No, Aliens Have Not Been To Earth

We're still not sure about these facts, but our Milky Way Galaxy contains around a trillion stars, and there are estimated to be a trillion galaxies in our Universe. Doing a bit of math, there are a trillion trillion stars in our Universe.

Astrophysicists seem to find more and more evidence that intelligent life is rare, but with that many solar systems, there certainly could be intelligent life out there.

'Out there' is meant literally, because they ain't (sp?) here. Why?

Our galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across, so any star within 100 light-years of Earth is very close to us.

(As a refresher, a light year is the distance light can travel in one year. Light travels at about 180,000 miles per second, so a light year is about 6 trillion miles).

Einstein famously said that the speed of light in a vacuum is the fastest possible speed. One hundred years later, we've confirmed this in many ways. (Yes, Star Trek and Star Wars have variations of a warp drive enabling them to travel much faster than light, but you might know these are fictional shows). 

It took us about three days to get to the Moon, traveling about 6 miles per second. At this speed, it would take us over one million years to travel 100 light years.

No spaceship traveling with people or aliens is going to do this. Heck, it will take us 6 months to get to Mars. Sending robots is no problem. Sending people will likely result in death. Elon Musk, who wants to send people to Mars, said that he would not want to go because he doesn't want to die.

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Let's move on to other reasons. A number of scientists and others have said that they've seen alien body parts and/or alien spaceship parts on Earth, but the government has kept this from us. This can't be true because someone would have sneaked them out or taken pictures of them. After all, it's not like this is a big national security issue. Ben Franklin said, "Three can keep a secret if two are dead". There's no way that we have physical evidence of aliens on Earth without someone bringing it forth. Yes, Congress has had hearings about aliens coming to Earth, but I'll bet my right arm that no evidence will be provided.

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Furthermore, if aliens had the incredible technology to get to Earth, wouldn't they be able to land here without crashing?

And why come to Earth? Certainly not for our resources as the aliens did in the excellent movie, Independence Day. An advanced civilization would have recycling down so they would not run out of resources. Even if they did, they could find them somewhere in their solar system, without trying to destroy a populated planet.

They would only come to make contact with us. They'd stay in orbit and communicate with us, and ask if they could land. Sure, we'd say. How cool would that be?

The only realistic hope is that aliens would try to communicate with us. SETI's purpose is to look for such things. Their message would take 100 years to get here, and our response would take 100 years to get back. Getting such a message would be the event of the millennium.

But you know what they say about long distance relationships.

 

PS: We'd love to have Yoda in Texas.

Abortion

 

Here is one of the least profound statements that you’ll ever hear: Abortion is a difficult and divisive issue.

This is because many people on both sides of the debate look at abortion in a black/white manner.

People’s views on abortion can be roughly divided into two groups: those who think abortion is murder, and those who are in the “my body, my choice” group.

If someone says, “After conception, the fetus is a human being. So abortion is murder”. You can’t really argue this point because that is their belief.

If another person says, “As long as the fetus is in my body, It is part of my body, and thus it is my decision whether or not to have an abortion”. You can’t really argue this point either because that is their belief.

We have a conundrum. Is there a way to handle this?

It’s important to look at abortion from both a moral point of view as well as a legal point of view. Let’s look at the moral point of view first.

For those who think abortion is moral, there are many who think that abortion would be immoral after a certain gestational period. One thought I’ve heard was that abortion would be immoral once the child could live outside the womb. Others have suggested that abortion would be immoral once the fetus can feel pain. Although there is no medical consensus about this, it seems that most researchers would agree that after 26 weeks, the fetus could feel pain. This is at roughly 6 months. An abortion after this period would be considered a late-term abortion.

So morally, most people would think that abortion is immoral after the 6^th month of pregnancy (unless the mother’s health is at risk, or the baby is not viable).

For those who think abortion is murder, either at conception or shortly thereafter, abortion is immoral.

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Deciding when and if abortion should be illegal is different than deciding when and if it is immoral.

One concept I like in the philosophy of law is that a good law is one that at least 95% of adults agree with. A complete ban on abortion does not meet this criterion, as only about 40% of Americans agree with this law.

Thinking about laws such as those that criminalize murder (after birth), rape, child abuse, or theft, well over 95% of people agree with these laws. Fortunately, most laws are related to these.

However, we could reach that 95% threshold if we made abortion illegal after the 6^th month.

With respect to abortion laws, most of them give punishments for those who provide abortions. But rarely do they indicate punishments for the women who get an abortion. These laws treat women as if they are not responsible for their own decisions. Rational abortion laws should penalize the women who get them equally to those who provide them.

This might sound callous, but there is a good reason to require abortion laws to be this way. After all, how many people (or state legislators) would vote to put women who have an abortion in jail? Not many. And that’s because most of us know many women who have had abortions, and even if we don’t agree with them doing so, most of us don’t want to see them in jail.

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Thus, the most compelling conclusion is that abortion should be legal until the last trimester. And in the last trimester, it should be legal if the mother’s health is at risk, or if the baby is not viable.

We can all come together when we acknowledge that no woman gets pregnant in order to have an abortion. What can we do to decrease the number of abortions without making it illegal?

Educating teens and adults about sex and birth control is a good first step. If you are going to have sexual intercourse, and you don’t want to get pregnant, the man and/or woman should use birth control.

Our culture is overly sexualized and is pushing the message that any consensual sex is good.

But sex between those who do not love each other, or do not respect each other can be harmful emotionally.

Men are much less discerning when it comes to sex. Women are more discerning because only they can get pregnant. We should teach our girls and women to say no to sexual intercourse unless they love and respect the man they are with, and that the man that loves and respects them.

Boys should be taught that girls are not ‘play things’, and to have respect for girls and women as they do for their mothers or sisters.

For a woman who does get pregnant, and doesn’t want the baby, she should be informed about the possibility of adoption.

The process of adoption could be much more streamlined and less expensive. Certainly, we want adopting couples to be well-vetted. Once that is done, and a mother is found who wants to give her child up for adoption, the couple should be introduced to the mother (if she so desires). Immediately after birth, and after the child has been cleaned and examined, the baby should be given to its adoptive parents. This allows the baby to immediately bond with its adoptive mother and father, an extremely important process.

We all want to decrease unwanted pregnancies. Doing this would decrease the number of abortions without making it illegal.

 

Tim Farage writes about the application of Natural Law to all areas of society, including education, government, economics, science, math, technology, environmentalism, and relationships.

Why We Should Have Lots Of Children

There are still people who think that the world is overpopulated. Prince Harry and Megan Markle are planning on only having two children to help keep the ecosystem sustainable. The Guardian said about this, “So, of all the lifestyle choices you could make, having one less child is by far the best option.”

Sadly, this is about the worst thing we could do. The Guardian, and many others are worried about our ‘carbon footprint’. For some reason, they want us to think that the developed world is responsible for majority of CO2 in our atmosphere. But if you look at the data, it is the under-developed countries that are responsible for all of the increase in CO2.

And most of the other under-developed countries are increasing their CO2 output as well. (And I don’t blame them. They need more energy to become modern, prosperous, healthy countries).

One can worry about CO2 emissions or not, but there is virtually nothing that the developed countries can do about it.

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Here is a huge problem that more and more people are realizing: under-population in developed countries is becoming a disaster.

Consider this graph of population growth:

It takes 2.1 children per woman to maintain a population. But by the end of the century, world population will begin to decline. Worse, population decline is already happening in most developed countries.

Why is this bad? Countries depend on current workers to support their Social Security and Medicare-type programs. Low fertility rates means fewer workers and more retirees.

Countries around the world are beginning to reckon with a years-long drop in new births that has skewed population demographics heavily toward older age groups.

In a more local perspective, some cities are already reckoning with the challenges of precipitous drops in new births, including “ghost cities” in China and maternity wards with too few births to justify staying open in Italy. Some South Korean universities have so few students that the government is pressuring them to merge with others, and entire towns where deaths outnumber births are being consolidated in Japan.

Japan sells more adult diapers than baby diapers.

Look about what Elon Musk says about this:

Elon Musk says population collapse 'potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization'

Musk has previously warned population collapse is a bigger problem than most people realize.

 

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It is true that too many children are being born in the Middle East and Africa, causing many problems for them. But outside of those areas, population declines are causing a huge problem.

Here’s my request of you, my dear readers: If you are a loving, married couple, please have lots of children. That means at least 3 and preferably more. Yes, kids cost money. But out great-grandparents were poor and had 6 to 8 children, and they worked it out.

NO! I don’t want to hear any excuses….

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Tim Farage is a Professor and Graduate Advisor in the Computer Science Department at The University of Texas at Dallas. He writes about mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, the reconciliation between science and spirituality, Intelligent Design, and the application of Natural Law to our various systems such as education, government and economics.

COVID-19: A Tale of Two Counties

This post deal with the facts about COVID-19 in Dallas County and Collin County, which is just north of Dallas County.

As of 7/22/2020, Collin County has about 1 million people and 72 have died of COVID-19 related illnesses. All of these deaths have been to the elderly or those with severe underlying health conditions, and typically both. Except for one person who was 48 and had no underlying health conditions.

My source for this is from Collin County:
https://www.collincountytx.gov/public_information/news/Pages/default.aspx 

This means that out of 1 million people, only one died who was presumably healthy and not elderly.

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Now let's take a look at Dallas County.
The Dallas County population 2.6 million

and the number of deaths was 567 as of 7/22/2020.

To fairly compare the counties, I'll report them as per 1 million people. So there were 218 deaths per million people in Dallas County. This is 3 times the rate of deaths in Collin County. What causes this discrepancy?

In Dallas County, the zip code hit hardest is 75211. According to the Dallas Morning News, 80% of its residents are Latino and 60% of those infected are Latino. The problems there are language barriers, overcrowding, not following the social distancing rules, and having a high number of illegal immigrants who are afraid or delay going to a doctor or hospital.

Currently, medical workers are increasing the testing of those in this zip code, and then beginning treatment immediately after a person tests positive.

Because of these sorts of discrepancies, 

the experts are indeed divided about the way to handle this, especially on the question of this mass shutdown.

Everything about this is confusing as experts with excellent qualifications are all over the spectrum on this issue. Even for the vaccine one hears promising results but then other experts also say that a virus vaccine of this type has not been developed and cannot be .. as the virus mutates by the time the vaccine is developed.

We do not have the answers yet about the best way to handle COVID-19.

Here’s what we do know. I live in Collin County.

Are my family and I afraid to go out? Heck no. We go out to eat and go to the movies. Yes, we obey the rules about facemasks and social distancing.

People forget that much poverty is created by businesses that are closed. This poverty itself leads to deaths.

The best thing to do is to allow businesses and schools to open so that the poor and middle class can stop hemorrhaging money. It is terrible what is happening to them.

And then we can focus our resources on protecting the elderly, as well as Latinos (and others) in poor areas.

Yes, we should wear a mask when out in public and practice social distancing. And get tested.

But let's open up schools and businesses so that a sense of normalcy is established.