Thursday 28th of January 2021
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the aliens are glowing in the dark and taking the piss...

alchemist

Fermi, the quantum physicist, was not the first scientist to ask about aliens. 

 

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in an unpublished 1933 manuscript had written: "people deny the presence of intelligent beings on the planets of the universe because if such beings exist they would have visited Earth, and if such civilizations existed then they would have given us some sign of their existence."



This has not prevented many of us fantasising about aliens in science fiction and about “them” having given us signs such as the pyramids and some cave drawings. Some people have even suggested that our “junk DNA" is the remnant of alien-life code, which is useless on this planet… 

I might only see blurry aliens after a “katzenjammer-giving" drinking session which has been quite rare — even more so, in my old age. But let’s not dismiss the aliens we never saw otherwise.

The religious nutcases have seen angels and demons, which of course could only be aliens from other planets on a sea-gull wing and a prayer (unless they had anti-gravity light-speed scooters under their long dresses… er, I mean robes…)

This Fermi paradox was going against other people who basically declared the non-existence of extraterrestrials. Since Fermi believed in extraterrestrial life and the possibility of space travel, he proposed the zoo hypothesis and speculated that mankind is not yet ready for higher beings to contact us. 


... a modified zoo hypothesis becomes a more appealing answer to the Fermi paradox. The time between the emergence of the first civilization within the Milky Way and all subsequent civilizations could be enormous. Monte Carlo simulation [gambling stats] shows the first few inter-arrival times between emergent civilizations would be similar in length to geologic epochs on Earth. Just what could a civilization do with a ten-million, one-hundred-million, or half-billion-year head start?[11]Even if this first grand civilization is long gone, their initial legacy could live on in the form of a passed-down tradition, or perhaps an artificial life form dedicated to such a goal without the risk of death. Beyond this, it does not even have to be the first civilization, but simply the first to spread its doctrine and control over a large volume of the galaxy. If just one civilization gained this hegemony in the distant past, it could form an unbroken chain of taboo against rapacious colonization in favour of non-interference in those civilizations that follow. The uniformity of motive concept previously mentioned would become moot in such a situation.[12]If the oldest civilization still present in the Milky Way has, for example, a 100-million-year time advantage over the next oldest civilization, then it is conceivable that they could be in the singular position of being able to control, monitor, influence or isolate the emergence of every civilization that follows within their sphere of influence. This is analogous to what happens on Earth within our own civilization on a daily basis, in that everyone born on this planet is born into a pre-existing system of familial associations, customs, traditions and laws that were already long established before our birth and which we have little or no control over.[13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis


The zoo hypothesis thus speculates on the assumed behaviour and existence of technically-advanced extraterrestrials and the reasons they refrain from contacting Earth. It is one of many theoretical explanations for the Fermi paradox. The Fermi hypothesis is that alien life intentionally avoids communication with Earth, and one of its main interpretations is that it does so to allow for natural evolution and socio-cultural development, avoiding interplanetary contamination, similarly to people observing animals at a zoo. I disagree...

Possibly pissed, but elevated in the high sciences of quantum physics and the speed of light, Fermi and his co-workers started to speculate about cartoons of aliens falling in love with trash cans in the streets of New York… 

York wrote in 1984 that Fermi "followed up with a series of calculations on the probability of earthlike planets, the probability of life given an earth, the probability of humans given life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, and so on. He concluded on the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over."

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So, what’s the caper?
Some intelligent Earthians are proposing that the rarity of cosmic alien visitations is due to the phosphorus “equation”. By chance, planet earth is a lucky planet, apart from the moronic human species that babbles and bickles as if to destroy the place.

Planet Earth has a carbon equation, a lovely median temperature with little extremes, water, salt, an atmosphere (a bit too thin really) and a relative abundance of phosphorus compared to the rarity of this element in the rest of the universe as observed. But this does not mean that phosphorus has not concentrated on exo-planets like it did on earth — as this element is hungry for other elements to combine with, such as oxygen and thus would quickly vanish from the cosmos soup. 

As far as we know, without phosphorus, still a “rare" element on this planet compared to carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and silicon, there would be no life. Some traces of phosphorus have been found on meteorites, but this does not mean that our phosphorus came after the formation of the planet, 4.5 billion years ago from the congealing cosmic dust of the solar system.

Life need phosphorus. This oxidising element is the key to the chemical process of life and death. We have already mentioned adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as a key element of life’s energy. I remember my mother tellings us to eat more of her stinking salted cod-fish so we kids would stock up on “phosphorus” for our brains. She believed the more phosphorus in our food, the brainier we would become. “But don’t eat the matches, the red phosphorus is poison…” And she was right. Mothers are always right, but we don't pay attention...

And the light came from concentrated piss…

One night in 1669, German physician Hennig Brandt attempted to create the philosophers’ stone. This elusive goal had been pursued by alchemists for centuries for good reason: it could transform base metals into gold.

Brandt had spent most of that day in his laboratory, heating a mixture of sand and charcoal with a tar-like substance produced by boiling down about 1,200 gallons of urine over two weeks. He then maintained the mixture at the highest temperature his furnace could reach. After many hours a white vapor formed and condensed into thick drops that gleamed brightly for hours. The glowing, waxy substance had never been seen before. Brandt called it phosphorus, a Latin term for things that give off light.

Brandt’s was an era that still saw a world made up of four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. And like the fascinated colleagues to whom he showed his new compound, Brandt assumed it was composed of these elements. (A little more than a hundred years later Antoine Lavoisier replaced this worldview with another, of elements as simple substances that could not be further decomposed.) Whatever his categories, Brandt’s phosphorus was a spectacular sight. Artist Joseph Wright of Derby immortalized this moment a century later in his painting The Alchymist.

Within 50 years of its discovery phosphorus was being produced and sold to apothecaries, natural philosophers, and showmen, who made the element the centerpiece of demonstrations at princely courts and scientific societies. Within 100 years phosphorus was appearing in chemistry textbooks, such as P. J. Macquer’s popular Elements of Theoretical and Practical Chemistry. 

Within another 50 years the element was making its way into matches, fertilizer, and bombs, once mineral phosphates had replaced urine as the best source material.

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/hennig-brandt-and-the-discovery-of-phosphorus


So what’s the beef? Are we going to run out of phosphorus should we use it too much of it in plastics, that will lock it up for a long time? The world tonnage of phosphorus production from rocks is somewhat secret "(or unknown)". Plants extract phosphorus from soils and we use it as fertiliser in various forms. We know about some guano which are high in super-phosphate… etc...

Are aliens coming to this planet to steal our phosphorus? And is this why aliens glow in the dark? Or is Guano alien poop, to keep us supplied in phosphorus and live despite our attempts to kill each others? Has Joe Biden eaten enough phosphorus?
So many questions…

Gus Leonisky
Average pot plant gardener. Next: the aliens are coming back...

the aliens are coming...

See: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/39933

 

Before Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Fermi, we had… Voltaire. It seems we can’t escape this guy… We've already mentioned his story of Aliens, Micromegas, at https://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/38778
...
Taking pity on the humans, the Sirian decides to write them a book that will explain the point of everything to them. When the volume is presented to the French Academy of Sciences, the secretary opens the book only to find blank pages.

At least we knew that this was “fiction” designed to let us know we’ve got ignorant butts for brains when it comes to understand “everything"…
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Meanwhile, reading Riley Black, at the Smithsonian:

Until now, I have assiduously avoided Ancient Aliens. I had a feeling that if I watched the show—which popularizes far-fetched, evidence-free idiocy about how human history has been molded by extra-terrestrial visitors—my brain would jostle its way out of my skull and stalk the earth in search of a kinder host. Or, at the very least, watching the show would kill about as many brain cells as a weekend bender in Las Vegas. But then I heard the History Channel’s slurry of pseudoscience had taken on dinosaurs. I steeled myself for the pain and watched the mind-melting madness unfold.

I’m actually glad that my editors don’t allow me to cuss a blue streak on this blog. If they did, my entire review would be little more than a string of expletives. Given my restrictions, I have little choice but to try to encapsulate the shiny, documentary-format rubbish in a more coherent and reader-sensitive way.

The episode is what you would get if you dropped some creationist propaganda, Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods and stock footage from Jurassic Fight Club into a blender. What results is a slimy and incomprehensible mixture of idle speculation and outright fabrications which pit the enthusiastic “ancient alien theorists,” as the narrator generously calls them, against “mainstream science.” I would say “You can’t make this stuff up,” but I have a feeling that that is exactly what most of the show’s personalities were doing.

There was so much wrong with the Ancient Aliens episode that I could spend all week trying to counteract every incorrect assertion. This is a common technique among cranks and self-appointed challengers of science; it is called Gish Gallop after young earth creationist Duane Gish. When giving public presentations about evolution and creationism, Gish rapidly spouted off a series of misinterpretations and falsehoods to bury his opponent under an avalanche of fictions and distortions. If Gish’s opponent tried to dig themselves out, they would never be able to make enough progress to free themselves to take on Gish directly. Ancient Aliens uses the same tactic — the fictions come fast and furious.


https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-idiocy-fabrications-an...

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In many ways, we are primed to believe anything stupid, as long as it is simple (simplistic, easy sausage). Since our potty-training we’ve been brainwashed with the good lord and his nemesis the devil — but not with atoms, molecules and chemical reactions, nor with quantum mechanics and relativity. These concepts are “too hard to understand" though we love the technology that has been derived from them. 

As far as Christians are concerned, it’s obvious that god is an alien who has been benevolent in his wrath. OBEY... So the mustachied oracle of CP tells us:

When it comes to Trump, it is possible that, because he was such an unlikely candidate, God revealed to a number of prophetic ministers that he would be used to accomplish good for America and for Israel. (You can evaluate all the prophetic words here relative to 2016.)

In the same way, it’s possible that these same prophetic ministers have been declaring that Trump will serve a second, consecutive term because of a massive attempt to steal the election from him. The prophets would then be saying, “Don’t lose heart! It will happen.”

Or they could be wrong. All of them. It has happened before. 


https://www.christianpost.com/news/the-essence-of-the-spirit-of-prophecy.html?clickType=link-most-popular

Yes, god’s dunny is overflowing with mysteries… Mentioning Trump, America, Israel, prophecies and god together in one breath is like the alchemist distilling bullshit instead of condensed urine (read from top). Trump is an alien sent by god to shake our beliefs, like He (god is a male) sent his son to erase our "original sin" — whatever this is. Did we fall into a vat of malefaction soon after the “creation”? Do we have bad breath? Did His (god is a male) son deserved the pain of being crucifed in a Roman/Jewish fake-flag prophetised set-up to save our souls? I guess not...

According to the laws of being right or wrong, we could be 100 per cent right or 100 per cent wrong, by chance, when we assume. On the godly front, you are always 100 per cent wrong, even if you believe it’s 100 per cent true. Trust me. Trump is not an alien, nor the result of a prophecy gone wrong… We are excellent at creating our own collective lunacy.

So what about The War of the Worlds — the science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells, first serialised in 1897 by Pearson's Magazine in the UK and by Cosmopolitan magazine in the US?
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Spoiler alert: this story details how The War of the Worlds ends.

The latest screen adaption of H. G. Wells’ 1898 modern masterwork The War of the Worlds will hit our screens this week. Continuously in print since its first publication, the book is a literary gift that keeps on giving for producers and screenwriters. They recognise the story’s unerring capacity to find its mark with each generation.

Wells – who also wrote The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) – helped pioneer the science fiction genre when he conceived this astonishing book. With an eyewitness narration that reads grippingly still, it tells of a Martian invasion of Earth.

Read more:
https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-war-of-the-worlds-128453
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Capitalizing on the fervor surrounding Wells’s The War of the Worlds, astronomer and science fiction writer Garrett P. Serviss penned a quasi-sequel titled Edison’s Conquest of Mars in 1898. Serviss posited that “giants of Mars” had moved large blocks and built the Great Pyramid. He even noted that the Sphinx had Martian features. Edison’s Conquest was part of a number of science fiction works published as books or serialized in newspapers in the late 19th century which imagined alien invasions fought off by great inventors of the time. Thomas Edison was a favored hero in these science fiction fantasies much later collectively called Edisonades.
…

In a piece for the online journal The Conversation rather frankly titled “Racism is Behind Outlandish Theories about Africa’s Ancient Architecture,” Julien Benoit, a postdoctoral researcher in vertebrate paleontology at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), addressed the continued harm of these theories:

 

Firstly, these people try to prove their theories by travelling the world and desecrating ancient artefacts. Secondly, they perpetuate and give air to the racist notion that only Europeans – white people – ever were and ever will be capable of such architectural feats.

 

Belief can indeed lead to action. In 2014, German pseudoscientists and “hobbyists” defaced a cartouche of Khufu inside the Great Pyramid in their misguided search to prove their alien theories. The Pyramids of Giza and the Great Zimbabwe site are commonly cited by pseudo-archaeologists as structures built by extraterrestrial beings, along with the Moai heads on the tiny Easter Island off the coast of Chile.


Read more:
https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behind-ancient-aliens/

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We have to mention Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who, as well as many other fantasies designed to make us accept that we are the defenders of our patch against “the others”. These are psychological dramas with a lot of pseudo in them. And a bit of fun.
This is where we need to go back to the elements… 
Before doing so we should indulge in a science fiction with Bruce Willis as the helper to negotiate with a machine gun against some nasty rhinos… This is the “Fifth Element”, after water, air, fire and earth… You’ve guessed it, it’s LOVE… Cute, hey? The world has been saved again (from reality)...

diva

Model and actress Maïwenn Le Besco's rise to playing a blue-skinned alien beauty in The Fifth Element wasn't intentional — but the story ended as tragically in real life as her somber portrayal of the opera-singing Diva. 
Read More: https://www.nickiswift.com/158131/movie-aliens-that-are-actually-gorgeous-in-real-life/?utm_campaign=clip
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We’ve barely started to understand the bits, where atoms of elements are “aliens” from other stars in flux, including phosphorus (P[15]).

elements



Most foods contain phosphorus. Foods that are rich in protein are also excellent sources of phosphorus. These include:

 • meat and poultry
 • fish
 • milk and other dairy products
 • eggs

When your diet contains enough calcium and protein, you’ll likely have enough phosphorus. That’s because many of the foods that are high in calcium are also high in phosphorous.

Some non-protein food sources also contain phosphorus. For example:

 • whole grains
 • potatoes
 • garlic
 • dried fruit
 • carbonated drinks (phosphoric acid is used to produce the carbonation)
Whole grain versions of bread and cereal contain more phosphorus than those made from white flour.
https://www.healthline.com/health/phosphorus-in-diet#food-sources

Happy phosphoring...

phosphine on venus...

Signs of the gas phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere have faded — but they’re still there, according to a new data analysis.

In September, an international team of astronomers made headlines when it reported finding phosphine — a potential marker of life — in the planet’s atmosphere1. Several studies questioning the observations and conclusions quickly followed. Now, the same team has reanalysed part of its data, citing a processing error in the original data set. The researchers confirmed the phosphine signal, but say that it’s fainter than before.

The work is an important step forward in resolving the most exciting Venus debate in decades. “I’ve waited all my life for this,” says Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who says the debate has reinvigorated the field.

The reanalysis, based on radio-telescope observations at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, concludes that average phosphine levels across Venus are about one part per billion — approximately one-seventh of the earlier estimate. Unlike in their original report, the scientists now describe their discovery of phosphine on Venus as tentative2.

It is the researchers’ first public response to the criticisms that have been levelled against them in the past two months. “The scientific process is working,” says Bob Grimm, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who is not involved with any of the phosphine studies. Researchers tend to respond to big claims with big efforts to gather evidence and either prove or disprove them.

 

Read more:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03258-5

 

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