crankypot.com

Life could indeed be beautiful and just a thought of dying could be enough to put you in a temporary state of depression. Most of us like to live. We love life and want more of it, but at the same time we’re all aware that one day we’re all going to die. Every human on this planet knows, that one day they will too cease to exist. Some people are terrified by this, but some just accept it and are fine with it, while on the other hand majority of us wants and needs to know if there’s life after.

Let’s first look at the facts and what we DO know about death:

1. Heart stops and cells get deprived from oxygen so cells start irreversible process of dying
2. Lungs cease to function and person stops breathing
3. If CPR is not administered within 6 minutes brain starts to die from lack of oxygen.
4. After 10 minutes brain damage is certain and irreversible
5. Muscles starts to stiffen and body begins to cool down
6. Skin and bone cells die latest and could survive up to 36 hours without oxygen
7. After 36 hours (and extensive tests) person is pronounced brain dead and there’s nothing that could be done for him/her anymore.
8. No one has ever came back after 72 hours of his/hers heart stopping.
9. Your body decompose and you eventually cease to exists
10. Your molecules and atoms become part of the soil and eventually end up in rivers, water air and perhaps some other person’s or animals body.

To describe the process medically we use fancy latin names like following:

• Pallor mortis, paleness which happens almost instantaneously (in the 15–120 minutes after the death)
• Algor mortis, the reduction in body temperature following death. This is generally a steady decline until matching ambient temperature
• Rigor mortis, the limbs of the corpse become stiff (Latin rigor) and difficult to move or manipulate
• Livor mortis, a settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body
• Decomposition, the reduction into simpler forms of matter

Doctors use instruments like Electroencephalography (EEG) or intracranial EEG (icEEG) to determine that there’s no electrical activity in the brain before they pronounce person brain dead or dead. Once these devices stop detecting brain activity, that’s it. Person is dead, and the process is irreversible.

You might say that this applies only to the body itself and not the soul. Well, neither me or you nor anyone else knows what the soul is. Let alone if it exists, so like I said let’s stick with what we DO know.
As you know it, your body (matter) cannot just disappear (second law of thermodynamics prevents that), but it can turn into energy or some other form of matter. If you consider this kind of energy to be soul then so be it, but that’s not really living after death and it will not be point of this article. I am assuming that when majority of people are talking about life after death, they’re talking about consciousness living. In other words, they would be aware they’re alive.

Sometimes belief in life after death could be overwhelming that it would be hard to put it in words. I’m sure we all had following conversation with our parents, friends or just acquaintances. I will describe brief dialog between myself and my mom:

Mom: ” So you believe that after we die we just go into the ground, decompose and eventually disappear.”
Me: “I really don’t know but yes, based on what we do know today that is what happens.”
Mom: We don’t feel anything and nothing happens afterwards?
Me: “Yes”
Mom: “But that cannot be”
Me: “why not?”
Mom: ” Because it cannot”
Me: “Why do you think that cannot be?”
Mom: “There has to be something.”
Me: “What?”
Mom: “Something. There’s just has to be.”
Me: “But what?”
Mom: “I don’t know what, but I cannot just go into the ground and just seize to exist. Something has to happen. There has to be something more.”
And goes on and on…

Now, I consider my mom to be very rational person of above average intelligence and well read. She is not the only one who talks and thinks like that in conversation like these. We’re just terrified of loosing someone or leaving the loved ones behind. Sometime we want something so bad that it’s hard to put it in thoughts. Let alone words.

Now, consider following quote which comes from one of our greatest thinkers. Mark Twain:

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” – Mark Twain

Can you remember time of the Napoleon or Roman empire? How about dinosaurs? Of course you cannot, because you did not exist back then. You also did not feel, taste, see or sense back then. You just weren’t here. You have no consciousness recollection on any of those events and you’re not bothered by it.
Mark Twain implies that you will experience same thing after you die. Nothing. For lots of people that is truly terrifying, but there’s something very comforting about what Mark is saying. To me this seems a lot more comforting then wandering around as a ghost, spirit or some kind of non-physical entity. Same thing goes for being stuck in some kind of purgatory or heaven and hell for eternity. Just think about it little further. Doing anything (no matter how beautiful and great) for eternity seems like a torture to me.
Let me give you personal example. I really love playing guitar. I can play guitar for hours, but after six or seven hours it becomes boring and then pure torture. Imagine doing it for eternity! Even something as good as sex will get boring and eventually become true torture. Literary. Think about it. Physically burning in hell will eventually will be equal to having sex. That’s something I never though will hear myself say.

Good number of scientists and theologians believe that we cannot fully answer question life after death without fully explaining the consciousness. So far good number of tests and experiments are conducted and most of them point to conscientiousness being tied directly to brain functions. For example: reason why you cannot remember when you were one year old is because your brain wasn’t fully developed. Basically you weren’t conscious back then. Another example would be that if I would to hit you in the head you would loose conscientiousness and would not remember anything at all while unconscious. Yet, another even more convincing example is that it is the known fact that brain damage could change person’s personality. All of these point to the brain.

Can consciousness survive death? If consciousness is indeed just a brain function then no, it cannot survive death, but If consciousness is more than brain function then where would this consciousness reside? Is consciousness nothing more then our neurons firing at the certain order? Consciousnesses could also just be a measure to describe brain activity. Just like a meter is measurement of distance. You cannot touch or feel meter. Truth is, we really don’t know but lot of smart people are working on it.

I will leave you with little excerpt of Jesse Bering:

“Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce.”

What do I think?

We really have no examples of consciousness existing outside of the brain, so why anyone would want to suppose such a thing in a first place. I think fear of unknown plays a huge part in this. Also, not all of us are equipped to deal with harsh realities in same way. Some of us cope with the unknown in totally different ways. Let me name some of them: resurrection, reincarnation, incarnation, heaven and hell, ghosts, NDE (Near Death experiences), 72 virgins (I am being serious here), zombies and probably hundreds of other interesting and inventive ways of surviving death. It became pretty much cultural. Different cultures have their own way of dealing with loss, grief and fear of the unknown.
My personal opinion is that if we (regular schmo’s) worry too much about all possible things that might come after we die, we will miss out on all of the good things in the only life we do know. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to live your life trying to conform to something you have no way of knowing exists. Sometimes it’s ok to say “I just don’t know”, and get on with your current life. The only thing that is going to be left behind you that we DO know is your legacy and deeds you did in this life.

At the time of this writing (2008) IBM has already released their Blue Gene/P (see image below) supercomputer which reached its peak speed of 3 Peta flops. I’ve calculated that is 3,000 trillions of calculations per second and you can take it another way: 3 million billions of calculations per second, or 3 quadrillion calculations per second. Believe it or not this is still not at capacities of a human brain which speed was clocked at around 20 million billion calculations per second or 20 quadrillions per second. So Blue gene is approximately 7 times slower (1/7) compared to human brain. However, technology is not growing linearly but exponentially. Processor speed is doubling every year now (used to be every decade, then every two years, then ever 18 months), which by some calculations home computers will reach human intelligence levels by 2025 (probably sooner) while commercial and military grade (like Blue Gene) computers will reach it by the year 2010 or 2012 at the latest. And those are the most conservative estimates. Scary stuff eh?

Update: IBM announces that the last known supercomputer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/Q is aimed to reach 10 Peta Flops in the 2010-2012 time frame.

Image of IBM’s Blue gene

Lets think about that for a second. What could we accomplish once we have a non-biological technology equivalent to a human brain in our arsenal? Well for one, with that kind technology we will be able to make even faster processors and exponentially even better technology. This will make technology grow even faster at neck-breaking speeds. It’s inevitable.
One of those technologies are going to be nanobots ( Nano robots). They are micro scale (10^-9 meters) programmable robots that can perform variety of duties with breathtaking accuracy and speed.
In medicine for example nanobots can be let into your blood stream to regulate your blood pressure, cholesterol, repair and rejuvenate cells, kill cancer cells, viruses and even make new and better proteins. They can even replace or at least interact (improve) neurons in our brain. Possibilities are truly endless, but the last one sounds the most interesting one so lets stick with that one.
In about 2025 nanobots will be able to map and copy our brain (every neuron, ever synapse, axon and every pathway) very accurately and save that information somewhere in a digital form, external from our bodies. We will be able to save our scanned brain to a hard drive or whatever medium will be used at the time. Our home computers will actually have enough power to sift through all that information and process it.
Now, the only thing we need in order to awaken our digital brain is software. Nanobots can take care of that too. Since they’re already in our brains mapping and copying information they can also simply mimic and learn from our biological brain and model appropriate software for our newly crafted digital brain. With the help of exponential growth, nanotbots will be able to make even better and more efficient software to run that digital brain than the one we have in our brains right now.
Next thing we need would be to find a way to communicate with our digital brain. This will be done wireless. Just like your wireless mouse can communicate with your PC right now, uploaded neurons would communicate via wireless with your biological neurons simulating all sensory experiences. This will probably be achievable through specialized glasses or implanted wireless chip into your brain.
We will have same memories, same senses and some scientists believe that our digital brain will indeed be conscious of itself.
As far as we can tell all of our current senses come from the actual interactions of neurons in our brains. Our digital mind will be able to do the same thing. Imagine now if we uploaded our brain to Internet. We would truly have endless sensory capabilities. Everywhere you went online, it would be communicated back to your true self through Internet back to your PC and then back to your biological brain. Everything from smell, taste, fear, ecstasy will be so realistic that you will not be able to distinguish it from reality. Words like online chat, blogging and Cyber-sex will reach a whole new meaning. Your digital self will be able to roam Cyber-space freely and unrestricted. Not only our digital brain will enable us to have true remote experiences, but it will be able to act as its own entity and think for itself and feel itself. Independent of our physical bodies. That means that after we die, our mind would still live on somewhere in a digital form, and since it’s modeled on our actual brain it will probably act as real us, have same or similar personality as us.
It will be able to interact with other digital humans and experience sensory stimulants beyond anything imaginable by today’s standard.
The word travel for example will also become meaningless. Lets say for the sake of argument that in the year 2030 you would like to travel to Paris and wanted to see The Eiffel Tower. Would you be able to send your digital mind (which will have exact same sensory experience as your whole-self would’ve had) instead? Yes you would. What’s experience anyway? You digital mind would have the same experience and same sensory outputs/inputs as your true self and would be able to beam that info back to your true self via Internet. Think of it as an extension to your brain. Think of it as if your neurons can reach all the way to Paris. No physical body is needed since even now, everything we see, feel, smell, touch, hear and remember is done in our brains. Everything. Period. You arm does not feel pain when you poke it. Your brain does. Your heart does not feel love. Your brain does. So you would indeed have the same experience as if you were really in Paris with your true physical body. You would not be able to tell the difference.
Even today we cannot distinguish some dreams from the actual reality even shortly after we wake up. Virtual Reality software and hardware is so advanced now that you would have a hard time making out what the reality is while using one of those things. Brain is the best 3D software there is.
Now, lets take the travel one step further.
Since all forms of communications will be done wireless, we would actually be able to upload our digital brains to a space satellite and for the first time see the Earth from outer space. And to take it even further; we would be able to make as many copies of our digital brain as we want so we could send number of them on the way to different planets and stars. We would drift away on our galactic plane into the vastness of the Cosmos and be able to safely explore mysteries and dangers of our universe.
Think about it. All of that from the comfort of our living room. Of course since our digital brains would be able to travel just at the speed of light (radio waves travel at the speed of light), we would be limited on how far we would be able to go. For example: we could explore our solar system within minutes, but closest star would take about eight years (4 years in each direction) so it would not be really practical.
Physical property (housing, cars, buildings, etc) will loose it’s value and will give way to a virtual property. As our digital brains are multiplied and self replicated, demand for online property will grow exponentially. More and more our lives will consist of less physical interaction. We could actually hibernate ourselves and live out our entire lives in a virtual environment (Matrix anyone?) and essentially reach virtual immortality.
Eventually our digital brain will want its own body, and it will be able to make it. It would probably first look like hologram (see picture below), but by the inventions of organic printers (printers that can print organic material on atomic and molecular level) it will be able to produce exact copy of you.

Digital Brain Hologram

Estimates are that by year 2035 technology will far surpass human intelligence and nanobots will be able to replicate itself with terrifying speed. And not only that but they will be able to learn and share information instantaneously between each other which will in turn jump start development and technological advance even faster. Law of cumulative returns dictaes exactly that. The fact is that there’s nothing we can do to surpass our biological brain speed limit of 10²⁶ calculations per second. That might seem huge to you , but non-biological entities (computers and technology itself) will far exceed that number by the year 2035. Law of accelerating returns almost guarantee that. Some scientists and mathematicians think that will exceed it by a factor of thousand and by the year 2099 by the factor of trillion. By that time computing will be done on quantum scale (qubits instead of bits) and true immortality will be reached. Taking over humans race is inevitable. If that’s the case than there’s no doubt in my mind that we will reach a whole new level of evolution and human race as we know it will probably become obsolete at some point. It will be replaced by a new digital species that might resemble humans at some point but probably not in a distant future.
Once we could not develop ourselves any further on our biological evolutionary scale (at least not without destroying ourself and consuming every little resource this planet has to offer), we’ve jump started natural selection and created a whole new species on the fly.
Think about what we’ve created here.
It took universe 9 billion years to create earth.
It took evolution 3 and half billion years to create humans.
It took humans about 10,000 years (only 200 of technological advancement) years to create entity better, smarter and more efficient then the actual creators themselves. This is what some call Singularity. They in turn are able to create yet another species that is even more advanced and so on. This will go on until there is bodiless super-intelligence in the universe that lives (if you can call it that) in a totally different dimensions and can create matter, energy, worlds, other beings and anything it likes at will.
I’ll leave it to your imaginations to guess what we’ve created here.

This article was inspired by scientists, free thinkers and transhumansits like: Isaak Asimov, Carl Sagan, John Archibald Wheeler, Richard Feynman and Ray Kurzweil.

Problem with calling something infinite is multi fold.

Problem 1: If there’s some being we can call infinite in the universe than there would be no more room for anything else to exist so infinity in itself is contradictory term (aside from some abstract mathematical possibility). For example: If we placed a ball with infinite 3 dimensional properties (infinite height, width and length) in the middle of our universe, that ball would occupy infinite space (all of it to be exact), therefore there would be no chance for anything else to exist but that ball, because if you’re capable of placing something else, lets say a secondary ball along that infinite ball, then infinite ball suddenly becomes finite, because space that our secondary ball occupies would displace some of the space that our infinite ball previously occupied.

Problem 2: Now, you can say that infinite being is outside of our time/space (or even higher dimensions). But if that’s the case then being like that cannot, will not and never was interfered with our affairs since was never present in our time/space and therefore its existence is meaningless to us.
Problem 3: You can also say that Infinite Being is everywhere. If it’s everywhere, then why can’t we see it?

Just some random thoughts I put out there even if it does not make sense.

I read an interesting article in space.com today and I thought I just put some of my thoughts down on the subject before they drift away into oblivion..

Here’s excerpt from the article:

“A new calculation predicts that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun in 7.6 billion years, capping off a longstanding debate over whether the sun’s gravitational pull will have weakened enough for Earth to escape final destruction or not.
After a billion years or so you’ve got an Earth with no atmosphere, no water and a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees, way above the boiling point of water,” Smith told SPACE.com. “The Earth will become dry basically. It will become completely impossible for life of any kind to exist. It’s a pretty gloomy forecast.”

Read full article here.

Some of you might say “start packing”, or start purchasing that “doomsday insurance policy”, but we have a long way to go, and I thought up a perfect solution on how to escape this really horrifying demise anyway, so put your suitcases away and listen up.

Easy three step solution to avoid earth’s destruction:

Current trend on how to avoid disaster of this magnitude is to simply pack our bags and colonize other planets or send city-sized spaceships filled with people into the space and have them drift away until they reach habitable planets. That’s all nice and dandy but why spend time, resources and probably lives colonizing other planets and building huge spaceships when we already have one. You’ve guessed it. Earth. The only thing we have to do is to move the Earth away from the Sun before sun gets big. That’s it. Or better, transform the actual earth into a spaceship itself. Let’s call it The Earth-Ship. Imagine the possibilities. If you thought that this would have some challenges you were right. Not only we have to escape expansion and horrid heat of our sun, but we would have to find a new one, since as soon as our Sun expands as far as its own gravitational core allows it, it will implode and probably become useless white dwarf, so I made following instruction in three easy steps just to prevent that from happening. So Astro-Physicists and Cosmologists pay attention.

1. Building custom atmosphere. We need to build our own atmosphere here on earth and be able to turn it on and off at will. And I’m not talking about just any natural atmosphere induced by algae growth (yawn…) or some other “slow” process that scientist are planning to implement on Mars. We need a complete protection, functionality and transparency from the outside space. Something like artificial sphere or a cocoon with its own weather system controlled completely by humans (or AI if advanced enough to be trusted). Not only this atmosphere will have to protect us from alien outside factors, but also from asteroid or comet impacts so it will have to be also very sturdy or very dense. We would have to be able to control everything from rain, sunshine, oxygen and magnetic fields to photosynthesis. If you all watched movie “The Truman Show” you will get the picture. If you haven’t, spoiler alert now! In the movie the whole city with some of the surrounding area is encapsulated into artificial bubble and everything from weather to sunlight is artificially produced and controlled by mad producer/director/creator Cristof (played by Ed Harris). We will have to build something like that but on a global or should I say “celestial” scale. It will also have to be very transparent so we would be able to get on with our lives uninterrupted. Considering that science progress is non-linear some scientist think we’re actually only 100-300 years away from developing technology like this. Let’s say we’re 1000 years away just to be safe.

2. Harnessing Sun’s energy. Next thing we need to figure out is how we’re going to live on our Earth-Ship without our Sun. Most of the life on earth depends on sun so let’s just all agree that we really need it. We could probably harness enough energy from our current Sun before we fly away into space. That would give us enough manipulative energy until we reach our first closest star. Now, our closest star Proxima Centauri is four light years away (4.2 actually), which would mean it would take us four years to reach it if we traveled at the speed of light, and with anti-matter rocket propulsion and solar sail some scientist really believe we can reach at least 10% of light speed. If you’re worried on how will human body endure 10% speed of light travel, don’t. It’s done by gradual acceleration and deceleration so humans won’t even feel the impact of speed. Moving on… So we need to conserve at least 40 years of Suns energy; probably double or triple that just to be sure. (Ironically one could say we already are doing this by uhmm “greenhouse effect”). Once we approach Proxima Centauri we would have to calculate exactly prefect distance from Earth-Ship to the star so we can stop the Earth-Ship at that point and start harnessing its energy. We don’t want to get to close, but just to be safe bring your sunscreen. When we get bored, we would then move to other stars or simply stay in certain orbit if it comfort allows. We would also need to become masters of not only converting mass into energy (burning a lump of coal for example) but also turning energy into mass (closest example for this is photosynthesis). Some scientists are saying that we’re tens of thousand of years away from achieving something like this. To be safe let’s just say we’re 100,000 years away. Just to put it into perspective: that’s ten times longer then our current recorded human history.

3. Navigate the seas of the stars. Final thing we need to figure out is how to propel the Earth and navigate it the way we wanted it, and thus escape sun’s gravitation pull and basically hurl ourselves away on our own galactic plane into the vastness of space. Closest analogy to something like this I can think of would be “Death Star” from Star Wars movie. There are many things we could do this with. One possibility is to use “solar sail” which is exactly what it says it is. Build a huge sail and have our Sun’s radiation propels us into the space. Scientists are already planning to propel space ships with this kind of technology. But why stop at the space ships? Why not “sail away” with the whole earth. Remember: once in motion, object (our earth) stays in motion until we or something else stops it. That would give us enough power to drift away into space until the need to change direction arises. To avoid asteroid hits would be one of those needs for example. In that case we would have to have some other means of manipulating Earth-Ship trajectory. One way would be to use anti-matter rocket propulsion system where we would just fire up our rockets as needed and basically repel-away from the objects. This way we would also be able to navigate the earth through the space as we wish. Some interesting fact: Right now, antimatter is the most expensive substance on Earth, about $62.5 trillion a gram ($1.75 quadrillion an ounce). To put that in perspective: To produce one gram  of Anti-matter would bankrupted whole world economy. Combining solar sail with anti-matter rocket system (depending on the size of course) should probably give us enough power and energy to escape Suns gravitational pull. There’s another non-conventional way to propel Earth-Ship would by bending (or folding) the space/time continuum to get us from A to B quicker. For example take a flat piece of paper and draw a dot on one end and call it point A. Next, draw a dot on opposite edge of paper and lets call it point B. If you have an ant that wants to go from point A to point B, you could simply have it run along the paper and eventually will get there. But, if you take the paper and fold it in half, two points will reach each other lot quicker. Another good analogy is piano on a carpet. If you want to get to the piano from one end of the carpet, why not just pull the rug towards you and piano will move towards you also. Just substitute carpet and paper with time/space. This is essentially folding of space/time. We’re probably few hundred thousand years away from technology that will allow us to do this. Just to be safe let’s say we’re 5 million years away from this kind of technology.

There you have it. In about 5,101,000 years we will be ready to move away from our Sun and look ahead where our race will drift eternally on a great cosmic journey. All that with 994,899,000 years to spare!

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage”

Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.” And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it’s unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative — merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of “not proved.”

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons — to say nothing about invisible ones — you must now acknowledge that there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages — but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such “evidence” — no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it — is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Just a little something to remind us how humble we must be. One of the most moving words ever spoken by a human being.
Carl Sagan we miss you.

Let’s state the law first:

“The Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can change its form.
The total quantity of matter and energy available in the closed system is a fixed amount and never any more or less.”

Some people (usually creationists) will argue that this contradicts what is happening on earth or in our solar system. For example: plants could not live without external energy source, our sun.
They will say something like following: “how come that earth is getting this extra energy when law clearly states that total quantity of energy is always fixed amount.” It is very easy to spot a mistake there (or deception). They forgot to include phrase “in the closed system”.

Well, explanation for that is that earth is not in the closed system. The whole universe is, and total amount of energy in the whole universe will never change. Energy might take another shape, or matter may become energy, but the results will always be equal to total amount of energy.

Think of the universe as a closed system. As far as we know there is nothing outside of it, so universe has to use whatever energy it has within it in order to survive and function, while our earth can “borrow” energy from external sources like our sun.

So explanation is: Earth is not in the closed system. Universe is. It is as simple as that.

Galaxies, stars, planets and solar systems can borrow energy from another as much as they like, but the total amount of energy in the whole universe will always stay the same.

It is a zero sum game.

You can also use poker analogy. Let’s say we have 4 players and each has $100 to play with. Total money (or you can say energy) amount will be $400. Sometimes person 1 can have $200 and person 2 only $50, person 3 $150, but sometimes person 1 can have only $50. Amount of money (energy) between players changes all the time, but total amount will always be $400.

Now, we get to the really tough question. If total amount of energy is always the same, then big bang might be beginning of time/space but not the energy itself, since that would violate the Law.
Well, then easy answer is that universe probably always existed in some form or another, it is our perception that nothing is “default state” that is wrong. We always assume that “nothing” has to come first, that “nothing” is the beginning, or that default state is “nothing”, and then comes “something”. Why?
I don’t think there is a contradiction in the law at all. Universe always existed in some form or the other.

Another explanation might be that our universe is not closed system but it is part of the even larger system (like our sun is part of the galaxy and our galaxy is part of the universe and so on) and that the big bang is just another of million other explosions.
There are lots of theories to consider before you start invoking supernatural which does not answer anything nor does it help critical thinking. To me, invoking supernatural is the easy and cowardly way out.

I was reading through livescience.com website and I came across their Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena so i thought i post it here since it is pretty interesting. Here we go:

Number 10: The Body/Mind Connection
Medical science is only beginning to understand the ways in which the mind influences the body. The placebo effect, for example, demonstrates that people can at times cause a relief in medical symptoms or suffering by believing the cures to be effective—whether they actually are or not. Using processes only poorly understood, the body’s ability to heal itself is far more amazing than anything modern medicine could create.

Number 9: Psychic powers and ESP
Psychic powers and extra-sensory perception (ESP) rank among the top ten unexplained phenomena if for no other reason than that belief in them is so widespread. Many people believe that intuition (see #3) is a form of psychic power, a way of accessing arcane or special knowledge about the world or the future. Researchers have tested people who claim to have psychic powers, though the results under controlled scientific conditions have so far been negative or ambiguous. Some have argued that psychic powers cannot be tested, or for some reason diminish in the presence of skeptics or scientists. If this is true, science will never be able to prove or disprove the existence of psychic powers.  Read more »

Here is the link to the site that has lot of Dawkins videos organized chronologically. Really nicely done.
http://www.unpronounceable.com/dawkins/

If you new to Dawkins then check this site out and then pick up his book The God Delusion and then read resto of his earlier books too. You will not look at the world with same eyes ever again, or to quote Penn and Teller about Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion: “If this book doesn’t change the world – we’re all screwed”.

Enjoy