Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Where is our progress leading us to?

I have thought quite a bit about this, with all the new technologies that we are developing, our future really looks like it is going to be even stranger than the strangest sci-fi movie, we will not be the same in every sense.

I mean: if you have read my previous article about the brain implants, in a few years we are going to be able to learn anything we need instantly by applying a micro chip containing the data in our brain, something like transferring data from an USB to your computer. You're going to be able to become an all knowing scientist, engineer, attorney in a matter of seconds, or even all of them!
Sentient robots are not that far from becoming real, and we are going to be able to live forever, unless killed from external sources.

Friday, July 22, 2011

The world ends next year? It already had to many, many, many times before

Let's take a look at how many times the world was supposed to be over before this 2012 new age prediction.

I am going to list some of the predictions that go from the end of the 90s to our days, there are a LOT of them that go back to the dark ages, and keep going throughout all our history, with new predictions every now and then.

4 July 1999: According to some interpretations of Nostradamus' prophecies, a third world war had to start, with Russia and Iran initiating the conflict. Nothing happened

1999: The scientist Hideo Itakawa discovered after a computer simulation that in 1999, right after a solar eclypse, the solar system was going to move itself into a cross shape. The astrologists believed that this formation represented the 4 knights of the apocalypse. This position of the planets would have caused mega earthquakes all over the world and even an increase in the solar activity. Obviously nothing happened.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Some UFO facts

Allow me to start with stating this beforehand: UFO does NOT mean alien spacecraft, a UFO is "simply" an unidentified flying object, it can be a plane, a baloon, a satellite, even a bird.

With that said, the UFO subject has always been bombed by the media and charlatans in every possible way, this lead to a massive and uncontrolled spread of fakes, fake proof, fake stories, and so on. These people, who either want to make money or gain prestige are the most active in the UFO scene. So, thanks to the increase of the available technologies (almost everyone has the possibility of making videos or photos nowadays) and the increase of the "Alien trend" the extremely reduced amount of real proof is even harder to find.

If I had to make a personal estimate of how many real unexplainable UFO events have been documented compared to the fakes, around 1% are real, the other 99% are fakes. The real unexplainable events are really rare.
Before believing in UFO stories, make sure that you know how to distinguish the fake from the true, if the sources of said UFO event are always making hype around their news, they're probably doing that just to attract more audience. If someone is showing you some kind of incredible find with undeniable proof, it would already be in the hands of the scientific community, which is made of very prepared and competitive people.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

The universe is not just "big" - Think again

big
adj. big·ger, big·gest
Of considerable size, number, quantity, magnitude, or extent; large.


Calling the universe just "big" would really be a joke. The universe is not big, the universe is SO humongous that not even the light that we see managed to reveal it all yet, and the light has been traveling at 299 792 458 m/s since the beginning of times, that's roughly about 13 billion years, as we can see in the pic.

(Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team for the picture)

With that said, not only the universe has this incredible size, but also the planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, etc have all different sizes and mass. Do you want to make yourself an idea about it? Take a look at this, click on the image, because ironically it is too big even for this blog!

Our earth isn't even worth a single grain of sand in the universe, oh! Since we are talking about sand here, did you know that there are more planets in the known universe than all the grains of sand of all the beaches in the planet earth? That is amazing.

Our planet Earth is so small that the sun wouldn't notice our presence even if we happened to collide with the star, yes, we are that small.


Being small, though, doesn't make the sun big. In fact, the sun's size is nothing too amazing compared to what you can actually find out there in the universe:


Our star is just a little dot there, like the Earth is to our sun!

We have spoken "only" (super obligatory quotation marks) about planets, galaxies and stars here. Have you ever heard of super massive black holes? Well, let me just tell you that it is the biggest type of black hole in a galaxy (we still do not know what we could find somewhere in the universe out there, we cannot exclude that somewhere an even bigger type of black hole can be found!) in the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses! The black holes are believed to be in the center of almost every single galaxy in the universe, and their gravitational power is so strong that they can keep togheter galaxies all by themselves. There is supposedly even one in the center of our own galaxy, it doesn't sound too reassuring doesn't it? Some galaxies even have two super massive black holes at their center in a binary system, which is amazing.

Do you think that our Milky Way galaxy is big? You should take a look at this:



















(This clip was taken from the show 'How The Universe works' - Discovery Channel)



Do you guys still think that when driving for 1-2 hours with your car, or taking a 4-5 hours train or even a 12 hours flight to the other side of the world with a plane you are covering a long distance? Well, you are not. Think again.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Brain memory expansions make rats able to instantly know things.

Scientists of the University of South California's Viterbi School of Engineering have developed a prosthetic chip that interacts with the memory of the rats' brain, enhancing it using electrodes. What does that mean?

According to Dr. Theodore Berger (the man who is leading the scientists) in poor words: if you flip the switch on, the rats remember, if you flip it off they forget. This amazing discovery is the real proof that we needed to confirm how the brain can interact with a neural prosthesis in real time to identify and modify the neural memory encoding processes, this allows to restore or even enhance said cognitive mnemonic processes.

Without the need to say that this kind of awesome technology can be widely used in medicine particularly on mental degenerative diseases like Alzheimer or for amnesia and losses of memory, these chips have the potential to be used in the same way that Neo becomes a master of Kung-Fu in an incredible short period of time just by "installing" the techniques on his brain like in the movie Matrix.

The future seems to be quite easier than what it is now. Right now we have to study, suffer and work hard for quite some time to become good at something, I am one to talk, since every morning I wake up to go to the university!

With this technology you won't even have to do that anymore, what to become a lawyer? Install the lawyer chip! You're going to learn every single legislation of every single state in the world in a matter of seconds! Want to become a space engineer? No problem, install the space engineer chip! You'll be building space ships at NASA in a matter of minutes! Hell, this could even be used for phisical abilities, want to become good at basketball? Soccer? Tennis? Just install the right chip, train your muscles for a bit, and you're good to go! Want to become a musician? Install the musician chip, learn every single chord, scale, note, progressions and what not in a matter of seconds! The possibilities are endless really.

I really wonder what the future has in hold for us when I see what we are capable of developing, and the technologies are becoming better and better as I write this!

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Elixir of long life? It's closer than you think

According to Aubrey de Grey, aging is simply a disease, and like every other disease it needs to be cured. The cure is just harder to develop than what happens with other curable diseases, because it damages our organism in several inevitable ways.




The "cure" to this disease is already in development, and if you are around 20-30 years old you're probably going to be able to benefit from it when said development is over. Looks like that in the future we won't be accepting death as an inevitable end to our lives anymore, we're going to prevent it from happening as if we are curing a flu or cold by taking some pills every day. I really hope that humanity is ready for this!