Do You Believe In Any Of The Following?

[naomi24]

A survey of 2,000 British adults was commissioned to mark the launch of the new TV series ‘Believe’. The poll asked respondents about their beliefs as well as superstitions that still hold sway in 2014, with the following results:

Top 10 Beliefs in Unexplained Phenomena:

1 - Ghosts (33%)
2 - Sixth sense (32%)
3 - UFOs (22%)
4 - Past lives (19%)
5 - Telepathy (18%)
6 - Psychic ability to predict the future (18%)
7 - Psychic healing (16%)
8 - Astrology (10%)
9 - Bermuda Triangle (9%)
10 - Demons (8%)

http://watch.uktv.co.uk/believe/article/do-you-believe/

[jim360]

There was a suggestion earlier in the thread that Stephen Hawking thought that antimatter might provide the key to feasible interstellar travel. No link provided, though he would probably have mentioned it in one of his books -- The Universe in a Nutshell, perhaps? (Which, for what it's worth, is the book that inspired me to take up Science as a career path in the first place). But even then it's still highly speculative and while it might lead somewhere and is certainly worth exploring, the amount of antimatter required could be just as prohibitive as any other limit. Depends a bit on the type of antimatter, but on the face of it you're looking at an amount measured in kilograms, which isn't much on the face of it, but again compared to today's efforts of something like only a few hundred atoms of antihydrogen lasting for a few minutes, we'd need to find a way of producing about 10^25 times as much, and making it stable, so you're still faced with a huge task. The was a suggestion that, at current rates, it would take us 100 billion years to produce just a gram of antihydrogen.

Whether or not these challenges can be overcome remains to be seen, to be sure, but they are certainly vastly greater -- almost unimaginably so -- than anything we've managed to achieve so far. It's important to recognise this, but even if it's impossible it probably wouldn't hurt much to try (although that said, given that the energy needed is equivalent to the resources of an entire planet, then it's more likely to be something to try if you're not intending to come back).

[LazyGun]

Stephen Hawking has certainly publicly speculated on being able to travel at "a significant fraction of the speed of light" by means of matter-anti-matter annihilation, and talked about visiting our nearest neighbours in around 6 years, subjective.

And he also thinks we should be looking to develop colonies/bases/homes outside of the earth, and that we should be careful what we wish for when seeking alien life.

Cannot be quite sure but I think he is not a fan of wormhole/black hole "warp" travel.

As to how viable matter/antimatter power generation is, I have no idea. I seem to recall some physicists at CERN pointing out how rare anti-matter was, and that we would need to be actively creating anti-matter for thousands of years- more maybe, just to create 1g when space travel as envisaged would need kilogrammes of the stuff.

We can speculate about all manner of things that we might come to know in the future; but the most profitable and productive lines of speculation will come from the bedrock of what we already know.

[jim360]

I was looking at the wikipedia page on this, which is found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel

Rather pleased to find that a lot of the figures and ballpark estimates essentially agree with my own (to explain any discrepancies, I was talking of ships travelling at speeds equivalent to about 0.96 times the speed of light, which is many times faster than the one used in Wikipedia of 0.1 times the speed of light, and requires much more energy, by a factor of about one million).

Some more problems that need to be considered including dealing with interstellar dust collisions are mentioned in the article. Future generations may well be able to overcome these problems, but the real possibility exists that they may not.

[naomi24]

TTT, thanks for supplying the link. It saved me looking.

[goodlife]

You can laugh at the childishness of such debate , because what adult would expect rockets or satellites to search out supernatural angelic creatures or detect evidences of the Almighty Spirit?

As Jesus said: “God is a Spirit, and those worshiping him must worship with spirit and truth.” Yet from all this is evident that these materialists do think about God, whether they believe in him or not.—John 4:24.

[naomi24]

Goodlife, You don’t seem to be getting the hang of this conversation. I don’t think anyone is expecting rockets or satellites to search out supernatural angelic creatures or to detect evidences of any Almighty Spirit.  

[viv38]

I've just come on to this thread again and read Sir Alec's posts about his Dad seeing dead relatives before he died. This happened to my Nan Sir Alec. She was reading a book one evening and she suddenly felt someone was looking at her and she looked up and saw her long dead Mum sat on the other chair looking at her and smiling. My lovely Nan felt awful because she was sat there reading and there was her Mum, but as she looked at her. she slowly faded away. Very shortly after my Nan died. Did her Mum come to pave the way, who knows? All I know is that this 'visit' made my Nan very happy and she talked about it all the time before she died.

[viv38]

Oh and I believed her 100%. All the family did.

[naomi24]

Viv, thank you for posting that. Hopefully it will encourage the conversation to move on from future space flight, which isn't on the list, to some of the other subjects - even UFOs. ;o)

[viv38]

That's OK Naomi. It's not the only time I've heard of people near to death seeing lost loved ones. My Granddad saw his old dog which, as a dog lover, I found quite beautiful.

[naomi24]

//It's not the only time I've heard of people near to death seeing lost loved ones.//

Nor me.