UFO

One of the great unsolved mysteries of LOST is the Island.

Some believe that the Island was its own character. That it may have been a supernatural being in its own right - - - so foreign to modern humans as to be "magic."

Others have tried to rationally explain the Island.

We know of few facts about the island:

1. It can move. During Faraday's rocket test, it was shown that the island was moving away from the ship. A real island cannot move across the ocean.

2. It had special light properties. When Faraday landed on the island, he remarked that the light was strange, that it may be bent. One of the theories of stealth technology is that the bending of light and reflection could cause an object to "disappear" to the naked eye. When the helicopter left the doomed freighter, Jack and those on the copter saw the island vanish without an ocean ripple.

3. It has unique electromagnetic properties. The Swan station was created to try to manage the EM properties so the island would remain in balance. When it was not in balance, the large purple flash would occur sending the island out of phase with time or space.

If you tie all three of these facts together you can come up with a plausible theory.

The island was a UFO.

Since earth islands are volcanic mountains that begin at the base of the ocean to crest above the water line, they do not move. Therefore, the Island is not an island.

Electromagnetic energy can be used as propulsion system. Several countries have been using technology to support monorail trains riding on a cushion of magnetism. The movement of the Island could be made as a result of the electromagnetism. This means that the Island has a powerful engine, probably underground in the forbidden zone, which allows the guardian to pilot the island to safety.

Stealth technology is also researching the use of bending light waves to mask radar patterns. Magicians use mirrors to make things disappear by light wave cancellation techniques. In a larger scale, the Island could mask itself by using EM energy to "bend" light waves to make the island disappear.

So what would be the purpose of a space alien having a stealth UFO in the Pacific Ocean?

Just as in other sci-fi shows like Star Trek, advanced space travelers would often create "observational posts" on primitive planets to gather data on the inhabitants, cultures and technology. A UFO disguised as an uncharted island would provide cover for any human wandering to it.

Further, mere observation could lead to more advanced testing and experimentation on humans. It was said that the guardian was the only person who could bring people to the island. The guardian must have been the captain of the ship. What better way to observe how humans interact than putting them in a survival situation on a dangerous island?

What would space aliens gain from such encounters? Information on human behavior, science experiments including DNA enhancement, mind control tests and possible allies in the off-island world. Wealthy people like Widmore may have been recruited by the Island aliens to obtain information that they could use (especially in defense technologies). The aliens could have given Widmore technology to make him rich, and in turn Widmore used his wealth and power to provide the Island with any resources it needed to survive, mostly human subjects.

UFO researchers believe that since the atomic age, at least 60 different space aliens have visited Earth and have been in contact with national governments. It may be too difficult for isolated ships to "conquer" the planet. But it probably easier to infiltrate world governments if aliens are after the planet's resources, such as gold which many scientists believe is a key element in deep space travel.

The UFO theory in LOST also answers the question about the long life of Jacob - - - he was not a human being. The smoke monster was not a human being. The aliens tried to breed human-alien hybrids on the island but those experiments failed (and why Juliet was summoned to the island). Space aliens could colonize Earth by interspecies procreation which would take human elements (compatible with Earth's environment) with the longevity of the alien races.

The UFO theory also can support the reason why Jacob and MIB wanted to "leave" the Island - - - they were so far away from their home planet their mission was a death sentence. They would rather die and end their existence than deal with the "never changing," corrupt and primitive humans.

Finally, with the real aliens gone, the Island ship would have been scuttled - - - which would explain the images of the Island resting on the ocean floor.

The Island as a UFO has some merit as being a plausible premise to the series.

DARK MATTER MODEL

Science wants to have unified answers to the Big Questions. So did LOST viewers.


A new physics model of the universe, formulated by Guillermo Ballestros at the University of Paris-Saclay in France and his colleagues, may be the answer to  explain dark matter, neutrino oscillations, baryogenesis, inflation and the strong CP problem.


Dubbed SMASH, the model is based on the standard model of particle physics, but has a few bits tacked on. The standard model is a collection of particles and forces that describes the building blocks of the universe. Although it has passed every test thrown at it, it can’t explain some phenomena.


For example,  science does not understand dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 84 per cent of the universe’s mass. Nor why there is more matter than antimatter. Nor why the universe grew so rapidly in its youth during a period known as "inflation."  

Something is still fundamentally missing from the standard model. Scientists think they new "new" particles to help balance or explain the formulas.


Some models, like supersymmetry,  add hundreds of particles – none of which have been spotted at colliders like the LHC. But SMASH adds only six: three neutrinos, a fermion and a field that includes two particles.

SMASH is several theories smashed together. It builds on Shaposhnikov’s model from 2005, which added three neutrinos to the three already known in order to solve four fundamental problems in physics: dark matter, inflation, some questions about the nature of neutrinos, and the origins of matter.
SMASH adds a new field to explain some of those problems a little differently. This field includes two particles: the axion, a dark horse candidate for dark matter, and the inflaton, the particle behind inflation.


As a final flourish, SMASH uses the field to introduce the solution to a fifth puzzle: the strong CP problem, which helps explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.

Why is this important? Curiosity about the heavens has been the main focal point of humanity from the very beginning. Our first ancestors looked up to the sky and wondered what it was. The sun and the moon orbits fascinated people. They used the sky to help organize their lives to correspond to the seasons. Some sociologists believe that the questions about nature helped develop mankind's brain function to be the planet's alpha species. 


To unlock the building blocks of the universe may be the key to understanding everything: what causes cancer, why humans have a limited life span, what elements of the universe are or are not on Earth?


As these questions continue to puzzle science, they are also used by writers to speculate on how the lack of knowledge can be captured into dramatic prose. The "what if" premise of film and television shows stokes the curiosity of the viewer. If there is a real sci-fi backbone in the stories, it can mentor people to find scientific careers (as many NASA employees admit Star Trek did for them.)


LOST had an opportunity to inspire a new generation to science if it captured the essence of any new theory about the universe in its mythological story foundation. But it did not. It still remains a disappointing lapse by the show runners. These new scientific theories could have helped explain the time/space tangents, the strange EM radiation and the Numbers used in the Hatch.

WE ARE ALONE, FOR NOW

The Washington Post recently had a story about a question that humans have pondered forever: where are the other intelligent beings in the universe?

Italian physicist Enrico Fermi once famously exclaimed "Where is everybody!" “Scientists have been trying to answer his question with this logic: we exist, so aliens should exist too.

According to one new solution, we have not seen or heard from any galactic neighbors because we are still waiting for them to be born. And it will, according to the calculations, be a long time before we can throw other solar systems a baby shower. If you grade earthlings on a cosmic curve, as recently hashed out by Harvard and Oxford University astrophysicists, we’re at the head of the class.

And this done make some common sense. In school, we learned the basics about our universe. And we were told about the Big Bang Theory, that the center of the known universe exploded outward to form all the mineral, chemical and cosmic properties (galaxies, stars, comets, etc.) Earth sits at the outer edge of the center of the universe. When science has been trying to find other life, they direct their telescopes and listening devices towards the center. But should not they be pointing them at the sides of the Earth's outer edge - - - to systems as old as our solar system?

A new study published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics calculated the probability that life as we know it should exist at any given point in the universe. Based on their assumptions, Earthly life is quite likely premature.

By the standards of the universe, humans are some of the earliest intelligent life around. You may have heard of ancient aliens on basic cable television. But, according to cosmic probability, the ancient aliens are us.

For life as we know it to arise, organisms require three things: carbon-based chemistry, liquid water and an energy source. The most crucial source of all three requirements is a star. Stars  fuse protons and electrons into carbon and other elements; stars heat up water in the so-called habitable zone and stars provide a steady sunny stream of radiation. Scientists scan the solar systems to find the right combination of star, planet distance and likelihood of water to see if it possible for organic life.

Stars play such an important role in our understanding of life that they dominate the researchers’ equation. The scientists’ timeline begins about 30 million years after the Big Bang happened, which as far as we can tell was 13.8 billion years ago. Their timeline ends far in the future due to the long-lasting red dwarf stars, which have lengthy wicks that burn for roughly 10 trillion years. (A yellow dwarf, by comparison, has a only 10 billion years of fuel.

Crucially, what red dwarf stars also have going for them is strength in numbers. The Milky Way is filled with red dwarfs. About three-quarters of all the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs.

Our sun is not a red dwarf. It is a rarer thing, a yellow dwarf, a star 10 times more massive but one that will flare out much sooner. That we exist around a yellow dwarf, per the scientists’ equation, makes us the true space oddities.

So if Earth humans are the only intelligent life in the universe, why did our ancient ancestors almost universally say that the planet was seeded by alien beings? Why do most religions believe in a creation story of extraworldly gods and angels creating mankind? 

It could be the natural curiosity hard wired into the human brain - - - ancient humans looking up at the stars in the sky may have asked the same question as Fermi. We cannot be alone in the vastness of space.

Human beings also have a sense and need to belong to a bigger group, a family and a community. At a planetary level, that need stills exists. Ancient ancestors were wandering nomads scraping by a subsistence existence. They were one with nature and nature was bigger than them. And when small bands of people found other people in their journeys, it solidified the notion that they were not alone in this world. Communication and trade of ideas and beliefs would reinforce the global notion that there has to be life in the magical stars.

Scientists are still searching for confirmation of that magic in the stars.

MAKING WAVES

For the second time this year, scientists have found evidence of gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the curvature of spacetime  that propagate as waves. generated in certain gravitational interactions and traveling outward from their source. The possibility of gravitational waves was discussed in 1893 by Heaviside  using the analogy between the inverse-square law in gravitation and electricity.

Albert Einstein based  his theory of general relativity on gravitational waves transporting energy as gravitational radiation. In  his theory , gravity is treated as a phenomenon resulting from the curvature of spacetime. This curvature is caused by the presence of  mass.  Generally, the more mass that is contained within a given volume of space, the greater the curvature of spacetime will be at the boundary of its volume. As objects with mass move around in spacetime, the curvature changes to reflect the changed locations of those objects. In certain circumstances, accelerating objects generate changes in this curvature, which propagate outwards at the speed of light in a wave-like manner. These propagating phenomena are known as gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves cannot exist in the Newtonian theory of gravitation since Newtonian theory postulates that physical interactions propagate at infinite speed.

Astronomers which aims to use gravitational waves to collect observational data about objects such as neutron stars and black holes to supernova events to help explain the universe and the Big Bang Theory. 

Understanding these concepts is important in figuring out if humans can leave Earth to make deep space explorations. In science fiction writings, the universe is so large it is impossible to travel long distances during a normal human life time. By bending the known rules, writers have given the prospect of space travel by bending time and space ("warp drive") to bounce around the vastness of space like driving cross country with an Interstate Highway map.

This adds to the discussion of whether time itself is linear. We currently perceive time as linear because our calendars and clocks march forward along a single line of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. But ancient people did not see time as linear, but as a cycle of spring, summer, fall and winter as based upon the rotation of objects in the sky.

For a space traveler, the concept of time and distance is important. The universe is expanding which means there are great forces pushing everything outward. It is up to us to figure out how to tap this unseen and unknown force to break the known boundaries of physics.

In physics, Acceleration  is the rate of change of velocity of an object. An object's acceleration is the net result of any and all forces  acting on the object, as described by Newton's Second Law.  The second law states that the rate of change of momentum of a body, is directly proportional to the force applied and this change in momentum takes place in the direction of the applied force.

If gravitational waves are forces that ripple across the universe, those forces can be used to help propel objects in space. For example, if one is in the ocean, waves created by the force of currents, push any surface objects toward the shoreline at variable speeds depending upon atmospheric conditions (such as wind velocity). A surfer rides the wave at the same speed of the wave. But if the surfer adds to his own speed (such as adding a wind sail or a power prop to the board), he could go faster than the actual wave he is riding.

In theory, if one can ride a gravitational wave in space, you can use it to propel your rocket faster because you are adding more applied force than the rocket produces on its own. And if gravitational waves are moving at light speed, then adding any additional force to it could mean you can propel an object at greater than light speed (the key to interstellar travel).

Scientists wonder if black holes, star degradation or supernova events that expel mass into the universe have some corresponding effect on gravity and other unknown elements in space (such as dark matter or dark energy).

When Daniel arrived on the island, he noticed that the light acted differently and time did not sync with the freighter several miles off shore. The light may have had a ripple effect such as to disclose that the island was riding a gravitational wave away from the ship. This anomaly in nature could have been a great power source or portal across the spacetime universe. And that was the reason why Widmore and Linus were fighting for its control.

What was under the Hatch could have been a complex tied to the island's electromagnetic energy that could have created gravitational waves since the island itself was accelerating away from known objects in the same ocean space. The ripple in spacetime by using gravitational waves would phase the island out-of-sync with normal objects - - - in a way to make the island disappear because its gravity and mass would be different than Earth's. If true, the ramifications would have changed how man would fight future wars or explore space.

SIMULATION

One premise of LOST was that it was only a simulation of reality.

It could have been a video adventure game with the characters being avatars.
It could have been an interconnected dream experiment.
It could have been a mock mental warfare simulation by Dharma and the U.S. Military.
It could have been an imaginary dream of a coma patient.

Or it could be our reality which itself is not real.

Scientists work to find out how our world actually works.
Recently at the American Museum of Natural History, scientists debated whether or not the universe is a simulation. The answers from some panelists may be more comforting than the responses of others.

Physicist Lisa Randall said she thought the odds that the universe is not "real" are so low as to be "effectively zero."

But on the other hand, celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was hosting the debate, said that he thinks the likelihood of the universe being a simulation "may be very high."

The question of whether or not we know that our universe is real has vexed thinkers going far back into history, long before Descartes made his famous "I think therefore I am" statement. The same question has been explored in modern science fiction films like "The Matrix" and David Cronenber's "eXistenZ."

But most physicists and philosophers agree that it is impossible to prove that we don't live in a simulation and that the universe is real. Tyson agreed, but said he would not be surprised if we were to find out somehow that someone else is responsible for our universe.

If someone else is responsible for our universe, then we would call those persons or things gods.

In any higher order planetary relationships, the most intelligent, strong, technological and adaptable species are the alpha species who can assert their will on the rest of the known world. In human evolution, mankind had to have come to the realization that it was the alpha species. But instead of adopting a self-sufficient, own legacy approach to species self-esteem, ancient and disconnected cultures adopted religion and worship of superior beings as being responsible for their own self-awareness and life cycles.

Some could argue that religion is a pagan belief system because they did not have the means to investigate their true world. Except, that ancient cultures did have the brain power to solve and predict thousand years of  astronomical cycles with the accuracy of our current atomic clocks. Ancient people were more well versed in nature and the effect of cycles on human existence. They were the first to understand and to ponder the question of whether we are alone in the universe.

Ancient Egyptians constructed the pyramids in 20 years. Our modern technology cannot replicate that feat. Generally, the public does not think ancients were very advanced in their thinking. But they pondered the same "big" questions we do today.

TWO LOSTS

There is a position in the LOST universe that says that the fans who hated The Ending never understood it. Or that they were never real fans of the show. Or they expected too many answers to the questions posed in the story lines.

In order to justify this viewpoint, it is said that the final season of LOST was its own universe, its own independent story - - - its own self-contained bubble. It's features and attributes do not reflect what was happening in the island world. In other words, the fact that the characters in the sideways world were dead did not mean that the characters were dead all along. But that in itself is only a supposition.

Except, there were connections between the two worlds. In the sideways world, it was a character's "awakening" that flooded back island memories to re-bond with lost friends and lovers.

But if you do want to separate LOST into two distinct, independent stories, here is what you get:

THE ISLAND world would apparently have ended with Juliet detonating the bomb, killing everyone on the island. Or, as the science would tell, you can't detonate an atomic bomb with a rock (there needs to be a complex chain reaction explosion to detonate a nuclear device), so the bomb did not work. That would mean the island characters were still "alive" and battling among themselves in the Jacob-MIB feud.

THE SIDEWAYS world would be totally different. For example, none of the characters were ever in a plane crash or lived on the island. They were normal people with normal problems. Ben was a school teacher taking care of his disabled father. Locke was a disabled substitute teacher who was happily married to Helen. Jack was divorced but from Juliet. He had a son. Hurley was a successful businessman after winning the lottery; a confident community leader. Sun and Jin had made it to the US. She was expecting their child.

Now, complete separation of the characters time lines has to be part of any independent universe view. In the linear story telling of the show, the sideways events happened AFTER the island events. And that creates a clear paradox. The children were born in the prior island time, but were not born in the sideways world until the end. And the End was a place of death so how can children be born in the sideways world? Again, the theory that the sideways is self-contained means it is not fair to ask that broad question.

Then you have to look at LOST as two franchises. The island and first 5 seasons were the original. The sideways episodes were the "re-boot" of the franchise (as JJ Abrams did with Star Trek). But that seems too confusing and inconsistent with what the show writers were telling fans at the end of Season 5.

One could divide the worlds into one where the gritty danger of real life engulfs a person with one where a person's dreams and imagination of a perfect life controls. If you take the sideways world as the collective dreams of the island characters, folding it like whipped cream into a cake batter, then you would discount Season 6 as mainly unimportant filler.

If, as some fans thought at the time, the sideways world was truly a glimpse of the characters if Flight 815 did not crash, then that would be fine . . . . until the point when the writers merged the fantasy with the island "awakenings" and the poor choices to conclude the series, such as Sayid embracing his alleged soul mate, Shannon, instead of Nadia. In fact, the whole structure of Season 6 was premised upon Eloise trying to keep Desmond and Penny a part in the sideways world - - - because she knew it would open a Pandora's box of memories to the characters which would cause her son, Daniel, to remember how cruel she was to him.

The two LOSTs explanation is one way of looking at the series. Two distinct character studies of the cast members. But that is a dry, academic explanation. And really unnecessary. If you wanted to show the good and moral side of a character, such as Ben, you could have made those changes in the island world story. You could have had the characters leave the island and try to adapt to LA instead of creating a conflicting, parallel universe.

LOST was one show and one series. It has to be accepted as being one, complete, and coherent story. The last part is what continues to cause fans the most problems. The blanket explanation that the show was only about the characters and their actions and reactions to events is shotgun logic. It does not explain the important mysteries the writers gave us to solve. It does not give closure. It just keeps fans debating the merits of the ending.

SCIENCE FAILS WHAT WE TRULY KNOW

"What do we know about the universe?" asked astronomer Bob Berman to a crowded room at IdeaFestival 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky. "Why aren't the answers satisfying? Where do they go wrong?"

There's a lot of hard and fast data, he says, but it doesn't always give us the right answers. "It's important to know when science is working," said Berman, "and when it's not."

Berman offered four reasons that our scientific approach to understanding the universe doesn't work, and what we can do about it, according to a Yahoo article:

1. Limited data--Most of the universe is dark energy and the rest is dark matter--and we don't know what that is, said Berman. "We only know what's in our vicinity."

2. Limits to our dualistic logic system--There are two ways we get information, Berman said. Directly and indirectly. In science, the indirect method can work sometimes. But not for everything. "Unless you experience love," Berman said, "you won't know what it is. If you're blind, you won't know the color blue. You need experience. And when it comes to the universe, we run out of symbols." The universe is growing larger, he said, "but what does that mean? We can't picture infinity."

3. Space/time framework--"Space actually is not real," said Berman. "We all have an image of space and time, a framework, but when we look, that space and time may have a questionable reality." Of time, Berman said it's also not real. It's merely "an ordering system that we animals created. And it changes."

4. Consciousness--"Consciousness is the greatest unsolved problem in all of science," said Berman. "In every experiment, we're seeing, thinking, concluding--and it happens in our consciousness. Experiments go differently if we measure them and how we measure them. Where we measure makes a difference. It depends on us as observers." And while we "continue to study the brain and how it works, this doesn't answer the question of human experience," said Berman.

Berman believes that science is not approaching the universe from the right angle. We continue to study the Big Bang, he said, but it "doesn't compute with us. In our everyday lives we don't see puppies and lawn furniture popping out of nothingness. A universe out of nothingness? How could that be? How could we possibly know what things were like before the universe was the size of a grapenut?" And even if we pin down the Big Bang, we still can't comprehend the infiniteness of the universe, he said. "We are representatives of the universe. We have the universe inside of us."

"We are representatives of the universe. We have the universe inside of us. We're working on the assumption that studying the parts will give us the whole," Berman said. "That may not be true."

So what's the answer? "If our thought process doesn't work with the macro-universe," Berman said, "the answers don't make sense. It means we're asking the wrong questions."

In terms of what we can ever know about the universe, "we're not really making progress," Berman said. "We're not knowing more and more."

The secret, he said, might lie in recognizing that the thing we are looking for is obvious rather than hidden; present rather than absent.

WHOLE WORLD SIMULATION PART THREE

MNN.com reports that scientists have been baffled by a new cosmic discovery.

The sheer size of our universe is just about unfathomable, so you can imagine the surprise that researchers must have experienced when they recently discovered a structure within our known universe that measures 5 billion light years across. That's more than one-ninth the size of the entire observable universe, and by far the largest structure ever discovered by Earth scientists.

The mysterious structure is so colossal that it could shatter our current understanding of how the universe operates in size and shape.

“If we are right, this structure contradicts the current models of the universe,” said Lajos Balazs, lead author on the paper. “It was a huge surprise to find something this big – and we still don’t quite understand how it came to exist at all.”

Just what is this massive structure? It's not a single, physical object, but rather a cluster of nine massive galaxies bound together gravitationally, much like how our Milky Way is part of a cluster of galaxies. It was discovered after researchers identified a ring of nine gamma ray bursts (GRBs) that appeared to be at very similar distances from us, each around 7 billion light years away.

GRBs are the brightest electromagnetic events known to occur in the universe, caused by a supernova. Their detection typically indicates the presence of a galaxy, so all of the GRBs in this ring are believed to each come from a different galaxy. But their close proximity to one another suggests that these galaxies must be linked together. There is only a 1 in 20,000 probability of the GRBs being in this distribution by chance.

A mega-cluster of this size shouldn't be possible, at least not if you think in terms of our current theories. Those theories predict that the universe ought to be relatively uniform on the largest scales, meaning that the sizes of structures shouldn't vary by much. In fact, the theoretical limit to structure size has been calculated at around 1.2 billion light years across.

If the Hungarian-American team's calculations are correct, then this giant new structure-- which measures in at over 5 billion light years across — would blow that classic model out of the water. In fact, either the researchers' calculations are wrong on this, or scientists will need to radically revise their theories on the evolution of the cosmos.

 This discovery  reminds us just how small our view of the universe really is and what it contains.

One can apply this new discovery to our recent discussion of our world being a simulation from higher species far, far, far away in space. If we are allowed to break through the fourth wall of our current illusion to find the reality of our existence, then this massive GRB, an electromagnetic event, could be the "projector" of all we know, understand and feel in our lives.

As Daniel observed, the electromagnetics of the island were "off."  He could not explain it, but perhaps this was the focal point for the data stream from outside our world. In essence, the island would be the "router" of the illusion we call reality through our world. The light source is our planetary projector which provides us with all the elements of life.

But why would a higher intelligence beam an illusion to Earth? Perhaps, it is a method of augmented reality - - - overlaying additional information inside the heads of lower species. Whether that augmentation is supposed to help raise the consciousness of mankind or hinder its progress is a debate for another day. But it does fit into the notion that human beings, as biochemical computers, could be constantly fed "firmware" updates from their programmers (creators).