Imagine If Again

Imagine if. . .


Aliens actually travel to Earth to examine and study humans.


Why would they use silly things like flying saucers?  All the rest of the phenomena isn't unbelievable assuming alien visitations - the abductions, the lost time, the (ouch) probings - but that bit with the flying saucers ruins the whole thing.  


Stealth technology isn't perfect, but aliens with the know-how to travel between stars might know a bit more about it than us.  Still, if we consider what interstellar travel could cost, maybe they have weight restrictions.  So given that aliens zoom-flash to Earth from some other planet with a team of probe-bearing zeno-scientists, they'll need some way to get around that is light, cheap, quiet, and able to stay aloft for long periods.


Yup, alien dirigibles for the win!  A couple of entries ago I mentioned Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV).  Most HAVs have a distinctly saucer-ish shape when seen from afar, and being mostly a bag of gas they start with a stealthy advantage.  Add on some advanced alien radar absorbing paint, improved alien non-metallic structural materials, and powerful alien engines, you get the perfect alien stealth transport and nature study vehicle.


And it still looks like a flying saucer, darn it.  Whoops 8)




Imagine if. . .


Quantum theories predicting infinite multiple universes could be true.


Some theorists claim every random event, every decision we make, generates a new universe.  Others think two or more universes are created, one for each possible outcome or decision.  These alternate universes get layered one on top of the other like pages in a book or infinite highway junction overpasses.  We only see the universe we chose, but another  


Now turn it inside out.  To the eye it looks like water flowing along a rocky stream bed takes every possible path.  In reality, the separate molecules of water each takes a unique path, winding randomly around the already-present obstacles.  It is the sheer number of random movements that create the illusion of smooth flow through multiple paths.  Like the stream bed, all possibilities already exist and we choose which universe we want to live in with every decision we make.


This thought leads me somewhere I didn't intend to go.  An infinite array of already existing universes, each universe a fixed set of events, sounds suspiciously like predestination or omniscient beings of various religions.  I've always questioned the viability of both, because free will in a single universe can't exist if the future is fixed by fate or God.  


But here is a way for both states to coexist - our free will lets us choose our own path from universe to universe, but all possible futures are already there, each unchanging as it waits to be chosen.  This can make dieties the know-it-alls religions claim them to be while still allowing us the freedom to decide our own paths.


Let me think a bit before I make a decision on that. . . 8)