__________________________________________________________

Existential Angst

The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago. It was lifeless. But after a billion years it
was teeming with organisms which resembled oxygen producing blue-green algae which made the
planet inhabitable for us. Our own ancestors were very primitive organisms 500 million
years ago. What sets us off from them is the emergent property of a consciousness and
self-awareness which we also share to some lesser degree with other life.

Human nature is both cooperative and competitive. These natures have been inherited from
our ancestors to insure our survival in a very dangerous environment. The evolutionary goal
of life has been simply to reproduce and then we all finish out our lives and die; some
sooner than others.

Religion has been assumed to have been around since the dawn of human history. Human nature
relied on the need to believe in origin stories because humans have an inquisitive mind and
have an insatiable necessity for knowing why things are as they are. Most societies, no
matter where they are at or how isolated they are from each other, all believe in some
origin myths; some of which are surprisingly similar.

Up to 95% of Americans are religious to some extent, believing in God or spirits.
* It is estimated by Freethought Today (mag) that 17% of Americans are atheists and I
think that is closer to the actual and correct number of non-believers.

"Freud postulated that the belief in God is the result of the wish to be protected, the
desire for safety and the fear of a punitive father. For Feuerback, theism was a projection
of humanity, for Marx religion helped to cope with the effects of economic exploitation and
for Durkheim religion was linked to the strength of the social order. More recently,
however, it has been postulated that the religious beliefs may have a biologic rather than
a theological or sociological origin. Boyer and others have suggested that our religious
beliefs are ways to organize and interpret the world that have been selected by evolution.
Cognitive psychology sees religious beliefs as a cultural by-product of human psychology.
An agency detection device and a theory of mind module lead us to expect an gent behind any
event to expect the agent to have a mind. The human need for attachment, protection and
meaning may also contribute to the foundations of faith. Dawkins claims that religious
ideas are like viruses that invade the host a a tender age and then replicate and spread
further." (Guido O Perez, M.D., Beyond the Science/Religion Debate, a naturalist world view
- 2008)

Dr Perez writes that religion may have evolved from our "need to give agency to unknown
things." He says, "It decreases the anxiety of living in a difficult world and it helps us
to face the inevitability of death..."It is a powerful archetype that assuages existential
loneliness, provides meaning, identity and moral values, lessens individual responsibility
and promises justice, happiness and everlasting life."

Religions are based on FAITH and REVELATIONS; they stress relationship of humans to a God
or Gods and monotheistic religions have been around for thousands of years. Jews - who
beginning with the Common Era were two groups: the Sadducees (Hellenists) did not believe
in a Messiah nor resurrection; Pharisees, the other group - which goes back to the Babylon
Exile of the Hebrews was influenced by Zoroastrism and did believe in a Messiah. Paul, the
father of Christianity was a Pharasee and he taught that Jesus was the Messiah.

Orthodox Judaism is based on obedience to the Torah (the first 5 books of Moses) and this
has been essential to tribalistic cohesion and to social stability. Other movements in
Judaism came out of the Reformation and are more based on a more modern approach to
tradition and cultural practices. Christianity came out of the apocalyptic spirit of
Judaism in the last century B.C.E. and Jesus became the embodiment of Christian divine
reality. It was the council of Nicea in 325 CE which ended Arianism, a view that Jewish was
created inferior to God (the Father). In the 7th century, Mohammed, declared himself the
final prophet who received direct revelations through the angel, Gabriel from God which was
the final word and later it was written in the Quran with elements borrowed from both
Christianity and Judaism. Bahai is a faith which has its roots in Islam.

During World War II, a journalist, Ernie Pyle wrote "There are no atheists in foxholes"
which are words repeated often in movies, i.e., the 1942 movie `Wake Island' and in news
print (most notedly in Readers Digest) and magazines ever since. Of course there are
atheists in fox holes, but atheists are very often vilified and this myth that there are no
atheists in foxholes is often quoted as if it is irrefutable fact. Many patriotic Americans
have been atheists.
* Foxholes were dug large enough usually for one soldier. The army stopped digging
foxholes after WWII and the Korean War. In lieu of foxholes beginning in the Vietnam
War, soldiers built fortified bunkers [usually 3 feet wide by 6 feet long].

I am not surprised that 80 to 95% of Americans believe in God because of the cultural
demographics of Americans and their traditions. The number is far less in Europe and Asia.
There are thousands of minor religions in the world today and there are the larger major
religions. [about 2.1 billion Christians, 1.3 billion Muslims, 1 billion Hindus - (and 350
million Buddhists). About 10% of the world is atheist.

We, humans, think about these things because we must. We have evolved the cognition and
consciousness to inquire about everything including our existence, sense of purpose and
meaning in our lives - but doing so also causes a concomitant problem, that of knowing
about our own dying - and thus the risk for extinction by the existential angst for
contemplating our own mortality. It is reasonable that those those with less anxiety about
death would have a greater sense of purpose and will to survive would be favored by
evolutionary pressure to eliminate the less fit to survive to reproduce.

When humans could enumerate and contemplate their navel, they needed to also be able to
rationalize "ultimate and intrinsic meaning" or the fear of death would be overwhelming;
they needed their absolutes.

"Furthermore, without God, there are no absolutes. All of our laws, our morals, our so
called "eternal truths," become subjective conceptions, man-made devices, as flawed and
imperfect as the humans who created them. Good and evil become relative terms, devoid of
any true means. Without God there is no absolute moral order in the universe. We become
existential orphans, barren of purpose, truth, or soul, lost forever to the vast and
meaningless abyss." (Matthew Alper, The "God" Part of the Brain" A Scientific
Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God (98))

We have come a long way toward having a deeper understanding for who we are and never so
much as the last 3-400 years and especially the 100 years in science.

Writer Christopher Hitchens says religion is bad for you. He says this about religion: "I'm
an atheist...I'm not just neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a
positively bad idea, not just a false one." And scientist Richard Dawkins says, only the
ignorant are religious.

The view about religion may be changing but as humans can we stand the knowledge upgrade?
I'm not sure. Religion is good for some people. There is no doubt it can drive men (and
woman) insane, but it can also cause one to go insane if to obsessed with it but as a good
thing it can create the conditions for coherence for communities and cultures and a
codification of morals - although there have been major breakdowns in religious societies
and their morals and ethics also.

To be an atheist it is not necessary to prove that God doesn't exist. What do we call
people who don't believe in leprechauns, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, or Tinkerbell? Do we
have to prove they don't exist? Rather, it is incumbent upon those who assert God does
physically exist to prove it. -- A Bierce

Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, the author of On Human Nature and Sociobiology:
The New Synthesis and Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge is an atheist who believes we
must co-exist with religionists. In his autobiography, Naturalist (1994), he said,
"Religion had to be explained as a material process, from the bottom up, atoms to genes to
the human spirit. It had to be embraced by the single grand naturalistic image of man."

In an interview he did for Salon (April 2000) he calls himself a secular humanist: "And
humanists -- I'll identify myself as a secular humanist -- recognize that they do not have
2,500 years of the evolution of ritual and mythology into which they can invest their
spiritual energies. That's the easy way. Humanists recognize that there's another way. It's
harder and it's not undergirded by a long history of sacralization. And it may never have
sacred prayers and sacred hymns."

Religion and God ideas, which it now seems likely evolved as a module in our brains to make
us more fit to survive to reproduce (and then die) answers the basic question a religious
conscious being would ask, why there is something rather than nothing. It is an
evolutionary adaption which originates in their brain. However, there is also the question
which is often posed, that if God created the universe, what then created God? And if there
really was a God, why is there no concrete evidence to prove God exists? Because it
doesn't, except in our brains because of that certain psychological need to invent God.
Ethics and morality are not something which relies on the permanence of a soul. For
atheists like me the impermanence of life is strong motivation for putting a greater value
on life while the religious view is predicated on a lie. We don't need to base ethics on
myths. Ethics is something we should feel about quality of the short life we have. It
doesn't need intercessors nor rely on reward strategies, i.e. doing good to insure an
afterlife, etc.

All of Life is Interconnected

Panspermia is the theory that life on Earth didn't start here. It is a theory that life
started as micro-organisms which originated somewhere else in the universe.

Exploration of Mars has fueled an interest and a second look at the century old theory that
primitive life might have travelled in our solar system on chunks of rock or ice and seeded
life on our planet.

"For the past 25 years Cardiff University Professor Chandra Wackramasinghe has postulated
that terrestrial life was brought to earth by comets. Rhodri Evans, Western Mail (Cardiff,
Wales), April 19, 2002)

"Some 500 million years ago evolution had resulted in the rise of the first vertebrates -
fish...150 million years later came tamphibians, then reptiles 300 million years ago...200
million years ago mammals appeared, by 136 million years ago primitive kangaroos, and 60
million years ago mice, rats and squirrels had evolved...By 50 million years ago the first
primitive monkeys were to be found, but it was a further 30 million years before the
evolution of chimpanzees...By 4 million years ago the first humans were walking upright and
by 2 million years ago they had started using stone tools...Just half-a-million years ago
the first modern men were to be found." (ibid)

For 500 million years that life evolved our species developed the complexity to make
awareness of ourselves and our surroundings the reality it is.

"...Scientists have developed computer simulations of how rocks ejected from a catastrophic
meteorite collision on Mars could have wandered through space and been captured by Earth's
gravity. Cornell astronomer Thomas Gold believes organisms living deep enough in a planet
or satellite could survive space travel. Gold believes all life, including Earth's, started
in rocky fissures deep below the surface as microbes feeding on methane, sulfur compounds
or other energy-rich chemicals. On Earth, micro-organisms have been found as deep as 19,000
feet, surviving without any sunlight or air. Gold believes this kind of life could generate
on other more hostile planets and even survive space travel. It also is possible that the
solar system has collected materials from outside itself, some perhaps even life-bearing."
(Chicago Sun-Times - Sept 22, 1996)

Evolution of a complex mind is the great leap in intelligence that made possible the
development of myths and stories creating culture and socialization which empowered humans
to create civilizations. Evolution of cultures have outpaced the evolution of our biology.

Our ancestors were primitive - organisms which were alive more than 500 million years ago.
The elements of life in the universe are the product of eons of cosmic evolution which may
have seeded Earth and our human species is physiologically the same as 200,000 year man
whereas knowledge of science is only hundreds of years old and the environment is being
changed faster than we could adapt our biology.

We are aware of our consciousness and most of us know the universe was not created for us;
we were created out of the elements of star stuff. We are animals and we depend on other
life for the energy we need to stay alive and that energy comes from our sun.

So are we closer to proving life came from space? Do we have the wisdom and science to
decipher the cryptic secrets of life? We are definitely getting closer to something very
remarkable.

Four hundred years of science has demonstrated that all of nature is connected and
impermanent. We live in an indifferent universe and we are ALL organic chemicals bonded
into fragile organisms; and our human minds are flooded with existential angst. Salvation
exists for us only in the moment - in our feelings and emotions and seeking connections
with other animals and each other.

It is what is human in us which makes us sad when we break with traditional memes. It is
our complex brain, though similar in plan to other animals is different, and the emotions
and feelings which motivates some people to do very bad things and other people to have
feelings of dread when a meme; a habit we normally find some comfort is changed.

BUT everything changes and time changes much too fast. Sad feelings are part of being human
which are uncomfortable and depressing. It is our mind which though similar to other
animals is also the emergent property of our oversize brain which motivates and conserves
complex neural mechanisms, cooperative and competitive behaviors we inherited from our
ancestors which insured our survival in a very dangerous world but navigating the social
interactions - to enhance our reproductive fitness are at times as depressing as they are
at other times a comfort.

We have a mind and consciousness which we can't yet define with precision but we do know it
provides the ethical dimension which provides us with meaning and purpose. There is a unity
of nature and our human awareness determines how we navigate the present.

Unregulated growth is not just degradation of our natural resources, it is short sighted
and destructive. Civilizations can burn themselves out. Our capacity to be human is our
only real salvation. If we do not reject nihilistic tendencies in favor of more egalitarian
societies, we will not survive as a species and the entire planet may go dark.

Regardless where life began it will end here if we continue down the path
of aggression, egoism, tribalism and greed.

What is also apparent to everyone who studies our nature and biology is that life is
impermanent and our social interactions provide some comfort against angst. We, all of us
determined by our nature, our nurture and the interaction of the two; and there is an
awareness that we are fragile and temporary.

So how do we find personal meaning in any of this? I think we do it by knowing the truth.
We knowledge the connections we have with our past and time limited future. And we connect
with someone. There is also a certain sense of awe acknowledging our connection to all
living things and rising above that fragility is the capacity to be human.

Hank Roth

|

All quoting per the Fair Use Doctrine
for educational and discussion purposes pursuant to^
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law.

Permalink: http://inyourface.info/ArT/Beta/ANgst.shtml

Today is Friday October 09, 2009

G 0 l e m D e s i g n s
Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)

Worm Hole (Home) - The Crypt - Hank Roth (Bio)

While I don't use a standard blog (weblog software) mostly because I've been doing this too
long - having been there with Ike when the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet got started
and every step of the way since, I can't get into all the many fads over the years (now it
is social networking), but I have been an observer and participant in events which shape
the world since my time with NSA and with Army Security and as a voice security
cryptologist in the White House for the President, and the War Room at the Pentagon for the
Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff plus two wars. You could say this site is one of the better
kept secrets [grin] on the InterNUT. You are invited back as often as you would like to see
what I and others, I trust, may be saying.
-- Hank Roth

[viewed 1796 times]

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THEIR WORLD IS YOUR WORLD

get out of your world
& into theirs
don't go to the malls
go downtown
see the darkside of the city
if you dare

what's the matter
scared?
see all the dangerous people
they'll kill you for a dime
because what do they have to lose?

-The Golem-

Socialism is better but it hasn't worked so well because people are just
animals and culture hasn't evolved very much since Lucy died. We're much the
same now as then. The big difference is in governments which insure the rich
get richer and the poor stay that way.

"From Each According to Their Abilities; To Each According to Their Needs."

Hank Roth
(TheGolem)

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This guy has quite a history. Amazing what can get elected here in
Illinois . . .

Democratic Illinois Lt. Gov. Nominee Arrested for Domestic Battery -
http://www.redstate.com/jrichardson/2010/02/04/democratic-illinois-lt-gov-nominee-arrested-for-domestic-battery/

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ENIAC

ELECTRONIC NUMERICAL INTEGRATOR AND CALCULATOR

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (Eniac), was
only a dream in the 40s. My interest in computers goes way back
to the late 50s to the ENIAC. I had been a Ham Operator since
1955 (K4EVY), when I was still in high school. There was no such
thing as a personal computer then.

But, my excitement about computers really began when I saw the
first computer, the ENIAC, at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland
in the 50s. I was in military school in Georgia then but on one of
our family visits to Pennsylvania and Maryland my uncle invited me
to see his laboratory and the ENIAC.

As early as the 40s (1943) scientists at the University of Pennsylvania
proposed a machine which would calculate "firing tables" - settings used
for directing artillery under varying conditions vis-a-vis weather,
distance to the target, etc. to be used for aiming artillery, which
up to that time sometimes took hours to calculate. That is when the
computer age was actually launched. The ENIAC, which weighed 30 tons,
was funded by the U.S. Army.

Dr. Goldstine lobbied a committee headed by Oswald Veblen, mathematician,
who influenced the army to go forward with funding at the Aberdeen
Proving Grounds (in 1943) with a request for half a million dollars
to pay for the research and the computer. Up to that time the army
had been shipping their guns without firing tables. Col Leslie E. Simon
was then the director of the Army's Ballistics Laboratory, where my
uncle worked. Simons retired as a general. Dr. Goldstine was in charge
of the operation for the army. A team of scientists and engineers at
Penn's Moore School built the computer. The project was secret.

After three years of military school and one year of regular high
school I enlisted in the army. It was there that I was selected for
a secret assignment and after extensive investigations by the FBI and
the Secret Service I worked at the White House for the President of
the United States. I had a top secret clearance but also a crypto and
nuclear clearance. I was privy to everything the President said and
later on the Chiefs of Staff ("need to know" was extended to everything
I heard). In the 60s I worked in the War Room for the Chiefs of Staff at
the Pentagon (before going to helicopter school and before the Yom Kipper
War in 73).

My uncle was a physicist who died when he was only about 49 years old
from a cardiac condition but while he was employed as a scientist for
the army he invented the fastest camera in the world and he used the
very first computer in the ballistics lab at the base, which was also
his research facility for developing munitions for the military.

In 1957 I enlisted in the army because a war was about to
start and I wanted to get in on it.

One of the most exciting days of my life however was when I saw the
world's first computer, the ENIAC in the 50s, which was built at the
Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland,
and was funded by the Ordnance Corps of the United States
Army.

My memory is admittedly a bit vague by now, because it was such a long
time ago, but I do remember, the ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes
and generated a lot of heat. Obviously there was very little memory and
it was extremely slow.

Later on a subsequent tour of duty in the War Room at the Pentagon, just
down the hall from where I worked they were using a newer generation
computer, which still used tubes - and I recall how huge it was also
and all those diode multipliers and bullion adders with their flashing
lights. I also remember the heat and an array of tubes which military
personnel were constantly replacing as they burned out. It seemed like
that was their only job. To this day I don't know what this equipment
was used for. But I do know the tubes were a problem and RCA had to
develop a new tube which had a longer life just for the application
there at the Pentagon.

I worked cryptology in the War Room and my equipment used mechanical
coding wheels and also used tubes. The wheels were metal rings which
had to be lined up in exactly the same configuration and started exactly
at the same time as those who we communicated with in the Six Fleet
or where-ever they were. Army Security Agency (ASA) kept trying to break
our codes but they couldn't.

These were not text devices. They generated synthesized speech which
did not sound at all like the person using them - and speech was encrypted.
We were armed with sawed off shotguns. And we not only guarded the equipment,
we swept the room for bugs and we monitored all of the speech.

My job was the same at the White House when I did a three year tour
there but included other things, a lot of other things and my training
was at Ft Monmouth and at NSA. I worked in all kinds of communications
including the first television hookups for the White House, which we
assisted in the engineering process. I taught single sideband and
various types of multiplexing, including packet communications when
it was new.

ENIAC was the first electronic computer which could compute a trajectory
in only one second (pretty damn fast when it took an hour before the
computer was developed). It was completed in 1945 and it was very BIG. It
was enormous. The system was 80 feet long and was 8 feet high. It
contained 18,000 vacuum tubes. The speed was 100,000 pulses per second.

It didn't really begin to calculate firing tables until the war was over
since it took so long to build. From the time it was imagined in 43 to the
time it was completed in 1945.

It became public in 1946. It was built at the Moore school and moved to
Aberdeen in 1947 where it was utilized until 1955.

When I finally left the military I went to school under the G.I.Bill and I
got an LL.B degree but I also studied programming and systems design. I
learned COBOL, RPG, Lisp, BASIC and various other languages, including
assembly code. I built and owned several computers and all of the first
ones I learned to program them using their individual machine language. In
those days that was not uncommon. COBOL was probably my favorite
programming language because although bulky it was plain English
and easy to use - but still no personal computers then and I had
to program main frames using punch cards. My very first personal
computer was a Commodore 4K and later a Commodore 2001. My first
hard drive cost me $1,700 for that Commodore. My next computer
was better; it was an IBM XT. Since then I have had more computers
than I can remember and the operating system for most of them has
been Linux. I cut my teeth on UNIX. And I still prefer DOS to
Windows (g).

Hank Roth
Go to the Worm Hole at http://up-yours.us/
More Article in The Crypt at http://inyourface.info/
Bio - http://pnews.org/bio/

- PNEWS - http://pnews.org/ (on the InterNUT since 1982)

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Are the laws of nature the same everywhere in the Universe?
Or, is our little piece of the Universe what it is because of the
environment where we live?

OR, is the Universe the way it is, our piece of it at least, just so
physicists can be here to observe it? (g) We live on a unique planet with
liquid water and our laws of nature have adapted to this unique
environment.

I think the Universe is a big random place, very inhospitable to our
kind of life, but for other forms of life the possiblities are unlimited.

I think each pocket of space has different laws of nature and vastly
different landscapes and much more than we can imagine is possible.

Ponder this: Dark Matter is 25%. Dark Energy is 70% of the Universe.
And Atoms only make up about 5% of the Universe.

Ponder This:

What if to the whole of everything we are small like subatomic human particles?

Or what if we are food for aliens who seeded this rock millions of
years ago with DNA and let it evolve and they will one day return to eat us.

Peter Wesson, a scientist in Canada recently wrote that our universe is
actually in a black hole and may be in another universe, which also might be in
a black hole, and so forth and so on. We know what we know but there is much we
do not know.

What if our human existence doesn't mean any more than the fact we are
here - and we have a brain? (because that is all I believe it means) And
if we have a brain we should be enlightened enough by the accumulated
wisdom of 500 years of books to want to be the species that saves the
world for us and for them (all the rest) and only by doing that can we
insure a quality of life that will make it all worth while and then we
won't be so insignificant after-all.

* Life on Earth is a product of evolution by natural selection
operating in the medium of carbon chemistry. However, in theory,
evolution is not limited to Earth, nor to carbon chemistry.

* Just as it may occur on other planets, it may also operate
in other media, such as the medium of digital computation

AND, "what-if" we are somebody else's computer simulation?

Also See: http://pnews.org/ArT/ZioN/EvO.shtml

Hank

TheCrypt - http://pnews.org/archives/
The WormHole - http://pnews.org/

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NEW submission policies for PNEWS-L and for DARK MATTER:

PNEWS is a distribution link-list for links to important news and views. [Not for promoting your site no commercial posting. Advertising will not be tolerated and all submissions will be reviewed before they are accepted.]. Links should include a short one or two paragraph summary as a preface and a link to the entire news or views item. Also see the CRYPT, a depository of articles from the Worm Hole and the Epsilon Weblog.

DARK MATTER has moved to dark-matter <at> yahoogroups.com
Dark Matter is a distribution list for articles. Nothing has change except the address so if you were subscribed at Dark Matter here, you must resubscribe at the following address:

Group Email Addresses
Related Link: http://inyourface.info/
Post message: dark-matter <at> yahoogroups.com
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[wormhole] replaces the old Dark Matter. To continue receiving articles from Dark Matter, send "subscribe wormhole" (without quotes) in subject line to:
ecartis <at> inyourface.info

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:41:20 -0600 (CST)
From: EpSil0n-// <epsilon <at> inyourface.info>
Reply-To: wormhole <at> inyourface.info
To: wormhole <at> inyourface.info
Subject: [wormhole] Is it worth the risk?

Hank Roth, on the InterNUT since 1982
Past (post) Commander Jewish War Veterans
* Cryptologist and Voice Security in the White House
and in the War Room for JCS at the Pentagon
BIO [with pics] http://inyourface.info/bio/

--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------

And is it worth the risk?

It depends. How much do we value wisdom? What risk is worth knowing the
answers to our existence? Answers beyond that which is known about
evolutionary survival and reproduction - what life means besides our
simple will to live until we die? We have learned a lot in the last few
centuries and acquired knowledge exponentially in the last couple of
decades. Do we stop now? I don't know that we can.

----------------------------------------------

H O M E - C R Y P T - B I O
Inevitable Consequences?
The Large Hadron Collider
and Due Diligence

There is little doubt if the LHC does all that it is supposed to do and
strange particles including the Higgs boson are discovered it will be a
giant step forward in our understanding of the cosmos. For all that we do
know about the universe there is so very much more we do not understand.
The test/detector results from the this SUPER-collider will be great and
will be extraordinarily exciting. CERN has looked at all of the
consequences and most scientists DO NOT expect a catastrophe. But, some (a
disproportionate few) do.

Some have suggested that cosmic rays bombard the earth and us constantly
and we're still here. Protons traveling around in the LHC 11,000 loops in
a second - will be over 99% the speed of light. Nothing gets much faster.
When protons smash into each other at that speed - close to the speed
limit of matter.
What will be the best or the worst outcome?

The consequences of these collisions may be mini black holes. Tiny black
holes grow into very large black holes. There is an accretion disk around
a black hole just before the event horizon where visible matter is being
sucked into the black hole pulled toward the holes center, its
singularity.

If the Big Bang is a correct theory the universe which some say is
infinite began as very tiny (too small to see) microscopic no-width and
no-height dense energy and has been expanding practically ever since.
There is a black hole in the middle of every galaxy and some of them are
millions of times more massive than our SUN and they continue to grow in
size - called (gravitational) accretion. No one has ever seen nor detected
one on Earth before but that may change then they crank up the LHC.

"One potential method of destruction OF THE PLANET is that the LHC
will create tiny black holes that could swallow everything in their path
including the planet. In 2002, (physicist) Roberto Casadio at the
Universita di Bologna in Italy and a few pals reassured the world that
this was not possible because the black holes would decay before they got
the chance to do any damage." (lhc-black-holes at physics arXiv blog)

The traditional wisdom, an impossible concept in science by the way, HAS
BEEN that any black holes created by these proton collisions would decay
before they swallow the Earth. Well, now - after thinking about it for
several years there are more and more physicists who are having second
thoughts about mini-black hole decay. They are saying now, what if the
decay does not keep pace with the mBH's (mini-black holes) growth? The
point is, they really don't know.

Casadio has also changed his mind. He no longer reassure us that black
holes will decay faster than they grow. I think we're in deep do do now.

"...there is no such thing as "rest" within the center of the Earth:
the temperature is 7000 K; the density is 13,000 kg per cubic meter. And,
after all, temperature is just an epiphenomenon of moving
particles......." (Read this at arXiv.org: "Hole Growth in the Warped
Brane-World Scenario at the LHC")

"....the effective velocity that an mBH feels while at "rest" within
the Earth's core is equivalent to an mBH traveling at just less than the
escape velocity of the Earth...." (IBID-arXiv.org)

Therefore ACCRETION ALWAYS OUTPACES HAWKING RADIATION (evaporation of the
black hole) and thus there is a NET (kilogram scale) growth of the black
hole - out-pacing its decay.

What would Albert Einstein say? He didn't work on the Atom bomb because he
was opposed to war and he was opposed to potential catastrophic
devastation from a nuclear fission. He warned of the possibility of a
flash-fire of the Earth's atmosphere and a nuclear chain reaction.

Here we go again: Nobody knows for sure what will happen when the LHC is
turned on and they start smashing particles of protons at full energy. One
thing is for sure: Testing under these conditions may be fine. But it may
not be. Is this due diligence?
And is it worth the risk?

It depends. How much do we value wisdom? What risk is worth knowing the
answers to our existence? Answers beyond that which is known about
evolutionary survival and reproduction - what life means besides our
simple will to live until we die? We have learned a lot in the last few
centuries and acquired knowledge exponentially in the last couple of
decades. Do we stop now? I don't know that we can.

How can unfeeling particles give rise to feeling organisms, like us; like
other animals - with perception - with emotions - and sentience? I can't
help but feel, as I have for as long as I can remember thinking about
these things, that life is a cruel joke - to have to endure the pain which
accompanies it - and happiness when we think we have it - is ephemeral and
most often it eludes us. We spend lifetimes trying to define and find it.
Then we die.

Major extinctions have wiped out whole species to where what is left is a
small fraction of the fittest until the next upheaval, whether it is
climatic or a celestial impact or we just kill ourselves by disregarding
the obvious truth of our own nature.

Why are we here? Dorion Sagan (son of Carl) tells us (in one of his many
books about life and death). In Notes From the Holocene, he writes that
the the most searched for questions in the Chinese search engine Baidu is
"Why are we are alive?" I learned from Dorion's work more about
thermodynamics than I was ever taught in school (he wrote an entire book
on the subject) - and from my understanding of thermodynamics I know our
constituent parts recycle themselves but it appears what is lost is the
essence of life, our consciousness [or the Chinese may say conscience]
although some day we may have the technology to upload it into a computer
- unless that is what we already are, computers or a modeling program on
some extraterrestrial or alien computing system.

Dorion writes: "The very substance of our bodies comes from and will
return to the biosphere when we die."

We will disappear; maybe when they turn on the Large Hadron Collider - (or
maybe not?) - but major extinction events are common.

Raup and Sepkoski (1982) are widely agreed upon as some of the most
significant: End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian, End Triassic, and
End Cretaceous."

And now, we are in the Holocene extinction period. Climate is changing. We
will likely not adapt nor be able to alter it in time to have it remain
suitable for life as we know it.

These and a selection of other extinction events are outlined below:

(Origins Quote)

1. 488 million years ago a series of mass extinctions at the
Cambrian-Ordovician transition (the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction events)
eliminated many brachiopods and conodonts and severely reduced the number
of trilobite species.

2. 444 million years ago at the Ordovician-Silurian transition two
Ordovician-Silurian extinction events occurred, and together these are
ranked by many scientists as the second largest of the five major
extinctions in Earth's history in terms of percentage of genera that went
extinct.

3. 360 million years ago near the Devonian-Carboniferous transition
(the Late Devonian extinction) a prolonged series of extinctions led to
the elimination of about 70% of all species. This was not a sudden event
the period of decline lasted perhaps as long as 20 million years, and
there is evidence for a series of extinction pulses within this period.

4. 251 million years ago at the Permian-Triassic transition Earth's
worst mass extinction (the P/Tr or Permian-Triassic extinction event)
killed 53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera, about 96% of all
marine species and an estimated 70% of land species (including plants,
insects, and vertebrate animals). The "Great Dying" had enormous
evolutionary significance: on land it ended the dominance of the
mammal-like reptiles and created the opportunity for archosaurs and then
dinosaurs to become the dominant land vertebrates; in the seas the
percentage of animals that were sessile dropped from 67% to 50%. The whole
of the late Permian was a difficult time for at least marine life - even
before the "Great Dying", the diagram shows a late-Permian level of
extinction large enough to qualify for inclusion in the "Big Five".

5. 200 million years ago at the Triassic-Jurassic transition (the
Triassic-Jurassic extinction event) about 20% of all marine families as
well as most non-dinosaurian archosaurs, most therapsids, and the last of
the large amphibians were eliminated. 6. 65 million years ago at the
Cretaceous-Paleogene transition (the K/T or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction
event) about 50% of all species became extinct. It has great significance
for humans because it ended the reign of the dinosaurs and opened the way
for mammals to become the dominant land vertebrates; and in the seas it
reduced the percentage of sessile animals again, to about 33%. The K/T
extinction was rather uneven some groups of organisms became extinct, some
suffered heavy losses and some appear to have got off relatively lightly.

6. Present day the Holocene extinction event. A 1998 survey by the
American Museum of Natural History found that 70% of biologists view the
present era as part of a mass extinction event, possibly one of the
fastest ever. Some, such as E. O. Wilson of Harvard University, predict
that man's destruction of the biosphere could cause the extinction of
one-half of all species in the next 100 years. Research and conservation
efforts, such as the IUCN's annual "Red List" of threatened species, all
point to an ongoing period of enhanced extinction, though some offer much
lower rates and hence longer time scales before the onset of catastrophic
damage. The extinction of many megafauna near the end of the most recent
ice age is also sometimes considered a part of the Holocene extinction
event.

(END Quote)

Our Solar System is middle aged - and there remains about another 5
billion years of life left in our Earth unless an impact smashes it to
pieces or a super collider does it first.

Dorion Sagan: "That Earth is a giant living being, perhaps a
superior-organism as far beyond us as we are beyond our constituent
cells."
Jumping Into the Unknown

Stevie Smith in TheTechHerald.com wrote -2009-):

(QUOTE)

Could LHC black holes still carry an Earthly threat?

New claims concerning the controversial Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
particle accelerator have this week suggested that microscopic black holes
created by the gigantic atom-smashing machine could, contrary to official
safety reports, will not vanish quite as quickly as they form.

Moreover, a group of physicists have scrutinized the mathematic
processes involved in operating the 27-kilometer ringed accelerator and
determined that any resulting black holes will not simply disappear from
existence a mere millisecond after being created, which is the line LHC
scientists are holding to.

According to Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and
Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama in the United
States, miniscule black holes spawned by the collider could exist for up
to a second or longer.

The physicists believe this length of time, an eternity when it comes
to particle physics, could then potentially allow the black holes to
struggle for growth increase as opposed to merely decaying in an instant a
struggle the teams theoretical model shows they ultimately would not win.

While Casadio, Fabi and Harms concede that planet-threatening growth
is highly unlikely, with any created black holes passing harmlessly beyond
the atmosphere before disappearing completely, they have offered that
current safety claims are inaccurate.

We conclude that the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does
not seem possible, they outlined through a paper posted to scientific
discussion forum ArXiv.org. Nonetheless, it remains true that the expected
decay times are much longer than is typically predicted by other models.

The European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) team behind the LHC
particle accelerator, which is buried deep under the Swiss/French border,
is hoping the mighty machine will enable them to re-create, study, and
understand conditions in the universe at the very point of its creation.

The Large Hadron Collider, the worlds largest particle accelerator,
suffered a mechanical failure when it was officially fired up in the
latter half of 2008. Following a frustrating period of repair, CERN
scientists are expected to resume smashing protons at velocities
approaching the speed of light this coming spring.

(UNQUOTE)

**** Remarks from SaneScienceOrg ****

(QUOTE)

Zealous, jealous, Nobel Prize hungry Physicists are racing each other
and stopping at nothing to try to find the supposed 'Higgs Boson'(aka God)
Particle, among others, and are risking nothing less than the annihilation
of the Earth and all Life in endless experiments hoping to prove a theory
when urgent tangible problems face the planet. The European Organization
for Nuclear Research(CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's most
powerful atom smasher that will soon be firing groups of billions of heavy
subatomic particles at each other at nearly the speed of light to create
Miniature Big Bangs producing Micro Black Holes, Strangelets, AntiMatter
and other potentially cataclysmic phenomena as described below.

Particle physicists have run out of ideas and are at a dead end
forcing them to take reckless chances with more and more powerful and
costly machines to create new and never-seen-before, unstable and unknown
matter while Astrophysicists, on the other hand, are advancing science and
knowledge on a daily basis making new discoveries in these same areas by
observing the universe, not experimenting with it and with your life.
Einstein used Astronomy to prove his landmark general theory of relativity
that, ironically, describes, among other things, the Black Holes which the
LHC is designed to produce at the hoped for rate of one per second.

The LHC is a dangerous gamble as CERN physicist Alvaro De Rjula in the
BBC LHC documentary, 'The Six Billion Dollar Experiment', incredibly
admits quote, 'Will we find the Higgs particle at the LHC? That, of
course, is the question. And the answer is, science is what we do when we
don't know what we're doing.' And CERN spokesmodel Brian Cox follows with
this stunning quote, 'the LHC is certainly, by far, the biggest jump into
the unknown.'

The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states: 'There are many theories
as to what will result from these collisions,...' Again, this is because
they truly don't know what's going to happen. They are experimenting with
forces they don't understand to obtain results they can't comprehend. If
you think like most people do that 'They must know what they're doing' you
could not be more wrong. Some people think similarly about medical Dr.s
but consider this by way of comparison and example from JAMA: 'A recent
Institute of Medicine report quoted rates estimating that medical errors
kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year in US hospitals.' The second
part of the CERN quote reads '...but what's for sure is that a brave new
world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator,...' A molecularly
changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads
'...as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of
the Universe.' These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely
more questions than answers but there isn't a particle physicist alive who
wouldn't gladly trade his life to glimpse the 'God particle', and
sacrifice the rest of us with him. Reason and common sense will tell you
that the risks far outweigh any potential(as CERN physicists themselves
say) benefits.

This quote from National Geographic, 'The hunt for the God particle',
exactly sums this 'science' up: 'If all goes right, matter will be
transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in
turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of
them never seen before. That's the essence of experimental particle
physics: 'You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.'

(END)

-- From The Tech Herald

What do you suppose will happen?

The speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. At LHC,
protons will smash into each other at 299,792,454.9 meters per second,
99.99999898% the speed of light, Assume all that energy produces black
holes. Suppose as protons smash into each other they produce millions of
black holes and they all MERGE. Suppose also that Hawking evaporation,
which is just as THEORY is false. What do you suppose will happen next?
Hank Roth
e-mail: epsilon <at> inyourface.info

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All quoting per the Fair Use Doctrine
for educational and discussion purposes pursuant to
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law.

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Today is Wednesday January 27, 2010
G 0 l e m D e s i g n s
Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)

While I don't use a standard blog (weblog software) mostly because
I've been doing this too long - having been there with Ike when the
precursor to the Internet, Arpanet got started and every step of the way
since, I can't get into all the many fads over the years (now it is social
networking), but I have been an observer and participant in events which
shape the world since my time with NSA and with Army Security and as a
voice security cryptologist in the White House for the President, and the
War Room at the Pentagon for the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff plus two
wars. You could say this site is one of the better kept secrets [grin] on
the InterNUT. You are invited back as often as you would like to see what
I and others, I trust, may be saying.
-- Hank Roth
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The last decade was the world's warmest on record

*
*

23/01/2010

The last decade was the world's warmest on record.

Nasa said global surface temperatures have risen by 0.8C since 1880 then
levelled off by 1970. But since then, they found an "upward trend" of
about 0.2C for each decade.

And 2009 was the world's joint second warmest year since 1880, beaten only
by 2005, and the warmest in the Southern Hemisphere.

The findings are a blow to climate change sceptics who claim the world has
cooled since 1998.

James Hansen, of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said:
"There's substantial year-to-year variability due to the tropical La Nina
cycle. When we average temperatures out, global warming continues
unabated."

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/01/23/the-last-decade-was-the-world-s-warmest-on-record-115875-21988980/

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Hank Roth, on the InterNUT since 1982
Past (post) Commander Jewish War Veterans
* Cryptologist and Voice Security in the White House
and in the War Room for JCS at the Pentagon
BIO [with pics] http://inyourface.info/bio/

--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------

One Cannot Live by RNA Alone

And just in case you think I am talking only about Homo sapiens, you
are wrong. We are neither the end result of evolution nor the highest
and best use of evolution, just another example of evolution - and one
which is surely not long for this world. There is no reason why we
should not follow the same fate as 99.9% of all the other species that
once lived on the planet.

"We are neither the fastest nor the strongest of creatures. We're not
even the most prolific: in terms of biomass, ants are more plentiful,
and they've been around much longer..." (Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., The
Genus Within - 2002)

Science and the natural law of science rules life and everything in the
universe. Although it is also quite possible that natural law may be
different elsewhere in the universe and different galaxies and
multiverses may have varying natural laws different than our own.

Just as the extreme right wing has been anti-science, for far too long
an extremist "radical" political left has resisted science preferring a
more idealized romantic world view where everyone has a greater
potential for doing good. That may be the ideal view but it is not the
right view.

"So the tendency toward slaughter that manifested itself in the Chinese
Cultural Revolution is not the product of agriculture, technology,
television, or materialism. It is not an invention of either Western or
Eastern civilization. It is not a uniquely human proclivity at all. It
comes from something both sub- and super- human, something we share
with apes, fish, and ants--a brutality that speaks to us through the
animals in our brain. If man has contributed anything of his own to the
equation, it is this: He has learned to dream of peace. But to achieve
that dream, he will have to overcome what nature has built into him."
(Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle - 1995)

Life is basically a simple idea but complex enough to add wonderment
and awe to it. We can't help but be humble in the presence of nature's
wonderment and great majesty.

AT first RNA did rule our world. BUT there were complications. There
there was DNA. DNA replicates but cannot do so unassisted. Replication
needs proteins which are large molecules chemically different from DNA.
And proteins, like DNA are built of subunits of amino acids in a long
chain. It is the business of each cell to put to work 20 of these amino
acids, which are called building blocks, to form the proteins.

So where did these amino acids come from? What is the origin of amino
acids? See "The Origin of Life on the Earth," by L. E. Orgel;
Scientific American, October 1994., the Stanley Miller experiment first
published in 1953 where he applied a spark to a mix of gases resembling
early conditions on Earth out of which two amino acids of the 20 were
formed. Also see info re: Murchison meteorite, which impacted with
Earth in 1969, in which 80 amino acids were found, out of which were
ample building blocks, i.e. nucleotides, for the formation of life. "By
extrapolation of these results, some writers have presumed that all of
life's building could be formed with ease in Miller-type experiments
and were present in meteorites and other extraterrestrial bodies. This
is not the case." (Source: Scientific American)

Amino acids make proteins. These proteins do a variety of tasks, they
are the _handymen_ of living cells. But it doesn't end there. The
handymen; that is, the proteins need enzymes, which are _expeditors_
which hasten chemical processes, making them useful for life.

It is the DNA which contains the recipe for the construction of the
protein which cannot be copied or retrieved.

Enter RNA, a class of molecule, like the DNA which is assembled in a
helix of nucleotide (protein) building blocks. RNA resembles DNA but it
is the molecule which edits and censors DNA code (instructions).

DNA and RNA are in a matter of speaking cousins.

There are clues that RNA appeared before proteins and DNA in the
evolution of life. There are small molecules, called _cofactors_ which
perform enzyme-catalyzed reactions and they carry an attached
nucleotide with no known function, so some scientists have speculated
that they are _molecular fossils_ - that is, they are relics descended
when RNA alone, without DNA ruled the natural biochemical world. We
don't really know for sure, therefore it is just a hypothesis (though
it is a good one) that life began with RNA alone.

And what happened before RNA? There are still many questions we cannot
answer and until there are answers to these and other questions much of
it will be attributed to an intelligent designer because being
inexplicable the natural course for those who do not have an answer is
to invent one and attribute all things inexplicable to the
super-inventor of everything, to that mysterious supernatural thing
referred to as GOD. That isn't really an answer for anything but it is
the meme most humans adopt as reasonable. And it is difficult to
impossible to debate the existence of god, no matter how unreasonable
the belief in a belief is - with those committed to that belief. How
did that first self-replicating RNA arise? What made RNA? Are Did RNA
just emerge out of gray-green goo?

There are opposing views (Miller experiment) and what has been found in
meteors is sufficient to produce the basic Watson-Crick building blocks
necessary for life.

The Scientific American reported that analysis of "several meteorites
led the scientists who conducted the work to a different conclusion:
inanimate nature has a bias toward the formation of molecules made of
fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus shows no
partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of
life. (When larger carbon-containing molecules are produced, they tend
to be insoluble, hydrogen-poor substances that organic chemists call
tars.) I have observed a similar pattern in the results of many spark
discharge experiments."

"Amino acids, such as those produced or found in these experiments, are
far less complex than nucleotides. Their defining features are an amino
group (a nitrogen and two hydrogens) and a carboxylic acid group (a
carbon, two oxygens and a hydrogen) both attached to the same carbon.
The simplest of the 20 used to build natural proteins contains only two
carbon atoms. Seventeen of the set contain six or fewer carbons. The
amino acids and other substances that were prominent in the Miller
experiment contained two and three carbon atoms. By contrast, no
nucleotides of any kind have been reported as products of spark
discharge experiments or in studies of meteorites, nor have the smaller
units (nucleotides) that contain a sugar and base but lack the
phosphate." (ibid)

"To rescue the RNA-first concept from this otherwise lethal defect, its
advocates have created a discipline called prebiotic synthesis. They
have attempted to show that RNA and its components can be prepared in
their laboratories in a sequence of carefully controlled reactions,
normally carried out in water at temperatures observed on Earth. Such a
sequence would start usually with compounds of carbon that had been
produced in spark discharge experiments or found in meteorites. The
observation of a specific organic chemical in any quantity (even as
part of a complex mixture) in one of the above sources would justify
its classification as "prebiotic," a substance that supposedly had been
proved to be present on the early Earth. Once awarded this distinction,
the chemical could then be used in pure form, in any quantity, in
another prebiotic reaction. The products of such a reaction would also
be considered "prebiotic" and employed in the next step in the
sequence." (ibid)

In any event the controversy is far from being resolved at this point
in time and any further explanation of the RNA first argument is way
above my pay grade but I wanted to at least lay out the essense of the
conflict which persists for this conundrum.

I think it is unfortunate that many of those who favor an Intelligent
Design approach will use this as an example of the scientific inability
to explain life.

There have been numerous other theories proposed for RNA or RNA type
substances playing a role in the origin of life on Earth. Most of these
theories vis-a-vis prebiotic Earth also rely on hypothetical
presumptions that Nucleotide Watson-Crick base pairs type replication
was used in the formation of life in prebiotic Earth. It has not been
possible to reproduce life using scientific experimentation; at least
not so that cytosine can be created, one of the four molecules
necessary for the Watson-Crick base for ATCG. Nor has Cytosine been
found in any analysis of meteorites or products of spark discharge
experimentation. It has been suggested that on the basis of evidence or
the lack thereof, it is unlikely that cytosine played a role in the
origin of life. However, theories that involve replicators that
function without the Watson-Crick pairs, or no replicator at all also
remain as viable alternatives.

Hank Roth

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No, its not some kind of deviant gorillas in the mist story, apparently,
millions of years ago our ancestors picked up pubic lice (crabs) either by
sleeping in gorilla nests (without the gorilla) or through eating our
silver-backed cousins. David Reed and colleagues at the University of
Florida publish details of their findings today in BMC Biology journal.

Reed is quick to point out that there was no monkey business between
gorillas and humans. Of course gorillas are apes not monkeys, but this
would be a perfect story for Ricky Gervais podcast star Karl Pilkington.
It certainly wouldnt have to be what many people are going to immediately
assume it might have been, and that is sexual intercourse occurring
between humans and gorillas, Reed says, Instead of something sordid, it
could easily have stemmed from an activity that was considerably more
tame.

Reed suggests that 3.3 million years ago, gorilla lice took up residence
in the pubic region in our ancestors, this was probably around the same
time that evolution took us from a fully hirsute state to our current
nakedness. With no hair on our bodies other than the head and pubic
regions, the lice would have been hard pushed to linger anywhere else.

http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/people-caught-pubic-lice-from-gorillas.html

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Islamic Certitude

"...Self-denigration is said to be a peculiarly English vice; but, it is in
fact far more prevalent throughout the Western world than one would
imagine...The truth is that not all cultures have the same values, and not all
values are worthy of respect." (Ibn Warraq)

Islam is a religion where children are taught the religious obligation of jihad
and martyrdom at a very early age so that a suicide belt is not as disturbing
to them as it is abhorrent to us. The glorification of jihad makes the idea of
jihad desirable. They are taught that if their faith is strong enough they
would welcome the opportunity to kill infidels for Islam and this kind of death
wiill even hasten their trip to paradise. It says to the children they are not
murderers; they are religious martyrs. There is no question about fearing death
when it is an act of religious sacrifice. This is their core belief. And it is
crazy.

The following from Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq - published by
Prometheus Books (1995) is excerpted here in compliance with the Fair Use
Doctrine provision of the Copyright Law for educational and discussion
purposes. Use the comments (or trackback) link at the end of the article to
post your views. If this excerpt interests you, it is my hope that you will
also read the book, obtaining it from your favorite bookseller and tell others
about it also.
Hank Roth

Read this article at:
http://inyourface.info/ArT/Zulu/IslamicCertitude.shtml

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