Advanced Technologies – TheBreakAway

DARPA’s Flying Aircraft Carrier Project

alternative news
Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
January 9, 2018

As you might have noticed, I’ve been largely focused on the apparently emerging geopolitical and financial memes for 2018. This story fits right in, though it may not be immediately apparent how it does so. Our friends at the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, a busy not only planning super-soldiers,warp drives, and subterranean operational capabilities, but now, according to this article shared by Mr. H.B., they’re also planning flying aircraft carriers:

DARPA Is Building A Flying Aircraft Carrier

Needless to say, the “flying aircraft carrier” is a bit different from those super-hero movies Hollyweird has been pumping out lately, for rather than actual aircraft carrier flying around implausibly, these will be aircraft equipped to launch several drones:

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – more commonly known as DARPA – is moving ahead with a project to create a flying aircraft carrier.According to the Navy Times, the so-called “Gremlins” program involves building a transport and bomber-style aircraft capable of launching swarms of fighter drones mid-flight.

Here’s the Navy Times:

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency plans to demonstrate the ability to launch and recover swarms of drones from a C-130 sometime in 2019, according to statements by the agency and by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, one of two companies contracted to design prototype of the drones. The other is Dynetics.

The test would serve as a major leap into the next phase of testing for DARPA’s Gremlins program.

The new platform is designed to carry drones equipped for a variety of operational missions:

Once dispatched, the drones would be outfitted with different payloads in order to accomplish an assortment of missions, to include ISR, electronic warfare, signals intelligence and even kinetic effects. (Emphasis added)

As one might conclude from my emphasis on the “kinetic effects” aspect of these platforms, this raised my suspicion meter into the red zone, for what is being suggested is a “small version” of the “rod of God” technologies I’ve blogged about before on this website, particularly a few years ago in conjunction with the mysterious explosions at Chinese chemical plants and the anomalously deep craters these left. At the time, many were speculating precisely on the use of some sort of massive space-based and launched “rod of God” kinetic weapon. More recently, readers here will recall that a hint of such weaponry was made by US authorities in conjunction with North Korea, when an American reporter asked general Mattis about the possible use of such weapons, to which the answer was a curt, but revealing, “yes.” That response, I concluded, was an indication of the existence of such weapons at the strategic level.

Which puts a unique context to this “flying aircraft carrier” project. I’ve occasionally pointed out in previous blogs about the subject of China’s silk road project that the building of rail and road infrastructure to connect Asia and Europe fulfilled the prophecy of British geopolitician, Halford Makinder, who prophesied at the turn of the last century that railroads and air transport would eventually tie the Eurasian land mass together, making it invulnerable to the conventional interdictions of (British) sea power. One hundred years later, and we’re watching it come to fruition. So how would one interdict such communications infrastructure. One solution is obviously the space-based kinetic energy weapon, whose destructive power theoretically could be equivalent to very large nuclear weapons.

Another obvious platform would be something like… a flying aircraft carrier, capable of deploying a multitude of smaller drones with small “tactical” level kinetic weapons capable of punching craters in road and rail networks and taking out hardened facilities. Tie that concept to other platforms such as an orbital aircraft, and you get the idea: redundancy of interdictive capability is the name of the game.

In short, this is a response – ultimately – to the growth of the Silk Road initiative in my opinion.

And that means the geopolitical-financial game most definitely is afoot.

See you on the flip side…

“Go Underground, Young Man” – DARPA’s Latest Goal

cosmic war
Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
January 6, 2018

This fascinating story was shared by Mr. R.M., and it has me speculating wildly (of course) on what it might all mean. It seems that our friends at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, or as we like to refer to it here following the suggestion of Mr. J.B., the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency, want to take humanity underground. The only question is, why? As one might imagine, the ostensible purpose is military, but as we’ll see in today’s high octane speculation, I can think of a few others.

Here’s the article:

Dig Deep: DARPA Contest Aims to Take People Underground

According to Ms. Tia Ghose, authoress of this article, the goal of all this is to develop the technologies, both hard and soft, for deep human presence underground, with an ability to respond to “unknown conditions” quickly, a military purpose to be sure:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced its latest challenge, called the Subterranean or “SubT” Challenge. The global competition asks entrants to develop systems that can help humans navigate, map and search in underground locations that are normally too perilous to visit.

“One of the main limitations facing war fighters and emergency responders in subterranean environments is a lack of situational awareness; we often don’t know what lies beneath us,” Timothy Chung, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO), said in a statement. “The DARPA Subterranean Challenge aims to provide previously unimaginable situational awareness capabilities for operations underground.” [Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects]

Groups all around the world will compete to solve problems that help people navigate in unknown, treacherous subterranean conditions, where time is of the essence, according to the statement.

Now, obviously, the ostensible purpose of this contest and goal is to develop new military capabilities for subterranean cartography and operational capability. This has been going on as long as there have been militaries and fortifications: the easiest way is not through, but under, or over them. “Sapping” or digging beneath an enemy position is as old as warfare, perhaps the most famous example being the enormous tunnel and mine the British tried to dig prior to the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Then, British sappers dug a tunnel beneath the German fortified trenches and planted an enormous amount of explosives, which were then exploded at the beginning of the battle with the hopes of blowing an enormous hole in the German lines. That it certainly did. The only problem was, the Germans heard the British digging, and simply pulled back prior to the detonation, and the effect aimed for was entirely lost.

So while the DARPA project appears to be par for the course for the military-industrial complex, I cannot help but think that there may be other purposes lurking in the shadows, unstated, and herewith, my high octane speculation of the day.

Recall, for a moment, that it is the same DARPA that (1) wants to create “super-soldiers” of various types, sizes, and “capabilities” (including the capability of relying on less sleep, and being able to function in exotic environments), and (2) set the century-objective for the USSA to be “warp capable” in one hundred years. Goodbye, rockets. Thus, I strongly suspect that this “subterranean operations” initiative is related to the long-term space objectives, where such capabilities would be most valuable, and, if the indications of subterranean structures on Mars that have emerged over the years are any indicator, it’s a capability that would serve any manned missions there quite well…

… particularly if one suspected there might be someone to encounter…

See you on the flip side…

Russian Engineers Want To Orbit Reflective Pyramid Satellite

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
July 1, 2017

This website, in case you didn’t know, has a Community forum where people also post conversational items, articles, or just carry on a conversation with whoever else is there. Well, I saw this strange article there posted by Mr. T.H., who shared it with the forum, and I want to post it here and talk about it in my high octane speculation of the day. Here’s the article:

Russian Satellite Could Become The “Brightest Star” In Our Night Sky

Now, as one can imagine, here’s the part that caught my eye:

The small spacecraft, roughly the size of a loaf of bread, will unfurl a giant pyramid-shaped solar reflector in orbit, with the aim of shining brighter than any other star. The reflector, 16 square meters (170 square feet) in size, is supposedly 20 times thinner than human hair, made of a thin polymer film. This spacecraft doesn’t have any other scientific purpose, although the team notes that a similar structure could be used to remove defunct satellites from orbit.

“We want to show that space exploration is something exciting and interesting, but most importantly that today it is accessible to everybody who is interested,” project leader Alexander Shaenko said, reported Sputnik News.

The team is planning to place the spacecraft in a Sun-synchronous orbit 600 kilometers (370 miles) above the ground. This means it will always be in sunlight, and thus will always be shining in the night sky at different locations as Earth rotates. At this height, the spacecraft will also be able to avoid large effects from atmospheric drag, so it could feasibly orbit for weeks, months, or even years.

Of course, the word “pyramid” immediately captured my interest, and I have all sorts of “high octane fantasias” running through my head, but let’s talk about that reflective coating; the satellite, we’re told, will be about the size of a small loaf of bread, which will then unfurl “a giant pyramid-shaped solar reflector” in orbit. Other than this, we’re not told much about the proposed function of the satellite other than to “look bright” and, by implication, “be fun and interesting to do.”

Uh huh…

Now, I don’t know about you, but I for one have some difficulty believing that the Russians would launch a big pyramid-shaped satellite just for kicks and giggles and to provide a nice “Nightlight in the sky.” Perhaps this is the latest component of their highly successful World Election Hacking System. Perhaps it’s some component of an illumination system designed for other purposes, such as blinding the optics of other satellites (ours for example), or some sort of “searchlight” for small but potentially dangerous near Earth objects. After all, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, you’ll recall, back before the Chelyabinsk meteor incident, called for an international asteroid detection and defense system, but if others did not want to join, then Russia would just have to “do it all itself.”

Curiously, Mr. Medvedev, you’ll also recall, also stated that Russia could destroy dangerous asteroids busting them up with missiles carrying large hydrogen bombs (ala the Bruce Willis movie Armageddon). Then, however, he went on to say something in a kind of “oh, hydrogen-bombs-are-so-yesterday” moment, namely, that there were “other means” of busting large rocks in space.

And that of course opened up all sorts of doors for high octane speculation, which I’m sure the remarks were designed to do, and I gladly walked through them then, and do so again now, for I propose to connect Mr. Medvedev’s remarks from those years ago, to this strange story today, and concentrate, not on the reflection properties, but the pyramid shape.

Many people do not know that during the 1960s-1970s and even into the 1980s, the Soviet Union conducted a number of very secret projects in what we would loosely and generally call the “paranormal”. One of these very top secret projects was the “pyramid power project.” Yes, that’s right; the Russians had a top secret project, lasting many years, exploring the alleged strange powers of pyramids for good and ill. To this end, they constructed a number of tall, slim fiberglass pyramids all over Russia. Some are still standing outside of Moscow today, and are a kind of tourist-curiosity destination. To my knowledge, this is the only known official state project investigating pyramid power; I know of no similar such project in any other major power, ever. (Indeed, I first learned of the project before it became more openly known, from a Russian Orthodox priest that was then a friend of mine.)

As I outlined in The Giza Death Star Destroyed, some of these projects were very revealing, and their scope – I am convinced – is not fully known to this day. But one of the significant things that came from this research was the finding, discussed in some papers by the Ukrainian physicist Volodymyr Krasnoholovets, that for some reason the pyramid shape seems to influence the vacuum energy directly. They found – or at least, claimed to have found – that the pyramid geometry was engineering the fabric of the physical medium locally. Strange energy upwellings appeared over the apexes of their pyramids. They discovered, also, that tall “thin” pyramids acted more as antennae for these strange energies, while flatter pyramids acted as collectors of it. Strangely enough, they also found that the height-to-width ratio of the Great Pyramid fulfilled both functions.

So I have to wonder, of course, if this “pyramid satellite project” is a part of those experiments; it certainly seems to suggest that the Soviet Pyramid Project didn’t completely end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the disclosure of the existence of the project, and that it may be moving into space. If indeed the alleged discoveries of “medium-manipulating” characteristics of the pyramid shape are true, it stands to reason they would want to study those properties in the low-to-zero gravity context of space itself. The reflective coating would also correlate to other pyramid investigations – those of the American engineer Parr, for example – where the position of the sun, incoming solar energy, and so on, played a major role.

In short, for those who’ve been paying attention to this strange area of research, there is probably much more going on here than meets the eye.

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
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About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

Inhuman Markets: Even The Algorithm Creators Don’t Know What…

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
June 27, 2017

Over the years I’ve become increasingly wary of the various markets that are now run almost exclusively by computers and have occasionally commented about it in blogs. I’ve even entertained the possibility, in my high octane speculation mode, that various “flash crash” events seem to have features that suggest that the algorithm “took over” and drove a market event with no connection to human market realities; in this respect, I continue to be unconvinced, for example, by the various explanations of the May 2010 flash crash; call it a suspicion, or a hunch, nothing more. Yes, in short, I’ve entertained the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) is not “coming” but already “here”, and may be infesting the “dark pools” and high frequency trading (HFT) algorithms.

Well, now I’m not the only one, according to these stories shared by Ms. K.M.:

Like Something Out of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ This Market Is About the Machines

Doug Kass: Not Even The Algo Creators Know What Is Going On

From the first article, I want to draw your attention to the following statements:

Listen Luddites, for the stock market, too, it’s a thing about the machines.

Throw away your fundamental analysis, your price charts, interest rates and economic growth forecasts, as the market has lost its moorings.

It is no longer a pyramid of fundamental and technical analysis nor is it a response to changing investor sentiment.

The ongoing multiyear changes in the market structure and dominant investor strategies in which quants, algos and other passive strategies (e.g., ETFs) have replaced active managers raise the same risks that Finchley faced 57 years ago.

And the overwhelming impact of central bankers’ largesse is the cherry on the market’s non-fundamentally influenced sundae.

As I have written:

“The combination of central bankers’ unprecedented largesse (and liquidity) when combined with mindless quant strategies and the enormous popularity of ETFs will, as night follows day, become a toxic cocktail for the equity markets. While we live in an imperfect world, we face (with valuations at a 95% decile on a number of metrics) a stock market that views the world almost perfectly.”

Back to JPMorgan’s Marko Kalonovic, who is quoted at the top of this piece and again here:

“… some striking facts: to understand this market transformation, note that Passive and Quantitative investors now account for ~60% of equity assets (vs. less than 30% a decade ago). We estimate that only ~10% of trading volumes originates from fundamental discretionary traders. This means that while fundamental narratives explaining the price action abound, the majority of equity investors today don’t buy or sell stocks based on stock-specific fundamentals. (Bold emphasis added)

Let that last statement sink in for a moment, for if you, like I, have been wondering just why the heck markets don’t make sense any more, it’s because they are utterly unconnected to humanity and human decision-making. That “less than ten percent” of trading volume that “originates from fundamental discretionary traders” means that actual human consideration of stock performance, or even equities in a certain specific sector of industry – say, film-making or farm implement manufacture – are based on actual human consideration of the performance, risk, and returns of a particular stock.

I don’t know about you, but I find this development more than disturbing.

But before we move on to the second article, pause and consider something else: it is often a criticism or critique that centralized solutions, the “one size fits all” political solutions of the political left are unworkable, precisely because no human being can calculate for all possible circumstances for all human beings: one cannot, as it were, create a bureaucratic policy or algorithm to stick in “guideline notebooks” for every possible situation.

And that raises the thorny philosophical question that no one seems to want to address:

How then, can we expect human creators of computer algorithms to do for markets, what cannot be done for other segments of human interaction by bureaucrats?

With that philosophical point in mind, turn to the second article, and consider these very cogent points made for our friends at Zero Hedge:

Most people think of artificial intelligence and algos as simply executing logical rules programmed into them by humans — the same rules that the programming humans would follow if they were presented with the same data and data analysis. The algos and AIs are doing it in the same way humans have always done and would do, but at a much slower speed or perhaps not at all because of the very weak and distant relationship of some data items to other data items.

The general belief is that algos and AIs are just “faster humans able to do a lot more calculations in a meaningful time frame”. That may NOT be a correct characterization of some of the more powerful AIs that may be working in the markets. Of course, we don’t know what AIs are working because there are no regulations requiring that machine decision-making accounts disclose and register as such … a very, very big gap in regulation.

True, AI and the related “machine learning” developments at the leading edge of such technology do NOT simply duplicate human rules and logic. Instead, while they may perform simple repetitive correlations initially on data as humans currently formulate that data, the more advanced machines go on to program themselves at successive layers, where the data being analyzed and correlated is no longer what we think of as data. Rather, it is often data artifacts created by the first layers in a form that no human would ever consider or has ever seen. To put in a more street-level way, the first level creates ghosts and apparitions and shadows that the second layer treats as real data on which it assesses correlation and predictability in the service of some decision asked of it. AND … a third and fourth and on and on are doing the same thing with output from each layer below it.

The result of this procedure is striking and terrifying when the the leading experts in AI and machine learning are interviewed. They admit that they have no way of determining what rules AI and machine- learning powered machines are following in making their decisions AND we cannot even know what inputs are being used in making those decisions.

Think about that. The creators have no knowledge of what their creations are thinking or what kind of inputs the machines are thinking about and how decisions about that are being made. The machines are inscrutable and, most terrifyingly important, UNPREDICTABLE.

We are not telling these AIs how to make decisions. The machines are figuring out how to decide to “make a profit” on their own and subject to no enforceable constraint.

The resulting risk of “flash crashes” — to lump all sudden and unexpected behaviors into a catchphrase — is unknowable but probably much greater than anyone even dreams. The machines have no fear of flash crashes or any other kind of crash. Such crashes might even serve their purpose of “making a profit.”

Note what is really being said:

(1) algorithmic trading generates artifacts in data that no human ever would;

(2) is processing and making trading decisions based on those artifacts;

(3) none of these processes are transparent, and thus, we do not even know why the markets are behaving as they are behaving, we only know they are not reflective of human market realities; and finally,

(4) all this can lead to the risk of flash crashes.

Lest one think that this sounds too incredible to be true, consider the final closing paragraph of this article, which is the biggest jaw-dropper of them all:

Everyone should read this important note from JPMorgan’s head quant (hat tip to Zero Hedge) in order to understand how risk parity, volatility trending, stat arb and other quant strategies that are agnostic to balance sheets, income statements and private market value artificially are impacting the capital markets and, temporarily at least, are checking volatility. (Bold and italics emphasis added)

Let that sink in for a moment: because algorithms trade at such extraordinary speed, and execute trades in blocks of equities, little or no correlation is being with actual specific equity performance, such as a human “discretionary investor” would make, looking at “old fashioned analogue sorts of things” like balance sheets, income, profit/loss statements, company indebtedness, cost-earnings ratios, exposure, assets &c… in other words, the algorithms have little to no connection to markets and their realities, much less to human decision-making processes that are normally involved in the investment process.

The bottom line? Well, over the long term, obvious a huge rethink of computer-based trading is in order. Frankly, I’m old fashioned enough to want to see a Wall Street trading floor of shouting traders, piles of paper, and bundles of stock certificates being mailed out every day. But beyond this, there’s a short term necessity, perhaps one can call it a strategy, and that’s “keep it local”, and in “keeping it local” I mean, even for local investments, finding out about their exposure to national and international markets: how much of that local bank’s stock is traded on the big markets, and who are the major shareholders? And so on… because, for right now, these machines are at the root of market unreality.

This should, and I hope will, prompt a discussion, and it will have to be a deep one, for the problem of the quants and their algorithms is highlighting the limitations of technology for a human world. The disconnection of markets from real human market activity is a case in point of how technologies have been adapted to a normal human activity – investing and trading – in an inhuman way. And the problem is, if the markets are that far removed from human realities, what will happen if, suddenly, someone pulls the plug? How many would remember how to conduct trades on the floor, the “old fashioned way”?

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
________________________________________________

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Manipulating Nothingness

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
June 22, 2017

Ms. K.M. sent this article this week, and I have to blog about it, for it seems that some physicists are making the claim – not yet totally sanctioned by other physicists – of being able to manipulate the vacuum, and hence the vacuum (or zero point), energy itself:

Physicists Say They’ve Manipulated ‘Pure Nothingness’ And Observed The Fallout

Before we get to why I had an “oh my!” moment when I read this, and to my high octane speculation of the day, consider the following paragraphs:

Then, in 2015, a team led by Alfred Leitenstorfer from the University of Konstanz in Germany claimed they’d directly detected these fluctuations, by observing their influence on a light wave. The results were published in Science.

To do this, they fired a super short laser pulse – lasting only a few femtoseconds, which is a millionth of a billionth of a second – into a vacuum, and were able to see subtle changes in the polarisation of the light. They said these changes were caused directly by the quantum fluctuations.

It’s a claim that’s still being debated, but the researchers have now taken their experiment to the next level by ‘squeezing’ the vacuum, and say they’ve been able to observe the strange changes in the quantum fluctuations as a result.

…

That sounds weird, but in a vacuum, space and time behave in the same way, so it’s possible to examine one to learn more about the other.

Doing this, the team saw that when they ‘squeezed’ the vacuum, it worked kind of like squeezing a balloon, and redistributed the strange quantum fluctuations within it.

Now, in case you missed it, let’s boil all this down to two basic ideas:

(1) there is an energy in absolute vacuum, which is known by a variety of names; zero point energy, quantum fluctuations, vacuum energy and so on;

(2) that energy can be observed, or accessed, when one changes the pure “shape” or geometry of the vacuum itself. Indeed, viewed a certain way, the particles of physics are “changes of geometry” in the vacuum that are stable for some period of time.

Let this all sink in for a moment: scientists have found a way to “change the shape’ of the vacuum itself, and hence, have observed and accessed the strange and hitherto inaccessible world of that “quantum vacuum fluctuation.”

There is, so to speak, a purely abstract – non-physical – topology to the way even the vacuum – pure nothingness – behaves, and this is manipulable via shape. So the claim – which, let us note for the record, is still being debated by the scientific community reacting to this experiment – is to have achieved the God-like power to shape nothingness itself. For most people, this will seem at once a contradiction of religion and the ultimate testament of the folly of man. In point of fact, for certain versions of religion, man is a “co-worker” with God, even in his own salvation, and there is no real limit placed on what that “co-working” entails, even, perhaps, to the cosmological scale. (For those interested in the details, it is part of the communicatio or circumincessio idiomatorum). While this experiment is only a first, small step, it is also a gigantic step in terms of the implications, for it is suggesting that the vacuum is directly engineerable – as some have been maintaining for decades – via its shape or geometry. Indeed, it recalls the pyramid research of Ukrainian physicist Volodimir Krasnoholovets, and his co-authored papers with topologist Michel Bounias.

It also recalls that disturbing statement in the Babylonian war epic, the Enuma Elish (and yes, I persist in my opinion that the epic is a war epic and not, pace academia, a creation epic), that after a colossal war and the destruction of the planet/god Tiamat, he “remeasured the structure of the deep“, of “the abyss”.

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
________________________________________________

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Immortality & Resurrection Inc.

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
June 13, 2017

Just when you thought the aspirations and plans of modern science couldn’t possibly become more diabolical (or, if one prefer, sacrilegious), an article comes along to renew your hope that the world continues on its path of normalcy, and that many scientists are, indeed, just as wild-eyed-nuts as you always thought them to be. And this week, apparently many people were relieved and reassured that the mad scientist is not a thing of the past or a species that died out, but a real, living creature deserving of our awe and respect. Ms. M.W. and many others found this, and shared it, doubtless because they were concerned that I was losing hope that there were no more mad scientists:

Could we soon REVERSE death? US company to start trials ‘reawakening the dead’ in Latin America ‘in a few months’ – and this is how they’ll do it

Way back when I first started writing about these strange topics in The Giza Death Star, I made the observation that physical immortality might not be such a good thing, without a commensurate and corresponding improvement in human spirituality and morality. In this, I took my cue from an ancient Greek Church Father named St. John Chrysostom, who warned about the same thing, and who stated that it was death, in fact, that formed the crucial condition for the possibility of human repentance and a change of mind, for it cut off further progress in evil. Taking this as my cue, in the final pages of that book, I asked people to imagine if such immortality were possible, or even a dramatically extended life span were possible – both of which are now being openly discussed and touted in serious and not-so-serious literature – what it might mean for the resulting civilization? One thing that would result, I pointed out, was a vastly expanded and accelerated scientific and technological development. One individual would, in such a condition, be able to learn and to master several academic disciplines, not just one.The explosion of technology and science would dwarf anything we have seen thus far. But the other consequence would be for moral progress. Imagine, I said back then, an Albert Schweitzer having not a century, but centuries or even millennia to do good things, or, conversely, a Mao Tse-Tung, a Josif Stalin, a Pol Pot or an Adolf Hitler, having that long to “perfect their progress in evil,” and one gets a clear picture of the sharp moral contradictions such a society would be in. And please note: this problem is not a problem that, to my knowledge, is receiving anything close to the attention it needs in the transhumanism-virtual immortality community. The sole focus is on the science; if we can do it, we should do it.

Now we have this:

Bioquark, a Philadelphia-based company, announced in late 2016 that they believe brain death is not ‘irreversible’.

And now, CEO Ira Pastor has revealed they will soon be testing an unprecedented stem cell method on patients in an unidentified country in Latin America, confirming the details in the next few months.

To be declared officially dead in the majority of countries, you have to experience complete and irreversible loss of brain function, or ‘brain death’.

According to Pastor, Bioquark has developed a series of injections that can reboot the brain – and they plan to try it out on humans this year.

They have no plans to test on animals first.

…

The first stage, named ‘First In Human Neuro-Regeneration & Neuro-Reanimation’ was slated to be a non-randomized, single group ‘proof of concept’ study.

The team said they planned to examine individuals aged 15-65 declared brain dead from a traumatic brain injury using MRI scans, in order to look for possible signs of brain death reversal.

Specifically, they planned to break it down into three stages.

First, they would harvest stem cells from the patient’s own blood, and inject this back into their body.

Next, the patient would receive a dose of peptides injected into their spinal cord.

Finally, they would undergo a 15-day course of nerve stimulation involving lasers and median nerve stimulation to try and bring about the reversal of brain death, whilst monitoring the patients using MRI scans.

Light, chemistry, and stem cells and DNA. If one didn’t know any better, one would swear one was looking at the broad chronological progression of Genesis 1.

But I digress.

The problem here is, one notices, the almost complete avoidance of the moral question. Let’s assume the technology works and that one can, literally, resurrect the dead scientifically. And let us assume the project reaches the stage of perfection envisioned by the Russian Cosmists, like Nikolai Fedorov. The cosmists, recall, want to extend the resurrection-by-science principle to the entire history of one’s ancestors. But should this occur, then what about resurrecting people like Stalin, Mao, or Hitler? The sad truth is, some people still “revere” those twisted and murderous people as heroes. The sad truth is, some people would attempt to do it, if given the means to do so.

But there’s an even bigger problem. The entire project is predicated on the materialist assumption that “brain function equals the person.” Regular readers here know that I have never subscribed to such a view, nor have I subscribed to the view, conversely, that there is no relationship between a person’s “personhood” and the functions of their soul, which would include, of course, the functions of their will, intellect, emotions, and brain. It is, I suspect, a very complex phenomenon not neatly divided into tidy Cartesian dualisms, with numerous feedback loops between the two. This said, however, the problem arises then that the brain is not the creator of individuality, but rather, its transducer (and, if I may employ a more ancient version of the term, its traducer). Thus, the possibility arises that one might “revive” a brain, and traduce or transduce a different individual than one “recalls” being present prior to brain death. Already some psychologists have written – and published – papers suggesting that certain mental disorders such as bipolarity and schizophrenia might not be disorders in any standard sense, but rather a phenomenon where an individual is inhabiting two very different and parallel universes at the same time. In this they draw upon the many worlds hypotheses of qauntum mechanics.

In short, for my money, I have no doubt that ultimately, some sort of “scientific” resurrection technique might be possible. But I suspect it will be a Pandora’s box of spiritual phenomena which, once opened, will be difficult if not impossible to close again, and that before we open it, we should give lengthy, and due consideration to all the moral problems it will engender.

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
________________________________________________

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Atmospheric Study & Gravity Waves

Space-orbit-satellite
Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
May 18, 2017

Every now and then someone sends me the abstract to a scientific article that really spins the tumblers in my mind, and today is no different, for Mr. V.T., a regular reader and article-contributer, found a real gem. This is, however, regrettably one of those articles that to read in full, one has to purchase it, which I cannot afford to do. Nonetheless, I was intrigued for a multitude of “high octane speculation” reasons. With the caveat in mind that we’re resorting to a departure from our usual “high octane” methodology, where we speculate on the basis of a whole article which we assume to be true, to this present case, where we’re speculating only on the basis of an abstract, on to the gem that Mr. V.T. discovered:

A case study of long gravity wave crests in noctilucent clouds and their origin in the upper tropospheric jet stream

I have to admit, that when I read the abstract, it confirmed some long-held and strictly private thoughts; its implications are rather breathtaking, if one allows the mind to “run wild” a bit. Here’s the abstract:

Scientists have investigated atmospheric gravity waves in detail, bringing a better understanding of how and where they are generated. Their study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

An international team of physicists, which included researchers from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, captured images of atmospheric gravity waves in noctilucent (night) clouds — delicate cloud-like structures made from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere — using three synchronized cameras positioned several tens of kilometres apart, and used a triangulation technique to estimate the height and horizontal characteristics of the waves.

By simulating the rays’ interactions with a reflecting surface and combining it with an analysis of global meteorological data sets, they concluded that the waves were formed from the balancing of the Coriolis force with horizontal pressures, and that the upper tropospheric jet stream was their most likely source. (bold-italics emphasis added)

At the 2014 San Mateo Secret Space program conference I pointed out that the ability to manipulate or engineer weather, or earthquakes, implied the ability to engineer – and potentially, to weaponize – systems of a planetary scale. I’ve been calling such ideas the “Farrell Corollaries” to the Kardashev scale. To refresh our memories for a moment, the famous Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev developed a simple classification system to give a taxonomy to any potential extra-terrestrial civilizations. A class one civilization required the energy of an entire planet; a class two civilization required the energy of an entire star, and a class three the energy of an entire galaxy. I began to wonder: how would humanity “bluff” its way through an encounter with the first two civilization types? One way to do so would be to demonstrate a capability to engineer systems of those scales, and to demonstrate an ability to weaponize them: hence the ability to engineer planetary-scaled systems would be a corollary one civilization, and the ability to engineer systems of a stellar scale would be a corollary two civilization. And, if one wants to translate one scale to another, think of a corollary one as being a kind of n=<1 civilization, and corollary two civilization as akind of n= >1 <2 on the Kardashev scale, i.e., falling in the cracks between Kardashev’s first two civilization types.

With that idea came the idea of weather manipulation: weather systems are systems of a planetary scale, when one gets right down to it. Researchers who’ve followed the topic of weather modification, geo-engineering, chemtrails, or weather weaponization over the years have focused their attentions on large ionospheric heaters like HAARP and EISCAT, pointing out that these machines had the capability to heat and lift portions of the ionosphere, thus giving a potential to modify the jet stream and move it around, in turn effectively steering weather systems which, incidentally, can have energy loaded into, or extracted from, them, intensifying or damping storms respectively.

To round out my private speculations, I’m one of those who believes that there is some sort of not-well-understood coupling mechanisms between gravity and electromagnetism. The idea of such a unification has been around for a long time: Kaluza-Klein, and for the connoisseur of the obscure, Gabriel Kron and T.T. Brown. If such a coupling existed, then planetary weather modification techniques and technologies would, perforce, have to have some gravitational component.

Reading the abstract carefully, one notes the following points and implications:

1) The measurements establishing the existence of gravity waves were correlated with meteorological data, which implies, perhaps, a relationship between weather systems and local gravitational conditions (tornadoes, hurricanes, torsion, anyone?);

2) The waves were composed of an interaction of Coriolis force and “horizontal pressures”, i.e., from the interaction of the force of a rotating system and a simple horizontal force;

3) The source of these waves was the jet stream.

Let all this sink in for a moment, for the simple implication is: , they are proposing a mechanism for the composition of gravity waves, and also proposing that weather modification is gravity modification (and, potentially, the converse).

Consider: if one accepts the interrelatedness of all the above implications, then might one be able to intensify any of the observed gravitational effects by an increase in the electrical conductivity of the atmospheric cavity, by (to take one example) dumping heavy particulate metals in the atmosphere?

But what really “grabbed” my attention, here, was none of this considered by and of itself. What really grabbed my attention was the combination of these ideas, and the fact that if one looks at the list of authors and contributes to this paper, the majority of them are Russian, from a variety of academic research institutions in the Russian Federation, who appear, according to the abstract, to be connected to the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. Engineering of course implies the interest of the Russians in one of two possibilities (and most likely, both): (1) to determine if someone else is engineering weather systems and gravitational anomalies and (2) to determine practical principles and technologies to do so for themselves, or (3) both.

Of course, this is a lot of parsing and analysis of a simple abstract and its contributors. The article itself, we must admit, might overturn all of it. Nonetheless, the implications that result from the abstract are profoundly disturbing.

See you on the flip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
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About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Artificial Womb Created

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
May 7, 2017

In case you didn’t catch the story, artificial wombs have been successfully created and tested… at least, for sheep, according to this article shared by Mr. B:

An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep — and humans could be next

Now, of course, this is all being sold – predictably enough and just according to the playbook – as a potential health benefit, for if it can be applied to humans, the technology could conceivably help premature babies; here’s the way the article puts it in its first three paragraphs:

Inside what look like oversized ziplock bags strewn with tubes of blood and fluid, eight fetal lambs continued to develop — much like they would have inside their mothers. Over four weeks, their lungs and brains grew, they sprouted wool, opened their eyes, wriggled around, and learned to swallow, according to a new study that takes the first step toward an artificial womb. One day, this device could help to bring premature human babies to term outside the uterus — but right now, it has only been tested on sheep.

It’s appealing to imagine a world where artificial wombs grow babies, eliminating the health risk of pregnancy. But it’s important not to get ahead of the data, says Alan Flake, fetal surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and lead author of today’s study. “It’s complete science fiction to think that you can take an embryo and get it through the early developmental process and put it on our machine without the mother being the critical element there,” he says.

Instead, the point of developing an external womb — which his team calls the Biobag — is to give infants born months too early a more natural, uterus-like environment to continue developing in, Flake says.
(Emphasis added)

True enough, such a technology would be a boon for care of premature babies.

But like Mr. B., I have difficulty believing that this technology is not applicable to the earliest stages of pregnancy. And that brings me to my high octane speculation of the day…

… while such a technology might be beneficial in the care of premature babies, I strongly suspect there’s another reason set of reasons entirely for the creation of this technology, and that set of reasons boils down to just two words: genetic engineering. Conceivably, such a technology could fulfill two dreams – or rather, nightmares – of the transhumanist “community,” for it would be (1) a means not only to create but to gestate chimerical life forms, and (2) a means to create and gestate clones. Both purposes could be served by the perfection of this technology. In the latter case, it would be a kind of real world fulfillment of the film Island, staring Scottish actor Ewan McGregor, where human clones are literally gestated in such ‘biobags” and then “birthed” surgically on a pre-determined date.

The reason? There organs are going to be harvested for their “real” counterparts, and the clone – who is not viewed as a real “person” of course – is butchered, murdered, and thrown away. The technology, in other words, raises moral and jurisprudential issues. I’m one of those that maintains that human clones are persons, unique and different from their “originals” in the same way identical twins or triplets are different unique persons, regardless of the DNA similarities.

But watch, the transhumanist-progressive crowd will consult medical “ethicists” from the University of Oxford, who will contrive sophistical arguments why this is not the case.

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
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About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

How to Turn an Asteroid Into a Spacecraft

project rama
Source: Inverse.com
Neel V. Patel
April 24, 2017

There is a lot to imagine what the future of humanity will be moving toward in the 21st century, but — assuming the species does not experience a calamity of some sorts — most of those dreams are peppered with the prospect of people speeding off into outer space, to explore and conquer worlds unknown. But few people have realized space is a two-way street. The future of the species beyond Earth does not simply mean building ships that will take us elsewhere; it also means the potential to build things that bring space to us.

“We want to turn an asteroid into spacecraft,” Phil Metzger said at the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Symposium last August. Metzger was talking about Project RAMA: a scheme to essentially turn an asteroid into a mechanical machine capable of autonomously navigating through space towards specific destinations. That’s not even an exaggeration — that is literally the goal.

Obviously, the first question one has after they hear about something like this is what is the actual point in this. Metzger, a planetary physicist formerly based at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, now working at the University of Central Florida and is a technical advisor for Project RAMA, told the NIAC Symposium the central benefit was to bring resources from vast distances to places closer and more easily accessible to human beings. This may include Earth’s orbit, colonies on other planets or moons, space stations, fuel and resource depots, or regions of the solar system where space miners are already situated.

Project RAMA is the brainchild of Jason Dunn, the CTO and co-founder of Made In Space. His company’s primary focus is to develop technologies that would make it possible to manufacture instruments and structures key to space exploration in outer space itself. The cost of launching things from the ground is enormous. It takes so much time and energy to build and fire a rocket capable of getting outside the Earth’s atmosphere. And while some like SpaceX have made great strides in proving the viability of reusable rockets, there is still a large cost that is irredeemable. The ability to build things in space itself would dramatically open up space travel and operations to a much wider bracket of the public and private sectors alike.

“We have this vision that as we move forward in space exploration, more and more of the things we need in space are manufactured there,” Dunn tells Inverse. “The ultimate idea is that we’re manufacturing those things in space using materials and resources that come from space itself. That, to us, is where space has to head for it to become a new place for people to live and for industry to find a way to thrive.”

Realizing such a vision means establishing a network of infrastructure that can move materials around. It’s not as if you can just build a giant space lasso that can wrangle resources over to you.

A few years ago, there were two different ideas Dunn and his colleagues at Made In Space had been discussing that seemed to converge and eventually meld into Project RAMA. The first was the notion of a self-replicating machine in space, along the lines of what great thinkers like John von Neumann and Freeman Dyson had previously played around with. “As a company building 3D printers for space, that’s always been fun to talk about.”

The other idea focused around asteroids and resources — how to find them, how to get to them, and how to mine them for resources.

“Of course the problem,” says Dunn, “is how to do you move an asteroid from its natural orbital location into one that’s a higher interest,” such as a Lagrange point parking orbit. “How do you make a very advanced robotic machine go into space and make more of itself?”

The answer, ostensibly, is quite a lot. So Dunn and his team started whittling down the concept into something much simpler: a simple, mechanical machine in space that’s also ginormous in size. The proposed solution was to build a version of the manufacturing technology the crew has been working on into what’s called a seed craft, which is capable of converting an asteroid into a giant mechanical machine, which can then fly back autonomously to points of interest.

“That was the beginning of Project RAMA,” says Dunn.

project rama seed craft diagram — A diagram of what Project RAMA’s seed craft might look like.

This isn’t just a weird dream drawn on a whiteboard in Made In Space’s office. Dunn and his team have pitched Project RAMA to NASA under the NIAC program, which offers researchers grants to conduct more in-depth studies on their very experimental proposals and demonstrate a proof of concept for some of the key technologies at hand.

Dunn and his team have just spent about nine months under a NIAC Phase I investigation trying to figure out just how feasible RAMA is, and they’re very encouraged by what they’ve learned so far. “If you compare what RAMA can do to all the other architectures that have been developed for moving an asteroid from one location to another, what we’ve found is that RAMA can allow for moving asteroids 100 times bigger than what is currently being conceived of,” he says.

The key reason is propulsion. RAMA’s technology doesn’t necessitate hauling huge amounts of propulsion to the asteroid in order to bring it closer to Earth or wherever. The seed craft converts the asteroid into a basic spacecraft that can fly itself using some of its own material for propulsion. Although that wipes out some of the asteroid’s resources from being harvested later, it’s still 100 times more than what other technologies could offer.

What exactly would that material be? It all depends on what kind of asteroid we’re talking about, but there’s an extraordinary potential to mine asteroids for precious metals rare on Earth, and fuel-dependent resources which could make space travel much more sustainable. Water in asteroids, for instance, could be extremely valuable, not just for allowing humans to survive in space, but for use as a potential source of propulsion.

The way RAMA would work depends, again, on the asteroid, but Dunn outlines what even the worst case option would be — an asteroid just made of rock and metal alloy, like iron. The seed craft would essentially hollow out the asteroid while producing thousands of “propellant shots,” which are basically rocky cannonballs. RAMA would also build several very big slings which operate almost like huge catapults. The asteroid self-propels by landing the catapults with these propellant shots, and flinging them out to impart a change in velocity in the opposite direction those shots are being fired in.

Obviously, the bigger the asteroid, the longer the mission takes. So far, the biggest asteroids the team has explored are on the order of 50 to 130 meters long. The seed craft also needs to possess enough power to convert a big ass space rock into a mechanical machine. It could take nearly a decade to fully convert an asteroid into a spacecraft which can maneuver itself to a suitable Lagrange point.

Learning that it was possible to move asteroids in this manner, however, is basically the key to making RAMA work. But there was another big solution Dunn and his team worked on that raised the potential behind this project for demonstrating how to actually find and identify asteroids of interests. To that end, the team used the NIAC funding to build a software called “Rock Finder,” which basically uses NASA on categorized and tracked near-Earth objects, and spits out answers relevant to what someone might be looking for a particular mission and its goals.

If you need a specific metallic asteroid by a particular date, Rock Finder will essentially build your mission design for you. It’s a tool no other party has ever developed. “This is exciting for us,” says Dunn, “because as our new report talks about, there are thousands and thousands more asteroids out there than we’ve ever found.”

Rock finder is critical to the idea of RAMA. When the seed craft finishes the conversion process, it moves to another asteroid, and then another. It’s in a perpetual state of work, able to convert as many asteroids as possible in succession. So while the entire process from launch to Lagrange might take a few decades, you could see multiple seed craft sending over many, many asteroids back to a closer proximity within a single time frame. Rock Finder is essential to this process because it can easily deduce the next target for the seed craft without much of a wait.

There is still a lot more to study before Project RAMA is even close to building a prototype. But based on the initial findings, Dunn and his team are very optimistic about how they push this concept forward and prove the constituent technologies are possible at a laboratory scale. And it falls exactly in line with what is already going on with Made In Space.

“Not only is it possible,” says Dunn, “it’s actually part of the same roadmap that Made In Space is build upon. Space has the resources we’re going to need for the future. We’d love to create something of a train line that continuously brings those resources to us. We can start planning the growth of humanity around that.”

Read More At: Inverse.com
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Neel is a science and tech journalist from New York City, reporting on everything from brain-eating amoebas to space lasers used to zap debris out of orbit, for places like Popular Science and WIRED. He’s addicted to black coffee, old pinball machines, and terrible dive bars. Email him at neel@inverse.com.

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