Tony1951

It is quite fashionable and has been for all of my adult life for people of a more liberal disposition to speak about the advance of our species out of barbarism and to suggest that we are now kinder and more virtuous than our relatives of past times. I don't think it is true - at least not in any universal sense. Some of us may try to be so, but it is only 'skin deep', and whenever it becomes possible, human beings revert to type and take what they want by force. They seize lands, enslave others and seek to maximise their own control of resources. We call them gangsters and criminals when it happens within our own society and we call them rogue states when Russia, or the United States, or China invade, or threaten to invade their neighbours. We don't need to look far back into history to see genocide. Even in the 1990s we saw it when Yugoslavia broke up, or going a little further back to a few years before I was born, we saw millions killed under the Third Reich and the war with Japan. It is all in our nature and it has not gone away. You may hold up your hands in horror and say, 'No - I would never do that', and you may be right, but others will as soon as they see that the costs of doing so are small in comparison to the gain. Why else is Putin in Ukraine? Why else did the Mullahs murder twenty, or maybe 30,000 protesters to maintain their control of resources? Why else are gangsters trafficking slave women for prostitution, and why else are petty thieves and robbers snatching phones, or mugging people for valuables all over London and some other cities? This stuff is in us and it would I suggest be in the nature of any alien intelligence that we might meet.

I beg to differ (No I don't suffer from Oppositional Defiance Disorder - I just have a point to make). Here is why I differ: My starting point is that any animal in the universe most likely (almost certainly) is affected by natural selection. On our planet this takes the form in more intelligent animals of competition, aggression and dominance behaviours. Those that have power, use it to control resources by chasing away any that occupy the space they want and they predate on those species that are weaker than them. The most intelligent creatures on our planet are predatory, none more so than ourselves. All predators act like this and they tend to breed to whatever level of population their environment can support. The kind of beings you hypothesise about above, would be massively more capable and intelligent than homo sapiens, so my hypothesis is that they would enslave us or eat us. There are plenty of us, so there would be no shortage of food for them and we would be easy pickings to such an intelligent species that could make the journey here. Mankind has completely dominated the animal world and mostly outside the milieu of David Attenburgh et. al. has farmed and enslaved most of the animal kingdom, or eaten it. Farms are huge breeding concentration camps where animals are enslaved and exploited. Another dimension of our foul conduct is that wherever human kind met a race of technologically, or culturally weaker people, we committed genocide to gain control of their resources, or we enslaved them. Look at how we treated the Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, or the Africans. No matter how advanced an alien species might be, it would require sustenance and it would likely need resources. So I suggest that if we did meet some advanced species, and it would as you imply be by definition extraordinarily advanced by comparison with ourselves, I think we might have a lot to worry about. I think the Dan Obannon and Ronald Shusset films in the Alien series probably have it about right in terms of the disposition of the aliens, if not their strange mechanical jaws and some other features. EDIT: This is of course a thought experiment only on the nature of possible alien beings. I have no fear that we will ever meet such beings or even have contact with them if they do exist. Our ending will I think be largely of our own doing through over populations, genetic manipulation of viruses, colossal warfare which results in environmental destruction, We don't in fact need any aliens to end our tenure on this planet. We will most likely do it ourselves.

You'll need to speak with my contact at the Tattie Bogle Express - Sean McFaggot. I sent him the image that I had enlarged and he enhanced it for me. He said that Alternative News had special abilities at enhancing stuff so I just believed him. I suppose you can find his number on Google.

It's real I tell you. After Grampian Police received reports that Nessy was floating, lifeless on the surface of the loch, they dispatched a team of underwater specialists to recover the object, and found it to be a genuine, giant turd, and not a monster at all. I have all this on good authority, because I got it from alternative media, and as you know, and have often said - this is always the best place to look if you want to find out what is 'really' happening. My contact at the 'Tattie Bogle Express, an Internet only news source favoured in the less well educated parts of Glasgow, and run out of a back bedroom in Govan, said: 'It was the biggest shyte seen anywhere in Scotland since Alex Salmond burst last year, while laughing about how he had made a monkey out of the Scottish justice system. Personally, I'd have thought he would have made a lot more than £500 out of his lawyering - but what do I know?

Scottish Water needs to get its act together and clean up that Loch. I enlarged that image on my digital microscope that I use for electronics and that image is a photo of a turd floating on the surface. OFWAT Scotland should be going after those scoundrels.

But your speculation is pure science fiction, isn't it? What we do know is that as we start trying to move actual mass (not photons) at anywhere near the speed of light, the energy required to do so does not increase at the square of the speed, as we might expect, but at vastly greater rates even heading towards infinite energy requirements. I got this nugget here from Gemini. I will quote it for you: "To get a single proton (an unimaginably tiny bit of mass) to that 99.9999991% mark, the LHC consumes about 120 Megawatts of power—enough to run a medium-sized city. If you wanted to move a 1-ton spaceship to even 90% of light speed, you would need more energy than the entire human race currently produces in a year." It seems to me that your confidence that some alien species may have 'cracked it', is nothing but wishful thinking and is not a serious proposition. Every wish or project we might imagine when in sci fi mode is not possible or practicable. There are very good reasons why not. Because you wish it so, does not mean that it ever can be if we could only discover the solution. Here is the rest of Gemini's answer to my request to explain why relativistic speeds are impossible: https://gemini.google.com/share/20791d17f885

I have written before about the extremely low likelihood of most of the trillions of planets in our galaxy being able to sustain life in any long term fashion. Three quarters of the stars in our galaxy are low mass red dwarf stars. These have a notorious characteristic of giving off gigantic flares on a very frequent basis. In many cases these temporarily double the radiation output of the star, and would make it very hard for life to tolerate the variability. Worse though, these flares would strip any nearby planet of its atmosphere. That would remove its water too. Planets are likely quite commonly born with oceans of water in the mix of material that accrues, but whether that can form oceans or not, depends on the pressure of an atmosphere - probably, around 1 bar of pressure is needed, just like ours. If it is less than that, water on the surface will evaporate even at low temperature, and if the star is an angry red dwarf - not very big; not very hot, but with a violent solar wind and flares, that water will be stripped away along with the atmosphere and blown away into space. Planets near enough to these very numerous red dwarf stars to allow water to be liquid, must be by definition very much closer to their star than earth is to the sun. These are low temperature dwarf stars and any planet warm enough for water not to freeze, would need to be close in. They are likely devoid of water in liquid form, so there is practically no chance that chemistry exists in a way that life could evolve out of chemistry in water. So that is three quarters of the stars in the galaxy ruled out for life. I have only mentioned one feature which rules out most stars, but there are more - and I don't have time right now to go there. Life itself will be extremely rare, and even though it may exist, it is very unlikely that it evolves beyond the state of slime and bacterial colonies. On our own, almost ideal planet, orbiting a very benign, long lived star, no animals of any complex sort - and I'm talking about worms and proto fish, emerged, until the last ninth of the planet's existence from formation until today. Out of four and a half thousand million years since Earth formed, although life existed from maybe 400 million years after the planet coalesced, no animal existed until the last five hundred million years, and our own species of smart apes only arrived in about the last 300 thousand years. The technology to send a detectable radio signal into space, or to launch a rocket into space, came around the 1950s - the last blink of an eye in reality. Don't get me started on the immensity of inter-stellar distances and the impossibility of meaningful space travel for a creature. As for unidentified visual phenomena, whatever they are, they are not aliens or their artefacts. If intelligent beings exist anywhere in our galaxy - they can't come here. If you investigate the scale of inter-stellar distances and the extraordinary breadth of our galaxy you will understand why. It takes light itself 100,000 years to cross the milky way from one side to another. Travel with our own technology to the nearest neighbourhood star to the sun would take between seventy-five thousand and eighty thousand years. A travelling alien would need a very very long lifespan and if he sent a robot, he would need to send an extraordinarily robust and long lived one - and why would he devote such a big resources to r=travel to the Earth when the journey would take almost a quarter of the time our species has existed? Cue sci fi fans like Woosh to tell me I don't understand quantum physics and that it is possible to accelerate matter to the speed of light. It isn't true. You can't. The energy required to bring actual matter to relativistic speeds is so immense that it is impossible to achieve and the forces applied would destroy any creature or its artefacts long before they got there.

I would not consider the remarks insulting though they are ad hominem and not addressing the issues he objects to. It would be far better to comment about what he thinks we got wrong. Woosh is correct in saying that Dave has contributed massively to the forum, because he is an acknowledged expert in analysing and fixing the problems with electric bikes, and he is also generous with his time, responding, usually patiently, to the often ill-described problems people bring to the forum. I have said so many times. Since he has felt able to freely express his criticism of me - and rudely - though I don't really care about that, and actually found the post funny, I will say this: Dave is an expert in electric bikes and some other things, but seems to think he is also an expert in most everything else too, and he patently is not. He is prone to believing in a variety of conspiracy theories and has often engaged with me in a quite assertive manner on topics he is uninformed about, such as radio communications and medical matters such as vaccines. To be fair, he is not alone in that, and we can forgive him for it. He is stubborn and opinionated, but so am I. I quite like him, though when he strays from his own area of expertise, I rarely agree with anything he says.

An interesting result for those who like to imagine little green men with technological civilisations.... Universe TodayWe've Been Listening for Ten Years. Here's What We HeardFor ten years, astronomers at UCLA have been pointing one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes at the stars and listening. Not for pulsars or gas clouds, or the hiss of the cosmic microwave b The big problem with SETI and listening to the radio spectrum, as a proof that we are not the only intelligent species in the universe, is that if an alien civilisation had pointed its own radio detection apparatus at the solar system and the Earth, even as recently as 1890, they would have had the same result that UCLA has had - no signals. Their conclusion, had they used our SETI criteria, would have been, 'There is no intelligent life there around that star.' What? The Victorians were not an intelligent civilisation? The Romans? Ancient Egypt? Mankind would have been undetectable using the SETI approach, really right up until about the 1920s with the advent of Long Wave radio stations, or perhaps later when high power transmissions from television stations got going and became commonplace. From the 1950s to the analogue switch off, the local TV transmitter around here, was blasting out half a megawatt of TV signal, pretty much 24/7, or at least from 6AM to midnight. There were around 80 of major transmitters operating in the UK around the year 2000, 45 of them at above 200 kilowatts. But that kind of radio emission was only operating at those levels for about 50 years and already, digital transmissions are at far lower energy and would consequently be much harder to find from far away. Will we still be using UHF to transmit TV in ten years time? I suspect not. WE will all be streaming TV on cable or low power 5g or some such method. So - I think the underlying methodology of SETI is interesting, but flawed. It assumes too much about what alien civilisations, if they exist at all, would do. It depends on a kind of technology that humans have only very recently adopted and operated and one which is likely to have a brief shelf life. The SETI approach is doomed to failure, absent some very lucky break, because the designers backed an outside chance that aliens would be just like we were in the twentieth century. Intelligent apes of our species have been here for maybe a quarter of a million years, and there were sophisticated civilisations for at least the last ten thousand years. A distant SETI programme looking this way, would have discovered none of them.

Who? Why? How?

The suggestion that Farage and Reform are some sort of analogue of Trump is just daft. Trump is a deranged, narcissist, and a megalomaniac, who is probably suffering from some form of dementia. His whole life has seen him spoiled and pandered to, by people who are afraid to argue with him. He is nothing like the leader of Reform and in any case, Farage could never have the unfettered power that Trump has. The USA is quite exceptional in allowing the degree of personal power that it does its president. Generally, they are rational people and take advice. There are numerous instances of past presidents actually deliberately seeking out challenging, alternative viewpoints, just to ensure that the right decision could be made. Trump of course, will have none of this, and has surrounded himself with pandering lickspittles, who simply flatter him, and do as he says. No British PM could ever have that much unchallenged power. In that, he is like Putin, who will not tolerate questioning of his deranged agenda. His team lie to him, disguising the failure of his policy. You suggest that Farage is like Trump. How exactly? He was born into a middle-class household and made money in commodity trading. I don't understand how anyone could make the comparison that you did. The two men are quite unalike in background and personality.

I am attempting, unsuccessfully to understand how you think. What possible connection to what I have said, leads you to think about Trump and Epstein and billionaires? I wrote about the failings of past Labour and Conservative governments - their delusions, their grotesque errors and their failure to pay attention to the problems and views of ordinary people. How do you conclude that this means I want sexually perverted billionaires and a deranged lunatic American President to take over? There are no such people running for government in the UK. There are no policies in manifestos which are remotely connected to such people or their views. The post you wrote is rather like that old chestnut, 'When did you stop beating your wife?'

Gilt Yields now at their highest since 1998. During the Truss debacle - credited by Labour as a complete disaster they rose to 4.7%. Borrowing costs in the UK soared. Labour accused her of, 'Breaking the UK economy'. Yesterday, under Labour, they rose to 5.02%. Thirty year Gilts are even higher. Since ten percent of government spending is paying interest on borrowing - THIS MATTERS. So what now? The UK under Labour has to pay more to borrow money than the Greeks.

... Did I ever tell you that from 1995 to about 2000, I was a member of the Labour Party? I was not active in politics, but after seeing the decline of the Conservatives at the end of the Thatcher government, I thought we needed serious change and I was (sadly) impressed by Blair's flair, and flourish, and thought he would do the right things. He didn't. Pretty soon he came up with the ludicrous ambition to send 50% of school leavers to University - without ever considering what they ought to study to make the economy fly. Masses and masses of them went to study soft subjects and 'ologies', that benefited no one - particularly not them. Then he started charging them fees. Over time, under different governments, these became massive. I had always taken the view that a country which does not invest in the education and training of its young is heading for decline, ignorance and ineffectual uselessness in economic terms, and on the world stage. Charging fees struck me as a terrible mistake. Worse still though was the fact that the policy was to be driven purely by what the young desired to take up. I thought that government needed to plan what the nations's needs were - what skills and talents the economy required. It needed to set targets for the numbers of places it ought to provide to deliver those skills, and that knowledge, and let competition among students fill those places, so that only the best, and most hard working, took up those places. That was how it was when I was 18. Disaster lay ahead. What happened was that universities opened their doors with a blank sheet, and ill-advised youngsters signed up in their hundreds of thousands, for courses that would benefit no one - not the individuals concerned, nor the economy at large. Worse still - the policy actually devalued technical and industrial skills. There was no consideration that what we needed more of, was highly trained apprentices, so that companies such as Rolls Royce, BAE systems, and a host of other high value, real world enterprises, could find the right young people who could be brought on to become experts in growing, thriving, and profitable enterprises. Of course companies such as the two that I mentioned, ran their own apprenticeships, but the numbers of talented young applying for such apprenticeships, collapsed across the manufacturing and industrial economy as a whole. This trend in the job aspirations of young people towards waste of time arts courses, just augmented the collapse of our manufacturing sector. We have a shortage of well qualified engineers, software developers and integrators of complex solutions, and at the same time, hordes of law graduates, psychology graduates, students of 'film studies', 'women's studies', forensic science (thousands more than can ever work in forensic science) and truly dreadful left wing grievance courses about 'the evils of empire', slavery', and other hobby horses of the hard left. I 'went big' there on my objections to Blair and Labour's policy on higher education, but it was only one of many terrible errors he and Labour made. Labour and I parted company pretty quickly. Our participation in the Iraq War, was a disaster brought on by Blair's hubris, and his deranged belief that God was guiding him. Then he made changes to our law and constitution, which have had awful consequences for our sovereignty, and for Parliament's ability to make law in the manifest interests of the people of this country. The Human Rights Act (which must be repealed ASAP) prevents any parliament from making any law that is not fully in alignment with the rules and judicial decisions, made by a foreign court. No new law can even be proposed, unless it fits entirely under the heel of those foreign judges. That is what the Human Rights Act says. Now - let me be clear - no one - and certainly not I, have any wish to deprive people of their human rights. The British in modern times, need no lessons in having respect for human rights. We lost half a million people in WW2, and bankrupted the country in defending human rights against murderous and truly 'fascist' regimes from Europe. I don't need to say more about the period when Europe was almost entirely under the jack boot of the German Reich, but we also saw other, rather less violent, but proper 'fascist' regimes, in Greece, until the 1970s, and in Spain, and in Portugal until about the same time. When I say 'fascist', I mean proper fascist regimes. I am not using the term in the way the modern hard left accuse any moderate conservative person, of being a fascist'. They are ignorant oafs, and only deserve to be ignored. They could not define fascism if you asked them to do so. They don't know what it is. We don't need a court in Stasbourg to ensure that the UK does not become a fascist state. We know about decency, and respect, and judging people on their character and behaviour, and not on colour, or religion, or gender, or age. It is what people do and what they believe in which makes them good or bad. We will still have human rights when the human rights act is repealed, and rewritten by a future government in OUR PARLIAMENT without regard to foreign courts and johnny come lately democracies. Gone will be the days when our elected governments are upbraided and denounced by a European court and told that it is illegal under European law to deport a child abusing foreigner, who has organised the rape of young girls on an industrial scale. We will no longer be told that he must stay in Britain 'because it goes against his right to family life to send him back to where he came from.' This ramble - and it is a ramble, just points out why I consider you are right to question the competence of government ministers in general. It does not only apply to Labour. We saw the disastrous incompetence and dishonesty of many Conservative ones - AND their contempt for the electorate when they promised a commitment to certain policies and then unforgivably went the opposite way. Suella Braverman when Home Secretary went to Sunac and demanded he do what he had promised and what he had stood for at the election - to cut inward migration to tens of thousands. He refused to support her and without his support, she was unable to do her job. She was soon fired by Sunac after she wrote an article pointing out that the Metropolitan Police were operating a biased policy against protests by people who were not left wing in their opinions. This country is probably in the worst state I have seen it since Labour was in charge in 1975 when inflation hit 28%.