Lebens Raum Ad Astra

It is a great moment to see private enterprise loosen the iron grip of the State on spaceflight.  If Elon Musk and SpaceX are allowed to continue pushing the boundaries of commercial space access, we may yet get to see space tourism - a decades-old dream - come to life.

I stayed up late into the night to watch the Crew Dragon launch, and I admit I got a little choked up to see private enterprise finally succeed in an endeavor previously reserved for the exclusive use of government operators and political entities.

The Dragon's gleaming interior and ultramodern design mark a stark break from the bleak, utilitarian cockpits of the defunct space shuttle, or the cramped confines of Soyuz.  Sleek couches, spacious interior, a couple of touch screens, and a handful of buttons were all that didn't clutter the sci-fi environment of SpaceX's minimalist design.

Though I was moved by the launch and fascinated by the engineering and design work, I couldn't help thinking that I've been watching this exact scene play over and over for the past 60 years - since the days of Yuri Gagarin (or was it Vladimir Ilyushin?) and Alan Shepherd.  Even more, chemical rocketry is a century old - almost as old as the automobile, rockets in general have been around for 2,000 years celebrating Lunar New Year.  Let's no forget that a number of dogs and monkeys preceded humans into space, as well.

The first iron tube rockets were invented Mysoreans in India in the 1700s.  A British officer named Congreve stole the idea for his rockets in the 1800s. American Robert Goddard is generally credited with inventing modern chemical rockets, though he was standing on the shoulders of many a giant.

In other words, SpaceX is just one in a long line of rocketeers who have refined the physics and abilities of rocketry, but the craft is almost as old as written history.

Sure, I applaude the milestone set by SpaceX, of commercial human spaceflight.  It is a significant achievement, even in the long, storied history of rocketry, especially getting one of the (ahem) pioneering nations back into orbit after a decade of bureaucratic bumbling.

The question I have, though, is where are all the real toys?  Are we really to believe that the 100 years of intense rocket development, the trillions of dollars in research, the many nations involved have only achieved something slightly more advanced than Chinese fireworks?

With all the decades of development on ion, microwave, nuclear, and electro-gravitic propulsion, the best humans can do is fart flaming gas out of a tube?  Why aren't we using aerospikes and EM Drives and spin-stabilized LASER launchers?  How is it, with the vast sums of money and millions of hours of research, we still can't do better than bottle rockets?  Why is it that spaceflight hasn't changed much since the Nazi innovations of the 1940s?  And why are their REAL advances listed as hoaxes?

Given all the possible reasons to riot, one might think that having a century of our savings stolen for projects and technology that we're not allowed to see, much less use, would be chief among them.  We the people are owed a huge debt and we are being deprived of collecting on it by a group of people who are hording our property from us.

Instead, we are told to be proud and joyful at yet another rocket launch, a feat nearly as old as civilization and one which the Russians and Chinese have been happily doing for the past decade while the US was grounded and begging rides.

I want the real toys.  I want to see the man behind the curtain.  I want all the things that were promised decades ago in the blush of human spaceflight adolescence.  We paid for it, we deserve it.  It is our heritage and achievements that are being robbed from us under our noses.

Way to go Elon and SpaceX!  Great job!  Nice design work!  Outstanding attention to detail.  But it's time your partner NASA gave us the goods that we've paid so dearly for - and farting tubes ain't it.

The Mandela Effect, Part 2

In Part 1, I described an experience that I have shared with a couple of other people, in which we have very distinct memories of B. B. King dying in May of 2005, yet it was reported in May of 2015, that B.B. had died again, at least as far as we were concerned.

Just last week, I learned purely by accident that this phenomenon has been dubbed the Mandela Effect, and apparently a great many people have experienced it.  In particular, folks are convinced that a celebrity has died who is still alive (Kirk Douglas for instance), while others have clear memories of a celebrity dying more than once.  Even stranger is the fact that many people, who are complete strangers, share the same memories in great detail.

Across the internet, much of the discussion seems focused on movie lines or titles.  I dismiss this as either remembering a popular impression of a character's scene or just complete bunk trying to cash in on the interest.

One prime example is the plethora of videos about Interview with a/the Vampire.  A quick trip to Wikipedia shows the title as using "the." But even if later issues have changed to "a," it doesn't matter since the author can confirm the original title and there must be thousands of original copies of both the book and movie in circulation.

I call this discussion the "Play it again, Sam" theory, and it includes the Snow White "mirror mirror" and Empire Strikes Back "I am your father" branches of the Mandela Effect hype.

I wanted the reactions of people I knew were level-headed and tended to research things a bit more deeply than Google and hashtags.

Of the people I wanted a reaction from was Joseph Farrell, the well-known author and researcher whom we've interviewed a couple of times on Radio Far Side.  I sent him a note asking if he had ever heard of the Mandela Effect.  The response was nearly immediate and he wanted to discuss my experiences.

It turns out that it is a topic of great interest to Farrell and his subscribers, who have discussed it at length in member vid-chats.  According to his members, this phenomenon is global and seems to have two common factors - celebrities and a period of roughly 10 years.

I was genuinely stunned.  After learning of the name Mandela Effect, I started looking around the net for references.  It wasn't hard.  There are around 511,000 returns on Google, covering websites, blogs and videos.  From what I see, about 50% of the data centers around people misremembering movie lines.  As I said previously, I find this highly unreliable, since a lot of folks remember the line, "Play it again, Sam," from Casablanca, but that line has never existed, at least in the film itself.

The rest of the data focuses on celebrity deaths.  Farrell has specific memories of Helen Thomas, the veteran political reporter, dying during the Clinton Administration and listening to Bill Clinton deliver a eulogy at that time.  Yet, any reference to her will mention her death in 2013.

Joseph also mentioned Kirk Douglas being alive, and that caught my attention.  I distinctly remember watching an interview with his son Michael talking about his father on the occasion of his death.  Yet, according to Wikipedia, Kirk is still alive.

At this point, we discussed reasons for this phenomenon.   I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to express his thoughts, but suffice it to say that he thinks it may be an experiment in social engineering that involves manipulating quantum forces and correlating the effects with massive databases to see what has changed.  The analogy he used was overlapping multiverses with leaks between them.

I was fascinated with the possibilities, though a bit horrified to think that anyone could be mucking around with timelines and peoples' memories on a mass scale.  However, my own theories more or less have the same thing happening, but in a different way.

The Mandela Effect reminds me a lot of several different stories, both fictional and real.

The first is a book that I was enthralled with as a child.  It was "A Sound of Thunder," which introduced the concept of 'the butterfly effect' into common culture.  In the book, time-travelling hunters from 2055 go back to the Jurassic Age to hunt dinosaurs.  An accident leads to a butterfly getting crushed in the past and causes hundreds of large and small changes back in the current time, as the effects of the butterfly's demise ripple through millions of years.

Another favorite book was Robert Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast."  Here, a mathematics professor invents a "continua" device that allows the main characters to shift through six dimension of time and space (leading to the reference of 666).  The characters are deceived by telepathic overlays on reality during their journey through alternate universes.

Finally, the story of John Titor comes to mind.  This may be a bit of an obscure reference, but John Titor was a supposed time traveler who appeared on the internet in various chat rooms around 2000 and 2001.  He was supposedly from 2036, and was on a mission to the 1970s to obtain an IBM 5100 computer to help in decoding a number of old machine languages to avoid some Y2K-like problem in the future.  He described time as a cone shape extending into the past and future that allowed access to multiple timelines, which could vary greatly or very subtly from our own.

All three stories are worth reading, so do make use of the links, but the salient point is that they all involve time travel and in some way mirror the Mandela Effect.  My operating theory is that our timeline has been changed in some way, either in a single event, or in several, and may be ongoing.  I suspect that easiest way to do that would be to manipulate very small and discrete parts of the past to change something in the future.  The double death/not yet dead phenomenon may be an incidental or intentional result for whatever purpose(s).

And yes, I know this sounds far out.  And I do have a much more mundane, though nefarious means of achieving the same result: Winston Smith.  If you recall in "Nineteen Eighty-Four," the protagonist's job is to literally rewrite history.  He spends his days at MiniTrue making people appear and disappear in history, changing narratives and making sure that the past matches the official party line du jour.

It's not an easy choice, and any of them require a very large departure from what we fondly refer to as "reality."  Whether it's Farrell's multiverse leaks, Bradbury's ancient accidents, Heinlein's continua machine, Titor's military time missions, or Orwell's MiniTrue, something is causing an actual phenomenon in which a large number of people "misremember" historic events, but do so in a way that complete strangers "misremember" with exactly the same details.

There is no natural phenomenon that can explain this, and it has only come into the public consciousness with the past two decades.  Most of the reports that I find credible more or less occur between the mid-1990s and today.  Nor can I find any reference in older texts to similar documented phenomena in the past, so this seems to be something completely new.

If you have experienced it, then you know the very strange and other-worldly feeling you get when it happens.  It can literally leave you vexed and paralyzed for a few moments as you try to process the discontinuity in your clear memories.

Either we are all being manipulated somehow (real or perceived), or accidents are occurring (likely in the past) that are changing our current timeline.  No matter how you slice this, the implications are truly unsettling.

One way to find out is to bring the topic to wide public attention.  By making it a major item of conversation, perhaps we can at least stop it from happening, and perhaps even discover why it's happening.  I suspect we will not like the answers behind the Mandela Effect.

There is no reason in physics that time travel is impossible.  When we peer into the Universe, we are travelling backwards in time, as we see the Universe only as it was anywhere from minutes to billions of years ago.  It is also quite possible that aspects of physics that allow time travel have been hidden from the general public for just the sort of reason we are discussing here.

What is most disturbing, and implied by the Mandela Effect, is that we may be unaware of just how much our lives have been changed.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Part 3

Pieces Of God

Woo Hoo!  'Scientists' 'may' have found 'something' that 'resembles' a theoretical particle called a 'Higgs boson'.t

Stop the friggin' presses!  End the wars!  The banking crisis is ended!  Dogs and cats living together!

Give me a break.

Even IF 'they' have found the Higgs boson, what difference will it make in our everyday lives?  Will it cure cancer, end hunger and change the human condition?  Will it provide a simple, pollution-free power source?  Will it turn deserts into jungles or provide affordable housing for the poor?

Didn't think so.

All this hubbub is nothing more than nerd wet dreaming and make-work for a bunch of head-scratchers who couldn't think of any other way to make a living that contributes to making humanity better.  In fact, the whole CERN thing is a complete waste of billions of euro and years of effort if all it is supposed to do is find the Higgs boson.  So we have to assume that it has some nefarious purpose from which you and I will never benefit.

A few miles south of CERN, warships are gathering, daily slaughters are being carried out, and an entire group of people have been trying since 1948 to regain the homeland they had for thousands of years, and which was stolen from them by UN decree and a group of REAL terrorists.

All this 'god particle' rubbish is nothing more than public consumption science that leads nowhere, designed specifically to keep us ignorant of the real thing...the science that people like Maxwell and Tesla were working on.  It's just lipstick on a pig whose sole job it is to keep us all in the dark and chasing our tails.

Our first clue is that something so useless is gobbling up mainstream headlines.  You can pretty much rely on the fact that anything receiving this much attention in the corporate media is a psy-op aimed at throwing as many folks down the wrong path as possible.

Don't get me wrong.  CERN does have its real purpose.  The fact that they are counter-spinning two streams of proton plasma to speeds that are an appreciable factor of lightspeed is trying, if not succeeding, in creating some hyperdimensional effect.  Crashing the two streams into each other to make cute pictures of curly-cues is the part we get to consume.

Rotating plasma, though, is the real goal.  That's the secret behind all other secrets.  That's the thing that could truly change the direction of Mankind.

Few people know that film director Brian de Palma had a brother named Bruce who was a physicist.  Bruce discovered that spinning things at high velocity and launching them made them fly higher and faster.  According to public consumption science, that shouldn't happen.

There's no 'known' reason why the Sun's magnetic field twists up into knots and causes things like flares and CMEs, except that it is a giant spinning ball of plasma.  Nobel laureate Hannes Alven found evidence of massive plasma currents everywhere he looked in the Universe.  Even lightning itself is a spinning torrent of plasma, and we know how powerful that it.

So, to hear that CERN is counter-spinning streams of plasma just to find some 'god particle', you can bet that it's bullshit, pure and simple.

The 'god particle' is for the consumption of us little people.  It's the justification we were given for taking our hard-earned money and literally sinking it in the ground.  Of course, they had to find 'something' that 'looks like' the 'god particle' in order to make us all feel like we were part of changing history.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

We've been showered with sub-atomic crap to hide from us the real science behind CERN and other projects like it.

Anyone who is familiar with the film genius of Terry Gilliam will know the movie "Time Bandits".  In it, the ultimate evil dude tempts our heroes to their doom with the "most fabulous object in the world".  Like a twisted game show host, Evil hypnotizes the gang into chasing dreams and phantoms, while simple truth is hidden behind all the glitz and glitter.

The Higgs boson is nothing more than the "most fabulous object in the world", and we are being hypnotized into chasing it, though it has no value in our lives whatsoever.  Too bad, because the real science is so much more interesting and promising: free energy, trips to the Moon for lunch, the ability to engineer solar systems.

But then, given our track record with nuclear power, its probably best to keep it hidden for now.  Until we the people learn to say 'no' to the PTB and take back our power and our freedom, we don't really derseve such nifty science.