Chariots Of the Gods? Anyone read it?

Originally Posted by HistoryWes

Come on now! This is obvious. Aliens dig Earth chicks! They are always coming after our women. Compared to Alpha Centaurians and Polarians, Earth girls are easy.

So why does the image of a young Geena Davis keep popping into my head? Oh, yeah . . .

[TimS]

Here are my favorite lines about how the pyramids were made:

Rimmer: "...like the pyramids. How did they move such massive pieces of stone without the aid of modern technology?"

Lister: "They had massive whips, Rimmer. Massive, massive whips."

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by wayrad

Cool article. He doesn't mention the surveyer's wheel idea of why numbers similar to pi can often be derived from manipulating the dimensions of Egyptian monuments; i.e. that they used a wheel for measuring out land, with a diameter equal to a standard unit of measurement which was also be used in determining height, so it would build pi in there without the builders being aware of it. That theory must be more recent, I suppose.

Good call! If you put a stick in the ground and tie a string to it you can demonstrate pi from tracing once around the stick without needing to know any mathematics. If pi had not shown up in any of the Egyptian monuments, now that would have been remarkable!

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

There is a vast gulf between saying that "there could be life elsewhere in the universe" and saying that aliens have visited Earth and initiated public works projects.

Well put.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by rock

he was talking about the magnetic pole, but he said it wouldn't be as rapid as some people think say 2012.

since this originally started about aliens (Chariots of gods?, how many people believe there are aliens?

Unless we happen to be a highly remarkable exception to the laws of nature, I assume that life is fairly commonplace. Since the experiment presently underway on this planet has been running for approximately 3.5 billion years or better, and has to date only produced one species capable of writing history books in all that time, I would assume that highly evolved intelligence is much more rare. And since that species has only begun to engineer extra-planetary travel within the last half-century, I would assume that species capable of interstellar travel are extremely uncommon. Assuming they exist; they would need a compelling reason to employ that technology.

I believe there are other intelligent beings out there. I know of no compelling evidence that intelligent extraterrestrials have ever visited this planet. That we may have been visited, or that we may be visited tomorrow is not beyond the realm of possibility, but it would be an extraordinary occurrence, and as Sagan always said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by lene1949

But if there were intelligent life elsewhere, why shouldn't they visit earth, if they have the means to do so...

Have you seen how we've treated every species we've ever encountered? We either ate them, killed them for sport, made slaves of them, or kept them as pets. If extraterrestrials have even the slightest knowledge of humans, I imagine they've already posted "Warning--Keep Out" signs around our planet, much the way the military in our country warns it's members who go on leave which of the local neighborhoods and districts are unsafe.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. (It isn't plagiarism when I expect people to catch the reference.)

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

... if you could get the ship to 0.99999 light speed, the travel time from the reference frame of the traveler would be just under a week-- but the ship's mass (from the POV of an outside observer) would have increased by more than 200 times. Good luck finding a reaction mass for that! ...

And travel at those speeds would be almost unimaginably risky. I've read somewhere that collision with a hydrogen atom at near-luminal speeds would rip a cannonball size hole in steel, and there are lots of interstellar hydrogen atoms! How do you affordably shield against something like that?

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I've read somewhere that collision with a hydrogen atom at near-luminal speeds would rip a cannonball size hole in steel

I don't know about THAT much energy, but look at what a beam of protons (essentially hydrogen nuclei) traveling at 99.99 percent of light speed can do:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/a...s-to-stop-it/1

From the article: "In experiments, researchers found that an 86-microsecond exposure of the beam would bore a hole 40 meters into a block of copper."

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

I don't know about THAT much energy, but look at what a beam of protons (essentially hydrogen nuclei) traveling at 99.99 percent of light speed can do:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/a...s-to-stop-it/1

From the article: "In experiments, researchers found that an 86-microsecond exposure of the beam would bore a hole 40 meters into a block of copper."

When I consider CERN, the cannonball sized hole from a single H atom is perhaps off the mark for any practical starship, but the cannonball hole is theoretically possible if you keep in mind that the closer a particle gets to C, the more its mass approaches infinity (which is why no starship could ever exceed the speed of light). Keep in mind that I'm speaking here of a thought-experiment involving speeds exceeding even those of the LHC. Even a speeds much less, hydrogen collisions are a real danger.

http://www.philforhumanity.com/The_D..._of_Light.html:

Image for a moment that you are in a spaceship traveling at 10% of the speed of light. All of a sudden your spaceship hits a single molecule of floating hydrogen gas (only two atoms of hydrogen). Traveling at those speeds, these two lonely hydrogen atoms essentially become high intensity radiation that will penetrate through your spaceship, destroy all electronic equipment that they touch, and kill any living thing that is unfortunately in their way.

And http://www.thestar.com/news/sciencet...eed-would-kill:

Edelstein said in an interview with the Star that the problem is when travelling in space at close to light speed hydrogen turns into “intense radiation” that kills humans and destroys electronic instrumentation. Even a ship’s hull of 10 centimetres in thickness would do nothing in terms of preventing damage.

[ardeegee]

I'm remembering a classic Scientific American article (1990s, I think) on detecting high energy cosmic rays from the Earth's surface-- which means detecting the rain of debris caused by a high-energy cosmic ray hitting the atmosphere and shattering atoms. That whole article may not be available for free on-line (I haven't looked too hard) but here's something more recent-- the most powerful known cosmic ray particles have the energy of "a fast pitch baseball":

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...to-black-holes

[wayrad]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

I'm remembering a classic Scientific American article (1990s, I think) on detecting high energy cosmic rays from the Earth's surface-- which means detecting the rain of debris caused by a high-energy cosmic ray hitting the atmosphere and shattering atoms.

I think you might mean cosmic rays ionize atoms, not that they cause nuclear fission.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by wayrad

I think you might mean cosmic rays ionize atoms, not that they cause nuclear fission.

No, they shatter the heck out of them.

I found the article I was thinking about:

http://www.nevis.columbia.edu/hires/...roninSciAm.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_shower_%28physics%29

[wayrad]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

No, they shatter the heck out of them.

I found the article I was thinking about:

http://www.nevis.columbia.edu/hires/...roninSciAm.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_shower_%28physics%29

Very cool article, thanks! I see they knock gamma rays and muons out of atoms as well as electrons and photons, so I stand corrected on nuclear reactions being involved (although I'm not sure I'd call that "shattering").

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by wayrad

Very cool article, thanks! I see they knock gamma rays and muons out of atoms as well as electrons and photons, so I stand corrected on nuclear reactions being involved (although I'm not sure I'd call that "shattering").

One particle causes a rain of decay products that is spread out over square miles-- that sounds shattery to me.

Besides, nuclear reactions in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays/solar wind isn't unusual. That's where Carbon 14 of "carbon dating" fame comes from, among other things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-...ioactive_decay