The Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias around 360 BC. The story supposedly came from Solon, the famous Athenian lawgiver. Solon had recorded that on a visit to Egypt, the priests told him that the Greeks of Solon’s day were the descendants of a mighty empire that perished in a single day, swallowed by the sea 10,000 years before. The location was “beyond the pillars of Hercules”. They described the landscape, city and society of Atlantis.

     Scholars agree that Plato wrote his own philosophical ideas into his story of Atlantis but argue to this day whether he based the story on actual places and events.

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

     In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly published his famous work on Atlantis and launched the modern infatuation with the legend.

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

     Since Donnely, various modern researchers have placed Atlantis all over the world. Some of the more interesting theories are mentioned below.

     If you take the pillars of Hercules to be the Straits of Gilbralter at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, then Atlantis would be out in the Atlantic ocean. This would be an island continent between Europe/Africa and the Americas. The problem with this idea is that the ocean floor in the Atlantic does contain a candidate sunken land mass.

     However, there was an island at entrance to Mediterranean Sea that was inhabited and sank 11,000 years ago at the end of the ice age.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/01/0102_020103wiratlan.html

     When the water bust thru the Bosporus straits into the Black Sea about 7000 years ago, the water level rose and drown early settlements on its shores. The story of this event could have easily made it into the fertile cresent.

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

      There was a round island in the Agean Sea east of Greece. It exploded in a huge blast in about 1500 BC. It destroyed the Cretean civilization and the tidal wave and ash swamped the eastern half of Crete. This is a lot closer to the origin of the story.

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

     Helike was a city  on the Sea of Corinth that was a rival of Athens. An earthquake sank it in a single night about 10 years before Plato wrote the Dialog. This is very close in time and space to the origin of the story.

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

     There have been claims that parts of Antarctica were ice free and habitable some ten thousand years ago and that Atlantis was located there.

http://www.apollonius.net/atlantis.html

     One group of researchers claim that Atlantis was Cuzco, Peru in the Andes Mountains of South America.

http://farshores.org/amjj0102.htm

     Cuba is the candidate of Andrew Collins. His is the best documented work on Atlantis that I have ever read. He makes a compelling case that Cuba was Atlantis.

http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/news/Atlantisfile.htm

     Many different cultures have legends of great floods. The most famous being the great flood of Noah in the bible. This was borrowed from the earlier epic of Gilgamesh from Ancient Summer

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

     Most of the human race lives near sea level near the ocean and/or a major river. Flooding would be a universal experience.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/print/40
     There WAS a world wide flood at the end of the last Ice Age approximately 12,000 years ago.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0317_030317_iceshelf.html

     Sea level rose 66 feet in 200 years. This would have drowned out a lot of coastal low lands where many people lived. It is possible that there was a civilization at the level of Ancient Greeks or Egyptians. Most of the evidence would be under water now.

     I think that Atlantis resonates with the racial memory preserved in legends of the end of the last Ice Age when the ocean rose. Survivors fled to the highlands bringing fragments of their culture and laying the basis for the lost golden age legends that are also common in many ancient cultures.

      I have been reading science fiction since I was a kid. A lot of the stories happened in other star systems. When I got older and started reading physics books, I realized that Relativity theory seemed to rule out faster than light travel. As the years went by, I kept an eye out for any theoretical technology that might permit the human race to travel to the stars in less that decades or centuries.

      Last March, I was invited to speak about FTL drives at Norwescon, a local science fiction convention. Before I went to the convention, I told Barbara that, with my luck, someone else on the panel would have expertise in the area and would challenge my presentation. When I got to my panel, the other panelist scheduled for that panel was not there. Instead, there was a guy from a previous panel in his place.

      I said, “What happened to Ted?”. The other guy said, “He died last week.” Being the smart ass that I am, I said, “Some people will do anything to get out of being on a panel.” The response was, “He was a friend of mine.” About then I felt like a real jerk. Then he said, “He would have appreciated the joke.” I introduced myself as someone with a general interest in science and technology. He introduced himself as a member of the Air Force laboratory for advanced space propulsion systems for 10 years. SIGH!

      Anyway, I want to share three possible FTL drive systems in this post.

1) A German rocketry expert named Heim was severely injured in the Second World War when his munitions plant exploded. He spent many years working on a new theory of physics but only published in German. Very esoteric math but the basic idea was that an extremely intense magnetic field might be able to overcome gravity.

    Another physicist named Droscher added more dimensions to Heim’s theory and said that a ship that was accelerated to near the speed of light by Heim’s system could then leap into another dimension he called “parallel space” where it could travel at speeds above 1 light year per day.

     With a month to accelerate and a month to decelerate, a 90 day trip could reach out 30 light years. This would allow us to explore a lot of nearby stars. The Heim- Droscher concept won an award at a competition for new ideas in space propulsion recently. The math is very hard to follow and our technology is just getting to the point where it might be possible to create the necessary magnetic fields to test the theory.
 
http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/index.html

2) In 1994, an English physicist named Alcubierre postulated that if it were possible to contract space-time ahead of a ship and expand it behind the ship, then the area of space-time surrounding the ship could be accelerated beyond the speed of light. There would be no acceleration effects on the ship. This approach would take an enormous amount of energy.

     Chris Van Den Broeck came up with the idea of contracting the bubble of space-time containing the ship down to the size of an elementary particle. This would require a tiny fraction of the energy the original concept required. Unfortunate, no one knows how to manipulate space-time in the ways that would be required to utilize the theories of Alcubierre and Van Den Broeck.

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

3) A physicist named Andrew Bender just published a book that explains his approach to FTL drives. Basically, he suggests that we need to create enough transuranic element 115 to create a cube 3 meters on a side. Usually the transuranics last for nanoseconds when created in the lab. But, there is an isotope of 115 that could be stable.

     His drive system would inject anti-protons into the cube of 115. This should create a spherical standing gravity wave that would isolate a bubble of space-time from the rest of the universe. Then, by distorting the bubble, the surrounding space-time would be forced to propel the bubble considerably faster than light. There would be no acceleration effects on the ship. This technology which Bender calls “slipstring drive” is based on an extension of string theory and seems to offer the best approach at present for an FTL drive.

http://www.slipstring.com/

     As I feared, the other panelist at Norwescon challenged any of the systems that I mentioned. He said that they would result in a violation of causality and that was not permitted under Relativity theory. Basically, the problem is that if you can exceed the speed of light, you can travel in time. That might lead to nasty paradoxes such as killing your mother before she became pregnant with you.

 However, causality is under assault right now at the University of Washington. An acquaintance of mine by the name of John Cramer is working on an experiment that might transmit information into the past. If his experiment shows that causality can be violated, then the prospects for FTL drives are considerably brighter.

http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/NLS/NL_signal.htm

Scotty, give me warp 7 !!!!

Title is from old joke where a guy asks a woman in a bar if she is free tonight and she says “No, but I am reasonable.” I have been coming across a lot of articles lately that discuss issues involving free will. Since that topic is one of my long time interests, I thought that I would toss out a few of my ideas on the subject.

I see an enormous amount of confusion on the subject. The term is one of those “umbrella” or “suitcase” terms that cover a lot of different meanings for a lot of different folks. People generally mean that they are not being forced to choose a particular alternative but are “free” to make their own choice. No one should want “free will” in an absolute sense. That would mean that you would be free to choose to do something that had NO connection to your circumstances, interests, needs, desires, abilities, resources, etc. In other words, of NO value to you. Obviously, no one has this type of “free will”. Let’s see if we can’t get more detail here. We are constrained in our choices in:

Space – we cannot pop from one point to another without crossing the space between the two point.

Time – we cannot jump from one time to another without living the time between the two moments.

Energy – we cannot exist in the corona of the sun or in the cold of outer space without special protection.

Matter – we cannot survive long without oxygen, water and food. Carbon monoxide will kill us if we inhale enough, we cannot drink liquid nitrogen without damage, etc.

Life – exposure to a host of pathogens – viral and bacterial can seriously harm if not kill us.

Animals and humans – we can be eaten or killed by a number of other creatures if we are careless.

Humans – other human beings can injure or kill us if we are not careful

Culture – If we trespass on customs or laws of society we can be suffer consequences

Personality – a great deal of our reaction to events around us is shaped by our genetics

Habits – we all have many habits that can be extremely difficult to escape

Situation – there are many other constraints on our choices that have to do with such things as needs of family, physical limitations, financial limitations, lack of education, etc.

We each have a small range of choices that we can make without someone or something preventing us or forcing us. If we make choices that are not congruent with our deep sense of who we are, then we can exhaust a certain type of mental energy. So even if nothing else is affecting us, our own  identity can exact a cost for certain choices.

And, in the end, we pay for what ever we choose in one way or another.

Given all this, we definitely do not have “free will” in any significant sense.

One of the fuels for the debates on free will consists of the question of assigning responsibility. If you cannot be held responsible for your choices, should you be punished for breaking the law or social custom. A lot of jurisprudence revolves around trying to figure out just exactly how responsible someone is when a law is broken. Not always an easy :question to answer. So, if I have correctly stated the situation, should people be held accountable for their actions. I would say “yes’. Here is my reasoning:

The human brain is essentially a control system. A society composed of many human beings cannot function unless those control system function correctly in concert. If one of those control systems is involved in a problematic occurrence, then society must investigate to determine whether the control system in question has malfunctioned. If so, can the control system be repaired or reset. If the odd are poor, then the control system should be removed from society.

The bottom line is that if the odds are poor that someone can function according to society’s rules, then that person should be removed from society. This does not depend on the existence of free will.

1) In 1991 major US oil companies were losing the competition for Iraq oil contracts to foreign competitors and Saddam talked about selling oil in other currencies which threatened the US dollar. When Iraq attached Kuwait, the US went in .

2) In the Mid 90s, Michael Ledeen of the conservative American Enterprise Institute said that the US needed to go into the Middle East and foment conflict between tribes, religions, ethnic groups, nations, etc. to use as an excuse to establish a major miliary presenct. This would allow us to insure  our access to ME oil.

3) In 1998, the Project for a New American Century issued a position paper urging attacks on Iraq. Many of the signers went on to positions in the Bush administration.
 
4) In the Spring of 2001, the Cheney energy taskforce was pouring over maps of Iraqi oil fields with representatives to divide up Iraqi oil.

5) “Rumsfeld wants the – best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] ?” This is from notes taken by Rumsfeld’s aide at 12:05 on September 11, 2001.
 
6) Bush broadcasts a statement to the citizens of Iraq on the eve of our invasion in 2003, telling them to not torch the oil fields.

7) When US forces invaded Iraq, they did not secure the weapons depots, they did not secure the nuclear facilities but they did occupy the offices of the Oil ministry

8) Number 1 benchmark for the current Iraq government is to pass the oil bill which is about giving US oil companies 30 year production sharing agreements where they would own the oil in the ground in Iraq, would not be obligated to hire and train Iraqies to work in the oil fields, would not be obligated to share technology with the Iraqis, would be able to repatriate oil profits immediately, etc. Majority of Iraqis are against this bill being passed.

9) Iraq may have the biggest reserves in the world, the oil is cheap to extract, the value of the known reserves has risen from 2 trillion before our occupation to 9 trillion today.10) In criminal investigations, you look for motive, means and opportunity. 

Motive = desire to secure major new reserves in the face of the decline of existing reserves to generate gigantic profits

Means = the US armed  forces
 
Opportunity = 911 attacks.