Time-travel Paradoxes!

[TimeTravel_01]

I apologize for wasting this much space but I thought some of you would be interested in seeing this after reading some of things I've been saying in the last few months. Below is the address to the news site and a copy of the text.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=004071676359148&rtmo;=r9XahmDX&atmo;=rrrrrrrq&pg;=/et/00/12/31/wcia31.html

This is the world in 2015

By James Langton in New York

Global Trends 2015 - Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]

CIA

International Insitute for Strategic Studies

THE world is on the brink of a new era that may resemble the script of a James Bond film in which international affairs are increasingly determined by large and powerful organisations rather than governments, according to a study just published by the CIA in Washington.

Click to enlarge

[Large graphic] 

These could include alliances between some of the most powerful criminal groups such as the Mafia and Chinese triads. Such groups, according to the CIA, "will corrupt leaders of unstable, economically fragile or failing states, insinuate themselves into troubled banks and businesses, and co-operate with insurgent political movements to control substantial geographic areas". 

The agency adds: "Their income will come from narcotics trafficking; aliens smuggling; trafficking in women and children; smuggling toxic materials, hazardous wastes, illicit arms, military technologies, and other contraband; financial fraud; and racketeering."

The 70-page report, Global Trends 2015, will be required reading for the new president, George W Bush, and his senior policy advisers. It suggests that the early years of the coming century are likely to be filled with both potential and peril.

Compiled with help from think tanks in America and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the report projects a future in which globalisation, whether in the shape of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, giant corporations or terrorist gangs, plays an increasing part in the lives of ordinary people.

"Governments will have less and less control over flows of information, technology, diseases, migrants, arms, and financial transactions, whether licit or illicit," it concludes.

In addition to confronting the growing economic and military power of China and India and the continuing decline of Russia, the CIA says: "Between now and 2015 terrorist tactics will become increasingly sophisticated and designed to achieve mass casualties."

In particular it notes the growing threat of biological and chemical weapons and "suitcase" nuclear devices against the United States. In addition, it expects rogue states such as Iraq and Iran to develop long range missiles in the near future.

Iran, it says, could be testing such weapons by as early as the coming year, and cruise missiles by 2004. Iraq could have missiles capable of hitting America by 2015, with both nations developing nuclear, chemical and biological warheads.

Potential flashpoints have a familiar ring and include India and Pakistan, China's relations with Taiwan, and the Middle East, where the best that can be hoped for is a "cold peace".

Elsewhere, the world population will grow by more than one billion, to 7.2 billion, most of the increase coming in the mega-cities of the developing world. In Europe and Japan, an ageing population and static birthrate means that allowing more immigration may be the only way of meeting a chronic shortage of workers.

The gloomiest predictions are reserved for Africa, where Aids, famine, and continuing economic and political turmoil means that populations in many countries will actually fall. At least three billion people will live in regions where water is in increasingly short supply.

On the other hand, there is good news on energy supplies. "Energy resources will be sufficient to meet demand," the study says. The CIA report is most optimistic on the world economy, which it says has a potential for growth not seen since the 1960s. Computer technology represents "the most significant global transformation since the Industrial Revolution".

"At the same time, genetically modified crops will offer the potential to improve nutrition among the world's one billion malnourished people. China's economy will grow to overtake Europe as the world's second largest but still behind the United States. Russia's economy will contract to barely a fifth of America's.

The study expects the European Union to narrow the economic gap with America. It points out, however, that "lingering labour market rigidity and state regulation" mean that "Europe will not achieve fully the dreams of parity with the US as a shaper of the global economic system".

The 2015 report is an update of a 1997 CIA study into the world in 2010, which it admits failed to anticipate the global economic crisis that occurred between 1997 and 1998 which had the hardest impact in the Far East and Russia.

The new survey suggests a number of alternative scenarios, none of which makes happy reading. These include a trade war between Europe and America, and an alliance between terrorist organisations to attack the West. Most alarming of all, it raises the possibility of economic stagnation, followed by America abdicating its role as the world's policeman.

At the same time tensions begin to grow in the Far East, where China orders Japan to dismantle its nuclear programme, leaving, the report says, no alternative but for "US re-engagement in Asia under adverse circumstances at the brink of a major war".

 

[Fast1]

check this out..

words to the wise from a proclaimed time traveler from the year 2036

url: http://www.p3n.org/pn120100.shtml

things concerning TT_0 pop up everywhere..

who knows whos listening...

Fast Out

 

[djayr42]

So it seems to me that this is one possible, most likely scenario. 

In about 4 years the voting system in this country will touch off a civil war. (Or at the very least the civil disobedience of many.) Because people will be divided about who should have power to do things, nothing will be done. When our foreign obligations become lax and we cannot hold up our end of an agreement, (in the far and mid east) they will see that as opportunity to move in on this country. They will feel that they have the right. This is going to take about 10 years for people to get angry enough to do something with more impact. During that 10-year period there will be groups (like organized crime) that will see the division of the people as an opportunity to get rich and/or get power. This will help the in those who seek to hurt this country. By the time we realize what is coming it is already too late, having been distracted by our own civil war and others with in who sought control. Basically we weren’t looking and got hit.

Doses this seem close? It has been the pattern for other countries in the past.

 

[TimeTravel_01]

I'm flattered and a bit overwhelmed. I can honestly say I've never quite had this experience before. I appreciate the news posting. Thank you Time 02112

 

[TimeTravel_01]

Well...you're getting closer people. Here's another one I found today. Again, I apologize for taking up this much space but I thought you'de want to see this.

http://www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,416412,00.html

Science 2001 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A machine called Z 

Under a ring of water in a sealed chamber in the middle of the New Mexico desert lies the heart of a machine that could change the world 

Michael Paterniti 

Sunday December 31, 2000 

It is never night inside the Machine. Even after the sun has set on the mesa and Jimmy Potter and the frogmen and the men in white jumpsuits and the men in blue jumpsuits have showered, packed up, and gone home; even as yawning, befuddled scientists - with names like Jim Bailey and Mark Derzon and Melissa Douglas - sit in offices in a nearby building, trapped by their own reflections and in the blackened windows; and even as this oesophageal dark falls over coyote and jackrabbit and moves everything towards sleep and dreams, towards the deepest centre of the night, the Machine is awake. 

Its 36 Marx generators are set in a ring like a metallic Stonehenge. The 20 Rexolite disks of the vacuum chamber look like flying saucers. Its vast, concentric pool of five-weight oil and deionized water seems bottomless - real oil and real water, in half-million-gallon tanks that sit one inside the other like a wheel within a wheel. Even now, there are depths in the Machine, invisible worlds revealing themselves, the secret body of the universe floating up. Deuterium, tritium, helium. 

It begins with the flip of a cyber switch in the control room at the north end of the hanger. Before a bank of computer screens, a man clicks a mouse, and then electricity, quietly sucked off the municipal power grid in Albuquerque, floods into the outer ring of Marx generators. Which is when the Machine takes control. A siren sounds, red lights flash, doors automatically lock. The frogmen and the white and blue jumpsuits clamber over the high bay, down metal steps, and retreat to a copper-coated room behind a foot of cement. 

Another switch is flipped, another mouse clicked. To the piercing sound of an alarm, a countdown in the Marx generators ensues, or rather a count up, in kilovolts, comes in a monotone, almost hollow voice beneath the frantic alarm. The man in the control room on a tinny loudspeaker, the Machine speaking through the human. 

'Twenty kV...' 

'Thirty kV...' 

'Forty kV...' 

At 90, the floodgates open: a pulse of electricity surges out of the Marx generators toward an inside ring of giant capacitors and then through a series of gas switches. The current is compressed by the Machine into a wild whitewater of electricity that charges toward the vacuum chamber at a speed of 60 million feet per second. On its way, it passes through painted sharks' mouths, drawn there by the men in white and blue jumpsuits in the way that fighter pilots sometimes draw on their warplanes to show their prowess - or hide their misgivings. The electricity pours past the sharks' mouths, is redirected downward, along the Z axis, into the vacuum chamber, blitzing and bombarding from all sides a three-dimensional target in a gold-plated can, a delicately strung array of tungsten wires the size of a spool of thread, hanging in black space like a tiny chandelier. 

Driven so furiously in the Machine, and then storming the array, the pulse of electricity - enough juice now to light up America like a birthday cake - instantly vapourises the tungsten wire into plasma, a superheated ion gas. The ions hover and dance along the invisible circumference once described by the array, while a relentless magnetic field keeps pressing on them, shoving them from behind. Thrusting and squeezing and ramming until the ions can no longer resist, the centre cannot hold, and in that hot nanosecond - Boom ! Everything becomes one. 

This is not a gentle conjunction but a Pandora's box suddenly ripped open by nuclear passion, an orgy of ions. Boom ! Lightning fills the Machine, veins out over the surface of the water. Temperatures flare to those inside the sun. The earth rocks once again. And in few billionths of a second, 290 terawatts - 80 times the power generated on earth at any given time - roar to life inside the Machine. 

Watching it through a Plexiglas window, you might as well be watching the beginning of the universe. Or the end of it. Contained in that single flash of white light, when the Machine holds the heat and the power of the sun, when the room fills with lightning, there is everything we know - and everything we may become. The 21st century. A world covered by rooms of little suns, generating intense energy and, with it, the possibilities of time travel and galaxy hopping. Peace among nations. Or the end of time as we know it, a hole ripped in the universe by the Machine, something many doomsayers predict, and the earth sucked into oblivion. Our downfall or salvation. A fusion machine they call Z. 

The magic bean; the Holy Grail: fusion. The idea is to take two isotopes of the hydrogen atom - deuterium and tritium - and mash them together with a little energy, which in turn releases enormous amounts of energy in the form of a single neutron. Contrarily, fission, the method widely employed by today's nuclear reactors, splits heavy uranium and plutonium atoms, creating lots of energy but also tons of dangerous and everlasting radioactive waste. Fusion offers a clean source, borne out of the material of roughly a handful of water and a handful of earth, with its only by-product being an easily disposable helium-4 nucleus. 

What would fusion mean? Endless, cheap energy. Amazing Star Trek , space-travel possibilities. Fame, fortune, and undoubtedly a Nobel or two for the lucky scientists. For the better part of five decades, the race has two separate approaches: magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. Most researchers - those from Japan, Russia, Europe and America - focus on the former: big accelerators called stellarators, spheromaks, and tokamaks (a machine designed partly by Andrei Sakharov) use huge magnets to contain and compress hydrogen isotopes that hover in a kind of reddish-blue plasma inside the huge torus-shaped tubes until implosion. 

On the other hand, the idea behind inertial confinement is that tiny fuel pellets of deuterium and tritium are bombarded by lasers or X-rays. In the case of the Z Machine, the explosion that occurs when ions are released by the vapourised wire array, and then when ions are pinched together, creates a huge X-ray pulse, one that scientists hope can be used to heat the tiny pellets and, in turn, create a small thermonuclear explosion. As it is, fusion has never been achieved for an extended time outside the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. 

The first time scientists attempted to shoot an early incarnation of the Z machine, in June 1980, there was bravado and false bravado and downright fear. At Sandia National Laboratories on Kirtland Air Force Base, in the same New Mexican high-desert landscape of America's greatest, most frightening nuclear discoveries, they'd been working on the Machine for four years. Yet there were still unknown variables, a scientist's nightmare. First, it was so much bigger and more powerful than any of its predecessors. What if the Marx generators blew up before it could be shot? What if residual X-ray radiation contaminated people in the area? Or a fire destroyed the complex? And what if everything worked perfectly and they got a huge energy release that blew up Albuquerque itself? It was a scenario that had been considered at the highest level. As had something worse: what if people later wished that it had been only Albuquerque that blew up? 

The shot - Sandia shorthand for the firing of the Machine - was scheduled for a Friday night. But then the machine blew a fitting. The technical crew - the frogmen, as well as the men in white and blue jumpsuits - worked feverishly, and by Saturday noon the Machine was ready again. 'No one knew what to expect,' remembers Gerry Yonas, 58, an engineer and physicist and one of the founding fathers of the Z Machine. They took all necessary precautions, charged the Marx generators, and crossed their fingers. A switch was flipped, electricity pulsated into the Machine, ripped through the switches, stormed on to the wires. There was a wicked jolt, and... silence. Sweet, beautiful silence. Everyone was still on earth; everything seemed to work. The feeling was surreal. 'I felt the ground shake,' says Yonas, grinning at the memory, 'and everybody said: "Let's do it again!" Nobody wanted to go home. I had to kick them out. There was nowhere else in the world to be. This was the beginning.' 

The scientists, at that time a group of 20 or so men, threw high fives and drank beer. Pure, silly jubilation. Only later, photographs of what actually had occurred inside the Machine made them gasp: huge dragon snorts of fire filled the hangar. Apparently, plumes of oil had sprayed skyward in the instant of explosion, flamed, and then flamed out before the men returned inside the Machine. They had nearly blown themselves up. By the grace of some benevolent god, or the Machine itself, they were allowed to return to work on Monday morning, giddy limbs intact. 

Over the next 15 years, the Z Machine gradually improved its output, packing an astonishing wallop - 20 trillion watts' worth of electrical output, as compared with the mea gre 100,000 amps of the first machine - but it wasn't enough. Scientists and theoreticians estimated that for high-yield fusion to be achieved inside the Machine, it would need to generate something over 1,000 trillion watts. A factor of at least 50 of Z's output. 

Which is when the men in suits and ties tried to kill the Machine. It was a dinosaur, they argued, no longer useful. They felt Z-pinch technology could not yield the mother lode. By 1995, even Yonas, who was about to become a grandfather, was acutely feeling the passage of time. He sadly had to admit that maybe he should sacrifice Z and all the optimism that had driven the project. Perhaps achieving high-yield fusion, something scientists compare to the invention of the lightbulb for its potential to change the world, did indeed belong to the other fusion machines, the stellarators and spheromaks and tokamaks. To the Russians or the Japanese or the British or the confederate nerds at Princeton or Lawrence Livermore or Oak Ridge. And maybe Sandia National Laboratories - over time, a place known more for its secretive mystique, its downright weird nefariousness, dating to the cloak-and-dagger days of Little Boy and Fat Man - would have to sit on the sidelines while someone else gave the world perhaps its greatest legacy. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to the chop shop. Maybe it was 11th-hour desperation, or some invisible bolt of providence visited on a few overworked scientists, a couple of whom lit on the simple idea of stringing the wire array, the spool-sized target at the centre of the Machine, with double, then triple, the tungsten wire. All of a sudden - Boom ! Forty trillion watts! No one believed it. They reconfigured the Machine, boosting its X-ray production. Then someone, Melissa Douglas, thought to stack the arrays. Boom ! Two hundred trillion watts in a single pulse! Short of a nuclear blast, it was the most energy ever released on earth, and suddenly, in 1998, after five decades of chasing the illusion of high-yield fusion, of regarding it as some far-off Atlantis or dark galaxy's edge, the Z Machine was a third of the way there. 

In science, if you do something once that's never been done before, it's considered a mistake. Do it twice, and it's simply a mirage. But the third time it becomes the truth. With Z's new, seemingly impossible results came the first flickering sign that some deep, unknowable power resided in the Machine. And so today, the Z Machine is considered one of the world's best hopes for achieving fusion. 'We may not understand how we get these huge pulses of power, the meaning may still elude us,' says Yonas. 'But it's still a fact.' 

One that Yonas himself, at first, had a hard time grasping. After he was handed the results, he remembers squinting at them, and sitting back at his desk as if blown by a solar wind. 'My God,' he said in a small voice. 'This could work. This could really work.' 

Listen to the Z scientists, to their best idea ('The use of stark-shifted emissions to measure electric-field fluctuations and acceleration gaps'), and their dream ('To remedy plasmic instability and create higher temp- eratures'), and you enter a kind of friend country that becomes an Andean prison from which it gets harder and harder to escape. The scientists admit that, at moments, their whole selves are inseparable from the Machine, that the pull of the Machine is so great that re-entering normal life can be nearly impossible. 

Jim Bailey, a handsome, soft-spoken, loafer-wearing plasma physicist whose conversation is peppered with references to spectroscopy and 'the visible regime', says sometimes it's even hard to go to a neighbour's barbecue - can't make small talk, can't communicate what you do - let alone talk to your wife. Mark Derzon, a boyish, bearded nuclear physicist, says he works a system with his wife: when he walks through the door at the end of a day, he says green light ('Yes, everything is fine, I'm ready for the kids'); yellow light ('Give me 15 to decompress'); or red light ('I need time'). Melissa Douglas says that there's no line drawn at all between the Machine and her private life - that the Machine, her place inside of the Machine, studying something called Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, is her private life. And now, at the age of 36, she's watched her friends get married, have families, settle, and on occasion she's wondered to herself: 'what am I doing? Can we really make fusion work?' 

Since the 1950s, the US government has invested nearly $15bn to find out, always with the promise that fusion is just around the corner - two, three, five years away - and, with it, a fusion revolution that would hurtle us to the centre of the earth, the deepest trenches of the ocean, and the farthest reaches of space. A revolution that would morph the Third World into the First World until we are simply One World. 

After all, how many wars have been fought over oil? And then, with oil reserves expected to reach full depletion by 2050, how many more will be? Remove oil as a vital component of our speed-driven, chip-fitted age and, sure, people would find things to brawl over, but energy wouldn't be one of them. 

And with limitless, cheap energy, the development of poorer nations wouldn't be one of them, either. 

And with development, the have-nots and pariahs of the world would theoretically join the haves, and so food and housing and education wouldn't be one of them. 

And with a higher standard of living would come a new freedom for humanity. For at its heart, fusion, as a Utopian ideal, has always symbolised freedom; freedom from the mistakes and waste of our past, the Hanford Reservations and the Savannah River Sites - those vast, spooky, radiating underground storage facilities chambered with containers of plutonium and iodine waste, on top of which America is built. Though left unsaid, the race for fusion has always been about democracy or a democratic alternative. 

And yet one of the biggest threats to fusion comes from the same group of people responsible for the Hanford Reservations and the Savannah River Sites: the US Government. Recently, Congress and various federal agencies have become disenchanted by the fusion dream. Critics have lambasted it as a waste of time and money. If we haven't achieved it in the last 45 years, they argue, we never will. The US has dropped out of a proposed $10bn international fusion project called ITER, leaving the facility in doubt of completion. Meanwhile, the government has spent $3bn, with as much as an additional $43bn to come, on developing Nevada's Yucca Mountain as a vast nuclear-waste site - despite well-documented problems - and continues its commitment to fission reactors despite the fact that radioactive waste can be lethal up to 600 millennia after burial. Leaders in fusion field, like the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, have mothballed their big machines, laid off staff, and now are fighting simply for their own survival. 

'You have to find a way to justify doing something that you may never see accomplished in your lifetime,' says Jim Bailey, who has a penchant for reading Hume. 'I mean, instead I could be working for a cancer cure, with at least a greater hope of finding one. But I'm OK with this. I've made my peace with it. Fusion will be the greatest scientific achievement of our time.' 

Yonas, with the Super Bowl confidence of Joe Namath, predicts that usable high-yield fusion will be made available to the American public by an accelerator called X-1, a generation or two beyond Z, within three decades - maybe sooner. Mark Derzon, a member of what's called the Advanced Concepts Group at Z, has designed what would be the first practical Z-pinch reactor - 'A zero-miracle power plant,' he cheerfully proclaims, and believes that the Z technology is rougher and tougher, able to sustain more of the constant rock and roll of such a plant, than are the sensitive lasers and vacuums necessary for magnetic confinement. But optimism usually carries the day only past lunch; the request to draw up preliminary plans for X-1, with its price tag of up to $1bn dollars, is likely to be approved by the Department of Energy. 

'Every day, it's a leap of faith,' says Neal Singer, a science writer at Sandia. 'Adding wires to the array - where did that idea come from? From the outside it makes no sense. It's incredibly complex and difficult to string tungsten wires 1/10th the diameter of a piece of hair and space them perfectly. And they did it and got tremendous results. Then they added more and more, spaced them a little differently and now we're a third of the way there. It takes these little steps, this day-by-day thinking. Hour after hour. Ten, 12, 14 hours a day. The constant question is, Can you just make a little change to influence the result?' 

Thus the world inside the Machine is driven down to its smallest, most maddening detail. For in the end, fusion - its possibility and reality, its attainment and capture - comes out of this finely tuned call-and-response with the universe itself, the channelling of some great unknown, copulating force that calls for the perfect alignment of human and Machine. That is, the human culture surrounding the Machine attempts to mimic the Machine itself , which is trying to mimic the universe. The mannerisms of the Machine become the mannerisms of its minions - people rage and tyrannise, overheat, relent, synergise, procreate, vanish, and recur. One idea seems brilliant and fails, while another may start as a quail but then, compressed by other ideas - electrons stripping off, ions colliding - transforms into something sharp and fast, something agitatingly, beautifully right. And then, of course, it is shot into the Machine to see if it is. 

Still there is Melissa Douglas's nagging doubt, which is the nagging doubt of everyone here. On certain days, it is possible to believe that you are merely trapped in the rubble of some cosmic joke with no punch line, that Godot is eating chilli dogs somewhere and won't be able to make it. After all, Jim Bailey's lab books are full of 13 years' worth of jottings; Mark Derzon has pulled countless all-nighters in the name of what may or may not be the reactor of the future; Melissa Douglas has spent entire months of her life obsessing over a single equation, the pallor of her face reflecting only pale computer light - all of this thought and activity and faith belying the possibility that their efforts might be for nothing. And yet as much as the race for fusion is a race against the Russians at Triniti labs, or the Germans at FZK labs, or other American scientists at Lawrence Livermore, it's also literally a race against the ticking internal clocks of each scientist who entertains the question: will I live to see it? 

'History forgets the individual,' says Mark Derzon pensively, surrounded by no fewer than 30 photographs of his young daughters. 'One day Plato will be forgotten. Ultimately, the name you make for yourself is not the important thing. It's what you did, what you stood up for, what you acted on. Did you try to make the world a better place? In order to do it, the world needs fusion. I just happen to think that Z is the best way to get there. And we're going to have one serious pizza party around here if it is.' 

Jimmy Potter stands inside the Machine, glaring down into the half-million-gallon pool of water at the submerged refrigerator-sized capacitors where, he suspects, there may be a broken, bubbling gas switch. Potter, a Texan, is the keeper of the Beast, the man who oversees the whole shebang for today's shot. 'Are those bubbles down there?' he asks out loud, vexed. 'We already sent the divers in. I sure hope not.' 

If Potter is driven by perfection, then he is merely a reflection of the culture at Sandia National Laboratories. And if the quest for fusion is intensely competitive, Moonily quixotic, and at times downright nasty, then Sandia mirrors, among its myriad projects, many of those same contradictory characteristics. Top secret or otherwise, spread over the dusty 27-square-mile patch of Kirtland Airforce Base, the projects include the training of honeybees to detect land mines, the invention of a foam that kills anthrax, the making of a synthetic sludge, and the perfecting of various micromachines, some so small as to be undetectable by the human eye, which might be used to lock down nuclear weapons. Sandia is the home to Teraflops, the fastest computer in the world, as well as the birthplace of moly-99, a radioactive substance widely used in medical procedures. On the east of the base, behind three rows of concertina wire, is a cluster of foothills rumoured to be now-empty nuclear silos. They seem to stand as a reminder of how closely the isotopes of Thanatos and Eros can be held in the same idea, for it to be a real idea, a saving idea, both have to be there, threatening to undo us and remake us at once. To obliterate and immortalise. 

Potter couldn't care about all that. 'My job is to work with the personalities here,' he says, now pacing the high bay, twitching with pent-up energy. He slips behind a pig (a radiation shield), and checks a silver box that houses a cryogenic pump. He monitors the tech crew, confers with the lead scientist on the shot, keeps everything running on time. 'You've got your top of the Ivy League class,' he continues. 'You've got prima donnas with huge egos. And you've got technicians who at least graduated high school. Nobody can operate without the other. The first thing that happens with two strong personalities is clash. It's my job to go to one and bring him up and maybe bring the other one down and then bring them together.' 

Of course, there are days when everything feels charged with Shakespearean plots and counterplots, days when tension fills up around the Machine. All of it is caused by the Machine, which rarely exists, of course, in its aluminum-and-Rexolite grandeur, oblivious. There is head-butting between the young comers kicking with ideas and the upper echelon of Z veterans, who ultimately hold the power here. There are Iagos trying to ice someone else's idea in order to promote their own. (The lab rewards the best with bonuses.) 

'I've become a lot more aggressive,' says Melissa Douglas, one of only three women among the 60 full-time scientists who work on Z. 'You have to really stand your ground. It was very hard for me to do that at first.' In four years on the project, she remembers her worst day as the one when she delivered a seminar and a colleague heckled her mercilessly. Why? Was she that stupid? Did her PhD in plasma physics and her postdoc at Los Alamos make her that inept? So she took her weakness, her insecurity, her lack, and shot it into the Machine, and it came back as power, 290 terawatts' worth. 

As have others. Marriage is shot in. Love is shot in. Innocence and experience and numbers are shot in, and come back as something almost holy. 

While many of these scientists consider themselves agnostic, they are quick to admit that they still find themselves in thrall to the unknown, to the force that pulses through the Machine. 'In a deep sense, I would say that my greatest satisfaction here comes from the act of creation,' says Jim Bailey. 'Because what we're trying to do is create knowledge that didn't exist before. Whether that brings us closer to God or not, I don't know. It brings us closer to an understanding of the universe, and if you want to think of God in those terms, then I suppose you could define it that way.' 

Melissa Douglas describes the charge of joy she gets from a perfect photograph of a Rayleigh-Taylor instability taken inside the vacuum chamber by a pinhole camera at the moment of the wire array's implosion. 'A beautiful picture!' she says, holding up a snapshot that looks more like a Rorschach test - kind of blobby with spikes and valleys. 'It sounds ridiculous, but when I first saw it I jumped and hopped around the room. Ecstatic. Just amazing. Being around this machine, you can't help but feel awe. The universe is mathematical and, you know, God is a mathematician.' 

And Jimmy Potter - Jimmy Potter is clearing the high bay as sirens sound for all personnel to vacate the Machine and retreat to the control room. Today's shot will attempt to find a way to bombard the wire array uniformly with electricity, so that each last kilovolt of energy can be accelerated into the Machine and come back as more. 'I mean, how do you explain all this to someone outside of this place?' he says, gesturing toward the Machine. 'We don't make a product that can be sold. You can't really see what's going on on in that vacuum chamber. I usually just tell people I work with X-rays. That we've got a big machine doing big things, and one day we're gonna change your life.' 

Dawn inside the Machine, and it's silent. The frogmen and the men in white and blue jumpsuits are arriving, shaking off their sleep, downing coffee. Jimmy Potter got the shot last night, downloaded the diagnostics, sent everyone home saying they'd take apart the Machine today, and then drove the half hour to his house, over the mesa and the beautiful landscape, to his wife and kids, trying to forget this place for a few hours. At 5.30am, he was back, rallying the crew, which now has sluggishly begun its work, drilling and hammering at the vacuum chamber. 

The people of Z admit there's a new inten sity, especially given the Machine's recent exponential gains. There's something to prove - and they need to prove it fast. Plans to win funds to build a cheaper, intermediary machine named ZX, one that will lead to X-1, are the stuff of new worry and hope. And, like life on the edge of any new frontier, there is still the possibility of danger. 

But there are dreamy days here as well. There are times when some Z scientists find it hard not to let there minds wander, to entertain versions of fusion-propelled rockets arcing the local solar systems, of fuel stations on the moon or Io or Pluto, wherever you can pick up a little lithium and water. And there are others who imagine it as the Peace and Love Machine, who've put their trust and idealism for the best possible world in Z. And to get Peace and Love from the Machine, they have to shoot in their souls, holding nothing back. 

Now the crane groans over its huge tracks above the Machine, preparing to lift off the 8,000lb crown of the vacuum chamber. Last evening, the Machine inhaled the sun, this room filled with lightning, and then everything exploded. Now, when the crown is unbolted, hitched to a hook, and lifted away by the crane, a group of men tentatively peer down into the Machine, goggle-eyed, perhaps expecting to find some traces of gold dust or, more absurdly, a pile of confetti - or, by some miracle of the universe, maybe a fully formed angel, sleeping with its white wings pleached and sooty, its legs twisted under its body, both comical and impossible. 

So the men look and look, down into the centre of Z, the womb of the Machine, for some message there sent back from the invisible world. But it is just a well of black space - plasma and atoms unable to hold the weight of their gaze, the chill of their wonder.

 

[NoTime]

A "Z" machine with a Marx generator -- is this something invented by Zeppo Marx?

 

[rgrunt]

Dear Mr Deviper,

Interesting indeed I will look up the points you stated for they are quite compelling. I do admit that the information I recieved came second hand so I trully cannot vouch for the accuracy of the statements in the story and I appologize to the people on the forum for the confusion. My father once told me that there are two topics that can never be agreed upon...religion and politics. However I do hold to my beliefs but without having performed carbon dating or other methods myself I cannot testify for or against their legitimacy. Is there any documented proof of a positive recorded in any lab? If do you have access to this proof that you may back your claims that creation is completely proven wrong as you so subtely implored in the last two paragraphs? Can you explain to me how it is more logical for such an intelligent existance to acurr merely by trillions of chance happenings whose probabillity of actually acurring is practically imeasurable then for an infinitely intelligent creator to have planned the creation. Do the numbers it is far more logical and probable for the universe to have been created then just to have acurred. By the way infinity has to exist. For infinity not to exist is a violation of thermal dynamics in that something cannot come from nothing. So if every chance happening accurs from a "big bang" before which nothing existed then something came from nothing. No this is not disputed by religion but by scientific law. Tell me how to get around this one. Let us first try to analyse order and chaos. In an infinite period of time does a universe with a mixture of order and chaos degrade to pure chaos resulting in a constant state of infinite entropy. Or does the universe gravitate to a universe of infinite order? Hot or Cold is the big question. If, on the one hand we have an infinite number of quantized randoms confined to a volume what is the shape of that volume? In this case the shape of the volume will be a perfect sphere on acount an infinite number of two or three constantly varying shapes would be at such compression as to form a constant uniform surface or volume. Thus an infinite number of randoms equills perfect order...yet even in such a universe we are measuring the randoms which must therefore exist. The measurement we made and the deduction is in no way connected to the origins of the quantities existant therein by a subtransfinite period. I say subtransfinite instead of infinite because I believe the universe is both finite and infinite and that time and space are quatiized and any movement in them. Thusly I believe that the distance in a finite space-time to infinity in this bounded space-time is finite. Thus any numeral beyond the barrier of the universe is not infinite but a finite number to big to fit in this universe so it exists in the area beyond the present universe...the past or future. If measure infinity in the small beyond any given center mass lies superluminosity and therefore past. The velocity of light is the folcrum point that exists in and marks the boundary between the infinite past and infinite future.I imagine that at this velocity one could part this reality and find another in the past or come in contact with the future. Tell me what would happen to matter if one were to burst infinitely into the future and back in a splitt second? I appologize I got side tracked this is supposed to be an inquisition to evaluate whether or not science supports or crumbles Creation. I appologize I have tried to see how a universe of nonexistance could come into to existance in the form of an infinite number of randoms and I can see no logic in this only a border created to establish the area of impossibility within for the existance of a universe to derive from nothing. But the relation that I see between the domain of non-existance and existance is unstated. I would have said non-linear but even these mathematical interactions acurr within the finite universe. It would appear that only super finite actions could exist within this region of nonexistance thus defining this region an infinite(beyond finite). I see no place for nothing in existance. There is no displacement within an infinite mass and I can therefore not see the possiblility of manufacturing a place of non existance save by an infinite being who alone could traverse this clause to make a domain existant seperated on all sides from the rest of existance by a border of absolute absolute infinite limit. 

All of this is purely my own ascertaining so it more then likely contains some flaws. I also want to state that I ment no insult by the way I stated my view up on top but this is merely how I learned to debate. I assumed creation side of the arguement and stated what I could ascertain in the hopes that others will debate my claims so that I and others may gain knowlege. 

Teach me,

let us discover the truth.

Edwin G. Schasteen

 

[Trott]

Who receives the Nobel Prize for inventing time travel? Surely, since there is a divergence from your time line such information would be of no consequence to divulge.

 

[pamela]

Another time traveler????

check out: http://paranormal.about.com/science/paranormal/cs/timetravel/index_3.htm

scroll down till you get to: "the Wave Rider"

I would have copied and pasted it but it is a handwritten copy of faxes.

 

[pamela]

piecing together the information in the faxes provided by the "waverider" it sounds to me that if this be true then it is some form of advanced remote viewing.consider the following on how he describes how he time travels:

"I am a time traveler. Although we refer to it as riding the wave. I am a US citizen born in 1964. I am nearly 40 years old. In 1983 I enlisted in the united states Army .it was shortly after my enlistment and before completing basic training that I was approached by those I now refer to simply as MY FRIENDS. This group does not contain aliens nor interdimensional beings, they are human.

I have learned over the years that not everyone can safely travel the wave, and I was first approached, I was told, due to an unusually large amount of some chemical that naturally occurs in the human body, it somehow aids in the time travel process,(MY FRIENDS told me what chemical it was back then,but that was many years ago. and I have long forgotten the name of the stuff. I think it has some copper or something in it.) I have since learned that when i enlisted in the US ARmy MY FRIENDS gained a large amount of information about me. My genetic history and so forth, and it was this information that changed my life forever."

"I should first explain how I travel in time. The short and sweet of it is that I was taught to target a particular person, place or event. The more information I have on the target the better my chance of success and the faster I reach my target. I take a photo of the target. a sheet of paper with the information on it, a map of the site etc. I circle the target and begin the process. I then enter a quiet darkened area (we use to call it the pad) a period of concentration and meditation begins. For days, weeks, sometimes even months after beginning I will study the target, concentrate on the target,even begin to dress in the period clothing of the target during my time in the pad ( only about two hours per day is all I can manage.) as I begin the feel the wave approaching, i look for the doorway, the gateway. the rip in the fabric of time or whatever you want to call it.For me it almost always looks like a pool of water that I pass through before entering the new time line. Some time travelers had only out of body experiences (these people we call projectors) others of us (called wave riders) physically disappear from the current timeline. Early on in the project I would use a small electromagnetic tuner to help me concentrate and focus on the target, I no longer use any aid when waveriding."

Interesting....the US Army again...

Timetraveler_0 have you ever heard of the "Waveriders"?

-pamela

 

[TimeTravelActivist]

Well it's a good thing I got injured in the Army, or else that might have been my fate as well. 

J.C.

P.S. I'm home... ?

 

[Curious]

Pamela, what the Waverider is describing sounds a lot like the technique used by the Incunabula/Ong's hat group. They supposedly had developed inter-dimentional travel. check out tis site:  http://www.incunabula.org/

A lot of the info on the site seems to be disinfo, but then there are pieces of the truth mixed in. Here is another site with another point of view: http://it.t.boltpages.com/it.t/

Dimentional displacement requires less power and technology then temporal displacement.

 

[Time021121]

TT_0,

I appreciate your comments here, and I thought I would provide you with an example of just how appreciated you are.

(You're sincerely welcome my Friend!...any"Time"

Below is a copy of a recent email from p3n:>

From: "Webmaster" 

To: 

Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 17:34:13 -0800 

Subject: Re: The "Z" Machine

Hi Gary,

I posted a link to the "Z" machine story yesterday, the second I saw it.

Thanks for sending the "Proclaimed" Time Traveler story. It was one of the

best things that has come into P3N and with the help of links from other

websites it has been one of the most visited pages. It was also very thought

provoking. Please feel free to submit more writings or links to good stories

when you find them.

Thanks again,

Rick Reed

Webmaster P3N

--------------------------

Pamela, I am very familiar with this "Waverider" I listened to his info. on the former "Art Bell Show" known today, as the current "Coast To Coast AM" program.

since "Premier Radio Networks" purchased Art Bell's Legacy for a sumisable amount. http://coasttocoastam.com

you can listen to pre-recorded programs, up to 30 days, in the "Past Shows" selection, on their website. Anything beyond 30 days, you will need to purchase a tape.

I believe that this "Waverider" information & faxes, are still available in text & jpg formats on the coast to coast website.

[This message has been edited by Time02112 (edited 01 January 2001).]

 

[Time021121]

TT_0

What could you surmise, as to what might happen, as a result if you provided us with copies of various news articles in relation to "Technology Reports" published a year in our future, or any "Time" after (Such as in your "Worldline" as you so describe?

*Could You?

*Would You?

And please explain your reasons for why you would, or would not do something like this for us?

 

[Fast1]

i think that when Art Bell retired(unknown reason..) he said that the Wave Rider was not real,it was just some guy messing around.he told that to the sheriff in his town,or something similar..

i could be mistaken..

Fast Out

 

[TimeTravelActivist]

I see that I have returned just in time. The concept of Time Travel has overwhelmed some with the idea of accepting it, and going along with it. Have you all forgotten that Time Travel is a means of controlling who we are. For a future collective agenda. 

My site is updated, check it out.

-INDIVIDUALS OPPOSED TO TEMPORAL MANIPULATION-

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Atrium/9822/

J.C.

 

[pamela]

Curious,

thankyou for providing the links to Ong's hat they are very interesting.I will be looking at it more indepth.

Time 02112,

boy, the "z" machine story got around pretty quick!

Fast,

If Art Bell has admitted to the time traveler being fake why are the stories still posted on his site? Knowing Art Bells

character I think he would have written a follow up letter on it or pulled all the faxes from the site.

It still does not mean the faxes are legitimate however.

one thing I have been noticing though is some of the predictions were not acurate. A time traveler from another worldline can really only testify to what he has seen on his worldline. but now I am beginning to wonder....how many timetravelers are out there? how many are on this worldline at any given time? how many times can you alter events before something happens?

a lot of what waverider spoke on in his final faxes sounds a lot like timetraveler_0's testimony. I know TTO is going to be really interested in reading waveriders faxes. perhaps he may be able to relate to some of the language written.

sincerely,

pamela

 

[Trott]

Timetravel Activist,

If you believe in the multi-universe interpretation of quantum mechanics than everything with a non-zero possibility plays out. Therefore, I do not see how one could say that your future or history is being changed since one possibility, if time travel is possible, is for your future to be changed. Of course in an alternate universe, you would still be whatever it is that you thing has been changed about you.

If time travel ever becomes more than just theory, it would mark the greatest scientific moment in all history. Surely, you must agree with that.

 

[Trott]

Mr. O,

You said that there were 7 other time travellers that you knew of who were on various missions from 2036 on your timeline. I am curious have people in 2036 been visited by people from further in the future? One would think that once time travel was possible and widely known that visitors from other time frames would be more likely to be visible and willing to be upfront about their visitation to the period after time travel, A.T.T (after time travel).

 

[Fast1]

pamela,

it is no longer HIS website...at least i think so.

the last time i checked in was when his page was redirected to CoasttoCoastAM.com.

i think i first got intrested into gibb's work after hearing him on the Art Bell show..

but i remember an interview or something where a friend of his or a sheriff said that the wave rider was a nice story,but it wasnt real.i think thats right.

Fast Out