What will our response be if we see a Romulan warship exiting a black hole? Are we prepared to gaze past the event horizon?

1. High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System – You heard it here.  These are small high power laser weapons, i.e. weapons that shoot energy beams at the speed of light.  That’s fast.
2. High Productivity Computing Systems – a.k.a. Super computers a.k.a. SKYNET from the Terminator mythos.
3. Machine Learning – Cognitive machines.  Hmmm.  Again, we’ll reference SKYNET and Terminator.
4. Neuroscience – In specific, projects that’ll create brain-machine interfaces.  Is this putting us one step closer to The Matrix?
5. Real-Time Accurate Language Translation – Tower of Babel my ass.
6. Space – , here we come.

Scary, but real, stuff.  You can find the full report here.

Which one of these research projects would you most like to see come to fruition?

If there is alien life on Everest, do we really want to find it? Anything tough enough to survive in the harsh environment of Mt. Everest could be a serious threat to mankind. To illustrate this point, here are two stories that clearly portray the dangers of searching for alien life in the frozen and hostile climates of Earth.

Story #1 is H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, the terrifying story of a scientific expedition to the arctic that discovers the ruins of a vast alien civilization and the preserved remains of highly evolved creatures that aren’t as dead as they appear.

Story #2 is John Carpenter’s The Thing, which recounts another arctic expedition’s encounter with a deadly alien organism that’d been frozen under the ice for hundreds of thousands of years.

If you don’t knkow these stories, we highly recommend you familiarize yourself with them. They are a clear warning against the current exploration for alien life on Mt. Everest.

Here’s the trailer for The Thing.

J.J. Abram’s Star Trek features a Hitchcockian macguffin like few we’ve ever seen before.  It’s a mysterious substance referred to as ‘red batter’ by the film’s villain, Romulan Captain Nero.  Now, there is some debate right now over whether Nero called it ‘red batter’ OR ‘red matter’, but for the sake of giving this amazing substance more identity, we’re calling it ‘red batter’.

‘Red batter’ has the ability to reduce itself and matter around it into a singularity at a rapid, exponential rate.  As a bomb explodes on impact, ‘red batter’ gravitationally sucks in everything around it on impact.  The end result is that most awesome of interstellar objects, the fearsome black hole.

In J.J. Abram’s Star Trek, Captain Nero uses the ‘red batter’ (or ‘red matter’) to create a black hole in the center of Spock’s home world Vulcan.  This black hole devours the planet in a matter of minutes in a sequence that is, in our opinion, much more terrifying than Star War’s Death Star’s planet destroying laser beam could ever be.

Besides creating black holes, the ‘red batter’ can also affect time travel.  If you’ve seen the new Star Trek, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Could such a matter exist in reality?  Perhaps.  A recent study, which you can read more about here, suggests that all particles are miniature black holes.  IF this is the case, than it is probable that there is a catalyst which would enable these miniature black holes, which are everything, to coalesce together at an exponential rate to create a rapidly growing black hole that devours everything in its path.

Could the Large Hadron Collider be a catalyst for such a reaction?  If so, what sort of defenses have we put in place?

And did Captain Nero say ‘red batter’ or ‘red batter’?  Personally, we think ‘red batter has a nicer ring to it.  What do you think?

When we hear the word Vulcan, our thoughts wander to the Star Trek character Spock, his home planet, and his people.  The VULCAN Engine Program is appropriately named since it is a “propulsion system demonstration effort to design, build, and ground-test an engine capable of accelerating a full-scale hypersonic vehicle from rest to Mach 4+.”

This could be our first steps towards a “warp drive” propulsion system like the one that propels the Enterprise across vast distances in space.

Read the DARPA News Release here (via DARPA’s news room.)

Recipe verbatim from the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility website:

• Take a hollow, spherical plastic capsule about two millimeters in diameter (about the size of a small pea)
• Fill it with 150 micrograms (less than one-millionth of a pound) of a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen.
• Take a laser that for about 20 billionths of a second can generate 500 trillion watts – the equivalent of five million million 100-watt light bulbs.
• Focus all that laser power onto the surface of the capsule.
• Wait ten billionths of a second.
• Result: one miniature star.

In this process the capsule and its deuterium-tritium (D-T) fuel will be compressed to a density 100 times that of solid lead, and heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius – hotter than the center of the sun. These conditions are just those required to initiate thermonuclear fusion, the energy source of stars.

By following our recipe, we would make a miniature star that lasts for a tiny fraction of a second. During its brief lifetime, it will produce energy the way the stars and the sun do, by nuclear fusion. Our little star will produce ten to 100 times more energy than we used to ignite it.

That ought to do it.  Please don’t use your homemade star for any destructive purposes.

Robot twitterati could be next.

Social media users worry they will not be able to discern between their “human” and “robot” friends.  Jackie Topovowitz from the organization Anti-Android Research & Development Team (AARDT) said, “We cannot blur the line any more between man and machine.  The simple fact is, robots should be taught to be subservient to humans.  Allowing them to interact with people on social networks puts us on equal footing, and we cannot let that happen.”

Members of the group Robots Deserve Rights 2, (RDR2), say the comments made be AARDT are robo-racist.  Jeffrey Gottchalk said, “we welcome robots to online social networks with open arms.  This is a positive step forward in robot rights.”

What do you think?  Do robots have a fundamental right to social media?

The documentary District 9 is a long overdue film about the serious issue of alien refugees.  The resources of the universe cannot support the rapid growth of the universal population, and this is not the first, nor the last, case of alien civilizations being cast off of their home worlds due to overcrowding, pollution, and planetary apocalypses.

Theorists say Earth could be next in this disturbing trend of planetary exile.  So far we’ve been lucky in that most of the alien refugees hoping to make our world their new home are not hostile, but analysts say we must be careful to not appear to weak as we accept more and more alien exiles.

“You can liken it to the position the Obama administration is finding themselves in with international relations,” says political correspondent Dan McGruffy.  “President Obama is being simultaneously praised and criticized with his open arms approach to foreign policy, the fear being that we will appear weak.  At the same time, there is no doubt that America needs to heal damaged relationships with foreign nations.  The same problems arise with interstellar exiles.  We do not want to appear harsh and insensitive while making it clear we will defend our resources.  The question arises, who does Earth belong to?  Earthlings?  Or the universe?  Do we have a fundamental duty to provide life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all beings?  The bottom line is, as our population grows and we continue to accept more alien exiles, we risk accelerating the depletion of Earth’s resources, and we might find ourselves exiled as well.”

What do you think?  Is it our duty to provide for interstellar exiles?  What is the appropriate response to their needs?

As we continue to wonder what might cause the 2012 apocalypse infamously predicted by the Mayans, this report has caused a stir because of the following quote from the article in the Times Online: “From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an ‘unreliable toy’”.

Could a frustratingly slow internet cause the infamous 2012 apocalypse?  This is a possibility according to an internet researcher who wishes to remain nameless.  The reseacher said, “We’ve become so dependent on the internet that a reduction in its performance could lead to global chaos.  Banking systems, transportation, utility grids could all come crashing down.  I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to think the ensuing mayhem could snowball into the end of the world.”

While these points are relevant to this theory, psychologist Dr. Eddie Eddington Jr. says he is more concerned about the psychological damage a slow and evaporating internet would have on the world.

Dr. Eddington said the following when reached for comment: “The instant gratification we’ve become used to with the internet and the immediacy with which we can connect to a world of information has made us extremely ADD.  Take for instance the Twitter phenomena.  Our attention spans and patience are dwindling at exponential rates.  If reports that the internet will start slowing to a sudden halt around 2012 are true, then we could very well see our collective psychology short circuit.  The results of such a short circuit could be widespread insanity, which would snowball into chaos, riots, and general anarchy.  It very well could trigger a sort of ‘social apocalypse’.  Perhaps this is what the Mayans predicted.”

What do you think?  Could a slow internet in 2012 be the spark that lights the fire of an apocalypse?