[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by WILDCAT

[COLOR="DarkSlateBlue"]Thanks for the responses AJ.

You know I'm not sure of length of time (feeling affected), being back that far - and I was recovering from a nice contusion on the left side of my brain, where my "intuitive" right side kind of blew wide open at that time. I'm not sure what your opinion is of the left brain/right brain functions. It seems medical scientists know or have concluded quite a bit thus far...(?)

It's clear that the brain organizes itself in hemispheres and that these hemispheres have somewhat different roles. I see no reason, at present, to doubt that this is the case.

However, I'm thinking I may have an incorrect reference of collision here. Did something happen around '94? I'm thinking this was actually two comets colliding? And it seems to me that it happened around 3:30PM something - give or take so many minutes...(?)

The Shoemaker-Levy collision with Jupiter was in the summer of 1994, over a period of about a week. Keep in mind that if you are saying you felt some signal sent to you from Jupiter that signal took around 45 minutes to reach you (that's the transit time for a signal, moving at the speed of light, to go from Jupiter to Earth).

And I apologize if I am mixing up collisions and dates. This is only one period that I identify with as something changed and happened, that I felt. It was quite particular - to me and some others I knew as it turned out. Perhaps other things happening out there in the great beyond had impact on me too over the years, I just don't think about it or keep abreast of much of the happenings - even though I am fascinated by it all. I saw on the "last" site, you had posted something, starting a thread on a near collision with something (meteor?) and earth, that we were not really told much about. I remember I wanted to write on that thread, but I think you dropped out of writing there sometime not too long after that. (Or, I found the thread... later after you had begun it.)

You might be talking about the Apophis near-Earth pass event that will take place in 2029. I've written about it elsewhere on this thread so I'll just give the quick recap. Apophis will pass VERY close to Earth (lower than the geosynchronous orbit of satellites) in 2029. It's not likely to hit the Earth then however, if it passes through a very small region called a 'keyhole' (I was wrong in my earlier post the keyhole is only about 600 meters across) then on its outbound pass it will hit the Earth on April 13, 2036.

Yeah, I'll bet it's hard trusting things with your brain having the type of scientific mind that you do.

This is a matter of training my mind to behave. I was, at one point in my life, a believer in faith healing, speaking in tongues, that homosexuality was caused by a demon, all manner of non-sensical things. After I left that worldview, I spent another few years studying astrology and tarot until one of my professor's asked me to explain how astrology worked in a complete and full manner since I was claiming it was scientific. When I couldn't come up with a reasonable mechanism, given the standard of astronomy (and since I was claiming that astrology and astronomy were both science the standard of evidence had to be normalized between the two) I had to abandon my faith in astronomy.

I hope that your grandmother came to visit you though. How wonderful is that, if it were somehow true?

That would be a nice thought but that doesn't make it a true thought.

And another question for ya AJ. What is outside of our known "universe"?

Well that depends upon what you mean by the 'known universe'. If you mean 'what is the Universe expanding into' I'm not sure that I can even give a speculative answer because I don't know and I'm not sure that it is a meaningful question. We are used to things like balloons expanding into available space but, as I understand it, as the Universe expands more space is being created! So outside of that known universe, I have no idea. There's another concept of known universe (and it's the one I prefer because it makes more sense to me) is that which is visible within our light-cone. Keep in mind that whenever you see *anything* you are looking at as it was however long ago light left it. Now, for all of our day-to-day seeing that can be considered instantaneous because light is fast and nothing on Earth is far away when traveling at the speed of light. However, when you look at the sun you are not seeing as it is now but as it was 8 minutes ago. So telescopes are, after a fashion, time machines. The very BEST telescope humans have built, the Hubble Space Telescope, can see back to the early Universe when it was only half a billion years old. But no further back than that. Why? Because before that the Universe was too hot for there to be free-floating photons so that is out of what is called our 'light cone'.

Do you think it's possible that there are other universes - that space is infinite and that it is quite possible (and beyond our current scientific capabilities) to see or know about this at this time?

I think it's *possible* certainly. What I have read of various multiverse hypothesis seem reasonably coherent although it's hard wrapping my head around them.

Like for shits and giggles, say somewhere like earth exist in another universe, and perhaps folks are much more advanced and different spiritually - having evolved I'll say, (kind of like in the movie Contact, if you happened to have seen that, with Jodie Foster).

Well, we don't necessarily have to look outside our universe for that. Given how many stars there are in all of the galaxies I think it's likely that life exists elsewhere in the Universe. Given what a neat trick intelligence is, I'd be willing to wager that there's other *intelligent* life in the Universe. Now, I think the supreme cosmic joke is that there may be intelligent life throughout the Universe but because of the limitation of the speed of light, we're all isolated in our little pockets.

I think how in the '60 our rockets shot up and dumped back into the ocean, and now we have precision landing. Maybe that's why at vary times in history here, folks perhaps saw various flying objects or crafts - not familiar to them? (And no, I don't believe all stories!) If we advanced so quickly in a few short decades, what about somewhere else, maybe "ahead of us" then?

I very strongly doubt that the Earth has been visited by extraterrestial beings. The reasons for this are numerous. For starters, exploration of distant stars is time consuming so if you're going to go somewhere you have a destination. Let's say we could build a spaceship capable of traveling the speed of light. A round-trip to the next *nearest* star would be 8 years (four out and four back). Because of the time-dilation affect, your subjective 8 years would be close to a thousand years here on Earth! So there's that for starters (this is not something related to us on Earth this is just true for ANY civilization that could build a ship that could accelerate to the speed of light). So why would aliens come to this planet? Until about 100 years ago, there would be no sure tell-tale sign from space that the planet had *intelligent* life (you could view the chemistry of our atmosphere and, presuming you were from a planet like Earth where animals breathed oxygen, surmise that this much oxygen in the atmosphere means that there must be plant life). So until we started sending radio signals out we would look like a planet with an unusually poisonous atmosphere (remember that oxygen is waste gas of plants). The other reason I doubt that we've been visited is that the energy requirements would be HUGE.

I'm not saying that interstellar travel is impossible. I'd like to believe that, in fact, some civilization has reduced the problem from a scientific issue (can it be done) to an engineering problem (how to do it economically and safely).


Cheers
Aj