Random Musings

On February 28th of this year, the US and Israel attacked Iran. One of the goals was to effect a regime change. Another was to decisively eliminate any possibility of producing nuclear weapons. A large number of people in the US have been harshly critical of this effort.

As far as I can tell, those who object are mostly Democrats, and their motivation appears to be political rather than rational. The attack was wrong because Iran wasn’t bothering anyone, they’re a sovereign country, and so on. Trump shouldn’t be starting wars. And of course, many Democrats hate Israel. Their presence did nothing to soothe the naysayers.

I find it difficult to understand how people can be so vehemently against this action. Iran has consistently hated the US ever since the Muslim theocracy took power in 1979. They routinely chant “Death to America, Death to Israel.” They refer to the US as the Great Satan, and Israel as the Little Satan. They refuse to even mention the name of Israel, instead referring to it as the Zionist entity. Iran has funded terror organizations in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere. In fact, this regime has spent billions of dollars on terror and nuclear development, while letting their infrastructure deteriorate to the point where the population is running out of water. These are not good people.

Many people complain that the US has “started” a war with Iran. Actually, this war has been going on since 1979, when Iran took over sixty Americans hostage, and held them for over a year. The Carter administration failed to make any headway with this regime; when Reagan took power in January of 1981, the regime suddenly decided that they could now release these hostages.

The difference was that Carter was trying to negotiate, to take a peaceful path to returning the hostages. While this desire is commendable, Carter wasn’t dealing with reasonable people who sought peace. Negotiations were doomed from the start.

Reagan, on the other hand, wouldn’t sit idly by as long as any hostages were held. Everyone knew this. Reagan would have used military force against Iran – so the regime handed over the hostages.

Since then, Iran has spread terrorism throughout the world. They’ve sought to build a nuclear weapons facility so that they would have the Bomb. We do not need Muslim extremists to have an atomic bomb. This is a very bad idea, and we should do everything in our power to make sure it never happens.

Trump was supposedly “negotiating” with Iran’s regime. This was an obvious effort to keep us at bay as Iran’s regime continued to work on their nuclear weapon. They were not negotiating in good faith. They were playing for more time. Anyone who cared to look could see this. I must admit, I was disappointed to see Trump negotiating with these thugs. Evidently, he was playing their game.

The attack on February 28th was not “starting” a war. That war has been festering since 1979, when the Muslim theocracy took control and started their aggression against the United States and Israel. This was a low-level shooting war, occasional acts of terror murdering Americans and other Westerners. Pouring billions of dollars into a nuclear program, other billions to fund terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houtis, and others. These groups have killed thousands of people; the Islamic regime has murdered thousands of their own people in Iran for the crime of not being sufficiently rabid in their hatred.

The West needs this regime to be destroyed, a more reasonable regime established. Someone who isn’t chanting “Death to America, Death to Israel” all the time; someone who could live with the thought that the US could continue existing. And ideally, someone who would use their money to repair the infrastructure that has been so neglected for so long.

Unfortunately, people – evidently Democrats – are against this war. I am beginning to think there might be something in the idea of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I thought that was just some Republican bullshit, but the more I look, the more I see that many people aren’t being motivated by reason or what’s needed, but by obstructing anything Trump may say or do..

I had previously offered various suggestions to explain what we call Fermi’s Paradox. There I mentioned one idea that I want to develop further.

The question is why, with the billions upon billions of galaxies in our Universe, we haven’t encountered any evidence of other civilizations.

Currently it is thought that there are roughly 200 x 10²¹ stars. Our existence tells us that life and intelligence are possible. We don’t know how common or rare this is, but it seems unlikely that out of so many star systems, we would be the only one where intelligent life developed. So, where is everyone?

The answer has to do with the vastness of space and time. Of all the trillions upon trillions of stars, only a tiny fraction are in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The closest galaxy to us, Andromeda, is about 2.5 million light years away. Unless we develop Star Trek-level technology, we’re not going to communicate with them or any other galaxy outside our own. This eliminates almost all the stars. They’re simply too far away to have any effect on us.

Within the Milky Way there are estimated to be 100 to 400 billion stars. It may well be that some of these stars have intelligent life. However, most of these stars are also too far away to matter. The closest star, Proxima Centauri, is roughly 4 trillion kilometers away. It would take a signal 4 years to travel from Earth to Proxima Centauri; and another four years for us to receive a response, if there was one. Every other star would take at least as long; most would take much longer. This time gap would make realtime communication impossible.

Travel to any star would also be impossible at our current level of technology.

If the transfer of information and the speed of travel are limited to the speed of light, then there isn’t a good way to communicate with any other civilization. If I call my friend at Proxima Centauri, it will take eight years before I hear him answer the phone.

At the moment, our understanding of physics limits the theoretical maximum speed of travel or communication to the speed of light. Unless we find ways to get past these limits, we’re not going anywhere, and we’re unlikely to ever contact anyone out there. Even if there are some civilizations who have technology to communicate faster than light speed, we don’t have that technology at the moment, and so we can’t receive their messages.

It is possible that civilizations who have recognized these limitations have chosen to turn inwards, to explore the inner Universe.

Often something is said to violate the Laws of Physics; or it is impossible, because that would violate the Laws of Physics. It is as though there is some sort of police force that makes physics follow the rules.

One of the common ideas about Quantum Theory is that some things don’t happen until someone observes the experiment. Until the observation, events are said to be in superposition – a particle is in all possible states, until someone observes it; when the observation is made, the particle is found to be in only one state.

Marathons have an interesting history. The story is that Greece and Persia were at war. Greece finally won a decisive battle at a place called Marathon. The runner Pheidippides was sent to give the news to the people of Athens. Pheidippides ran the 25 or so miles, imparted the news, and promptly dropped dead of exhaustion.

Somehow someone thought, “Say, this running sounds like a great idea. We should do it regularly.” Not sure how they skipped the part about dropping dead, but there it is.

So now marathons are held all over the world. And every year, some people wind up dropping dead, and it’s a great mystery. “He was in good health, young, can’t imagine why he dropped dead.” I’ll tell you why: running is bad for you. WTF are these people thinking?

It is difficult to overstate the importance of using units in physics. Back in the day, my physics teacher would take off half the points in a question, if we forgot to include units. A question might be, convert 100°C to degrees F. If you said 212, you’d only get half points. Even if you said 212°, you’d be penalized. The correct answer would be 212°F.

You might think that this is just silly nit-picking. I mean, of course it’s 212°F; what else would it be? Why all the fuss?

I was recently looking up some facts about physics, as I often do to ensure that my statements are correct. Physics is filled with many non-intuitive facts, and I like to double-check what I understand. I came across a peculiar statement from a Google search. It said:

The only basic SI unit that is a vector is the meter. All others are scalars. Derived quantities can be vector or scalar, but every vector quantity must involve meters in its definition and unit.