
rapid change in the rate of the object’s spin, a change which was also
not observed in practice, and it also might have torn the object apart.
If
it wasn’t comet outgassing, what force caused Oumuamua to accelerate?
It is precisely here where Loeb enters the picture. According to his
calculations, Oumuamua’s acceleration was caused by a push.
“The
only hypothesis I could think of,” he relates, “is a push from solar
radiation pressure. For that to work, the object would have to be very
thin, less than a millimeter thick, in other words a type of pancake. In
addition, the Spitzer Space Telescope found no evidence of heat
emission from the object, and that means that it is at least 10 times
more reflective than a typical comet or asteroid. What we have, then, is
a thin, flat, shiny object. So I arrived at the idea of a solar sail: A
solar sail is a spaceship that uses the sun for propulsion. Instead of
using fuel, it is propelled ahead by reflecting light. In fact, it’s a
technology that our civilization is developing at this very time.”
Bottles in space
Avi
Loeb definitely knows a thing or two about solar sails. In 2016, the
physicist and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, together with Stephen
Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg and others, established Breakthrough Starshot,
an initiative to accelerate solar sails to one-fifth the speed of light
in order to explore the neighboring solar system, Alpha Centauri, which
is four light-years away from us. Loeb was appointed the project’s
scientific director.
“The
first question we asked is whether a sail like Oumuamua could survive
billions of years in the Milky Way – and we discovered that it could.
Being hit by interstellar dust or gas won’t wear it down. Afterward, we
tried to calculate the acceleration a solar sail would cause in an
object [such as a ship or probe], and we found that the acceleration is
consistent with that of Oumuamua.
“We
have no way of knowing whether it’s active technology, or a spaceship
that is no longer operative and is continuing to float in space. But if
Oumuamua was created together with a whole population of similar objects
that were launched randomly, the fact that we discovered it means that
its creators launched a quadrillion probes like it to every star in the
Milky Way. Of course, the randomness is significantly reduced if we
assume that Oumuamua was a reconnaissance mission that was deliberately
sent to the inner solar system – namely, to the habitable region where
life would be feasible. But we need to remember that humanity didn’t
broadcast anything tens of thousands of years ago, when the object was
still in interstellar space. They didn’t know there was intelligent life
here. Which is why I think it’s just a fishing expedition.”
Fishing for what?
“I
don’t know. I love walking along the seashore when I’m on vacation,
like here in Tel Aviv, and looking at the seashells with my daughters.
Occasionally we find a glass bottle among the shells. In my opinion, the
‘bottle’ needs to be investigated. Until now we were looking for
signatures of alien cultures in radio broadcasts, because we developed
that technology in the last century. But another way is to look for a
message in a bottle. Humanity launched Voyager 1 and 2, which are
already in interstellar space. They’re messages in bottles. And in this
century there will be a great many systems to which a great many bottles
will be sent, and at far greater velocities.”
Like Breakthrough Starshot?
“Exactly.
Our goal is to accelerate solar sails to one-fifth the speed of light,
so that they will reach Alpha Centauri within 20 years. And the reason
is clear: I am 56 years old, and Yuri Milner is 57. At that speed we
will be able to see the pictures in our lifetime. Of course, the sails
will continue on their way long after Milner and I are no longer around,
maybe after none of us will still be here. It’s possible that space is
filled with sails like these and we just don’t see them. We only saw
Oumuamua because this is the first time we’ve had technology that’s
sensitive enough to identify objects of a few dozen to hundreds of
meters in size from the illumination of the sun. In three years, the
building of the LSST telescope will be completed. It will be far more
sensitive than Pan-STARRS and certainly we will see many more objects
that originate outside the solar system. Then we’ll find out whether
Oumuamua is an anomaly or not.
“The
importance of my article lies in attracting the attention of
astronomers so that they will use the best telescopes and look for the
next object, and will even plan an encounter with it in space. The
current propulsion technology doesn’t offer us the possibility to chase
after Oumuamua. The visitor comes for dinner, goes out into the street
and disappears in the dark. It’s possible we will never know what it was
looking for.”
But
the project Breakthrough Listen used a radio telescope and listened to
Oumuamua with amazing sensitivity, to the point of being able to receive
a call from a regular mobile phone, from within the object. But we
heard nothing.
“When
I suggested to Milner that we listen to Oumuamua, back in November
2017, we knew that the chance of picking up something was poor to
nonexistent. Because even if a signal had been sent, it wouldn’t
necessarily have been sent in our direction – it would be in the form of
a ray. In other words, even if this explorer broadcast back to its
operators, we wouldn’t necessarily have seen that. We also wouldn’t know
which frequency it was broadcasting on. And it’s also possible that it
wasn’t broadcasting all the time, but only at particular times. And
maybe there’s no longer anyone for it to broadcast to.”
Okay,
this object was silent, but if they’re out there, why haven’t we heard
any radio signals directed at us? We’ve been listening to the expanses
of space for decades and hearing only the blood pounding in our ears.
“If
to judge by our own behavior, it seems to me that the likeliest
explanation is that civilizations develop the technologies that destroy
them. There’s a length of time during which a culture is still careful –
for example, not to get into a nuclear war. But consider that if the
Nazis had developed nuclear weapons, human history might have led to
mass destruction. And there are, of course, asteroids and there’s global
warming and plenty of other dangers. The technological window of
opportunity might be very small. Sails like these are launched, but they
no longer have anyone to broadcast back to.”
“Definitely.
Most of them. Our approach should be an archaeological one. In the same
way we dig in the ground to find cultures that no longer exist, we must
dig in space in order to discover civilizations that existed outside
the planet Earth.”
Isn’t it easier, and therefore more scientific, to assume that we are alone until it’s proved otherwise?
“No.
Anyone who claims that we are unique and special is guilty of
arrogance. My premise is cosmic modesty. Today, thanks to the Kepler
Space Telescope, we know that there are more planets like Earth than
there are grains of sand on all the shores of all the seas. Imagine a
king who manages to seize control of a piece of another country in a
horrific battle, and who then thinks of himself as a great, omnipotent
ruler. And then imagine that he succeeds in seizing control of all the
land, or of the entire world: It would be like an ant that has wrapped
its feelers around one grain of sand on a vast seashore. It’s
meaningless. I assume that we are not the only ants on the shore, that
we are not alone.”
That’s speculation. You don’t know that for certain.
“The search for extraterrestrial life is not speculation. It’s a lot less speculative than the assumption that there is dark matter – invisible matter that constitutes 85 percent of the material in the universe.
The dark matter hypothesis is part of the mainstream of astrophysics –
and it is speculation. Life [elsewhere] in the universe is not
speculation, for two reasons: (a) We exist on Earth; and (b) There are a
great many more places that have physical conditions similar to Earth.
Science contains many examples of hypotheses that haven’t yet been borne
out by observations, because science progresses on a basis of
anomalies, on a basis of phenomena that aren’t amenable to conventional
explanations.”
But
there’s a vast difference between the search for dark matter and the
search for extraterrestrial life. You wouldn’t have been interviewed on
“Good Morning America” about an article dealing with dark matter.
“Because
there’s extensive science-fiction literature about contact with
advanced civilizations, and not about dark matter. So what? Most
scientists talk about a search for primitive life, but there’s a taboo
on the search for intelligent life. Maybe I don’t understand that. After
all, the only place where primitive life exists, namely Earth, also has
intelligent life – if we’re actually intelligent. Our science is not
healthy. I asked a scientist who’s researching objects in the Kuiper
belt, a senior astronomer who discovered a large number of the objects
there, if he had discovered changes in their brightness originating in
artificial light. He replied, ‘Why search? There’s nothing to search
for, it’s clear that their brightness will change like light that’s
reflected back naturally from the sun.’
“If
you’re not ready to find exceptional things, you won’t discover them.
Of course, every argument needs to be based on evidence, but if the
evidence points to an anomaly, we need to talk about an anomaly. Who
cares if this anomaly appeared or did not appear in science-fiction
books? I don’t even like science fiction.”
A raw, telescopic image of Oumuamua. The
first visitor in history from outside our solar system?
ESO / O.Hainaut
Come on, now. You don’t like science fiction?
“No.
When I read a book that contradicts the laws of nature, it bothers me. I
like literature and I like science, but the combination bothers me.”
So as a boy you didn’t read “Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke? Because it really recalls the encounter with Oumuamua.
“No. What occupied me were the basic problems of life.”
The origin of life? Its distribution in the universe?
“Life
itself, our life as human beings. I read books of philosophy, mainly
existentialism. I was born in a moshav, and every afternoon I collected
eggs and on weekends I would drive the tractor into the hills, to read
there. I loved nature. I liked being alone. I don’t have a footprint on
the social networks. I think of ideas when I’m alone in the shower. And I
never thought about being famous. I wrote a scientific article that was
published in a scientific journal. I didn’t even issue a press release.
Two bloggers found the article in an archive, and it went viral.”
And
how did you feel about being a viral scientist? The report about your
piece was obviously the most popular space article in the past year.
“I
took advantage of the media exposure to explain the uncertainty of the
scientific process. The populist movements in the United States and
Europe rest in part on the fact that the public has lost faith in the
scientific process. That’s why people deny global warming, for example.
One of my interviewers in Germany said, ‘There are scientists who
maintain that it’s a mistake to go public when you’re not yet certain.’
Those scientists think that if we reveal situations of uncertainty, we
won’t be believed when we talk about climate change. But the lack of
credibility is due precisely to the fact that we show the public only
the final product. If a group of scientists closet themselves in a room,
and then emerge to deliver a lecture on the result as though to
students, people won’t believe them – because they won’t have seen the
doubts, they won’t have seen that there weren’t enough data in the
earlier stages.
“The
right way is to persuade the public that the scientific process is a
normal human activity, that it’s no different from what a police
detective does or a plumber who comes to fix a drainpipe. Scientists are
considered an elite, because they themselves create that ivory tower
artificially. They say, ‘The public doesn’t understand, so there’s no
need to share with them. We’ll decide among ourselves what’s right, and
then we’ll tell the politicians what needs to be done.’ But then the
populist politician says, ‘Only the elite say that, they are hiding
other things from us.’ Because there’s a leap to the stage of
conclusions and policy. The differences of opinion in the scientific
community are what lend humanity to the scientific process, and humanity
lends credibility.”
If
we do actually discover that we’re not alone in the universe, what
effect would that discovery have on our life, do you think?
“A
huge effect. They will probably be more advanced than we are, given
that our technology developed only recently. We will be able to learn a
great deal from them, about technologies that were developed across
millions and billions of years. And it could be that this is the reason
we haven’t yet identified extraterrestrial intelligent life: because we
are still primitive life that doesn’t know how to read the signs. As
soon as we leave the solar system, I believe we will see a great deal of
traffic out there. Possibly we’ll get a message that says, ‘Welcome to
the interstellar club.’ Or we’ll discover multiple dead civilizations –
that is, we’ll find their remains.”
And
that will be the good news? Because, if there are a lot of
civilizations more developed than ours that were liquidated or that
liquidated themselves, that’s not a good sign for the future.
“It
will be an excellent sign. It will give us second thoughts about what
we are doing here and now, so that we will not share the same fate. We
need to comport ourselves much more decently and less militantly with
one another, to cooperate, to prevent climate change and to settle in
space. That should lead to a good place. The basic question is whether
people are good, at the foundation.”
And what’s the answer, in your view?
“I
believe they are. As soon as it becomes clear that there really have
been many civilizations that have become extinct, I believe that people
will learn the right lesson. And if we discover remnants of advanced
technologies, they will prove to us that we are only at the start of the
road; and that if we don’t continue down that road, we will miss a
great deal of what there is to see and experience in the universe.
Imagine if cavemen had been shown the smartphone you’re using to record
me. What would they have thought about this special rock? Now imagine
that Oumuamua is the iPhone, and we are the cavemen. Imagine scientists
who are considered the visionaries of reason among the cavemen looking
at the device and saying, ‘No, it’s just a rock. A special rock, but a
rock. Where do you come off claiming it’s not a rock?’”
Saturday, January 12, 2019
CLASSIFIED: The most powerful investor you never heard of ~ hehe & don't fer~geet ta fill out yer "controller files" ...that's fb boys & girls ...today Huh !
For
many readers especially on Zero Hedge this comes as no surprise, as you
are well aware of the octopus that wraps its tentacles around the
globe. But it may surprise you how active In-Q-Tel is and how chummy
they are with the rest of the VC community. It’s as if they are just
another VC, but with another purpose. Let’s look at some of the stats, from Crunchbase:
Here’s a list of recent investments…
If
you dig back you won’t see Google or Facebook on there – which is
company policy for retail consumer investments that can impact the
public (it’s kept secret behind an NDA). Here’s how it works – In-Q-Tel
may invest in your startup but there’s a big catch. First, you have to
sign an NDA which is enforced strongly – that you are not to disclose
your partner. Second, you must agree to ‘cooperation’ when it comes to
information sharing now or down the road, such as location data on
people using Facebook, Google, or other systems – perhaps only to feed
it into a big data brain at Palantir. Or perhaps for more street level
surveillance. The surveillance is known by fact, not conspiracy theory –
but by fact – due to the disclosure of classified documents by Edward
Snowden. If it were not for Snowden, we could only guess about this. The name of the main program is PRISM but there are many others.
But
for others, it may come as a surprise that not only the CIA has its own
VC fund, but that it sits on many corporate boards alongside many Wall
St. firms and other VCs.
And of course, they always do well.
Let’s
consider the doors they opened for Google, or in the case of Google it
was more like the doors that were closed. Google was not the best
search engine, it was not superior technology – it wasn’t even really
very good. It just became a monopoly and crushed the competition. Many
wonder how they were able to do it, and that this is part of the
Entrepreneur “Magic” that few have. Well we can say in the case of
Google there was no Magic they had a helping hand from a friend in the
deep shadows. Google wanted to become huge – the CIA wants information
(they always do, so we don’t use the past tense ‘wanted’). So it was a
cozy and rational partnership – in exchange for making the right
handshakes at the right time, allowing Google to become a global
behemoth, all they needed to do was share a little information about
users. Actually, a lot of information. No harm in that, right?
But
in doing so Google violated itself as well as prostituted its model and
its users. Google still does this and is not nearly as flagrant as its
brother Facebook, however Google shares more detailed ‘meta data’ which
is actually more useful to Echelon systems like Palantir that rely on
big data, not necessarily photos of what you ate for breakfast (but that
can be helpful too, they say).
The
metaphor is making a deal with the devil; you get what you want but it
comes at a price. And that’s the price users pay to Google – they get
service ‘free’ but at a huge cost, their privacy. Of course – this is
all based on the concept of Freedom which really does exist in USA. You
don’t have to use Google – there are many alternatives like the rising
star Duck Duck Go:
But who cares about privacy; only criminals, hackers, programmers, super wealthy (UHNWI) and a few philosophers.
Google
remains the dominant search platform and much more. Google exploits
niche by niche even competing with Amazon’s Alexa service.
Two
decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon
Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at
the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to
Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research
group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track
individuals and groups online. The intelligence community hoped that
the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified
information and user data, combine it with what would become known as
the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to
suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They
hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to
make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital
information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive
public-private mass surveillance state possible today.
There
you have it – Google is the child of the digital revolution of the
surveillance state. Why spy, when you can collect data electronically
and analyze with machine learning?
The new spy is the web bot.
And
the investors in Google did well – so that’s the investing story that
matters here. It pays well to have friends in high places, and in dark
places. Of all the investments In-Q-Tel made, almost all of them have
done very well. That doesn’t mean that Palantir is going to grow to the
size of Google, but it does provide natural support should a company
backed by In-Q-Tel run into problems.
By
the time Facebook came out, digital surveillance was already in the
n-th generation of evolution, and they really stepped up their game. In
the creepiest examples, Facebook doesn’t necessarily (and primarily)
collect data on Facebook users – it does this too. But that’s just a
given – you don’t need to perform surveillance on someone who gives all
their data to the system willingly – you always know where they are and
what they are doing at any given moment. The trick is to get
information about those who may try to hide their activities, whether
they are real terrorists or just paranoid geniuses.
How
does Facebook do this? There are literally hundreds of programs
running – but in one creepy example, Facebook collects photos that users
take to analyze the environment surrounding. Incidentally, the
location data is MUCH MORE accurate than you see on the retail front
end. So you get the newspaper and see a gift in your mailbox for your
birthday – you take a photo because the ribbons are hanging out. What
shows up in the background? All kinds of information. What the
neighbor is doing. License plate of the car driving by. Trash waiting
to be picked up by the street. A child’s toy left by the sidewalk.
You get the picture. Facebook users have been turned into sneaky little
digital spies! While they are walking around with their ‘smartphones’
(should be called ‘dumbphones’) scrolling their walls and snapping
photos away – they are taking photos of you too. That means, Facebook
collects data for the CIA about users who don’t have Facebook accounts.
This is the huge secret that the mainstream media doesn’t want to tell
you. Deleting your Facebook account will do nothing – every time you go
out in public you are being photographed, video recorded, and more –
all going into big data artificial intelligence for analysis.
But
here’s the best part. You own it! The CIA may have a bad reputation
but it is part of the US Government, and thus – profits go back to the
Treasury (those which are declared) or at least they are supposed to.
Considering this, why is there a stigma about even talking about
In-Q-Tel when in fact we should be more involved in any US Government
operation when it is technically owned by the people and funded by
taxpayers? Meaning, do taxpayers have rights to know what goes in in
taxpayer funded entities, like In-Q-Tel? The big difference between
In-Q-Tel and the CIA is that In-Q-Tel functions just like any other VC –
they disclose most of their investments, they attend conferences, they
accept business plans. You can literally submit your idea to In-Q-Tel
and get funding. Of course, like any VC there’s a very small chance of
being funded.
So
what’s an investor’s take on this story? In-Q-Tel is not Freddie Mac
there is nor a quasi-government entity; it’s not an NGO and there is no
implicit guarantee that In-Q-Tel’s deals will do any better than Andreessen Horowitz.
However,
their deals do very well. Companies they fund not only have the
backing of the CIA explicitly, it’s not only about business – it’s about
national security! Under that guise, it’s no wonder that companies
like Google and Facebook rocket to the top.
We
are not suggesting that investors double down on In-Q-Tel bets. We are
only suggesting that at a minimum, we follow what they do. It’s a data
point – a good source of information. And the best part is that it’s
public.
Their most recent investment is in a virtual reality company in Boca Raton, FL called Immersive Wisdom:
Immersive
Wisdom® is an enterprise software platform that allows users to
collaborate in real-time upon diverse data sets and applications within a
temporal and geospatially-aware Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality
space. Immersive Wisdom is hardware-agnostic and runs on VR, AR, as well as 2D displays. Regardless of geographic location,
multiple users can be together in a shared virtual workspace, standing
on maps, with instant access to relevant information from any available
source. Users can simultaneously, and in real time, visualize, fuse, and
act upon sensor inputs, cyber/network data, IoT feeds, enterprise
applications, telemetry, tagged assets, 3D Models, LiDAR, imagery and
UAV footage/streaming video, providing an omniscient, collaborative view
of complex environments. Immersive Wisdom also acts as a natural human
interface to multi-dimensional data sets generated by AI and machine
learning systems. The platform includes a powerful SDK (Software
Developer Kit) that enables the creation of customer-specific workflows
as well as rapid integration with existing data sources/applications.
Cool
stuff for sure – but it’s in early stages. Pre IPO Swap suggests real
Pre IPO ‘unicorns’ not because of size, but because of the right mix of
risk and reward. https://preiposwap.com/pitch" style="color:#0d2e46; text-decoration:underline">See why we think so in our pitch.
In any analysis, it’s worth watching In-Q-Tel, which is a top source of funding and investment data we watch on www.preiposwap.com/">https://www.preiposwap.com/" style="color:#0d2e46; text-decoration:underline">Pre IPO Swap.
Despite
the growing availability of legal options, online piracy remains
rampant. Every day pirate sites are visited hundreds of millions of
times.
red pill junkie
