M.J. Rose

The Long Now Foundation offers a series of seminars on long term thinking. The speakers are always incredibly interesting. Their most recent speaker was Priyamvada Natarajan. She is a professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University and at the Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is an active proponent for the public understanding and study of science.

“These days,” says Priyamvada Natarajan, “data is coming in from the universe faster than theory can keep up with it. We are in a golden age of cosmology.”

Click here to go straight to her seminar.

The darkness of dark matter and dark energy
ALL THAT WE KNOW of the universe we get from observing photons, Natarajan pointed out. But dark matter, which makes up 90 percent of the total mass in the universe, is called dark because it neither emits nor reflects photons?—?and because of our ignorance of what it is. It is conjectured to be made up of still-unidentified exotic collisionless particles which might weigh about six times more than an electron.

Though some challenge whether dark matter even exists, Natarajan is persuaded that it does because of her research on “the heaviest objects in the universe“?—?galaxy clusters of more than 1,000 galaxies. First of all, the rotation of stars within galaxies does not look Keplerian?—?the outermost stars move far too quickly, as discovered in the 1970s. Their rapid rate of motion only makes sense if there is a vast “halo” of dark matter enclosing each galaxy….”

For the rest of the description and the entire recorded seminar, click here to go to the Long Now Foundation website.

In the spirit of the Reincarnationist books, here’s something really intriguing…

This 10 Year Old Boy Remembers His Past Life As A 1930’s Hollywood Actor

Thespiritscience.net

“This is such a mind blowing story.

This isn’t the first account of a child remembering their past lives – there are thousands of recorded cases of the exact same experience from kids all over the world. This caught my eye because it was an NBC newscast which I just found amazing. Enough people in the collective consciousness are interested in past lives to get it on the news.

This 10 year old boy from Oklahoma named Ryan, was born with the memories of his past experiences. He is able to remember vivid details of his past life, which took place in 30?s Hollywood. He says he was an actor on broadway who worked for an agency, travelled the world and was married 5 times. They were actually able to open a book and have him point to a man he says he was.

His mom, acting as a support, decided to take him to a child psychologist who really seemed to know what’s going on. He approached these cases with a beautifully open mind, something many professors are afraid of doing.

His conclusion after 50 years of the university collecting 2500 different cases of children remembering past lives is: ”These cases demand an explanation, we can’t just write them off.”…

For the rest, and a video, click here.

Long term thinking. It seems to be a rarity these days, but these industrious people are all about it…

They’re asking the question: Are we being good ancestors?

The Inventor of the Long Now 10,000 Year Clock Tells the Story of How the Idea Originated
by Lori Dorn

In “The Clock of the Long Now” by Public Record, inventor Danny Hillis of The Long Now Foundation explains how the idea originated for a 10,000 Year Clock and what the clock is meant to symbolize.

I wanted a symbol of the future, in the same way that the pyramids are the symbol of the past. I wanted to to build something that gave us a sense of that connection and that’s how I started thinking about the clock. …I’m building a clock that will last for 10,000 years.
The clock is currently being built into a Texas mountain. Long Now board member Kevin Kelly wrote about “The Clock in the Mountain” in 2011.

The Clock is now being machined and assembled in California and Seattle. Meantime the mountain in Texas is being readied. Why would anyone build a Clock inside a mountain with the hope that it will ring for 10,000 years? Part of the answer: just so people will ask this question, and having asked it, prompt themselves to conjure with notions of generations and millennia. If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish? The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?”…