Remember that image of Carl Sagan holding the “Don’t Forget, No Billboards in Space” sign that’s been bouncing around the internet the past few years? Turns out its fake, but that in no way takes away from the sentiment. Space in many ways is the final frontier, the last piece of untouched, untainted real estate we have on our shrinking, stinking planet. Why ruin it with advertising?

Let’s agree to ignore the massive amounts of orbital pollution surrounding the Earth.

Billboards in space sound objectively horrible to anyone who’s not a reptilian capitalist overlord, which is exactly why a Russian startup with massive amounts of venture capital behind it already has the billboards ready to fill the night sky with flashing neon reminders of the hellish corporate dystopia we’ve found ourselves in. Just wait until They find a way to advertise to us in our dreams.

The real photograph showed Sagan holding one of the plaques sent along with the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft.

Aerospace startup StartRocket wants to launch tiny cube satellites into orbit some 400-500 (~250-300 miles) kilometers above the Earth in order to create massive glowing displays which could be seen from dozens of square kilometers below at a time. The landing page on the company’s website displays an image of stargazers taking in the nightmarish scene of a fake Coca-Cola logo (“Loca-Cola”) floating through the night sky along with the mission statement “Space has to be beautiful. With the best brands, our sky will amaze us every night.” Blech. StartRocket project leader Vlad Sitnikov told Futurism that regardless of what literally everyone else in the world says, he insists his vision is all about bringing “beauty” to the world – in the form of brand names and logos:

We are ruled by brands and events. The economy is the blood system of society. Entertainment and advertising are at its heart. We will live in space, and humankind will start delivering its culture to space. The more professional and experienced pioneers will make it better for everyone.

The company plans on launching their first prototype in 2021, and says their orbital displays could be programmed to display logos at six minute intervals, orbiting a particular location three or four times a day. Start clawing your eyeballs out now; it can take a lot longer than you think. 

Tiny cube-shaped satellites called Cubesats are being developed for all sorts of purposes.

Of course, there are huge legal and regulatory hurdles the orbital billboards would face if they ever came to fruition, so it’s unknown if they’ll ever be launched at all. Whew. Still, there is some precedent for orbital “art.” Last year, a New Zealand startup called Rocket Lab shot a cross between a disco ball and a D20 into space, prompting widespread criticism from astronomers. Caleb Scharf, director of astrobiology at Columbia University, wrote in Scientific American that despite being billed as a work of art, the orbital disco ball was merely “another invasion of my personal universe, another flashing item asking for eyeballs, adding that it was “hogging some of that precious resource, the dark night sky, polluting part of the last great wilderness” we have left on Earth. What will Scharf and other astronomers have to say about these garish orbital billboards?

Is it just me, or does this image of one cup on Mars somehow seem worse than the millions of cups currently strewn about the Earth?

I don’t know why anyone would think this one is a good idea. Anyone except for the soulless, money-hungry cacodemons who sit on the boards of the world’s largest advertising firms and multinational corporations, that is. Sure, the night sky might be ruined for everyone else you say, but listen, you commie punk: at least the billboards created a lot of value for the shareholders. What’s more important than that?

Well, that didn’t take long. On December 30th, 2018, researchers from the SALSA (Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access) expedition used hot water to drill through Antarctic ice to a depth of 1,084 meters (3,556 feet) to reach Lake Mercer – a “lost” lake buried 600 kilometers from the South Pole. While they expected to find the microbes that seem to exist everywhere and in the harshest conditions, the researchers scraping mud off of an instrument retrieved from Lake Mercer were stunned to find it contained the remains of higher life forms – crustaceans, plants and one hardy little eight-legged bear.

“Fully unexpected.”

In a press release published in the journal Nature, University of Nebraska-Lincoln micro-palaeontologist (talk about specialization) David Harwood described his reaction to what he saw with his microscope positioned over a speck of the mud from a lake that has been locked under the ice for thousands of years. He expected to see the million-year-old shells of photosynthetic algae from Antarctica’s warmer times. What he didn’t expect was something that looked like “an old leaf that’s been sitting on the ground for a season.” That “leaf” turned out to be the shell and legs of a shrimp-like crustacean. In micro-paleontology, where there’s one, there’s bound to be another and sure enough, Harwood found a fresher specimen that looked much like it did when it was alive. He also recognized that one of the legged creatures was a tardigrade, the ‘water bears’ that seem to be able to survive the harshest conditions, and things resembling worms were tendrils of a land-dwelling plant or fungus.

To rule out the possibility that the unexpected creatures were the result of their own doing, the researchers sterilized the probe and sent it back down again. Harwood’s microscope found more crustaceans in the new mud. That means they definitely lived in Lake Mercer. But how did they get there?

To answer that question , the mud was sent to animal ecologist Byron Adams at McMurdo Station on the Antarctic coast. He recognized the crustaceans, tardigrade and fungi as the same creatures he’s seen alive in regions of Antarctica called the Dry Valleys and the Transantarctic Mountains. Based on that, he believes the creatures actually lived tens of thousands of years ago in the Transarctic Mountains. After they died, their remains were washed down into Lake Mercer where they intermingled with the million-year-old diatoms.

“What was sort of stunning about the stuff from Lake Mercer is it’s not super, super-old. They’ve not been dead that long.”

That’s disappointing news to those who were hoping the creatures actually lived in the buried lake, but Adams doesn’t rule out the possibility and would like to see more mud, thinking “it’s possible that you could still find things that are alive.” In the meantime, he points out that biologists are now changing the history of Antarctica once written by geologists and glaciologists. The SALSA will now use radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the creatures and DNA testing to find out if they lived in fresh water or the ocean. Further tests will determine if they were surface creatures eating algae or were actually able to live in the dark, sub-ice lake where they were found.

You never know what you might catch in Antarctica

This is truly exciting research, but the scientists are racing against the Antarctica-melting force of climate change. Will we find out where we came from before it’s no longer here?

The SALSA camp at Mercer Subglacial Lake. The team included 45 scientists, drillers, and support staff who spent three weeks drilling through the ice and sample from Mercer Subglacial Lake.

(Photo Credit: SALSA)

There is absolutely no doubt that the world, right now, is a dangerous place – an extremely dangerous place. In light of all that, an important questions needs to be asked – and answered. If war comes – and it turns nuclear – will world leaders and elite figures head deep below the surface of the planet, only to return years later to claim what remains of the planet and human civilization? Such a thing is not at all impossible. In fact, there are significant signs that plans are indeed being made to ensure that the underground will be the place to be if the apocalypse occurs. But, as is usually the case, it will be the controlling elite who will be calling the shots, rather than the rest of us. Let’s take a look at some of the highly-classified installations that exist on our planet and how they may make use of them if the unthinkable happens.

Given the fact that Russia amounts to a huge area of land, there are plenty of areas in which secure, underground facilities can be built – and which have been built. The U.S. Intelligence community has known for decades that at least two, massive facilities exist – and which have the ability to survive nuclear strikes, chiefly as a result of the fact that they are built deeply into almost impenetrable mountains. Those same mountains are Mount Yamantau and the Kosvinsky Mountains.

As for Yamantau, it stands at in excess of 5,000 feet and is the highest mountain in the Urals. As far back as the 1990s, the Russians began the construction of a massive facility within Mount Yamantau, primarily to provide the controlling elite with a secure place in which to survive a nuclear exchange between the super-powers. American spy-satellites have confirmed massive digging on the mountain, suggesting that huge, hollowed out sections of the mountain now exist – and which have been turned into the perfect locations for literally hundreds of thousands of people to survive an attack. And make no mistake, the Yamantau facility is gigantic. Studies undertaken by American intelligence agents suggest that its size is that of Washington, D.C.’s huge Interstate 495, which surrounds the capitol of the United States. Given that I-495 has a circumference of more than sixty miles and that will give you an idea of the scale of the Yamantau facility.

As for the Mount Kosvinsky installation, that is equally almost impenetrable. Built well into the heart of the mountain – which is located in the northern Urals – it is protected by around 1,200-feet of granite and, just like the Yamantau base, is designed to provide housing for the elite in the event of a nuclear attack – and also to allow for some form of continuation of government. Presuming, of course, there is anyone left to be governed after a major nuclear exchange between the most powerful nations on the planet. All that’s really known for sure is that the construction of the base was completed by the mid-1990s and that it, like Yamantau, can house thousands of people – with a near-indefinite supply of food, water, medical supplies and all the provisions needed to survive underground not just for months but for years. Some intelligence estimates suggest possibly even for decades.

Mount Yamantau

Moving away from the Urals, but still focused on Russia, there is Kapustin Yar, which is situated in Astrakhan Oblast. Construction of the installation began back in the 1940s – with the intention being to create the ultimate facility for building and testing new and novel rockets. The first such rocket launch took place in October 1947 – it was a test using a captured Nazi A-4 rocket; one of a number that the Russians got their hands on when the Nazi regime collapsed in 1945. As the base grew in size and scope, yet further rocket tests were undertaken and by the early 1950s atomic-bombs tests were carried out in close proximity. Spy-satellites of the United States’ National Reconnaissance Office have noted that in the last few years massive digging has been afoot at Kapustin Yar, all of which suggests that the base is no longer just used for rocket and missile tests; but that it may be being refurbished on a gigantic scale – to essentially turn portions of it into a huge, underground bunker, one designed to withstand the terrible effects of a nuclear war.

Now let’s take a look at China. The most visible of the various installations that U.S. intelligence suspects have been converted into massive, bunker-style facilities is the Sanya installation, as it has become known; although, its official title is the Yulin Naval Base – Sanya being a nearby city which is home to around 700,000 people. Essentially, the installation, located on Hainan Island, is one of China’s most important submarine bases. But, it’s far more than that. The National Interest website states: “The People’s Liberation Army’s Navy (PLAN) is undoubtedly moving to buttress its presence on the island. On Yalong Bay near the island’s southeastern tip, China’s recently constructed Longpo naval base is a deep-water port complete with submarine piers, an underground submarine facility with tunnel access, and a demagnetizing facility to reduce the magnetic residuals on ship hulls.”

Hainan Island

The Diplomat notes: “Open-source intelligence tools provide an informative glimpse of Hainan Island’s busy, fortified, and increasingly vital base. All told, Yulin-East encompasses over 25 square kilometers of military infrastructure lying within a protected, man-made harbor… the base accommodates surface and subsurface vessels (and most of the necessary accouterments thereof), theater and point defense weapons systems, munitions transport vehicles and depots, and administrative buildings for military commanders.” Not only that: U.S. military spy-satellites, using ground-penetrating radar systems, have been able to confirm evidence of huge excavating within the hills that surround the base. In other words, while the submarine base certainly still exists, it is being expanded on – specifically with the creation of fortified facilities buried deep within the depths of the local landscape.

What all of this demonstrates is that two of the world’s most powerful nations – Russia and China – are taking careful, rapid and secret steps to create huge underground installations which may provide some degree of survival for the elite. If anyone tells you that Russia, particularly, is not a threat, they’re wrong.

At last year’s annual “PROJECT” scientific expo in Russia, organizers showed off what they claimed was Russia’s “most advanced robot,” named Boris. Boris wowed expo attendees by conversing with hosts, liberally handing out fist bumps, and even dancing on stage to “Skibidi” by Little Big, Russia’s answer to “Gangnam Style.” Absurdist K-pop dance hits aren’t the only thing being ripped off, though: it turns out Boris was just some guy in a suit. Whoops.

The 3 1⁄2-inch floppy disk hot glued to the chest box was a nice touch, though.

Not to be outdone, the 38th Annual Technology Exhibition in the Ghanaian capital of Accra rolled out its own questionable displays of allegedly “advanced” technology. The exhibition featured the usual variety of telecom tech and social media apps, but the main event was without a doubt a parade sponsored by the Apostle Dr. Kwadwo Safo Kantanka, owner of Ghana’s first car maker Kantanka Automobile and frequent maker of dubious claims. At the Technology Exhibition, Kantanka showed off what was alleged to be the most advanced military technology in Ghana: soldiers wearing powered exoskeletons and a massive, heavily-armed personnel carrier. The personnel carrier seemed like it could hold up alright to small arms fire for a few minutes, but as for the cyborg supersoldiers, well, just check it out for yourself.

Those guys wouldn’t even make it into the top ten at a cosplay convention. That one dude’s “hydraulic cable” is just hanging off his leg and is obviously empty split loom tubing, and as a cosplayer myself, I know a spray painted motorcycle helmet when I see one. Part of me wants to laugh, the other part just feels embarrassed for the poor guys who had to wear those costumes in the Ghanaian heat. I have to wonder, though: what did the exhibition attendees think?

The whole parade reminds me of several times I got paid to impersonate fake business executives at grand opening spectacles in China. Everyone watching knew it wasn’t real and that I was probably just American off the street, yet somehow a collective delusion would take over and everyone would agree that yes, this 20-something unshaven white guy must be the real Fitzgerald Prescott, VP of Far East operations for the Cass Hotel Management group. Champagne would be poured, pictures would be taken, charters would be signed, then we’d all empty out into the streets and wonder what we just saw. Isn’t that how all reality works, though? We all agree we see the same things every day when in fact we have no idea how subjective our perception may be.

Yours truly, pretending to be Fitzgerald Prescott, signing the hotel charter and everything. True story.

At any rate, this isn’t the first time Kantanka has showed off laughable props and tried to pass them off as advanced defense tech. Check out this bottle-rocket shooting “Kantanka armored car” from the 2013 Technology Exhibition. Still, Kantanka stands by their exoskeletons, even publishing a piece titled “Ghanaians Shame Blogger JB Klutse over His 5 Stupid Questions About Kantanka’s Exoskeleton” on their company’s “Newsroom” page in response to online criticism of the whole charade. Ouch.

While it’s fun to laugh at these silly costumes and wonder how anyone could have possibly tried to pass them off as real, this story only really highlights just how unequal the modern battlefield has become. With the world’s superpowers boasting technology that makes anyone else’s look like bad cosplay, it’s no wonder that terrorism and asymmetrical warfare has become the new norm. Just wait until the real cyborg supersoldiers start marching through city streets.

Of all the lasting themes that have remained prevalent in science fiction over the last century, what would the genre have been without ray guns, lasers, and “death rays”?

One might even argue that lasers have been a part of science fiction as we know it today since the very beginning, or close to it, at least. Some argue that the creation of science fiction harkens all the way back to Mary Shelly’s eerie tale of reanimation, Frankenstein, while others claim that better “early” examples of the genre appeared in the writing of American authors like Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote what are among the earliest stories that incorporated space travel and journey to locations like the Moon.

However, if ever there were a “Shakespeare of Science Fiction,” as some have argued, it might have been H.G. Wells, whose contributions to literature included everything from the first non-anthropomorphic aliens (as well as what may be the earliest use of the word “extraterrestrial” in reference to an alien craft), to the “heat rays” wielded by the Martian antagonists in his War of the Worlds. And, with the appearance of these directed-energy weapons in his story, we also have one of the earliest appearances of lasers or “death rays” in science fiction

It would not be the last, of course. After humanity fumbled their way to triumph over its Martian invaders (with a helping hand from a few friendly terrestrial viruses), later fiction cast these futuristic weapons in the hands of human characters the likes of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and other characters.

Ryan Lambie, writing for Den of Geek, argues that it wasn’t until decades later in the 1950s and 60s that the laser truly claimed its place in science fiction, in part thanks to the real-world development of laser technologies in various industries: 

The production of ray guns of all kinds reached its zenith in the 50s and 60s. Real-world scientific breakthroughs in laser (“light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”) and maser (“microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”) saw numerous kinds of ray-gun appear in the sci-fi movies and shows of these decades, which no doubt fed back into the popularity of the huge armory of toy weapons that appeared around the same time.

The trend continues today, of course, with laser weaponry remaining an indelible part of the fictional Star Wars universe, along with other fantastic interpretations of alternate futuristic realities.

Lasers used for weaponry exist in real life too, but nothing like what we see in science fiction. I recently caught up with Jeff Hecht, author of Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon and a fellow of the Optical Society of America. As Hecht puts it, in the early days finding practical uses for lasers may have been more challenging than actually building the lasers themselves:

“At the very beginning, the running joke was, ‘the laser is a solution in search of a problem.’ They would say that because a lot of the problems the laser was supposed to solve didn’t just go away when you brought in a laser and applied it; you had to do a lot of good engineering to make them work. And we’ve had a lot of good engineering, and certainly for telecommunications, the pairing of the advances in lasers and fiberoptics and the advances in electronics, are behind the whole information technology advance. You can’t have one without the other.”

An example of an operational laser system in use by the U.S. Navy.

Of course, most of the lasers in use today have nothing to do with weaponry, and finding ways to concentrate a beam with strength comparable to what we see in science fiction seems a ways off, too. However, that doesn’t mean that lasers haven’t been useful in terms of making existing weapons more deadly. Hecht says that even in the early years of laser innovation, “what they were looking at was using lasers, at first, just to measure the range to a target–how long does it take to get back and forth–that’s the range of a radar. And then there was a device called a laser target designator, and what that would do is send a series of coded, invisible infrared pulses at a target.”

“If you had an infrared sensor, you’d see this code of reflective pulses coming from something and you could aim a weapon at that ‘something.’ That was how a smart bomb worked.”

So lasers certainly have weapons systems applications, and field tested designs in use by the U.S. Navy, for instance, are capable of disarming drones and other objects at a distance, as was demonstrated in the summer of 2017 with the AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System.

Drone being dispatched using a long distance laser system from aboard a U.S. Navy ship in 2017.

While the capabilities of laser weapons described here may remain limited in the present day, this is not to say that someday more powerful lasers won’t still be developed. However, it is obvious that the current state of the art has not caught up with the imaginations of our science fiction luminaries from over the decades.

In short, lasers continue to play an important role in technological development, as they have since the end of World War II. Their influence and relevance to a variety of industries cannot be denied, and yes, lasers even see some practical use in modern weaponry. But despite these innovations, it remains true that the most powerful lasers are the ones on the printed page; so to reappropriate an old adage for our use here, perhaps the pen truly is mightier than the sword… and the same still goes for the laser.

An unidentified aircraft seen circling overhead for days has residents of the Canadian city of Kingston wondering if something strange could be afoot. Kingston sits along Lake Ontario at the mouth of the St. Lawrence river a few hours from the major metropolises of Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. For days now, residents have seen an aircraft with “minimal lighting” flying over the city under the cover of darkness. Even more curious, not one law enforcement agency or branch of the military has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the craft. What’s going on in the skies over Kingston?

It’s probably just another one of those shadow government planes again turning the frogs gay with chemtrail magic.

The Kingston Whig Standard reports that the news paper has received multiple emails and calls about the unidentified aircraft. According to Kingston resident Doug Stewart, the aircraft appears to circle for hours in the dead of night:

It’s a mystery. I can hear it at 2 and 3 a.m., and I’ve only heard it after dark at about 6, 7, 8 p.m. Some nights it’s constant … it seems like it’s circling.

Other witnesses have estimated that the aircraft is flying fairly low around 3,000 to 5,000 feet and appears to circle the same area every five minutes or so. Naturally, many Kingston residents assumed that the nearby Canadian Forces Base Trenton, Canada’s busiest Air Force base, was to blame. However, Public Affairs Officer Capt. Graeme Scott reports that the aircraft isn’t theirs.

Many law enforcement agencies now operate spy aircraft equipped with incredibly high-resolution video cameras.

Likewise, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have issued a rather opaque, somewhat passive aggressive statement denying any knowledge of the aircraft:

The RCMP’s primary concern is the safety and security of Canadians. We have multiple aircraft that support our mandate in Ontario and elsewhere in the country. To maintain the integrity of our investigations and operations, the location of our aircraft is not disclosed. We therefore have no additional information to share with you at this time.

With such little information to go on, Kingston residents are left in the dark about the plane circling their homes and who it might belong to. While many see this as an invasion of privacy, deciding who owns the airspace above privately-owned homes has proven tricky for federal governments. Should undisclosed, unidentified aircraft be able to loiter in the sky despite the public’s concern or alarm?

Despite the frequent warnings of both experts in the field and laymen, we continue to march along towards a future dominated by artificial intelligence constructs. For some reason, those with the ability to shape our futures just really want us to become the subservient Terminator fodder of a superintelligent AI hivemind built right into the very fabric of the technosphere. Are we creating our new overlords? Even worse, have already already created them? Could it be possible that we’ve already passed the tipping point and are already controlled by AI constructs?

It’s possible, according to technologist and historian George Dyson, son of theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson. Dyson has built a career out of studying the history of science and technology, and believes current trends point to a future in which the machines surely take over. To ring in the New Year in the most depressing and hope-crushing way possible, Dyson sat down with Edge.org to discuss the digital revolution and where he sees it heading. According to Dyson, we’ve already lost control of our most advanced technology and are already following the orders prescribed to us by the machines:

As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. […] There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around.

Think about it: your social media feeds, search engine results, suggested products on Amazon – all of these are curated for you by intelligent algorithms which study your habits even when you put the phone down for a few scant seconds. Ever notice how ads occasionally appear on your phone for things you’ve been talking about within hearing range of your phone? The machines are listening.

Let’s hope they like what they hear.

Dyson goes further, stating that whereas search engines and social media were once descriptive – that is, they were designed to map and index human knowledge and relationships – they have now become prescriptive. Google ishuman knowledge, and Facebook is your social life. When you want to know something, where do you go to look it up? When you want to know what your friends are up to, do you ask them or Facebook? According to Dyson, this shows we’ve already given up control to the machines, or at least those controlling the machines. As those companies give more and more control to their AI networks, though, we’ll see human control removed from the equation entirely.

As early as 2017, technology experts were already warning that there was a dark secret at the heart of AI: we have no idea how the most advanced systems actually do what they do. What happens ten years from now when these systems are exponentially more advanced than they are now? Will all-intelligent AI became the new gods? After all, humankind has always created our gods and supreme beings using whatever media were available to us at the time: stone, ink and paper, big-budget superhero films, and now machine learning algorithms. Will the new gods be as malevolent as the old ones?

Dyson does add a bit of hope, stating he believes we’ll soon see a new “analog revolution” spring up in response to the out-of-control digital revolution. Does that mean angry mobs of pitchfork-and-torch-wielding Luddites will =smashing computers and self-driving cars will become a more common sight?

Man, I hope so.

There was once a children’s book called If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. It was spellbinding little tale about what happens when a mouse shakes you down for your baked goods and you give in. Spoiler alert: he takes you for everything you’ve got. Well, it might be time to update that story, a 21st century reboot if you will. The book could be called something like If You Give A Nerd A Particle Accelerator. It’s a working title.

I’ve been fascinated with CERN and the large hadron collider for years. It’s one of those perfect, real-life-science-fiction endeavors that is just so cool and so terrifying to a lot of people. It’s understandable. There’s a lot of wires and buttons and pipes and tunnels. All of which are intimidating by themselves. Add to that the search for something called the “god particle” and the idea of creating mini black holes, it start’s to look like something that just shouldn’t be. But it is, and we’re still here, seemingly unaffected—unless you buy the idea that we jumped universes the minute they switched it on, explaining why everything feels like it’s gone sideways and the proof is in the Berenstain Bears. If so, you’re right and I’m sorry.

Seemingly not content with the level of fear and fear-mongering they’ve caused, CERN is now looking for funding to build an even bigger, even badder particle collider to sit next to the LHC outside Geneva, Switzerland. The plan for the “Future Circular Collider” (which sounds like what mad scientists call things, but probably just refers to a circular collider that will be built in the future) was unveiled Tuesday, and officials at CERN hope that the 22 member states commit to providing the estimated 21 billion euros that would see the machine completed and operational by the late 2050’s.

“And now we shall smash….the future!”

That’s a lot of time, and a lot of money, but CERN believes it will be worth it. The FCC would consist of a 100 kilometer-long circular tunnel for smashing things together, which is four times larger than the tunnel at the Large Hadron Collider. Not only would the size of the thing be greatly increased, but the energy output as well. Frédérick Bordry, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, says:

“The FCC’s ultimate goal is to provide a 100-kilometre superconducting proton accelerator ring, with an energy of up to 100 TeV, meaning an order of magnitude more powerful than the LHC”

According to CERN’s website, the proposal would provide “tantalizingly more powerful particle colliders that can inaugurate the post-LHC era in high-energy physics.” Whenever physicists start using the word “tantalizing,” that’s a red flag.

The first phase of the FCC project would be the construction of the tunnel and an electron-positron collider that could be operational by 2040 at a cost of 9 billion euros. The second phase would be the “superconducting proton accelerator ring” in the same tunnel, which would require another 15 billion euros and an extra ten years of construction.

These machines just look like the sort of serious business I’ll never be a part of.

Credit: CERN

What will they use it for? The technical answer, I believe, is “blowing stuff up.” Extremely small stuff, but it’s the same basic premise. CERN says that they can’t predict what discoveries the FCC could produce, but CERN Director for Research and Computing, Eckhard Elsen gives a much less snarky explanation of the potential benefits to humanity:

“Proton colliders have been the tool-of-choice for generations to venture new physics at the smallest scale. A large proton collider would present a leap forward in this exploration and decisively extend the physics programme beyond results provided by the LHC and a possible electron-positron collider.”

So, blowing stuff up then. Got it. Excuse me, I have a children’s book to write.

The world of law enforcement has a large arsenal of techniques, equipment, technology, and training at its disposal to help hunt down criminals and solve the many crimes that plague society. Yet, sometimes leads go cold, evidence is sparse, and not even all of these resources seem to be able to penetrate the murk, leaving a case to go unsolved. In some such instances police and even the FBI can be tempted to look past their usual repertoire of technology, to go out past known science and attempt to harness the powers of the unknown in an attempt to find answers, seeking the help of those with psychic gifts. Who are these people and do their powers really do any good? Welcome to the weird world of police psychic investigators.

One quite well-known supposed psychic who has claimed to have lent his unique set of mysterious skills to the police and FBI is a man named Troy Griffin. According to Griffin, he first became aware of his powers at the age of 12, when he had a vision of his friend in a car accident and the predicted crash happened exactly when and how he had seen it. Fortunately, no one was injured, and the young Griffin became convinced that he had the gift of clairvoyance, intuition and foresight, which he believed he could further hone with practice and use for good.

In later years he says he found he could discern what people were going to say before they said them, or predict certain events down to amazing accuracy, and he also became aware of another gift lurking there in his mind. As well as being able to predict the future, Griffin claims that he developed the ability to talk to the spirits of the dead, and that it is this ability which would end up making him popular among law enforcement, although it started mostly as a freelance hobby. Among his many supposed successes is the case of a missing woman named Lora Hale Costner, whose sister approached Griffin for help. The psychic would then divine “impossible” information that he should not have known about what had happened, saying that she was killed, how it had been done, and that he knew where the body was. When the sister sent this information to authorities they supposedly found the body exactly where he said it would be. Not only that, Griffin was able to point police to the perpetrator, 19-year-old, McKinley Lane Cody, who was found to have killed her after a drug deal gone bad.

This case and others like it apparently got Griffin on the police radar, and he became a sort of unofficial, unpaid psychic investigator for both them and he says the FBI as well, and he has supposedly worked over 100 cases in various countries such as the United States, Germany, Canada and Australia, mostly called in as a last resort when all else fails and the mysterious case has gone ice cold. Griffith says he has some sort of innate ability to look through pictures of missing people, such as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database and get a sort of psychic “hit” just by looking at the person’s eyes, as if that person is somehow calling out to him from beyond the grave. He says he will get further information when these people subsequently appear to him and talk to him in his dreams.

It sounds rather amazing, and to the families of the victims of crimes he has successfully “solved” it is, but he has also raised his fair share of skepticism. One problem is that the law enforcement authorities he claims to have worked with, including the FBI, have remained silent on Griffin’s involvement, neither confirming or denying his assistance. There is also the fact that by Griffin’s own admission he typically has an 18 to 20 percent success rate, which doesn’t sound really all that impressive, although he defends himself by pointing out in an interview with ABC News, “When you look at murder cases and unsolved missing persons, they’re very few percentage that actually get solved.”

Adding to the skepticism is that Griffin has been very close-lipped about exactly which cases he has worked or which ones were successes and why he thinks so, nor has he provided any proof that he really has ever worked with the FBI and police at all, making it all rather murky. Nevertheless, there are many who are confident in his abilities, and he has managed to make quite a living for himself, charging up to $300 dollars an hour as a freelance psychic or also as a spirit medium, although he says his work on crimes and his police and FBI work he does for free. For his part, Griffin says of the skepticism aimed at him:

I don’t take advantage of people that are grieving. Most are referred to me from what I did. I don’t charge them. I’m not coming with false hope either way. I’m not here to tell you yea or nay. I’m here to help. What I say to skeptics is, if you have never been in the people’s shoes that I walk with, don’t judge or put opinion on it until you really know if it’s real or not. The only way you’re going to know is if there’s ever a day that you need somebody like me. Then you’ll know. Before then you’ll probably never believe in me but the people that I help and walk away with closure moving forward. They’re the ones who believed in me. That’s why I continue to do what I do.

Another psychic detective who has claimed to not only have helped on official cases but also given training and lectures on criminal profiling to police officers, the CIA and the FBI, is profiler Deborah Schurman-Kauflin. She is well-known for her incredibly accurate profiles, which she in part credits her psychic abilities, of which she says in an article on Psychology Today:

I trained thousands of police officers, CIA and FBI agents and interviewed 25 serial killers and mass murderers. I was famous for how accurate my profiles tended to be. Many, many times, shrewd detectives told me I was so accurate it was eerie. There was a reason for that, a truth that I kept secret. I kept this secret because telling the truth about this subject is often taboo. The truth is that I am a psychic medium.

From the time I was little, I had spirits around me. I didn’t think it was strange because I thought everyone did. My family was very open to psychic phenomenon, and my mother’s aunt was also a practicing psychic medium. But even though I experienced things firsthand, like knowing people’s secrets, I was very skeptical. It became harder and harder to hide my abilities when working with police because I’d come up with things I had no way of knowing. And more than one shrewd detective outright asked me if I was psychic.

With her we face the same situation as Griffin, as police and FBI tend to shy away from talking about involvement with psychics, but she claims that these agencies most definitely are willing to use such gifts to get answers in times of desperate need. She also says that law enforcement and psychic prowess sort of go hand in hand, and that the police and FBI believe in these powers much more than they let on, of which she has said:

In law enforcement, it is not something that is widely accepted. However, the majority of detectives who I worked with admitted to going to crime scenes and asking deceased victims for help in solving their murders. I even know a homicide lieutenant who used a psychic to locate a body only to say he’d never admit that publicly for fear of ridicule. The interesting thing is that the best police officers are the most intuitive. They get gut feelings about suspects which later prove to be true. Some have prophetic dreams. How often have detectives pursued something “on a hunch?”

The reality is that people use their intuitive skills every day. You know when you meet someone, and your gut tells you that something is wrong even though the person looks normal? Perhaps something tells you not to take a certain route to work, and you later learn by doing so you avoided an accident. I’m sure many of you have stories of where your intuition saved you from something bad. I believe that those in police work have lots of protection from the other side, so it is not surprising that police can be some of the most intuitive people. Though not commonly accepted in police circles, psychic abilities are being used. With time perhaps people can be taught how to better ‘tune in’ to their own abilities and learn to trust their gut instincts. There is more to this world than meets the eye.

Whether they really believe in or rely on this power or not, and whether they want to admit it or not, state and federal law enforcement certainly do turn to psychics on occasion, although perhaps not as much as many may think, and not typically treating this information as some magical solution. In a 1993 survey on the matter it was found that a third of the 50 police departments surveyed admitted to using psychics, although in most cases this information was not treated any differently than tips from other, more ordinary sources. The FBI also uses psychics, although they typically deny it, and one former senior investigator for the FBI has explained that “psychics may be used as a last resort and as an investigative tool with caution,” although this information is not typically admissible in court. One retired Police Commander named Rick Bruno has also said of law enforcement and psychics:

We didn’t necessarily employ psychics. They sort of came out of the walls. Especially when reward money was set up. But we listened to anyone who might add something to the case. We still do. We had five innocent women murdered in cold blood in a clothing store. They were moms and sisters and daughters whose only crime was to be in the store when a monster walked in with a gun.

We had a hundred detectives working on the case. We even asked NASA if they had any available photos of the exterior environment to see if we might catch a glimpse of a getaway car or the murderer running away on foot. We sent cops to Texas and to England to follow up on leads. We were doing everything we could think of to find that son of a bitch. So when someone would call and say they had “a vision” of who the murderer was, or where he might be found, we listened. And we send cops out there to interview them.

It certainly does not help the case of psychic investigators that unfortunately some of the psychics who have helped law enforcement have been exposed as frauds. Before her death one of the most well-known and talked about psychic detectives of all was a woman named Sylvia Browne, who appeared on countless TV programs such as regular appearances on The Montel Williams Show, as well as news outlets, expounding her abilities and the important work she had done for the police and FBI. Indeed, allegedly had many endorsements from some of these officials, such as that of former FBI agent Ted Gunderson, who said of her powers, “I’ve worked with numerous psychics in the past and very few are really on target, but Sylvia Browne is probably one of the most accurate psychics in the country.”

However, despite this, an eye-opening article in a 2015 edition of The Skeptical Inquirer managed to mostly smash this illusion by digging into her past and scouring files requested from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. This research showed that not only had Brown made many misleading and outright false claims as to the extent of her police and FBI dealings, but also that there were no records of her dealing with the FBI at all. The author of the article explains:

There is no documentation released by the FBI to support the claim that Browne conducted any psychic readings for the FBI, either directly or indirectly. Moreover, Gunderson’s name appears nowhere in her FBI file, and the topics in the FBI release do not discuss working with the FBI. Thus, there is no evidence from the records that Browne was involved with the agency. Assuming Browne worked with Gunderson, it appears to have occurred after he retired from the FBI and when he was investigating aliens, “Satanic” child abductions, and numerous other conspiracies.

In addition, further damning evidence against Browne was her big mistakes, such as declaring a missing girl dead when she was later found to be alive, and she seems to have had just as many misses as hits. It was also discovered that not only had she apparently never worked with the FBI before, but her and her organization, the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research, had actually been investigated by them in the 1980s for “selling securities without a permit,” and “violations of federal law in applying for loans from federally insured financial institutions.” This in no way means that every psychic detective is a charlatan or fraud, but it certainly makes them look bad, and gives fuel to those who would doubt them. It has been pointed out that these people are merely very good at tricking everyone and feeding off of desperation, grief, and a potent desire for any answers at all, throwing out vague clues and relying on confirmation bias to do the rest. Famed skeptic Joe Nickell does not mince words when he says of their supposed abilities:

What people should realize is psychics cannot do what they claim to do. They have been reviewed by mainstream science, and they can’t do it. If they can do it, let’s see that they do it. It could be defined as ‘after-the-fact matching. In other words, the detectives have a missing person. They assume the person might be dead, but they’re looking to find that person. In comes the psychic, often ingratiating himself or herself with the family, forcing the police, pretty much, to have to pay attention to the psychic. The psychic will say things like, ‘I see water. I’m getting the number 7. I see some sort of tall structure,’ and so on. They call these clues.

Is this accurate? Are these and the many other psychics allegedly helping law enforcement merely frauds feeding off of suffering and strife, trying to make a name off of tragedy? Are their abilities really all bogus? Or are there some who under the right circumstances manage to reach out and touch some force that allows them to see into where others cannot? Whatever the case may be, there are many who believe this phenomenon to be genuine, and as long as there is hope that it could pry open cold cases and unsolved cromes there will likely be people in times of desperation that will seek these psychic detectives out, whether they really believe or not.

Why would someone want to hide files related to nuclear tests unless there was something in those files they didn’t want to go public? That’s the question many are asking after multiple documents related to the nuclear weapons testing conducted by Great Britain in Australia during 1950s and 1960s. There are many claims made that there are parts of the tests the British and Australian government would like to keep a secret. Who took the files, and what are they attempting to hide from the public?

A photograph taken during Operation Buffalo in which four separate warheads were detonated at Maralinga on September 27 1956.

Whatever it is, it’s likely related to radioactive materials left behind by the tests – although with all of the allegations made about the tests, there’s no telling what’s in the files. The British conducted twelve fairly low-yield nuclear tests in the Woomera Prohibited Area in South Australia and on the Montobello Islands in Western Australia between 1956 and 1963. As it turns out, of course, many of the tests also created a particularly nefarious type of radiation known as “black mist” which covered the Maralinga area and drifted towards Australia’s more populated east coast after detonation. Many Australian and British service members died after being exposed to the fallout. There have also been allegations made that human test subjects were flown into the site and never flown back out again, and it has even been claimed that people with severe disabilities were used as human guinea pigs to test the effects of the weapons.

What the Maralinga test site in South Australia looks like today.

Picture: Glenn Hunt

Source:Supplied

Maralinga today.

Perhaps worst of all – although testing weapons on disabled people is pretty reprehensible – one of the test sites, Maralinga, was home to the the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal people prior to the tests. They were relocated against their will to make room for the test range, but many of them refused their new settlement and ventured back into the off-limits former test site. Signs warning that the area was a weapons test site were written only in English and could therefore not be read by many of these people, and it has been suspected that some Aboriginal people may have already returned to the site when the test weapons were detonated.  In 2017, the Australian government announced that any indigenous Australians suffering from radiation exposure would qualify for upgraded healthcare.

The British nuke tests were kept a secret from most of the Australian people until journalists in the 1970s began uncovering government documents related to the tests. Public scrutiny grew stronger questions arose over the last few decades over how well the the sites were cleaned of any radioactive waste. While the radioactive waste issue is a probable reason why the documents have suddenly vanished, who knows what else could be in them? A spokesperson for the National Archives from where the documents went missing stated only that the archives were “asked to temporarily withdraw these records” and that they have been reclassified to “access under review.” Of course it remains unclear how long the review will take or how many of the documents will be restored to the public.

Aerial image of the Woomera A-bomb site in October, 1953.

Source:News Corp Australia

Why were these files suddenly withdrawn from public access? What is the Australian government hiding?

In 1816, something very strange and ominous occurred across the planet: temperatures dropped by around 1.3 °F. That may not sound like a lot, but it was enough to cause significant problems which bordered upon catastrophic, and particularly so across much of the Earth’s northern hemisphere, which is defined as anywhere and everywhere north of the equator. It was a situation which had its origins as far back as the 1300s. That’s when the Earth was subjected to what has become known as the Little Ice Age. While certainly nowhere on the scale of previous ice ages, it still proved to be calamitous for the people who were forced to endure it.

The Little Ice Age – a term created by a Dutch geologist named François Émile Matthes (1874-1948) – was a period of more than a few centuries which resulted in noticeable fluctuations of temperature, which, having begun in the 14^th century, extended to midway through the 19^th century. Much of North America was affected, as was Europe, to the extent that from the commencement of the 15^th century to the 18^th century, London, England’s famous River Thames froze solid on no less than two dozen occasions. In 1683, the huge river was frozen for no less a period than an incredible two months. Norway, Holland, and Iceland were particularly hit hard, too. But, what was it that provoked such disastrous, cold temperatures, ones which led to famine and death on a large scale? The U.S. Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offers the following:

“…climate data obtained from trees, ice cores, marine sediment and historical documents indicate 1816 was part of a mini ice age that lasted from 1400 to around 1860. During this time lower solar output produced harsh winters, shorter growing seasons and drier climates which were blamed for a host of human suffering and crop failures such as the Irish Potato Famine.”

But, other things were afoot, too, as NOAA make very clear: “Another possible cause was the eruption of the Tambora volcano on the island of Soembawa in Indonesia on April 15th 1815. The eruption lasted one week and rumbled for 3 months. The mountain elevation dropped from 14,000 feet to 9000 feet, killed close to 10,000 people on the island and another 80,000 people would eventually die from starvation and diseases related to the eruption. Tambora was one of the largest recorded eruptions with estimates of 1.7 million tons of dust put into the air equaling 6 million atomic bombs. The theory is that the dust reached the Northern Hemisphere during 1816 reducing solar output.”

Science and history have both demonstrated that Ice Ages have certainly occurred – and up to recent times, too, as the story of the Little Ice Age demonstrates. Theories abound, however, with regard to what, exactly causes them. Massive volcanic eruptions, strikes by huge meteorites and comets, and changes in the levels of methane and carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere, have all been offered up as potential candidates. What we do know for sure, however, is that over the course of the last one million years alone, there has been more than a handful of glacial events, specifically in the northern hemisphere, and of varying degrees of harshness.

Around 650,000 years ago the Earth was engulfed by massive amounts of ice, with gigantic sheets extending from what is, today, the American Midwest to central Europe. It was a turbulent time for the planet and for the early, primitive humans and wild animals that lived in that era. And it was a long spell of time, too: the glacial period lasted for around 50,000 years. Successive ice ages occurred, of varying lengths and frequency, with the most recent true Ice Age having reached its end around 11,500 years ago, but having reached its peak roughly about 18,000 to 16,000 years ago. And it wasn’t just the colder, northern parts of what are today Europe, Russia, and North America that were badly affected. Evidence exists to show that New Zealand suffered too, as did portions of South America, including the Andes of Chile.

As staff at the San Diego-based University of California – a focal point for research into Ice Age history and development – note: “The reasons for these large swings in climate change are not yet well understood” We would do well to remember that. Maybe even prepare for such events. Anyone who thinks climate change is nonsense is speaking nonsense themselves.