About those UAPs and aliens

 

Here are the problems with “Aliens” coming to visit us.  First is the idea that a lot of complex life is out there. We don’t think it occurs all over the place.  In order to have a complex organism (brain, arms, eyes, stomach, etc.) you have to have cell differentiation.  Cells have to know if they are a liver cell or a toe.  And that means that a simple bacteria cell without a nucleus is not enough.  You have to have a nucleus and a ribonucleus and mitochondria.  The only theory for these that astrobiologists have come up with for the presence of all these things within our cells are two extreme chance events, the snowball earth episodes.  The first one 2.7 billion to 2.2billion years ago featured an ice age so long it covered all or most of the earth, and for 500 million years.  After this it seems that nuclei appeared (hard to verify).  The second snowball earth evolved the ribonucleus and mitochondria.  The thinking is that individual cells of bacteria were so distressed by the cold conditions that some symbiosis occurred that caused one cell to live within the other.  If that is true, we should find bacteria everywhere but complex life only once or a few times in a galaxy.

Since the galaxy is so large it is unlikely that this happens closer than 10,000 light years apart. 

Secondly, to travel such distance would require travel faster than the speed of light. But that creates time travel problems.  Going faster than the speed of light means going backwards in time.  So you have the Back To The Future problem.  What if you go back in time and change something?  When you travel forward then, the world becomes a different place than it was when you left.  And that causes violation of casuality and other problems.  So some have said that any backwards time travel would be highly restrictive to not change the future and maybe even won’t allow awareness of what you observed from the past. 

Put this together, and say there is 1000 light years distant from you and a planet you find you want to investigate. You’ve figured out how to violate the speed of light. Likely you will use an unmanned drone to do this in which case you have to transmit back at the speed of light and can travel at whatever speed you can achieve.  Whatever the case it will take >1000 years to find results of  your investigation.  Are you willing to wait that long? What if the transmission is forbidden? What then?  Are our UFO events really just drones from somewhere else?  If on the other hand, if the transporters contain real life, that presents a huge problem with our current understanding of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Evangelicals and Politics

 

Since the 80s Evangelicals have tended to vote 70-80% Republican. A new study by Duke’s Mark Chaves and Joseph Roso found that their clergy are pretty much in sync with those views, while other Christian groups have other stories.  First they did a study asking clergy if they were more or less or much more liberal or conservative than church members.

                More liberal    same     more conservative

Evangelicals     12%      74%        14%

Black Prot.         15%      70%        16%

Catholic              53%     28%        20%

Mainline             53%      33%        16%

For years it has been known that mainline clergy are more liberal and 21% call themselves much more liberal. Only 1% of Catholic clergy say they are much more liberal.  So as it turns out Evangelical  and Black Protestant clergy say they pretty much the same as their parishioners.  True in practice? They asked how clergy and laity voted in 2016 how many voted for Trump

                     Laity           clergy

Evangelicals  66%           80%

Black Prot.     1%             5%

Catholic         49%           24%

Mainline         49%           16%

So in fact, Evangelical pastors voted more for Trump than did parishioners. Blacks voted very low for Trump but note that pastors voted more conservative than the laity. Catholic clergy were half as likely to have voted for Trump and Mainline pastors were 1/3 as likely. What this shows is that in his first election, Trump did not get very many black votes at all and fewer evangelicals than most R Presidents, only 66%.  This was much hyped in the media. What the Black and Evangelical politics shows is that when there are many like-minded pastors the church can function well in GOTV efforts.

Things unexplained in Oppenheimer

 I KNEW I’D GET MAD WATCHING OPPENHEIMER, because I know Hollywood. They spent much angst along with Oppie, replete with all the worries about the New World it started (20-20 hindsight), managed to insert sex and infidelity, but spent no time on an explanation of the atomic bomb. It’s not hard and here is a quick primer. Radioactive elements have nuclei with elevated states. When they decay they give off a lot of energy and sometimes the nucleus fractures. To make a bomb, you have to have a chain reaction, that is, self-sustaining reaction where one atom’s decay shoots off particles that cause more reactions and constant fission (nucleus splitting) If you can’t figure out how to make this chain reaction, there’s no bomb and no nuclear reactors. Next you have to have enough pure uranium 235, and make a charge that will suddenly implode i.e., bring all the reaction material together for a split second and activate all the reactions in an explosion.

In 1938 2 Germans discovered fission, the splitting of large nuclei, in some radioactive materials, and it was postulated that such a high energy thing could become a powerful bomb. In 1939 Einstein fled Germany and came to USA and wrote FDR about what the Germans were up to. America panicked and virtually demanded that the physicists work on this. The Germans were never able to make a bomb. They achieved no chain reaction, did little enrichment of fissionable material and their scientists like ours were morally nervous about doing this. But a Japanese scientist almost replicated our work, though poorly funded. Enrico Fermi fled Italy as the war started and together with Americans built a pile of Uranium bricks and graphite in secret under an unused Chicago football stadium. This pile keept getting hotter and hotter and proved how to make a chain reaction. Which is tricky. Fission scatters lots of neutrons and since they have no charge, can penetrate almost anything,until they undergo a decay explosion of their own. That means the reactor is dangerous—too much exposure and you’ll die. But the trick is to slow down the neutrons, and this causes the chain reaction to react more. Carbon (graphite) slows neutrons down. Uranium 235 is the reactive atom, but 95% of natural uranium is the inert U238. Refine Uranium oxide out of ore from the Congo. Then you have to separate out the U235, the good stuff. That is what Oak Ridge did with powerful centrifuges and that is what Iran is doing today. Plutonium 239 also reacts, is rare in nature, and can be produced by a nuclear reactor. You build a bomb by jamming enough U235 together in a microsecond and it reacts and explodes. Use a gun-projectile or an implosion method to do this. It was tested at Trinity on a tower near Los Alamos. How much energy? Oppie thought maybe 3 kilotons if they were lucky. It was 20 kilotons. The second atomic bomb hit Nagasaki made of PL239 and was even more powerful.

The film also don’t tell you how Oppenheimer was rich enough to own a big ranch near Albequerque. His family owned 10% of DeBeers diamonds. And being Jewish like Einstein, he was driven to make the idea work before Hitler had a bomb. In fact, Hitler basically cancelled the German project because he couldn’t understand it.

Bringing American Jobs back

 

BRINGING AMERICAN JOBS HOME EASIER SAID THAN DONE. Taiwan semiconductor has built the world’s largest chip factory in Phoenix.  But they are delaying opening a year because of worker shortages. Other plants in Ohio have the same story.  Trump wanted manufacturing and especially electronics & chips to come home for our security. Obvious strategy is to have control of chips and let the rest of the world supply us with things chips go into. Congress passed the CHIPS Act for huge federal subsidies.  Trouble is, USA has a deficit of 67,000 engineers and STEM workers and there are only 70,000 who graduate each year.  This is big stuff since deficiency makes the difference between good productivity and labor costs stable vs. high costs and low productivity in our STEM industries.

    It’s more than a slim workforce.  If you put tariffs on China, you might score new contracts with India and Thailand.  But what if the plants there are buying lots of the parts from China? In some cases, stuff from China gets repackaged and a third world country simply acts as the middleman. Mexico, our supposed ally does a lot of this. Supply chains get more complex, stuff gets higher priced from another middleman.  And now many of the smaller Eastern countries are becoming good friends with China, the supplier, and not USA.   They distrust USA who won’t work on new trade agreements.

    What to do? First, work with Puerto Rico, once the chief source of pharmaceuticals. They are us and need jobs. Next tariff content.  If parts came from China in a device made in India, assess ‘em.  Third, work on trade agreements with the Far Eastern countries. (Yet Trump didn’t want these and Biden/Blinken are too stupid to do them).  Fourth fix the broken borders and fix the visa program to allow educated foreigners to come here for jobs. (Biden tolerates chaos and Trump didn’t want many foreigners getting Visas)  40% of semiconductor jobs are filled by foreigners since US kids don’t take enough STEM classes (Ungh! Too hard! I wanna party through college!) Fifth, concerning Defense, the manufacturers are dragging feet about replenishing weapons and ammo we gave the Ukrainians.  That’s because Dems defunded for years.  This also risks losing our edge in new military technology if research investment is stifled.  A more steady purchase stream needs to be worked out with weapons manufacturers (lest in time of war we suddenly have idled plants). 

   There is more to this than Trump and Biden’s tariffs. We need to play this game smarter.

 

Decline in US churches

 

METHODISM, ONCE USA’S LARGEST DENOMINATION, IS IN CRISIS as are many churches with declining membership.  This year, 16% of the UMC churches have quit and by 2025 an estimated 25% will leave over leftist doctrine.  This doesn’t count the many individual conservatives who will likely leave (44% of members call themselves very conservative). Estimates that the 11 million in 1969 will decline to about 4 million in 2025.  A major obstacle, ownership of all church properties by the UMC, has now been relaxed allowing churches that don’t want to stay to keep their place of worship.

    Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists and many others have faced similar splits and declines. Even the  American Catholic church was shrinking until the Latino surge. What should Christianity do? I Thessalonians 1 has the key.  Scholars say that of all the churches Paul started, only 2 thrived, grew and became large centers of Christianity in the second century—Ephesus and Thessalonica. So Paul’s letter to Thessalonica was to a thriving church and was full of thanksgiving and praise. Thessalonica’s key on the personal level is in chapter 1 verses 9 and 10, “for you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and wait for His Son from heaven.”  An important word is “wait”.  That, to the Hebrews meant to talk to God a lot and then wait for the answer. In present terminology, “have a real close relationship with God.”  Watch Him answer. This fits with my own observations from being in 4 interdenominational groups: Christians who involve themselves in much confession, prayer and reading of the Word often become rock solid in faith and the happiest people.  Once a Christian realizes that God has done the work (saving you), yet one remains a messed-up person in practice, it’s obvious God is after more.   Those who start finding answers to personal problems in passages they’ve read a dozen times before chance upon new meaning.  Hearing His voice nudging your thoughts, hearing it echoed from like-minded friends, perhaps even some wildly cool experiences creates a deep unforgettable bond to God. And nothing can take that away.  This is the Holy Spirit at work. Knowing God is near gives confidence unlike anything else. If then a church has a nucleus of such humble believers, such people often find they can’t shut up about the faith, the experiences, the delight in serving others. When the group focus is Jesus (vs. 8), quibbling mostly stops. When they imitate good leadership and their Lord, despite obstacles(vs.6), they grow. Such was the Thessolonians and many other Christian groups since.

    Face time in confession to God is critical. It is there that the Christian realizes how spiritually dependent they are and the frequent  conversation with God comes about.  Theology isn’t just theory.  Church isn’t just allegiance. Justified by faith in God’s grace means that you must utterly accept His definitions and rules.  If He says it is sin, it is.  To deny that, to label some sins non-sins takes that sin off the table for forgiveness. In political compromises  or indulgence, faith dwindles. The dystopic can’t reach out to God if he/she sees no problem with the self (a recipe for despair).  Yet in God’s upside down economy, a murderer is in the same boat as a the gossip spreading dirt about the neighbor.

     Good News! God’s pushing your boat.

     This writer thinks the problem is more than just leftist views in the churches.  It is more like the seed that fell among the weeds in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower.  The weeds, cares of the world, are choking out Christian belief.  The popular culture convinces that all mankind’s  longings are likely to be solved only by science, economics, politics, etc.  But Christians realize that there’s more than just the physical universe.  There’s a force beyond that reveals Himself to us.  And in the still small voice of God inside, He wants to weld you to Himself to revolutionize the world.