THE NEED FOR TRACE EVIDENCE

“No experiences, ordinary, everyday, usual or unusual, whether impressions, ideas, dreams, visions or memories, strange, bizarre, familiar, weird, psychotic, or sane, are objective facts.”

R. D. Laing

This statement may seem hard and intransient but it has to be when attempting to prove a scientific concept. It lies at the heart of the scientific method. Science, like it or not, requires hard facts and solid evidence. The abundance of sightings, witness reports, and unexplained experiences on file with MUFON hold little weight with mainstream science because they can’t be repeated. This is certainly not limited to the UFO phenomena. Every radical concept has been greeted with skepticism. Consider the theory of continental drift. It was first proposed that the continents were constantly on the move when one man recognized that North and South America fit neatly into the coastline of Europe and Africa. Further there were animal species and geologic formations common to both. The idea that every continent was floating on a sea of magma rather than solidly rooted to the Earth was radical to say the least and the theory while occasionally mentioned was not considered valid. Then, in the sixties, several things happened. First the ocean floor was accurately mapped by sonar and satellite radar showing the expansion plates and hot spots necessary for a regular motion of the Earths surface. Then maps were published showing the sea floor that graphically illustrated the ongoing action of continental drift. Finally satellite measurement allowed us to track the actual movement of the Earth’s surface exactly as predicted by the theory. Today continental drift, now called plate tectonics, is the working theory for understanding and predicting earthquakes. Solid evidence and facts, prevail.

It isn’t always easy. When the exploration of Australia began reports of the platypus were dismissed as ridiculous. A specimen was found and subsequently mounted by a taxidermist, the usual method of the day, and sent to England. Ripley, of believe it or not, reported how the scientists who examined it attempted to disassemble it to prove how it was faked. It took a living specimen to lay the matter to rest. And this is the standard that must be met. Victorian science had been faced with plausible fakes and simple misidentifications for years. Genuine looking and obviously organic unicorn horns were presented as proof of the unicorns existence that later turned out to be the horns of the no less exotic narwhale. Later the skull of Piltdown man was accepted for decades as authentic later turning out to be a complete fraud.

It is for this reason that while we must continue to investigate witness reports and close encounters, the collection of trace evidence is vital to ultimately proving the existence of UFOs to the scientific community.

©2010 David A. Henninger

Quantum Communications Between Stars and Spacecraft

If you accept, as many of us do, that we are being visited by craft and machines of extraterrestrial origin, how then are they communicating among themselves and why, in spite of the best efforts of SETI, The Search for Extraterritorial Intelligence, have we not detected such communications? This kind of question has often been posed by skeptics. It is a legitimate question and deserves an answer beyond the simple statement that they are in some manner more scientifically advanced that we are. Now, new breakthroughs in quantum mechanics suggest an answer for this question and, at the same time, promise the greatest advances in computing and communications since the invention of the radio.

The argument that any communication used by extraterrestrial should be detectable come from the fact that, until last year, the only form of long distance communication over great distances that was understood by humanity was electromagnetic (EM) radiation, commonly known as radio and television. Limited by the speed of light, EM is poorly suited for communications beyond the confines of Earth. Communications with probes on other planets are delayed by several minutes, making it necessary for exploration devices such as Spirit and Opportunity on Mars to be completely self operating robots and communication with probes to other stars is impractical to impossible due to delays measured in years. This is all about to change. We now know of a theory of communication that will render EM - radio and television - completely obsolete.

The answer has been understood as an aspect of quantum mechanics since the Thirties. It is a principal called quantum entanglement. This is a property of sub-atomic particles with a common origin. Suppose a particle decays, as they constantly do, and emits two photons. These two photons are entangled. Whatever happens to one will happen to the other. In a sense, they are still the same photon in two places at once. They share the same state, wave or particle: they can be either or both. They have the same properties, spin, for example. Both are speeding away from each other at the speed of light. They could be light years apart, yet what happens to one will happen to the other. The important part is that it will happen at the same instant. There will be no delay for the information to get to one from the other at the speed of light or slower.

Suppose that you have the ability to use a laser to affect one of the photons. You want to change the photon to have an up spin. At the same instant, with no regard for the distance that may be between them, whether feet or light years, and with no delay at all, the other entangled particle will also have an up spin.

This seems impossible. In Einstein’s universe there seems to be no way for the second photon to change with out some carrier wave to take the information that it is supposed to change to it, a carrier wave that can go no faster than the speed of light the universal ultimate speed limit . But here we are not dealing with Einstein’s universe governed by his theory of relativity, the theory of the very large, space itself. We are dealing with quantum mechanics, the theory of the very small, atomic and subatomic particles.

When this was still documented only in theory, Albert Einstein used this argument as a point against quantum mechanics. The entire theory of quantum mechanics was invalidated, he said, since it predicted quantum entanglement and nothing could violate the speed of light. Einstein was wrong.

Quantum mechanics, the theory of the very small, is now a major part of our lives. Quantum mechanics makes your computers run, it makes your cell phone work, it allows you to listen to an Ipod and a multitude of other things now taken for granted in our world. Instantaneous communications over vast distances using quantum entanglement is only one small benefit and proof of quantum mechanics. Faster than light communications is not only possible it has been done.

Recently, two teams working independently, one at The National Institute of Standards and Technology at Boulder Colorado, the other at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, using slightly different methods to transmit information in zero time from one quantum entangled particle to another. (They don’t have to be photons.) The Boulder team was led by David Wineland, the Innsbruck team by Rainer Blatt. Both are experimental physicists who will undoubtedly be one day considered for the Nobel Prize. Each used lasers to affect a particle and that effect was duplicated in its sister entangled particle instantaneously.

This is only the first baby step in a complete revolution in computers and communications that will lead to the quantum computer and then to faster than light or, if you prefer, instantaneous communications. ---

Today’s computers are direct descendants of the ENIAC computer that filled warehouses and used vacuum tubes for on/off switches. All computers can only understand binary language. Everything in the computer, whether its math, word processing, spread sheets or Internet surfing is reduced to ones and zeros. A letter of the alphabet, for example, is expressed by a series of ones and zeros in a particular order. This was understood by the ENIAC by its vacuum tubes, off for zero and on for one. Huge and slow, ENIAC had valuable but limited uses. In modern computers, things work much faster, since all of those switches and many many more have been crammed into a chip an inch across, reducing the distance a signal has to go between switches by several orders of magnitude and vastly speeding up the computer. Otherwise modern computers work exactly the same in principal as the ancient ENIAC. But computers are still limited by the number of switches you can cram into a chip, a number that must have an ultimate limit: how fast an electron can travel through circuits within that chip. Supercomputers try to improve this by using super-chilled circuits to create superconductors. If a circuit is chilled to near absolute zero the resistance is lowered and the electron can go closer to the speed of light. But that still has its absolute limit. Now replace all of those switches with quantum-entangled particles. Suddenly computing time drops to zero. A computer can now function faster than the human brain. In terms of power, a single desktop computer can be more powerful than all of the computers and supercomputers in existence today. That alone would be enough to revolutionize society, but inevitably those computers are going to be connected just as computers are today. If a computer can have a few billion entangled particles of its own then it can also have a few billion entangled particles that it will share with its several thousand brothers. Now these quantum computers can communicate with each other instantaneously. If one of these computers can be taken on a space ship to another star, we will be able to speak with the ship with full sound and video over vast distances with no delay whatever for the speed of light, exactly as two people would converse in the same room. - like Captain Picard calling Star Fleet Command from Enderi Epsilon III.

When this technology comes online - we should see the first signs in about fifteen years -scientists will be able to control robot probes on other planets in real time, fighter pilots using control centers at bases in the United States can take part in dogfights while their planes are on the other side of the world - or the other side of another world, dangerous mining operations can be conducted by remote control regardless of the miles of rock between operator and machine. We could in fact mine the moon by remote control.

If all this will soon come to pass on our world, then isn’t it likely that other intelligences may have thought of it too? Isn’t it possible that quantum computing may be the basis of communications and operation of extraterrestrial craft if they exist? There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of reports of flying objects that perform maneuvers that would kill any human pilot. Perhaps no pilot was on board. Or rather the pilot was perhaps in a distant mother ship or safely on its home planet. Is it possible that the robot-like objects that have been reported disembarking form landed craft are the alien equivalent of our Mars Rovers, operated either remotely or by independent preprogrammed quantum computers?

There is an aspect to this that does not bode well for SETI. When a quantum-entangled computer communicates with another quantum entangled computer, there is no EM radiation, no carrier wave or any detectable connection between the machines at all. If you don’t have a machine that was part of the original network, you have no hope of eavesdropping at all or even detecting that such communications are taking place. Thousands of civilizations throughout the galaxy could be communicating with each other or with their machines or people on or around Earth and we will never know. Even when we develop this technology we will not detect their communications since we will not have machines that share their entangled particles. SETI -and for that matter the NSA - can close up shop. If we are to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization that communicates by quantum computer, we will have to do it face to face either on their turf or our own.

For the rest of us, this will be life-changing. In addition to the complete revolution on Earth, we can go to the stars. While we still don’t know how to travel faster than light, we do know how to go about half that fast and how to lengthen the human life span. A trip to another star will soon be equivalent to a voyage with Magellan or Columbus in their centuries. When our astronauts or our probes get there, they will communicate with Earth as easily as we speak now on the telephone. In light of this it becomes apparent that extraterrestrial spacecraft can cross vast distances without traveling faster than light. they could be robotic probes using quantum communication that needed to travel to our planet only once.

We thought of it. Why wouldn’t others?



©2010 David A. Henninger