As the joke goes, on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. But although anonymity has been part of Internet culture since the first browser, it’s also a major obstacle to making the Web a safe place to conduct business: Internet fraud and identity theft cost consumers and merchants several billion dollars last year. And many of the other more troubling aspects of the Internet, from spam emails to sexual predators, also have their roots in the ease of masking one’s identity in the online world.
Change, however, is on the way. Already over 20 million PCs worldwide are equipped with a tiny security chip called the Trusted Platform Module, although it is as yet rarely activated. But once merchants and other online services begin to use it, the TPM will do something never before seen on the Internet: provide virtually fool-proof verification that you are who you say you are.
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In 1955 a UFO book by a previously little-known author was published. The book was The Case for the UFO, and the author was Morris K. Jessup. Jessup was a 55-year-old Indiana farm boy who had dreamed all his life of being an astronomer. He had, in fact, studied astronomy at the University of Michigan and later been an instructor there, being part of the University’s 1926 expedition to Mexico to view and photograph the solar eclipse.
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How many light-years is it to the nearest alien civilization? In 1960, when Frank Drake made the first modern effort to eavesdrop on radio signals from ET, he trained his antenna on two relatively close stars, Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti: respectively 10 and 12 light-years from Earth. He picked these backyard buddies for several reasons. For one thing, they are Sun-like stars, the type most likely to have planets suitable for the dirty chemistry we call life. But of great importance, they are nearby, and signals from close-in transmitters are likely to be stronger. Such signals will suffer less from the inevitable dilution of distance. In addition, it would be more interesting to find aliens in our neighborhood, as opposed to halfway across the Galaxy. If the aliens are really close – say less than 100 light-years – then two-way communication, while admittedly tedious, would at least be thinkable.
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In Star Trek, the USS Enterprise is powered by what is called a “warp drive” and at the moment only Paramount Pictures know its secrets.
But new, highly mathematical research may have brought us one step closer to being able to explore the Universe in a starship capable of travelling faster than the speed of light.
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In some future history, 1994 may be remembered as the year that the warp drive was first conceived to be a physical possibility. Long a cliche’ of science- fiction writing, the warp drive has transported countless fictional characters through light-years of interstellar space in the time it takes for you or me to travel to the market. Unfortunately for real-world travelers, the warp drive has always been thought to be inconsistent with the laws of physics.
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Have you ever wondered when we’ll be able to travel to distant stars as easily as in science fiction? Believe it or not, scientists are seriously looking at concepts such as wormholes, space-time distortions and space drives.
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In early July 1947 an incident occurred in the desert just outside of Roswell, NM. Many people have heard of the Roswell UFO crash, but very few people know the details of the incident. The following account of the 1947 UFO incident was taken from public records, from information provided by the International UFO Museum and from the press release for UFO Encounter 1997.
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Now in the 90s, it is common knowledge that “psychics” were used in specialized intelligence units belonging to all countries during the “cold war”. What you must remember is however that back in the late 1950s to obtain funding for such covert operations the word “psychic” was definitely taboo. Words had to have a plausible scientific meaning or a made up one, or completely baffle the government funding bodies so the invention of the words “Remote Viewing”, “Sensitive Hearing Verification”, “Project Invisibility”, “Project Astra” and many more came into being by covert operations managers.
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For a place that doesn’t officially exist, Area 51 has been referred to by a lot of names over the years. Some of those names included; GroomLake, Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, Watertown Strip, the Box, the Pig Farm and several others. Many people do not know how or when Area 51 came into existence in the Nevada desert some 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas Nevada. Most people believe it was a military base, when in fact it was originally opened by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).
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While interest in the question of extraterrestrial life is at least as old as historical civilizations, the modern SETI era can be defined as beginning in 1959. In that year, Cornell physicists Giuseppi Cocconi and Philip Morrison published an article in Nature in which they pointed out the potential for using microwave radio to communicate between the stars.
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