Gods or Aliens

Ancient cultures across the world talk about beings descending from the skies. Such stories exist in India, China, Egypt, Americas, Europe etc. Almost in every culture there is description of these beings possessing mythical powers, who came to our planet and taught humans. Ancient texts in the above mentioned countries are full of such descriptions. The ancient man thought that the being whom he interacted with was the creator, the GOD.

In India there are stories of sages meditating on some God till the god appears in front of the sage, he then gets a boon or some psychic power from that being. The scriptures say that the city of Dwarka, that is now submerged under water in the Gulf of Kutch was built by a god named Vishwakarma. There is mention of weapons that resembled bows and arrows but when fired they would emit powerful thunder and laser beams.

Now the question obviously rises, who are these beings that descended from the sky and what were the things that the ancient man saw? We know very well that bows and arrows cannot generate thunder by themselves. So what was it? Was it some other weapon that only had an external appearance of the bow and arrow? The weapon could not have originated on earth since the ancient man did not have the scientific and technological knowledge to build such a weapon. 

Again who were the beings who appeared before the people who meditated on them? How did the other worldy beings know about them. The answer that comes to the mind is, the being was from a technologically advanced civilization, which did not have any origin on earth. In other words Aliens.

If we consider the amount of scientific knowledge and technological development that we have achieved in the last 200 years, we will find that the growth has been exponential and not linear. So if we extrapolate this graph over a million years, we come to a conclusion that our knowledge of science and advancement in technology would be so high that we cannot even imagine.

If there is an alien race that is only a million years more advanced than us, then they would have the levels of knowledge and technology that we associate only with Gods. Today we have the technology to detect gravitational waves, at LIGO, the researchers were able to detect collision of two super massive black holes, that happened 1.3 billion years ago - with the help of gravitational waves. 

Similarly it is very much possible that the advanced alien races might be able to read our thought waves. So what has appeared before humans as Shiva, Krishna, Jesus etc., may be some beings from this highly advanced civilizations. While almost every civilization talks about God, it is observed that the form of God seems to be different. 

It is possible that the extraterrestrials took the form of the beings that humans imagine. Humans have begun understanding the universe only a few hundred years ago since the discovery of telescope. Prior to that, it was thought that the earth was at the centre of the universe - the sun, moon and other stars revolved around it. Hence it is very much possible that the extraterrestrials did not reveal the truths about them because the ancient man won't understand or believe them. Alternatively it is possible that they did reveal the truth but the ancient man did not understand it at all. 

Today we are beings of planet earth, but with the development in science and technology, in the future, we would colonise other planets and at that time, we would be technologically advanced enough to change our physical forms to adapt to conditions in space and other planets. In the future we may have robotic implants that would make us super humans and make us powerful enough to survive in space and other planets. 

The extraterrestrial beings, whom we call gods probably had this capabilities, since they evolved a million years(or earlier) before us. Looking in to the context of evolution, a million years is not a big number, today when a dinosaur egg is found, its existence is normally dated in ranges like 70 to 80 million years or 100 to 120 million years. So one million years is a small number, but species that have human like intelligence can do mind boggling things in a small period of a million years.

It is said that Sri Ramakrishna Parmhamsa, while performing his penance to see God, came to stage where he decided to severe his head off, at that time he got the vision of what he called "The Divine Mother". It maybe possible that the penance might have been detected by some alien species and the vision of the so called Divine Mother was an effect of some alien technology. The knowledge he received might have come from some extraterrestrial sources.

Later when Ramakrishna met Narendranath Dutta(who later went on to become Swami Vivekananda) the various mythical experiences that Naren and his mates had was probably the work of aliens whom they misunderstood as God. 

So you see in this article I have not denied that unusual or so called mythical experiences documented by several people. However the explanation that I have given over here is on the basis of observances and possibilities.  

How Science and Technology can be a double edged sword

Science is a double edged sword. Science and technology opens up a wonderful world of opportunities to humanity. However the knowledge should be used wisely. Not only we require good scientific brains, who can do research, find new things about nature and use the knowledge to build gadgets and devices. We also require leaders with compassionate and sensitive hearts as well. 

Science and Technology has been used to make our lives better. However there is one negative side to it as well. The same knowledge that makes machinery and other sources of energy can be used to create massively powerful destructive weapons. 

The pre historic man, who lived in the caves used to fight with other tribes with his bare hands or used stones. As he started developing weapons - bow and arrows, swords, spears etc came into existence, which were more lethal. Once civilization came into existence countries started maintaining armies. They would attack each other from time to time to expand their borders. 

Then the technology of guns and cannons came into existence which made wars more destructive. Far greater number of people started dying in wars than earlier. However human greed for power knew no borders, the technology to build more powerful weapons kept improving. Wright Brothers invented the plane for humans to travel in air, however the same planes were used in the first world war to throw bombs on different countries. 

The First world War(1914-1918) created great scale of destruction and devastation. However at the end of the first world war, the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds of the second world war. It is because of the First World War that dictators like Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy came to power. 

The twenty year gap between the two world wars was just used to to upgrade weapons technology and prepare for the next war. The Second World War(1938-1945) was even more destructive. Millions of people lost their lives. The scale of devastation that happened in the Second World War was never seen before by humanity. Directly and indirectly over 80 million people lost their lives in the Second World War. 

The Second World War ended with US dropping the most powerful weapon mankind had built till then. USA bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two nuclear bombs named 'Little Boy' and 'Fatman' respectively. Never before in the history of mankind has such a powerful weapon been used. We thought the existence of such weapons were limited to the pages of mythology, but now we actually saw one being used. 

Little Boy Killed all 20,000 Japanese soldiers along with 50,000 other civilians. Around 70,000 more civilians were badly injured. At that time, the city of Hiroshima just had a population of only 330,000 people. Now consider this facts 'Little Boy' was a highly inefficient nuclear bomb. It carried 64 kg of Uranium but  around 1.7% of the Uranium contributed to the energy produced. 

The energy released was around 16 kilotons of TNT. This was 71 years ago, after that USA, Russia, China, France, UK, India and Pakistan have done nuclear tests of weapons that released far greater amounts of energy. The most powerful nuclear weapon was tested by Russia, 'The Tzar Bomba', the energy released by it was 50,000 kilotons of TNT  or in other words the bomb had the power of over 3125 atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima. 

While energy from fission and fusion promises to be great source of energy for humanity, if used in war nuclear energy will surely be the cause of end of humanity. We will be extinct, in the same way as dinosaurs became extinct from earth. 

Even after the second world war there was a race between capitalism and socialism, between democracy and communism. USA and USSR were competitors of each other. While USA was a democracy and a cradle of capitalism. USSR followed communism and socialism.

A situation of Cold War prevailed between the two countries. The two nations were developing their nuclear arsenals very fast. There were times when the two nations came close to being at war. The war itself would have devastated the world. 

Although the threat of Cold War veered off with the partition of USSR into Russia and other nations. The effects of animosity between the two superpowers of the world are felt even now.

When Russia invaded Afghanistan, USA supported Taliban. Taliban - Al Qaeda became a big terrorist organisation, that did terrorist attacks across the world including the 9/11 attacks on the New York, World Trade Center.

Taliban had actually seized power form the hands of the ruling government in Afghanistan and ruled Afghanistan for many years, they were a bunch of religious extremists who enforced strict medieval laws in the country. Women were forced to wear burkha, men had to keep a beard. Public killings were common in Afghanistan. 

After 9/11 USA attacked Afghanistan in search of Osama Bin Laden, they were able to liberate Afghanistan from Taliban's regime however even now terrorist attacks are very common in that country done by followers of Taliban. Afghanistan was once a very liberal Muslim nation, it is now one of the most backward and poor nation in the world. 

After the Korean War, Korea spilt into two parts - North Korea and South Korea. South Korea sided with democratic US. While North Korea went with communist Russia and China. In the 1950s, USSR trained North Korean nuclear scientists.

The result, North Korea, in spite of being the poorest nation in the world has managed to build nuclear weapons and has done around 4 nuclear tests since 2006. North Korea has been ruled by dictators. The North Korean public has no access to amenities that modern world enjoys. They don't have electricity, they don't have television, they don't have Internet. 

The are brainwashed into thinking that their leader is god and anything their leader says should be followed. The North Korean government has isolated its people from the rest of the world. If anyone does not do what their government orders, the person is killed. 

Not only this, North Korea has access the long range intercontinental ballistic missiles, which it has probably got from China. Nuclear weapons in the hands of such a crazy leader is a threat to entire humanity. 

One simply hopes that countries around the world work to neutralize the threat generated by these evil forces, so that humanity uses Science and Technology in a positive way. Knowledge should be used to make human lives better and happier not for war and destruction. 

Solar power - Growth in production

In the last 3 to 5 years the cost of production of solar energy has come at par with traditional sources of energy. It is the reason why we are now able to see the exponential rise in solar energy production across the globe. 

The world leader in solar power production is Germany. Germany has installed around 39 gigawatts of solar power. During the year 2010,2011 and 2012 -- Germany annually installed 7 Gigawatts of solar power per annum. 

However recent data indicates that China has just surpassed Germany with an installed solar power capacity of 43.2 gigawatts. In 2011 China added 2.5 GW, in 2012 5 GW, in 2013 9.5 GW, in 2014 10.56 GW and in 2015 15.13 GW of solar power capacity was installed in China. 

In India where the installed solar power capacity was only 160 MW in 2010, today we have over 5 GW of Solar Power. In the last one year approximately 2.5 GW of solar power installation has been done in India and this will go up. 

So since the time prices of solar panels came to a reasonable level, countries around the world including India are tapping into the the vast amounts of available solar energy. India in particular gets tremendous amount of sunlight and in the future will be one of the biggest producers of solar power. 

This above numbers tell us why the prices of crude oil has come down. India gets far greater amounts of sunlight than Germany. India should produce more solar power than Germany.With development of cheaper and better energy storage technologies like ultra capacitors, people would start moving off grid, they would generate their own electricity. 

Solar power can potentially save our planet from all the pollution that is generated by combustion of fossil fuels. One just hopes that the exponential growth in production of solar power and installation of solar power plants across the world continues, along with increase in utilization of more energy efficient electrical appliances. 

The future of space exploration

3D printers can make complex objects. In the future this technology will definitely improve, now let us imagine this, we have robot of the future which is capable of 3D printing and this robot which is way more intelligent than current robots, is able to 3D print its own replica. This robot is more intelligent than the robots we have today, the robots of the future are going to be self learning systems, they would learn from their own experience, just like us. 

So we launch a robotic spacecraft and the robot goes to a distant planet. With the materials available there it creates its replica. It designs and creates machines along with other newly made robots. This machines are able to extract resources from the planet like fuel, iron ore etc. The machines are used to build factories and more machines are made by the robots to build better processors and increase memory to upgrade themselves and build spacecraft to come back to earth. 

In the future it would be possible to have powerful robots like these that can bring an asteroid near the earth's orbit and set its orbit. They can build a factory in space that would produce different material sourced from asteroids and other planets. The will send us whatever products we need by producing them in those space factories. The source of energy for them would be solar power that they would harness from the sun. 

Robots are going to be our future exploration devices. Currently scientists in NASA are working on a technology that would use lasers to accelerate a spacecraft to very high speeds. The energy that is produced from solar energy is used to create the laser beams that would the be focused on a sail of the spacecraft. 

Each photon that bounces off the sail would impart some momentum to spacecraft. When a very huge number of them bounce off the the sail a significant amount of acceleration is generated. When the spacecraft is accelerated over great lengths of time very high speeds can be generated. 

According to NASA scientist Philip Lubin the spacecraft can go as fast as 30% of the speed of light.  He says that with this technology a 100 kilo spacecraft will reach Mars in 3 days. This technology will also cut the propellant requirement. Currently a space launch vehicle's mass at launch time is 70% propellant. Propellant not only comprises of fuel but it also has oxidiser since there is no oxygen in space. 

So it is clear that in the future better propulsion technology along with robotonics, artificial intelligence, faster data transfer and 3D printing will determine our future of space exploration.

With these technologies it would be possible for us to build planets that would have the same rotational path of earth, the raw materials for the planets will be sourced by these robots from astreiods and other distant planets, these planets will be new homes for humans in the future. The only thing we need to make sure is that we should not let robots take over us. 

Human Evolution

Human beings are intelligent thinking beings. Our brains have evolved our millions of years of evolution. Life evolved on earth beginning from a single cell organism to complex organisms like us. When we use the term complex organism it does not necessarily mean biggest in term of physical size. The largest organisms ever to walk on this planet were dinosaurs that were as heavy as 60 to 100 tonnes and measured over 50 meters in length. In terms of size we are 1000 times smaller than them.

However their brains were much smaller than us. They were nowhere near our level of mental development. No other animal comes even close to human beings when it comes to the ability to think, create, imagine, design, feel, express etc. No other animals makes tools for themselves except the humans. 

Humans have evolved rapidly. Just around 10,000 years ago most humans used to live in jungle and they would hunt animals to feed themselves. At that time the tools they had were weapons made of stone and wood. With the rapidly developing brain they discovered that by sowing seeds of plants in the ground they can make the plants grow at places they want. This reduced human dependence on hunting for food and human beings started agriculture. 

As they practised agriculture they started sowing the best seeds that they can find. Selective breeding is responsible for many of the food stuff that we eat today, you can go to this link and find how some of the commonly used grains, vegetable and fruits looked a few centuries ago and how selective breeding done by us has changed them. 

From building simple tools for self usage, humans developed more complex tools. Beginning with simple machines humans were able to develop more and more complex machines that would run on power provided by humans or animals. Then later on windmill and waterwheel were made, which ran on wind and flowing water. 

After that development in science and technology led to discovery of the power of steam and humans started using steam, it was made by boiling water using coal. Steam was used to drive different machinery and locomotives. After that electricity was discovered and it was generated in enough quantity to power homes and industry, the steam engines were replaced by machinery running on electricity.

Similarly giant advances were made in electronics, computer science and information technology. This lead to entire world being better connected. Just 20 years ago one had to rely on letter to communicate with people living overseas. Land line telephones were there but call rates back then were prohibitively expensive. Today thanks to the internet people living on any part of the globe can instantly communicate with each other using various free video conferencing services available on the internet. It costs nothing except one needs to pay his monthly broadband bill.

Human intelligence is constantly expanding and it is expanding at a very fast rate. The rate of innovation and invention has gone up. For humans evolution is not about physical growth, it is not about becoming dinosaurs or becoming bigger than dinosaurs. But if you observe human behaviour it is always guided by his curiosity in nature. Our desire to know about the various aspects of nature leads to discoveries. It also leads to increase in knowledge and using this knowledge we are able to make different tools, vehicles, machines etc. 

Above all animals humans have this quest of knowledge that makes him stand apart from all other animals on earth. In the future humans will be the first and only organisms from planet earth that would make homes in other planets. Maybe by then we would have developed technology to genetically modify ourselves to beings who can exist in any condition. 

Human knowledge and innovation can do things that one can't even imagine.

Number Systems

Decimal Numbers

In practice we use a number system called decimal number system. In the decimal number system there are 10 numbers that we use 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Using this ten numbers we can show any decimal value that we want to. Consider the number 251, we can describe it as
251= 2X(10^2)+5X(10^1)+1X(10^0) =(2X100)+(5X10)+10X1=200+50+1



So you can see that as we move from right to left in a number, for each position the power increases by one. Let us consider a few more examples
62= (6X10^2)+(2X10^0)=60+2
7821=7X(10^3)+8X(10^2)+2X(10^1)+(1X10^0)=7000+800=20+1.

Other number systems

In addition to the decimal number system there can be multiple different types of number system depending on number of literals that we want to use to describe a number.

In the hexadecimal number system in addition to the then literals 0...9 we also use the literals a,b,c,d,e,f. For the decimal number system this numbers correspond to a=10, b=11, c=12, d=13, e=14, f=15.

So (f)16=(15)10

If we want to convert a hexadecimal number to a decimal number, the method we need to follow is this:-

Consider and hexadecimal number (f2a)16 . Now let us convert this number into a decimal number

aX16^0+2X16^1+fX16^2

Now we know that a=10 and f=15. Hence the above equation becomes:

10X1+2X16+15X256=10+32+3840=3882.

Now to convert 3882 back to its hexadecimal form this what we will do.

16)3882(242

32

68

64

42

32

10

Reminder 10=f

16)242(15

240

2

Reminder 2

16)15(0

00

15

reminder 15=f

so the hexadecimal number become (f2a)16

In this way we can create any number system that we want to. We can even use an octadecimal number system by just increasing two more number, we can denote them as g and h, where g=16 and h=17.

Computers that we use today process the numbers as binary digits 0 or 1.

The decimal 5 is expressed as 101. Similarly (7)10=(111)2

Suppose there is a binary number 11001, this is how we find its decimal value.

We will move from right to left and keep increasing the power of 2 for each position. So

11001=1X2^0+0X2^1+0X2^2+1X2^3+1X2^4=1+0+0+8+16=25.

(11001)2=(25)10

Pycrete

If you live in a location where you have lots of ice all year round then you can try mixing water with sawdust and then freeze the mixture. The proportion should be 86% water by weight and 14% sawdust by weight. Which means that if you want 1 kg of the mixture you need to mix 140 grams of sawdust with 860 grams of water. When the mixture freezes the product you will get is almost as hard as concrete, it is called Pycrete. 

Pycrete is much harder than ice and it melts much slower than ice. On a hot summer day 1 cubic foot ice can melt into water in an hour. However a block of pycrete of equivalent size will take many days to melt.

It also takes more time to freeze the water and sawdust mixture to make Pycrete. The reason why Pycrete melts slowly and also why pycrete forms at a slower rate as compared to ice  is due to presence of wood particles, wood is a bad conductor of heat. In parts of the world where there is snow all around the year, people can use structures created out of Pycrete.

If we want to create man made structures in Antarctica, we can very well use Pycrete to create replicas of structures like Taj Mahal, Pyramids, Sphinx, White House etc out of Pycrete, since the temperature in Antarctica always remains below freezing point this structures will never melt. 

In Antarctica people can replace ice with Pycrete to build igloos. Their homes will be stronger because Pycrete is stronger as compared to ice. 

Pycrete was named after Geoffrey Pyke, an English journalist and an inventor. During the second world war he and his team discovered the properties of a frozen mixture of water and sawdust. He wanted to build a giant aircraft carrier out of pycrete, however the project never took off.