Private Spaceflight Watch: SpaceX launches Falcon 9 Rocket

SpaceX Dragon Crew Capsule.

Yesterday SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation), the private spaceflight development company founded by Paypal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk, successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket into orbit at 2:50 pm EST.  This historic event clears the way for serious private space exploration, since Falcon 9 is the same launch system that SpaceX plans to use to take crews and cargo into Earth orbit on its Dragon spacecraft.

From Here to Eternity? Biosemiotic Cosmology Alert

Electron micrograph of bacteriophage virus.

Among weird academic announcements, this blurb came up at the H-Net, "From Here to Eternity: Can Mind Evolve to the Cosmos?" The author, Judy Kay King of North Central Michigan College, is interested in the field of Biosemiotics, the next level of information science. Biosemiotics combines social scientific methodology with Postmodern theory and applies them to biological science, especially reproductive technology. A semiotician searches beyond the mind-matter divide postulated by Cartesian dualism. This is an effort to 'think outside the box,' beyond causal associations between the mental and the physical, between inner and outer meaning.

Biosemioticians apply the intepretive rules of semiotics to biological processes. For example, they suggest that we are mortal because we procreate vertically through sexual intercourse. However, viruses replicate horizontally and that is a key to immortality. How do viruses reproduce and carry DNA messages? In biosemiotics, to turn a phrase, the DNA message is the medium. Do the symbolic configurations that viruses take to replicate horizontally cryptically reappear in ancient religions? Do ancient religions therefore show us the roadmap to immortality? That gets King to replication of life beyond death, to timelessness, gods, and the mind as map for the universe. No wonder her end results point to mythology, mysticism, occult, religion and alien speculation.

"Some scientists believe that viral DNA dispatched from an alien cosmic civilization has been transferred into the DNA of earth’s organisms. In relation to this idea of ancient viral DNA, but not in support of its alien dispatch, a published paper presented at the 34th Annual Meeting (October, 2009) of The Semiotic Society of America (SSA), an interdisciplinary professional organization grounded in the logic of American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce, is now available online at no charge at www.isisthesis.com.

In line with the conference theme of the Semiotics of Time, the paper is entitled “Evolution Backward in Time: Crystals, Polyhedra and Observer-Participancy in the Cosmological Models of Peirce, Ancient Egypt and Early China” by SSA member Judy Kay King. The paper supports two major points. First, ancient Egyptian and early Chinese cosmological models lawfully sustain Charles Peirce’s idea on the continuity of mind. Second, the Peircean theme of crystallized mind, the Egyptian transformation of the dead King into a hybrid pyramidal form of millions, and the four-faced ancestral transformation of the early Chinese Yellow Emperor may point to the polyhedral form of an ancient lambdoid virus, suggesting the possibility of afterlife horizontal gene transfer and viral lytic replication (cloning) from here to eternity. The semiotic approach also explores the backward-in-time aspect of quantum observations, as well as the ascent/fall ontological structure of consciousness as framed by Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger in relation to Heidegger’s thought. Put simply, mind may act as a cosmic unifying force."

How many clones of ancient pre-Christian deities who are infected with alien DNA viruses can you fit on the head of a pin? See more at King's site, The Isis Thesis.

The perspective driving a line of inquiry predetermines its outcome. A biosemiotician preoccupation with the meaning of time sees it as a timeless association of related archetypes, governed by semiotic rules of association, with no apparent reference to the passage of time as part of the equation. No doubt semoiticians see vertical concepts of evolution and history as mechanistic, defined by perception limited by our mortality. If we want to think like gods, if we want to conquer time, we have to act like viruses and think of time horizontally.

The World's Time Capsules

Hi there. The gold Pioneer plaque, affixed to both Pioneer spacecraft.

Who remembers Voyager 2?  I do!  The 1977 Voyager 1 and 2 projects are still ongoing at NASA.  Voyager 1 and 2, as well as the 1972-1973 Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, were sent to gather information, and bore messages that distilled the life on our planet down to a picture, a collection of sounds, and simple messages describing the apex of human development and scientific knowledge.

The plaque on Pioneer 10.

They serve two purposes. They are time space capsules and attempts to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence.  The spacecraft are historical artifacts, and their messages for alien life sum up human existence, a 'message in a bottle' cast into the sea of space.  Any object that washes up on a beach should be treated with caution.  A message in a bottle could inspire a rescue of a scarecrow castaway.  More often, bottles on beaches are considered a bad sign, a key to a mystery better left alone. In that regard, there was something disingenuous about the 'we come in peace' imagery associated with the Pioneer project.  The Pioneer plaques were created at a time when space exploration was optimistic, a product of global village idealism.  At its best, space exploration still embodies that part of human ambition. More likely, it will come to reflect the conclusion of Arthur C. Clarke's 1946 short story Rescue Party, about advanced aliens who come to aid humans as earth is destroyed and soon regret it. There is more to the human interest in space than benevolent adventurousness.  You can read Clarke's story here.

Histories of Things to Come

This blog is named after Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of days, in which he described Histories of Things to Come.

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

Newton's work on the occult and alchemy - the problems of bridging mind and matter - hinged on his perception of time. To unlock the problem of time, he studied the Bible to try to pinpoint the end of the world. He knew that these esoteric and eccentric branches of research would be dismissed and did not publish them. Upon his death in 1727, his occult work was hidden in a locked chest in the home of the Earl of Portsmouth, where it remained until 1936. The contents were then split and auctioned at Sotheby's to two buyers and only recently came to light. A 2003 BBC documentary, Newton: The Dark Heretic, described Newton's predictions about the end of time.

Lovecraftian Time Slip

H. P. Lovecraft saw time as a well, a living thing, a key to dark, terrible secrets and alternate realities. Brand new material is unearthed at Miskatonic University's Department of Ancient Manuscripts: Cinema Suicide reports that The Whisperer in Darkness produced by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society will be released in October 2010 (see the trailer below in this post). Eldritch Animation has a new animated version of The Statement of Randolph Carter (see the video link below in this post).

Lovecraft, like M. R. James, relied on a mood of historical authenticity. Lovecraft established his historical mood  by setting his stories in the well-guarded world of early twentieth century academia and indulging his politically incorrect love of the WASP middle classes of New England, now targets of parody.

Hearing the Future in the Past: Isao Tomita

Isao Tomita, the renowned Japanese synth composer, is known for his own pieces as well as his reorchestrations of classical works into new eletronic atmospheric pieces.  Tomita seems to be either loved or hated, provoking electronic music enthusiasts or classical music purists alike.  His redux of Gustav Holst's The Planets (1914-1916) so angered Holst's daughter Imogen that she successfully sued for a court order which kept this pop version of her father's suite banned.  Some 30,000 records were removed from stores.  Tomita's Planets (1976) was only re-released after her death in 1984.