I learned today how long our bones — or rather descendents uncremated bones — can hang around. Like 3.3 million years long according to scientists who located a skull from a species of ape-man called Australopithecus afarensis. I’ll wait while you check that link out too. Halloween comes early.

The discovery should fuel a contentious debate about whether this species, which walked upright, also climbed and moved through trees easily like an ape. The remains are 3.3 million years old, making them the oldest known skeleton of such a youthful human ancestor.

Forget the debate over whether or not we evolved from ape, who wants their skull being used as some dark, futuristic football? Maybe I’ve watched one too many Terminator sequels, but this seems like another checkmark in the why ‘cremation makes sense’ column.

A subject I’ve not written about here in great depth are UFOs and aliens. A Hmm search for “ufo” only yields 4 results. A couple months ago on the weekly live radio show I host, I talked a bit about this. It’s a topic where you can’t spend too much time on or people give you a raised eyebrow stare. A low tolerance topic. It’s one where people either believe, disbelive, or begrudgingly disbelieve or believe.

We just returned from the most alien place in the United States: the desert of Nevada where the one and only (?) Extraterrestrial Highway exists. We didn’t actually travel along the highway which runs north of Las Vegas and to the east of the Nevada Test Site [google map location pictured above]. Apparently there is a place where you can stop and eat an alien burger.

Video Keypoints [see: how to create keypoints]
[3:20] Dude making copious notes on aliens he thinks might be among a UFO convention. Yes, he is serious. And check out that he changes up his outfit on day 2 to avoid detection [18:47]
[8:37] P&T paint a sex toy silver and a woman claims it is alien in nature.
[16:11] Woman displays picture of her extraterrestrial husband. Sort of looks like half-man, half-cheetah. Rarrg!
[21:05] The Bush family come from reptillian alien bloodlines? A UFO author says yes. Hard to type while laughing.

What I believe and don’t believe when it comes to E.T
When it comes to other intelligent life, I’m a skeptical believer. I think it’s foolish to assume we are the only intelligent life out there and that some other planet somewhere doesn’t have beings with equal or superior intelligence.

I do not believe aliens are coming here and conducting secret human research using strange probes. I’m with Penn & Teller on the content and thrust of their video. Most, if not all of those people are there to exploit and earn money from selling UFO-related books and speaking gigs to vulnerable people. The people caught up in it I feel sorry for too, just listen to Penn’s thoughts at the end of the video. Some people need to believe in something. An alien being interested in them is better than nobody being interested. It’s sad, really, not funny, even though I laughed at the video keypoints above.

I do believe there is evidence in a military stronghold (Area 51 or elsewhere) somewhere that extraterrestrials have visited — and or keep visiting — earth and that the government doesn’t want the American people to know about their findings. Do I think people today would panic knowing E.Ts have visited earth? No. Some people might, but then some people panic at the sight of rain in Seattle or rush hour traffic.

The flipside is projects like SETI haven’t been successful yet and they don’t think they will be until 2020. It would seem with the massive combined computers effort that something, anything would have been found by now and yet there’s been nothing. Is it possible the government has squelched results from the SETI project from being echoed back to the participants? I’m not big on conspiracies, but that sounds unlikely even for a conspiracy theorist.

What I’d like to see is some sort of open source community movement for dealing with what’s already been discovered and is being kept secret. For military defense reasons, I doubt that will happen any time soon, but I wish the government would stop playing the finders keepers song. Have a little faith in people and their ability to reason. Sure, there are crazies out there, people who can’t handle the truth, but I believe strongly in the human condition. That man can find a way to live with the knowledge that a more superior creature exists.

Even if that means we are living among them right now.

Forget abut HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for now, imagine storing your entire collection on one piece of media. This has been the promise and allure of holographic storage, but there is another storage type that could be on the horizon beyond that.

Scientist Professor V Renugopalakrishna is working on a protein-based storage system:

The new protein-based DVD will have advantages over current optical storage devices such as the Blue-ray as well, because the information is stored in proteins that are only a few nanometres across.

“The protein-based DVDs will be able to store at least 20 times more than the Blue-ray and eventually even up to 50,000 gigabytes (about 50 terabytes) of information. You can pack literally thousands and thousands of those proteins on a media like a DVD, a CD or a film or whatever,” he said.

This is all wishful thinking at this point so don’t get too excited but it is fascinating imagining the demise of hard drives. And web based storage? Who would bother if/when they could carry around their entire life on a DVD? Piracy alarmists will not be psyched, but I’m sure there will be advances in anti-piracy and DRM long before protein-based storage does or does not become a real world option.

And it looks like we’re going to have to live through at least two more iterations of storage technology (HD-DVD/Blu-Ray and then holographic) before getting anywhere near these types of massive storage options. Expensive future for those who repeatedly keep buying the same media on newer, faster, better formats.

Hmm regular readers already know my single greatest fear of human extinction isn’t nuclear war, global warming or biothreats from terrorists, it is an asteroid collision [Hmm search: asteroid]. This morning I was delighted to learn about the “gravity tractor” theory which will be tested by sending a spaceship on a collision course with an asteroid not threatening earth over the next decade:

The tractor could deflect an asteroid before it passes through a “keyhole,” an imaginary hoop in space through which asteroids must pass if they are to strike Earth; bypassing such a keyhole would ensure a miss.

Though I’m sure the brainy scientists have already thought of this, but what if the gravity tractor knocks the asteroid into earth’s path? Wouldn’t that be some dreadful irony?

To end on a more positive note, there is a multi-player Asteroids game I checked out yesterday (pictured above). Maximum of 20 players per session. There are no asteroids, just other real player ships trying to blow you out of space. Fun for a brief break time distraction.

Already on the record here at Hmm saying my biggest concern for the annihilation of most life on earth is an asteroid collision. A slower form of death concern of mine is the impact of global warming.

I’ve seen predictions of serious problems on Earth by the end of the century but this is the first time I remember reading that this might happen in the next 20 years:

By 2020 ‘catastrophic’ shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Before beginning work on your bomb shelter, keep in mind the word “could” is being used here. There are lots of experts predicting bad things all the time and being wrong. Still, it’s hard not to be disturbed by the possibility that our next 20 years might be getting increasingly worse, leading up an event that could make all the things we think are important today completely insignificant by comparison of basic survival needs: food, water and shelter.

Imagine walking up to a door like they did in Star Trek and it just opens. No locks, no keys, no doorknobs, it just recognizes you and opens. Now take that a step further and imagine that it’s not even a traditional door but something that you can literally walk right through as it molds around your body shape.

Thanks to Popgadget who reports that this futuristic door is currently a prototype:

Its motion-detecting portal saves energy by keeping a door from having to open and close all the way, which helps to maintain a stable temperature in a room, and can prevent dirt or other materials from entering.

That is the concept of the product displayed on this Japanese website (pictured above). This sort of reminds me a bit of Terminator 2 where the Terminator just walked through the jail cell — but his gun wouldn’t. Ok, if/when they ever get something like this working and it’s not astronomically expensive, I want one.

Ahh, serendipity. This morning I learned how the fearsome Death Star could have destroyed a planet like Alderon. In painstaking detail.

It’s actually a well-written and hmm-inspiring article. If you like Star Wars, anyway. Also saw a rumor recently that there will be 3D versions coming someday. The flight scenes especially would look good in 3D.

A University of Rochester study showing light that can travel backwards:

the pulse enters the material, a second pulse appears on the far end of the fiber and flows backward. The reversed pulse not only propagates backward, but it releases a forward pulse out the far end of the fiber. In this way, the pulse that enters the front of the fiber appears out the end almost instantly, apparently traveling faster than the regular speed of light. To use the TV analogy again—it’s as if you walked by the shop window, saw your image stepping toward you from the opposite edge of the TV screen, and that TV image of you created a clone at that far edge, walking in the same direction as you, several paces ahead.

What makes this fascinating to me is that this was just discovered recently. With all the brilliant minds in science, why hasn’t this been discovered before? The answer must be that the right person(s) haven’t come along yet.

This is why I think hyperspeed space travel, the kind of stuff we only see in movies like Star Trek, will be discovered and made possible someday. That includes time travel, which is another science mystery people have been working to unravel for many years. It will happen. In my lifetime? Don’t know. But it’s not if, it’s a question of when. What scientific mysteries would you like to see discovered in your lifetime?

I hope I’m alive long enough to take a trip into the future. I’d like to see if we all are controlled by apes or have nuked the human race out of existence in a few hundred years.

via physorg:

… according to Einstein, whenever you do something to space, you also affect time. Twisting space causes time to be twisted, meaning you could theoretically walk through time as you walk through space.

“As physicists, our experiments deal with subatomic particles,” said Mallett. “How soon humans will be able to time travel depends largely on the success of these experiments, which will take the better part of a decade. And depending on breakthroughs, technology, and funding, I believe that human time travel could happen this century.”

As for going into the past? Not much interest there, especially if Mallett’s theory is accurate about going back into a parallel universe and not the past that we know and are a part of exists.

Somebody get Marty McFly and Doc on the phone, here comes Transition from Terrafugia.

Maybe not a Delorean, but some MIT wizards do have a working 1/5th scale model in a wind tunnel and with $30,000 hope to get a full size prototype built by 2008:

Terrafugia is aiming to build a vehicle that will fly at 120 miles per hour and get 30 miles a gallon in the air. (It will also get 40 miles per gallon on the freeway and 30 in the city). The Transition vehicle will carry a payload of only 430 pounds, far less than cars, but how many cars can take flight after 1,500 feet of takeoff space?

Is it just me or does $30,000 sound pretty inexpensive for this type experiment? Back at Seattle Mind I saw a speedy $100,000 electric car. The Transition will come in around $149,000 and be available in 2009, according to the Terrafugia website FAQ. A valid drivers license for street mode will be required and at least a light sport pilot’s license will be required for flight mode.

This would be great to see us move to the skies if they can get this working and practical. The latter part is the challenge since, according to the article, technically flying cars have been possible since the 60s. Also, will these fly themselves?

Also, as their own FAQ states, it wouldn’t be very safe to go into flight mode on the freeway, so no punching it in a traffic jam and flying the friendly skies to get to work on time.